English Mick drove us across
the desert in his van. He stopped at the Great Australian Bight, and we ran
over the khaki scrub to the edge of the Bunda Cliffs, the wind from Antarctica
beating us in the face. We were so small there, at the bottom of Australia, the
great red land above us, hanging like a stretched out sail, the canvas pulled
tight right down to the cliffs, where we stood with our toes hanging over the
edge, and the waves like seals, darting and diving, spinning with the gummy
sharks. We stood and our eyes were
blown dry, our lungs breathed it in, the sea, the sky, the desert, blew our
physical away, blew us into souls, until just the shells were left, and we were
whole again. Jacob told me, ‘I’ll never get tired of looking at you’ and I wondered
what else he saw, as though there was nothing else to see, but I wanted him to
see it. Time took us back into the metal van, where it was still, and the dust
was waiting, and where we shook off the outside, turned the key and it all
magically worked, and took us forward. It wasn’t hard to convince the motel in
Eucla to hear him sing and we were spoiled with beds and beer while Mick slept
in his van.Jacob’s energy drove us across the desert and we
did it in two days, hitting Norseman on the third day. His narrow face behind
the wheel of the Englishman’s van, the sky a dark grey towering over us as he
steered us through the storms, dodging squalls like a sloop at sea, darting
over the flat black road, the white line luminous, glowing in the electric light
of the desert. The red dust blew through the town and the front yards
were laden with ochre coloured dirt. Jacob played the oldest hotel in town and
a trucky offered him jaundiced coloured speed, but we slept early in a corner
room, windows open to the sweeping verandah, a dark, old wardrobe against the
walls. As the road turned to the south we said goodbye to Mick and the
intensity of the desert’s burning orange turned to the green and blue of the
south west corner of our map.
