I actually am driving West, the wrong way to Sydney. I want to see the Great Ocean
Road, supposedly the most spectacular shoreline in Autralia. I have occasional regrets
about leaving the Cup hoopla but in the end I’m really glad I did. Especially after
hearing it on the radio—one big, wild, undoubtedly drunken, Australian party.
It’s cold and cloudy. I’m not in the best mood. A couple hours away from the
city, the road gets extremely windy. I’m taking standard scenic shots, not really
inspired. At Lorne I’m deep into the drive. I’m not really here yet however. I
don’t begin to until after I check in at Apollo Bay and I drive into a valley.
Brilliant green, sheep-sheared hills and sunbreaks through the clouds make it glow.
I’m chasing the sun. I’m on a gravel track above the river valley, green hills
all around, gum forests below. Bird sounds everywhere. I pause and begin to take it in.
The ocean is to the south, sun splotched in the last of the day. 
I’m lonely! That’s the disquiet. I see all these couples around me and I feel my singleness intensely. I want Robin here. I want to have this day together. I want her to have walked among the kangaroos on the golf course with me and watch her amazement with them and with the Gulahs and the Rosellas. She would like the Magpies here. More like our crows in temperament, they’re loud and rowdy and scream a lot. Their chorus in the morning is other worldly, the exotic sound of Australia I’ll take with me. I miss her and wish she were here with me. This is the sort of trip we would do well together. She would slow me down and help ground me and enrich the trip immensely.
A notable feature of the Australian landscape—not a single “No Trespassing” sign anywhere in the country.
The best part today was the rainforest. It was cloudy and drizzly, which made for good conditions to photograph in the forest. Amazing treeferns, big beech and myrtle, so unlike our Pacific Northwest rainforest. I was thoroughly enchanted. The coast is probably spectacular, but for some reason I was inured to it. The overcast didn’t help, here I wanted sunlight on the rocks and blue sky for pictures and it was overcast and dull and no life to the rocks or the surf. I shot knowing nothing would be usable commercially. And I didn’t like the people I was running into most of the day. Lots of tourists and tour buses, and service people on the coast who tend to them. Even off-season there’s a lot of traffic, and it has the character of a place that sees too many strangers. I went 16km out of the way to a pub, on Michael Fendley’s recommendation, to find a not too notable roadhouse with 2 very drunk old codgers in it that repelled me instantly. Petersborough looked flat and depressing, and I paid for the most expensive room of the trip. $50. And dinner at one of those pubs where you pay table service prices for steam table cuisine. At least I didn’t have to stand and grill it myself. The downside of this non-tipping culture is that businesses vie for methods to eliminate service.
I’m annoyed at Australia tonight. Their ridiculous politics of the extremely
unimportant, the media attention on insignificant minutia and worse international coverage
than the US, if you can believe it, the one lane country roads (can’t they afford to
pave 2 lanes?), the coinage in odd denominations that I still can’t identify at a
glance. Insignificant nonsense that I only see because of my mood of the moment. The bad
food—that’s starting to get to me. Next trip will be to someplace known for
it’s cuisine. This is a high fat, high cholesterol culture. Still solidly anglophile
in its cuisine.
The next day. West along the coast to Warmoobong. To my nicest breakfast this trip.
Great coffee, great scrambled eggs on good toast. I birded in the park, seeing more blue
Fairy Wrens. Then the sun comes out. The clouds are breaking up. I decide I have to go
back up the coast and reshoot everything I shot yesterday. So I do. Spent 2 hours at Loch
Ard Gorge, going to all the distant lookouts that the tour bus passengers don’t have
time to do, so I had a lot of solitude. It was much, much nicer. Got the standard shots at
the Twelve Apostles lookout. It’s illegal to go down to the beach there and hard
too—only at low tide around the headlands. I see thousands of Little Penguin tracks
down there—that’s why. It’s obviously a very active burrow area. 
Then I drive inland through flat green rangelands north. The Grampians start emerging
on the horizon. Uplifted chunks of earth, their east ends lifted high to form attractive
pyramid shapes. Then through miles of gum forest to the town of Halls Gap. Got a cheap
single room at the Backpackers Lodge. $15. My own bathroom even. Off for a short hike, a
windy uphill drive to The Balconies. Ledges of granite, view south of the Victoria Valley
and surrounding peaks. Gentle mountainous hills ringing the scene. Low setting sun.
Wonderful. 
The next day I hike and bird some more. White cockatoos call incessantly all night and day in the park in the center of town. I see Gang gangs—I think my favorite bird of Australia. They travel in flocks as pairs, then sit next to each other and nuzzle and preen each other all over. A sweet call too, for a cockatoo, like a creaking door opening, rising inflection. Tame. They’re a medium black cockatoo, the males with a bright red head, the females with pale barring on the breast. The shape of the beak and the position of the eye makes them look like they’re smiling.
A morning walk right out of the town, up a creek. There were kangaroos grazing in the
park. At the Venus Pools was a woman lying on her stomach next to a waterfall. I tried to
make some noise so as not to startle her. “I was meditating, letting the water flow
through my head and out my toes. It’s how I survive the souvenir shop.” She
hustled on back to work. 
I hustled on out of town. I head east finally, drifting across northern Victoria across
a pancake flat landscape. By evening I make it to Echuca, on the Murray River. The next
day I wander through the empty old part of Echuca, which looks like a movie set. Which it
is, but it’s also authentic. All the buildings and riverboats claim to have been in
the TV series. The woman at the ticket counter says she can tell what country the series
is running in because then there’s a slew of visitors from there. “I’ve
been seeing a lot of Americans lately, is it running there?” It’s kept the
riverboat industry alive. At least 4 of them run 1 hour cruises for the tourists. I get on
a genuine wood fueled one (2 are diesel) and make friends with the crew, who let me
photograph them incessantly. A woman tends the boiler, very friendly and very strong. I
watched as she unloaded a ton and a half of wood into the hold. In the little galley area,
on a shelf, sat a baby possum. “I thought it was steel wool, and when I grabbed it,
it moved!” she said. Wide nocturnal eyes stared back at us. 
Miles and miles, hurtling eastward through country flatter than Kansas. I'm listening
to ABD Radio, I am overwhelmed with how erudite it is. It amazes me. First this afternoon
was an hour long piece elucidating the psychotic ravings of an obscure French nihilist.
Then a very cranky opera snob playing selections of 60 year old recordings and bemoaning
the current state of the art where they don’t even pronounce the Italian correctly.
Then an hour on Jewish Feminist Red Diaper Babies coming of age in the 50’s and
60’s. I’m told the ABC is accused (I’m shocked! Shocked!) of left wing bias
and that the government is cutting funding to the bone. 
Hills. Beautiful, gum covered hills in the late afternoon sun. Topography. And evening light. I whizzed through Wondago, to the mountains, stopped at a lookout over Lake Hume, where I got Turquoise Parrot. First bird I’ve seen not notated in the field guide as a “common” bird. This one “rare to uncommon”, and here was a flock. I decided to backtrack after consulting Lonely Planet, nothing about the way ahead, raves about the country I was leaving behind. Through the terminally quaint town of Yakandandah, the whole town a National Trust Site, to Beechworth, almost as quaint. Great light, sweet, bucolic landscapes. A pasture with camels. Then to town. Motels—full. Caravan park—no cabins. “I have a caravan site left.” I’ll take it. “$25.” For a spot on the ground to roll out my sleeping bag, I’m thinking. Wow, she’s gouging me for the scarcity of sites. We roll up to a fully equipped RV trailer. “Oh!” I exclaim in surprise. “Is this alright?” she asks, hesitantly. “Alright? It’s amazing. I had no idea.” “It’s OK then?” “No, no, it’s wonderful.” Yes, we only think we speak the same language. A “Caravan site” is the RV you rent for the night. They stay, you move. Keeps them off the roads. Makes so much more sense.
Lots of finches on the ground in the morning. A good bakery open early. Clean, bright
low sunlight casts long shadows on the iron tables and chairs outside. 
Snowy Mountains, with snow on them. And snow falling on me. Hard flurries, even drifted a hint in the trees. At the trailhead at Cascade Pass came a mountain biker up the hill from town. Sweaty. I said, “Now you get to freeze headed down.” Another biker comes off the trail. As they start chatting I head up the trail, arranging for him to come behind me so I can get some trail shots. I passed through snow gums to an open meadow-like habitat. Reverse treeline. The trees stop where the cold air settles. It felt familiar, like high elevation riverine meadows in Idaho. There were plants like sagebrush and grasses. And halfway up the hill the gums started. Stunted and gnarly at the treeline. And beneath the trees—Brumbies. Wild horses. There was a stallion, several mares, two foals, a couple yearlings. I was downwind, they didn’t run off. On the way back it started snowing. It made me very happy.
Descending out of the Snowys the land turned to treeless rolling prairie. It could have
been central Wyoming. Bright sun, cold fierce wind. I entered a snow squall, I had to slow
considerably from the blowing snow. Who’d a thunk it? Australia, driving in a
snowstorm. Rising now to another mountain range as I head east to the sea. Thick, old
growth eucalypt forest. Then down the escarpment. 1000 meters down, down, down on windy,
15kph hairpin curves. 
Down to the Green. Really green, green, green hills with lone gum
trees backlit by the sun against rain squalls and rainbows the other way. Rainbow, catch
the rainbow. I speed along on a side road looking for the right foreground, the right
elevation and configuration of hills and valley and sun, and quick! Catch it before it
disappears. The light and the sky and the topography are so dramatic, the weather so rare,
to have such drama with brilliant sun too. I milk it as long as it lasts. There’s a
period of light I find most appealing, between 3 to 1 hours before sunset. Later, with the
sun extremely low and grazing the land severely, I find harder to work with. But 2 hours
before, that sweet, full light, the landforms and the trees well defined by sidelight, but
not so coarse as a lower angle will give. I know other photographers go for that last 10
minutes, but I don’t respond the same way to that time. By then it feels over to me.
And by that time, I’m relieved to be able to get on with finding a place to eat. 
After another two days I arrive back in Sydney, the day before my flight home. The
closer I got to Sydney, the thicker and faster the traffic. I’d been a month in
mellow, unpeopled areas with hardly any traffic. Now I’m in a swirl of aggressive,
fast drivers on roads with narrower lanes than I’m used to. It was just yesterday
that I was at Pebbly Beach with kangaroos all around me, and Rosellas eating out of my
hand. And at Camel Rock at high tide an hour past sunrise, with only a flock of Bar-tailed
Godwits and Pied Oystercatchers to share the experience with. It’s all tinged with
the poignancy of leavetaking, these final days. I never tired of travelling, I wish it
could go on for weeks more. I hardly met a traveller who was doing Australia in less than
6 months (but then, I hardly met a traveller who had a life elsewhere). This will do.
I’ll be glad to be home and experience the familiar again as new. 
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