Round Trip

We’re both on leave this week and so decided to go for a drive, just to remind ourselves how big this place this. We went north up the highway to Grafton, turned inland across the hills to Glen Innes, home of a Celtic festival and some faux standing stones, along the New England Highway to the small university town of Armidale, and then completed the circle by returning through Ebor, Dorrigo, Bellingen and Coffs. It was about 600km, I guess.

It was a day of broken cloud, and we’d had some rain, so the light was spectacular, navy blue clouds lurking over the still-parched inland fields. For the most part, the countryside looked empty, with just post-boxes hinting of a farm or homestead down the end of a dirt track. It reminded us of Mid Wales, only much more lonely. Although the road signs are in English, of course, it still feels foreign.


Caution - Quoll

You wouldn’t see “CAUTION - QUOLLS” in the UK, would you? And here, CATTLE AHEAD doesn’t mean that, occasionally, some cows will cross the road, it means that there’s a herd apparently living beside and on the road.

Every watercourse is named - Bullock Creek, Boggy Creek, Boundary Creek and Skeleton Creek - I guess because water’s so important but also to try to confer some ownership, some sense of security or continuity. Then it strikes you that for centuries before the Europeans appeared, all these places had other names, all foreign to us and with their own stories. At the end of the day, it’s just the kind of countryside to see ghosts.