Sublime

Once someone told me that unless you taste sugar, no amount of description no matter how fancy and intricate will suffice, you will never know the taste of anything unless you simply put it in your mouth. Nothing mysterious, just plain simple and sensible logic. Same goes for just about everything else… I can tell you about the banded rocks, all yellows oranges and reds. These magnificent gorges shaped by wind and water over eons. I can tell about and show you photographs that make you oooh and aaaah, but I can’t gift you the experience of heat shimmer or the scent of dry earth or for that matter the deep and mystical aroma of rain wet earth.

Those are the things I never knew as a child growing up in the big city. When I moved away in my early twenties it was like having a bucket of cold water thrown over me when I took up residence in he North West of Tasmania. It was a small town of around 1,200 people who tunneled into the mountain extracting zinc, lead and silver. From the outside looking in, you did not see that in Rosebery, it was hidden beneath the mountain. What was visible were snow capped jagged peaks carpeted in green, grey and white. One of the most rained on places in Tasmania. I can tell you about the button grass stained tap water that we bathed in, or the tiny sweet wild strawberries that grew in the backyard along with ferns that made me feel like I lived in a prehistoric wilderness… but you will not really know it unless you lived it, tasted it, smelled it and breathed it.

There is a whole narrative in my head that is deeply embedded and is part of the fabric of my psyche. Dry heat at Python Pool in the East Pilbara or red granite monoliths like giants’ bowing balls abandoned in a stunted forest of sandal wood. These places hostile to the unprepared have surrounded the walls of my dwellings capped by a blackest of skies bejeweled by a billion suns. Sometimes I bury myself in nostalgia and wonder why I am not still there… The weight of memory is both a stone in my guts and an arc lamp in my brain… heavy and blindingly bright!

Here is a short list of pain and pleasure, a rant of the sublime…

Sitting on a rock near the Ring river on the side of the road, my exposed ears are bathed in agonising pain as the chill winter wind blew from snow capped mountains;

The taste of ash as I watched through eye stinging smoke as the summer fire surrounded and engulfed our little town;

The adrenaline rush and clammy fear as I almost stepped on a snake slowly wending its way into a corrugated culvert pipe;

Sitting surrounded by terrified children as widow panes bulge in cyclonic gusts;

Orgasm in our little tent in the dark on the banks of Lake St Clair;

Communing with porridge eating emus;

Wading waste deep through the incoming tide with a hessian sack of mud crabs and a terrified 13 year old at Hearsons Cove;

Coober Pedy, stting in the pub where you could buy a beer only if you ordered minestrone soup… don’t eat the fish I was told… you’re to far from the coast;

Leaning back on an old Land Rover on the shores of Lake Eyre and day dreaming about the ocean that was once upon a time; and

Climbing, back in the day when I still could, up Frenchmen Peak to look if I could see Pink Lake from there… I could not… but hey, I was still blown away…

Enough for now… sleep beckons!

Breaking Ground

Composition and composure.