Daylight is raw and I wonder if I would rather be back there in the empty sky, on cold granite in cold sun, trying to bubble my blood like girl, you were the snake, the lizard, the three degrees of separation, it was you. I want to be all these things I was told I couldn’t just because I shouldn’t, when will you settle down? like I’m supposed to be happy with three children, a house and a man who deigns to fuck me every now and then—no, fuck you, there’s a desert calling my name, a mountain, a spit-out-sideways precipice. And it’s easy to fall back into that, into love, you are my salvation, love, but out on that rock when the thunder is all that you can hear, the sound of the world turning right-way-up—out there you remember. You’re water and rock. You’re ancient and you’re transient. You’re scraps knotted together and you are whole.

Is it funny that the loneliest I’ve ever felt is between the sheets with someone else? Friends, lovers, sisters, brothers. The same words over and over again. The water in this city tastes like salt, and I want to destroy this thing that eats at me inside but you can’t make a shell bleed, and there’s nothing that disintegrates the desire to create like that self-destructive void, that my life can be nothing, that myth that you can find permanence in hot pulses of adrenaline when everything else is burning, burning, turning to ash. Ash heart. A faultline. A crack in the crust, thunder and the tremors echoing—quick, hold me, I need to stop these rocks collapsing, wearing away, salt and sand and somewhere here, somewhere, a trembling, miasmic, volatile heart. Right now the gulf is roaring and I need to drown it out.

Delia, oh Delia
Delia all my life

I spent Friday night in secret hot springs, silver fish with red eyes swimming between my thighs, owls swooping low over the water, fingers swollen and scaly, nails chipped and black. My knees ached from rock-hopping. I crawled into my swag at five in the morning, discarding a couple of moonlit tears. But I was drunk and the curlews were crying.

If I hadn’ter shot poor Delia
I’d-a had her for my wife

New friends that had materialised in the last couple of weeks disappeared again, and I thought, how do you hold on to people? How does anyone ever hold on to people? I want to keep you in my pocket. The universe knocks us into each other sideways and provides only scraps of time as fuel—it’s no wonder we all feel lonely. Social niceties are hardly worth the time they swallow, surely—let’s embrace instead like long-lost lovers after five minutes of mirth-bubbled banter.

Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone

Sometimes I want to turn off these nerve endings, these synapses cracking, these red-raw impulses and sympathies, and when we got back to Darwin I squeezed my feet into my high-heeled boots to hide my mosquito-eaten and apple-bruised legs. Just to remember how to wear them. Just to remember how it felt to teeter, to be your doll. But even then my elbows itched, my eyes were tired-swollen, my face unpainted, my manners lax and my enthusiasm low. Alcohol strips me of my ability to provide a shield for myself and I’m feeling the full force of it now, poisonous drug—nausea and the need for a cocoon, even one spun from mud and sun. Even one as remote as this.

Delia’s gone, one more round
Delia’s gone

If this were a conversation, I would end it with a kiss.

I never understood the appeal of what I saw as a ‘quiet’ life. I never understood how one could find meaning in a tiny country town, as though meaning—greater meaning, overarching purpose—could only be created in conjunction with as many other people as possible. If you aren’t doing a job for other people, if you aren’t getting out of bed for other people, if you aren’t changing the world for other people, what’s the point?

This says far more about my own temperament, priorities and misunderstandings than it does about the reality of rural life. I don’t know when I started thinking that days would be spent in idleness, in selfishness—in pointlessness—in the country. I don’t know why I thought that living in the bush would mean life would be reduced to a struggle for daily survival. I don’t know when I started assuming that the cities were the best place to make meaningful differences to the world. And I never thought seriously about how our priorities might be shaped by the physicality of the places we grew up.

At Kalala Station, a 20-year-old ringer called Dan and I sit on an esky in the dust behind the kitchen. ‘Didn’t think you’d last,’ he tells me. ‘Really thought you’d crack after a couple of days.’

So did I. I thought stock work would repulse me, exhaust me, drain the life-blood out of me. Instead it has made me feel alive—I’m excited and enthusiastic and I’m not even sure why. I thought isolation would make me crave people, bustle, company and confusion. Instead it has had the opposite effect, and I’m forever trying to think of the best way to sink into the bush, the best way to feel like I am part of it, the best way to get away. The best way to stay away. And in the cold howling dark of predawn I no longer dread the day. I can, in all honesty, now say: I get it. It is possible to turn the world on its head. It is possible to remake yourself.

You should see the stars out here.

It’s May 14. Our lantern has run out of batteries, so I’m writing this in the amenities shelter in the campground at Boodjamulla (Lawn Hill) National Park. I’m writing on lined paper in a fine blue pen and I have to stop every couple of words to brush the moths off the page and pick beetles out of my hair. The fluorescent light is on a timer. After 15 minutes or so it flicks off and I am plunged into darkness again, and have to feel my way up the wall to the light switch.

Ever since we left Cairns people have been telling us to come here. It has been on our itinerary from the start, however—Cadie’s grandmother was born not far from here in Elizabeth Creek, one of the tributaries to the watercourse that flows down the Boodjamulla gorge. Her uncle Noel reckons he once found the exact spot, but no other family members have seen it. For me, the earliest memory I have is of canoeing up that same gorge with my mother and father, gazing at the sunstruck red cliff-face and dark water. I was three years old.

Algae turns the creek a shifting olive green in the sun, deepening to emerald as it stretches out and curls slowly through the shadow of the gorge. The light twists as it ripples around the lilies and water plants. It’s beautiful to look at but high levels of calcium make it no good to drink and the idea fascinates me: water that only makes you thirstier.

In spite of the crocodiles we decide to float down the gorge in nothing but tyre tubes. We are excited at first, especially after trudging up the slope in the hot mid-morning sun. The water is the perfect temperature to cool off but not cold enough to cause goosebumps, and fish suck at our calves by the jetty and scatter when we try to touch them. The cheerful tumbling of the falls initially has us in good spirits, but as the noise of them fades so does the novelty, and soon we are the only people on the water and we cannot see the bottom. We are walled in on either side for a kilometre and a half by mangrove trees and cliff-face. The water moves so slowly that foam, palm fronds and insects gather in the slightest curves in the rock wall. The wind is whispering at us through the cracks and neither of us wants to think about the fact that I’ve seen freshwater crocodiles four metres long. We try to swim as quietly as possible, our hands as paddles, our arms aching. I can feel bubbles pushing up around my waist.

Sometimes I think I’m just trying to get lost, pushing myself further and further away from what I know, taking less and less precaution. Except that the more remote I go and the less people there are around me, the clearer the world becomes. Blood and dust. Grass and sky. Rain and sun. Eat and sleep.

If you cross Boodjamulla Creek and edge your way along the shadow of the gorge you come to a rock art site called Wild Dog Dreaming. The carvings on the walls are an estimated 30,000 years old, so of course we want to see it. Cadie is lagging behind, however, and I reach the site alone. Hot afternoon sunlight angles directly at the wall where there are three sets of arches painted on the rock in yellow ochre. Sitting underneath them is a bright yellow snake. Its head is reared up, it’s halfway to strike position and it’s looking me right in the eye.

For the Waanyi people, Boodjamulla was a ceremonial place—Rainbow Serpent country. When you look at the sky in the evening, you can see it stretching from west to east—a yellow head and an orange neck, pink and purple and green along its belly, the tip of its tail a wet blue-black. And I run along the red dirt road towards it, flies on my back and sweat on my lips, wondering if I will ever be lost enough.

What about the way a rapidly-moving river can feel perfectly still? What about the water weeds lying flat on the riverbed, waving as the current takes a breath? What about the way the mist comes down, breaking into a thousand droplets in a space no wider than your palm? What about the way it throws the light back at you, the way it jumps out at you in the dark?

What about standing in a cavern as drops run off the leaves a hundred metres up, gathering speed as they hurtle towards your open mouth, cold splashes as they slap against your teeth? What about a storm just passed and wet roads filled with kamikaze toads, cracking and popping under the tyres? What about that bird with the long legs pecking at the bitumen, or the owl feasting on someone else’s roadkill? What about accelerating through the puddles and spraying the windscreen with mud?

What about your mother? What about your friends? What about your job? What about your car? What about the mortgage? What about your taxes? What about the way your shoes don’t keep the rain out? The way the sweat runs down your nose. The way breathing northern city air feels like taking a mouthful of damp wool. What about the cut on your finger? The stain spreading on the hem of your T-shirt. What about the steam in your eyes?

What about those dreams I have of a heaving ocean? Of depths that breed darkness and echoes—sonic ghosts. What about sky that looks like sea? What about clouds that splinter like coral or ripple like sand, or race past in puffs like schools of fish? What about floating face up two and a half hours from land, imagining a world upside down?

What about today?

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Here.

Much of the country I’m travelling now, we travelled as a family in 1997. The trip so far—and it’s just over two weeks since I left Melbourne—has already been punctuated by flashes of recognition and re-evaluation, constant moments of this is where. This is where my brother, this is where the river, this is where the rain, this is where the butterflies. Doing it without them is like rewriting part of my childhood with no points of reference but those in my head. Did I come here? Do I remember this? The vague memories are overwritten, the vivid ones are detailed and deepened. Experiences now have price tags and responsibilities attached. Every 500km costs me $100. Every overnight stop is a negotiation between energy levels, fuel availability, community dynamics and the elements.

The Land Cruiser is a dogged but shuddery old thing, and I promised myself when I finally hit the highway that I wouldn’t get distracted by the romance of the road. But even monotony has its aesthetic, and pretty soon I was trying not to veer off the bitumen while typing text messages to myself so I wouldn’t forget the colour of the grass, the way the light fell, the sunset reflected on rainclouds. At one point, the car climbed a hill and the very road was glowing—luminous pink and orange, like when you peel the skin from a nectarine—the crest all but bursting with colour and light, and then the bonnet dipped and plunged in the cold, dark hollow of the valley behind it, sinking into mournful, wet blue-grey. ‘Watercolour’ doesn’t do it justice; it was richer than that, like saturated sound. And the muse squeezed my lungs and said, Capture this.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking that it doesn’t even matter where I’m going. The movement is enough; away is enough. It was always the blur of the country rushing past, soothing and stirring, and the rhythmic lilting of the car that made travelling inspiring. Even the bus trip between my house and high school was scope for imagination. I was never an ‘are we there yet?’ child. Arrival ruptured my reverie.

But when I run away from myself fast enough I catch up to myself from the other direction. And I’m not only running to, I’m running from. The road between Brisbane and Melbourne was tracked with mud and rainwater, bloodsoaked carpet, alcohol and leaking engine coolant, and I stumbled along it clad in clothes that smelt like smoke and sweat. This was unsurprising, given the state I was in before I left. I know the danger signs because I’ve seen them in other people. When the catalyst for all your epiphanies is consumption of a substance. When someone pours their heart out to you, tells you exactly what you mean to them, and you have to ask them the next day to repeat what they said. When you are sabotaging opportunity after opportunity in favour of momentary, beguiling, artificial warmth. When people you love finally, angrily explain to you that while intoxicated, you have criticised, insulted and offended them well past the point of friendship, and you hear the words: ‘I am at the end of my tether.’

Last Monday, I was that person. And perhaps sometimes it’s good to know how far you can push it before it gives, but it would be better yet not to reach that point in the first place. I don’t understand people who can create under the influence. I drink so that my head will shut up, except that it doesn’t shut my mouth. I have sex so that I will feel better about myself, and then speak like I am putting myself on trial. It’s not about guilt or shame, it’s about control. Getting out of control to feel in control. But apathy has always been a problem for me, and the abuse that I put myself through, not just physically but mentally and emotionally, in order to somehow untangle these knots eventually takes its toll. It’s not that I don’t care; rather, I get to the point where there is so much to care about that in order to cope I have to sequester all cause for concern. An oxymoronic embrace of neglect.

As I post this I am 9 days celibate and sober. No sex, alcohol or drugs for 100 days. A self-imposed fast. I will have 100 days together with my own mind and my own body. I will remember what it’s like to be whole. It’s a good time to do it. I have a novel to finish writing and two thirds of a country to explore. And then, we’ll see.

And I know you, city lights—flimsy, artificial things, clamouring that you have the answers, that all of the world’s secrets can be found in the crackle of electricity and the flick of a switch. I know what you’re really hiding from me. I’ve seen them, out in the bush, hurtling across the sky, dying thousand-year-old deaths in front of my just-born eyes. I’ve seen them glistening between the branches of the redgums and the stringybarks and the ghostgums in the mountains. I’ve seen them out in the middle of the floodplains, peeping awake as the sky bruises purple. And I’ve seen them in the shudder of a lover, in the taste of sweat and dirt and eucalyptus, and the way my fingers break the skin of a peach.

And I know my shadow is far more willowy and graceful than I will ever be, but still, it is part of me, and so I run along the Story Bridge with her leading the way, my little weightless piece of the dark, carved out by streetlights, skirt billowing, hair flying, flat-footed, shoeless. And I don’t care what they think of me. I’m not here for them. This is bigger than them. This is bigger than me.

The carcass of a wild pig lay discarded in the middle of the oval, flies buzzing and crawling over it. Two crows perched on the rump, pecking at wormy flesh through coarse black hair. They flapped a few feet into the air as I drew near. It didn’t occur to me to steer clear until a shadow passed over the grass in front of me, and I looked up to see a hawk circling just metres from my head. Above it, spiralling, turning and turning in the widening gyre, were five or six more—swooping in close to the carcass one after another, looking for a chance to dig in their talons and beaks. For an unsettling moment it felt like it was me they were circling, and the jolt it gave me left my hands tingling.

In the city, death is sanitised. White sheets and chemicals strip the blood and spit and shit from death and halt decay, because we prefer instead to see quietude, composure, rest—as though the reward for a hot, quick, electric life is inertia. And when the muck of it manages to splash through, it’s unexpected. In our shock we sensationalise it, dramatise it, and talk about tragedy and grief and respect to remove ourselves from the reality of rot and disintegration. But out in remote country, those white sheets don’t exist. Death is everywhere, raw. Blood and dirt mingle and open wounds fester. Temporality feels as close as skin.

The Europeans were afraid of the bush. They tried to stifle it, to conquer it. It was a quest, a duty: man against nature. Even now, we barricade ourselves in and push the world out—hiding from sunlight, from storms, from insects, from snakes, from people, from possibility, from ourselves. How could such a passionate need for control be anything other than an acute manifestation of the fear of death? I wonder sometimes if everything—if Western culture in its entirety—can be boiled down to this.

Sometimes in the city, in the deep hours of the night, I hear birds. They don’t sing at that hour; they cry. Sometimes I think they’re crying for us, for our fear of nothingness, of not knowing, of not meaning. Sometimes I think about crying with them: so afraid, not of death, but that the weight of possibility will bury me before I’m finished.

The last time I drove these roads was a month ago, on a warm Friday night when the sky was clear and the air was thick with insects. The high beams glanced off the ferns and the bark curled in ribbons down the trunks of ancient gums. Even in the night-time, the forest felt alive—whispering and laughing as the car sped through it. Tiny prickles of excitement ran up and down my arms. Bursting out of the heart of the concrete city and straight into the hills, the heady scent of earth and undergrowth was almost overpowering. Bush magic.

At some point the following day, I got caught on the edge of someone else’s story. Four days ago, when I drove through Toolangi, it got stuck in my throat again—a choked moment. It’s not my story; it’s not this story. It’s the corner of another story, an edge protruding from the mess that I scraped up against, that bent February out of shape.

Sometimes, when I’m driving alone down long stretches of empty road, when the moon is bright, the windows are open and the trees arch overhead, I switch off the headlights. It only takes a few seconds—just long enough for the dark to flood in, for my pupils to dilate, for the grey shadows to thicken and spread out into branches and hills as I speed by; just long enough to feel the leap in my chest, to take a sharp breath—for my senses to shift out of neutral. The adrenaline rush is like a reset button. Start again—now.

When I arrived at our property on Saturday night, there was a ring around the moon. Here, two years on, the black scales scarring the trees are wearing veils of green. I spent two days listening to my parents’ vinyl, wrestling with the dogs, studying the Malak Malak native title claim, watching the light dance across the kitchen table and sleeping for nine hours a night. I drove the tractor. I dug rocks out of the earth. I took the corner too sharply on the dirt bike and slid three metres face-first into the dust. A lizard scampered over my jeans. On Monday evening, Jethro-dog and I sat on a rock on the ridge behind the house and looked down into the forest, and I thought, if perpetually bruised shins are the highest price I pay for living this close to the edge of the world, then here they are and welcome! Perhaps that split-second glimpse into the red eye of the February dragon was enough to stop me stumbling sideways and pull the blindfold off. Perhaps I was never really wearing one. The fact is this: that for the first time since I can remember, I’m alone in the world and I feel alone, and I’ve never been so happy.