It’s been a loooonnng book month (Book Week gets bigger and bigger all the time). So… After Ipswich, Bendigo and schools visits in Victoria in the last few weeks I boarded a plane for Broome on Sunday 17th August. Despite being Qantas, all went well for the 4 hr or so flight across central Australia (that’s mean isn’t it!).
You know, I haven’t really identified with a lot of Australia before. I haven’t spent time in the great expanses of red, or lingered in scrubland. I’ve passed through, visited briefly, seen edges of places. Australia made sense to me from the air. It’s red and orange plains – vast and overwhelming were applied with a great brush and trailling fingertips. Trees were scattered, minute and regular like settled dust motes. Rivers snaked and curled, impossible to tell if they were dry beds or muddy trickles. Dead straight roads, simple dark red scars, crossed each other in giant geometric patterns. And there were pictures – enormous creatures living impressed upon the land – a salt lake in the shape of a great pheonix, and bunyip patterns in the red and orange of the earth.
And then we reached Broome – the sea, aqua and milky was an impossibly beautiful contrast.
