The Stuart Highway – Australia
Added on Friday, August 8th, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
The Stuart Highway – Australia
Slowly Australia started to come into focus. It was like a camera full of film trying to find some more space in which to put another picture. Nothing was not there, it was all in place. The light that poured in through the lens brought a sense of time and place and colour to something grey. The light of Australia is the first clue to the way she thinks.
At Cooper Pedy there were holes in the ground that led to sediments of Opal. Miners pit shafts, the depth of which represented time like the rings of a tree. A horizon of dirt piles that exhibited a type of magnificent obsession where men will spend whole lives underground to cherish particular types of hardened stone. The route to market is walking distance to the shops on the street. It was almost organic in the way a procession of men carried nothing more than a pocket of raw gems with which to trade. In return they got women and drink enough until spent up they walk back down to their holes and stay until they find more stones. Trucks with cranes stand like rusting animals that come to the surface to secrete half digested earth and so keep their worm hole clean.
Australia was also giving off more than her colour. Mrs Macs meat pies were in all the shops but it was broad expanses of salt pan that gave you the taste. Crystallized salt on top of a covering of mud met the clouds at the far end of the sky. Soil as red as a sunset lay like a strip along the thin covering of tarmac 1500 miles long. The Stuart Highway named after a man who walked the length of where I was riding was beginning to reveal nuances of personality that in successive trans-continental voyages I had never seen before.
I saw combinations of colour and sky that was like a painted desert. Giant water holders sprayed in reds and yellows, browns and greens all set against a cobalt sky turning to purple and ochre as the sun began to set.
There were roads so long and straight their vanishing point was too far away to be seen. Across a swath of foliage so vast it covered a continent, these feats of civil engineering had to be seen from outer space to truly appreciate their meaning. To say that the Stuart Highway is not one of the great highways on earth, comparable with the Panamericana or the Trans Gobi to Ulan Batar is not to know what it took for men to build it.
At Stuarts Well Roadhouse I saw Jim Cotterill and his singing Dingo and outside I saw the night sky like I’d never seen before. The revelation was in the re-discovery of things I’d seen many times before but now in a different way. That what looks like a swath of cloud is actually the leading edge of the Milky Way where a compressed view through unquantifiable amounts of stars give an impression of solidity in the sense of a gas having more substance in a vacuum than nothing at all.
In my cabin it was midnight, as it was outside, but here, in a warped space that was loaned just then only to me, I was once again so excited that I couldn’t calm down. Instead of thinking, in comparison to so many galaxies containing billions of stars, how pointless it could be thought our short lives were, I felt emboldened by the fact that most of the life of which I am told might be up there, is probably the size of a virus that can withstand the heat of molten mercury. Well I am substantially bigger having a lot more fun, and with that in mind I closed my eyes and slept.
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