Songlines

I missed the bus by two minutes. In the taxi from Airlie Beach, there are dust devils in the fields but the air at Proserpine airport is hot and still, no scraps of whirling bark, no dancing cigarette ends. John the barman serves ice beer in polystyrene coolers and thinks England will win the Ashes. The place is almost deserted, just a girl in a red summer dress taking her bags back from the taxi driver. This is the set of an arty short film.

Flying over Brisbane, the sun is such that I can track the shadow of our plane across the thumbprint of the city suburbs. A cluster of cricket fields, town planner blueprints for successful living. I arrive into the heart of a Saturday night that would sadden Tom Waits and puts Cardiff to shame. The sullen taxi driver hates his job and himself and me. A chatty receptionist at the labyrinthine Palace backpackers points me towards the cliffs at Kangaroo Point. It's a thirty-minute walk but I get in some legitimate climbing for the first time in a month - good, hard traverses, and a 5C-ish problem that I'll go back to tomorrow. The drill holes from the dynamite are still struck through the rock, a hundred years old, thick with chalk and shiny from the polishing weight of hundreds of boulderers.



The cliffs have been made readily available for climbers by the city council, who installed massive floodlights along the entire 500-metre stretch. At the top of the cliff they have rooted concrete pillars for top roping and drainpipes for safe belaying. The above photo - rather good, I think - is of a guy called Nick. He used to manage pubs in London but prefers life in Brisbane. He uses an auto-belay device because he never has any climbing partners on a Saturday night.

I'm not feeling so good. I've just finished Bruce Chatwin's 'The Songlines'. I bought it on a whim from the Airlie Beach book exchange in part-exchange for 'Lullaby'. It had an interesting cover. He is a travel writer. He travels Australia in the company of a first-generation Australian-Russian called Arkady who facilitates his meetings with the Aboriginals, who, in turn, gradually and often reluctantly - often by his own inference - explain about the Songlines, a network of trails that riddle Australia in a mix of creationism, territorial assertion and spiritual belonging. The ancestors walked these lines. As they walked, they sang aloud the things that were around them - and by doing so, called these things into existence.

It's a bit too much to take in. It's not that I believe it so much as I am shaken by the Aboriginal faith in it.

I read the extracts from Chatwin's notebooks drinking beer in the bar under the hostel. His account of the Tower of Babel left me shaking. I sat trembling on my barstool under the weight of thought and could not continue reading for several minutes. He died at the age of 49. I am very tired.

I've added some photos of the Coral Trekker from a couple of blogs ago. Tim, that middle yard arm is not far shy of 20 metres, you shyster.