Crocker's outback

Chilling out in the Australian outback is a getaway from the banality of political machinations. In the world of IT, “chilling out” is akin to deleting the mind’s hard-drive—purging the brain of superfluous spam, returning speed and clarity of function—I think!

Enjoyment is assumed, sans permission, and like a welcomed holiday, enjoyment comes easy and right is at one. Remarkably, from the murk of urban profanity perception is aroused, simply by sitting long enough, and patient enough to observe simplicity itself. Thus interspersed with unfettered imagination and a liberal dollop of fantasy, the whole experience tastes like cold, thick, cream drizzled upon fresh strawberries that bleed their sweetness to a swirling pink that eludes the finest hue on the artist’s palette. All of it far more palatable and easier to comprehend than any polly-babble from an elected one’s muzzle.

Escaping to the “outback” for some is met within a hundred kilometres of major hubs—or less. Where coin-operated BBQs caked with cremated guck in suburban parks are remote enough—close to toilets and pizza shop. Others, I suppose the dullards of modern youth, seek the outback for hunting—to experience the difference between a manicured T-bone from the supermarket and biting on a bullet in the stringy leg of a murdered roo. These high-powered warriors from moving vehicles kill mail boxes and road signs, and too often a grazier’s livestock that meander too close to roadside boundaries.

It’s a primal gene from the neanderthal hunter-gatherer that commands and it’s also a one-off exercise where gutting rarely occurs and little if any is eaten—too yucky for an interloper to outback ways.

Nature’s reign in the wild is omnipotent and attends to its own dreck—efficiently at that. Roadkill and the likes are nourishment to many creatures that lick the plate clean. But not so the empty grog cartons littering the roadside table drains, nor the plastic shopping bags hiding mankind’s messy flotsam of loaded diapers and other unmentionables that no animal will consider. It says much about these macho ill-bred pests and their assault upon rural order.

But these mobile neanderthals are marksmen of note, the Robin Hoods of a Sherwood Fair when the bowman’s shafts were split at 50 yards—a double bullseye. Progress, however, examples that by close-range shotgun blasts to a 10-square-meter road sign—just nicking it with a one-metre spray at point-blank range. Bravo lads! God speed the fleeing emu and have mercy upon the disoriented rabbit. Do they know, or care that about 98 percent of Australians are fed by the remaining two percent—the farmers whose domain they plunder and sully?

“It’s a sign of the times” lament older locals that remain in decaying country towns around Australia. The vibrancy of the “sheep’s back” is now obscure and the salad days have wilted. Those communities once enriched by farming families from generations before are mere skeletons of a social tapestry from a bygone era.

Most Station Homesteads in this land had, and many still do, a tennis court—symbols of rural lairdship. That once venue for social intercourse, like so many remote communities, has atrophied as Mother Nature reclaims the burnished clay courts of yore and tumbleweed inhabits. All that remains in most cases are memories of crisp, tennis whites, cool lemonade between sets, hearty steaks that fortified the body and news of others that nourished the mind. The steely resolve necessary for prosperity and survival in our sunburned country survives but in a very different way.

Modernity, with its many trappings good and bad is testing a new era for our rural providers. Conglomerate ventures, foreign ownership, a changing climate and world production are contentious matters. The crystal-ball guessing of when and what to plant for local and world markets spell success or failure in a “Cockies” life—not to mention the unpredictability of government regulation.

Perhaps Banjo Paterson’s poem, Clancy of the Overflow resounds more fortuitous than ever imagined when he compared city life to country living:

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow, they have no time to waste.

But my world is but a distant reverie from the times of Banjo’s romanticism, and indeed the reign of the Australian Cocky; and their once privileged children at upscale boarding schools.

My sojourn has delivered me to Lorne Caravan Park near Lightning Ridge. The original Lorne Station was a 10,500 acre purchased by the Waterford family in 1947. Five-Star it ain’t—rusticity it oozes. Action it has not—peace, tranquility and the outback it has tonnes. And, clean toilets and ample hot showers are as essential as quaffing a frosty beer on 40 a degree day—nothing to do with being a sissy, is it?

Geoff Crocker.