Day 10 of my 3,000km bus journey up the east coast of Australia, and I’m dropped off on the aspect of the street in central Queensland at 1:10am, about 30km from my vacation spot.
It's chilly. It's desolate. We're in what seems to be a bay the place truckers sleep of their cabs. It’s disorienting however I calm myself with ideas of pizza.
My buddy Brendan has opened a pizza restaurant within the city of Agnes Water (inhabitants 2,210) which appeared a ok purpose to go to – even at this inhospitable hour.
Agnes Water is off the primary freeway between Bundaberg and Gladstone. It’s beautiful. Inside a day I used to be on realestate.com, plotting a brand new life right here. There’s a surprising and sheltered foremost seashore, then a street as much as a headland the place you'll be able to fish, stand-up paddleboard, swim, watch the sundown over the water, have some oysters and a crisp glass of wine.
And the pizza is superb.
However actuality intrudes. I've a bus to catch. And Brendan jogs my memory that I'm nonetheless solely midway to Cairns. On the night time of my scheduled departure at 12:30am, I get a midnight textual content from the bus firm. The bus is delayed 1.5 to 2.5 hours. That’s form of a variety to be standing exterior on the aspect of the street in the course of night time. We give it a miss and my want to be caught in Agnes Water is granted – at the least for one more 24 hours. However one other day right here places strain on the remainder of the journey – leaving me solely three days to cowl the 1,288.5km to Cairns.
**
The next night time the bus travels to Airlie Seashore, the place I get off at round 9am, then head to my lodging the place I sleep for many of the day. From the balcony I see the Whitsundays and it appears like paradise.
The subsequent morning I get again on the bus once more. That is an eight-hour stint from Airlie Seashore to Mission Seashore.
The breeze is powerful exterior and the palm bushes bend. The panorama is just not lush and tropical as I imagined it to be, however scrubby and dry, the vegetation harsh and low to the bottom.
Within the bus the chemical odor of somebody’s V Vitality drink is all-pervasive.
We go salt pans, telegraph poles and mudflats crammed with pale pink water which are oddly lovely but in addition eerie. Is the color pure or is it air pollution? Raptors circle overhead.
We preserve driving; palm bushes, service station stops, small cities with tin and wooden homes, chain-link fences, closed outlets with “for lease” indicators and grand outdated pubs all rendered attractive within the dappled winter solar.
Late afternoon, and in Tully they're burning sugar cane in a paddock. I see it as a blur by the bus window, over my shoulder, as we pull out of city. The sight is unusually thrilling, evoking a borrowed nostalgia for an Australia that I believed not existed – the Australia of Ray Lawler’s play Summer season of the Seventeeth Doll; that 1985 GANGgajang tune about lightning crackling over canefields; the Go-Betweens’ Cattle and Cane; the Jimmy Barnes movie clip Working Class Man – with a canefield fireplace raging behind him.
It’s a romantic picture, I suppose. In a panorama that rolled previous me for weeks, intimidating in its measurement, generally bland to the purpose of hypnosis – the canefields burning is an image of Australia I can seize and keep in mind.
**
Within the closing push north, I started to dread the journey itself, not as a result of it was lengthy and boring, and generally occurred by the night time which prevented me from a good sleep, however due to the loop of ideas I had whereas on the bus.
The ideas – generally 10 hours at a stretch – have been: what’s the purpose?, you simply go on a journey, it’s arduous and generally it’s lovely, then you definately get to the place it's worthwhile to be, then flip round and return. It appeared meaningless. Underneath fluorescent lights of service stations, because the white traces turned to at least one in a blur, within the chilly air exterior and the nice and cozy stale air contained in the bus, on the lengthy, lengthy, empty freeway – I puzzled …isn’t that what LIFE IS?? Like going to Cairns on the bus? In my mind, disadvantaged of firm and the web (my battery was low – on 1%!!, I didn't carry a charger), the entire journey grew to become a metaphor for existence. When the journey went badly, it appeared as if my existence was cursed. When it went properly, my life was blessed.
By the point I received on the bus for the final leg of two.5 hours to Cairns I felt very depression-adjacent.
I stored asking myself “What for?” What was I doing this journey for? Why was I travelling 3,000km as much as the highest of Australia by bus, getting there, then going to the airport and flying again?
If there had been a purpose, I had forgotten it.
However the impulse had most likely began in lockdown – a longing to satisfy this nation once more, see it unfurl all of the border declarations, permits, state being pitted towards state, the entire depressing smallness of the final two years.
It was the craving, I suppose, to be free. To attach with the nation and hopefully join with others.
I did join with individuals. The buddies I noticed on the best way, and the brand new individuals I met. I met surfers in Suffolk Park that needed to speak about Marcus Aurelius, a vacationer operator in 1770 who launched canine stand paddle-boarding to Australia, an electrician who implored me to go to Yeppoon and hire a ship, a taxi driver in Airlie Seashore who fondly recalled the times of jobkeeper, and a masseur in Cairns who informed me about north Queensland toes.
As he stretched out my again he informed me about individuals who labored on farms with out sneakers, individuals who labored on boats with out sneakers, individuals who labored in kitchens with out sneakers.
The bloke who labored in a kitchen with out sneakers had grown “pores and skin sneakers” on the soles of his toes so robust that he felt nothing when he walked on rocks. That's till the masseur seen uncommon swelling and warmth within the man’s toes and ankles, and a visit to hospital revealed he had glass embedded deep inside the pores and skin. His toes have been so robust he didn’t even realise he had glass in his foot.
By day 15 I used to be able to go residence. My journey was finished. It was becoming then that my flight again to Sydney was cancelled on the best way to the airport.
This nation – as soon as it’s beneath your pores and skin, it doesn't allow you to go simply.
Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
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