The rock of otherness

 

As a child, I had an Aboriginal friend.  I don’t remember her name. We were both day students at St Catherine’s Girls’ Orphanage in Geelong in the late 50s. It must have been a conveniently located school/child disciplinary centre, as I was not an orphan. In my mind’s eye I can still see the well-to-do home where my friend lived.  In adulthood, when I realised my friend must have been part of the Stolen Generation, I felt sad, and sick.    I remember her as quiet, warm, and kind.  I feel like crying.

 

Cut to Alice Springs June 2021.  My sister Margaret and I have been to the Tip Shop for an exhibition of recycled sculptural pieces, and have ventured into town for a drink.  We wander in and out of a couple of venues before passing The Rock Bar.  The large windows on both sides of the door present a view inside.  Immediately obvious is the fact the place is full of Indigenous people. I’m instantly taken aback.  I’ve never seen a pub with only Indigenous people inside, like never in my life. 

 

‘Evening ladies!’ the white guy at the door ventures as we pass.  We nod, grin, and keep walking.  Within a few strides, I stop. ‘Shall we go back?’ I want in. I want to unsee colour. We stall for a minute, Margaret slightly more hesitant, and head back. 

 

‘Coming in?’ the same guy asks, a wide smile creasing his animated face.  He walks us to the bar, and stays close for a few minutes.  He’s looking after us, I muse, aware of a creeping discomfort in my bones.  Our whiteness attracts an intense gaze.  I’m seen.  This is ironic because I’ve spent a good deal of my life thinking about this very subject, the importance of being seen, and heard. During my travels in the past five months, I’ve felt othered.  Being single and travelling roads traversed by mainly couples I’ve felt excluded from conversation, excluded from the status quo, ignored. 

 

This is different though. I’m seen in circumstances where I feel I don’t belong. 

 

We’re escorted out the back where a crowd of a couple of hundred people are dancing enthusiastically to an upbeat Aboriginal band, MB Reggae. They’re good. Apart from the guy on the sound desk, we’re the only whites out here as well.  Although I’m barely seeing outside my own uneasiness, I feel a probing gaze that unsettles and unnerves me.

 

It’s not long before a woman approaches us, puts her arm around my shoulders.  We bob along to the sounds.  A couple more women approach us, their sociability reassuring.   I pull out my tobacco pouch to roll a smoke, and offer it, the women taking a pinch, rolling it in the palm of their hands and placing it in their mouths.   Tooth to jowl, the crowd whoops and cheers, their fists raised, their solidarity compelling. 

 

But all is not well within.  A couple of times I look around.  The mob is eighty per cent men, many dancing, many holding up the walls.  The feeling of scrutiny creates a terrible discordance.  I’m at sea, unable to reconcile my intuitive sense we don’t belong, are unwelcome. I feel a hand on my arm and turn.  A woman catches me off guard, whispers in my ear. ‘… men rape … you’re not safe’.  I look her in the eye, see her upset, her insistence.  She is protecting us.  ‘Go home.’ She repeats, over and over. 

 

So this is what othering feels like. A particularly insidious, too-common characteristic of the world we live in. 

 

Stepping outside my comfort zone has had a positive effect though. My empathy has grown muscle, given voice to that part of me that feels for and cares about the lived experience of the marginalised, and vulnerable.     

 

I wanted to not see colour.  Who was I kidding?  Sixty years on from my childhood experience, the awful reality of division continues. 

 

 

The Gibb aka Testosterone Theme Park

 

With a once in a lifetime opportunity arising to spend time with my sister Margaret from Hobart and daughter Pia from Brisbane in Alice Springs in June/July, two options were available to get there. More bitumen, or dirt.  Having spent excessive weeks on bitumen in the past month, like thousands of kms of it, in Broome I began to seriously consider the Gibb River Road, challenging every sensible conclusion I’d previously entertained about the reality of gravel roads, the stamina it entailed, and the suffocating dust.  Not to mention my relatively constant anxiety about the reliability of my rig and what the fuck happens if I bust a tyre or suspension, or shatter the windscreen with no mobile reception?    

 

At the caravan park I approached a number of people with red dust on their vehicles.  The first was a woman.  Her husband was out of earshot!  I often find women’s perspectives vary enormously from that of men.  The road was shit, she offered with creased brow, the corrugation shit, the hours long, the tension to the body exhausting.  We screwed the shockers on our 4 X 4 caravan, she said with raised eyebrows.   Right, I thought, that’s that! No fucking way. 

 

Some hours later I ventured out again.  This time I spoke to a guy.  Whilst he considered the road ‘poor’ he brought his map over to my site and together we studied the rivers and waterholes that traverse the road.  I found my mindset shift.  As a water sign in astrological terms, the enthusiasm he expressed for the gorges and waterfalls and swimming holes had a weighty and positive effect on me. My mind did a 180-degree pivot.

 

On the morning of my departure, unsure of correct tyre pressure I was directed to another camper, an engineer who’d also just completed the crossing.  ‘Good strong rig you’ve got there’ he said, ‘you’ll be fine’.  His assurances were medicine to my mind.  Slow down, watch out for the sea of pointy rocks that jut out unexpectedly from the road, they’ll split your tyres, and have fun.

 

In the final analysis, the road was indeed shit! Your ability to enjoy the landscape on either side of the road is compromised as your gaze is continually fixed on the road five metres ahead, always on guard for those shitty sharp rocks.  How can you enjoy the sights when your body's as rigid as said rocks?  Travelling at between 20 to 50 kph, I could manage only a couple of hours driving a day, at most. If you can imagine those long white plastic tubes electricians have on their vehicles, and then imagine them coloured brown/red and lined up at right angles to the road, you’re on the way to visualising the experience.   I was sometimes so exasperated by the hoons sitting on 80 kph, whose speed would send up great clouds of red dust, blinding the driver travelling in the opposite direction, I would pull over and curse loudly, and send them a retrospective finger!  It came to me that the Gibb was their testosterone theme park, an adventure to be seized at maximum hormone levels. Carpe diem! Observing vehicles pulled over at the side of the road, ripped tyres, busted shockers, and a roll-over or two, often vehicles I recognised as having passed me at great speed, was cold comfort.   I learnt to navigate the road with trepidation and caution. 

 

The magnificence of course is in the pause that occurs when you reach your destination.  The national parks and gorges and soaring ripe apricot coloured escarpments and quirky roadhouses and waterholes and characters on the path I’ll remember to the end.  I’ve attained my Certificate 101 in Creek and River Crossings!  The key is in gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles, keeping revs up, and hoping for the best!  The knowledge that I completed The Gibb without injury to body or machine is a mini triumph to my sense of adventure. 

 

 

Boab Prison Tree, 1500 years old.  This is a site where Aboriginal men and women were enslaved by whites to work in the pearling industry on the coast. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Images from Windjana National Park.  Can you see the crocs (freshwater ones) in the last image?

 

Look at the utter brilliance of this bowerbird's bow.
 

 A view from the road, including those deadly rocks.

 

 

'What do you think you look like?' Said with narrowed eyes, my mother would have abhorred this image.  A woman your age should not wear such short shorts.  Mutton dressed up as lamb!  I include it here to silence judgement.  This is just before I stripped off. 

 

 

I have no idea what this plant is but I was totally enamoured by it.  Perhaps someone could enlighten me.

 

Likewise with this one. 

 

Bella mama tree

Durack camp site
 

 

My camp at Pentecost River.  Here I defied the crocs, and Scomo, by having a quick dip.  Later I learned a six metre saltwater croc, the dangerous kind, cruised along the bank at dusk, checking out visitors.  My neighbours thought me barking mad, which of course I occasionally am! 

 

Genteel me, at El Questro Station. Mum would approve!

 

Trees and heartsong

Here in Ceduna I’m on pause.  At the edge of the big desert, I’m resting and walking, waiting for friends to catch up to cross the Nullabor together, in convoy. The caravan park I've chosen is the runt of the litter. It’s cheap. I feel home. My tribe.  There’s something about most caravan parks that make me feel I don’t belong.  They’re full of big shiny caravans and motorhomes, packed in like sardines, their occupiers rarely leaving the safety of their metal homes. Generally, I bush camp, but when I do rarely stay in them, I feel uncomfortable.  Unless I initiate a conversation, a condition I am compelled to do as I crave human company, I’m not approached.  It’s as if a woman travelling solo is a threat to some unwritten order.

 

It feels edgy, the town centre eerily quiet.  Poised on the precipice between trees and the Nullabor, meaning place of no trees, in this small patch of otherness, it is the trees and the expectation of company that render my heart still.  Their presence represents strength, resilience, composure, commitment. 

 

 

The earth is the colour of ground coriander seeds, a tinge of pink elevating its taupe.  A dozen dignified big gums frame the caravan park, enclosed by corrugated iron, worn horizontally.    Rusty car bodies, their tyres long dead, lounge lazily in the dirt. The camp kitchen emanates a rotten egg odour.  In an attempt to stem the errant jets of water on the shower head last night, the rebel squirts, my gut involuntarily lurched.  Have you ever felt a slimy shower head?  It’s more a park for locals, or retreat for those who’ve fallen on hard times than a travellers rest stop.  Of course, it’s both.   Pre-fabricated cabins, products of another century colonise the haphazard space.  To my left is a couple from Kilmore in Victoria who must turn around and return home; ‘my father died’.   To my right, a guy living in a boat who offered to help me put up my obstreperous awning last night, and another guy with a Ned Kelly beard who cleans the park to save money to repair his Troopy.  Should I mention the benefits of Domestos? 

                                         

The view from my Camp Hilton @ Ceduna

 

But it’s not just trees. It’s moments when a flight of swallows rise from the bushes as you pass on the isolated highway, their perfect synchronisation and sway a thing of beauty. The contours of bald hills that seem to defy the flat lay of the land. Gravel roads to who-knows-where, intersecting main arteries, pathways that knead you to remember once all roads were tracks. Striations of spectral colour, the red and orange of daybreak. The feel of movement on the body as I steer the truck across country, the vibration of the ocean crashing against the shoreline while I dream of destiny, living on rubber atop the cliffs where land meets ocean.

 

Port Gibbon campsite

 

For the time being, I'm practising being my selfie!

 

 

 

My heart sings. And I’ve finally taken my uke out of its case.  But that's another story. 

 

 

Selfie vs Country

  A selfie? Of gnarly feet!  But check out my campsite.

Spending time in spaces of incredible natural beauty with handfuls of other tourists this week, I’ve intersected with lots of selfie-takers. I find the world of selfies cringe-worthy! It really grates.  Maybe it’s a boomer thing, the relative absence of technology in the era I grew up, a valorisation of the past.   Don’t get me wrong, faces are fascinating, their shape, contours, creases, the eyes, everything. I understand the arguments that selfies express personal agency and identity, its fluidity, construction.  Everyone needs to be seen, and heard, and selfies excel at this. Images are a language too. But a selfie foregrounds the self, fails to show the spaces we inhabit, the wonder of nature.  In the vacuum of climate change, a condition largely a result of human greed and disregard for the living earth that sustains us, it feels critical to direct attention away from the self, and focus on service, care and respect for country.

So you won’t be seeing selfies from me.  If you do, know I’ve been kidnapped, maybe even dead, and someone’s hacked my computer.  I'm making an exception for the selfie of the feet!

It’s my last day on Kangaroo Island (KI).  I love how locals welcome you on the road with that raised finger signal. No, not that one! The one that smiles, says hello, having a good day?  I remember a similar gesture in the early days in Mullumbimby.  Drivers raising their pointers from the steering wheel in salutation. It’s probably a rural or remote thing.

 

I’m disappointed not to have seen a koala. During the devastating fires in Adelaide and Kangaroo Island a little over a year ago, over three-quarters of the koala population perished.  We all saw images on TV and social media during the 2019/20 bushfires of the effect wrought on species like the koala.  It breaks my heart. I recently read an article that explores why humans are so emotionally charmed by the koala.  Apparently we attribute human qualities to them, that is, they share characteristics with babies.  I did give birth to one relatively hairy baby, but I'm not sure she'd appreciate being likened to a gumleaf-eating tree-dweller!  Anyhow, locals assure me the koala residents are being well cared for by the wellspring of adorers all over the country, nurturing and rehabilitating them in specially dedicated koala hospitals in three Australian states. 

 

The bush is recovering too, parading extraordinary resilience (see pics below), bursting with brilliance.  This happens in spite of a seemingly universal common indifference to country, multispecies and diversity.

 

Kangaroo Island weather’s been Melbournesque.  Cloudy, rainy, sunny, windy, warm, and really fucking cold.  I’ve fished out the thermals. Congratulated myself a couple of times for having the foresight to pack the sheep!

 

Disclaimer! In my time on the road, I’ve attempted the selfie twice.  The result revealed my arm was way too short, my face occupying two-thirds of the frame.  The camera must also be faulty! Hear me when I say I’m doing you a favour by abstaining from the selfie. 

 

Enjoy the images of our beautiful, rich, fascinating country.

Stokes Bay campground, I prefer gnarly trees to feet. 

 

These images are taken in Flinders Chase National Park @ Cape de Couedic in the far west of the island.  Over 90% of the park burnt. The wild beauty of destruction and despair.  Such resilience.

Sunbaking seals at Cape de Couedic

 

Admiral's Arch, the seal's hood

 

 

I see a deranged dinosaur

 And a sad pig

The 'Remarkable Rocks', by no other name. At Flinders Chase Nat Park as well.   Seeing and feeling the energy and symbology and strength of Uluru here.

 

  

Curlew doing a tap dance

 

At the Raptor Domain. The masked owl.  I swear he was eyeballing me. 

 

Magnificent coastline @ Weir's Cove

 

I'd driven 30 kms on a gravel, heavily corrugated road and had just turned onto the bitumen.  I think I was tired! I did a double take.  Thinking I might have seen a ghost, I stopped, and reversed.  

 

Back to the road now

 

By the C

 

Despite leaving home a month ago, my solo journey began only a little over a week ago.  Although I've travelled solo before, the strength of the learning journey I’m on is Everest to my mind.

I’m writing this in the library of the Meningie Public School.  It also serves as a community/tourist library. Greeting me somewhat cautiously at first, the librarian informed me:

“It’ll be noisy in about half an hour, it’s lunchtime”.

Hmmm! I can cope with that. I’m a mother, it could be entertaining.

“… then it’ll be noisy again a bit later when the fire drill happens”.

Right! Maybe I’ll be gone by then …

 

Where to begin? 

 

The first three weeks I spent with family and friends in and around Melbourne, a spirited time of conversation, film and wine. When I reflect on those weeks I see faces, and food. The faces of family, of long-time friends, engaged and engaging, active, loved.  Sisters, their familiar ways, the comfort, and old restlessness.   Old friends - past work colleagues and travelling companions, memories of Iceland, of raising children, of growing old.  A goodbye gift of eggs, passionfruit and tomatoes sweet. You know who you are.  My love for you endures.

 

A couple of weeks with Raf my son, and his beloved Maraya, their cat Tilly, and brand new Cavoodle pup, Rupert. Rupi for short. I had to zip my unease re naming rights! Rupert be damned! Raf forfeited his spare time, bless his heart, fitting out my rig, installing an inverter, shelves, bed frame, awning, the works. Vroom Vroom is now ready for the long road ahead. Figs also characterise this time.  Kilos upon kilos from the tree on the pavement, ripe, stout, juicy teardrops of gods that I ate with gusto. As their oversupply threatened to spoil, we slowly dry-roasted their sweet flesh. OMFG!

Another highpoint, albeit bittersweet, was revisiting Pelligrini’s, Melbourne’s iconic Italian café.  The face of Sisto, one of its previous co-owners is like a tattoo on my body.  His smile a million hearts of welcome, I was regularly one of its recipients during my 25-year working life in Melbourne’s CBD from the early 70s.  He embodied hospitality and warmth, and flirted like a peacock. He was killed a couple of years ago in a senseless act of violence in Bourke Street. I miss his joie de vivre.

 

Bye for now Melbourne.

During the past week since leaving the city, I’ve clung to the coastline like age spots to the face.  The Great Ocean Road on Victoria’s southern coastline runs from Torquay in the east to Allandale, near Warrnambool in the west. Sometimes called the world’s greatest war memorial, work began on its construction in 1919 and was the effort of over 3,000 returned soldiers in remembrance of their fallen comrades during WW1. Driving along its 245 km stretch of coastline, famous for its great southerly winds, breathtaking views, rugged cliffs, snake-like curves and narrow lanes is a work of serious concentration.  For a 67-year old driving an old landcruiser that’s had a very gendered (sorry men) lift, the act of steering requires inflexible concentration. The centre of gravity is all wrong, the steering hyper sensitive.  I find myself thinking death, I’m legendary for it. It’s a brute of a vehicle and I’m still warming to its singular rhythm and style.

 

a view from my camp at Bay of Martyrs

Along a stretch of The Great Ocean Road between Cape Otway and Port Fairy, hundreds of shipwrecks lay to rest on the seabed, although only a small percentage of them have been discovered.  This expanse is home to the Twelve Apostles, limestone stacks which over the years have been falling victim to the seas and erosion.   Only seven Apostles remain, the stubborn, perverse ones, but I’m fortunate to have witnessed their happy dozen standing during my childhood.  

nup, not my pic!

Occasionally, I succumb to anxiety.  Leaving home to travel solo comes with a host of niggling little apprehensions.  Yesterday, for no reason other than curiosity, I discovered scum floating on the surface of the coolant, a milky layer that screamed problem to my overactive imagination. It shouldn’t look like that, I mused.  I began googling.  Cracked head gasket! A woman with her bonnet up attracts lots of blokes, and it was those blokes, who, furrowed brow, smiling blue eyes n all, assured me it probably wasn’t all that serious.  24 hours later, I’ve relaxed a little and because I’m close to Adelaide, will get it checked.  Motto: don’t trust Mr Google.  

bush camping, Mt Richmond Nat Park

I’m beginning to find my tempo, getting into the groove of the road. Solo travellers to this point have been very few on my radar.  Occasionally when I strike up a conversation with couples, I have to bite my tongue when the refrains ‘you’re travelling alone?’ in feigned worry, or ‘it’s not safe’, or ‘don’t go to Tenant Creek … Katherine …’, threaten to destabilise my reverie.  They're fear-based narratives I refuse to invite into my thinking. Trust the universe, but tie up your camel! My everyday routine of the past five years, sitting behind a computer for long hours studying is no longer, a new everyday occupies my lens.  I’m generally at my most content behind the wheel and camped in nature. I’m up with birdcall, down by dark. Travelling ultra-slowly through space and time, feeling Country, eyes attuned to the natural world, the coastal heath, pink-barked gum, salt lakes, and the insanity of pine plantation monocultures.  My camps in the past week, mainly in the Great Otways National Parks, remind me rich ecosystems, home to a multidiversity of species, are the soul of Country. 

 

Botanic gardens, Warrnambool

Cape Bridgewater 

Blue Lake, Mt Gambier

 

The magnificent Umpherstone Sinkhole, Mt Gambier

 

Despite the occasional unease, I'm content, the road beckoning. I see people from home in the faces I encounter, their body language and visage a reminder I'm never far from the community of the Northern Rivers I call home.