Even as a kid, getting on my bicycle and just riding, far as I could, anywhere, away. New places. To the other side of the lake. Then further afield. Up into the hills, wagging a day in my first year of high school to escape claustrophobia and boredom, all the way up into the hills to find the railway tunnel that cuts stone black and dark through the rock, where a runaway train once failed and sailed spectacularly backwards down through the Darling Range.
Even before I got my first car, wild and lost missions to Wungong Dam to find huge, mythical concrete pipes to skate. And even when I did get a car, just heading out on mad, hashish-driven treks to Kalbarri, Margaret River, anywhere. Away. New places.
One new year, taking a clapped-out Lite Stout to a place on the west Australian map simply because it had nothing marked on it. Just another one of those big, blank white spaces that marked the whitefella's idea of country. Wondering what was there, wandering out along some thin track northwest of Kalgoorlie, to Lake Giles, finding that explorer's cairn atop a lonely granite ridge. Repairing the radiator at an empty fossicker's shack to sail on past the shimmering flat salt of Lake Barlee, along the back tracks thinly disguised by my large-scale paper maps. Before Google of course. Even now, even with Google maps, I can barely trace this road on the satellite. Reaching a place called Sandstone, I place I never knew existed, to be welcomed by country people there with beer and rum counting down to the pointless celebrations of the early morn.
Shooting ceremony on country today. Amazing. Just amazing. Devil dancing in the twilight against the sacred stone sites of this oldest living culture. Yidaki and clapsticks from Elcho Island echo fresh in my memory with such foreign singing I can't begin to describe.
