The day started with the occasional whooshing car alerting me to the pending dawn. Tradies getting to site early and telling me to wake up long before the alarms chimed at 0530. But if it wasn’t the tradies waking me up it would have been the dodgy mattress on the church hall floor where we…
I need to get this gear sorted. The clothes are being culled in favour of supplements of the dietry kind. But it still needs sorting. The scroggin needs mixing up and putting into sachets for each day as does the drink supplement. I fear it is still going to weigh more than I want. Maybe…
Time to start the anti – malaria drug regime. That seems to make the pending trek all the more real, even more so than all the kilometres we have been hauling up and down the last six weeks or more. Better get the final gear sorted out and equipment checked. We fly out on Tuesday morning. I am…
Scrubbed timber has no smell. The burnt brake pads and the metal wheel flange create their own dust and heat and smell which lifts in the warm afternoon, hangs in the humid air and is pushed aside by the train as it sighs up to the platform. I watch the handful of people who angle…
I rolled into Cobar with the sun sunk by twenty minutes and the clear autumn sky turned Indian ink blue. The rising moon was flashing through the trees on my right, distracting me from the roos taking a leisurely leap into my path. Thank goodness for peripheral vision. To my surprise all the “No” neons…
Snaky Creek, just out of Manna Hill (ironic given the arid country, but then, perhaps not so ironic: I wonder if quails fall from the sky around here?!). Not Snake Creek. Or Big Snake Creek. Or Black Snake Creek even. But an adjectival snaky, suggesting deviousness. A slipperiness. A snakiness. And perhaps a sense of…
There was something unsettling sitting in the offices of a certain government department in Baghdad and hearing senior civil servants, some with PhDs from US and European universities, cynically observe that they had swapped their home grown dictator for Dictator Bremer of Washington DC. Perhaps most disturbing was their discussion about how they were poised…
…the town clerk (not sure which town) in the 1920s or so who thought it would be good for all in that part of the bush to have some water delivered via the channel that now bears his name. Once can only suspect he well earned the naming rights since, as a town clerk,…
