First Camp Under the Bunyas

The Bunya Mountains were our first planned stop, and we arrived not quite believing we had made it.

Two nights. That was all we had allowed, which in hindsight was about right for a couple still learning how to stay somewhere without a reason beyond wanting to. The campground sat high, close to a thousand metres, and the temperature had dropped enough from the lowland heat that the air felt like a different country. Ancient bunya pines stood above the site, enormous and still, their dark crowns holding a silence that the wind barely reached. Some of those trees had been standing for centuries. We had been on the road for three days.

Twenty-two months between buying the bus and this moment. We had said that number to each other so many times during the build that it had lost its meaning, but here, parked beneath trees older than anything we would ever make, it landed differently. Twenty-two months of weekends and late nights, of panels cut wrong and recut, of a conversion that started on the street in Wurtulla and finished in the driveway at Aroona. The bus still had no name. It had a fridge, a bed, a stove, a diesel engine that ran well, and now, for the first time, a campsite that was not a test but the real thing.

Sal walked the loop track through the rainforest while Anth sorted the camp. King parrots moved through the understorey in flashes of green and red. The forest floor was damp and shaded, the canopy thick enough to hold its own weather, and the bunya cones that had fallen along the track were the size of footballs, split open to show the pale seeds inside. It was not dramatic country in the way the coast is dramatic. It was quiet, and old, and entirely unconcerned with the two people who had just arrived with everything they owned in seven metres of converted steel.

That first evening, sitting outside with the trees going dark above them, neither of us reached for the usual words. No talk of plans, distances, the next stop. Just the cooling air and the sound of birds settling and the particular stillness that comes when something long anticipated has finally, plainly, happened.Read more