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’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?

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.

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.

The fact is that I drink (or have sex, or party) to shut my head up, because the other option is to create art: to confront the fuzz—the slowly building tension and existential angst—head-on and work through it. I avoid it for a day, a week, even a couple of months. But if you run away too fast, you catch up to yourself from the other direction. And then suddenly I’m standing still in an empty room with only the sound of the far away traffic, or walking down the street at twilight and my hand brushes a lavender bush—and I give in. The stories rise up out of the gutters and spread over the city, calling, crying, clamouring, and threatening to swallow me until I can’t make sense of them any more. I can’t make sense of myself any more. I am a soldier, silver, sulphur, sugar. Energy, electricity, air, dirt. Cracked lips, a spatter of rain on the cold window pane of a cold world, a drowned world, of rosé and merlot and pinot and rainwater in my hair and other smooth-coloured liquid lovers that I push out of the way so there’s space for the fragments. And then I write, and quell the disquiet.

Almost every day for a week and a half, I navigated their river. I fished in it. I got mud in my shoes. I saw stars flare and flicker and shoot across the sky. I got scratches on my legs from reeds and rope and the frantic flapping of an ill-fated long tom. In the middle of the night, mullet flew through the air like birds, and all the time the crocodiles lurked.

I couldn’t see them for the first few days. You have to train your eye. It’s not so much that log floating downstream—that’s a cliché designed to throw you off actually looking in the right places. It’s that muddy patch on the bank you need to look at. The slight shadow on the sandbar, or the sunny spot near the fallen tree. Sometimes you can’t tell if it is or it isn’t until you’re close enough to throw a spear, but once the sun goes down, all you need is a spotlight and you can pick the red gleam of their eyes from hundreds of metres away.

I admire them, in a way. I think about them a lot. Every part of them, from the shape of their toes to the back of their throats, is engineered towards expending the least amount of energy for the most gain. They laze around with their mouths open, teeth bared, sun on their backs, waiting for nighttime when the fish fly. And that’s really what they’re interested in—fish, injured animals, easy targets. Despite their reputation, they rarely go after sober, healthy people. Even so, there’s a reason why you keep a shotgun in the boat.

And that’s the thing. Self-preservation sometimes requires that you pull a trigger; that you shoot before you lose a limb. And it’s easy, when you’re fascinated by something, to wait too long, to draw too close, to get stuck on that fucking sandbar in the dark.

My dad always told me not to trust anyone. I do it anyway. I let people take my time without requiring that they prove their worth in advance. I place my heart on the table where people can see it, carve it up and feast on it. I don’t have many secrets. I once claimed I didn’t have any, but I made a meal of that sentence immediately after I’d said it. I don’t like having secrets, and those I do have are mainly other people’s. The only thoughts of my own that I feel like I should need to keep close to my chest are those that are unfinished. Sometimes I think this is what makes me still human; that allows me to still be open to the world and learn from it, because what are the other options? To turn my skin to leather and let my blood run cold? Because that is what a lack of trust means for me. That, and an uncharacteristic silence as all my energy gets sucked into holding down the trigger-happy girl with the machine-gun mouth.

“What’s been going on in your life?” people ask. “Crocodiles,” I answer. The stories have been told so many times now that I wonder if there is anyone left to tell. Perhaps only the crocodiles themselves. Only, I’m not sure they’re inclined to sit and listen just yet.

I thought about speeding cars and the hot summer sun, the wet leaves blowing in the back door, my empty stomach and the sand still in my shoes from four nights ago. And I wondered how far I could stretch myself – whether it might actually be possible to reach up and kiss the sky while still keeping my bare feet firmly on the ground, how much that might hurt, and how many layers of skin there are between what we say, what we hear, and the things we do with our bodies and our minds. And I thought about the subtle, pervasive nature of hibernation, of how to recognise the colour of my wings when they’re reflected back at me, and whether I ought to jump out while the water was still hot or stay in there until it cooled and risk the shivery, naked walk to my bedroom and nothing to wear when I got there.

And I thought: I will bury myself in this for the minute, for this moment, momentarily – because when things push at you from a hundred different directions, sometimes the only thing you can do is stop and let them crash in around you, wash over you, soak into you. So I stayed like that – in the steam and the foam and the million-miles-an-hour in my head – until the song faded and the echo of the heavy-dripping tap reminded me of all the things I have to do today.

One particular November, I broke up with a boy in the beach car park at Rickett’s Point. He’d already bought my birthday present but hadn’t had a chance to give it to me, so at the conclusion of my spiel he reached over to the back seat and handed me a small package. It was a notebook: royal purple, covered in hearts, and on the front of it there was a little gold-embossed quote about following your dreams.

It was obviously intended to be a bit special, and when I was eight years old I probably would have loved it, but at eighteen my writer’s quirks were rapidly becoming habits and absolutely everything about this notebook was wrong. It had coloured paper (more like card than paper), wide lines, a designated space at the top of every page for the date and the trite little quote repeated at the bottom. I can’t stand to waste paper – even if it’s horrible – and it took me ages to throw the thing out. I used it for shopping lists and scrap until moving out of home forced me to part with absolutely everything I didn’t need.

We were never a good match. I am a feminist agnostic with a major in Philosophy and English; I write stories about abused girls with illegitimate babies, gay men getting mugged in alleys, drug-taking, sex, loneliness, despair and euphoria – he is married at 24 and studying to be a minister. I heard on the grapevine he writes a Bible name, chapter and verse on the back of his hand before he plays basketball to stop himself getting angry. It always used to rain when I was out with him – every day except for the one we split – and that spring birthed some crazy storms. Sometimes I think the storms were the earth’s way of showing its displeasure. (He would probably say it was God telling him to drop the heathen. It was obviously never meant to be.)

The birthday present, however, stuck in my mind. Perhaps it comes with the territory – being picky about the words you use makes you picky about the surface upon which you place them, because as much as the words themselves are the most important part and don’t judge a book by its cover, quality stationery is all about respect. It was also my final year at school, and at Presentation Night not long afterwards, the principal presented me with a plaque, Stasiland by Anna Funder and a beautiful unruled A5 Moleskine notebook. I would probably have preferred 6mm ruled, but I decided then that my school really had understood what it was all about, just as the former boyfriend so obviously hadn’t.

One afternoon not very long ago, while shopping for books in Brunswick, I had the unexpected foresight to purchase a packet of three pocket-sized Moleskine cahiers. I dithered before buying them – I wondered when I’d get to writing in them. Back in high school, when I believed I was qualified to write what one might (loosely, very loosely) term ‘poetry’, I would swallow notebooks whole; numbering every page, filling them in as short a time as a couple of months, depending on how many free periods and unrequited loves I had. These days I choose my words more carefully. Notebooks are forever only half-full and I have more of them than I could possibly need. But for once my purchases weren’t mere indulgence: one has found a home in the pocket of my satchel and one sits permanently on the bedside table with my alarm clock and a fine blue pen. Too many nights I’ve been wrapped in the lazy haze of almost-sleep when something splutters in the corner of my mind – a spark, a little brighter than the rest – and too many times I’ve thought, “If I repeat this to myself, I’ll remember it in the morning and I won’t have to move right now.” But it doesn’t work like that. I need words on paper or the spark flickers out and the thought slides quietly away.

My crazy MA supervisor once said (although she was probably plagiarising) that if you can harness those moments between awake and asleep – the space between the conscious and the unconscious – that is where the real stories come from. I wonder what I could have found over the years if every time I’d seen that spark I’d climbed out of sleep far enough to blearily scribble half a sentence. For the last few months I’ve tried to get up early and write – to sit in the sun and find inspiration in the patterns of living ‘normally’. But there’s something about the quiet of post-midnight – a solitude you only get when everyone around you is asleep – that really unshackles my mind and gives it space to run.

When I am in love with someone, my writing takes second place. I spend my nights lying awake in a cocoon of tangled limbs instead of the cool blue light of my computer screen or an armchair with a blanket and a pen. It’s okay for a little while but not for the long term. I am not sure how to fix it. Why should writing and love be constantly in opposition? The boys with bad taste in notebooks are easy; not so those who actually matter.

Sometimes I wonder if underneath it all I already know the ending. In Coetzee’s Foe, Susan Barton asks, “Without desire how is it possible to make a story?” On page 9 of my bedside notebook in the loopy scrawl of 3am some weeks ago, it says:

I’m going to be a bag lady one day
with a trolley full of junk.