retrospecting

Camp 119

 

By the time I reached the Gulf Country any hope of keeping this blog relatively current was gone. I had wildly under-estimated the degree to which I would be off-grid. The telco, Vodaphone, assured me at Tullamarine (Melbourne’s international and domestic airport) that they had something like 98% coverage, but of course that was by population, not area … I sussed that out when I asked the eager Tullamarine telco salesperson about coverage at Gibb River, a random outback site that I threw at him.

Like many Australians he had no idea of anywhere beyond the boundaries of his city. If that. As one respondent to my Facebook posts noted, I had travelled far more of Australia than most Australians. That was true even before this trip.

But it’s now my task to soldier on, finding ways to turn an adventure into words … I hope you stick with me?

Oh, and elsewhere a pictorial travelogue is slowly forming too. Look out!

So I reached Borroloola, and I reached Bing Bong, and I reached Normanton, and the story continues.

 

Like other remote Australian locations, Normanton had held a fascination for me as a result of a chance encounter.

Back in Charleville days I attended a Rural Ministry Conference in the Clare Valley, South Australia. Yeah, back in 2004, I hurtled down from Charleville to Adelaide and the Clare Valley. Another songline, though it was a repeat of earlier travels, mainly. 

I thoroughly recommend Turkey Creek wines. Or did back then. I think that’s what they were called. A magnificent rosé – and I don’t normally like rosé. Nom.

As it happens I went through the Clare Valley on this trip, too, though it doesn’t get a mention in this blog. It will appear in my photoblog when that eventuates. When, not if. I’m not done dissecting this saga yet.

I didn’t really get anything out of that 2004 conference, apart from a little networking. But I spent a fair bit of time with the Roman Catholic priest from Normanton. Or was it Burketown? Both, perhaps.

Sadly I’ve lost his name, and lost my diary of that period, but he was a wonderful, warm, wise man. We shared several intakes of the fruit of Bacchus over those few days … by and large we drifted away from the conference, gaining far more from one another’s own experiences of rural ministry.

Charleville, Normanton … just 1400 kms apart up the Matilda Way, but I never got to see him again. Part of that passing parade of faith- and life-connection.

But I’ve traversed the thread that joined his world and mine, now.

Not all on this trip, and not quite completely. A small section from Cloncurry to the Burke and Wills Roadhouse has eluded me, but that’s the point of circling the songlines, you see? I would need many more lifetimes to join all the dots, all the paths traversed by the original, the Indigenous inhabitants of the Big Red Island, and apparently we only get one gig. But our connecting road was the Matilda Way, criss-crossing the spot where Banjo Patterson wrote his famous song … “once a jolly swagman …”

Yeah, alright, you know it. I won’t sing it.

The songlines of Indigenous communication and the lines, much later lines, of “gospelization” and, sadly perhaps, colonialization, these intersect.

In my little world of Anglican Christian ministry, once reached down to Cunnumulla, the bottom of the Matilda Way. My world of travel reached further south, to Melbourne and Port Phillip Bay. In these I interconnected that priest’s world of Roman Catholic ministry in the Savanna lands and Gulf Country.

I was privileged to encounter him,  and however fleetingly to share stories of faith, and heat, and flies …

I paid my respects to his memory outside the church where he no doubt celebrated Mass countless times, wondered if he is still alive somewhere, and thanked God for the weird diaspora of faith and its woven strands.

I attempted to attend a service at the little Anglican church, too, for it was a Sunday. Sadly no-one turned up to take it, and the church was locked. I was there on the wrong Sunday of the month. 

St Peter’s, Normanton

So, a couple of nights in Normanton, because I looped around the area for a full day. I kept the kilometrage down to about 530 that loopy day. Above all I spent time at the infamous Camp 119, where Burke and Wills made their final northward stop on their ill-fated, ill-conceived attempt to cross the continent. I wondered about their noble futility, and about my pale replica as I hurtled around the same continent in an air-conditioned ute. 

Was it vanity? All is vanity, said the Teacher.

So I returned to Normanton, refreshed, knocked myself up dinner, and pondered these things before turning north for the penultimate time.