Well, just back from a three-day outback tour to Kings Canyon, Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) and Uluru (Ayers Rock) I have too much to say and haven't had time to figure out how to say it, so here, at least, are a few photos. The first is a reflection in the water of a the Garden of Eden, a lush little oasis in the heart of the Kings Canyon landscape of sandstone cliffs and beehive-domes - the colors should be going as far as a steel-blue.The second is the famous Rock, showing its famous color-shifting proclivities - without sun it's dull brown, with sun it can shine through oranges to red, and when it gets wet in rain (apparently) it turns charcoal grey; the color of the stone before oxidization is in fact grey. That picture's also a sop for those of you who complain there are no pictures of your truly in this blog. Satisfied? (I thought I was posing to look like I was resting on the Rock as a cushion but the photographer thought better. Enough about this view of the Rock already!
The third photo is part of the surface of this otherworldly thing. It's the fantastic by turns Gaudiesque, Daliesque and Tingueleyesque networks of caves and cavities which most surprised me, and made the Rock's view from the distance seem uninteresting by comparison. I've never seen anything like it. It's like something from outer space, or deep within the earth. Twentieth century western (mainly Catalan) artistic analogies aside, the patterns are sui generis, like hieroglyphics in an indecipherable language.
The following risks being indecipherable, too, but here are at least reminders of some of what I've been up to since last posting.
On Tuesday I took the Overland, the train from Melbourne to Adelaide. The landscape was mostly flat, occasionally distended by hills, but everywhere a lush green from the autumn rains. We even went through some rain - amazing how precious those little splinters of water on the window seem in a drought!
In Adelaide I had dinner with my brother in law (in town as his company works on extending a tram line), who was missing his family terribly, and had an early-morning stroll through the wonderful Botanical Garden (most of it dew-dappled) before catching the Ghan just after noon, for the 25 hours to Alice Springs. Oh, I also nipped into Tandanya, an Aboriginal museum, where I found two books I read on the way up to the Alice. One, Sojourn on another planet by Nancy Sheppard, was a memoir of a (white) teacher on the mission in Ernabella in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The other, The undying by Mudrooroo, was an Aboriginal gothic horror novel, a surprisingly gripping combination.
In Alice I met a friend of the partner of a friend in Melbourne, a linguist who's lived in Alice Springs for ten years. My sister had been trying to connect me to a woman one of her friends in Shepparton knew without success - no need: it was the same person! She took me up to the old telegraph station, where the town was born, and told me lots about this very recent European settlement and the populations of Aborigines who congregate around it. It's a thriving little town of twenty-thousand, although the indigenous communities of the Centre are still nomadic part of the year so their population swells and shrinks. Some exciting things happening within the Aboriginal town, but it sounds like there's little connection between the two populations. Later I happened into a poetry reading at an Aboriginal Arts Centre, and heard unremarkable readings by a famous piranpa (white) and maru (black) novelist from Adelaide and North Queensland, respectively, and lots of some poetry by residents of the Alice, both piranpa and maru. [The maru novelist was Alexis Wright, not perhaps an exciting reader but, I finally learned this year, an amazing writer. - 12/2011]
The next morning it was off at the crack of dawn - before dawn, in fact, at six - for my three-day Mulgas tour with twenty other hardy souls (from England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, South Africa and the US) and a good-natured guide originally from Perth. I was probably the oldest person there, but the generation gap didn't matter much. Three days isn't that long, anyway, but it was long enough for me to wish that some of these people had been along for my India trip - more seasoned travelers, more intellectual curiosity... I suppose we were a more college educated (or still at college) group than my Intrepid pals.
We spent both nights in swags under the stars, the first night very clear and verrrrry cold. The moon (as you know) is only half-full but while out illuminated everything on the ground in its gentle light. I don't think I've every slept under the open sky before, and certainly not in a place so flat the the whole dome of the sky is there around you. Is the Milky Way longer here than in the northern hemisphere - it seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other, and to slowly move as if the ends were attached - or is it just the absence of familiar constellations? In any case, it was a fantastic experience. It'd be hard not to feel connected to the Milky Way and the animal life which comes to life at night if this were your experience every night, just as it would be hard not to feel a profound bond with the land if you were walking on it in bare feet (which we weren't). No surprise that Aborigenes were not interested in houses; the very thought of a room seems unbearably confining, and unnecessarily so - if you're safe out under the sky, why would you want to cut yourself off from its care?
I'll try to find some wise or at least non-babbling words about Uluru for tomorrow. In the meantime, I have to say that I have found the great Melbourne (or Victoria) novel, no thanks to my friends. It's Peter Carey's Illywhacker and, half-way through at page 300, I'm inclined to call it a masterpiece. Fan. Tas. Tic.
