Epilogue

“A long curved wash of ripple

Left there its fingerprint

One long-before-time lost day.

I turn a dead sea’s leaves

And touch that day and look.”

Judith Wright

My time in Australia is coming to an end. In a couple of hours I shall be starting my 33 hour trip back home. For the moment everything is still fresh in my memory, but what will stay of this trip as time goes by and memories blur? Maybe I will remember when I was walking jet lagged in the Botanic Gardens in Sydney and saw the Opera House for the first time; or my first encounter with a wombat in Tasmania; the koalas in Cape Otway; the Central Market in Adelaide; the train to Alice Springs - the way Aboriginal children kept smiling for the long journey while spoilt white children would make scenes; the first time I saw Uluru on the horizon, the omnipresent ochre colour and the outback roads; the heat in Darwin, the rock paintings in Ubirr and the minutes I had Gunlom for myself; the bays of the West coast; brushing my teeth under a waterfall in Karijini, and the way everything became hot there - the water, the steering wheel, everything; the evening ceremony at the monastery in New Norcia; the many sunsets. Or maybe I will remember many apparently insignificant moments – sitting on a couch in Federation Square, crossing the road in Canberra or finding refuge from the heat in Alice Springs’ shops.

And then there are the people I met on the way: Jiayin, whom I met in Tasmania and later on the train to Alice Springs; the Israeli couple of farmers in Coles Bay who couldn't figure out how googlemaps worked on their iPad and asked me, of all persons, to help them out; Nathalya, Dave and Stephen, who not knowing me from anywhere opened me the door of their houses; Heather and Yvette in Victor Harbor, so concerned that I would be stranded on Kangaroo Island; Fei Hung and the expression on his face when we met again in Monkey Mia; Kate, in New Norcia, who found me a room to spend the night; the girl from the petrol station in Kalbarri who re-opened the station for me when I told her I had almost run out of fuel; that guy in Meekatharra who laughed and said "An espresso?? Forget it mate, you are in the bush!"

The bush. This word will never sound the same. Big wide hot spaces full of life, where the notion of time is different, penetrated by a powerful light and a deep silence interrupted only by the sounds of nature, undisturbed by man or technology or anything else, obeying ancient rhythms known only to the wise. When I visited the Australian Museum in Canberra I saw pictures of the scars left by the wounds that the Aborigines open on themselves as they progress in knowledge and understanding of the universe. Later, when I was in Uluru and Kata Tjuta, I noticed how the surface of the mountains seemed to be cut by shapes which strangely looked like the Aboriginal scars: it’s a sort of elliptic shape, a bit like the leaf of a tree, or an eye. I interpreted – but this is only my interpretation, I do not by any means pretend to be an expert in Aboriginal culture – that the Aborigines opened those wounds because they wanted their sacred landscapes marked on them, part of them. I come from a different culture/background, I am a whitefella, and yet I understand that need so well! I do not want a collection of exotic moments. I want what I lived marked on me, I want it to participate and mingle with everything that I will live next, to keep living in me, to stay present like a scar.

 

 

These are my last hours in Australia, and this is what I wish.