desert smoke

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 12 years ago

In 1999 I published my first book. A week later the girlfriend who used to live across the road returned to Brisbane from the desert and said, do you wanna make a road trip? We set off on retread tyres and with (it turned out) not enough tools to help out when things went wrong. Just outside Toowoomba (an hour west) I phoned my Mum. “Mum the van’s overheated! We forgot to check the water.” Anyway we made our way west, west, west. Spent the night in a grand hotel in Longreach with verandahs broad enough to foxtrot on. In the morning I stashed my packet of tobacco in a potplant and that is how I finally quit smoking.

We spent the third night in Alice Springs. By this time we had bonded and had told each other our life stories. I read her passages from my diary. She told me stories of her abused mother’s fight to shift her relationship with the now aging grandfather, using delayed cups of lukewarm tea, passive-aggression, and humour. Only 700km to Uluru (‘Ayers Rock’): we were on the home stretch! It felt like our own driveway. Then we blew a tyre. Like superheroes we got down and changed it, yay for us. Then we blew another. Two people who were travelling round Australia in a mobile home stopped to help us. The man was seamed and nuggety, he said, Don’t you girls dare go a whisker over 30 kays, now: you’ll blow the tread, and then you’re really rooted. So we crawled home to the tiny community of Mutitjulu where she worked – the short drive took us more than seven hours. We daren’t stop. When one of us needed to pee the other took the wheel and we hung our bottoms out the window. She was still smoking but somehow, I had lost the knack. I had last left Uluru when I turned 21 and quit my tour guide job. I spent ten days in a dream of homecoming, rolling myself naked in the red dust of an evening, walking out the door or her little house, magnetically drawn, almost every time I glanced up and saw Uluru. Crouching there like something, someone, it’s unsacred to speak of. I found the tiny second hand shop in the resort, run by a ranger’s wife, and consisting of things the high-turnover staff had left behind. I bought old-man’s underpants and a singlet and dyed them to form a swimsuit. After that I swam laps every day in the Sheraton pool. A rich lady befriended me at the bar and confided if you showed up at the front desk with enough confidence, you could ask them for the keys for a ‘poolside room’ (that is, on the asssumption that your own room was too far away upstairs) and so that is what I did. I lazed in the big white beds and had baths. I wrapped myself in dense velvety white bathrobes every day. I met interesting people from faraway places. And I kept going back to the sacred place, every day, every day. One night I cycled round the base as it grew dark and had to follow a very merry carload of local men home: I could not find which sandhill concealed the community. Never been so glad to hear a booming generator.

I took copies of my book into the newsagent and they said, yes, they would buy some and sell them. I went out dancing on the same dancefloor I’d loved when I was 20, and danced til I could barely remember my own name. When I was ready to come home, there was a problem: at that stage I had never owned a car, and saw no reason to carry my driver’s license in my purse. So as well as no shoes I had no photo ID. There was a tiny library for staff and the librarian was a Justice of the Peace. I explained to her my dilemma. I showed her the book, whose title is Going for the Eggs in the Middle of the Night. I showed her how the poem titles were printed in my own handwriting. And how it has photos in it of our family when we were kids, photos of me and taken by me as a child. “Ok,” she said, “it’s you.” And after she’d signed an affadavit I was entitled to buy a plane ticket and fly across the detailed and sumptuous red plains, to Brisneyland.