Relief Creek! Relief Falls! Before being here with my kids I hadn’t thought of naming these places, but it is handy for me now, talking to you.
I drop my pack, hat and sunglasses, peel off my clinging shirt. I dive in and swim underwater, ten slow clean strokes through the cool green sunlight, drinking. I breathe beneath the waterfall, then glide ten clean stretching strokes back, drinking some more. The water is freakishly clear; I feel I could reach down and touch the bottom, but it is twenty metres away. I watch a falling stone take forever to hit it, then I wait for the chink sound to reach me.
I love swimming, and here I’m in heaven, but I’m getting burnt and there is no shade at Relief Falls and I know shady Relief Beach is upstream. So I get back into the hot air, repack and climb the spinifexed hillside to get above the falls. What I want is the pool/ beach/shade package; a waterfall is an optional extra, not available this afternoon. I follow the creek up for five minutes. It feels much longer because I’m so sore and exhausted, but it is only a couple of hundred metres.
I hang in the pool at Relief Beach, slowly recovering. Little fish swarm about me, nibbling. After a while I feel cold, so I get out and lie on shaded sand for an hour or so, dozing.
I open my eyes to see a fly walking about on my hand. I watch it for several minutes: its amazing eyes, the rainbows in its wings, the grooming actions of its tiny legs. Eventually my awareness shifts from the fly to a crow in the tree above me, talking with its mate nearby.
Soon I’m standing and walking about. The pool is wide and handsome. A little waterfall and rock shelf separate it from the pool behind it. Banksia, grevillea, wattle, paperbark, pandanus, palms and cyprus pine fringe the pool and adorn the beach. All about me are stunning rock formations: the stone country at its most contorted, most spectacular. Finally, after days of nonstop movement, I stand and stare.
The sun sinks. Flying foxes cascade from west to east in the darkening air. I light my fire, cook and eat my dinner. I have my final swim. I try to cross the pool underwater with one breath, counting strokes: … ten, eleven, twelve …. a couple of times I almost make it but come up a few metres short, my lungs bursting, after fourteen strokes. I float on my back and see only stars. I get out and lie on warm, flat rock.
I wake. The stars have shifted hours. I go and lie down on the sand near my pack. I wrap the muesli up in my shirt for a pillow, mounding the sand beneath it, and for a while I lie on my back and stare at the sky.
I’ve given up on the dictaphone idea, the talking out loud onto tape. I like to be quiet out here. I figure I’ll put my words onto the stars, and they’ll be there for you when you need them.
Occasionally I startle myself with a laugh that barks into the still air and bounces off the auditorium’s stone walls. Was I on the bus only yesterday? It feels like that was long ago, far away. Was it me on the bus? Or someone who looks like me? I trace the movements – a continuous line – of that guy on the bus, and I’m led to me here, now.
The day before yesterday I was in Darwin, on my bicycle on the road. I visited Mbakeh, who lives on the second floor of a big block of units. He seemed depressed. We sat on his balcony and looked out to the world. There was a huge lawn below us and to the right were several magnificent giant trees, but straight ahead was the intersection of two roads. I looked at Mbakeh but his eyes were on the moving cars, and after a while I was watching them too. Only very occasionally a pedestrian or two, members of the carless underclass, humanised the scene by walking to the petrol station on the opposite corner.
When Mbakeh was in Africa, at home, and sitting outside, he was there with his neighbours, who were outside, and with the traffic, who were pedestrians. He saw these people and they saw him. The road was a free and easy place, a place for spontaneous exchange, for goats, gossip, football, chess, for life. And so it was in Australian cities before the car. Now the road is hostile, barren, alien: black bitumen and noisy, fuming, dangerous cars.
I left Mbakeh and put my bike on one of those roads. I know all the back ways, alleyways, shortcuts and quiet long cuts, but to get from Fannie Bay to Nightcliff you have to go on Dick Ward Drive for a few kilometres. Dick Ward Drive is a major engineering feat, built on reclaimed land through mangroves. Running along one side is a wide bike path sectioned off from the cars, so it is safe, conflict free riding. There are no hills and the surface is excellent. It was hot: late afternoon, late March, the black tarmac had soaked up heat all day, but the trees planted years ago were finally providing shade and I created a breeze for myself as I rode. It was an enjoyable, meditative experience.
There was a quiet minute when there were no motor vehicles roaring past me. I listened to the whirr of my tyres, to the birds and insects and the rustle of wind through the hundred shades of green. Then the cars came again. From hundreds of metres away they drowned out the sounds of life. Louder, louder, until they were screaming past me, ugly, violent, poisonous bullshit.
I’m a long way from cars here, and getting further away, but I still feel them. They’ve entered me with their ever-presentness in my life, with their centrality to modern Australian existence.
Cars are big. Step outside your door and there is a car. They rule the common thoroughfare. Great swathes of our cities are roads and car parks. ‘Cars are a given,’ my friend Hannah says, meaning cars are somehow beyond question, beyond analysis, beyond discussion.
I was with Louis when he suddenly flew into a panic. His car was at the Mechanic’s for repairs. He had an appointment in town in two hours time. He hadn’t forgotten the appointment, but he had been imagining hopping into his car and driving in and out, and with a shock he realised he couldn’t do that. He rang friends until he found one who could pick him up and drive him in and drive him home. The fourth call found its mark and he began to relax. ‘Damned if I know how you survive without a car,’ he said to me, shaking his head in disbelief.
But he knows me very well. He knows I go into town quite often. He knows I ride my bike or I catch a bus.
I’m talking to you, Louis, and to you, Hannah. I’m talking to you all. You’ve put car in my face for forty years. I’m putting it back into yours for a while.
SUNDAY APRIL 3RD, 2005
I had been heading towards a particular place: a creek, a gorge, falls. I see it on my map but I’ve never been there and I can’t imagine it. What is it like, this Mystery Creek, this missing piece of the puzzle, surrounded by country I know, by creeks I’ve followed?
I went to sleep intending to wake at dawn and walk, but at dawn, in an instant, I change my mind. Mystery is too far away and requires too much walking. I would have to walk six or eight hours each day for the next seven days to get there and back to the highway, to get back to town. There is no scope for a rest day. I’m not fit enough to do that without it being too hard. I turn in my sleep and see the sky lightening in the east. Oh no! The next time I look it is lighter and the birds are starting up. I suddenly reject the idea of the race against time, and accept, with great relief, a week of freedom: now I have time for everything. I don’t have a schedule dictating my actions. If I wanted to, I could spend five, six days here.
I sleep for a while longer, dreaming exuberantly. I get up and wander about the beach and rock shelf. I sit cross-legged on the sloping sand at the water’s edge, watching the fish in front of me, and slowly getting through a bowl of muesli. When the sun rises above the ridge behind me and I need my hat and shirt, I pack my bag and set off.
I leave Relief, which here runs south, and walk directly towards the sun. I’m heading for Halfway Creek, which runs north three kilometres to the east. I have done this crossing eight or nine times, and I’ve never gone the same way twice. The terrain is so rugged and diverse that within