The View from Elsewhere

the Olive Pink of Merri Creek

So, so, so...I'm at the end of leg one of my move to Melbourne, having (a) started my new job and (b) moved into my latest rental abode.  When I say moved in, I mean me, the swag, the esky, a suitcase full of workclothes, and later a toaster, a saucepan, a fridge and a microwave.  Leg two will involve the cats and the bike, and those finicky electrical goods I could have brought in the car but forgot (the jug, the powerboard, the clock radio, etc).  Needless to say, first housewarming gift to self was a secondhand swing-door kitty-litter box.

Otherwise, I'm slumping after five days of hitting the tarmac pretty much running at my new job and organising various bits and bobs before the Big Move. That's right, the real move, leg three, when I load the rest of my stuff into the back of a van and hope that it somehow makes it here from Alice. The removalists have given me a set-down date of 6 April, tho that does seem optimistic, given they're based in Alice and they'd have to be driving over the Easter break.  All this removal business is reminding me what an undertaking it is, and how it's not to be done on a whim...every year.  I'm leaving my unit semi-furnished so I can go back for a stint in Alice if I want, but I doubt I'll ever do another permanent move back there.

I ended up applying for the first place I saw -- the Greek Grandmother's Delight in blue and white in a divey-looking block with lots of pot plants and cat kitsch -- then rescinding the application after seeing several larger abodes which would take all my stuff easily, but which were considerably more expensive. At one point, I was seriously taken by the renovated ground floor of an old bank -- plenty of cupboard space, and potential for me to subdivide an area into a study and a living room.  But there was no outside space for the cats, all the windows were fixed (so I'd rely on air-conditioning to ventilate the place), and a tramline was directly outside: I'd be woken every morning by the first tram that rattled along.  I woke up in the middle of the night and thought: do the cats really need to go outside?  The Ancient Princess was not in question, as she'd sleep all day on my bed if she could, but did the others really go out when I wasn't there?  Answer: not a lot, but they do like sitting on their chairs on the balcony of an evening.

The solution was clear: I must return to the Greek Grandmother's Delight, with its north-facing balcony.  (Happily, no one else had applied.) There were other advantages, like potentially clear delineation of cat boundaries (with separate litter boxes). The living area was kind of small, but it had an unusually large dining area opening onto the balcony, which would make an excellent writing nook, especially in the winter.  The block might look divey from the street, but it had a quite congenial feel (indeed, the residents have been friendly in a downmarket funky Melrose Place kind of way).  In fact, it seemed almost rural, because of its relative quietness and proximity to Merri Creek.  "Rural' is good after Alice," a fellow ex-Springian in the office said.  He's right; you don't want to get too urban too quickly.

It was also walking distance from High St and, as C pointed out to me on Google maps, it was a 1.2 km walk to work.  I could always buy my own floor of an old building if I still liked living in Melbourne as much in a year's time, and subdivide it as I liked. (And who wants to be worrying about having enough money to pay the rent at the expense of all the other things one came to Melbourne for -- like going out and buying books?)

the return

<iphone photo of the view from High St> 

'The thing that I noticed about returning to Adelaide,' Sebastiane said when I visited her there, 'was the lack of broken glass on the footpath and of cries in the night.'

I drove into the fine city of Adelaide on Wednesday evening last week.  My brief encounters with Adelaide over the last decade or so have been enough for me for me to appreciate some of the good things about the place (the elegant township, the good food and wine, the festivals), without experiencing any of the aspects people complain about, like the conservatism and the relative lack of degrees of separation in Alice.

I dined with Kerryn in the evening, and among other things, she warned me about the road to Nihill -- how some kind of traffic accident vortex exists along the section of inland highway around Nihill.

I had to admit, I didn't enjoy the last leg of my journey so much -- it may have been tiredness or the fact I could no longer speed, but more than anything else, the sudden change of landscape. The more cultivated environment definitely seemed dull after the arid plains, orange rocks and salt lakes of the drive directly south from the centre.  It all seemed like drab farming country, with the kind of towns that teenagers can't wait to escape (tho I did enjoy the country bakery-style meat pie and homemade wagon wheel at Bordertown).

 Nihill was mirage country: trees shimmered on the horizon, hazy where their trunks should be.  The shadows of trees flickered across the road. The picnic areas of yore have all been transformed into power nap stops. No wonder, I thought, there are so many accidents in these parts.  Drivers would be mesmerised into some sort of trance state.  Not only that, but the constant signs warning against taking you eyes off the driving game began to take on a certain gnomic wisdom: 'Yawning? A microsleep can kill', 'open your eyes - speed kills', 'only sleep cures fatigue' (a certain Shakespearean eloquence there!)  And more intriguingly: 'in times of emergency, tune into local radio xxx.'  Imagine, the little green peeps in the purple saucers are fast approaching rural Victoria, and you tune into radio Horsham for advice on what to do.

And then I realised: I'm back in the police state.  That's why I'm seeing so many warnings.  I mean, a series of road shrines is the more usual warning in the Territory.  

Some time, a couple of hundred kilometres out of Melbourne, when I started seeing huge European trees lining the highway and thick, lush grass, I thought to myself, this is a place where it actually rains.  (Melburnians might dispute that, as I'm told it's hardly rained in Melbourne over the last ten years, tho it seems to every time I visit...so there may be more of that, now that I'm back).

It was also a part of the highway (particularly the segments with convict-built stone walls) I remembered from driving out to meet with a certain Aboriginal leader's community.  Yet again, I felt I was re-tracing much of my initial journey into Aboriginal affairs and the Centre.  An Aboriginal woman said to me today that it was surprising that I was still working in the area, given some of the crazy people I've worked for: certainly, I've seen some very interesting politics, far more complicated than the perception of what goes on -- the 'Star Wars' view of Aboriginal issues that the Left often holds.  On the hand, I feel privileged to have been taken by them to places (communities, old mission -- 'reservations') that I would never have visited and to have met people I would never have met otherwise.  If I was feeling less tired, I might philosophise on some of these themes more (maybe the subject for another blogpost some time).

travelling south

In the morning I drive slowly around Coober Pedy. I feel a renewed fascination for the place, after living for six years in the Centre.

  

There's a program on local radio about how country women manage finances better than city women.  Well, there's probably not much to spend it on at Coober Pedy. To me, like many mining towns, CP seems like a very male environment, somewhere you'd find it difficult to persuade a woman -- an urban chick at least -- to live.  (Caricaturing madly, here.)  What look like the remnants of old catacombs -- presumably work or home dwellings -- are built into the sides of hills around former shafts.  A totally unused drive-in movie theatre stands in the middle of town.  It's a curiously quiet place, eerie, like so many western NSW towns.  At the same time, I'm tempted to see it as part of that line of sores, buttons or oases, however you might want to look at it, stretching (along the old telegraph line?) up to Darwin: Alice, Tennant, Katherine. 

 While in Coober Pedy, I stand in line behind an Aboriginal man in a beanie in the local servo, then pass several equally-beanied Aboriginal grannies in the back of a SUV.  There's an Australia post tube in the rear window, addressed to a well-known native title organisation. Perhaps this mob is off to establish their claim on country.  (I remember the SUV's white driver from the taverna the night before.  I heard him say something like, 'they have songlines all over the country', to a younger colleague.  Blergh: the songlines thing is beginning to sound like a tired social studies class to me.)  Driving along the highway, I occasionally see an estuary of dirt roads marked with signs indicating entry to Aboriginal country and communities. The further south I go, the less I'll see of scenes like these.

 

It's hard to describe the sense of exhilaration I feel driving through this countryside. I don't think I found it quite as interesting as I did the first time I passed through it.  Some of it is the imagined similarities to the landscape in Utah and Arizona: the long plains suddenly broken by mound-like hills and other rock formations or salt lakes.  Everything seems much more spread out than it did in Utah, where one rock amazing formation rapidly follows the other. The colours of the landscape seem more washed out than around Alice Springs, but there's still the pale blue sky with the scudding clouds teamed with the rocky orange soil dotted with saltbushes.

 

 I don't know what it would be like to be Australian but never to have seen the Centre or the Far North. It's that old irony that we often travel so much abroad but don't spend as much time exploring our own country.  I think I've been very privileged to have worked in an area that's taken me all over the country.  Nicholas Rothwell's Red Highway captures the 'otherness' of northern Australia well: his narrative moves fittingly down from the tropics to the desert.   If you haven't been there, then I thoroughly recommend reading it, along with Marie Munkara's Every Secret Thing, a novelistic take on a northern mission, in a similar style to Bran Nue Dae.

 

  

Coober Pedy leg

 I'm eating moussaka and grilled prawns at Tom and Mary's Taverna, the only place I know worth eating at in Coober Pedy.  This is a 'choice' place, as one of my best teenage friends would have said (she was from Wollongong): it's got a glow-in-the-dark fake bonsai tree, a fake fishtank full of fish, and that Iconic Greek photo with the white house beside the blue sea.

I made it to Coober Pedy by dusk. It would be more impressive if I didn't have to put my watch forward by an hour.  I''ve had two half hour stops, but otherwise, I think I've made 780 km in seven hours...an average of 130 kmh.  No wonder I'm going through so much petrol.

The first leg of my journey, 200 km to Erldunda Roadhouse, was very familiar to me from the Kings Canyon Cruise, which I've done three times.  I kept remembering downhill runs, the looming shapes of hills, stop-offs with the snack van, and snatches of conversation that accompanied various landforms.  Like: Dr Geoff talking about his sports watch that could do 5,000 things and Fred telling me how they would have constructed the culvert across that river.  Ah, memories! The only thing is: it's all more verdant now than it's ever been, because of the recent rains.  

I reached Marla at about 2.30 pm.  This inspiring location (pictured) boasts not only the beginning of the Oodnadatta Track (dirt road that takes you further into the bowels of 'the Outback') but also the infamous Roadhouse.  I say infamous, because of some of stories I've heard told about this otherwise unprepossessing place.  One of them claimed to have had a thr&&s@me in the tub at Marla Roadhouse; but because she was an Unusual Overwhelming Alice personality, I tended to take this story with a grain of salt. The other, a straight woman, said she dreamt that a large woman had mounted her in the middle of the night (she saw as a sign that she was leaving the energies of the Centre). Notwithstanding, I elected to stay further down the road at Coober Pedy, a troglodyte opal mining town.

 Marla had other memories for me, because I turned off here with a small team six and half years ago to head into the AP lands on a research trip. I remember being told we should to drink our last beers if we wanted, because most of the communities we were visiting were dry. One of my companions was a gay man who was about to turn 38 in the same week as me.  As we drove out of Marla, he began weeping about the fact that he would never have children.  At the time I thought, what is wrong with this picture?  Shouldn't it be me who's crying? Later, having brought cream pants to wear in the red centre, he began to ask whether there would be a laundromat at Amata (Amata being a small remote community).

 This time while I drove, I listened to the Raj Quartet--The Jewel in the Crown.  I never managed to watch the whole series when it was on TV (like, 30 years ago).  I couldn’t quite face the prospect of a High Brow Talking Book for the road: not that there are that many of them in the local library and I had Anna Karenin etc on my iphone, anyway.  The Raj Quartet has been a strangely perfect choice in many ways, given the anxieties about white liberals and the old Raj that it explores. In some ways, it seems a more overblown and at times overwritten version of A Passage to India. I could  relate to many of the cringesome thoughts expressed by Miss Crane, the school teacher in the first volume, who feels closer to the mixed descent than the full descent Indian people and worries about the ‘bump’ she always feels present between herself and Indian people.

When this book came out as a series on TV, I remember there being a great stink about the fact that the actor Art Malik, who played Harry Kumar, wasn’t full descent himself.  This was I suspect around the time when subaltern literature was taking off (the early 80s?  I was in year 10 or 11 when The Jewel in Crown was on TV).  Interestingly, while the first book in this quartet is told mainly from the third person intimate perspective of Miss Crane, the second book seems to be shifting between the third person intimate perspectives of white female characters and Indian male characters.  The Indian perspectives are often ‘managed’ by providing dramatic monologues of various sorts.  

 Now listening to the Raj Quartet in an era that emphasises the need for postcolonial literatures often not just to be written by minorities but in some senses controlled by them, I wonder if what’s missing is the space for fiction to explore the fractured consciousness of the ‘coloniser’.  I’m not saying space to dominate, but to ruminate about about relationships with other ethnicities.  It exists to some extent in non-fiction (e.g. Balanda) but I’m less sure about fiction.

Driving into Coober Pedy, with the egg-carton crenellations of slag heaps on its outskirts, I was reminded strongly -- as indeed I was repeatedly throughout central and south Australia -- of Utah, and its white cliffs and worn-down mounds of rocks beside the highway.  Unfortunately, no pictures I take ever seem to do justice to the Coober Pedy slag heaps.  Coober Pedy still seemed to have that sense of stillness and air about it that is so much a feature of central Australian towns and communities.  This eerie quietness was also present when I drove round the back blocks of NSW.

<accidental phone photo of Coober Pedy> 

Coober Pedy has a reputation for underground dwelling, including houses and churches.  I'd seen these before as a tourist, so I didn't visit them again.  The room in the hostel where I stayed was at least a storey underground.  I was chaperoned down to my slot in Hades by a bloke who'd no doubt delight British tourists: a 'real Australian' with a huge bushranger beard, sun-wizened limbs, a blue singlet, stubbies and boots. (I remember being accused of 'not being a real Australian' by some of my co-workers in Britain, along with being asked if I'd ever been to Summer Bay.) Believe me, there's nothing romantic about being underground. It's like being in someone's basement. My room was windowless but quiet.  Being a TV tragic, I had my TV with me (in case I ended up for a couple of weeks in an unfurnished flat). But I couldn't get any reception so I watched the end of the second series of The Circuit, which was great in the way that second series can often be great in building momentum.  Much to admire about The Circuit in bringing the reality of bush courts to TV.  Have to say I was disappointed to see that our protagonist seemed to end up with the Boring Trophy Blonde with Sloping Shoulders and A Nothing Haircut, rather than the feisty Bella…tho that could be revisited in another series, I guess.

road trip

I'm sitting in the Olive Pink Gardens (view from Annie Meyer Hill right), eating my last bigilla before I head off on a road trip.  That's right: how could I road trip begin without a fortifying breakfast. 

The past week or so, a refrain of 'road trip, road trip' has been going in my head...now faced with the reality, I feel a little subdued.  There has been a weekend of brunching and de-cluttering. The cats made themselves scarce, especially once the Dreaded Camping Gear appeared. That is, except for the Ancient Princess, who's scarcely aware of anything except the next feed (her hearing may have gone, but her sense of smell hasn't). 

I've been given various sage pieces of advice about the trip south -- how it will clear my mind, lift the tension from my shoulders, help me to think in longer arcs.  All of that.  We'll see.  I think it's a fitting way to ease myself out of the Centre: gradually.  The other thing is: talking books.  A road trip is always a great opportunity to fill your mind with longer narratives you wouldn't usually get a chance to read.

 Over the past few days, I've run into some of the personalities I met when I first came to town ...in the way that one does in Alice (not always a welcome experience), but also fortuituously, like the rounding off of loose ends in a mini-series or like the re-appearance of obscure earlier characters at the end of a Dickens novel. One of the local identities I ran into was the 'desert queen', who brought me here (pictured left).  When I told her I was travelling south, she said, 'Ah, you won't last in the Big Smoke.  You'll be back.'

I had hoped to leave town before 9.30 am...it's now almost 10.00 am.  I guess there's no screaming hurry to reach Coober Pedy tho I'd rather arrive before it gets dark (except to miss all those potholes).   No, the cats aren't coming with me.  I'm not that mad -- not driving 2,500 km with cats.  I am driving the Getz, which has raised some eyebrows amongst my male friends, but I'm sure the Getz is up to it.

Anyway, I'm for the open road:

 

the woman of the cattery

Just had a telecanvasser:

Her: Can I speak to the Man of the House?

Me: There isn't one. Are you a telecanvasser?

Her: Am I speaking to Mrs Elsewhere?

Me: No, you're speaking to Ms Elsewhere and this has been a fairly sexist telecanvassing session so far.

Her: What?  This is not sexist.

Me: Yes, it is.  [Slams down phone]

Phone ring again.  Pulls connection out of wall.

Thinks:  She's probably calling from Singapore...descending into my own generalisations here.

Thinks again: What kind of a sad, mad, unreconstituted relic am I?  Have I been too long in Alice?

Of course, there is always Otty, who thinks he's the Man of the House, but he's too shy to talk on the phone.