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Sally looked round when Julie spoke, following her gaze towards the doorway of the Starlight. Her heart began to beat faster and her whole body tensed up when she saw Muz walking towards them.
"Where's Anton?" she asked nervously,after Muz had sat down.
"Oh, he's being a junkie in Sydney." she replied with a strange expression on her face, an expression that Sally couldn't read. "He's got this new mate ... A bit of a weird old guy. Quite nice though in a way. But they're always out scamming together and scoring..."
She faded off, wondering if she should really be talking to Sally about this. But, yeah, why not? she thought, it's only the truth. "They kept me in smack for a while, i suppose, but i got a bit sick of it really. I got too much of a habit, so i've come back to dry out"
"Dry out? Here?!" Julie laughed. "You must be crazy!"
"When's he coming back?" Sally asked, disturbed and confused by this news. Although she'd been a bit edgy about him being with Muz, she'd at least felt he was with someone he knew, and not alone in a strange city, lost and smacked-out. It was silly really, but she felt as if she'd lost contact with him, now Muz was back and he was still in Sydney.
"I don't know." Muz answered. "He didn't say anything about coming back. But then he didn't say he wasn't either..." Muz seemed a bit strange when she talked about Anton, Sally thought. She wanted to ask her if they'd been fucking, but it didn't strike her as being a very acceptable question, especially not in public. Muz would probably take it as some kind of attack or a sign of jealousy and Sally didn't want that. Although, when she faced up to it, she did feel a twinge of jealousy. But she tried to keep it under control and not let it show.
"Is he alright?" Julie asked. "It sounds like he's getting a bit heavily into smack."
"Yeah, i think so. He doesn't seem to be having any major traumas. He's been working actually. Which he seems to be happy doing. Although it sounds more like scamming than working to me. He met this ageing junkie called John in the Cross. And he's been working with him, ripping things off out of empty houses and building sites mainly, as far as i can tell, anyway. John reckons it's demolition salvage, but it seems more like thieving to me!"
A feeling of confusion and despair came over Sally as she sat there quietly listening to Julie and Muz talk about Sydney. What had gone wrong? They were supposed to come to australia and be happy, and better off than they'd been in england - and together. But now look at them. Anton was a junkie, supporting his habit by crime. And she hadn't seen him for over two weeks. She was lost, lonely and depressed, living off the dole in a small crazy town in the middle of nowhere and drinking a lot. This didn't feel like the promised land to her - or, what did they call it here? "The Lucky Country"! Lucky for who? she wondered.
She really wanted to see Anton, but the thought of going to Sydney and finding him somewhere, who knows where, up to his ears in junk, didn't attract her much. She didn't even know whether he would want to see her anyway. Or if he'd feel she was intruding on him by turning up there. She would never have felt like this before. She knew Anton really well. But things were different now, and she felt she hardly knew him at all.
"Did he get my letter?" she asked Muz suddenly.
"Yeah. That must have been over a week ago now. He was going to write back, but i don't think he got it together..."
*-*-*
The next couple of weeks were two of the strangest and, in some ways, the most unpleasant weeks of Sally's life.
She didn't know how to handle the situation with Anton, although she realized it was worrying her a lot more than it should have because of the position she was in. She could see that being a stranger in a strange country reduces your confidence and boosts your paranoia to levels that make even the simplest little problem take on astronomical proportions. And this was a lot more than the simplest little problem. But knowing that didn't make it go away.
In fact it was more like the opposite - she began to wonder if the circumstances of her life were making her crack up a bit. And this possibility only added another worry to the list.
She half understood why she felt the way she did. But half of the cause she couldn't have imagined then, and wouldn't have any inkling of for quite some time. Not until she looked back on this period from a time in the future - after she'd learnt a few of the secrets of the country she was in.
Half of her problems didn't actually come from within her - except in the sense that she lacked the understanding and experience to deal with the other forces that were exerting themselves on her life.. And they didn't come from migration to australia - if you discount the fact that the government and the people controlling colonisation had conned her into migrating to a hallucination. A mass hallucination produced partly deliberately, as a means of social control, and partly unconsciously by a form of mass hysteria which came from an incredible number of people finding themselves in a land they didn't understand. They had been, and still are, denied the means of understanding this continent by the divisions placed between them and its original inhabitants. And by the suppression and systematic destruction of the only culture which could help them understand it.
From the very beginnings of australian colonization, people have been prevented from assimilating into the culture that belongs here. They have been encouraged to treat australia as if it was europe - which it very obviously isn't - and to try and apply the laws of nature they had learnt in europe to a land where a very different set of laws are reality.
At the same time, the indigenous reality of australia has been viciously stamped on by people who didn't want that to interfere with their plans for taking power and making money. But nature's laws are not something which wa can be destroyed or changed. Still, to this day, they exert themselves through the concrete of the cities. They can be felt, perhaps more strongly, in the bush: in the trees and the hills, the rivers and the plains, the deserts and the beaches and the rest of this vast and varied continent that is now called australia.
These forces probably have more influence on the minds of australians, if not their daily lives, than the plastic image of europe that's projected onto this misunderstood land. And, of course, they are not at all compatible with that hallucination. The effect of trying to live under those circumstances could be compared to convincing yourself that a section of forest is an open field and wondering why you keep walking into trees, you know aren't there!
*-*-*
"I'm going to go away for a while, Julie." Sally announced suddenly, one day, about two weeks after Muz had come back from Sydney.
Julie had been staying with them for the last week or so, since she'd lost her home. Sally had been surprised to learn that all the time she'd known Julie, she'd been living in a car. Somebody else's car. The owner of the car, a rather strange man called Perry, was an old friend of Julie's from Melbourne. Sally had met him once or twice in passing, but for some reason she'd never thought about where Julie lived and the possibility that 'home' for her was this man's car.
Julie had always been vague about where she lived and it wasn't until the car broke down a long way from Goonabah, never to move again, that she'd told Sally about it. She'd had to hitch all the way to where the car was, to retrieve her possessions, and Sally want with her to help carry them back.
That afternoon, the two of them were visiting some neighbours in Mainline. They were a group of ex-hippy skinheads who Sally had never met until Julie took her round there one day. They never went into town because they were all scared of being bashed by rednecks. They were a really weird bunch, and Sally had never been able to work out how they got their food without going into town. But they always seemed to have plenty of it. And heroin too, although they kept that fairly cool while Sally was around, because they knew she didn't use.
Julie had told her some vague story about them growing big quantities of grass in the bush and using the money they made from that to pay people to go to town for them. But that was before she'd met them and it didn't really seem very likely then. Now, she wasn't quite so sure, but had never really wanted to ask about it. It was just too bizarre!
"Where are you going to?" Julie asked, thinking Sally was going to say Sydney.
But Sydney was the last place Sally would have gone, although she really wanted to see Anton again. She was afraid of what she might find when she got there.
"Happy Christmas." she replied instead. "I'm going to take up Liz and Ali's invitation to go and visit them.
"Really?" Julie was surprised. "What's brought this on so suddenly?"
"I'm just getting edgy, hanging around here at the moment. I suppose it's partly because of Anton. I"m sort of hoping he'll be here again when i get back."
"Yeah..." Julie was sympathetic. She knew how Sally was feeling and was really pissed off with Anton for not writing at least. But at the same time, she knew how time flew by when you were using smack every day and how hard it could be to remember other people. She'd been in a similar situation herself once.
"But i've also got this really strong urge to go somewhere else. To get out of these hills for a while. There's something about them that seems to be closing in on me at the moment, and i reckon a break would do me good."
"I know what you mean!" Julie said after a while. "I might come with you. Maybe a break is what i need too. I haven't really been away from this place for months. It gets a bit of a grip on you sometimes, without you really noticing it."
"Yeah?! That would be great." Sally smiled, beginning to feel much happier now than she had for ages. The prospect of getting away from Goonabah and Mainline and all the weird people and crazy things that were associated with them seemed to take a big weight off her shoulders. And having Julie to travel with was an added bonus.
"I feel much better-already!" she said, smiling stupidly, "And we haven't even gone yet."
"When shall we go?" Julie asked, pleased to see the change that had come over her friend.
"Tomorrow?"
*-*-*
As Sally shut the gate, she read the sign that was hanging on the inside of it. It was written in black pen on an old piece of cardboard, and it said:
"Australian Government Immigration Dept.
You are now entering Australia
Please disengage your mind and get your
I.D. card ready for inspection." She laughed and pointed it out to Julie.
It had been a long journey, but it looked like they'd finally arrived. Hitching hadn't been too bad, although it had taken all day to get there. But the walk from the highway was what had really buggered them. It had taken almost two hours to get to the gate, along a deserted and dusty track. And although they were obviously at Happy Christmas there was still no sign of any people or a settlement.
"Just keep on following the track." Ali had said. So that was what they did.
The contrast between the land outside the gate and the land they were now walking through was striking. Outside it was all cleared - bare for kilometres - and the soil was really badly eroded. But here, they were surrounded by trees. It was obviously quite recent regrowth, but already the soil seemed to be recovering and the land in general looked much happier.
On their left, through the trees, they could see a river. It was flowing noisily in the opposite direction to the way they were going.
"Let's have a swim." Julie said, the lure of the water already drawing her off the track as she spoke.
The trees grew right down to the water's edge, not wasting a good opportunity to get a drink in this dry country. A cluster of large rocks seemed to indicate a good place for a dip, so they quickly stripped off their dusty clothes and jumped in.
"Yay! That's better!" Julie shouted, as she lay back into the water and floated, feeling its cool strength soak away her tiredness from the journey. She suddenly flipped over and dived deep under the surface of the water.
"It's amazing how the land in here feels much more friendly than it does outside the gate, eh? it she said when she surfaced again.
"Mmmmm .... Yeah, it's funny." Sally answered, becoming conscious of the feeling for the first time. "It does, doesn't it. It just feels so good being here. And we're not even really there yet."
They swum around and dived and floated for a while, before climbing out and lying on the rocks to dry off in what was left of the sun, filtering through the tree tops.
"That was just what i needed." Sally said cheerfully as they reached the track again and continued their walk. They both felt capable of walking the same distance again now - although they both hoped they wouldn't have to.
After about quarter of an hour, they turned a corner in the track, which had been meandering this way and that since they came through the gate, and suddenly the scenery changed. A large clearing sprung out of the trees and made them stop where they stood.
For the first time, they got an idea of the landscape that surrounded them. The river ran straight along one side of the clearing and the track bent round to run alongside the river. On the opposite side of the clearing, vast hills rose out of the valley they were walking down. Partly tree covered and partly great big bare slabs of rock, the hills really dominated the landscape at this spot.
Most of the clearing was taken up with a variety of what looked like food crops and fruit trees, all mixed up together in an apparently random fashion. But a small area, not far from where they stood, was given over to car parking. There were about half a dozen cars standing there, a couple of motorbikes and an old truck. Along one edge of the planted area, was a small and jumbled collection of huts and other weird-looking structures, presumably built for living in. A couple of teepees stood among the huts,- towering over them and adding to the unusual appearance of the village.
"Wow!" Sally exclaimed, open-mouthed. "So this is it then?"
"Yeah,it looks like we've finally arrived ..."
*-*-*
"So how long are you staying?" Liz asked as she poured boiling water from a big old iron kettle into a slightly smaller enamel teapot. They were both thoroughly smoke-blackened from being heated up over the wood fire.
"Dunno really." Julie answered. "A week or two maybe. We'll see how we feel."
"The way it feels so far," Sally joined in, "i could almost stay here for ever!" Everyone sitting round the fire laughed at this .
They were sitting in the communal kitchen, one of the bigger and more weird-looking structures they'd seen from the other side of the clearing. It was sort of half dome-shaped, half triangular in shape, with sticks poking out at all the angles like branches on a tree. It was covered in a mixture of bark, grass thatching and old potato sacks, which gave it a mottled, organic look - almost as if it had just grown out of the ground. There were no windows in it, but smoke from the fire billowed out of a large hole at the top of the dome-shaped part.
Inside.the kitchen looked just as unusual as outside. In the middle of the dome section, a ring of flat rocks surrounded a shallow pit in the dirt floor, where the fire burned. The three feet of a tall tripod were spaced evenly around the outside of the stone circle and, suspended from this by a meathook on the end of a chain, a big iron pot hung over the flames. An old battered frying pan was also on the fire and someone was using this to cook chapattis, which were beginning to pile up on an enamel plate nearby. And a few other people, sitting on the ground around the fire, were occupied with preparing that evening's meal for the village.
The triangular shaped section of the kitchen was obviously a storage area. There were a couple of roughly handmade tables with boxes of vegetables and fruit on top of them and three large steel drums which must have been used for storing dry food. There were also a few bundles of what looked like bedding, piled up in one corner.
Looking around at the inside of the walls, you could see all the details of how it had been built. There was a basic structure of sticks, each up to a couple of inches thick, that stuck into the ground at one end and bent over to join onto others to form a series of arches. Tied on to these at irregular intervals, were cross members - smaller sticks which kept it rigid and gave something to attach the covering to. The whole thing was held together by odd bits of string and the occasional strip of brightly coloured cloth .
"Yeah, this place is a bit like that." Liz replied to Sally's remark about staying for ever. "A lot of people come here just to visit but end up staying. There's something special about it that seems to affect people as soom as they arrive." She smiled. "I don't think i could live anywhere else now! I wouldn't want to really, there's everything i need here."
As they sat there and talked, more people slowly trickled into the kitchen, some carrying lanterns or candle torches and some bringing pots of food for the meal. By the time it was dark, there were about twenty people sitting in a big circle, illuminated by the light from the fire.
After eating, everyone stayed around the fire, drinking tea and coffee and talking. The conversation mainly-revolved around village matters, like planting and picking crops, water, problems between people and the general direction things were going in. From listening to the talk, Sally and Julie began to get a bit of an idea of the way things worked at Happy Christmas.
They picked up a few hints about the relationship of this village with the other villages. This seemed to be quite a tricky subject, as they were the ones who took most of the responsibility for growing the crops. There was supposed to be a system where people from other villages did work there or collected bush food in exchange for anything they needed from here. But, by the sound of it, it didn't seem to be working that well and some of the people who did most of the work were getting a bit sick of the situation. It was hard, as theirs was one of the only three cleared areas on the whole community and, although it was possible to grow some food in other places, a lot of people depended on what they produced there. It was obviously something that would take time to resolve. Gradually, as the night got deeper and the large full moon slowly crawled up among the million stars in the black sky, the group began to disperse. People got up in ones or twos and, without saying much, wandered off into the darkness. Eventually, there was only Julie, Sally and Liz.
"You can sleep here." she,said to them. "Just make yourselves comfortable somewhere. I'm off to bed."
"Weird place,eh?" Julie said, after Liz had gone.
"Yeah, but i like it though. I'm glad we came."
"It's going to take days getting to know everyone's names.There's so many people here!"
They made themselves up beds on a carpetted area of the floor and lay down in the fading glow of the fire. Looking up, they could see the stars through the hole on the roof. This made them both feel peaceful and relaxed and they both fell quickly into a deep sleep.
*-*-*
They were woken up early the next morning by someone lighting the fire. It was Andrew, one of the people who'd been preparing the meal when they arrived.
"Coffee?" he asked when he realized they were awake.
"What time is it?" Sally asked, surprised that it seemed so early, but it was already beginning to get hot.
"I don't know." Andrew shrugged. "Seven, maybe. The sun's been up an hour or more."
"Does everyone get up this early here?"
"Most of them. I'm usually one of the first up, but i always wake up as soon as it gets light."
A few of the other residents of the village trickled in - and out again - over the next couple of hours. But the kitchen obviously wasn't such a popular place in the morning as it was at night time. Julie and Sally were just about to go out for a walk and have a look round, when Liz finally made an appearance.
"It's nice to see someone who doesn't get up with the sun!" Sally said, laughing, when she walked into the kitchen.
"Yeah, most people here get up a bit too early for my liking!" Liz replied, checking to see if there was any coffee left in the pot.
"I'll show you around a bit today, if you like." she continued. "I should have shown you around this village before it got dark last night. At least where my place is, so you could've come and got me up instead of hanging around here!"
"Oh, that's alright." Julie replied. "It's been good here this morning. We got the chance to talk to a few people when they came in for breakfast. And it's a pretty good place just to sit in the morning."
*-*-*
"That's a really good swimming hole down there."Liz pointed down the steep rock face they,were walking across. The path they were following was a really narrow and winding one, that wove its way up and down the hills, through clumps of trees, over rocks and along the river bank. Now it passed across a massive rock face which stretched a hundred metres or so on their left hand side, down to the river below them. The flat, sloping expanse of rock rose above them too, for about the same distance - to where the trees began,just before the top of the hill. It was the path to "Nowhere",which was the village that Ali lived in.
"How far is it to the village from here?" Sally asked, looking down the rock to where Liz said the swimming hole was. There was a splashing sound coming from the bottom, but she couldn't see anyone in the water.
"Not very far." Liz replied, we're near enough there now."
At the end of the rock face, the path turned gently towards the right and they began to walk up hill again.
"We just have to go over this hill and we're there."
They were out of sight of the river now, almost for the first time since they'd started walking along the path, and it felt like they were moving in a big circle. Suddenly, they passed round a gigantic rock, about three times their height and almost spherical, and the river came back into view again.
"This rock's called the 'Headstone'." Liz told them. "There's a series of smaller ones round the other side that you can use to get up on top of it. People camp up there for a while sometimes, when they need to get their heads together for some reason or another. Or if they injure their head it helps it heal. It seems to work every time."
They began to walk back downhill again now and before long ,the path just ended, in an open space about fifty metres from the river. Or, more accurately, the path became lots of smaller, less clearly defined paths radiating out from that spot. There was a big fire pit, just off the path, surrounded by a bigger circle of flattish rocks. And straight ahead of them, between a couple of big trees, stood a large reddish-brown teepee. But apart from this, there was no sign of a village.
"Well, this is is it." Liz said, stopping and looking at the other two. "Welcome to Nowhere!"
"But where's the village?" Sally asked, puzzled.
"It's here, all around you. You're standing right in the middle of it. If you know what you're looking for, you can even see some people's places, but they blend in pretty well with their surroundings eh?"
"You can say that again!" Neither Sally nor Julie could see anything except trees and rocks and small bushes.
"Ali's is over here." They started to walk along one of the little paths that branched of to their left.
Ali's place was in a group of big rocks right alongside the river, slightly back towards where they'd come from. It was made from a framework of long sticks, nestling in a hollow in the rocks. Most of the wall area was rock, with the roof and the rest of the walls made from a combination of grass thatching and a jumble of old green and brown tarps. Liz let out a low, animal- like call as they approached it, which was answered by another one, similar, but quite distinct, from inside.
"Wow! You decided to come after all, then?" Ali was sitting on a low bed on the uneven dirt floor. A kettle was just beginning to boil on a small fire which was half inside and half outside the strange little shelter.
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