Bing Bong

 

Okay. Timey wimey and all that. While some writers, though maybe not so many bloggers, write in the first person present tense, “I walk across the room, I turn on the light,” there are few polite words for that technique.

Mate, if you’re walking and turning, somersaulting even, then you’re not writing, see? Willing suspension of disbelief can go so far, can even go to the beyonds of time and space, but walking, talking, turning while simultaneously writing is, yeah, up there with juggling oranges with your ears while eating porridge (“oatmeal” to you non-English speakers) from an Orrefors champagne flute.

So yeah. As it happens I’m writing from Melbourne, where I’m cold and damp. I wrote my last piece from Townsville, where Narrative-me has not yet reached, but where at least I was warm. Narrative-me reached Normanton, via Bing Bong, but Typing, Cold-me wants to backtrack, back across the deserted lands of the Gulf, or some of it. Back to Bing Bong and surrounds.

Bing Bong? Because yes, it is a place. When you’re Sleepless in a Triton on the outskirts of Borroloola, and you know Bing Bong is just up the road, why would you not give it a go?

So … I am rubbing my eyes, turning the key in the ignition … yeah, whatever.

Someone called Mikey went to Bing Bong about twelve years ago and he found pretty much what I found. Except I was circling songlines, and the songlines, unheard, unseen, inevitably embraced this cul de sac.

I don’t regret that dead end. Mikey, whoever he (probably not she) was, found a public jetty there. But Mikey wasn’t there at 3:00 in the morning. Crocodiles can see at night, so I left them in peace. But I had reached as best I could to the end of a songline. No kayaking, see. 

So: back to Borroloola? Not quite. There was a road, there was a sunrise, and there was stillness. I turned and travelled more corrugations and reached King Ash Bay. I'd heard of it on a YouTube Blog.

There I witnessed a sunrise. Like every sunrise it was a sunrise like no other and I was infinitesimally small and the universe, universes perhaps, were infinitesimally large,  

There was the breath of a God unseen but not unfelt. That breath embraced and renewed me and as you know (if you have read my previous post) I turned and travelled East once more.

I travelled the road I feared most, and it was a cinch. (Later I travelled multi-lane freeways and I fear them more because their soul has gone. But I might blog that later. Or not. Whatever).

There’s metaphors here, again. Vastness, smallness. I wrote of it in Townsville and I write (in present tense) now in Melbourne, while Blogger-me is in, well, Bing Bong and King Ash Bay and Normanton, and if you ever see my photo blog, that blogger is in – well King Ash Bay as it happens – and it all takes my breath away, and time is, well, timey wimey I guess. 

But I’ve been to Bing Bong.

New York, Paris, Bing Bong ... 



... and King Ash Bay


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