After dinner, our attention moved upwards. There was little competing light, and the night sky gave us plenty to look at. We had phone apps to help identify what we were seeing, along with the monoculars from the van. The phones that had been less than helpful with the day’s communications could at least earn their keep in another capacity.
The Places We Found and the Things We Never Went Looking For
The goanna had apparently vanished. Its tracks had been quite plain in the dust of the airstrip, enough to give our morning walk a small investigation, and then there was nothing. I was prepared to credit it with several useful bush skills, but disappearing into thin air seemed a little ambitious, even for a local.
We were staying at Mataranka, with the van at the end of what turned out to be a runway. This gave the site rather more potential for passing traffic than the usual caravan park road. Silver Leader, whose work at Macquarie Airport gave him some interest in these matters, had a story about a light aircraft landing while caravans were being set up. I could see how that might interrupt the business of getting the chairs out, particularly if you had chosen your position on the understanding that the long clear stretch in front was merely an unusually generous driveway.
On foot, the airstrip seemed a considerable opening in the bush. There was room for the eye to travel along it, following the cleared ground farther than it could in most other directions, although even that view gave us very little sense of the country surrounding us. The trees and scrub gathered along its edges, concealing whatever lay beyond. We could look down the runway and appreciate its length without being able to see much of the land through which that narrow opening had been made.
The association with We of the Never Never seemed particularly appropriate there. Those words have a reach beyond the title of a book, suggesting country that continues well past the point where someone standing beside a caravan can make any useful assessment of it. We had arrived by road, found somewhere to put the van and begun attending to the usual matters of settling in. Yet the little area we occupied belonged to a much larger landscape, most of which remained out of sight behind the bush.
I tend to think of vastness as something you should be able to look across. An open plain makes the point readily enough, as does a distant range with a great deal of apparently empty country between it and you. Here, the bush complicated that understanding. The land did not cease to be extensive simply because I could not see it, but my eye kept arriving at the nearest trees as though they marked some sort of boundary.
Even the springs were concealed within it. Warm water could be close enough to visit while remaining entirely absent from the view, leaving someone unfamiliar with the place little reason to suspect what the vegetation was hiding. Beyond those springs there was more country again, with its own contours, waterways and distances. From the airstrip, however, it was all gathered behind an edge of scrub that offered very few clues.
That gave the words Never Never a particular appeal to me, although I doubted they would have meant anything quite so vague to people who knew the country well. What lay beyond my view was simply beyond my view. There would be tracks, familiar places and ways through it that meant something quite definite to others, while I was still getting my bearings from the position of the van and the direction back to the amenities.
For the morning, I had a much smaller piece of country to investigate. Whatever had crossed the runway overnight had left marks in the dust, bringing our attention down from the surrounding land to the ground immediately in front of our feet. There were peacock tracks, which fitted with the birds we had seen on arrival, and wallaby tracks as well. We even saw a wallaby during the walk, a helpful piece of supporting evidence for those of us whose qualifications in identifying footprints were largely self-awarded.
The cleared strip had made those crossings visible in a way the bush beside it could not. We could follow an animal’s progress for a little while, then lose it where the surface changed or the vegetation took over. That was quite enough to keep us occupied. Somewhere beyond the edges of our morning walk, the animals were getting on with their day without the slightest need to explain where they had gone.
The goanna, or at least the animal I took to be a goanna, offered more of a challenge. We followed its progress until the marks stopped, then looked a little more closely at what the ground was telling us. It appeared to have doubled back along its own route before leaving at a point where there was very little dust. Farther away, where the dust deepened again, the tracks reappeared.
That pleased me more than it probably deserved. Here was a bushy who had spent more than forty years in the city, still able to make some sense of a few marks on the ground. I had not actually found the animal, and there was no one available to certify my interpretation, but I was happy enough with the result. The goanna could keep the remainder of its morning to itself.
There was no checkout time to organise ourselves around that day. We were staying put, which meant the walk could take as long as a set of tracks required. Nobody needed to calculate when to start packing the last things away or whether we could make another town before lunch. The van was already where it needed to be.
An airstrip might seem an unlikely place to spend a morning looking closely at things. Its main purpose encourages a fairly broad view of the ground, preferably one taken at speed by someone with wings. On foot, the dust supplied another version of the place altogether. The overnight crossings had left us plenty to examine without our needing to get very far.
There were colourful birds in the trees, too, which I suspected belonged to the lorikeet family. I was rather less confident about their identification than I had been about solving the goanna’s escape, but their colour needed no expertise to appreciate. As we made our way back, falcons began circling overhead, attending to the more serious business of finding something to eat.
I photographed flowers for a friend who was always looking for subjects to paint. That gave the camera a small job beyond collecting evidence of where we had been. A flower beside our morning walk might eventually find its way into a painting somewhere else, through someone else’s eye. I did not need to know its name to think it worth sending.
Our return also brought a more obvious user of the airstrip into view. A car was coming towards us at speed, raising dust, and for a while appeared to be heading straight at us. We were walking in the middle of the strip, so moving to the side seemed a sensible contribution to the situation. The driver eventually slowed, passed us at a reasonable pace and continued down a well-travelled track at the end.
That track had already attracted a little of my curiosity, but there were other things to attend to before I went looking for more ways out. An empty gas bottle needed attention, and a fitting on Robyn’s side of the wardrobe had come adrift again. She had considerably less clothing hanging there than I had on my side, which did not seem a fair allocation of mechanical consequences. The movement of the van had defeated the screws before, and apparently intended to keep doing so.
Caravan travel carries its domestic arrangements along with the views. You can wake in a place you have looked forward to visiting for years and still have washing to deal with or something that refuses to remain attached to a wall. Robyn had put a load through before we went out. By the time we returned later, the breeze and the warmth had done their part, and I brought it in dry.
We went into Mataranka with hopes of improving our phone and internet reception. Outlook was being difficult, although Gmail seemed able to cope, while Silver Leader wanted service for his Optus phone. We parked under a tree and gave technology an opportunity to redeem itself. It declined, so we moved on to something that required rather less cooperation from a telecommunications provider.
Bitter Springs offered warm water and a current. Compared with the pools at the Homestead, there was more room and considerably more movement in the water. Forbsy supplied a pool noodle, and Robyn and I settled into the business of drifting along together. After the morning’s interest in where everything else had gone, it was pleasant to let the water take care of where we were going.
There is a useful lack of dignity in a pool noodle. It makes no pretence of being sophisticated equipment, and nobody supported by one looks as though they are undertaking a particularly demanding expedition. Yet there we were, afloat in warm water, asking very little of ourselves and receiving rather a lot from a length of foam. I could find no fault with the arrangement.
My breathing became part of the entertainment. As I filled my lungs, our position in the water rose, and as the air went out we settled again. It was a small thing to notice, but there was time to notice it. We had no need to swim hard enough to make breathing a matter of effort, and no particular reason to hurry towards the end of the drift.
Robyn and I meandered through the springs with the noodle doing its modest work between us and the current doing most of the rest. A walk generally asks at least that you keep moving your feet. Here we had found an outing willing to make an even smaller demand. Given the warmth, and the fact that we were both fighting colds, I was quite willing to accept those terms.
We stayed a couple of hours, by which time our fingers supplied the familiar evidence that we had been in the water long enough. There are plenty of devices available to tell a traveller when to move on. On this occasion, pruney hands were adequate. We emerged with no notable achievement to report beyond having enjoyed ourselves.
Silver Leader, meanwhile, had found other travellers to talk to. This was hardly a surprising development, and the conversation had produced recommendations for places ahead, accounts of roads and views, and warnings about things we might encounter. Information travels freely between people doing laps of the country. Whether you ask for it or not, someone is generally happy to tell you what lies around the next bend.
One traveller had a caravan like ours, although an older version, and could supply a considerable catalogue of its early troubles. Having described those, he remained pleased with it and had seen no reason to get rid of it over the three years he had owned it. I could appreciate that position. A loose wardrobe fitting was annoying, but it had not prevented us from spending the morning following animal tracks and the next part of the day floating at Bitter Springs.
There had also been interest in a shop advertising mango smoothies. Four of our party were enthusiastic, whereas I detest mangoes and could approach the proposed stop with rather less personal investment. Unfortunately for the others, a sign announced that the shop was closed until next year. That was a fairly comprehensive answer to any hope that we might simply wait a little while for it to open.
Back at the park, our neighbourhood had changed. A caravan was being set up beside us, and a helicopter now stood no more than a hundred metres away. The airstrip was keeping its options open. I sent a photograph to a friend who was following our travels with interest but whose two young children might have made some of our long travelling days a more complicated proposition.
I also wandered over to the replica house associated with We of the Never Never. Inside, the museum displays gave some sense of the hardships behind the story, while the view from the back porch held my attention in a quieter way. I wondered how many old homes in the district still looked out on something similar. We had our caravan comforts close by, and I had no wish to exchange them for a practical demonstration of the difficulties described in the rooms.
The heat was beginning to make itself felt, especially after the walk and the swim. Nanna naps became part of the day’s arrangements, followed eventually by the attraction of an ice cream and a wander near the pub. There was a drink as well, of course. We had stayed in one place without finding it necessary to stay in one position.
Our appetites had not been helped by the colds, and for a while dinner seemed less than certain. Nevertheless, after gathering in what we called Silver Leader’s beer garden, Robyn and I managed our version of fish and chips. This involved frozen battered fish fillets and slabs of potato on the barbecue. It was dinner beside the vans, and we both got through it despite our earlier lack of interest in food.
There was the usual call to our absent travelling companion, the Missing Link. The caravan yard had now lost his keys, another addition to the troubles keeping him away from the trip he had helped persuade the rest of us to undertake. It would have been funnier had it not been preventing him from joining us. Our own small maintenance matters seemed fairly manageable by comparison.
After dinner, our attention moved upwards. There was little competing light, and the night sky gave us plenty to look at. We had phone apps to help identify what we were seeing, along with the monoculars from the van. The phones that had been less than helpful with the day’s communications could at least earn their keep in another capacity.
One app even showed the satellites travelling across the sky. There was something enjoyable about having a device in my hand help me find things so far beyond it, although I did not need to identify everything for the looking to be worthwhile. A name could help locate something and make it easier to point out. It could also wait while I simply looked.
The morning had held my attention close to my feet, following marks through dust until an animal’s route became apparent. Now there was no convenient edge to the scene, and no prospect of following anything to the place it had gone. I could move between the phone, the monocular and the unaided view, finding something different in each. There was plenty of evening left for that.
We had driven only twenty-seven kilometres in the course of the day, a modest entry beside some of the distances already behind us. The washing was dry, we had been fed, and the mango enthusiasts would have to survive their disappointment. Above Mataranka, there was still more sky to look at. I was content to give it a little longer.
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