Kaputar's Quiet Claim

The country changed on the way west from Mann River. What had been green and lush dried out quickly, the hills pulling back from the road until the land was wide and pale and open. We stopped at the standing stones outside Glen Innes, a modern arrangement honouring the area's Celtic heritage, and walked among them long enough to feel the shift in the air. This was different country now, and it asked for a different pace.

Rain caught us at Killarney Gap, sudden and heavy, wrapping the peaks in cloud that had not been there ten minutes earlier. We drove through it and out the other side into dry heat again, resupplied at Narrabri, and turned south toward Mount Kaputar with the afternoon still ahead of us. The road climbed steadily from the plains, and with every switchback the air through the windows cooled a little more. By the time we reached Dawson's Spring campsite at fifteen hundred metres, the January heat we had been carrying since Aroona felt like something we had left at the bottom of the mountain.

The camp sat inside the forest rather than beside it. Light came through the canopy in broken shafts, and the understorey moved with small life: fairy wrens darting low through the scrub, king parrots in the middle branches, a currawong calling from somewhere we could not see. A kangaroo stood at the clearing's edge as we set up, a joey's head poking from her pouch, both of them watching us with a stillness that felt less like caution than mild curiosity. It was the kind of place that makes you lower your voice without deciding to.

A Dutch couple were camped nearby, and the conversation started the way campground conversations do, with routes and recommendations and how far each party had come. Somewhere in the middle of it we discovered that their daughter carried the same name as ours. A small thing, but it shifted the talk from practical to personal, and we sat together longer than planned, trading stories while the light changed around us.

The summit walk the next morning took us above the treeline and into wind. Serious wind, the kind that bends the scrub flat and pushes at your chest. The view it guarded was worth the effort: plains running west toward country we could not yet imagine, ranges stacked to the east, the whole of the surrounding land laid out beneath a sky that seemed, from this height, to belong to a larger world than the one we had been driving through. We stood there a long time, not saying much. Before we turned back Sal leaned into Anth and kissed him, briefly, with the wind still pressing at them both. Neither of them mentioned it afterwards. It was enough that it had happened, up there, at the beginning of everything.Read more