Traces of Time, Tranquility's Promise

The plan was Oatlands, twenty minutes down the road. What happened instead was Ross.

Grammy had wanted to see Ross. It had been on her list during the three weeks she and Fran were with us and it had not happened, the way things do not happen when there are four people and a schedule and a ferry at the end of it. Anth pulled in on his own, four months after she flew home, and went round it for her.

The town centre is a crossroads and the locals have a name for each corner. The hotel is Temptation. The Catholic church is Salvation. The town hall is Recreation. The old gaol is Damnation. It is the kind of thing that could be a tourist invention and is not; it is just what people there have called it for a very long time, and standing in the middle of it you can see the whole scheme at once, all four options available within thirty metres of each other.

There was a geocache up past the church, which took him toward the river, and that is how he came to the bridge.

Ross Bridge was finished in 1836 and it is the third-oldest bridge still in use in this country. What makes it worth walking to is not its age. It is the carvings: one hundred and eighty-six of them, cut into the stone of the arches, animals and faces and Celtic patterns and figures that are recognisably particular people. They were carved by a convict called Daniel Herbert, transported for highway robbery, and the work was good enough that he was granted a pardon for it. He stayed in Ross afterwards. He is buried there.

So a man sent to the end of the earth for robbery cut faces into a bridge and got his life back for it, and the bridge is still standing and still carrying cars, and the faces are still there, worn but legible.

On the way there were the old stables, which are the sort of building that has outlived its purpose so completely that there is nothing to do with it but look at it.

He would have stayed longer. But there was a camp to find and light to lose, so he got back in the bus.

Oatlands, when he reached it, was mid-festival. Winter festival, the last day of it, and the free camp that would ordinarily be a paddock with a few vans in it was stalls and parked cars and people. There is nothing wrong with any of that. It was simply not what he had driven there for, and after seven months of choosing camps for how few people are in them, the calculation happens automatically.

WikiCamps again. Something at Tunnack, twenty minutes off.

Tunnack is a small town in the sense that there is not much there, and the camp is the community oval, which you are welcome to drive onto. He put the bus at the edge with bush on one side and the whole open field on the other. One other vehicle, well away.

A country oval is a strange place to sleep and a very good one. Flat, mown, absolutely quiet, and enormous relative to the one vehicle on it. Somebody plays football there on winter Saturdays and somebody mows it and somebody put a set of goalposts up, and none of them were there that evening.

Last night alone. Hobart in the morning, then the flight, then Adelaide and CMAX and a fortnight of blood tests and controlled meals and the money that would put all four of them in Japan in November.

Sal would be back before long. The bus would be full again. For now it was an oval in the middle of nowhere, going dark, with a bird calling somewhere in the bush and nobody at all to talk to about the faces on the bridge at Ross.Read more