Diamond cutter
I am seated at a low wooden bench beside a honking road, holding out a handful of money. An old woman sits opposite me, the calm centre of a small table cluttered with bottles and pots and chopsticks and plates. She is old enough to remember the French in Laos; old enough to forget them too. Her face tilts downwards, lips carefully pursed. In her right hand she holds a battered meat cleaver. In her left, a rhombus of pork. She begins to slice with absolute and majestic concentration, as if she was cutting a diamond.

Breakfast
In the early mornings I am hungry, but my few words of Thai are still too blunt to confidently prize a breakfast our of the local vendors. I am not ready for the world, but I must ask it for food.

Today, wandering the outer suburbs of Bangkok, we manage a hopeful, laughing, pointing exchange with a charcoal-smoked clutch of friendly chefs beside a narrow road. I buy nameless meat forked between two pieces of bamboo, rice and a taut plastic bag of broth, swollen like some benevolent lung-and-liver-filled grenade. We want to eat out of the traffic and soon find a narrow tree-lined canal cleaving through the city. A concrete drain cover cantilevers out over the water and we sit down to eat, dangling our legs.

The meat turns out to be chicken, a salty, blackened sweetness curling at its edges. I take a mouthful and look idly past my toes to the water. It is a challenge, to hold such an exultant taste in my mouth and separate it from the disposable nappy floating calmly by.

A boat full of brown-shirted workers chugs towards us. The low belly of the craft swells with a pile of unimaginable filth, scooped from the water with hand nets. Seated in front and obviously the leader is a red-cheeked matron. She calls sharply to us and scowls; the other workers laugh uproariously. I think she is telling us off: what the hell are you doing eating your breakfast here?

A young guy in tight jeans and white hitops walks past with baskets of flowers hanging from a long bamboo pole across his shoulders. He toasts us with a can of pepsi and grins. A few steps further along the path he turns back and says in clear, unmistakeable English: "Go home!" Go eat at home? I'm going home? Or fuck off back to your own country?

When my brother stands, we realise he has been sitting on a dead rat. We laugh. We chalk everything up to experience.

Smoking
At night the men sit in ragged rings on plastic chairs in the street, smoking and drinking 100 Pipers whiskey while the women, wielding beefy arms and tired smiles, do the cooking.

Escaping the ghetto
Luang Prabang is old-world provincial France time-travelled and culture-jacked into the middle of Laos. Three-storied hotels with colourful shutters and generous balconies spill their restaurants and cafes out into the streets. At night it is a fairy kingdom of soft lamp-light and candles. There is no traffic noise to interrupt the sipping of your latte. It has to be one of the nicest tourist ghettos in the world, and we are sick of it.

Over the bridge is the real city of phone shops, motorbike repair sheds and traffic. We walk the banks of the Mekong past dozens of identical tourist eateries with identical menus until there are no menus at all, just laughing locals seated round a half-dozen bottles of Beer Lao and a menagerie of bowls and baskets. Huge speakers blast fuzzy, red-hot Laos pop. It's the country's signature sound, created from a universal habit of over-cranking stereo-systems to the point where they explode with distortion. This looks like the place to eat.

I select a dish at random from my squirrel-hoarding of Laos words. 'Jao mee kao soi dae?' The cook wipes her hands on her apron and looks a little shocked, shaking her head. I wonder what she thought my mangled words meant; I thought I asked for 'kao soi', a common pork and noodle soup, but obviously not. She suggests an alternative that sounds like 'ping gai' and 'kaeng something' - grilled chicken and a curry of sorts. We just nod and say, sure, two please. Nod, smile and hope for the best.

Minutes later a plastic basket arrives filled with hunks of cabbage and fistfuls of river weed. The peppery weed still has the roots attached and looks like it was pulled straight from the Mekong. Soon after we're delivered a huge plate of dried, grilled buffalo strips, flecked with chilli and matted black buffalo hair. It's delicious but disconcerting - chewing each small piece takes a good five minutes. We're three or four pieces in when the main course is placed under our noses with a grin: a giant, steaming bowl of offal soup. Floating in a cloudy broth are lungs, liver, hearts, aortas, tracheas, kidneys, brains, and a fair bit of other viscera we can't identify. The word viscera doesn't really carry weight till you've put a steaming spoonful of it into your mouth and tried to chew.

Enthusiasm will get you a long way when travelling. Enthusiasm gets us about half-way through the bowl before something snaps. I chew and chew but there is no purchase for my teeth; it refuses to dissolve into a swallowable mass. The flavour swells to fill my mouth, nose, throat, stomach, my whole being until I am enveloped in offal like the clouds of flies that swarm the bowls of raw ingredients. It's the first and only meal we are unable to finish. Without a word, we know it is time. Time to return to the tourist ghetto.

Secret ingredient
The secret ingredient of street food is diesel. After dinner at night I am filled with fire and smeared with soot, and happy. The vendors throw in galangal and lemongrass, chilli and lime, but such aromas can never completely mask the excretia of buses, motorbikes, tuktuks, cars and trucks. Fossil fuels tinge all. In Australian restaurants, Thai food never tastes this good and so I conclude: the secret ingredient in street food is diesel.

 

Bangkok was waiting, but I wasn't quite ready for her.

At each corner the city thrust skeletal juggernauts into the sky, half-built or burned-out, a latticework of twisted steel bursting from concrete shells. At each corner, unbuilt, abortive pillars for gargantuan future freeways hung dark against a fat grey sky. At each corner, highrises sparkled into existence, bombarding us with white light and white noise, the bus radio sparking between Thai pop in the front and down the back where we sat - rocked with speed, heat in our faces, ten hours of travel through space still clinging to our skin - the unmistakable tinny echo of public-address political speeches.

I listened to rushes of Thai syllables, broken by loud cheering and pauses for dramatic effect, shattered by razor-sharp bursts of static as the signal scattered and reformed. Later, in a 'Taxi Meter' from Victory Square to our guest house, the driver was listening to the same public-address rant. It came at us from TVs on street corners surrounded by a circle of shoulders, from open windows where bodies sprawled on the floor, listening or sleeping. Not knowing any Thai, the barking voice and roaring crowd recalled equally incomprehensible addresses I'd heard by Hitler. An invalid reference I know, because what's going on here is utterly unconnected to that history, but the reference did come to mind unbidden. I suddenly, irrationally, wondered if we might be hearing some momentous political speech, some call to arms, the announcement of a civil emergency or civil war, poured into our unsuspecting ears on our way to our fan-swarmed dorms.

Roaring through Bangkok's streets, I tried to recall what i knew about the madly unstable political situation here. The glittering airport we'd just left was closed only two months ago, by 6000 occupying demonstrators, and we soon learned that the red-shirts were gathering in large numbers not far from Khao San Road, the iconic (and hysterically funny) Westerner strip. Everywhere there are men wearing 'Long Live the King' wristbands, orange versions of our white 'make poverty history' ones. Banners proclaim 'No More Dictator, Constitution Now'. A small sticker declaring 'We Want Democracy' whizzed past where I sat at a roadside noodle house, affixed to the glass pane of a motor-bike vendor cart. The papers are filled with photos of mass demonstrations, seas of red t-shirts. Several times we've stumbled across large groups gathered around trucks fitted with loud speakers, blaring speeches into the night. We know somehow that we are surrounded by a direct, urgent and highly charged politic, but we have no idea what it is.

We might sense its presence, but are only slowly realising its scale and momentum. Yesterday Bangkok was brought to a complete standstill by 100,000 people demanding the return of ex-Prime Minister Thaksin and the dissolution of the current government, installed after a 2006 military coup. Traffic is a nightmare, whistles and police and always a sense that people are rushing towards, or away, from something with urgency. Today has been declared a national holiday by current Prime Minister Abhisit in an attempt to diffuse the growing tension. And he is threatening to declare a state of civil emergency and call in army reinforcements if protests at the upcoming Asean economic summit in Pattaya turn violent. Which, we found out today, they already have.

So having been in the country for a week and have a lot of friendly conversations , can I say what's actually going on? Hell no.

A square, beefy man in pointy-toed crocodile-skin shoes and chunky gold jewellery, who told us he was a stock-broker then later admitted that his father was, accosted us around in the Siam Square shopping district to practice his English. In between telling us how not to get ripped off by his working-class compatriots, how to not ever have to pay for pussy ("BBK! Bang Bang Cock! Get it? Bang? Bang? Cock?"), and how he really wanted to fuck a black woman ("black on the outside, pink in the middle!"), he would only shake his head when pressed about politics.

Another educated Thai, an accounting professor who had visited New Zealand and wore a silver fern tie pin beneath a kind face, told us to avoid the areas of the protests, saying the anti-government / pro-democracy marches were "no good, no good."

Later, seated on hard wooden seats in a crowded third-class train heading north, I chatted to the elderly man next to me. He had rusty but amazingly good English, and talked with strong emotion about the current situation, showing me a coin sewn to the outside of his wallet bearing the King's face. "My King," he said. "This is my King," with a voice that somehow sounded near tears. "Democracy, you have many people decide everything. King, you have one person tell the army, the police, the courts, government what to do." I must have looked confused, and when I asked "So which do you think is better, King or no King," he looked me in the eye and emphatically replied "King." I didn't think it was even about the King, but I think here it always is.

In the bowels of Bangkok two guys we met talked candidly about how utterly corrupt the entire system was, rattling off a long list of abuses on all sides, with the added complication that having a King who supposedly stands outside of politics gives a misleading impression that there is a higher, neutral power to which the people can appeal. According to these guys (who I'll tell you more about later), a pair of hilarious, passionate cynics hyped up on coffee and cheap whisky, everyone is rotten to the core.

From it all I can happily conclude I have ABSOLUTELY no idea. It's a hugely complicated tangle of alliances, royal traditions and class allegiances, none of which are readily accessible to someone like me, crash-landing in the middle of it with an open curiosity but without a lot of knowledge. There are pro-democracy Red-shirts, mostly rural poor, many of whom also support the ousted and by all accounts corrupt Thaksin. There are the Yellow shirts, the pro-royalists who also shut the airport down last year. There are widespread accusations against the current army-backed government, which came to power in a 2006 coup, of taking a fascist direction, using 'lesse-majeste' laws to arrest anyone criticising the king or the regime. And there are the urban middle classes and academics who support that government as well. I've even read of moves to roll back democracy even further, with only a handful of seats in parliament being elected.

Thai New Year approaches on the 13th, with the glorious promise of water fights, festivities, and maybe, just maybe, a state of emergency. We can only glimpse the bigger picture through reading the papers, and have to drop in to internet cafes to check out what's happening. All we really know is that Thai people are hugely engaged in politics, out in the streets, following it keenly at every turn. We are sheltered from it, through our ignorance, and perhaps a reluctance to tell the tourists. Tourism is huge in Thailand. Everyone wants us here, and we want to be here too, and it's perhaps best for all if we pretend there's nothing going on.

 

The atmosphere is hushed, and there are children present, but here, 2018 metres above the earth, we are having an orgy. It's the only word I can conceive to summon the sense of total abandon, the mass lack of thought as to consequence, the morning after, the confused and dirty exhilaration; not to mention the effect it will have on those children, like the one doing laps of the cabin, gazing at us all with wide brown eyes.

I'm talking, melodramatically of course, about the burning of fossil fuels on the eve of a global warming catastrophe.

There are always gaps in our thinking, between our thoughts, our values, and our actions. The gaps are usually produced by the combination of alcohol, sex and money, the key ingredients for the orgy. But politically, there are bigger gaps with more profound impacts. For a generation preceding us, this has lain between our incredible lifestyle and our knowledge of the total unmitigated horror required globally to sustain it. You can close that gap a little by traveling to the global south and seeing the impact, or radically changing your consumption habits, or engage in activism. But they're often minor, personal and most of all, voluntary. It was never possible that this gap between the so-called first and third worlds would slam closed on us like a gin trap- a mass rebellion, an uprising against the West. Freud's return of the repressed didn't stand a chance against the military intelligence, border policing and pure, naked firepower. No-one is going to disturb the orgy.

But global warming has a different kind of gap at its heart. I'm living in it right now, with the thousand islands of Indonesia visible below through a haze of evening cloud. Burning tonnes of fuel per second in pursuit of ephemeral and delicious adventure, while knowing, thinking, reading about and even writing about the extreme threat of climate change: we know it is real, but we act as if it is not. This has to be the paradox, the fundamental gap, of our generation.

The problem is, with this latest version of Western cognitive dissonance, we can't ignore it. One day the gap will simply close- the earth's temperature will lurch upwards, and we may or may not lurch with it. Someone will turn on the ugly lights, kill the music and leave us pink and sweating, pants round our collective ankles.

I keep coming back to this gulf in our understanding. I'm fascinated by it. I know a lot of people who live and act with climate change as a reality. For most of us though, myself included, despite the wealth of evidence and the books we read and the conversations we have in coffee shops, it's business as usual. Am I trying to talk myself out of going on this holiday? You might think I feel a sense of guilt and impending doom from what I've written above, especially about taking this trip. If I'm truly honest, the reality is that I don't feel guilty, not one whisper. And I suspect that a lot of us, who hold clear environmental values in the abstract and are quick to outrage when we hear of politicians or businesses denying climate change, are the same.

The classic solution to problems of cognitive dissonance - the gap between values or beliefs, and actions - are:
a) change your behaviour to match your beliefs.
b) maintain your dissonance by ignoring the gap
c) drop your beliefs, admit that you don't really hold them.

The hard-nosed environmentalists in my life would be quite blunt: you can't believe in climate change nor can you be an environmentalist and continue to fly. Drop the pretence: you're actually in the denialist camp.

But the reality is more complex than that. I think a lot of us are stuck somewhere around option B, and are slowly sidling towards a), changing our behaviour.

So, my puny little list of justifications: I ride a bike, have never owned a car, don't even have a licence, and have gotten a fair few others into biking myself. I live in a large communal sharehouse and have for a long time where we share resources, buy in bulk, buy organic, try to avoid packaging. I attend the occasional environmental rally, and worked for two years on the Future Cities Project, about urban sustainability for Melbourne ... and ... and ... that's it. It's almost a list of requirements for social inclusion in the inner north of Melbourne, rather than a coherent environmental philosophy. How does it weigh up against international travel? The honest answer is: it probably doesn't.

The slide to a), changing our behaviour, is the key though. How do we do it voluntarily, on whatever scale we are capable? How are we going to continue to travel and explore the world, but avoid contributing to the probem? Or better still, leave the environment in a better shape than we found it?

My partner and I are planning on travelling again at the end of the year, but doing it without any flights. We'll train, bus, bike, boat, walk and probably crawl for a bit too. The challenge is to see how we can experience the world in a low-energy way, and try to document it publicly. We're far from the first to want to do this, and it's still an orgiastic kind of trip. But it does brings me to my final defense: In writing about the gap and admitting there is a serious gap in thinking between the values and actions of myself and a lot of the left, we can work openly on closing that gap, before it's closed for us.

 

At my kitchen table I am more at home than most. I've lived here for years. I've spent years of my life sitting here typing on this laptop, to the point where the letters are starting to wear off the keys. I made the table myself; I painted the walls around me on a hot summer night that ended with a paint fight out in the street and white hand-prints slapped across out bright red door; and knocked a hole through the wall to my left to put in the glass door leading out to the garden. I may not own the house - in this financial and ethical climate, I may never (want?) to own a house - but as far as renters go, I feel like I know more about this house than most.

As for Thailand, which is about to become my temporary home for the next little while ... well, what do I know about Thailand? Mainly that it's been the single biggest recipient of my disposable income over the last eight or so years, even though I've never set foot in the place. Since I discovered Thai food at uni, I've eaten it at least twice a week, and often at least once a day. You could fill an olympic swimming pool with the amount of pad thai i've put away over the years. I got so well known at one restaurant down the road from my work that they tried to hook me up with their daughter. She'd always get sent over to wait on my table, which was kinda embarrassing given we both grew up in NZ and weren't quite down with the family way of arranging things!

Liberal multicultural cliches that equate food with culture and national costumes aside, I know absolutely nothing about Thailand. So far people have given me such useful gems as 'don't say anything about the king or you'll get arrested', 'Bangkok is totally amazing / insane / full of men with perfect, surgically implanted breasts', and 'make sure you don't eat or drink the water / ice / restaurant food / street food / beer / whisky', and 'stay the hell away from the lady boys / political demonstrations / provinces / backpackers,' and 'only / don't travel on local buses / air conditioned buses / skyways / boats / trains / taxis / tuktuks / foot.' So far, not so good.

My brother and I are on a plane for Bangkok tomorrow afternoon, the first plunge into South East Asia for both of us. We're leaving two months later than planned, and have no plans beyond touchdown and hoping to score the ever-sketchy Visa On Arrival. At this stage the plan is as follows: walk into the city, stopping at roadside stalls to fill our water bottles from the taps, eat as much dodgy food as possible, slug back a few litres of thai whisky, get in a drunken conversation about the Thai royal family with a heavy-breasted man. It'll be great.

 

This house is a measuring stick. How much water did you use today? How much wood did you burn? How much beer did you drink? When it’s only you and the ants, every act of consumption is visible. Every act of waste too – when you half-finish a tin of tuna and the rest goes off, what do you do with it? Bury it.

When you are half-finished and gone off, what do you do with yourself?

*

It’s a symphony of fluttering and dying. Insects surround me, smashing their lives into windows, walls, lights, my arms and my face. A thousand flies, a thousand moths. It’s a strange daily companion, to be in the presence of so many expiring souls, such constant, frantic death all around.

*

I am sitting upstairs writing with the windows thrown wide to a perfect day. I am distracted by the sound of a car revving, and look out to my left to see a man two properties over backing his car into a small tree. He hesitates as branches begin to crack, then decides to continues his awkward manoeuvre. With a loud, juicy snap the tree goes down and he is able to back clean over it. The car stops, and he gets out. He is white-haired, wearing stubbies and a dirty purple shirt. He walks quickly to the fallen tree, leans down and attempts to resurrect it. Even from here, I can see that he will fail. He holds it for a moment so that it stands upright alongside its neighbour. He lets go and stands back. The tree flops to the ground, defeated. He shakes his head and drives away.

*

This is a drunken house. Nothing is straight. The window and door frames lean into each other for support. Even the glass is tipsy. Move your head to the left and the right and the world beyond bubbles and lurches. Hello world. I can make you drunk. In the 1850s, this was a hotel. We have stained the ground.

*

Outside. The main street. A woman in a phone box, hair pulled back sharp, tattoos punched into her neck. "He said, when he sold the bike he’d give me two hundred to fix the tooth he smashed. Two hundred dollars?! You couldn’t get them to pull one out for that much!"

*

Inside. It’s too much. It’s too utterly, ridiculously good. The whole house is booming with thunder, the rain is roaring down it doesn’t storm like this in the city the table shaking I can feel thunder in my belly I’ve got apple crumble in the wood range it’s like New Zealand lightening tears the sky down purple and white over silhouetted trees I miss this and for this one brief, brief moment, it’s all mine.

Fucking hell. I think I’m getting old.



*

Some days are rubbish.

Clumsy and wrong. Today was like that. I’ve burned my hands and arms on the stove a number of times, failed to do any writing, felt frustrated. I rode out to the Avoca cemetery to give myself something to do, and that compounded the problem. I entered against the wind and within minutes was feeling strange, really strange. No sense of peace, no sense of rest. Amongst the cemetery's paths and rows, there are certainly some beautifully tended graves, and out to the west across the fields, the hills of the Pyreneese have a soft beauty. But as I make my way through the forest of headstones, I discover a jarring contrast to that gentle view.



Some headstones are damaged, the Chinese graves are mostly missing and there is rubbish everywhere, slag-heaps of concrete, discarded plastic flowers by the hundreds, even a shipping container. A shipping container in a cemetery. What the hell is in it?



In the Chinese section, segregated by a stand of trees, there are only five headstones left, each enclosed in a sturdy metal cage to prevent further vandalism. There were over a hundred Chinese buried here, but only five headstones left, muzzled. Perhaps they bite.



A nagging feeling that something is wrong.

A friend told me about visiting a cemetery in Romania which was divided in two. One half was a bloom of colour - flowers, toys, letters, plants, all immaculately tended. It was a living place for the dead to rest. The other side was quite literally dead - stone and concrete, neglected and cold. She asked about the division at the local hotel where she was staying and discovered that one half was for the local townsfolk, the other for the Romany. There wasn't even a permanent gypsy population in the town, but any who passed through stopped off at the cemetery to pay their respects and tend the graves. The way we treat our dead says a lot about how we treat the living.



My sense of unease is largely me of course. I was restless before I arrived. But it's this place too. Under the trees beside the Chinese graves there is a fox hole, an explosion of yellowed clay settled in claggy hold around a line of shrivelled corpses. Hens, rabbits, other scraps of bone I can’t even identify. Nothing unusual in itself, but there’s just something raw about seeing that in a graveyard – a hole dug in the ground, decomposing flesh out there in the sun.



*

 

It’s raining in drought country. Really raining now – the flood plain and the trees have dissolved into a hail of white and I can’t hear a thing above the thunder and crash of water on tin.

I went out in it today, just before it really came down, to get some meat. The man from the milk bar in the main street stroked his chin of grey stubble and squinted out from under to awning to the south. ‘There’s a whole lot more a’ that coming,’ he said. ‘Say so,’ I replied. It was the first time I’d talked to anyone in three days. My voice came out as a squeak, stuck in my throat. I kept walking towards the Butchers, the last shop on the strip. ‘We’re the only ones open, cobber,’ he called after me. ‘It’s Saturday.’

Inside, he pointed a finger at a frozen tray of steak. ‘Sausages, BBQ packs, and that.’
‘Nothing in the way of chicken?’, I shouted, over-compensating for my earlier croak.
He shook his head. ‘Nothing in the way of chicken.’
‘So what kind of sausages are they?’
He paused for a good few seconds and looked at me like I was insane. He cocked his head to one side like I was simple and said: ‘Beef’.

I laughed all the way back to the house, swinging my bag of frozen sausages through the rain and grinning at the huge dark thunder clouds. Beef. What the hell was I expecting?

It’s raining in drought country. The rush of water above me means the tanks are filling. Good to know. I’ve been dragging an old-fashioned white tin bucket around with me for nearly a week now, catching every last drop and pouring it onto the veggie garden. Not tonight I won’t. I’ll light the wood stove and sit down to write, then when the water’s hot, have my shower bucket-free. A small guilty pleasure.

On Monday when we came up from Melbourne to drop off gear, I was taken to visit a local lake. A row of houses backs down onto the shore along side the boating club, change rooms, launching ramp and jetty. A weathered sign shows an image of a diver with a large red line through it. But the jetty juts out into the middle of an empty paddock. Since 1997, there's been nothing there. It's dried up. There is no lake. Imagine that. In ten years. The crops have failed, again, the aquifers are coughing up salt and in places people are walking off the land. And there sure as hell isn't anything resembling a lake out there.

I have a thought. Australia has a penchant for historical re-enactments. Goldfields days. Victorian gentlemen and ladies. The twenties. I'm thinking of coming back out here and staging a re-enactment of the year 1997 entitled 'Summer at the Jetty'. You're all invited. Find some late nineties period costumes. Come by for a barbie after the water-skiing's all done.

I’m in Avoca, a small country town in Victoria’s goldfields region doing what is, for me, my first writers residency. An old house in an old town, each a great rusty space, and for the next month or so, they are mine. I’m living alone. No mobile coverage on my network. My phone battery’s gone dead too and I brought the wrong charger. So I can’t even ring out. I don’t actually know anyone’s phone number any more, and no-one knows mine here. But the best part? It suits me fine. For now.

I'm only a stone's throw from the main street, but you can go a whole day and not see anyone. When someone walks past, you can hear their footsteps crunching on the dirt road a full thirty seconds before you see them.

Welcome to the silence.

On Tuesday, I rode here from Castlemaine. 71km is a long way. I’m glad I did it though, to arrive here under my own energy, to experience it as a journey. Half in the light with a ceaseless, maddening Westerly wind in my ears. Half in the dark with the cicadas and the stars.

Switch off your light. Coast down the hills with your throat to the sky.

(Did i mention how utterly, ridiculously, maniacally fucking excited i am to have this opportunity? To hang out here, with not a single distraction, and just write? I can't quite believe it. I may lose my shit ever so slightly - talking to yourself, anyone? - but hey. It'll be fun.)

 

Now that the year has opened and swallowed me whole, and my head is split from right to left with the throb of last night’s beer, I find myself wanting to write about beginnings. It’s Saturday night. The windows are thrown open to the last of summer’s heat and the roar of Sydney Road, and I’m waiting for the next six weeks to crush me. Funny that I should be drawn back to this story. Funny that I am sitting down to write about clear-headed beginnings in a cool New Zealand summer in the midst of all this chaos. It was an uneventful trip in some respects – no fireworks, no real dramas – but it affected me in a strange way.

***

2007 starts with the sun. When I open the hut door the light is blinding. My eyes adjust and I can see Tongariro for the first time. Its enormous flanks rise from the tussock and dissolve into mist, then blow away.



With a billy-full of muesli and a half-pulverised banana from the bottom of my pack to begin the year’s eating and shitting, I lean back on the porch and enjoy the view and the sun’s warmth. Boots, gaiters, knees and hairy thighs eddy around me, then with a chorus of farewells, are gone. My brother is the most meticulously slow-moving creature on the planet. He’s laying out every item in his kit before packing them away in optimum formation; we’re not going anywhere. But I’m in no hurry to rush this. The rough boards of the hut against my back and the astounding view are enough for now. Besides, I spend most hours of most days of my life rushing. Normally I’d pack in 5 minutes and leave half my shit behind, whereas he’ll take an hour and can guarantee you that his pocket knife is where it’s meant to be.

The morning steeps in tea. We’re still sitting there chatting to the wiry hut warden and her hung-over friend when two young guys arrive back from their dawn adventure. They got up at 4am to catch the sunrise but spent it huddled in cloud, trying to cook frozen sausages over a gas stove that refused to fire in the cold. 10am it is. The tussock is bent sleek by a knife-thin wind, the snow is coming: we should get a move on. Ben finally packs his perfect pack, and we’re away.

Straight into the hordes of day-walkers. The main track heading in towards the peaks is a long slow babble of visitors in jeans and t-shirts. In my gore-tex and carrying a fairly hefty pack, I feel a touch ridiculous, like I’m walking down a suburban street dressed for a blizzard. But we are actually in the mountains, and it is actually going to snow. Tongariro Crossing is the most popular day walk in the entire country, but despite the frequent and prominent reminders that it takes between seven and nine hours and requires all-weather clothing, food, water and good footwear, perhaps half would be adequately prepared. The news frequently runs stories about tourists getting into trouble, and only last year a 70-year-old American died of exposure after the weather turned and their party became disorientated in the fog.

About an hour on from the hut we catch up to a group of young Indians down from Auckland for the day. They’re friendly and intelligent, some studying, one working as an engineer, all excited to be out in the mountains. They’re also a classic example of under-preparation. One of them has a windbreaker, two have gloves; but for the most part they look like they’re going to the mall to do their shopping. Nearing the top of the Devil’s Staircase, panting and flushed, the first flakes of snow begin to fall. We laugh together, gleeful to be in a snowstorm on new year’s day, but up over the lip of the climb and into the southerly’s teeth and we’re the only ones still smiling.



Of course these guys will be fine – they’re fit and young and are following the track markers pretty closely – but the mountain has taken a fair few over the years. And it isn’t all the mundane business of dying of exposure. On Christmas Eve, 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s much anticipated visit down under, Ruapehu decided it had had enough. The giant gorged up its innards and sent thousands of tonnes of water, mud, rock and silt down the mountain. The lahar that ensued took out the Tangiwai rail bridge at the mountain’s foot. A young postal clerk from Taihape named Arthur Cyril Ellis saw the light of the Wellington-Auckland Main Trunk express approaching, grabbed a torch and sprinted out onto the tracks to warn the oncoming express. The driver saw his frantic light in the darkness and with only a second’s thought threw the brakes, but it was too late. The massive steam locomotive and the first five carriages plunged off the edge of the bridge and into the flow. The sixth carriage teetered on the brink and was entered by Ellis and two other men just before tumbling over the edge. Although the trio managed to save most of that car’s occupants by pulling them out through the windows, it was New Zealand’s worst rail disaster. 151 people lost their lives.

Those are the mechanics of what happened. Some Maori have a different interpretation. Whenever the Queen, the ruler of the British Crown and the pinup girl for the dispossession of Maori land comes to visit, there’s a disaster. In 1963 a busload of Maori went off the road on their way back from Waitangi Day celebrations attended by her Royal Highness. 15 were killed. There may have been others. In this case, it has been suggested that Ruapehu, the sacred mountain, had spoken. Tangiwai, which means ‘water of tears’, was the land’s answer to Waitangi, the name given to the treaty signed between Maori and Pakeha in 1840. I’m not necessarily inclined towards superstition. But thinking about it while crossing south Crater, I start to think I could believe anything about this place.

South Crater is what I imagine crossing the moon would be like. The rocks that dot its flat, dusty expanse look like they’ve been sitting there for ever. It isn’t a human landscape, and at a glance there is nothing that could be called living. The clouds hang low, swooping in to block out the light then slowly dissolving back to reveal the same rocky vistas. The only human trace is a thin trail of dusty footprints that cut it down the middle. Each set of tracks follows those in front closely, as if the walkers have huddled together for comfort. Off to one side is a fallen camera, a dead human eye.



Bending down to take this picture and looking more closely at the ground, I see moss and lichen, tiny filigrees of life eking out an existence amongst the rocks, steam and snow. There’s also the ever-present spirit of the place. When we leave the comfort of the trail and find a rocky shelter off at the edge of the crater to have lunch, we step out of the wind and into utter silence. It’s a piercing, unearthly silence, not a breath of wind, no insects or birds, no cars, voices, nothing. Freaky. The only other time I’ve experienced this is in caves deep underground, where the darkness matches the silence. In a way it’s even more profound out here in the open, in broad daylight.

***

Sound begins to grow. Softly, then faster. Petals of sound, drifting from the sky, settling with a light shush on my jacket. More snowflakes. We’re trudging up the ridgeline, away from the main track, heading for the summit of Tongariro. Well, not the summit itself – that’s tapu, and I’m happy to leave it unclimbed. But somewhere nearby will be nice. But the mist and then snow are so thick that we can only hope we’ll find the right spot.

I’m wearing every item of clothing in my pack in an effort to keep warm. You’re OK if you keep moving.

Over the last day, my eyes have slowly become more accustomed to the colours of this landscape. It’s a little like those Magic Eye books that were so popular in the 90s. Stare at it for long enough and the most beautiful patterns and colours emerge. We’re three-quarters of the way up a technicolour mountain of rock, blacks and rough volcanic greys strewn with reds, oranges, yellows, purple, even green, now starred with a floating galaxy of brilliant white, curving up the valley, swirling around our head and settling silently across the rock. The snowflakes plot the path of the breeze; we can see the wind whistling around us. Ben is a dim shape ahead, and we really have no idea where the summit is now. The only thing to do at this point is to sit still and wait for the view to clear a little. I find myself a spot at the base of a massive rock outcrop which may or may not be the top, and lie back with my mouth open. To my right is a tiny bleached white skeleton. A possum? Some sort of stoat? A tourist’s pet poodle even. I’m reminded of the fact that the remains of Heuheu Tukino II (Mananui) were interred in a cave half way up Tongariro, perhaps somewhere round here. The landscape looks blank, but has begun revealing itself a tiny touch in the last day. Imagine generations of learning these mountains- there must be caves, streams, hot springs, secret valleys and burial caves all over it.



Mananui’s body was removed in 1910, but who knows what else is still here. These are all part of what makes these places the sacred mountains of each iwi. Mine is Aoraki, the tallest peak in New Zealand. They’re tapu, the head of the tribe, of the island. And their significance is not a matter of historical curiosity either. In 1997, when Ngai Tahu made their landmark settlement deal with the NZ crown, a massive symbolic aspect to the settlement was the return and renaming of Aoraki. Surprise surprise, after Captain Cook made a visit to these waters, Aoraki was named Mt Cook in a fairly blatant act of linguistic as well as symbolic and material dispossession. With settlement of the tribe’s treaty grievances (massive land dispossession, unpaid debts by the crown, and a whole lot more – it would take 160 years to relate it all) came cash, land, and rights to traditional hunting and fishing grounds. It also included legislation which renamed Mt Cook to Aoraki / Mt Cook, and returned the mountain to the tribe. Ngai Tahu in turn gifted Aoraki, along with all the other mountain tops in the South Island, to the people of New Zealand.

(Aoraki Photo)

It was a beautiful acknowledgement of Ngai Tahu’s mana, and it also guaranteed the preservation and continuing tapu of Aoraki in the face of contemporary land development and off-shore sell-offs. In a way, it’s a modern version of the gesture that Te Heuheu Tukino III made in creating this Tongariro National Park, all those years ago.

***

I’m no expert, but I do know a little bit about these matters. I’m Ngai Tahu, I did my honours thesis on the New Zealand landscape in Maori and Anglo literature (?!), hell, I even worked for the iwi for 18 months researching the treaty claims to make high school resources – but when I’m living in Australia, it’s all pretty far from my mind. Sitting up the top of Tongariro, waiting for the snow to clear, shivering with thoughtful pleasure and serious fucking cold, I’m glad to find these ideas rising to the surface.

***

As Kundera said, the sublime and the ridiculous often collide; Tapu provides you with a bit of a problem when you need somewhere to piss. Somewhere that isn’t the top of a sacred mountain. The snow is coming in hard now, and we have to make our way down. There’s no-one else left in sight on the mountain – the day-trippers are long gone. In the loose gravel and snow, the quickest way to walk is to pretend you’re skiing. It’s fun crusing down the steep black volcanic sand ridges. They drops away to the left and right, but the blizzard’s blowing hard into our faces from the south so that I can’t even look that down that way. Probably a good thing, given the drop. But we make it down quickly enough, and once we’re off the steep stuff and I’ve emptied several bucket-loads of rock out of my boots, I’m able to melt some snow in blissful relief.

We are left to cross a final crater of rock-strewn sand swallowed in mist before the track starts to descend to the hut. Visibility is the lowest it’s been the whole day. All I can see is a two metre circle of sand around me, which seems to move as I move. It’s following me. The world has never felt so surreal. The wind drops, making it all feel completely artificial, without beginning or end. We’re gliding on the sea, we’re in a film set. It could all be made of cardboard.

***

Finally, we come down from the clouds. The view out over Lake Rotoiti and Lake Taupo unfolds. It’s been a long day, and I’m exhausted. My body’s aching a good warm ache, the fruit of time spent active after months huddled over a gaunt stress-desk. A quiet night in the hut is all I need. But before sleep, I'll find there’s a great deal more to come.

 

[ file under: Pilgrimage ]

New Year’s Eve, 2006. And we’re in Palmerston North. With a population of 75,000 and located in the central North Island, it’s best known as a student party town. Only right now there are no students. Or parties. Even though it’s the most festive night of the year, the best we can muster on the party front is an invitation from a depressive cardiologist to a drizzly BBQ with a bunch of young doctors. Sitting at a café after returning from a tramp in the Tararuas, we’re weighing up our options. We came with the intention of spending the festive season out bush on Tongariro’s spectacular Northern Circuit, but we almost got blown off the mountain by gales in the Tararuas, and the weather forecast for the next three days is for snow. Yup, in mid-summer. Snow. Staying in town might be the better option.
My brother Ben looks at me across the café table, his unshaven face grim with the possibility of spending the night here in Palmy. I can see the potential: conversation about keyhole surgery techniques, some half-assed champagne-cork-popping, kicking on to some dubious night-club to chase teenage girls … it sounds memorable. So we’ve got to choose: either the young doctors, or a freezing, snow-filled volcanic wilderness that might be the moon, might be mars.
Fuck it. Let’s roll.
We make the decision at six pm, hit the road at eight after a quick shop and a trip to the bottlo and by ten pm on New Year’s eve, we’re at Whakapapa village and ready to walk. It’s raining, and night has fallen. Ahead, the clouds thicken and swirl in the breath of an icy southerly, a thunderous dark mass concealing the mountain-tops. Somewhere in there, says my brother, are some monsters of mountains. My hands are shaking with cold as I pull on my pack. I’m aware that going into this territory this late at night, at this altitude, in the wet, with snow forecast, is perhaps a little stupid.
Bring it on!
Our destination is the central north Island volcanic plateau, a high-country moonscape of crazed rock and ash, crowned by three of the highest peaks on the island – Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu. All three are active volcanos, with mud, gas and rock eruptions a constant feature of life around here for the last few thousand years.



Ngauruhoe is the best known of the three, having featured as Mt Doom in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings series.
But before it gained any fantasy significance, all three mountains have long been held as tapu (sacred) by local Maori. Each tribe has its own Maunga, a geographical as well as spiritual way-point. Tongariro is the Maunga for the Ngati Tuwharetoa tribe. During a challenge over Ngati Tuwharetoa land around Lake Taupo, a rival chief claimed ownership through conquest and ahi ka – the ‘burning fires’ of occupation. The supreme Ngati Tuwharetoa chief , Te Heuheu Tukino IV, is famous for gesturing to the smoking summit of Tongariro and saying: “There is my fire.” The land remained his.
In 1877, with the rapid encroachment of European settlers into Maori land and facing the prospect of seeing their sacred mountains surveyed, sub-divided and sold, Te Heuheu gifted the mountains to the Crown and the people of New Zealand on the condition that they be protected for ever. At a sitting of the Native Land Court in 1886, the fate of the great mountains came up for discussion:
"Many a deeply tattooed warrior chief of the old order was there; many who had fought against the Government, others who had taken up arms for the Queen against their Hauhau fellow-countrymen. Towering over them all in hereditary nobility of rank was Te Heuheu, the kingly head of a tribe that had always held its territory against assault of war from the coast-dwelling clans. Te Heuheu was a man of about sixty-six years, white-haired, tattooed of face like nearly all his contemporaries. As adviser and agent with him was Mr. Lawrence M. Grace, M.H.R. for Tauranga, who had been his friend and neighbour for many years …
The question of the apportionment and disposal of the mountains Tongariro, Ngauruhoe and Ruapehu came up for settlement. When this subject was being discussed, Mr. Grace noticed that the old chief looked troubled - pouri. At the adjournment the two of them went out on to the verandah of the Court building, and then Te Heuheu told his friend that he was disturbed in mind about the future, of his sacred mountains. "If," he said, " our mountains of Tongariro are included in the blocks passed through the Court in the ordinary way, what will become of them? They will be cut up and perhaps sold, a piece going to one pakeha and a piece to another. They will become of no account, for the tapu will be gone. Tongariro is my ancestor, my tupuna; it is my head; my mana centres round Tongariro. My father's bones lie there to-day. You know how my name and history are associated with Tongariro. I cannot consent to the Court passing these mountains through in the ordinary way. After I am dead, what will be their fate? What am to do about them?" Mr. Grace agreed that it was undesirable to permit these famous mountains to be dealt with in the ordinary way. They should he regarded as tapu from private hands. 'Now," said he to the old chief, " why not make them a tapu place of the Crown, a sacred place under the mana of the Queen? That is the only possible way in which to preserve them for ever as places out of which no person shall make money. Why not give them to the Government as a reserve and park, to be the property of all the people of New Zealand, in memory of theTe Heuheu and his tribe?". " Yes," said the old man; " that is the best course, the right thing to do! They shall be a sacred place of the Crown, a gift for ever from me and my people."



Tongariro became New Zealand’s first National Park, and the fourth in the world. It is thanks to this incredible foresight and generosity that we are able to switch on our head torches, lace up our boots and begin our trip.
The first section of track is marked at three hours, but in the dark and rain, we can see that it will take a while longer. The track has become a river, walking has become the act of flowing uphill in the dark. The muddy track gives no texture or depth – each foot is placed in the hope that the ground beneath is level and true.
When walking at night, the world becomes two metres in diameter, just the sphere thrown by torchlight, the rest in darkness. But when we stop to put on more clothes, over trousers, pull down our beanies, eat more chocolate, we switch off the torches and bask in the dark. The cloud formations at night are incredible, the world transformed to a thousand soft shades of grey. As the drizzle comes and goes on the face of a southerly, the massive flanks of the mountains emerge from the gloom, vanishing up into cloud. It might be cloud. It might be smoke. Perhaps both – these mountains create their own weather patterns, tell their own stories, demand their own respect.
At about the point of the new year, we stop to eat again. Talking is too hard with hats pulled low and hoods up over our heads, but when we pause, pull back the hoods and look around, we find that the cloud has lifted, sky above us has opened up. I turn around to look back at the way we have come and there behind us, rising straight out of the ground to nearly 3000 metres is mighty Ruapehu, clear in the moonlight, capped with snow and ice. My gaze lingers, and with a yelp of glee a shooting star streaks its way across the sky, burning green down to a cloud-swarmed horizon.



I think: this is the way to start the year, and this is the way I want it to continue. Doing something weird, challenging, exhiliarating and potentially risky and stupid as well. Werd.
We reach the hut around 1.30am. Sitting out on the porch waiting for the billy to boil, there is an almost perfect stillness. I think about the mad adventures of previous NYE celebrations, and compare it to the grey on black on grey world that surrounds us, the seethe of fog and mist. This place has a serious, eery and commanding presence, especially at night. It is no landscape, not in the sense of background, or scenery. It is rich with history and spirit. The billy hums and sings a tiny quiet song, and in the middle of my reverie I hear the sudden, perfectly clear sound of fluttering, of wings. In front, then to the side, then suddenly, impossibly, behind me. A bird? Not here, where there are no trees. I think of the manaia - the guardian bird spirits which curl their way around traditional carvings. Fingers of fog rise in achingly slow motion from the river behind the hut, reach forward and gently enfold us. The world vanishes. The billy is done, the water boiled. We make hot chocolate with a rich swirl of baileys, then creep into the hut to sleep.

 

‘There’s one! There, look! Jungle bunny, there!’ yells Doug, really starting to enjoy himself at the wheel. The engine’s roar breaks the night’s swerving back, our headlights punching wildly through trees. ‘There! nigger! there!’ He stabs at a switch; floodlights on the car roof blaze up and through the window I see whites of frozen eyes flash wide in the glare then away, cutting back a running black shape the bush seethes with ripsaw barking, dogs going sick somewhere to the left and in the back of the hurtling taxi we’re charged and speechless and terrified and the road is far behind and the fun, the fun, is over.

*

My first thought: this town is going to eat these guys alive.
American tourists, Swedish tourists, stupid hats, video cameras and a long line of tonsils thrown wide as the porter tells retarded jokes and twirls his moustache. Sitting on a train together for two days straight and the first chance our fellow passengers get to stretch their legs, what do they do? Queue for a bus tour. A bus tour of Kalgoorlie.
The train’s only stopping for an evening, but we’ve been warned. Kalgoorlie. A brick-shithouse of a mining town, a throbbing red-necked pin-prick in the desert between Adelaide to Perth. With nothing but three thousand kilometres of sand and salt-bushes for company, it’s home to an army of ball-breakers, beer-guts and goatees, out on the town for a fight, a feed and a fuck. Rape country. And here’s an entire trainload of clueless tourists, about to be turned loose in their midst. The thought comes unbidden: this town is going to eat these guys alive.
Not us though. We‘ve got a plan. We emerge from the station into wide, dusty streets. First stop, the Super Pit. There’s nothing like the world’s biggest open-cast mine to kick-start your appetite. But fuck queuing or paying for a bus tour.
The taxi driver flips open the passenger door, flicks us the butt of a smoker’s smile and says:
“I’ll sort y’out. No worries.”
He settles his bulk and punches a stubby finger at the meter as we pile in. Tom and I in the back, big, blond Peter the South African in the front. As we pull away I look back at the first class passengers, waiting for a bus, a shepherd, a clue.
The driver‘s a stubble-faced rabble-rouser with predictable beer-gut swelling out beneath a dirty green polo shirt. Name of Doug. Doug Teeny. Polite enough to begin with, but then Tom starts asking about the Titty Bars and the flood gates open.
“So,’ asks Tom. ‘which is the best whorehouse?”
“Ha! You’ve come to the right place, mate. But mate, fuck the whorehouses, cost you two twenty an hour. Private escort’s the way to go, one seventy, one eighty an hour, come to your house, that’s what you want. ‘sides, whorehouses are all next to the good guys – cops, courthouse, church. Better off at home. Or in the back of a taxi!”
We laugh along with him. This guy’s pretty good. Keep him laughing, keep him talking and he’ll show us this town.
At the Super Pit, up on top of the world, the earth simply splits itself open. It’s a stepped Inca-trail spiralling down into the rock, swarmed with tiny, winking 200-tonne trucks. The landscape around us is a billion tonnes of shifted earth, enough to bury Melbourne in choking red sand. World class environmental destruction. Perfect fodder for horrified tales to leftie mates back home.
“What about the Chinese?” I ask. “I’ve heard there were heaps of Chinese miners in these parts.”
“Nope, Chinese were kept out of here. Known gold thieves, mate. Known gold thieves.”
Sunset splits red across the blackening sky, cranes on the oil-shimmering horizon standing in silent silhouette beneath the suck and roar of a jet coming down. More miners in from Perth. We turn from the mine and drive back into town. At an intersection, Doug points across at two Aboriginal teenagers.
“There ya go. There’s the real niggers. Blackest of the black. Born thieves, mate, born thieves.”
Peter’s ears prick up. Racism, colonialism – he’s doing a Masters in that stuff. In his most diplomatic voice he asks: “Is there much racism here? Do the miners and the Aborigines get on OK?”
“Nah, mate, no problems. Niggers keep to themselves. ‘sides, they’re the real racists. If you’re not a hundred percent black, you’re nothing.”
We sit in silence. Filing it away. Nothing to do with us.
Down along the strip of titty bars in the hot night air, Doug starts playing sex-tour guide. He pulls up outside his favourite place. Out of the taxi, meter off and Doug’s coming in for a beer. Peter flashes me a grin and rolls his eyes. The guy’s pretty wrong, but it’s not every day your taxi driver wants to buy you a beer.
Through the wooden saloon doors and first thing we see is a tall, blond girl in black hotpants with magnificent fake tits behind the bar. I swear they don’t move a millimetre as she takes our order. Moving through the swirling crush, we find this giant barrel for a table and settle in to stare. Jug, beers all round, conversations verging on shouting. I‘m thinking about the sexual politics of it all – swig of beer – these women all on show, in front of all these guys, not even a semblance of conversation, just meat on display like – drink a jug – thinking about how sexism is alive and well and a jug, and another jug, and yeah, sexism and pert asses and it’s a bit fucked but jug jug jug and those tits are spectacular and the piano sounds drunk and the beer’s raw-throated fire and the nipples sway into view every few minutes, and Peter’s quieter than usual, it’s so rabidly hetero but not Tom, he’s looking to take a photo of the girl but the bouncer says: “No. Look but don’t touch, mate.”
If it’s touching you’re after, there are plenty of 17-year-olds stumbling round in pale imitation of the bar-staff, each girl swarmed by burly men in fluro work vests. Girls, tiny, hairless and wide-eyed in a sea of goatees and beer guts.
Time to go, time to go before we have to witness what happens when you put teenage girls into a mosh-pit of heaving miners.
“Let’s go check the brothels.” suggests Tom.
“Crackhouses, thattaway” points the bouncer.
Out through the double swinging saloon doors and the heat rises with the wind. Down the Hay street strip, Doug leads us on. Red neon glows ahead. Heat and the beer, and two days on the train and the road buckles and rolls underfoot. The ground is dirt, not concrete. Weird. A bus rolls past. Looking up, I see the first class passengers, faces pressed against the glass.
Up ahead, three wasted miners have stopped in front of a car repair yard to shout obscenities at the guard dog. ‘AaaaaaayafuckenBITCH!’ yells the first guy. ‘ComeonyaCUNT!’ The dog hurls itself at the fence, a note of vicious desperation in its snarl. We pass in silence.
First brothel’s a squat corrugated tin shed lit by a single red neon. Couple of oxen tethered out the front, night smelling hot and sour. Through the doorway, a pair of legs, crossed at the knee, red dress riding high. “Hello love!” calls a voice. Keep walking.
Music rumbles around us, a car stereo blasting out somewhere in the distance. Car yard, whorehouse, tile shop, whorehouse. A flood of women.
“Hello boys, what’s going on tonight?”
“Come on in, meet the girl.”
Girl?
“Girls,” she corrects herself.
The three miners push past, given up on the dog, looking for pussy. Smiles, cleavage, a pair of bruised ankles. A guy in a theatrical dinner jacket watches from behind the bar. We consult, hovering on the edge. Whaddayareckon? Tom, never been in a whorehouse before, keen to check it out. Peter too – let’s go, hetero! I’m saying nothing. Doug just stands there, grinning like a fool, fingering his ponytail.
Tom turns to the nearest woman, dark hair, perhaps Maori? “Hey, can we just come in and have a beer, play some pool?” He’s trying to sound casual, but she just laughs.
“We’re not a fucking pub, mate.” Pause. “But what the hell.” She turns and walked back inside.
We follow her through a low doorway into a dimly-lit lounge area. A pool table sits against one wall, piled high with old national geographics. At the opposite end of the room, a pale woman in elaborate skirts sits at an ancient piano, banging out ancient tunes. The three miners stand around, singing:

O Brothers mine, keep white the strain!

Before I can even order a drink, the man behind the bar is suddenly standing in front of me, asking:
“Would you like to see the girl?”
“Girl?”
“Girls, I mean.”
Blink. I’m out the back, head starting to hurt, a dirt-filled courtyard, a rabbit hutch against one wall, covered with sacks. The man’s hand is on my shoulder, a gentle pressure and something isn’t right. Time to go. A faint keening sound. Time to fucking go. Without a word I twist free, stumble back inside. We’re gone. We’re barely talking now. I just want to go, back to the station and leave, out of rape country, away from the environmental slaughter, the bruised women, the known gold-thieves, the real racists, the real niggers. We’re just the tourists, we didn’t pay to see that.
Back into the taxi, out onto the road the stars blur. Doug rants into the wind, shouting out stories of him and his two brothers and their thirty-nine kids, all boys, every single one. Thirty-nine boys, all bare-knuckle boxing champions, won all the titles. His hands on the wheel are soft and fat and stained with nicotine. What to believe? Look away. Out the window, stars. Stars blurring fires burning under the trees, dark shapes gathering round – “What’s going on? Doug?”
Doug winds down his window and spits. “See that? Know what that is?”
Across from the fires, a towering barbed-wire fence encloses blocks of houses. “That’s the housing for our indigenous people,” he says with a sneer. “Cost millions. Look at the dumb cunts. Drag the mattresses out onto the grass and sleep out under the stars.”
“Is that where they all live? There?”
“Nah,” said Doug, “main camp’s just outta town. Hell, I’ll show you. Not sposed to, but I can. They all know me. Dori Dori Doug, they call me.”
“Dori Dori? What’s that?”
“That’s nigger for wanker, mate.”
The meter’s running, time ticking and without a drunken second thought Doug swings the wheel and we’re gone, tyres squealing back up the road. Hang on a minute. To see the camp, where the niggers live. Mind racing, hang on, lips forming sentences that never surface. Just go along with it, drive down the street, see how they live, see how racist and segregated this country really is, more stories to tell the Melbourne crew … it’ll be fine. No-one looks at anyone else. The town thins. We swing out onto the wrong side of the road to overtake another vehicle. With a jolt I realise it’s the bus, filled with the first-class passengers. What are they doing out here? Is this part of their tour? I open my mouth but drunk and flushed and the bush takes over. We’re on a single road cutting through the dark, the light’s blind, the road leading nowhere, desert looming flat and dead.
“Should be round here somewhere,” says Doug. “There!” He wrenches the wheel. Boom. The road’s gone, we’re off, in the bush, light is gone, time goes under, subterranean.
‘There’s one! There, look! Jungle bunny, there!’ yells Doug, really starting to enjoy himself at the wheel. Headlights punch wildly through trees, the engine’s roar breaks the night’s swerving back, ‘there! nigger! there!’ he yells, floodlights blazing up and through the window I see whites of frozen eyes gleam fear in the headlights then away in a flash, cutting back a running black shape. The bush moves, cacophony surges up a ripsaw barking, dogs going sick somewhere to the left and in the back of the hurtling taxi we’re charged and speechless and terrified and the road is far behind and the fun, the fun, is just beginning.
There’s a shotgun across my lap, cocked loaded, humming with warmth. The running shape vanishes into trees, branches slapping the windscreen, shrieking across the roof. Doug laughs high, exhilarated, mad and Peter’s up, out of his seat, leaning out the window his blond hair blasting in the wind yelling into the night in his thick South African accent come on you fucking cunts, come on and suddenly we burst clear of the trees and into the nightmare.
A long scar is burned through the bush. The bus has veered from the road, smashed through the trees and lies on its side haemorrhaging smoke. Flames, figures running. The first-class passengers drag themselves from the wreckage, out through the windows, blood running, glass cut into flesh, winking in flame. Doug slams us to a halt, flings open his door and hurls himself from the taxi, Peter a step behind. Tom’s fainted. I’m stunned, the only point of hysterical stillness amongst the seething dark. Miners, Aborigines, passengers wailing with fear. The first-class porter tries to drag himself away into the bush before he’s pulled down from behind, a heavy bearded man swinging a pickaxe into the dark. Their screams mix and curdle as the bearded man drops, staggers and falls, a long spear through the chest.
Over the roar of fire and the miners, the wails of the real niggers and the dying tourists, I hear the shriek of the train as it pulls out of the station, filling the air with smoke and soot and ash, leaving us to our one night in Kalgoorlie.

 

Undergrowth & Dislocated.org present the Melbourne launch of the first Nomadology book at St Jeromes on Thursday 23rd November.

From documentary-making in the central Australian desert to cruising the red light districts of New Delhi, Nomadology is a diverse and challenging selection of new writing by young Australians on the nature of travel in a globalised world.

The book takes a selection of the best stories, articles and photos from this site and presents them as a beautiful, limited-edition pocket-book published by Undergrowth.org.

“It’s a great idea and it works. As a collection of blogs, the writing is fresh, personal, and accessible ... Undergrowth have also done well in their selection of contributors. They are sensitive and intelligent, able to draw out the interesting political / social / moral nuances of their experiences.” - The Program

From 6pm this thursday, St Jeromes will come alive with readings and photography projections from the book. Come along and hear stories on everything from hitch-hiking across the USA with a pyromaniac gulf-war veteran to body-bagging in Thailand after the tsunami.

Following this, the night will continue with music from the amazing Uber Lingua Sound System. Featuring back-to-back DJs, live performances and a host of local and interstate guest MCs, Uber Lingua brings a multi-lingual flavour with mutated international hip-hop, gypsy dub, bar-mitzvah electronica, Middle-eastern, Latin and Aboriginal beats.

Details:
Thursday 23rd November 2006 at St Jeromes, 7 Caledonian Lane, 6pm – late.
With readings from 7-8pm featuring: Rak Razam, Nicolas Low, Phil Smith, Dominic Allen, Sam Hoffmann and Tim Parish.

Tunes till late by Potato Masta, Mashy P, Trevor Brown (Gypsy Dub Sound System) and DJs: bP (RRR), Monkey Marc (Combat Wombat), Raceless (Curse Of Dialect), Sakamoiz and many more.

 

[ file under: Home ]

What happens when a collector of dead people’s lives dies?

When people pass away, they leave an almost unbelievable amount of stuff behind. Shoe-boxes full of tram tickets, gilt-edged plates, address books, tweed cardigans, knitting needles, sex toys and the most amazing variety of spoons. An entire life expressed in a galaxy of spoons. What the family doesn’t want goes to the op-shops, charities and random second-hand dealers. The living pick over the lives of the dead. We buy their used toasters for five bucks.

What happens when a collector of dead people’s lives is murdered?

The dead guy ran a second-hand store, an enormous, mouldy warehouse a few blocks from my house. A swarthy bundle of energy, dark messy hair, permanently unshaven, name of Raph. He was notorious for his chequered flannel shirts and the slightly mad look in his eye. Everyone in the area has a story about how he owed them money, had ripped them off, insulted them. I only talked to him once; I complemented him on playing a Sex Pistols track, and he ranted at me about how punk was political, but that no-one understood that any more.

Someone stabbed him in his kitchen about six weeks ago. Everyone in the area has a story about that too. Over money. Over antiques. Over a 15 year old girl.

And yesterday they opened up his warehouse to the public and sold off his life. When most people die, the things they leave behind tell a story of their own, peculiar life. Their photos and slides show blurry holidays, awkward, youthful weddings, badly-lit and framed christenings, endless pet photos. The momentous occasions that might define their individuality are captured and preserved in perfect, faulty detail.

Raph was a collector of other peoples’ lives. The leftovers of his life, two whole warehouses full, are made up entirely of other peoples’ memories. I’m captivated.

Old ivory cigarette holders. Souvenir badges from the Royal Tour 1953, the 1956 Olympics. Big old sunglasses, 1930s gloves and hats, crumpled posters, ugly clothes, a majestic, crumbling chaise-lounge he wanted hundreds for. Old Vogue magazines from the 50s and 60s. An 80s video projector that could have doubled as an anti-aircraft searchlight. I got an industrial circular saw for $25, and boxes and boxes of other peoples’ images.

It’s like this enormous cache of memory, the artefacts and mementos of hundreds of different people have suddenly been released into the world. A swarm of memory, leaking out of the warehouse and into the street. The living crowded in, snapping up the bargains, telling their stories, praising their luck.

The only traces left of the murdered man are in a cracked, bubbling slide of someone else’s grandmother, pearls at the neck, peach hat pulled low, mouth a thin gash of lipstick on someone else’s wedding day.

(For Colors Magazine).

//

And in other news, Insecurity System is going to Adelaide!

 

The CLEAN project is an exploration of what happens to a city when it ceases to be home to the people who live in it - when a city is cleaned up in the name of sport. Melbourne is hosting the 2006 Commonwealth Games, and moves to crack down on beggars, move homeless people out of sight and get rid of graffiti and street art are all gaining momentum. We've been documenting the transformation, both good and bad, through sound over the last month, and are presenting an interactive sound installation in Hosier Lane from March 15th - April 2nd as part of the Next Wave arts festival. Opening night is on the 15th of March - why pay to see the Comm Games opening when you can come to our version for free?!
The CLEAN website has just gone up so check it out for more info on the project, as well as the latest news on what's happening down on the ground in Melbourne.

 

Insurance claim.

That tastes like SHIT I gotta spit some, gotta spit most out the window but the spray got Keppo a bit blown back in the wind

hahahahahahahaha

he laughs like he’s gonna puke when he’s that close to puking but he’s driving, one arm on the wheel the other reaching down the back for more

Givvit here ya dumb cunt, Kylie takes it off me passes it to him

Goddamnit so dark it’s so dark I can’t see but I know it’s there that’s the Teremakau out there in the dark ice wind blasting numb in my slab face through the window out there in the dark the bush and the mountains the river the Teremakau the river was so fukn cold ice up the legs trying to cross and someone left his league gear in the shelter there who’s is this shit? who cares, some tramper and I hold my tongue then coz course it wasn’t a tramper wearing league gear out there in the bush and Keppo and Hemi’ll laugh but that was last week and this is ill is dope as fuck the speed this car and

fuck! See that?

Keppo slams the brakes stomach lurches I’m in the back face pressed into the back of Keppo’s sheepskin seat covers I can smell the smoke and stale shit then slam back into the seat and Hemi kills King Kaps on the radio grinning silence.

See that?

I can see his teeth turned towards us in the back Keppo too he’s grinning stopped in the middle of the road nothing for a million miles

Did ya see that? Two cars, at the walkway carpark, fuckin tourists away up the river bro, let’s go!

Spin it round squeeling headlights cut the paddocks the swamp’s out there and the mountains, black black black all of them green speeding by back the other way we going back the pub? Nah fuckwit, the cars, see what we can find in the crash and bump over the cattlestop into the carpark, crunching gravel and dead light killed headlights and silence.

Just wind and then crunches the gravel and kills the lights. We’re at the pub that’s it the pub spin spin spin taste my stomach open the door get out fuck the belt fumble the clip unclick sprawl. Not the pub, fuck where is this, where the fuck are we? yeah it’s red, I can see that, stationwagon, that’s right, red stationwagon free shit nothing flash, pretty stink car but Hemi’s got his flashlight, got it a few weeks back from that campervan down the bridge when Kylie slapped me looking in. hahaha Hemi laughs, dumb cunts, look there, tryna hide shit under the seat I see you ground bouncing ground walking waking gonna fuck me up stay up hold it together you fuck, don’t act so pissed follow the voice where’s Keppo, Keppo’s what the fuck you doiing

fsiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiaaaaaaack!

the sound smashes ears smash glass across the ground he’s got the tyre wrench through the window no messing around pop the lock and in, smell of socks, some tourist cunts smash! Hemi’s done in the other one, white rental car, more fuckn tourists hey shoes, big too big, hey hey check this out, a hoodie, black with a zip fingers numb can’t unzip Kylie hey Kylie hey that one’s mine fuckn hey Keppo, you want this? she says fuckn bitch that was mine I saw that first slump down in the car look under the seats headspin spin head down in the car, doors open, dark, dark, a hum a hum louder the fuck is that, car, car, coming fuck get down swoooooosh light and then dark sound and silence

nah bro, ‘s all good, didn’t see shit, gone, what else? Kylie’s voice nearby what’s that, got a camera? Fuckn sweeeeeet bro! givusit, givusit here, bro, nah comeon, scuffling on gravel, hahahahah that fukn laugh Keppo scares me fuckn dunno where that laugh comes crazy high like like it’s like fuck like some movie, some film like what is that film, fuck it’s dark and quiet then Hemi says come on you fullas, get your dumb drunk ass out that car let’s get the fuck outta here Keppos still laughing let’s do em, the fuck, yeah you pussy let’s do it Kylie laughing egging him on yeh and the smell always that fuckn smell petrol every time spin the gut wretches coming this time drowning acid guts up heave it out gotta get out of the stationwagon and now I know I’m scared and I love it.

The fumes petrol cap open the slosh trickle petrol through and flick flick the zippo metalclick and lick it up it licks here we go here we go giggling as it lights get in the car, get in the fuckn car you cunts go go go light and light and whoosh the heat burns hot throw back it up and up the blaze blinding doors shut wheels spinning go you fuckn crazy cunt let’s go let’s go she’s gonna go go! Go! Go! heat and heat and this when I get the one clear thought one crystal thought when the flames make it all day the light burns hot and yellow slashes the trees the roar and flash and one good clear thought I can hang on to and I wanna tell it to Kylie but the words won't come out:

We can light up the moutains.

 

Melbourne Airport departure lounge, in disarray, out of time. I recently tried to fly to NZ, but there was no plane. Everyone disappeared. This is the story of what happened.

Two flights down, in the airport basement, coiled in the unhitched wires of a half-finished building site, rows upon rows of bleary-eyed passanger are strung up and back in a great long line to nowhere.

This is how how people get lost.

On the tarmac outside the departure gate stands a giant, sunlit expanse of nothing. Plane? What plane? From the 6am wakeup call, bathed in thick dark coffee to the tricky taxis beside laughing men who speak no English, they’ve assembled together to do absolutely nothing. For some reason, there’s no plane. But no-one’s noticed that yet.

‘Five!’
‘Bleh!’
‘Six!’
‘Blah!’

Jim shifts against the wall, tilting his hat back to get a better look at the source of the shrieks. Canned music competes with the huzz of conditioned air but loudest of all, the queel and scraw of a wheeling flock of children. After four months in the Amazon, Jim feels like sleeping. He’s just climbed a tree to tickle a sloth, suffered a mutinous stomach across a hundred hours of bone-jarring bus hell and tried to sleep in a hammock slung betweeen two glorious, booming, salt-sea coasts. And at this moment, stuck in the airport only a single flight from home, all he wants to do is sleep.

‘Se’en!’
‘Bleh!’
‘Eight!’
‘Sh’up, dickhead!’

A couple of young kids stand back to back on a chair, shouting out a sing-song counting rhyme. Jim smiles and rolls his eyes at a bearded man sitting opposite. Even though it’s only 8am, the guy looks slightly tipsy and his wife, short and solid with a blond bob fashioned into a perfect mushroom cloud, is snoring on his shoulder. The man smiles back with the friendly, lined face of a comfortable middle age. They both turn to watch as the boy, in long green shorts and a bright red t-shirt that says ‘New Zea-lambs’, taps his sister on the shoulder and runs down the aisle. Suddenly, the tiny table at the end of the row is a ship.

‘This our ship!’
‘Yeah, and I’m the Captain!’

The girl clambers up. She lies down on her stomach and leans out over the edge of the table. The polished concrete floor of the unfinished lounge suddenly dissolves, and she peers wide-eyed into the glittering deep as it rushes past in the wake of their speed.

‘I’ve gotta go see what’s down there’ she calls.

‘Ok! Getcha dive suit on!’ hollers back the captain. They mime suiting up, and with a cry of ‘awaaaaay!’ she launches herself over the side and into the blue. Down she swims, circling round middle-aged couples with their bum-bags and duty-free, paddling over the young crew slumped in corners, avoiding shipwreck on the red-eyed islands of parents.

In the corner around the departure gate, a small cluster has formed around the one staff member who seems to be present, a slim, dark girl with straight black hair cut in a ragged waterfall. From the other side of the room Jim can see gesturing, the shaking of heads. He’s used to the delays, but the girl looks kind of cute so he stands and sidles over to see what’s going on. From the jauntily crisp white blouse comes the verdict: a spring has popped free from the undercarriage of their plane-to-be and they’re just waiting on a replacement part. Just an hour’s delay, maybe two. Her walkie-talkie crackles with new information, and the hostess smiles and hands out $5 food vouchers to soften her explanation. “Actually, it looks like they might have to – five dollars for you sir – bring a plane down from – there you go, five dollars for food – Brisbane, so there will be a delay until – five dollars, go get yourself a coffee - 5.00pm tonight.”

Easily bought off, thinks Jim, with a hint of contempt. They were meant to be leaving at 9.30am. He steps forward and requests two of the vouchers anyway – one for him, one for ‘Steve’. The girl flashes him a wry smile as she hands over the second. ‘One for Steve aye? One for Tom too?’

‘Nah’ says Jim. ‘Tom’s not hungry’.

On the way back to his seat, Jim sees that the kids are in uproar. A sea-monster sighted somewhere in the vicinity of the emergency exit has eaten one of their crew and is making straight for the main ship. ‘Dive! Dive!’ screams the captain. ‘Ive! Ive!’ echoes his sister the diver, her tiny shoes flapping across the concrete as they both run shrieking towards the window. Plat! They press up against it and turn in terror as a multi-headed baggage-trolley snakes its voracious way across the tarmac outside. ‘Nooooooo!’ Their shriek shatters the brittle glass of parental nerves, and it’s time for mum to intervene. She rises up from behind her Von Dutch cap and Von Dutch camo t-shirt to martial them back into place. ‘Kids! Henry! Grace! Move!’ She herds them before her rolling bulk and as Jim passes the fugitives, he catches the eye of the little boy and once again smiles, rolling his eyes. The kid looks at him, wide eyed, then suddenly smiles back.

The hours wind up their tired minds. Some even attempt sleep. They stretch themselves across the inarticulate spinal furniture, shifting and re-shifting their heavy heaps of elbows and spines. Newspapers drape faces, yesterday’s words and images rustling across their light, restless dreams. Beneath it all comes the light clicking sound of thumbs on phones, the apologetic murmers of the meek and the whining announcements of the important: the People advise the World that They are going to be Late.

An announcement chimes out through the halls of the terminal.

‘May I have your attention please. This is an announcement for passengers travelling on flight DJ 62 to Christchurch. I have some good news – we are relocating to gate lounge number twelve – it’s a bit nicer than fifteen.’ Laughter ripples out. ‘And we’ve also got some bad news, I’m afraid.’ Groans. ‘Due to technical difficulties, our revised departure time is now 10.30pm’.

The weary sigh their weary sighs, and one by one the 180 passengers rearrange themselves around gate lounge twelve.

‘No plane, aye?’ says a voice behind Jim. It’s the bearded man, defininely tipsy this time, tired but still smiling. ‘We could ask New Zealand – they’ve got two planes…’

‘Yeah but only one engine!’ laughs his wife. ‘They have to share it.’

Little by little, the ordered, neon world of the airport begins to fray at the edges. People sprawl across the floor, bags disgorgge their contents and the lines that line their faces lengthen and stretch with each sticky hour.

Another gate change. This time it’s Gate 2, down the opposite end of the airport. Again they trudge off, grumbling, voices raised, each step a little slower. The kids swirl in and around with seemingly endless energy, hyped up on junk food and the novelty of this giant playground. Jim orders a coffee, a third foccacia for the day and a bullet-proof muffin. He settles down, poncho around his shoulders, to watch.

‘… shit! This whole thing is full of shit!’

Heads turn. The squat middle-aged woman with the blond bob is a couple of G&T’s further into the dimming evening and has had enough. ‘Full of shit!’ Beneath the weight of her accent and a long day, her words are driven home with the slap of one hand pounding the other. Around her, a small army of tired passengers has assembled. The single cabin crew girl retreats.

‘We’re sorry.’ says the girl. ‘We are having trouble with the plane, and ...’

It’s amazing, thinks Jim, how quickly the polite, vacant façade of fellow travellers breaks down. Usually you sit next to eachother, smile, paddle around in a shallow bath of smalltalk then blot the world with headphones, a magazine, the back of someone’s head. But as tempers wear, personalities quickly rise to the surface. The quiet ones retire, wait and hope. The anxious ones fret and pace, heel to toe, teeth to nails. The bolshy, opinionated, righteous ones announce their sense of injustice to anyone who will listen.

‘Look’ says the wife. ‘First the plane was broken. Then there was a new plane. Now there’s no plane. Can’t we just go home until you sort it out?’

The girl looks uncomfortable. ‘Actually, no. Um… you’ve technically left Australia, you see. Legally you’re no longer here. So you can’t leave the departure lounge. But we’re bringing up some catering, and some drinks.’ She finishes brightly, but no-one is fooled.

‘That’s ridiculous. Of course I can leave the departure lounge. I’m an Australian citizen. This is my country. I live here. And I want to see my family, and you have no right to keep me here.’

‘I understand, ma’am. But I’m just relaying what I’ve been told by Immigration. Technically you’re no longer here in Australia, so until you leave and re-enter, you can’t come in to Australia.’

The lady with the bob reddens further, takes a deep breath ‘You’ve got to be joking. How can we not be in Austrlia? We’re already in Australia.’ She pounds the vinyl floor with a stubby foot. ‘What do you call this? This …’

Before she can finish her sentence, a tall, bony Security Police officer with huge shoulders pushes his way into the front. His shaved skull and severe handlebar moustache are complemented by the magnum, slung low on the hip. Behind him two other hefty young security police form up in a tight wedge of authority. The hostess shoots them a look of gratitude as Handlebars takes over.

‘Let’s all stay calm now, shall we? I’ve been informed about the situation here, we’re working with the airline to resolve the issue, and you’ll all be on your way as soon as possible.’

The crowd ripples with relief, relieved to hear someone in authority saying intelligible things. The officer continues.

‘In order to complete the paperwork on this, I need all of your passports please.’

So far so good. His assistants pass through the crowd, asking people to produce their passports. With gathering surprise, the crowd of passengers realise that the police want to take each of their passports. The bearded husband comes to stand behind his wife and tentatively asks when they’ll get them back.

‘It’s just a formality’ explains the angular security officer. ‘We need to check them and once we’ve done that, they will be returned as soon as possible.’ Whites of the eyes, traces of fear. The blond bob hands over her blue passport. Turning away, she mutters to her husband under her breath: ‘No plane, no flight, no passports, nothing. We’ve been cancelled. This whole thing is full of shit!’

Jim turns away with a grimace and enters the bleep and gurgle of a row of pinball machines. He’s not so keen to give up his passport. The kids – ship’s captain, little diver and another girl in long pink coat fringed with pink fur – are already in there, tussling with the controls of a space invader game. The new friend is wearing a utility belt stuffed full of magical animals - a unicorn, a bear. Beneath her sparkly blue princess tiara, she has a steely glint in her eyes.

‘I’m winnin! Look! Hey! Look out! Lookloooklooklook!’ She shouts across the room to her mother who, barefoot in a long flowing skirt, doesn’t even turn around.

‘Lookloookloooklooklook! Booowoooowoooooooowoowoo bang bang bang!’

They haven’t even put a 20c piece in. Beside them, a gigantically tall, fat man with blond hair and a pencil moustache glares. He’s playing a pinball machine, whacking and grunting, googly-eyed. ‘Where are ya?’ he cries at the tiny steel ball. Electronic bleeps merge with the cries of the children and again, the parents materialise to shout them into submission.

‘Just keep it down, OK! Your mother has a headache.’
‘But dad, we were winning, we were…’
‘ Just BE QUIET’

When the parents retreat, Jim walks over the the cluster of kids. He bends down to their height.

‘This is very serious’, he says. ‘There’s no spacies, and no ship anymore aye?’

The boy, the ship’s captain, understands at once. ‘Nope. They took our ship away, just when we were gonna get the seamonsta!’

‘Oh no, well that’s no good. No ship and a sea-monster on the loose. And have you heard, there’s no plane either.’

A silent row of faces, big eyes. Jim smiles. Hell, if they’re stuck in the airport, they might as well entertain themselves. Behind him, an Indian man in an enormous South African rugby jersey has joined the melee. Now that the cops have departed with their passports, he grows more and more uneasy beneath his heavy gold chains, a perfectly barbered goatee and a fierce brow. He corners the attendant.

‘ I’m flown to Christchurch many times. You are telling us that we have a plane ready to leave at 10.30 tonight. We will be arriving into Christchurch at 3.30am. You can’t land at Christchurch airport at 3.30am. The airport is closed. You are going to land us in a field?’

Jim turns back to the kids and continues.

‘So there’s no plane, and they’ve stolen our ship, but you know, we’ve got to escape!’ The kids giggle. The diver asks ‘Where are we going to go?’

“Where do you want to go?”

They think, then the little princess with the animal belt blurts out ‘Boston!’

Jim’s taken aback at this, but decides to run with it. ‘Ok! Boston then, but we’ve got to … steal a plane first, don’t we.’

‘Yes!’ they cry.

‘And to steal a plane we’re going to need some help. Who are we going to get to help us?’ He jumps up onto his feet, rears up on one leg and lifts his arms high above his head. He’s a tall guy, and he towers massively over the gaggle of laughing kids. ‘I’m a gigantic, ferocious dinosaur! If you want me to help you, we can just run on in there and TAKE THE PLANE! WOOOO!’

The kids cheers and throw their tiny arms up to the sky, dinosaur fashion.

‘Ok’, says Jim. ‘Charge!’

On tiptoe, arms raised high, they sneak along the side of the departure lounge to the window that look out onto other people’s planes. No-one notices their movements. The departure gates are all echoingly empty. Jim points out the window – ‘OK kids, which plane are we going to steal?’

The main group of passengers is a seething council of war. A tall, farmer type with white hair and a red face mapped by thin veins has taken the lead. He’s claiming that there never was any flight, that his Relatives have looked it up on the Website, it was never listed, it never showed up on the departure information screens …

‘Yeah’ chips in someone else, ‘there was no mention of it thismorning at the check-in desks either … we had to ask … so what’s the deal? And when are we getting our passports back?’

Agitation swells, puffs out the chest. The farmer, tired of diplomacy, shuffles forward another step, closing in on the shrinking hostess.

‘Look, we’re not a bunch of bloody refugees out of some shithole country. We didn’t get here on some leaky boat. I’m an Australian citizen. You can’t treat us like this’ He lowers his voice and takes another step closer, an inch from her face. ‘I’ve got money, too. If my wife and I need to pay extra, to get on another flight, I’m happy to do it.’ He glares at the rest of the passengers. ‘There’s no point in trying to organise this lot. But if there’s a way for those of us with … connections…’ The hostess looks at him blankly.

‘Full of shit’ mutters the heavy wife again.

Jim and the kids have identified the plane they want to take. It’s a giant, snub-nosed jumbo two gates down, prised open to the night to let an ant-line of reflective orange men fill it with container after container of luggage.

“Good choice. What colour are we going to paint it? It’s gonna be our plane, so we can have it any colour we like.”

“Pink, and with green, yeah, with a green bit up there, and -”

“And, with blue, like the sky so we can fly infisible.” adds the princess.

‘Perfect’, says Jim. ‘Infisible flying is the only way for dinosaurs. Now, we’re going to have to overpower the guards. You see those guys?” He lowers his dinosaur arms and points at four new airport security police who are making their way back towards the adults.

‘Yeah, we’ll tie ‘em up and put em in a cupboard’ says the Captain.

“Nice! We’ll try sneaking round them first, but if we have to, we’ll take ‘em. Arms up, let’s go!”

Back with the frightened, frazzled group of adults, the security police arrive and take charge. Handlebars is back. Words like “legal rights” and “ombudsman” ricochet off the high ceiling.

‘You, shut your mouth’ Handlebars rounds on the Farmer, finger pointed. ‘Come here. Closer. You’ve left Australia, are legally no longer in this country. Don’t talk to me about legal rights’ From behind him, The Indian man speaks up.

‘You cannot talk to us like this. This is a first-world country, not some ant-colony. We have paid our money, we have our rights. Why …’

The cop takes a step forward. ‘I know. Your rights. Exactly. Arrangements are being taken care of, and an announcement will be made – ’

Suddenly, across the angry buzz of voices chimes the announement which silences them all:

‘Ladies and Gentlemen, Flight DJ62 to Christchurch is now boarding from gate seven point five. Could all passengers please make their way to gate seven point five for immediate departure.’

The silence is deep and lasting.

‘Seven point five?’ someone whispers.

Jim stands against the wall staring at the backs of the cops as they lead the flock away. He checks his pocket. He’s still got his passport. Headed by the Farmer, the Indian and the woman with the blond bob, the adults make their way towards gates seven and eight in a daze. The tall, fat man with the googly eyes looks on the verge of tears. Through the weary haze of 16 hours spent at the mercy of strange, opaque decisions and misleading information, a spike of crystal clear adrenalin now pierces his thoughts. Maybe they’re going to have to escape after all. He jumps, interrupted by a tugging on his backpack. The kids are ready to go.

‘Let’s go!’ whispers the diver.
‘Gogogo!’ says the Captain. ‘We gotta get out of here.’
‘OK. Let’s go grab that plane.’

They move quickly along the side of the wall, dinosaur arms to the roof, eyes on the plane they are going to steal. The main body of passengers vanishes round a corner, herded by the security police into a narrow service corridor between gates seven and eight. With quick, winking steps the four remaining figures whisper past. Jim raises the bar on an emergency exit and waits as the children slip silently out onto the tarmac. He turns and catches a final glimpse of the adult passengers, vanishing into the darkness.

 

I'm guessing that a few of us are going to be making the journey to Newcastle for TINA. It'd be nice to put a few names to faces to names - how about a beer at some point during the festival?

 

If one person were to swallow a whole country - trees, borders, public holidays and all- would you trust them to lead you through the bump in their throat?
Today, Nic ate a country that we shall call ‘New Briton’, for it is new and I feel like a little British schoolgirl. He has swallowed lines of pine trees, hushed paddocks and an old church, and I am here dozing on it all – the rise and fall, rise and fall of his New Briton chest shivering a little under me.

The afternoon has moved past tea and biscuits, and it is time to get back onto our bikes. Back along the curly country roads, back over the scraps of rock and short burst of thigh-pumping hill, back past the sheepdog and his friends in the lead up to dinner. The wattle trees are on show for the ‘Hurstbridge Flora/Fauna festival’ (HFFF), their yellow fluff-buds smearing most corners of our route. Before our ride is up, I am determined to dismantle Nic from his bike with my pinky toe, but this ride requires all of me – my gears are suffering from windscreen wiper negligence, and the cog chain has fallen off twice. We are on our off-road, and we are winding towards Laura: one of Nic’s favourite people who lives and writes from her Hurstbridge tree-house.

Nic has told me about the ‘hill o death’ – the killer rise before we reach our dinner spot, and I assume this is Nic is being good to this first-time rider. He has been so good to me – I can trace the good along the lakes, the big city smoke and the school bells which run like contour lines, deep and shallow - from the corner of his eyes. But this is no bump, this is an APEX: a good hundred metres of scraggling road and a summons to crawling.

What’s more, I’m still not friends with these gears. They are clicking and clacking, and I am beginning to look more like that fallen woman I passed on the street last week, slowly snapping her bike into bits. Nic has suggested that I change gears BEFORE we reach the hill, but I am so used to the sound of the clack clack, and I have to rush and yank some ease into the pedals not far from the base.

Nic is off. He is gathering speed and is yelling to the sky, ‘I’m going to go the whoooole way up, Ray’. He is determined to make it further than last time, just as he has made his way up further, past my hips and into the curve of my sore spot. I do my best to pick up speed, and let out a ‘weeeee’ for extra power. As soon as I can feel the rise, I stand and press down and demand more from each turn. Down and turn the pedals against the weight of the world, clack clack, against the weight of my quick breath, clack clack, against the weight of the SNAP!

The clack clack has given up and down I go, bike and legs with a yelp! tumbling onto the gravel, sprawling my surprise across the hill. Damn. The pedal has said goodbye to my bike and has to rest on a grassy patch, a few metres up the hill. I almost start to cry. Stop – it’s Saturday, and the sun is still out. As the shock begins to settle, I pick up my shaky legs, inspecting the dirt spots all over my ass. ‘Bah! That was nothing! I’m not done with you yet!’ I warn to my broken bike, and begin to walk the focker up the hill.

When I reach the top, I wave my Olympic-pedal-torch, shouting ‘Look!’ and wait for Nic to whoop in delight. But he is crouched on a grassy side of the road and he is heaving. His back shakes and pulls as he sucks in spare pockets of air. “Asthma” he manages between gasps, ‘but I made it to the top….all the fucking way!’ I dump the bike and limp over to the spot where he rests. ‘Your…knee’ he whispers, and we take a moment to watch the trickling cherry glue weep down my leg. I begin to laugh, and he, between the wheeze, tries also.

We collapse onto the grass, Nic and I, defiantly crippled, at the top of that hill. A white Mercedes pulls out from a driveway opposite our mending spot and the driver looks a little bemused. ‘What a sight we must be, one wheezing, one bleeding,’ Nic says. We laugh at this (I may have even snorted), and once more he pulls me onto his chest. Again I ride the rise and fall, rise and fall of New Briton until the breathing settles and order is returned to the land of scones and cream. All good hills should be conquered with blood, breath and a little love, no?

 

Let the feedback roll!

 

Getting me out of bed at 7.15am takes a lot. Slap a flat foot cold on the hard wooden floor and I’ll curl like a leaf in flame and shiver back into slothful warmth. There are a couple of exceptions though. Snowboarding is one. I might be blunted on two hours sleep and wake to find the morning sky still hung with last night’s frozen breath, but 6am will see me wide awake and drinking in daydream adrenalin with the morning mug of coffee.

The other thing that hurls me from the warmth of bed to the scalding shower then out into the frost is an excited arc that finishes in the warmth of Rachel’s smile as she opens the sleepy door. Saturday, 7.15am and the dream to wake to is a day spent riding in the hills.

With rain dripping from the roofs we wander the Vic Markets in search of supplies. A boy with a husky suburban baritone sings a dirt-grained duet with the avocado man. “Two dollar potato, two dollar two dollar potatoes!” – “Avocados! Two for a dollar you’d be mad to miss ‘em two for a dollar one dollar one dollar!” For me though it’s a lungful in a bagful of Thai basil and brilliant red chilies, while Ray skips ahead to the land of pastry and buys us sweet sustenance for the ride. Friends call and wave through the crowd and Nick, who works at Vic Market Organics, tells us a lengthy story about getting knocked off his bike on his first day working there. He’s been up since 4.30am and can only talk in straight lines. As he goes into crazy detail about the joys of concussion and a 14-hour day bagging organic veges we shuffle foot to foot amongst the throng then slip away with a cry of ‘take care!’

Restlessness to be off into the morning hustles us back to the bikes, locked and dripping with departed rain. We saddle up under the gaze of the avocado man, and his “You’d be crazy not to…!” follows us off the pavement and into the traffic.

The sky finally cracks blue then opens with light. Trains make me feel like I’m free to roam anywhere, even back to France with these new clouds and this wonderful woman. We’re sitting the wrong way though, and the train rolls backwards out of the station.

Ray’s excited. It’s her first time riding the Hurstbridge line, her first time on a bike out in the country, though not the first time she’s wrapped her legs wrapped around me, smiling, then frowning, snorting – ‘No! We’re not supposed to be doing this. We’re meant to be just friends!’ She’s joking and frustrated and angry all at once. Factories scythe past outside the window; we’ve left the comfortable suburbs and the world opens up around us. It’s nearing the end of the line and the carriage is empty. We’re good at getting ourselves into funny places where it’s just the two of us – climbing over fences at night, trying every door in a building until one opens for us … and we’re equally good at finding ridiculous distractions when desire blossoms into open lips.

‘Race you to the end of the carriage!’ Scrambling over the seats, jumping aisle to aisle I’m just in front but at the last minute she leaps across and blocks my path with her ass. Victory!

Hurstbridge is busy. The busiest I’ve ever seen it. Five other people get off the train, and in the bakery, watched by a thousand custard-filled donut eyes, we have to queue for our leaky sandwiches. ‘What a bloody great helmet!’ exclaims a red-faced gentleman outside the shop. ‘Like a spaceman!’ Ray grins, pats the shiny silver helmet, pulls it firmly down over her curls and mounts the red, white and chrome 5-speed. With breaks squealing she rolls down the path to the road and we’re away, into the countryside, side by side, the happy couple who aren’t a couple at all, but look so definitely happy. And couple-like.

Up hills and down hills and ‘is that a UNICORN?’ yells Ray at a thick-faced white horse grazing next to the road. The gears mash and clunk and at the crest of one hill after another we stop to remove layers of clothing and wave at the world. Speed and wind rise in the downhill curves and the laughing banter keeps our tires filled with light air. What did we talk about? There was perhaps 10 seconds of silence the whole time, we talk so much, yet what about? About riding through a paddock in a straight line, about living in the country, about friends and work, and, naturally, the politics of racial science. Partly because I’m reading about it for my Masters, but mostly to keep the sexual tension down to a manageable level.

Lunch dumps us off the bikes onto a bank and down into the grass. The sky curls up with hills and the bleached fingers of dead trees point down, upside down up above our touching heads. Ray smears mayonnaise on my face then curls up on me and dozes. Behind us a handful of cows wander over to the fence and chew curiously. The sound of munching mixes with the whoops and calls of kids playing somewhere on the farm nearby, and my thoughts close the sky with soft-eyed clouds. I’m happy with her, out there in the open. We could travel the world, I think.

 

Had a few technical itches / hitches for as yet unknown reasons - the wonderful web hosting nerds that lurk in a cave in NZ aren't providing answers as yet. We're back, for now, and will be restoring functionality over the next week. Apologies for the gap in your nomadology diet.

 

[ file under: _Site Admin ]

Here's a neat wee trick. Won't work on the front page but in the post itself:



Woot!

 

[ file under: _Site Admin ]

New things that are new, if not particularly functional at the moment:
- user list
- very basic commenting.
- front page summary cf full post.
- categories
- font size increased.

Still to come:
- proper photo stuff
- archiving

Work in progress, but it's a start. :)

 

How does 3 days turn into six weeks? At the funeral that brought me back to NZ in the first place, I stood at the drinks table after the speeches were finally spoke, and poured myself a whisky with my back to the crowds. In the time it took to get my dead great uncle's finest scotch malt into my mouth, mum & dad had stolen up behind me and grabbed onto one arm, an eclectic assortment of friends took hold of the other, and there was much twisting.

That pretty much sums up the different elements in the equation - family wanting me to stay for christmas, friends old and new arriving back in town and demanding catchup drinks, and drinks. Staying in CHCH to stay away from the excesses of Melbourne, and staying in CHCH creating new excesses with old friends. It was excessive.

I flew out over the razor-backed rock spine that hums its way along the curve of the south island, and my heart leapt out of my mouth. You can almost feel the rough tickle of those peaks along the soles of your feet as you fly over them - it's the feeling of gravel on the soles of your feet when the heat finally pulls of your shoes and socks and sends you paddling out into summer. I spent the last couple of weeks climbing some of those peaks around Arthur's pass, and it was beautiful to catch one final glimpse before home was swallowed in cloud.

From one old home to a newer, more vibrant one though, and it feels good to be back in Melbourne. As we approached the airport from above, the dry, dry brown fields stare up at you with their dust black tree eyes, and it occurs to me as I lean out across the bleached thighs of a ruddy Queenslander for a better view, that these landscapes are still alien. NZ seems almost criminally lush in comparison. My heart is firmly in its place at such flatness and brownness. It has a beauty which I have appreciated to the point of delerium when flying across Australia on the way to Europe, but that's only seen from above, not experienced over the 20 years of living in NZ that has made that landscape shout HOME! It'll come though. It'll come.

The heart->mouth thing comes into play in spades though when i touch down and suddenly I'm surrounded by the crew - Tom, Steve, Phil, Julia, Laura, Debs and the other trashbags and their brutally effective plans to kickstart yet another year of debauched brilliance. Bring it on!