This Was Alive Once

We stood among the death and ash, and the world stretched away and between us. The fire had torn through the trees and farms and left nothing behind. My feet were anchored to the ground, but she moved freely, shifting and floating, unable to stay still. Somewhere, a house had stood. 

In Memory of The Journey

We switch trains at a single-platform station, moving from one empty carriage to another. Both trains were clean and quiet and clinical, marvels of modern transport but far removed from the rattling cages that I remember from the homeland. The tracks are wider and newer here, so we lounge on comfortable seats in diode light and slide across the landscape with barely a sound. The passing freight trains hiss by the windows in near silence.

The City Slows But The People Bloom

During summer, the mountains behind Brisbane are hot and humid, and the crowds flock to them. Tourists and residents swarm through the bushland and over the lookouts to enjoy the heat and the views, but in winter, the air cools quickly, and the chill winds tug at clothes made for the beach. We sit with our legs hanging from the lookout, huddled against ourselves as the sky slips into darkness.

The Waves Stroked Our Ageing Hull

The water rolls gently against the hull of the boat, rocking us gently as we lounge in the heat of the midday sun. The engine is still, and the only sounds that fill our world are the breaking of waves, the cries of the gulls that orbit overhead, and the occasional page being turned – a crisp slice of paper folding through itself.

Monuments To What This Land Once Was

The store sits on the corner of the street in a building as old as Sydney, all cracked mortar and intricate mortises, but the art inside is older still, older than the boats that landed in the bay nearby and older than the methods used now used to create them. The bus rattles to a stop, and the doors struggle to pull apart. Of the three – the art, the shop, and itself – the bus is the youngest, but it pulls away from us in shame and coughs up a hill and out of sight.

A View from the Roof

The tyres gripped and spun in the dirt and stones that lay on the side of the road as we pulled the van off the tarmac. We didn’t indicate; the road was empty bar us. We had been driving for hours and hadn’t passed another person since an empty bus had overtaken us on a corner and sped away. She turned the radio down, and I clicked the engine off. She opened her door and pulled herself onto the boiling steel of the van’s roof while I climbed up over the bonnet and windshield.

This Is The Harbour City

The ferry is old, all welded steel and flaking paint, and we sit on a creaking wooden bench as the engines rise and throb through the floor. The water surges around the hull, and we pulse backwards and into the harbour. A wind pulls against our clothes. We huddle against the chill, but we do not take refuge inside. We wait as the skyline of Sydney is pulled away and into view: the bridge, the opera house, and the towering high-rise are all where they should be, where the tour guides say.

Melbourne’s Cobblestones

She carries her heels loosely in one hand, and her toes curl through her tights against the weatherworn cobblestones. Our arms are linked, and the lights that are strung between the laneway’s windows blur against the flashes of graffiti. Even with the moon hiding behind the brickwork, the coffee shops stay open, and the caffeine still flows. Somewhere beyond these walls of art is a country of red dust and venom.

By The Docks of Hobart

The road scythes through dolomite veins with the cliffs shading the road. Before us, the mountains of Wellington Park wrap around the horizon, coated in a deep and shimmering green. Burnt and blackened trees reach from the new-growth and claw like fingers toward the solitary cloud that floats in the sky. We weave around corners, glimpsing the river and the bay it opens onto, but we have to push through the suburbs for Hobart to present itself.