Bricks, Bridges & the Nomad's Heart

Anth came off the highway at the first opportunity and took the back roads south.

It costs almost nothing in time on this island and it changes the day completely. The Midland Highway is the fast way between Launceston and Hobart and it is dull in the specific way that efficient roads are dull. The alternative was farmland, patches of forest, small rises with something on the other side of them, and a string of geocaches to stop for along the way. He had done the highway version months earlier with Sal. This was better.

Campbell Town by mid-afternoon, and a camp on the bank of the Elizabeth River with the Red Bridge standing over it.

Setting up alone takes longer and is quieter. There is nobody to hand you the thing you are reaching for, nobody to say the chairs would be better facing the other way, nobody to disagree with about where the level ground actually is. He got it done and the bus sat there with the river behind it and too much space inside, and he did what people do in that situation, which is take a photograph to send to somebody who is not there.

The Red Bridge is worth the stop. It was finished in 1838 and it is the oldest brick arch bridge still standing in this country, and every brick in it was made and laid by convicts. Somewhere between one and two million of them went into it. It is still carrying traffic. Trucks go over it.

That is the thing about Campbell Town: the convict period is not commemorated here so much as still functioning.

Down the main street there is the Convict Brick Trail, about fifteen hundred bricks set into the footpath, and each one has a person on it. Name, ship, year, crime, sentence. You walk along reading them and the crimes are almost all the same, which is the part that gets you. Stealing a coat. Stealing a handkerchief. Stealing food. Seven years, fourteen years, life, sent to the far side of the planet and never going home. Roughly seventy-five thousand people were transported to Van Diemen's Land, and a decent proportion of them ended up doing work like the bridge at the end of the street.

He walked it slowly, from the Foxhunters Return, which is a convict-built coaching inn from the 1830s and also still in use, down through the town, reading names off the ground.

There were geocaches through the town too, which sounds trivial alongside the rest of it and is not, particularly. Both things are the same impulse: somebody leaves a record, and somebody else finds it later. One of them is a name pressed into clay by a man with no choice about being here. The other is a plastic container behind a fence post. But they are both people saying that they came through this place.

He bought food at the grocery, walked back down to the bridge as the light went, and stood there a while looking at it.

Then back to the bus, and the river, and an early night, and Hobart tomorrow. Sal was in Brisbane with her parents. In a few days he would be in Adelaide with a needle in his arm. The bridge had been standing for a hundred and eighty-six years and would presumably keep standing, which was a reasonable thing to think about while going to sleep alone.Read more