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.

It was a promising start for those of the mainstream who felt sidelined by the Liberals: make a couple of important symbolic gestures, then put feelers out into the public arena. ‘Let’s see what you want.’ A national conversation. ‘How do you feel?’ An apology, Kyoto, a national thinktank. And for a little while this was okay. It was their first term after all, people were speaking up again after the Howard years, and it felt right, after such imposition and hardline paternalism that quite clearly favoured the liberties of power and the wallets in already-deep pockets over the less fortunate—or indeed, anyone outside of the commercial elite. For a government to finally appear to be asking the public—listening to the public! Well, it was only fair to give them a little bit of time to get things right, to work out how to implement the changes that the public had just told them we wanted. If the lack of immediate action wasn’t ideal then year or so’s delay for the right research to be conducted was forgivable, especially if it meant that reform would be solid and fair and happen.

All governments break promises. They break election promises, they water down reforms, they compromise idealism for big business because big business is big money. Juxtaposed with John Howard’s brand of polarising political snark, Rudd sounded like blessed reason in the face of zealotry, and the promise of change delivered a kind of momentum to his style. But after the kick of apparent progress wore off, so did any remaining shreds of charm, and after the breakdown of the ETS the Labor Government appeared not to be able to deliver much at all. Rudd’s style came to be perceived as somewhere between bland and smug. The Labor Party said a lot over the last six months but had nothing to show for it, and I think that by the end of last week, the electorate was pretty sure about what Kevin Rudd himself believed in, but not if the Labor Party could actually achieve anything. Rudd was tolerable as long as he was doing things, as long as he appeared to be doing things.*

But that’s the problem with politics. So much time needs to be spent on the appearance of doing things or the public gets this strange idea that the government does nothing all day except play games with each other. Part of good governing is the theatre of making sure the public knows you’re governing. The Labor Party had been failing at either one or both—the ads were just as boring as Rudd’s speeches, cynicism was high, the polling reflected that. Of course none of this says much at all about the internal politics of the issue. If a party leader is reviled by the majority of his or her own party then there is little point in him or her attempting to continue in the role, and out of the tumult of Labor Party division, floundering policy and low polling we now have Julia Gillard, our first female Prime Minister. And while it’s big symbolism—important symbolism—for Australian feminists, the fact that she’s female is a side-issue, however, because she’ll continue to be tough as all get-out whether we like her or not, so it’s time to stop talking about her hair.

* Part of me still wishes they had pushed for a double dissolution. They would have been returned to power (nobody was considering the Opposition a viable opposition at all at that stage, least of all under Abbott) they probably would have won the Senate (an idea I don’t like at all but I reckon it would have happened) and it might have given them the momentum they needed.  But apart from anything else, it would have been exciting politics—and if you’re craving dramatic change, dramatic politics bring hope.

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.

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?

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.

Winter ruptures my insides.

I am dragging this weight around with me, a lump of living flesh that won’t work the way it’s supposed to. Warm, soft, heavy and painful. Created in a moment of madness, like the complications of a kiss. A gasp, the quick paralysis of shock, hot tears and the crunch of bone against bitumen. Don’t watch where you’re going, girl. Tumble off head first.

I remember this girl. I’ve seen her before, half-blind and reeling, a cannonade inside her head. Is this pain or the memory of it? She’ll be back again the next night, back to the spot where she fell. She won’t be on her bike this time but still won’t look where she puts her feet. She knew before she started that it could be dangerous, but people only learn to take care after they fall, and recklessness makes her teeter.

I remember once, driving through an intersection alone late at night. A camera started flashing in the corner of my eye, through the window, bright slaps of white on my forearm gripping the wheel. My heart jumped, blood rushing to my head, and suddenly I couldn’t remember if the traffic light had been green or red, if I’d taken any notice at the time or been so caught up in the song playing, the momentum of the traffic and the smell of summer through the open windows. I kept driving, shaky, breathing quickly, left arm tingling with the memory of that flashing light, like it had stamped itself into my skin, an invisible scar.

Sometimes I think she knows she’s losing, as I watch her block me out with wine and noise, the light of a computer screen, or the hard, fleeting warmth of pills and potions. And all she wants me to do is put her in the car and drive, grip the wheel with both hands, and burn a straight line down the freeway, a straight line to wherever and ever. And I want to be able to do that too, but I have one arm bound across my chest now and it feels like paralysis, artificial inertia. Because I remember that girl; I remember how she felt back then. I remember her pleading with me, trying to convince me that it would be okay, that head first was the only way to fall. But she mistook arrogance for strength, ego for confidence, intelligence for understanding and intensity for passion. And in her moments of shock she listens when I speak. That voice that knows best—that voice in her head—pick yourself up, pick yourself up, you’re tougher than this, pick yourself up. And so we get back on the bike and ride home in the dark, whether from stubbornness or fear, it doesn’t matter. I know what to do, because I remember her curled up in the cold, I remember the smear of tears in the fine hairs of her arm—this arm, the dead weight, a limb and the light fantastic—so while she’s still numb I put a bullet in it, because I don’t want her to cry again.

The sky has been crackling and sparking all evening. I am supposed to be writing but instead I am thinking about the new year, about sticky days with champagne and sweat and lessons on shattering crystal. About seawater in my jeans at five in the morning, numb fingers and an unexpected kiss. About swimming naked across a river to watch the lightning dance through the cloud-mountains for hours, a full moon high in the sky behind me, above the blue-black and grey silhouettes that make up the midnight world. We sat on a mudpan, a field so flat and wide and dry that the horizon looked an arm’s length away. The sky was alive, but the world was silent. Silence that wasn’t silence. Bush silence: the whir and chirp of the night insects and the semitone interval drop of a boobook. The rain is coming, they murmured. The earth is singing for it.

Music has colour, the same way words have mood. It’s like an extension of the sound, another dimension to the experience. A veil through which you can see the world. A veil just behind your eyes. Tonight’s song is the colour of light through rainwater, and I’m never sure if this is love or sadness, but it’s not so much an ache these days, more of a hum. Not quite disillusionment, but its sister, perhaps. And again, again, this mind of mine, despite all its stretching out, it always seems to circle back to solitude, back to the self, still fascinated by the experience of being alone, of thinking alone, of knowing alone—and this song that I can’t stop playing.

Thunder is the sound that trembling would make, in the hot dark, the sparse ground radiating from a sunken sun. Something is trembling now, and it’s coming towards this house, towards me, a rising crescendo. At 3am, the storm hits. The rain pounds, the sky heaves, and there is so much water. It pours down the window pane, rivers against the trunks of trees, and I am swamped by the sheer weight of the sound, each rivulet singing a memory, splashing against a melody, the ground drinking greedily. It fills my head, drenching my heart, like it may as well be pouring out of the walls around me, that rainsong, over and over and over, skin prickling even now as the music ripples around it, and it’s all I can do to throw my head back and be swept along because simple sounds have never changed the world quite like this. I am submerged in it. I am consumed by it.

And now it’s 4:29am. I’ve hit ‘play’ thirty-eight times tonight. I see bare legs, smooth knees, the dim light of my laptop on the bedsheets, slight black scuff marks from shoeless household wanderings, and I am bone dry but I am swamped.

It’s 4:29am and that’s the first glow of fresh dawn through the bamboo.

It’s 4:29am and the leaves outside are dripping, still.

It’s 4:29am and I am, I am, I am.

Or of oranges plucked from a tree at 3am, spitting rain, tram tracks and electric lights, and another woman’s bed. (I never told him, but I found myself then.)

Or of those who didn’t want to talk about it but preferred instead to talk it out; who wanted to hear the words expelled from my mouth, staccato blasphemy: ‘Fuck, suck, cock, cunt. Does that make you feel good?’ (Face forward, kitten. I want you on your knees.)

And there again—bee-stings on my cheeks and things rough to touch, like skin on bark, a man’s chin inside my thigh—a dirty angel face, a beautiful beast. (When I draw, it’s trees: haunted, leaf-bare skeletons, curling branches. There’s more in my head, but that’s what comes out.)

And then there were those stories that made girls like me believe that love and sex made you feel the same way; that a declaration changed the world; that a couple of words were comparable to being pressed up against a wall with a tongue in your ear. Or limbs and fingers and hair, gasps and laughter, knotted together in damp sheets. Or binding someone’s arms because that’s what they asked for. Or coming home after a sleepless night with sore breasts and bruising between your legs, but still so desperately wanting, wanting, wanting, and not able to touch yourself for the pain.

Or was an orgasm the moment when the universe shifted? An escape from yourself; an embrace of yourself. A little bit of another person. A little death; a little life. Rebellion. (Touch me, and we’ll see.)

And every time I think I could make a choice to last a lifetime, I grow some more, learn some more, see the possibilities expand. And sometimes I think I might find enough comfort in a glass of red wine and a drunken stumble into a stranger’s arms—maybe a little taller, a little older, a little further away—because after all, it’s mostly chemistry, and everyone looks good in the dark. But even when it means nothing, it carries weight. Perhaps no more than the heat of your breath—just enough to maintain the push—but weight, nevertheless. Minute momentum.

So I won’t close myself off and I won’t hide, but one way or another I know what I’ll be left with, which is exactly the same as I’ve always had: the world in my head, an open window, and a cool breeze on swollen skin.

Someone is firetwirling in Royal Park. The sharp kerosene smell jerks me back―five years, six years, seven. A flash of flame―‘Do you remember when?’―and I do, I do―I remember nights on the beach, drinking straight vodka, and learning to cut my own hair. I remember wishing you would speak to me, what it felt like to want to be ‘that girl’, and when I started calling myself a woman instead. I remember believing only in uncertainty, because every time I felt surefooted, the ground moved again and unsettled it all. And I remember letters from South Africa, a friend imploring me to say a prayer and ask for God’s love, and the first time I wrote it down on paper: ‘That’s not how it works for me.’

At the intersection of Blyth Street and Sydney Road, there is a Baptist church. On the front of it, a sign in flickering, lowercase, neon purple announces that this is indeed Brunswick. It jars with me. When I think of churches, I think of reverence, silence, stillness, and a sort of reflective, ethereal joy. Gaudy plastic and fluorescent lighting sell a flimsy aesthetic that is perhaps supposed to speak to the urgency and superficiality of my generation, but still: it jars. Perhaps it’s my Catholic heritage that does it, growing up in a world of carved ceilings, glittering stained-glass and a focus on the solemnity of ceremony and theatre of the Gospel. Selling religion feels like an oxymoron. One of the things I always liked about it was the sense of something running deep, something that didn’t need to be sold. A church was a place where you considered the way you lived your life, contemplated your choices, meditated on your morality―whether you agreed with the priest or not. It was a place where you couldn’t help but be confronted by the possibility of your own mortality and fallibility. It was place that said to me, Take something seriously. Think.

University philosophy is not quite the same. It requires you to remove your emotions and your instincts from your analysis in order to systematically, logically deconstruct and reconstruct the world. There is a place for that, a very important one, but it isn’t and will never be everything. Sister Loretta, Sister Verna, Sister Barbara, Sister Anne―they taught me this. Even when wracked by crises of faith, they still got up early and took vegetables to their neighbours, taught music and maths, visited the sick and elderly, consumed literature and science and philosophy, and tried to accomodate as many disadvantaged families in their cottages as they could possibly manage. Long after I decided that the church was not where I fit―too rebellious, too changeable, too interested in the soft mouths of my friends―I still went back to stay with them, to help them, because it was so obvious to me that faith was not what made a person good or bad. Good people are good because they choose to do generous, loving, kind things. The titles they work under mean far, far less than the work itself.

My lack of faith in religion hasn’t eaten away at the reflective hush I feel when I walk into a church. It’s not religion that is evil. Belief in God isn’t what hurts people. Bureaucracy, power abuse, prejudice and closedmindedness are not the exclusive domain of the church. And the frustrated, fed up agnostic in me wants to shriek that in the last few years I have met more closedminded, pigheaded atheists in this country―closedminded and pigheaded about their atheism―than I ever have closedminded, pigheaded Catholics. The institution, the individuals, the doctrine, the interpretation of doctrine and its practical application are all separate issues, as is the social context in which they are cultivated. Calling a theist ‘stupid’ for their faith is arrogant and presumptuous. Fear of being wrong is emotionally toxic and intellectually crippling, whether your doctrine stems from Jesus or the scientific method. And I can’t help but feel that people who bang on about the evils of religion and quote from the bible of Richard Dawkins are just as guilty of intolerance, ignorance and spite as their accusations would have others be. It’s far harder to be receptive to and welcoming of possibility—of any kind—than it is to be blockheaded and insistent that your own tiny corner of the universe can tell you everything there is to know.

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.