Highland Magic: Three Days of Wonder

Christmas Eve was spent driving up into the highlands, slowly, because Anth had caches to find and because there is no reason to hurry on a road you have driven before when the only appointment is a day that arrives on its own.

There was another old one at Arthur Lake, twenty years in the same spot, still being logged. That is four of these now and they have become a small collection of their own: containers left in the bush by people at the start of a hobby that barely existed, still being found by people who were not born when they were hidden.

The light started going while we were still up there, and the highlands emptied of vehicles and filled with animals. Small wallabies going off the verge in that abrupt way they have. Then a wombat crossing the road ahead of us with the unhurried confidence of something that has never had to give way to anything. We slowed right down, which is what you do up there at dusk if you want to arrive with your bullbar intact and your conscience clear.

Through Miena and past the Great Lake Dam, then onto roads neither of us had driven, with the sun going down behind us the whole way.

The camp we had picked had a tent in it. One tent, nobody else, somebody who had come a long way to be somewhere quiet on Christmas Eve, and there was no version of pulling a seven-metre bus in next to them that would have improved their night. So we left them to it and went looking, and ended up at the boat ramp at Little Pine Lagoon, which was better than the place we had been aiming for.

The wind came up hard that night, as it does at that altitude, and the bus moved on its springs until morning.

Christmas Day, then. The first one out here.

We had talked about walking to Lake St Clair and did not. There was no reason to be anywhere. That was the whole point of it, and it took most of the morning to properly understand what we had been handed: a Christmas with nothing scheduled in it. No lunch to time, no drive to make, nobody arriving, nothing to be cleaned before or after. Just a lagoon, a bus, and a day.

We watched Violent Night, which is a film in which Santa Claus kills a large number of mercenaries with a sledgehammer, and which is now apparently our Christmas tradition. Nobody suggested anything else.

Then the calls, and this is the part Sal will tell you about.

Torrin and Sophie and Shea in Japan, in a ski town in the northern winter. Mack in Queensland in the heat. Us at a boat ramp in the middle of Tasmania. Four screens, three time zones, and every one of them wanting to talk rather than checking a clock, because none of us had anywhere to be. In a normal year those conversations happen in gaps: between courses, before someone drives home, with a room full of noise behind them. This year there were no gaps. There was just the whole afternoon and everybody in it.

Sal said afterwards it was one of the best Christmases she has had. Not one of the best of the last few years. One of the best.

She meant it, and she was not being brave about anything. There was no house to prepare and no schedule to run and nobody to perform any of it for. Her kids were happy, and told her so at length, and she got to sit at a lagoon in the highlands and hear it without watching the time.

Then, just before midnight, the aurora came back.

Faint. A low green wash in the south with a bit of structure in it if you looked properly, nothing like the May night and nothing like Trout Creek. Four now, in eight months. We stood out at the boat ramp in the cold and watched it do very little, on Christmas night, having spent the day exactly as we wanted.

On Boxing Day we had planned to move and did not.

The lagoon was flat in the morning and the birds were working it, and the wind that had been shoving the bus around all night had dropped to nothing. There was no reason to leave and every reason not to, so we stayed another night and did very little in it.

That is the part of this that took the longest to learn. Not how to find the good places. How to stay in them.Read more