Wide open spaces

Whenever I return to the Lands from holidays or work trips, I rarely enjoy a trouble-free trip. It's not the long hours in the car. I have always liked the timeless quality of passenger travel, moving steadily from one world to another, briefly without obligation or commitment beyond the hours of the journey itself. I let myself loose on an orgy of daydreaming, allowing extended role plays that are impossible on short trips or in snatched moments throughout the day. Although, I must admit that with Eleanor in the car, my opportunities for daytime reverie are now regularly interrupted by demands to send over snacks, pick up her water bottle or sing repeats of her favourite Playschool tunes. Nevertheless, hours spent driving are not a problem for me. Coupled with dramatic scenery that fills my daydreams with imagined lives of people only recently gone and rock formations that beg for their story to be told, I should be floating back home when I return.

This is not the case. My dreams are typically interspersed with lingering concerns about choices. Choices I've made that have set my life on certain directions. I linger over which choices, which directions, were pivotal or consequential. Choices about when to leave and how long to stay. A deep and undeniable yearning for a green base - as if all my Anglo-Saxon heritage compels me to own a little piece of earth. A yen in direct contradiction to my current life choices. Life in an arid zone Aboriginal-owned far flung place that I could never call my own.

While I am deeply drawn to the landscape here, I am also daily conscious of the transitory nature of my time here. Few people stay for long, and I know of only one non-Aboriginal person who ever retired here. A unique constellation of circumstances meant he had a little corner of the Warakurna roadhouse to call his own, complete with its own postbox (a salutary tip of the hat to retired life off the Lands, there being no postal service that calls for a box by the door). As we came through Warakurna today, I see that even his postbox has gone, six months after he lost his battle with cancer. I felt sad to see the shallow quality of corporate memory (meaning the memory of staff who are in charge of things like removing or keeping odd things like a postbox outside a hotel room). His small but solid footprint on the Lands wiped away, as if he never existed. Except in the memory of the locals and a few old-timers, which I seem to have become.

I wonder also if the turmoil in my thoughts as I drive back 'home' (can you call it home if it really isn't, if it is always a staff house?) is related to the constant challenge of the daily life I am heading back into. The more I know the less I know what to do. I recall clearly the day I set off to live in the Lands for the first time. My car loaded to the gunnels, a bike strapped to the front bullbar with nowhere else to hide, and a heart filled with adventurous confidence. I felt blessed to be travelling in convoy with two women who know the Lands well, having come out to be linguists in the Warburton mission in the late 60s. Blessed indeed, as they asked me to join hands with them in prayer to start the journey. While not a believer, it seemed to herald the new world I was going into, requiring extra assistance to secure our safety and guide our way.

Eleanor returning home to Blackstone

As chance would have it, the car I drove had no CD player, and being in a radio-free zone, I purchased the first faintly interesting cassette tape I could at the Erldunda Roadhouse, two hours south of Alice Springs. Wide open spaces, by the Dixie Chicks. Not only did this start a love affair with the Dixie Chicks, in some ways this song remains the anthem for my life on the Lands. And while I'm not the wide-eyed girl of the song, I am the wide-eyed woman for whom the lyrics resonate in different ways. Struggling as I do with the substance of my life choices and the possibilities of all that could have been and is yet to come.

Who doesn't know what I'm talking about
Who's never left home, who's never struck out
To find a dream and a life of their own
A place in the clouds, a foundation of stone

Many precede and many will follow
A young girl's dream no longer hollow
It takes the shape of a place out west
But what it holds for her, she hasn't yet guessed