Australia Day

It’s Australia Day today.  It’s a day when half of Tennant celebrates while the other half mourns.  Knowing where to stand on a day like today can be tricky, so I tend to stand alone.  From the top of One Tank Hill you can look down over our town, not quite nestled in the foothills of the Honeymoon Ranges. 

Most people go there to see Tennant from a distance and be convinced for a few deceptive moments that harmony lives here.  I go there to see Tennant as it really is - an island, standing alone in a vast ocean of spinifex and red dirt.  

On a clear day you can see right to the edge of the earth, to the gentle curving horizon from up there.  Standing in the silence, it’s easy to believe that the world outside is too far removed to reach you.  That if you stretch out your hand, nothing will touch it.  That no one can reach in and touch you.  

Its a view with the power to evoke a primal fear, revealing to you just how small and vulnerable you really are.  The hot dry air sweeping up from the ancient plains below, carries with it that palpable uneasiness those first European settlers left behind - disconnected from their homeland, feeling alone in a harsh and unforgiving landscape, an uncertain future ahead of them.

Its also a view, that if you let it, can draw you into its protective embrace.  It promises to hold at bay the world outside, unable to cross that vast and seemingly endless emptiness. Standing there, its easy to understand how forty thousand years of living here could lull you into a false sense of security.  Make you believe you were safe from that inevitable invasion.

This is the original Australia.  This view.  This landscape.  This isolation. Out here you can touch our past, connect with the land that has shaped us, made us who we are.  Its easy in these times of high speed connectivity to forget that we are all islanders, that we are in this together.  But stand up there, alone on One Tank Hill, and that landscape will remind you who we really are.

Liquid Gold

They say Australia was built off the sheep’s back.  Not Tennant.  We were built off the back of a beer truck.  It’s not the first thing you notice when you come to town.  But spend enough time here and eventually you will realise there’s no creek in Tennant Creek.  

The locals call it the Seven Mile, and for very practical reason.  The highway crosses Tennant Creek about eleven kilometres, or seven miles in the old money, north of town where the old stone telegraph station still stands.  It wasn’t the only building on the creek in those early days.  This is golden country.  Settled by pastoralists drawn by the swaying golden grasses, and desperate men gambling their last hope on the promise of endless golden riches hidden in that deep red earth. 

Like all men working hard in the relentless heat and dust, our founding fathers were thirsty.  It was a thirst that could only be quenched by that other kind of gold.  Liquid gold they called it. Beer.  It must have been a fateful day, that day the beer truck broke down just seven miles short of its destination.  

Now, if you believe local legend, our founding fathers were also a resourceful lot. If the beer couldn’t come to town, then town would simply come to the beer. Today Tennant Creek still stands seven miles south of the crossing, the pub in the main street a fitting monument to that truck’s final resting place.

Gold, in all its forms, seems woven into the very fabric of this place.  That first lucky strike wave passed, as it did in so many Australian towns, though men, seemingly less desperate now, still search for the next big find.  The swaying golden pastures feed a thriving beef industry, and that liquid gold flows freely, though mostly through our blood too often spilled on the red earth in an angry drunken haze.

What do we do, in a place so intimately connected to the very thing that tears so many of us apart?  How do we extract ourselves from our history, our blood?  Someone please tell me - how do we quench that thirst that wasn’t earned through hot and dusty toil?

Rough as Guts

Don’t get me wrong.  It’s rough as guts out here.  It’s the kind of place where you can turn the corner and find a woman squatting in the gutter for a pee.  She’d have had her nickers around her ankles if she’d been wearing any.  The fences are high and the windows barred, the glass behind grimy.  Even the water is hard, thick with minerals that clog your shower-head and stain your toilet bowl.

There’s no gloss here. No ornate facades meticulously restored to the cha-ching of the Bunnings cash register.  No cafe strip.  The cappuccino’s are served flourish-free, and a large is a “mugaccino”, the pun completely unintended. 

When I first came here, I wasn’t sure how I was going to survive without coffee.  I’d been working in the city where you were never more than fifty metres from a decent cup, hot but not too hot.  It had become a basic human right.  An essential that in my opinion should have qualified for GST-free status.

But not out here. My coffee was another victim of that rock hard water and it didn’t end there.  Good quality fresh food.  Being able to buy everything on your shopping list at the supermarket.  Reading the Sunday paper... on Sunday.  Express Post.  Shopping that doesn’t require an internet connection.  The list goes on.  

Four years on and somehow, miraculously even, I have survived.  More than survived.  I’m happy.  Enjoying a lifestyle free of the pressure of convenience.  It would seem that all of those essentials come with a cost that I don’t pay out here. When the Sunday paper arrives on Monday morning, it doesn’t bring with it those glossy magazines, flaunting before me page after page of the next “must-have” that I can’t afford and won’t feel complete without.  I’m blissfully unaware and I like it that way.

But I also understand.  This living in Tennant Creek rough as guts thing - it’s not for everyone.

Coming Home

Coming home is no small feat.  I’d been in Melbourne for five weeks all up and the three hour morning flight to Alice Springs doesn’t quite get me half way.  Heading north through the ranges out of Alice with a five hundred kilometre drive ahead, I was tired and I just wanted to get home.  Why do I do this?  I’d set out at five in the morning and I wouldn’t be home until after eight in the evening.  Why do I live so far away?

But as I drove in silence, kilometre after long kilometre it happened as it always does.  There is something about this arid landscape that seems to rejuvenate me.  The red soil.  The vast open space.  The quietness of it all.  And that dry heat.  

It had been hot for a day or two in Melbourne, but it was the kind of heat that invades your personal space.  Coats you.  Smothers you.  Up here its different.  It penetrates you right to the bone.  It hits your skin and sinks right in, becoming part of you.  It rises up from the earth and in some kind of primal way connects you to the landscape that surrounds you.  

I pulled over at the half way mark for a pee.  Stepping out of the cool air conditioned four wheel drive it hit me like the heat from the oven when you open the door, the rich baking aromas rushing up to meet you. Most people hate it of course, the heat.  That’s why they visit in winter, wearing their shorts and t-shirts while the locals rug up.  Living out here isn’t for everyone... but I love it, heat and all.    

Pulling in to town as the sun set, I couldn’t help but smile.  Home.  The dirt and dust coating everything.  The long grass in the not quite kept yards.  The group of aboriginal women sitting cross-legged on the footpath, another not far away passed out on the grass. The bloody camp dogs that roam the streets... 

...and the heat.  Home.