38 Years Between Visits

We left Goobang early, coffee made by candlelight before the sun was up, and turned west off the Newell Highway for the first time since we had joined it days earlier. The road ran flat and straight through country that was drying out by the kilometre, the paddocks bleached pale under a sky that was already building heat at seven in the morning. This was the run toward Parkes, and the dish appeared on the horizon well before we reached it, the way things do in flat country: a pale shape against the sky that grew slowly into something enormous.

Sal had been here once, thirty-eight years ago. She remembered the scale of it but not much else, and standing beneath it now she was quiet in the way people are when a place has changed less than they have. Anth had never seen it. The dish is sixty-four metres across, mounted on a concrete tower in the middle of open farmland, and up close the engineering of it is difficult to take in. It does not look like something that belongs in a paddock. They watched it rotate, slow and deliberate, tracking something neither of them could name, and the silence around it was not the silence of an empty place but of a place doing something precise and patient that had nothing to do with its audience. They stayed longer than they had planned to, walking the grounds, reading the panels, standing in the shadow of the dish when the sun moved far enough to cast one.

The heat was building. Thirty-seven degrees by the time we left Parkes, the kind of temperature that turns the bitumen into a shimmer and makes the air-conditioning not a comfort but a necessity. Our original plan, whatever it had been, dissolved in the way plans had already started to dissolve on this trip: quietly, without argument, replaced by the simpler need to find somewhere bearable before evening. Lake Wyangan appeared, unplanned, a few kilometres outside Griffith, and we took it.

The bus parked up beside the water with the tinted windows blocking the worst of the glare, the curtains drawn across the windscreen, the fans turning overhead. Inside, the Coaster held its own. The gap between the furnace outside and the stillness within felt like the first real test the build had passed under pressure, and passing it mattered more than either of us said. We cooked that evening with the doors closed and the temperature inside sitting at something close to comfortable, and ate in the quiet of a bus that had been designed for exactly this and was, so far, proving it.

The sunrise the next morning came across the lake in pale colour, the water flat enough to double it. We stood outside in the brief window before the heat returned and watched the light arrive, and the photographs we took were not really the point.

South of the lake the road passed through Griffith, a town laid out by Walter Burley Griffin, the same architect who designed Canberra. Sal recognised something in the grid of the streets, an echo of the city she had grown up in, familiar geometry in unfamiliar country. She mentioned it without elaborating, the way she did when a connection surfaced that was more feeling than fact. Beyond Griffith the orchards began: citrus trees heavy with fruit, vineyards in long rows running toward a horizon that seemed, in this heat, to wobble slightly at its edges. The road south continued, and the bus held steady against the afternoon, and neither of us suggested stopping again until we needed to.Read more