Austbiblica

In 1964 I crossed Australia by train. I was a teenager, and at the time I didn’t realise that this event would shape much of my much of my thinking over almost 40 years and lead to this book. It left me with an overwhelming sense of the vastness of this land. Although that it took place in the 1960’s, the impression of that journey has stayed with me over all those years.

We left Perth at 6.00pm on a Sunday in January, 1964. After a few hours of travelling through familiar territory I settled down for the night on my bed. I woke early next morning with the sun, and when I pulled up the blind and looked out the window, I was amazed at what I saw. We were somewhere between Southern Cross and Kalgoorlie. The countryside was flat, the earth was red-brown, the grass was dead, and the trees were found only in clumps. It seemed to me to be a vast uninhabited space, and the landscape continued like that until we reached Kalgoorlie. It was a town which seemed to me to consist mostly of red dirt, and houses with fences made exclusively of battered and badly painted corrugated iron.

We changed trains at Kalgoorlie, leaving the narrow-gauge Westland for the air-conditioned luxury of the standard-gauge train known in those days as the Trans-Continental Express. It was to take us to Port Pirie, where the end of the standard gauge track meant a change of train for trip to Adelaide on South Australia’s broad gauge. The trip from Kalgoorlie to Port Pirie took us across the treeless landscape of the Nullarbor Plain. Covered with spinifex, it was dry, red and so flat that at one point the train line ran dead straight for nearly 550 kilometres. Although the train travelled at reasonable speed, it seemed to take forever to cross.

Along the way were small settlements, home to the fettling gangs who maintained the railway line. In the era of steam the train used to stop at these places for water and other requirements. After a trip of over thirty hours we arrived at Port Pirie and boarded the non-air-conditioned train for the three hour trip to Adelaide. It was a typically hot January day too hot for carrying a block of chocolate in my coat pocket, as I rather ruefully discovered during the journey. At Adelaide we changed trains again and travelled overnight to Melbourne, where there was another change of train for the trip to Sydney. After nearly four days and 4000 km my trip finished not far south of Sydney.

Although that trip took place in back in 1964, its memory stays with me. It was my first experience of the huge mass of land we call Australia, and it left me such a strong sense of its overwhelming size and intimidating character that the trip could have happened just yesterday. As someone born and raised in a coastal city, the experience of the land was overwhelming. The railway line and the small settlements along it were like threatened outposts, insignificant markers on the unending flat landscape. The sheer size of our land has impressed itself on me again and again: on flights across Australia either from south to north or east to west, in visiting the Kimberleys or the deserted gold mining sites outside of Kalgoorlie, or in trips along the coast where in some places the beach seems endless.

Standing on an Australian beach and looking out to sea, I often think of how far away we are from the next landfall. It is a different experience from standing on Singapore’s Ponggol Point and looking across the water to Malaysia, or seeing the cliffs of Dover from across the English channel. We in Australia stand on the edge looking both inwardly and outwardly at a huge expanse of either land or sea. We are “the last stop before Antartica”. The experiences were on the one hand of the overwhelming power of the land, on the other hand of feeling on the edge of something. These encounters with the land had become liminal experiences, pointing me towards the divine.