Australian Memoir 1997

“We caressed the scaly skin of Uluru… we gazed at the
moons of Jupiter up in the clear black night sky”

When my friend Spud told me to lie down and press my ear to the blacktop, I wondered whether the packet of bush biscuits we’d just finished had a special ingredient. This was my introduction to Australia, on the first night of a three-week camping trip. We were halfway to Uluru from Alice Springs, at a roadhouse on the Lasseter Highway. With my ear hard against the ground, I heard the rumble of a road train five miles away. How could something so far seem so close? Five minutes later the triple-trailer ripped past us with a mighty roar, sending up a cloud of red dust. We walked away rubbing our eyes.

The trip had actually started two weeks before I arrived. An advance party of fellow campers had landed in Darwin and explored the northernmost parts of the Northern Territory. I hooked up with them in Alice Springs and was briefed on the next stages of our journey… first west to Uluru and Kata Tjuta, then south down the Stuart Highway to Adelaide, where we’d meet Australian friends and journey up the Murray River aboard a houseboat called Freedom. After that we’d drive to Melbourne, then to Sydney, and then fly back to Britain.

If there is a narrative arc in this travelogue, it is in the land and the environment. From the hard, red, remoteness of Australia’s scorched centre, to the rolling green fertility of the southern wine regions, and then into the hard-faced congestion of the big cites. It was a slow build – from emptiness to full-on – from being all alone out in the wilds of Central Australia with nothing more than a toilet roll and a spade, to being four deep at the bar of a Sydney pub.

In the early stages of our journey the land, to my innocent eye, seemed to be full of defiance. Later, in towns such as Coober Pedy (function: opal mining), Woomera (function: aerospace) and in the cities, it was wilfully compliant. Right from the start, the sensual and the logical came flying out of their traps… or so it seemed. I already knew that Australia is around thirty-two times the size of the UK, but equations (AUS = UK × 32) count for little as your Toyota campervan eats up mile after mile of burnt orange earth. It was appropriate as we headed west towards Uluru, that our soundtrack was an album called Diesel & Dust by Midnight Oil.

Other sensations arrived head-on. The rare appearance of an oncoming vehicle on the highway locks your eyes in a test of scale. That bird you just saw hovering in the distance turns out to be a dead fly on the windscreen. Then there’s Australia’s clumsy courtship of line and pattern. On a map it resembles a misshapen pie, but onto this eccentric plan has been drawn a grid of pathologically straight lines dividing all of Australia’s 7.7m square kilometres into six territories. Inside this rigid frame are mountains, rivers and lakes in mesmerising non-conformist shapes. Rocky outcrops bubble up from barren flatness and stand massively, all stumpy and proud.

Our passage across the border from the Northern Territory to South Australia signalled a transition from red to green, then from green to blue as we entered New South Wales. Metaphor lingers in colour so, with no irony intended, our lodgings in Sydney were in Kings Cross, an area known for its ‘red-light’ attractions and ‘blue-movie’ parlours. Our days out of town were on trips to the Blue Mountains or to the seaside at Manly and Freshwater Bay.

When Spud next told me to press my ear to something it was to a tree on the banks of the Murray River. ‘What can you hear?’ he asked. I heard what sounded like a storm drain in action. ‘Thirsty things, trees’, he said with a wink. In the end, with such flimsy impressions and distant memories as my guide, this account risks adding up to little more than reheated fantasy in a three-way with nostalgia and false memory. Yes, we caressed the scaly skin of Uluru, something which I understand is now prohibited as it is recognised as a sacred site. Yes, we gazed at the moons of Jupiter up in the clear black night sky. But most of the time we just revelled in domestic ordinariness. We sat still, our ‘thongs’ on our feet, our ‘stubby holders’ at our side, sucking up this new world of wonder. The Aboriginal folk music of Baku was our serenade. We mastered one-pot campfire cooking. We played ‘pokies’ in small-town bars. We conned a few Australians into believing we personally knew Princess Diana, whose tragic death was non-stop news during our visit. We were woken up in the middle of the night by the shriek of rutting wombats. In this sense, Australian Memoir is more of a reckoning than a comment or an explanation. It is the rough statement of a relationship. It is Australia and Me.

This piece is originally from a curatorial project in collaboration with Monash University Museum of Art and Art et al.