Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

I wake in the morning in the sunlight and the warmth and the air perfumed by wildflowers. I rise with the sun. There are no alarm clocks in this place, and even if there were, they would not feel right. The calm and quiet stillness has an almost spiritual experience to it. To pierce it with the modern would be blasphemy against some ancient, unknown god.

Outside my tent is a spectacular sight. Laid out before me as though painted in oils by the hand of some master long since passed. Sandstone gorges. Parched and jagged mountain peaks. Pea green trees against orange rock against cobalt skies. It makes for striking contrast. The countryside is bold beyond comprehension.

It is both humbling and saddening to know that in three months, all I see before me will be gone. The people. The wildlife. The open savannah plains. The fields of multicolored flowers growing unhelped and unhindered by human hands. Even the azure sky, so perfect I must keep reminding myself reality cannot be Photoshopped.

Yesterday the owner of the property on which I camp took me through his home. A hunkering building of sandstone and cement, every piece of furniture constructed of concrete and bolted to the floor. The bottom of the walls stained red in a crude wainscoting about a metre in height. I asked him if the paint had any particular significance. “It does, but it’s not paint,” he replied, giggling as his dark face spread into a smile. “It’s the high water mark from the monsoon season last year.”

That is why they leave, why this most spectacular place is annually abandoned to the elements. In three months the summer rains will begin, and the ancient rivers running through the land will reclaim everything. Like Antarctica, this part of the world remains one of the last bastions of nature, as undomesticated and untameable as the fauna. Tied since antiquity to this never-ending cycle. Drown and be reborn. Die and flourish.

I am not in a foreign country, though I am nearly 4000km from home. I am in the Kimberley in Western Australia. The earth is old and unfertile. Cracked and wrinkled and burnt as an old man’s hand, yet still nothing short of breathtaking. This is my country, my home, and still this place – this world – is so far removed from anything I have ever known. I might as well be a prisoner on the First Fleet discovering this raw and arid realm for the first time.

On the ridge I will call home for the next few days, I breathe deep the clean, warm air. The wind carries with it the sound of didgeridoos from the homestead below. The euphony of chirping birds. The Kimberley is waking up, and so must I. There is so much to see, so much to be discovered. I change quickly in the already sweltering sun and set out across the hot earth of the savannah into the unknown.