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“There’s a Road Train Going Nowhere” (2013)

When the following was written, I sporadically divided most of my time between Brisbane, Rockhampton and Melbourne, where I tended to do a lot of driving along Australia’s eastern coast and the National Highway. In doing so I frequently saw the turn-off for the town of Tarcutta in south-western New South Wales, on the M31, and I thought of Josephine Rowe. Every time I wondered if I should make the turn and try to vicariously see what she romantically saw in that rural area, inspiring her to write the short story, and the Tarcutta Wake anthology. Perhaps I’ll come across the same old broken-down and decrepit 1940s style automobile stuck in the branches of a dead (Snow Gum) tree, as is portrayed in a black and white photograph, on the cover of her book—an apt iconic portrayal (or perhaps a borrowed Americanised image). In any case, the image of the car in the tree conveys a rustic and quixotic type of imagery. I wanted to try and convey that same kind of imagery, if I could …

We begin to drive westward, departing from Townsville and into the night. A sense of energy, excitement and apprehension circulates within and around us. We grow silent, but why? Is it difficult to leave the comfort of the coast, perhaps? The coast made sense. It has always made sense. It is difficult letting go of that logic. Trees thinned, and ranges flattened into the secluded plains and scrublands that now grow more and more unfamiliar in their destitute simplicity. The echoes from the crashing surf and bustling city centre and the general roar of the population subsides and penetrates no longer. Our silence turns into contemplation, turns into meditation, turns into a respectful isolation, and still we continue to drive onwards, breaking free from the edges of the world as we drive further away from its fringes.

Music is playing. In fact, it has always been playing in the car, but we have only just realised that. We are waiting for something: something big, ominous, threatening perhaps. We’d all heard stories about road trains leading up to this journey, but none of us had ever actually seen one, and nobody wanted to be the one who had to tackle a road train within the insignificance, vulnerability and (dis)comfort of our automobile. The music grows louder, or maybe merely seems louder. A throbbing and cyclical bass line, and in the midst of a wailing and harmonious yet dissonant harmonica growls the vocal sensibilities of a young impassioned Peter Garrett, proclaiming: “There’s a road train going nowhere.” And coincidentally, right at this moment, the road train manifests itself. The great mammoth of Australian pride and industry, transportation and solidity looms out of the darkness. A beast foreboding, forbearing and ingraining itself into the earth around us, trembling, shaking, determined it growls rising up from the horizon before us. Lights. A dark shape lurching ever so carefully forward as we hurry or scuttle towards it. Eyes sparkling, lustrous and moon-shaped, our irises recede into the background of our minds. It is a giant, a titan of production and productivity. Rogue and nomadic in essence, it knowingly owns and rides that road.

Australia is one of the only continents or countries to have road trains in use. The only other countries that have and use them are Argentina, Mexico, the United States and Canada (as far as I know).

A monochromatic sheen coats its body, its armour. Too many wheels and too many metres long. Signposted in black and yellow, a fair warning is given to the oblivious, to the naïve and to the overly ambitious. A blackened, darkened cockpit. An anonymous driver never to be seen by others on the road, except for perhaps other drivers of other road trains and the ‘other’ of more metaphysical realms. These are the dominating species. They control the habitat of these barren roads. We must be respectful to them or perish.

Shrubbery flies in front of and behind us. A kangaroo leaps. Cicadas chatter and chime away somewhere and everywhere in the distance. But the ratios of the animalistic and natural world are all skewed and wrong in comparison to this towering object. So grand, so large, so overwhelmingly powerful it dominates the night sky creating a black hole of some sort unto itself. All the powers of the world seep into it. The night turns light by comparison. I think I can still see the sun gleaming somewhere off in the distance, but I can’t exactly pinpoint it—the road train is silhouetted by the powers of the world.

But where is the road train going? Is Garrett correct? Is it going nowhere? It’s certainly not stuck or stationary. It has motion and momentum and speed, yet it continues to drive into nothingness, into the outback of absurdity and delirium, into nowhere, in fact. It goes because it needs to go. It propels and projects itself. Its purpose is grander than what we are simply led to believe. Its journey and travels are both the means and the ends of its existence. Through universe and time and change it persists and endures as an icon of Australian industry and power.

Across the great red plains of the Australian outback the road spirals into the centre of an old prehistoric world now dried up. The road train conquers, controls, manoeuvres this road. These road behemoths were built to exist here together; an enforced harmony with our indigenous history and our industrial and multicultural present and future; an uneasy synchronisation, unified by the smoky black tires that the road train attaches itself to the road with, gliding, soaring further into the tranquil inverse universe that is the National Highway.

Very close now. We are right behind it. It shudders. No, we shudder at the prospect of having to somehow actually ‘pass’ this titan. No, no one will do it. Respect the giant. Leave it be. It owns the road. It owns the night. It owns itself. We will not overtake the road train this night.

After long absences from living in Australia, when I have lived in Poland for instance, the Australian landscape does change and look very different to me. It becomes fluorescent, like the brightness and contrast has been turned way up on a television screen or monitor. I find myself squinting a lot more due to the intensity of the sun reflecting against the burnished surfaces of Australian flora and fauna. Normally, when I am residing in Australia, the landscape of the bush seems quite barren, bleak, brown, light green and grey. But from a European or migrant perspective, and depending on which season a migrant is travelling from their country to Australia in, the landscape of Australia can appear quite different and distorted through compromised eyes.

The imagery employed by many Australian writers, including the contemporary Rowe, and going back to the beginnings of white Australian writers in the works of Lawson and Paterson, all tend to grapple with the conflict or contrast between the bush and the city, nature versus industry, an old world versus a new world.

The “bush” and the “city” were symbols that somewhat negated each other (Whitlock 197). “The city and the country were established as separate moral universes” (200). This conflict, and the Australian art and writing that has come about over the years highlighting it, creates “a staging point for immigrants; a haven for the drifter, the outcast, the man or woman with a past; a twilight zone of rootlessness and anomie” (194). “So we will never arrive at the “real” Australia. From the attempts of others to get there, we can learn as much about the travellers and the journey itself, but nothing about the destination. There is none” (Whitlock 25). This is highly relevant for me, and my endlessly dispersed selves.

“The Writer on Holiday” or Clockwork (2014)

Pure sentiment and a godliness that comes from the rejuvenation and reunion of soulful companions, a band of brothers separated by time in the form of years, and space in the form of long, cross-continental distances:

And yet, still and quietly, in sequential rushes of euphoria:

Tidal forces churn again

To flow aside the current trend

I walk for miles

I wonder through hazy trials

Change the course of modern men

To race against the clockwork bend

I run for miles

In exalted, exhausted strides

Now look for truth beyond the fair,

Where I alone become the heir

I walk for miles

I wonder through hazy isles

Rekindled vigour, an energy formed through bonds and heartfelt leaps of faith: bounding, cyclical, beautiful, ecstatic, genuine. A short-term breeze and a rather cool summer in which the warmth has been reduced and absorbed by men who have taken a break, a holiday from themselves, and instead embraced themselves and one another.

In Barthes’ Mythologies there is a chapter entitled “The Writer on Holiday” which states that a writer on holiday may stop working or physically writing, but that he never stops “at least producing” (30). The writing or the thoughts and processes continue to exist in the back of the mind. One doesn’t choose when inspiration comes—ideas and thoughts that often and sometimes happen to permeate and invade the conscious configuration of the self. The “writer is the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times, without bothering, tyrant that he is, with the holidays of his medium. Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop” (Barthes 30). The creative writer definitely takes their work home with them, and also away with them when they travel, where they inevitably suffer from a pestering doom, a conscience that is incessant and insatiable—an unrequited will.

In her piece “Hemingway’s Typewriter” Robyn Ferrell’s says, “The writer has a vocation, not a job, so that even while on holiday he is working, whether he is reading or taking notes or doing nothing. Indeed, to go on holiday is to work, for the writer, since all his experience is writing in potentia” (27).

There is a reinvigoration that occurs after a writer takes a holiday (from journeying). The physical writing is fresh, but it is never very far from the mind. Writing occurs and often changes or becomes different when self-discipline is removed from the context of the writer’s personal, emotional or social life.

A Train Ride to Russia in 2007 (2015)

Transient populations roll by and roll on, sideways, somewhat and partially slanted and always in the upper right corner of my eye, where the sun peaks in the morning and sheds its light through moving windows, pa(i)ned and streaked glass that glows with the coming of heat and clearer uncertainty. No longer arctic—the chill is suffocated by a distance and vaulting horizon, insurmountable and without permission, it glows and rises like the daze of the day(s) to come.

The reawakened eye explodes into new vision. After taking a pill, a minor slumber, and then I’m jolted into sudden awareness by the tittering tracks beneath the train, and behold, a sight; we’re heading east. The night has passed in a kind of sobriety when I contemplate the fact that now I have this new way of seeing things. The cabin/room comes to life, illuminated by a new-fangled light. I’m sitting up, while the others in the room are asleep in the same space, but the momentum of the train and the tracks and the grind and progressive swagger and sway projects us onwards.

A different headspace now: the one I was seeking, but I’m always surprised when it ignites, as it seems to come after a dreary, sleepy delirium of some sort. A dream from which I don’t think I will wake but then I do, and I’m in another dream inspired by a distorted kind of reality. My eyes now fully open and wandering, I stand up, reach for the door of the cabin and step out into the corridor where more light is shining through—I am looking left and right, and I shuffle my feet a little more steadily, carefully.

I muster up a modicum of grace as I sway to and fro, walking down the corridor towards the rear of the train. I can see from a few metres away, through the small circular porthole in the back door of this last train carriage that there are two fellows, still awake from the night just passed, in the breaking dawn of the day, sharing a cigarette and some conversation, discussing sweet nothings in the sincerity of the morning and the sleeplessness and tiredness that can make us honest sometimes, if only in grimly expression.

I step outside to greet them with my unusual stance, feeling rather peculiar with my new diluted vision. I’m hunched a little as they look at me and roll on with their stammering chat, the last of the beer and vodka, lukewarm and nearly empty in their hands as they take a small sip and a little toke now and then, both of which are going to have an infinitesimal effect in the aftermath of the night just now officially concluded with the heavy rise of a new sun over that vaulting horizon, demanding some kind of rigour and stamina from us ignoble folk who continue to defy convention as we travel towards a new and unknown (to us anyway) east. We believe we are pioneers as we stutter and stammer and take the journey for granted, but we (or I) definitely feel here in the moment, now, more so than I ever have before.

The pill, a sleeping tablet for insomniacs, produced in me a kind of effect that was so difficult to understand and comprehend at the time, a giddily distilled sense of experience, two-pronged in its psychological manifestation; I believed I was in a constant state of déjà vu, whilst experiencing and remembering life and what was going on around me concurrently.

One of the fellows outside, neither of whom I knew, asked me something about what they’d just been discussing, to which I retorted that I didn’t know or that I knew nothing, and proceeded to comment on his shoes, which I claimed I knew everything about.

I knew everything about them because he’d just told me about them after I’d asked him. But because the medication, was causing me to recall and experience in the now, simultaneously, I was confused about what was happening and what had already just happened. They both looked at me puzzled also, and I, still hunched and perplexed and amazed at my own ability to predict the … now, dismissed both of them with a wave of the hand that rudely motioned the smoke from their cigarette away from the small space between us. The wisp of cloud dissipated quickly, as did the conversation, and any mutual interest or understanding we had established.

I looked away, back towards the east. They stalled for a moment and after a short while continued on with their sweet nothings. All three of us out there on the rear balcony of the train were too delirious, either from the night, the booze, or our state of medicated or prophetic exhaustion, to care about courtesy or social sincerity at that point in time. No, it was more anti-social than anything. I knew I was waving at and into people’s personal space, dispersing the smoke between bodies, a hunchback in a world apart.

Nevertheless, the east shone with sudden clarity in the midst of this entire anti-climactic ruckus. The train curved left, and I was able to see the glow of the east with much more instilled potency. It was a new primordial world, where I couldn’t see beyond the horizon or even beyond the front of the train due to the compacted darkness and shadows of the land. There was no way of seeing the beyond. The world was covered in black and blue. The clickety clack was the only noise I paid attention to. I was remembering and experiencing this at the same time. The horizon stopped us from seeing into the future as we simultaneously moved towards it. All conversations stopped here before they began and were understood and comprehended before a singular utterance was made, or at least it felt this way to me. Everything was coming and going, moving forward and standing still, being seen and being ejected out from the horizon back towards us as we gazed in perplexity and fondness towards it, all in the motion of the moving tracks that we rocked and rolled and swayed over and over again. We existed in the abysmal infinity mirrors beneath our feet, caught in the motion of an unchanging and unremitting Doppler effect.

Déjà Vu Delirium (2013)

Dean Moriarty, in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), once said, “the thing that bound us all together in this world was invisible” (191). What was it, though—this invisible “thing”? What was he saying? What was he thinking? The potential for the justification or explanation of this concept is manifold: the intrigue, the intuition, the naivety, stupidity or obliviousness. A benzedrine-fuelled madness stimulated his systematic conceptions of ‘time’ and ‘it’ and other tangible or intangible concepts. He was a fool, a holy man, a con artist, a goof and a kicker in the constant tireless and reckless pursuit of kicks. How can this statement be trusted then? What faith or divinity or reality can be accepted in this notion of all notions, if at all a notion? This grand statement of grandeur. “Look no further! The answer is here!” someone (I) sarcastically mimicked and mocked in the background of the dreary soulless landscape. Moriarty’s enthusiastic, yet vague comment in turn, and in all fairness, requires a similarly obscure answer.

Travelling tirelessly is an attempt to conquer something, anything, all things perhaps. In any case, the horizon itself is one thing that subscribes to many of these attributes and elements. Constantly unfolding and receding and revealing and reigniting sparks of energy as we propel ourselves forward into it or from it or alongside it. We struggle to surmount it, overcome it, know it, beat it, bear it, to encapsulate everything and gain the cumulative knowledge that both drives us and that we drive ourselves upon. To digress, in an attempt to gain a sense of transgression—to do so at any cost. Coast to coast, take my hand into your hand. And beat on racing forwards and onwards. Doubt. There is doubt. What will be the repercussions of reservation? What is the mirror to this story? What is the opposite of exalted exhaustion and moving for the sake of motion? Deep-seated fulfilment from experience, ownership of doubt, ownership of transcendence, in one way or another. To see and experience the world simultaneously. Well, that’s obvious … Stilnox (the sleeping tablet). Déjà vu delirium. Enough said. But no, this is something slightly different. The world is spherical. No doubt about it. Stop putting faith in the horizon then. Just because your natural vision and the horizon somehow together are barring you from what you want to see. You can’t own them simultaneously in some kind of naïve omniscient and omnipresent synchronisation. And so, hence, doubt. Consequences of reservation and doubt will follow on.

Mirror: invert the latitude linearity of the horizon and this regret will now proceed to pain and slay me and try me for many days to come. It will quiver and waver and defeat me as I progress or do not progress in my day-to-day, hour-to-hour, roll on and roll out and still continue to replicate fate and chance and the struggle to go on.

The opportunity was entirely there, and conscience got the better of me. That wicked demon that instils paranoia and fear and what is quite possibly wrong, on a fundamental level. What can I do now? What shall I do now? Conscience has caused me pain. Conscience has caused me regret. Conscience has ironically caused me mischievous wrong-doing of the worst kind.

Ride it out, wait, be patient, the nightmare will pass and blow over. There will be another time, another opportunity. But not like this one, not like this one (I mutter). This was the one, and it is over. And another lengthy chip has been struck and splintered away from the wooden, splayed fragmented character of my body, my being. A being or entity chipped away at until less solidity remains, until less remains, until nothing remains. Shame. It hurts me, but not because of the pain, but because there is now less of myself. A pain associated with a lacking of—of therein, of within, of nothing. Time and the timelessness of the sneaking conniving devil of regret and conscientiousness will inevitably and soulfully and meaningfully break me down. So here are the two options: you commit, fly, ride, stride in a desperate state of fluctuating mortality or morality in which the means is the end and nothing makes sense and the purposeful purposelessness of your journey is foolish but fulfilling; or you doubt, regret, let your conscience get the better of this damn thing, this situation, this mirror, this fluctuating principality that shreds at you in the dark corners of rooms and you suffer and think and ponder like a child, getting annoyed for not having leaped at these opportunities, even though the opportunities were so foolish and ridiculous to begin with. It’s silly and ironic to still think this way, and yet still be this way too—a counter intuitive paradox, yet human nature is synonymous with this type of (self) resentment and an unrighteous sense of crude entitlement; these things are worth saying too.