Both men are tied to this country in ways that are neither abstract nor accidental.
Books
Centre to the Dish – Introduction
Through all of this, the land remained what it had always been.
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 2 Starting Point Condobolin
But those numbers, as tidy as they are, don’t tell the whole story. They flatten out the texture of lived life here
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 3 The Gum Bend Water Ski Park
The same rules apply. Don’t overstay. Don’t claim it. Respect the place and it will return the favour.
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 4 The Utes in the Paddock Museum
It’s bush logic at its finest. Entirely implausible. Perfectly coherent. The idea that machinery evolves the way people do.
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 5 The Fallen Jockey Museum
Standing there, between humour and mourning, invention and inevitability, it becomes clear that Condobolin isn’t hosting these stories so much as holding them
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 6 Struggling Out of Condobolin
The rust is honest about it. It doesn’t pretend permanence. It just shows the cost of exposure
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 7 Road Art that is Mailboxes
You understand why they are there. You even admire many of them. Craft, humour, resilience welded into form. But appreciation does not erase accumulation.
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 8 Names on the Fence Line
The tragedy is not that the white man named the land, it is that in doing so, he stopped listening to what it was already called.
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 9 Signs Signs Everwhere Signs
Still, they stand. Because someone decided they should. Because someone calculated the risk.
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 10 The Endless Straight – Ootha to Bogan Gate
Darkness and distance, those twin enemies of childhood travel, hung heavy over these roads. “Are we there yet?” wasn’t impatience so much as hope. And still the road goes on
Centre to the Dish – Chapter 11 Gums Pine Trees and Lignum Scrub
But the land remembers even when we do not. It presses back gently, persistently, reclaiming what it can in the margins.