For half an hour I clamber through labyrinthine stone, then settle into a stretch of high, flat, sparse woodland. Occasionally I catch glimpses of escarpment several kilometres away to the northeast.
I gradually descend into a little creek – let’s call her Gully – which I remember from other times. Later in the year Gully will be dry with occasional pools, but now she is flowing, and here is a two metre waterfall, an exquisite, small but deep pool and a shaded patch of sand. The countryside oozes out its moisture. Gravity pulls it down, into trickles into gullies into creeks into rivers. This is a great time of year because there is water everywhere: cool, clean water to drink, and cool, clean water to fall into, to dissolve into.
I’ve always been comfortable in the bush. I spent the first five years of my life in a semi-rural outer suburb of Melbourne, and my earliest memories are of the creek, pine forest and cow paddock within toddling distance of home. Then we shifted to a beach and bush outer suburb of Brisbane where I spent the rest of my childhood. Bushwalking – the kind of thing I’m doing now –was a natural progression from the out-of-school activities of my youth.
I cop flak for bushwalking alone – ‘weird’, ‘wacko’, ‘oddball’, ‘selfish’ – but I’m happy to be alone. I’ve bushwalked with many friends over the years, happily, successfully. Walking with my children has provided me with the best weeks of my life, and Seb was great for a few weeks twenty years ago. But being close to someone for days on end can grate on the nerves.
Phil was always singing the jingles of television commercials or TV shows. I was annoyed by a particular song for canned fruit on day one. I walked with him for two weeks, and by the end I wanted to throw a can of fruit at him. And he was always shouting for echoes. I felt we were intruding, wearing thin our welcome.
Jeff was inordinately bothered by flies. There are always a few flies about, and later in the year there can be more than a few, and I wave or blow them away from my eyes and mouth unconsciously. Jeff was forever loudly cursing them and chasing them away from his legs and arms. He’d look over to me and angrily ask, ‘How come you don’t have any flies on you?’ then realise I did but wasn’t bothered by them. He would rise late, and wanted to bolt from one campsite to another. If I stopped to look at anything he would ask, ‘What’s wrong?’ He was up ahead calling out, ‘What’s wrong?’ every two minutes.
At least those guys enjoyed the country because some friends don’t. Everywhere is ‘dreary’. They are disappointed. They ‘didn’t think it would be like this’. They ‘can’t get comfortable’. Robert cut the walk short due to junk food addiction. Mel worried about her dog. Scott was incensed by the lack of man made paths. Before he came out with me he had imagined he would be walking on paths thinking about his business, and I was sorry to disappoint him.
Alone, I am my own man. I stop and start without consultation, without thought. Alone, things are very simple. And after a few days the aloneness becomes a great theatre for revelation.
People wonder about me being ‘scared’ by myself. Ann went camping by herself once: she walked along a designated walking path in a National Park, and had stopped at a designated camping area in the middle of the afternoon. There was no one there but she was sure other people would arrive. When no one had come by dusk she freaked out. She considered walking back to her car but it was too dark. She got into her tent but didn’t sleep a wink because she was ‘scared shitless’. To her great relief dawn eventually broke, and she packed up and rushed home. She said it was the worst night of her life.
‘But what were you scared of?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know.’
‘No, seriously. Why were you scared?
‘I don’t know.’
She was enclosed in her tent, safe from the ‘creepy crawlies’ that people can fear. I pressed her. ‘You must have been scared of something.’
‘I was! I was scared shitless,’ she said again.
‘But of what?’
She didn’t understand the question. She said she was amazed that I’m not scared when I ‘camp’ alone.
‘But what would I be scared of?’
She didn’t know.
‘So, you were scared because no one was there? How about if a bunch of drunk footballers turned up? Would you have been scared of them?’
‘No. They would have protected me.’
‘From what?’
She didn’t know.
And then they wonder about me being ‘bored’ by myself. Michael was visiting Darwin, and his friends had taken him to Litchfield National Park, about one hundred and fifty kilometres from town. The three-hour return trip – chatting and listening to music in the plush, air-conditioned interior of his friends’ new car – was probably the best part of the day.
‘Where’d you go?’ I asked.
‘Florence Falls’
‘And what did you do?’
‘Had a swim, then read the paper,’ he said, and he saw something in my face because then he said, ‘Well, what else am I going to do? Matt starts reading the paper, then Audrey starts reading the paper. What am I going to do?’
Here, so close I can touch it, is a wattle, less than a metre tall, with perhaps one hundred leaves. Several leaves are old and yellow, about to fall off. Several leaves are new: small, unblemished, a more vibrant green. Some leaves have been significantly eaten by insects. I look at one particular leaf: its backbone and its fine veins, and about twenty little light-coloured circular blemishes and several other dark squiggly blemishes, caused – I think – by organisms. And there, a beetle. I look at it closely: tiny eyes, tiny legs. I look at its wings. Each wing is composed of twenty or so segments. I look closely at one segment, then another, then another, and in each segment I can see a rainbow.
I nod to Michael. There is nothing he can do but read the paper.
I follow Gully downstream – north – for a while. I’ve not done this before, but it’s easy walking and I want to meet Halfway further downstream from where I normally meet her. I recognise a big bluff ahead. The Spot – a place on Halfway – is to the right of this bluff and Gully continues past it to the left, I’m sure. The recognition makes me feel good: I’m getting to know this country. When I get closer, I leave the creek and go east through stone, then make a steep but straightforward descent to the bottom of Halfway’s gorge. I hop a few hundred metres downstream and I’m at The Spot.
There is a particular feel here that I recognised the first time I came through. I didn’t stop that time – I had camped half an hour upstream and was on the move – but I’ve slept here several nights over the years, and I’ll sleep here again tonight. I shed my pack and hat and sodden shirt, and the pool takes me in like I have never been gone.
Hours and hours later, the pendulum that throws me into the water to cool, then drags me out to warm, is losing momentum. I’ve been into every nook and cranny of this pool, and the crusty surfaces of beaches – until today disturbed only by lizards and birds – are now trampled with my footprints. I went upstream for a while, and swam up the long narrow gorge to the bottom of Halfway Falls. The walls of the gorge are so close together I’m careful not to kick my feet against them as I breaststroke, and so high and narrow that in the half-dark I cannot see the bottom. Eventually they open, and I tread water beneath the fifty metre falls. I can’t climb up anywhere – I’ve tried, but there are no handholds – so I slowly glide back to The Spot.
It is an hour before sunset – I don’t have a clock so I’m always guessing – and the shade from the western ridge has crossed the pool and crossed the beach I’m on, and is spreading away from me like a slow-burning fire.
Overlooking me are huge bluffs, cliffs and hillsides, their