The open road carries the breath of possibility

And I’ve always liked those long-winded Australian country-road driving trips. Maybe my appetite for such things was born from days in the State Basketball League with the Mustangs. We’d clamber aboard a bus and take off, up the coast, into the hills, through the ranges…

And I remember how Australia looked and felt outside the window.

And I’d glance out into the unfolding landscape and see something uniquely belonging to us, something beautiful. And a great feeling of being alive and free and fortunate would descend upon me and the bus and all of us.

And so it goes that there has evolved in me a love for letting the country fill up my car windows, a deep fondness for for an Australian road odyssey. 

And I was away and up. Out through wide-streeted Merriwa, across the Streeton-esque undulations and lethargic river bends.

And up there, the mesmerising and endless horizons of Australia begin to open up before your eyes, as they do. A hint of the vastness of Australia can be tasted on the through-the-window breeze. An undertone of the ineffable beauty and loneliness that comes with being on remote Australian ground.

And across the Great Dividing Range. Our mountain range first seen as a bumpy ragged line in a Jacaranda Atlas. 

And the beauty of the epic eastern range that divides the inside from the edge could never be felt until you saw her rocky limbs, her gum-tree ribs and brain, could never be discerned until you were there upon her, and then began to dream about aborigines living beautifully in her folds and fissures for millennia, as they did…

And it’s out through Dunneedoo, that magically named and soporific town. And onto Dubbo and the river’s up and there’s water on the road near Narromine …

And out of town now, and near on a 100km of straight, unbending road, the likes of which would bend the mind of Europeans. Straight like a crow-bar, straight like a Glenn McGrath off-stump line, beautiful and straight and long, and you start to breathe real easy…

And the road and sky and your memory all converge to create a fertile hypnotic state, an opportunity to unravel neglected aspects of ourselves, to develop ideas, to stare off toward the clouds, to look back across the years and finally understand something about what went wrong and all that…

And out on those limitless Australian roads, in those entrancing moments of gentleness and calm, there is a chance for feeling Australia, and seeing ourselves…

And so it goes.

Goodnight.