Country Calm Before Hobart's Hustle

Buckland is an hour short of Hobart, which in Tasmania counts as a proper leg. In Queensland an hour gets you between two towns on the same stretch of highway with nothing in between worth stopping for. Here it takes you from the east coast to the edge of the capital through four distinct kinds of country, and you can do it after a slow morning and still arrive with the afternoon in hand. We had not adjusted to it even after four months. Everything was closer than we expected, always.

Ye Olde Buckland Inn lets travellers use the paddock behind it. There was one other caravan over on the far side and otherwise the whole thing was ours: flat, open, treeless, with the sky sitting on top of it uninterrupted from one horizon to the other.

Which was the point. The batteries had been living hand to mouth since Storeys Creek, and the bus carries a large enough reserve that topping it up properly needs real hours of real sun, not the filtered stuff you get under a canopy or the hour or two between fronts. This paddock had nothing in the way. We parked, angled up, and left it to get on with it, and for once the numbers went the direction they were supposed to.

The sun had actual heat in it by late morning, which had not been true for a while. So we set up outside, and Anth got a haircut.

Sal has cut his hair since the road started, sitting him on a chair in whatever open ground the camp provides, working around him with the clippers and a comb and a pair of scissors that live in a drawer with the tools. The hair goes wherever the wind takes it. There is no mirror until afterwards, and no negotiating. It takes about twenty minutes and it is one of the small ordinary transactions that hold a life like this together: nobody books an appointment, nobody pays anybody, and every few weeks one person sits still while the other one sorts them out.

The warmth went early. It usually does at that time of year, but it went fast, an hour of shirt-sleeves collapsing into a scramble to get the chair and the tools back inside. By four it was cold enough to want the door shut.

Tomorrow was a town day. Hobart, errands, resupply, and then Sal off to her friends for the weekend, the three of them together for the first time since we left. She had been looking forward to it since the mechanic told us the wheels would not come off.

So we sat in the paddock with the batteries full for the first time in a fortnight, one van for company, and the sky going through its colours over an empty field. There is a particular quiet to the last night before a busy one, when everything is packed and nothing has started yet.Read more