Paying Ready Attention

History and geography often seem to be unfair to the siblings of the famous.  Einstein may have had a brilliant older sister for all I know, Bob Dylan’s younger brother may have been gifted in ways that will remain forever hidden.  The bright flame of fame does not always illuminate those who stand close to the source of the light; rather it can cast a darker shadow.   Uluru does this to it’s geological sibling Kata Tjuta – it draws all the attention away and casts a very long shadow.  But if you look away from the light, you see something even more remarkable.  Uluru is an icon – like Sydney Harbour Bridge and the kangaroo  - bound to the world vision of Australia through repetition and the failure of advertisers’ imagination.  You can’t sum up a country, much less a continent, in just a few objects.  There is always something else to find, something else that tells a different story. I don’t know when I lear...

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...