The Order of Things

On the subject of Burke and Wills, one of my most memorable trips to Australia was in a small plane put together and piloted by a friend who shares a similar interest in those explorers and offered to take me out to where they perished and other places he thought would be of interest to me. At first I thought it was just a hopeful conversation egged on by shared bourbons, but within a few months he sent me the itinerary for my next time over. We would fly into where Burke and Wills died.

First stop, The Dig Tree, then further inland where a driver would meet us and take us out to the exact sites where they died and we could read their last letters home aloud.

At each stop we tied down the plane and walked to where there would be a ride to what we came to see. Innaminka, Birdsville, White Cliffs, and more, finishing up in Broken Hill at a somewhat seedy hotel with one bathroom on each floor for our final night out. When we returned from dinner, they were waiting for the “American” one of us to read a favorite American poem aloud to the gathering of Poets in Pubs Night which just happened to be meeting there that month. A Toohey’s Old among Australian poets in a dingy hotel/pub….excellent!

There is a kindness that Australians readily offer to a lone traveler in their country. In Townsville on my wedding anniversary a young bartender bought me a nice dark porter on tap at his brewery and showed me to a very private location in which to write, sketch and have the most delicious barramundi. Another similar experience happened in a small pub after teaching and touring wineries.  I waited for all on the bus to unload and follow each other to the left. Then I went right, around the corner and into a hotel bar  where I met a young man anxious to relive his experiences in the states over a couple of beers he shouted for the only woman in the bar at that hour. Lovely.

A coffee shop owner opened early and treated me to a latte after watching me skype my husband from a computer perched on the lid of a garbage can out front in Katoomba. A lovely older woman of means advised me in the lounge car of a train that perhaps I should not drink my dark beer from the bottle but have it put in a glass first. A cab driver who told me all anyone would ever want to know about dingoes. A student in Gympie who told me at the close of the workshop that I had done a good enough job to learn her secret of keeping a spikey hairdo…….leave the soap lather in all day.

Kind, informative and patient people in Australia, all anxious to be of help and tell you something you didn’t know. None more so than those who volunteer to look after us during our rushed schedules of teaching, traveling, teaching again and taking a break. They offer beds, refreshments and travel….and all with such obvious enjoyment.

Thank you to them and to their country. I have my journals, my notes, my sketches and memories of some of the very best times of my life…..all ready for me when I want to visit again and again. I am looking forward to next March. It will be my twelfth time there. Some places in Australia I will never see but what I have will stay with me forever.

I have pretty much made all my plans for the twelfth trip to Australia. Some teaching, some quiet time and a few days of special time working with some of the students who have shown up so often in my classes that we just want to continue working together. I can get it all done in just a bit over a month and be back home. A few years ago I started writing down the impressions and experiences of Australia. So for the next few posts, it will be like a serial of sorts. An installment of the memorable events that have happened down under.

Australia – The Indelible Marks Left Behind

Sandy Webster

It is impossible to express, this feeling of being deeply branded by Australia. How does one put into words the depth of the marks that the country and its people have left on me. I think it started when I was a child with early National Geographic images of something so foreign looking and yet familiar. Raised in a rural environment I was drawn to those dramatic country scenes. The men and women of the Outback struggling with keeping themselves and their livestock alive in what looked like insurmountable dangers of fire, flood, and distance. Brave, strong people I thought as a child. Friendly, open and honest and busy with lives full of action. Men forever wrestling sheep and cattle and one another. Women surviving on what little they had while they waited and waited for the next demand to take its toll. What I couldn’t imagine from the pictures I saw, the writers of Australia filled in nicely. From convict colonies to contemporary urban scenarios, Australia’s writers, photographers and artists brought their country to life.

In 1997 I got the chance to go there and see for myself how real it all was. I would teach workshops for the Fibre Forum and be housed and shown the sights. It was magic. The air was clearer, the horizon further away, the sky bigger and bluer, the smells new and different, the sounds exotic and louder, the voices happy-sounding and full of strange expressions. I took it all in and took notes…. constant notes. I photographed everything…..the picture being the physical evidence of my presence in this country. I did not know then that the notes and quick scribbles and drawings would be of more importance to me than the photos…..photos that gave too much information and missed the essence of me being there, at that moment in time. On that first visit I vividly recall my hosts taking me from Canberra to Mittigong and making sure to be in Golburn for a pre-arranged luncheon where the owner would first serenade me with the didgeridoo and then a Civil War melody on his violin because it was the closest he could get to music of where I traveled from. The thoughtfulness that went into giving me that experience as a welcome to their country was the most wonderful and memorable welcome to a country I would never get enough of.

I asked questions, so many questions that seem silly and ignorant in retrospect. But sometimes not. Like asking my first driver on a walk into the countryside of Canberra if she ever just wanted to keep walking, walking further into the outback. And if she could hear the sound of what I interpreted as the “sound of waiting”…..women waiting for their children to return, the postman to come, the rain to come, their husband to return from long distances in dangerous places. She politely replied, “No, not really.” And she warned me not to keep walking myself. “People are lost that way you know, searching for something out there.”

On that first visit to Australia I went to Alice Springs and Uluru…the very soul of Australia. A private pilot flew me out there and banked around Uluru and the Olgas so I could get good photos from the air at dawn.  A guide who had last minute cancellations ended up with just me to drive around and accompany on hikes through the Olgas. At the base of Uluru he dropped me off near routes that had few if any tourists and waited to take me to the next back way in. He suggested what I should order for lunch while he went off to catch a thorny lizard for me to see close up before letting it go in the desert. He brought me dark beer to drink while I sat with him and watched the sunset on Uluru, then drove me back to the airport where the pilot waited to take me back to Alice Springs.

The following day I went to a Coroboree and let the Aboriginal spokesman, George, cut my hair to add to his string while thanking me and saying that the Japanese tourists did not offer theirs. He said he and I had hair with more tooth to grab on. I breathed him deep into my lungs so as to have him and his country stay inside me for as long as possible. Later that morning I ate a witchetty grub and other bush tucker. It was at this Coroboree that I bought my first Australian Aboriginal Art.

I never thought I was going to come back. I was intent on filling myself and my suitcases with Australia.