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.

 

  

Comments

[Zoe]

My favourite memory of Coober Pedy was a beautiful teenaged girl at the supermarket checkout singing along with the radio, "all I wanna do, is have some fun.." Still see it, 20+ years later.

[M-H]

As a New Strayan I haven't seen the Centre or the NT yet but, I discovered, neither have most of the 20 Aussie-born people I work with. And, unlike me, they're not especially interested in seeing them either. Once has worked in Darwin, and hated it, two have been to a conference there, one has holidayed in the Alice and loved it. Other than that, zilch. Huh.

[elsewhere]

Well, that's a great shame, M-H. I have a theory that Austn cities and regional centres are very insular because of the distance between them, and that people often think their slice of Australia is 'it', as a result.

[Danny]

One day I will have to make it west of Dubbo! Since I'm in the UK for three years, though, that may have to wait. (It's looking like I'll see Anatolia before Alice.)