Midland Meanders & Melbourne Moments

East off the plateau and then north into the Midlands, which after weeks of sub-alpine moorland felt like a different state entirely: farmland, hedgerows, stone buildings, sheep.

Campbell Town again. Anth had been through in August on his own, on the way south to the Adelaide flight, and had walked the Convict Brick Trail then and told her about it. This time both of us walked it.

It is a different thing with two people. Alone you read the bricks at your own pace and the accumulation does the work. Together you keep stopping each other. Look at this one. Fourteen years for a coat. This one was sixteen.

And then Sal found one Anth had walked straight past.

John Kelly. Transported to Van Diemen's Land in 1842 for stealing two pigs. Seven years.

He served it, got out, went to Victoria, married, and had a son called Edward. Ned Kelly, the armour, Glenrowan, the most told story in Australian history. All of it descends from a man who stole a couple of pigs in Tipperary and got sent to the bottom of the world for it, and whose name is now set into a footpath in a small Tasmanian town where several thousand cars a day drive over him without looking down.

We stood there a while. Anth had read that footpath carefully three weeks earlier and missed it entirely.

Coffee afterwards at a café on the main street, sitting inside with other people's conversations going on around us, which is its own small pleasure when most meals happen in a parked vehicle.

Then Launceston for the practical run: water, diesel, groceries. And in the middle of that, a phone call, and another opportunity to put money into the Japan fund, and Anth booking a flight to Melbourne for a screening the following morning.

We ate quickly and drove out to Evandale, to Honeysuckle Banks, again. Third time at that camp and the only reason we ever choose it is that it is five minutes from the airport.

He was gone under twenty-four hours. Sal had the trains and the headlights and the flight path for a second time and knew exactly what she was in for.

The next day ran in two places. Anth in a Melbourne clinic doing bloods and questions and forms. Sal in a bus in a paddock at Evandale with her laptop open, working through her coursework, occasionally with a plane going over that might have been carrying him. He was back that afternoon and we drove the five minutes from arrivals to the camp.

We stayed another night, and Sal had lectures. Live ones, on a schedule, which means being somewhere with signal at a fixed hour, laptop open, headphones in, in a bus. While that was happening Anth walked into Evandale and looked at it properly for the first time. It is one of the oldest surviving Georgian villages in the country and almost the whole main street is intact, buildings from the 1830s and 40s still being used as shops and houses rather than preserved behind glass.

The last day was laundry and the hairdresser, which is not much of a way to describe a day and was exactly the day. Machines running, then Sal in a chair getting her hair done properly for the second time in a month, and then out of Launceston in the dark with clean clothes and a full tank.Read more