So anyway. As I was saying. This morning (was it really this morning? It seemed like some never, never land of fog and fatigue) I got up at 4:30 am (ugh) in Melbourne to catch my flight to the Red Center, Alice Springs. Only here it’s really rather green, rather than red, due to unprecedented amount of rain they’ve had here. I rented a bike from my filthy backpackers lodge (filthy!) and cycled around to the many aboriginal art galleries here. Saw some AMAZING paintings and also a lot of cheap crap done for tourists. Still, the good stuff is really fantastic. I wenTt into one gallery, and from across the room my eye was drawn magnetically to this one painting, which I later discovered was called Yam Seeds Dreaming. I must have an innate eye for quality in aboriginal art because it was the most expensive painting I saw the whole afternoon for $11,000, by a very esteemed but dead lady named Emily something-or-other. Then I went to the gym, and then up to Anzac Hill to watch the sunset. I sat for an hour there, and the air, and the sky were huge and clean, just beautiful. The desert, for me, is always full of peace and right-on IT-ness. (IT is that feeling of being connected, fundamentally, to the earth, to this world. A sense of well-being, belonging, happiness. And, I must report, I had the most amazing example of synchronicity this well. Reading the Economist in my dwall this mornign on the plane, I stumbled across the full quote from Goethe, alluded to in Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (Chapter 4 which I read just last week), and which I have been meaning to try to track down, as being hugely meaningful for me right now:
“Whatever you do, or dream of doing, begin it. Boldness has grace, power, and magic in it.”
Then, tonight, just to prove my truly spiritual credentials and connectedness with this ancient earth, I ate Skippy the friendly kangaroo for supper. Connoiseurs will want to know that I ate him with a demiglaze sauce. I can feel his little tail hopping around in my tummy.
It’s the next day. I had a dreadful night. The filthy hostel gave me a room, which actually should more accurately be called the stink-pit, fronting the street and I had a vast number of very rowdy Aboriginals shouting in the street directly outside my window the whole night, plus doors banging in the hallways of the hostel, given that I was unfortunately situated right beside the exit door. I’m sleep-deprived for sure now. Anyway, I’m sitting uncomfortably on the bus (it’s VERY cramped!), making my way out to Ayers Rock or Uluru in the local Aboriginal language. It’s a site of great spiritual significance for the Aboriginal peoples, containing a large number of sacred sites, where the ancient mystical beings dreamed the world and the landscape into existence. We hiked around the base of the rock, went back to the camp for a swim, and then returned to the rock for sunset, which, as you know from all the photos, sends light horizontally through the atmosphere, refracting it into its constituent parts, shining the red light onto Ayers Rock itself, where the iron oxide is already quite red. In other words, at sunset Ayers Rock looks like it is on fire. Only we didn’t see this. Why not? Because it rained. Actually that’s too mild a word. I think to say that it dumped-huge-bucket-loads-and-running-sheets-of-water on us would be more correct. In fact, for most parts of this trip, I couldn’t even see the rock itself. But there is an amazing peace in the desert, despite the rain, and Uluru is a very spiritual place. More prosaically, did you know that it is the largest single rock in the world (called a monolith), rising some 380m out of the earth’s surface. I tried to discover how far underground it extended, Rob, our slimy tour guide answered, with all the self-assuredness of an absolute tyrant at the height of his regime, 7km. This gave me the first clue that there was something seriously wrong with this guy, as I’m pretty sure that the earth’s crust isn’t even 7km thick. More examples of Rob’s slimyness followed. He would put punk music on the bus loudspeaker early in the morning, and when we complained said it was to keep him awake, and he didn’t really care what we thought!
Aside from Slimy Rob, what about the tour itself? Well, it’s really rather hilarious, though grisly too. We have far too many people cramped on far too small a bus. However, I met some very nice people, such as Suresh, an Indian American from New York who kept me well supplied with iced coffee, sanity, and healthy dollops of a delicious cynical humour. Also, Joe and Barbara from NY who are as into wildlife – she works in wildlife animal rescue operations - and as NOT into our tour guide, Slimy Rob, as me! But the area is beautiful and worth the trip. One thing strikes me: how similar the vast blue sky, light green scrub, and red soil of central Australia is to the bush of South Africa. Apart from the lack of acacias, and the fact that somehow, indefinably, South Africa is much, much more beautiful, I wouldn’t know I wasn’t in the bush just outside of Johannesburg. I also visited the excellent Desert Research Center just outside Alice, which is a huge ecological and environmental research and educational center just outside Alice. I saw large numbers of the native marsupials which have mostly been driven to the edge of extinction by habitat destruction and the European introduction of animals like rats, foxes, rabbits and cats (which have gone feral). (These introduced animals compete for food and breed faster by virtue of the fact that they are placental mammals rather than marsupials.) I learned all about the animals and plants in the desert, and the Aboriginal peoples’ relationships to these flora and fauna, and how they survived in the desert. It reminded me so much of what we know about the lives of the San or Bushman in Southern Africa before they were harried to the edge of extinction, and how well attuned these people were to their environment. Fascinatingly, Aboriginal rock art has a lot of parallels with Bushman rock paintings and carvings both in terms of style, content matter, and, it is thought, spiritual significance. Oh, the bus is stopping, pulling over to the roadside. Something’s up, we’re taking a short break. Stay tuned. I’ll be back!
Well, we’ve just been sent out into the roadside scrub to gather wood! I never! Apparently, if you get even the tiniest splinter of this wood, with its native bacteria, inside your skin, it goes septic and you run a large risk of blood poisoning. And we’ve been instructed to break off branches and push down dead dry trees and drag them over to the trailer. We got up at 5am, were herded like cattle onto a tiny uncomfortable bus, are now being sent into the bushes in work gangs to tread through thorns, and battle potentially deadly snakes, scorpions to gather fuel. I feel like I’m part of a prison chain gang. Well, now we are back at camp, where I am hiding in the bushes to avoid having to assist in the preparation of dinner. Folks, I think this is it, my last despatch from the Red Center. I’m off to Perth tomorrow and then up the West Coast, hopefully to swim with the whale sharks! (I’m a bit early, but I have been praying for them to arrive.) I will write more.
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