Creek Talk and Cypress Pines

We packed up in sunshine and rolled out of Goobang National Park with the bus pointed at Parkes. Winter was no longer arriving; it had arrived, and it had started setting the terms. What we needed from the week ahead was simple and not negotiable: sun on the bus, wood for the fire, and a place that would hold us while the cold deepened. Everything else was decoration.

Parkes got barely a glance. We had stood beneath the great white dish in the January of our first year, in thirty seven degree heat, Sal under it for the first time in thirty eight years. Grammy had seen it on her own adventures. So one of the most famous radio telescopes in the world became, on this pass, simply the place we topped up the water, and none of us felt the loss. Winter travel narrows a town to its essentials, and it narrows the traveller too, in a way that feels less like going without and more like finally knowing what you need.

From there we swung south east through Eugowra, a small town carrying a large story, the site of Australia's biggest gold heist, bushrangers relieving the gold escort of its cargo back in the 1860s. Twenty minutes past the town we turned in to Nangar National Park and the country changed almost at once. Goobang had been what we thought of as typical Australian bush, dry open eucalypt forest. Here, logging and grazing in the decades before the park was declared had left broad green clearings, and the slopes were dark with cypress pines, denser than gum country, holding their shade differently. The road in crossed Terarra Creek again and again. None of the fords ran deep, but each splash of water under the wheels felt like a small yes, this way.

At the campsite we did a slow loop and settled at the base of a steep hill. Sun enough, space enough, a week's worth of both. The brief was met before the kettle boiled.

Then the place did the thing we had not asked for and could not have ordered. It let us in.

The creek ran close to the bus and did not stop talking all week, and the frogs joined it every night. One evening we walked down with torches and found the water crowded with life, yabbies backing away from the beam with their claws raised, native tadpoles stirring the shallows. We stood on the bank longer than the cold strictly allowed, two torch beams on a whole society going about its business a few steps from where we slept, and walked back up to the bus feeling less like visitors than we had that morning.

One clear day we took the bikes out along the trail to Dripping Falls. Mobs of grey kangaroos and common wallaroos lifted their heads as we passed and kept loose company with us the whole way, grazing along unhurried, as if riding beside us was simply what the morning held. We came back to find one of the two other campers gone and a small pile of firewood left where they had been. Anth split the logs and stacked them beside the few we had bought at Wanda Wandong, and the arithmetic of the week changed. We now had wood to see us out. There is a comfort in a full wood stack with the cold coming down that sits somewhere older than this trip, older than us, and no town luxury has ever quite matched it.

The neighbours kept their routines around ours. Every afternoon a herd of goats worked its way along the flank of the steep hill beside us, bleating as they went, a procession so regular we could nearly have set the clock by it. Through the middle of the day a lone fox wandered the cypress pines, nosing for leftovers that were not there, entirely unconcerned by the bus parked so close. Human campers came and went, the way they always did at the places we stayed longer. The animals stayed, and so did we, and by midweek it was hard to say who was keeping an eye on whom.

The nights kept getting colder. Somewhere in the dark hours the thought would surface of Canberra, still a few weeks down the road, and how cold it would be by the time we finally made it there. It was not quite worry. It was more the old habit of leaning ahead of ourselves, and each night the fire made the same quiet argument against it: you are warm now, you are here now. Most nights we let the fire win.

The day before we were due to leave, we tackled the hill. The goats had already drawn the map, their trails switching back and forth across the slope, and we followed them upward until the ground eased and we stood on the crest. Below us Terarra Valley opened out whole: the clearings, the dark pine ridges, the thread of the creek we had crossed so many times on the way in, the bus small at the hill's foot. A week of our life lay there in one look, and for a moment the week looked back. We stood in the wind and let the valley be larger than we were.

Then we followed the gentle ridge down, the goat trails handing us from one to the next, and walked into camp. The creek was still talking. It would go on talking after we had gone, to the goats and the fox and whoever pulled in next, and somehow that was the comfort of it. We had not owned the week. We had been allowed it.Read more