flatlands

 

A hill

I have often said I abhor flat. Well, except on a bicycle, perhaps. Even then the wind always fights me, no matter which way I ride. 

Which I don’t.

So, for example, in Australia I find the Hay Plains to be perhaps the only stretch of roading that that I yearn to escape. Or in New Zealand the Canterbury Plains [as it happens I will be avoiding traversing them today, travelling north in a different word, taking an inland route to avoid the tedium].

I could never voluntarily live in a flat town … Hay – Levin – Invercargill … though mowing lawns is a whole heap easier. And I did live in Palmerston North for four years but I was young and silly and rode bicycles then. 

Slowly I have come to realize that it isn’t “flat” per se that irritates me. It’s flat and manicured. Flat with fences. Flat with hedges. Flat with windbreaks, manicured out of all semblance of nature. Flat lands desecrated by human fiddling.  

As I headed north from Normanton, pre-dawn, the sheer contourless flat was exhilaration, not tedium. Tourists head north of Normanton to reach Karumba. To fish, or to gain a sense that they have traversed the continent, like Burke and Wills, reached the Gulf, seen the north.

I’d skip the fishing. A true hypocrite, I prefer not to view the baleful eyes of a fish out of water. And I’ve stood on the slimy yet inspirational shores of the Gulf before, at Numbulwar.

I always wanted to get to Nhulunbuy, too, but I guess everyone has a fish that gets away. I probably won’t ever get to Ushuaia or Stanley, either.

Have I mentioned the novel I’m publishing? Oh? Can’t keep a good narcissist down, eh? Self-promotion and all that. Anyway, [spoiler alert], it opens and near-closes on the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

As it happens, the drive to Karumba was in part necessitated because I realised that I had got a scene wrong, and I still had time to correct it. Just a throwaway sentence, but still. Writing a novel from memories and maps is fraught, and this sojourn in Normanton warned me that drug smugglers are not likely to sashay into harbour there because, well, it’s 70 kms inland.

In the unlikely possibility of a critic actually reading my spiels, they could have had a field day with that. Earlier in this circlement of songlines I visited Fremantle for the same reason. I was uneasy about some details. I have them now. But that’s another novel, far from publishers’ eyes as yet.

I feel I have digressed. Karumba. Yes. I captured a beautiful sunrise, a couple of bird photos, and a coffee. And my last glimpse, perhaps ever, of an Australian north coast. Did you know that the bakery in Karumba won a national silver medal for its, well for one of its pie varieties? Or so I was told. Unfortunately, the vagaries of access to remote towns are such that supplies are unreliable. The beef hadn’t got through on my day in town, so I had a choice of chicken or no chicken. I settled for chicken. And great coffee.

Goodbye, North Coast. I turned and headed back through Normanton, for there is no other way out of Karumba. Just past Normanton I took a left, and headed across the vast Gulf Country plains, to Croydon, Georgetown and beyond. They are probably the only two towns I encountered on this trip that I had not previously heard of. 

I may have mentioned, I often do, that I am a manual driver? I loathe automatics. Like showering with a raincoat, they remove the joy of driving. Even in city snarls, much though I hate the snarl, I love the coordinated caress, the dance of gear stick, clutch pedal, and accelerator. A pas de trois. Paradoxically, perhaps, I remember realizing that I could almost put up with driving an automatic in rural and remote Australia. So few opportunities to change gear. I used to drive regularly from Charleville to Melbourne and reckoned that gear changes would average at about one per 100 kilometres. Not much opportunity for pas de trois.

My by now trusty Triton is of course a manual. I doubt that I shifted gear more than once up and down as I passed southeast across the plains. Barely a change of contour, and certainly not one demanding a downshift. But the vegetation changes; while I am no botanist those changes inspire me, fill me with a deep sense of the variety of this vast continent. Climate, soil types, these and other factors combine in a subtle dance, their own pas I guess.

The road was flat. And exhilarating. Country unspoiled by human hands.

Then, at a spot that my GPS identifies as Ellavale, but which was no more than a solitary bend in the road 40 kilometres or so northwest of Croydon, there was a hill.

I doubt it was hill enough to warrant a line on a contour map, but a hill nevertheless, portent of things to come. Although it was only twenty past ten as I drove past that hill, I will leave us there for now, at what was the last of the vast flatlands. Flatlands that ultimately are not flat. Unless seen from an Airbus 11 kilometres high). Flatlands and are never boring.

I still had another 40 kilometres or so to go before Croydon, and many hours to drive before the day was out, but contour change was afoot. Like a change of life, really, a moment to put my pixels down and breathe.