Travelling Slowly
In May 2019 I quit the toxic office job I’d been working for the past fifteen months and set out for the centre of Australia. I took the long way there (a twenty-six hour bus ride) because I wanted to gain a tactile sense of just how big this country is. I wanted to step off the bus at each stop and hear the changing inflections of our vernacular as the day wore on, smell the dust and the eucalypts and the acrid odour of bodies on a tedious journey. Eventually arriving at the final stop and taking my first breath of dry desert air with the past thirty-six hours still pulsing through me – this destination being in itself not an end, but another stage of a bigger journey.
I believe that when we travel slowly, purposely, and presently, then our journeys become a way for us to learn about ourselves, and the world, on a deeper level. Artist and writer Kim Mahood wrote, “It is common now to treat the journey as a metaphor, but there was a time when the journey and the traveller and the story were the same thing... There was a time when we walked into consciousness through our journeys, when our awareness was brand-new, so that the shape and texture and sound and smell of the journey remained in us, a real and vivid part of our substance.” And when we travel - and I mean really travel, not just to take the picture and say we’ve been there, but when we are totally present with the people and the place, then we surrender to the idea that we are on a journey and let the force of the journey guide us instead.
That connection to the land around us is a central theme in Position Doubtful, as Mahood comes to learn, through her own experiences living and working in Aboriginal communities, just how palpable the link is between these people and their country. I can’t personally express what that connection, solidified over thousands of years, must feel like. But I know it to be true. Because I know for myself how different a person I am in different cities, how alive I felt going back to the coast after months in the desert, and how the land on which I stand commands my being more than my mind can comprehend.
The summer just passed I took another slow trip, this time at an even more leisurely pace. I drove 9,600km, across four states and one territory, arriving back in Alice six weeks after leaving North Queensland. If I hadn’t had a job to come back to, I would have kept going, up to Darwin and across to do the west coast. A backpacker in Coober Pedy told me he didn’t plan on venturing west because he didn’t want to see more of a ‘whole lot of nothing.’ But the nothing is undeniably powerful and its intensity would be palpable if we only knew how to feel it.
It’s that feeling that permeates even the smallest of journeys. Because I didn’t so much drive across the country to arrive back in Alice as I did to simply spend six weeks looking, listening and feeling; letting the shapes, textures, sounds and smells of the journey seep in. Right now it might be hard to imagine our next summer road trip, let alone overseas holiday, but there are lessons in our smallest meanderings – weekend hikes and trips to our favourite beaches – as much as in the journeys we save for and mark in our calendars months in advance. If we can only feel for a few seconds the potency with which our bodies’ sense our surroundings, then we might find meaning in the smallest of excursions and revel in the knowledge that one’s life – in which we play the role of eternal traveller – is the most potent journey of them all.
Ownership of the land I travelled through this summer was never ceded. I pay respect to the traditional owners, past, present and emerging, of the following country:
Yuwi, Guwinmal, Darumbal, Bayali, Gureng Gureng, Badtjala, Gubbi Gubbi, Yuggera, Bundjalung, Gumbainggir, Dainggatti, Biripi, Worimi, Awabakal, Kuring-gai, Eora, Dharug, Tharawal, Gundungurra, Ngunawal, Wiradjuri, Nari Nari, Madi Madi, Kureinji, Latje Latje, Meru, Ngadjuri, Peramangk, Nukunu, Kaurna, Andyamathanha, Banggarla, Nawu, Narangga, Kokatha, Antakarinja, Luritja, Arrente.
