Paying Ready Attention

Yellow flowers flutter in the light rain.  Green melons lie by the side of the road, bloated and misshapen.  Some of then are broken leaking a sticky looking flesh that seeps into the red soil.   Overnight rain has made the flood-ways run with water, stained as rich a red as the soil that does not hold it.  This combination of colours – yellow, green and red – becomes the whole landscape. We leave Kings Canyon and head south towards Uluru and its famous rocks.  The four beat swish of the windscreen wipers drops in and out of sync with the music on the radio.  In the floodway the water kicks away from the wheels of the cars and foams over the dry sections of road.  In the rear view mirror you can see it wash back onto the flooded section of the road.  Where the water meets the road, branches and leaves heap up in some counterfeit of a dam.   For a short while the tyres sing a sharp whistle as they shed the water d...

Kings Canyon - view from the steep hill Driving on dirt roads is like playing with a pet crocodile; eventually something is bound to go wrong.  Both are ticking clocks, waiting for you for you to blink, look the other way or be distracted in some way.  And when that time comes, bang, you get bitten.  This fact must be frankly terrifying for people barrelling along dirt roads with a birdwatcher at the wheel of the car.  Phones and sat nav systems pale into insignificance compared to a bird on a high treetop for these most distractible of drivers. “Yes officer, I know I drove off the road for no reason that you understand, but I thought I saw a pale morph goshawk.” After a few minutes I realise that the people in the car are much quieter than normal.   Thankfully the road is in pretty good condition, and some sections are being graded as we drive through.  The road grader, basically a desert snowplough, is flattening out the regul...

Alice from ANZAC Hill It takes three hours to fly from Melbourne to Alice Springs.  It’s a trip that takes you from the green and blue of the coast, over the sickle of the Great Dividing Range, and out into the red of the centre.  It’s a trip that takes you away from most of the people that call Australia home and out into the sparsely populated Red Centre.   It’s a trip that takes you to some of the most iconic locations in Australia – red stone and red soil - and into the places where the oldest surviving cultures in the world meet the 21 st centaury head on.  For many Australians it’s a journey of discovery, challenge and inspiration.  For some Australians this may also be a journey of obligation; a kind of visitation to the mythological centre ground of a continent country. A place where we can look at the people we displaced, and try to understand what this means. Every country has its myths, used to define itself, and a need to se...