Where the Sky Got Through

Canberra gave up almost at once. Ten minutes of suburb and then paddocks, and then the paddocks steepened and became foothills, and the road stopped running straight and started working its way up into Namadgi. Honeysuckle Campground sat further south again from the Cotter, up where the country turns properly to mountain, and the plan was a week there before Monday brought us back in. Anth knew the ground. He had spent a single night here late in 2025, on the same run through this corridor that had taken in the Cotter, Orroral and Mount Clear, one stop in a string of them.

The bus went into the same spot he had used that night, and not for sentiment. There is exactly one place at Honeysuckle where the trees let enough sky through to run the portable panels out and hold a Starlink connection, and that place is a matter of geometry rather than preference. Sal still had her online SMART Recovery groups to run alongside the placement, which meant the connection was not negotiable. So the bus went where the sky was, the panels came out onto the ground, and Grammy pulled in alongside with requirements that were, as ever, a fraction of ours.

The ground had been chosen for its sky before. Honeysuckle was a tracking station once, one of the dishes that worked with Parkes through the Apollo missions and carried the signal when men were walking on the moon. What survives is concrete: foundations, footings, the flat pads where the structure stood. Nothing above knee height. It is an odd thing to park a bus not far from a set of slabs laid down to talk to the moon and then run a cable out to a small white terminal doing roughly the same job on a smaller scale, and to be doing it so that a woman can hold a support group meeting with people scattered across the country. The purpose of the clearing has not changed as much as the hardware has.

The week was quiet in the way that midweek in a national park is quiet. The occasional camper came in, stayed a night, went. Mostly we had it. The wildlife did not, in any sense, keep its distance: small kangaroos and wallabies that had long since worked out people are harmless came grazing to within a few steps of the chairs, close enough to touch if touching them had been the done thing. Nearly all of them carried joeys, heads out of pouches, watching everything with the unbothered interest of an animal that has never had a reason to run. Satin bowerbirds came through in groups, working the campsite over methodically for anything that had been dropped, and finding, one assumes, enough to justify the visit.

One day we walked, taking geocaches as they came, so Sal could see what was left of the station. Another day the weather came up fine and we took the bikes to Orroral. Five kilometres of climbing to get there, three quarters of an hour of it, an hour if the legs were honest, and at the top of it Legoland: a run of enormous granite boulders stacked along the ridge above the Orroral Valley, stacked in a way that looks deliberate and is not. We walked around them for a while and looked down over the valley. Then fifteen minutes back down, the entire climb given back at once, which is the arrangement bikes offer and the reason people keep riding up things.

Midweek a four wheel drive pulled in and a fellow got out and came over to apologise. Anth asked what for. It turned out a car rally was finishing here late that afternoon, raising money for children with kidney disease, and he wanted us to know in advance that every site in the campground was about to be taken. They arrived on schedule and in vehicles of every description, and they filled the place completely. The Pomoly was already going by then. A few of them drifted over to stand around it, and there was a yarn, and then at some point they were all back in their cars and gone to wherever they had come from, and the campground was empty again as though none of it had happened.

Then the weekend, and weekends bring people. The ground filled with tents and a scattering of vehicles, and the kangaroos, who had spent five days grazing at our feet, made themselves scarce and stayed that way. The crowd thinned out on the Sunday. We had the place to ourselves for one more night.

Monday was Trinity College again, half an hour in, the second placement day. It was also the first parting. Grammy had a noise coming from a rear wheel that wanted a mechanic's opinion rather than a driver's, and she had arranged to stay with someone she knew nearby while it was looked at. We were going the other way, to a house sit at Higgins for the week. Since Gympie, since the sixth of June, the convoy had been two vehicles and had not once been anything else.

The panels came up off the ground and went back into their allocated spot, the cable came in, and the clearing went back to being a clearing. The slabs stayed where they had been since before any of us were paying attention, waiting on the next thing that needed a clear view of the sky. Down through the foothills the road straightened out and the paddocks came back, and then somewhere on the edge of the city it divided and Grammy's van went one way and the bus went the other. It took about four seconds. Seven days, and a meeting point already agreed, and nothing about it worth calling a separation. But the mirror was empty the whole way in, and Anth kept checking it anyway.Read more