in large quantities, has a narcotic effect, and I can easily believe that, watching these animals, but inside their louche stoned-ness there seems to be an active and inquisitive mind at work. Bizarre creatures.
I like Currumbin. All I recall of it is a sort of rapture as I stood in the centre of a mad blizzard of lorikeets. I remember the surprising weight of them on the fruitbowl, how my arms ached for a day. How calm and content I felt as the birds sat on me and shat down my back and screeched in my ear. If we want to feed them today, however, we’ll need to wait for hours, which we can’t do, not with a continent to cross. So we wander round and look at the animals and then sod quite quickly off.
Wonder if he was any relation. Could easily be. One branch sprouted over the Dee into Liverpool, the other over the planet into Oz. And there’s an obvious shared passion for birds, although whether such things are hereditary is of course debatable. But still: I wonder.
We take the Pacific Motorway through Beenleigh andCoolangatta and Mullumbimby and stop at dusk in Byron Bay, which holds a literary festival to which I was once invited but couldn’t go due to prior commitments and, wandering around the place, am now glad I didn’t. There’s a tree full of lorikeets under which I stand and marvel but the town is all gap-year types in batik trousers and dreadlocks and uniform faux-Celtic or faux-Maori tattoos and the entire place reeks of parental indulgence and superannuated self-satisfaction. Home Counties accents batter my ears in the internet caff and signs lobby for coach-firms, excursions down the nearby valley on which you will see ‘natural wonders’ and ‘authentic aborigines’. Authentic? For fuck’s sake. Enjoy your gawp-year, all you Barnabies and Tristrams and Jacintas. Oh what funny stories you’ll have to tell back in Richmond-upon-Thames.
Ballina, Lismore, Casino on the Bruxner Highway. I’m beginning to get some notion of the vertiginous scale of Australian distances; what looks adjacent on the map takes hours of driving to reach. The place is colossal. Mallanganee, Drake, Sandy Hill, Black Swamp. The incantations in these names. So many histories we’re driving through. Our intention is to reach Armidale because that was where we made our first stop on the journey thirty years ago but we’re deep into night by now and Tony is tired so we park up outside Tenterfield, on the edge of the Blue Mountains. It’s freezing. I wrap my feet in woolly socks and my head in a bandanna and my body in a sleeping-bag and sleep for a few hours then wake and crawl outside for a pee in the before-dawn and I’m shivering so bad my teeth are a-chatter. Dull dawn rising. Frost on the grass and on the reef of McDonald’s wrappers in the ditches. Back in the van, sleep more, wake early. Wash with baby-wipes. Drink water, eat cereal bar. Drive on.
Dundee is four houses on the river Severn, which here is a muddy dribble. A sign welcomes us onto the Bald Knob Road and we laugh. There are a lot of ‘Knobs’ in Oz, I am to discover. Already met several. And we’re evidently in Celtic Australia because there is the Gwydir Highway and Shannon Vale and Glencoe and Stonehenge and Ben Lomond and, look, Glen Innes, which declares itself to be the ‘Celtic Capital of Australia’ on a sign next to another sign that says, on entering the town: ‘Domestic violence is a crime. Please report it’. We stop here, in the car park of a kind of pan-Celtic theme park, with rings of stones and a mock-up of Excalibur protruding from another stone and a wall with holes in it containing separate chippings and pebbles brought here from far Celtic parts, including Llantrisant and Caernarfon and Blaenan [sic] Ffestiniog by Mrs Enid Watkins-Jones . There are stones from my mountain, Pumlumon. I tell myself that I’m not going to stroke them but my hand reaches up as if of its own volition and gives them a wee caress. All small towns in
I like Currumbin. All I recall of it is a sort of rapture as I stood in the centre of a mad blizzard of lorikeets. I remember the surprising weight of them on the fruitbowl, how my arms ached for a day. How calm and content I felt as the birds sat on me and shat down my back and screeched in my ear. If we want to feed them today, however, we’ll need to wait for hours, which we can’t do, not with a continent to cross. So we wander round and look at the animals and then sod quite quickly off.
Wonder if he was any relation. Could easily be. One branch sprouted over the Dee into Liverpool, the other over the planet into Oz. And there’s an obvious shared passion for birds, although whether such things are hereditary is of course debatable. But still: I wonder.
We take the Pacific Motorway through Beenleigh andCoolangatta and Mullumbimby and stop at dusk in Byron Bay, which holds a literary festival to which I was once invited but couldn’t go due to prior commitments and, wandering around the place, am now glad I didn’t. There’s a tree full of lorikeets under which I stand and marvel but the town is all gap-year types in batik trousers and dreadlocks and uniform faux-Celtic or faux-Maori tattoos and the entire place reeks of parental indulgence and superannuated self-satisfaction. Home Counties accents batter my ears in the internet caff and signs lobby for coach-firms, excursions down the nearby valley on which you will see ‘natural wonders’ and ‘authentic aborigines’. Authentic? For fuck’s sake. Enjoy your gawp-year, all you Barnabies and Tristrams and Jacintas. Oh what funny stories you’ll have to tell back in Richmond-upon-Thames.
Ballina, Lismore, Casino on the Bruxner Highway. I’m beginning to get some notion of the vertiginous scale of Australian distances; what looks adjacent on the map takes hours of driving to reach. The place is colossal. Mallanganee, Drake, Sandy Hill, Black Swamp. The incantations in these names. So many histories we’re driving through. Our intention is to reach Armidale because that was where we made our first stop on the journey thirty years ago but we’re deep into night by now and Tony is tired so we park up outside Tenterfield, on the edge of the Blue Mountains. It’s freezing. I wrap my feet in woolly socks and my head in a bandanna and my body in a sleeping-bag and sleep for a few hours then wake and crawl outside for a pee in the before-dawn and I’m shivering so bad my teeth are a-chatter. Dull dawn rising. Frost on the grass and on the reef of McDonald’s wrappers in the ditches. Back in the van, sleep more, wake early. Wash with baby-wipes. Drink water, eat cereal bar. Drive on.
Dundee is four houses on the river Severn, which here is a muddy dribble. A sign welcomes us onto the Bald Knob Road and we laugh. There are a lot of ‘Knobs’ in Oz, I am to discover. Already met several. And we’re evidently in Celtic Australia because there is the Gwydir Highway and Shannon Vale and Glencoe and Stonehenge and Ben Lomond and, look, Glen Innes, which declares itself to be the ‘Celtic Capital of Australia’ on a sign next to another sign that says, on entering the town: ‘Domestic violence is a crime. Please report it’. We stop here, in the car park of a kind of pan-Celtic theme park, with rings of stones and a mock-up of Excalibur protruding from another stone and a wall with holes in it containing separate chippings and pebbles brought here from far Celtic parts, including Llantrisant and Caernarfon and Blaenan [sic] Ffestiniog by Mrs Enid Watkins-Jones . There are stones from my mountain, Pumlumon. I tell myself that I’m not going to stroke them but my hand reaches up as if of its own volition and gives them a wee caress. All small towns in
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