White Storm Over the Water

We woke to the stillness of the camp, that early country quiet that sits over a small town before it has properly stirred, and set off on a short walk through Maidenwell to stretch the night out of our legs. Like so many of these inland towns it was a modest place, a handful of streets given over to the wide quiet of the bush around them, and it did not take long to see the whole of it. We came back to the bus, packed our small home down, and said our goodbye to the first stop of the leg. One night, and already the road had us again.

The drive was a short one. We rolled into Dalby, a town threaded through Anth's earliest memories, the waypoint of his childhood on all those long runs out west to family properties, familiar to him in that deep and half-remembered way a place is when you knew it as a boy. This time we stopped, long enough for a coffee, before pointing the bus out of town again. Twenty minutes was all it took to reach the next camp, on the shores of Lake Broadwater, the one true natural lake of any size on the whole of the Darling Downs and a known haven for waterbirds. We found ourselves a spot up the far end and settled in among the red gums.

There were corellas. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, a white storm of birds strung through every tree and wheeling over the water, and they were loud beyond all reckoning. Their racket filled the days from first light, a relentless, comic, ear-splitting chorus that rose and fell and never quite stopped, to the point where Sal could barely hear herself think, let alone hold a video call. And calls were exactly what she needed to make, for she was settling into the new office Anth had built for her in the cab of the bus. This was the cleverness of his long list of small jobs come good. Sal's counselling work asks for privacy, the kind of quiet, closed space a client on the other end of a line has every right to expect, and Anth had made her one out of the front of the bus, fitting a Lagun swing-out table so that she could take her sessions in private at camp. He had thought ahead, too, to the days when we would be moving: the table swung out for study on the road as readily as it served at a standstill, so that neither the driving nor the destination need interrupt the steady progress of her degree. The corellas, of course, had not been consulted, and on the worst of their mornings Sal could only laugh and wait for a lull.

We took the bikes down off the back for their first proper outing of this new chapter. It was nothing arduous, a gentle ten kilometres looping through an old pine forest, the trunks standing in their long planted rows and the soft needle-fall hushing the ground beneath the tyres. Ten kilometres, though, was ten kilometres, and Sal was quietly pleased with herself for it, the sort of small physical victory that this life serves up when you least expect it. In the afternoons the Pomoly came out, the faithful hot-tent stove that had warmed us through cold Tasmanian nights, pressed now into gentler service for cooking, and we ate the early evenings away beside its glow while the corellas finally, mercifully, began to settle.

The riding was not the only thing keeping us moving. Over the still months at Grammy's, Anth had been quietly working out a training program built around the little equipment the bus could carry, and this was the place we began it again in earnest. Rings hung from the sturdy lower bows of the eucalypts, swaying slightly in the morning air, and from them we worked through push-ups and pull-ups and rows, our resistance bands stretched to the very limit of what they had in them. It was a far cry from the ordered machines and clean mirrors of a gym, this business of hauling ourselves up beneath a gum tree with the corellas jeering overhead, but it did the job. It kept us active, kept the blood moving and the body honest, and there was a satisfaction in it that no gym had ever quite managed, the satisfaction of making do, of building strength out of rope and rubber and whatever the bush gave us to hang it from.

The other quiet luxury of the place was its showers. After so long making do, there is a real and uncomplicated joy in a hot shower at a campsite, and on the morning before we left we indulged in one, washing the dust of the road away and stepping out clean into the day. The last couple of nights brought a little light rain, soft on the roof, the first the new leg had given us. Lake Broadwater had been everything we could have asked of a second stop, generous and easy and alive with birds, and as we packed to move on we agreed between us that the next chapter of the trip had begun about as well as a chapter could.Read more