Redbacks and Resilience

Emus watched us leave the Warrumbungles. Hundreds of them behind the fence of a farm near the highway, their necks swivelling in unison as the bus passed, and beyond them a scatter of native budgerigars lifting from the grass in a green and yellow cloud. It was that kind of country now: flat, dry, alive with things that moved.

Gilgandra came next, a small town with a war memorial and a story worth stopping for. In 1915, when the recruitment offices were not drawing enough volunteers, thirty-five men set out from here on foot for Sydney, over five hundred kilometres south, calling "Cooee" through every town they passed. By the time they reached the city their number had grown past two hundred. We read the plaques and stood in the heat for a while, feeling the particular weight that small-town war history carries in this country.

A toppled dog trailer had blocked the main road out of town, which sent us through backroads we had not planned on. We wound through side streets and farm tracks until the highway appeared again, no harm done, the kind of minor reroute that was starting to feel less like disruption and more like how things worked out here.

Dubbo was a supply stop: fuel, water, groceries, the practical side of the life that does not make the photographs. From there we turned into Goobang National Park and found Wanda Wandong campground, which was modest in the way bush camps often are. Flat ground, a few sites, kangaroos moving through the scrub at the edges. The drop dunny, though, had a resident. A redback spider had set up under the seat, and the size of it suggested she had been there long enough to consider the arrangement permanent. We used the dunny anyway, carefully, because the alternative was the bush and the bush had its own residents.

The heat was serious but different from what we had left behind in Queensland. Dry heat, the kind that pulls moisture out of everything it touches. We strung a line between trees and hung the lot: sheets, pillow slips, a fortnight's backlog of clothes. Everything dried in hours. Sal stood in the shade of the bus while the washing crackled stiff in the sun, and the thought that passed between us without needing to be spoken was a simple one: this was easier than it had any right to be.

Two weeks on the road. Not long, but long enough for something to shift. The urgency of the first days, the low hum of anxiety about whether the bus would hold or the life would feel right, had begun to ease. What replaced it was not excitement exactly, more a settling, a quietness in the routine of waking and driving and stopping and sleeping that felt less like something we were doing and more like something we had become. The dry air and the flat country and the uncomplicated business of washing clothes in the sun had something to do with it. So did the redback. You cannot take a place too seriously when a spider has more claim to the toilet than you do.Read more