Tag: Australia
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THE GATES OF HELL
Out here nothing changes,Not in a hurry anyway.You feel the endlessness,Running from the light of day… – Goanna, Solid Rock. East of Borroloola the back left tyre of my four-wheel-drive exploded. I was driving fast, too fast, probably, on a hellish stretch […]
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CROCODILE COUNTRY
Out where the river broke,The bloodwood and the desert oak… – Midnight Oil, Beds Are Burning At Roper Bar I was swimming with crocodiles. And not the harmless freshwater variety, either. These were the real deal: big ‘ol, bad-tempered, drag-you-under-and-drown-you saltwater crocs. […]
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IRON AND GOLD
the emu-sextons pay me a last cursory glance… At Menzies, a dead-on-its-feet mining town a hundred kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, I turn off the bitumen highway onto a rutted track bulldozed through the red dirt landscape of Western Australia. My rented car moves about on the loose surface like a schooner under sail on a […]
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UNDER THE SUN
You’re in by Karumba,Where the fishing boats come in;I can’t believe this feeling,But I wish that I was there,Every passing day… – Goanna, Every Passing Day Fifteen nautical miles north-west of Karumba the oppressive air presses down on us with an almost tactile force. Thunderheads massed […]
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NORTHERN LIGHT
I’ll never let you go If you promise not to fade away… – Muse, Starlight Dusk on The Esplanade. As the evening hubbub of Cairns comes alive, I sit at a corner table at the Coast Roast […]
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Corner Country
“I thought of all the songs I’d sung About this Outback track, And that is how this vision came to me…” – Slim Dusty, Along the Road of Song. Beyond Bourke, a one-dog-town on the banks of the Darling River in Western New South Wales, the single lane bitumen road gives way to a rutted outback […]
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Vanishing Points
Nothing beside remains. Round the decayof that colossal wreck, boundless and barethe lone and level sands stretch far away… – Percy Bysshe Shelly, Ozymandius. At Curdimurka Siding, the windows of an abandoned railway station stare sightlessly out onto a landscape of grey saltbush and red dirt. The roots of a coolibah tree have cracked and […]
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Walking on the Moon
I no longer feel as though I am walking on the moon; I am back on the good Earth.
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Ghosts of Cooper Creek
I live and breathe the silences and dust where no man reigns… – Cold Chisel, Wild Colonial Boy Dawn at Cooper Creek. Day begins early out here in the far north-east corner of South Australia. Long before first light seeps into the sky, the birds are awake: screeching and wailing and […]
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Wide Awake in Dreamland
Out here nothing changes, not in a hurry anyway. You feel the endlessness, running on the light of day… – Goanna, Solid Rock Before the Dreamtime there was nothing. The Earth was flat and lifeless; no stars glittered in the sky. The universe was dark and silent. […]
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