CREATIVE DRIVES - BEAUTIFUL VOICES - MISSIONARY PLAINS.

I am tucked up in my Italian Penthouse in the Aboriginal community of Ipolera while the remnants of Tony Backhouse's Desert Choir still chat around the fire. Beautiful singing has given way to low chatter. Words pop like with crackling wood. The warmth of human voices mirrored by the fire. Of course I wish they would shut the fuck up and go to bed. Don't they know I am trying to write?

My mind is too close to this trip to write about it at the moment. It would be like describing a sunset as it happens, the nuance of colour and movement buried under an avalanche of cliches as bad as the one I just used.

So I'll tell just spin some threads without producing a garment. 

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I'll tell you that a dingo is howling somewhere on the Missionary Plain. The same Missionary Plain that before it was called that was roamed by Aranda people who'd never thought they needed to be saved, let alone by people with thick German accents from across the seas. As they roamed that plain they didn't know that before the missionaries another mob would arrive, with guns and murderous intent, to take the land and place massive beasts around the waterholes. They knew a lot but not that. 

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I can tell you the tonight is milder than our other camp at the base of Mt Sonder. For years everyone would say "it wasn't as cold last night." After four years of mild Tuesday nights it tweaked. The sandstone escarpment behind the tents releases the afternoon heat captured by the western sun. A wave of warmth ozzes out all night and defeats the best efforts of the frost to lay its ice on us.

Cecilia, who has done about 5 trips with me, always camps under a certain tree, eighty or so meters from the wall of warmth. Her distance from the sandstone trades warmth for solitude. She sleeps without a tent in a swag and is up at first light to start photographing. I watched from the imperious heights of my penthouse, as she set up her tripod and waited for first light to redden the sandstone like stage blood. She is German Swiss by birth and like many of her countrymen has a passionate love for the desert.

'I love my tree' she said at breakfast.

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I watched another of my walkers in the sand of Davenport Creek some years back. In those days we slept in synthetic cocoons called bivvy bags. Each morning a torchlight turned the bivvy into a glowing worm, as author Gabrielle Wang started to deposit her nightly thoughts onto her notepad. From 4 am or so the worm turned, the mind inside writing furiously.

On the last day she sat in the bough of an ancient tree and again wrote for hours. A triumphant Eureka sounded as the plot for a trilogy of books, now written and published, came to her. The old fella is now called, of course, The Eureka Tree. 

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There's lots of other things I can tell you.  Like I feel I am being drawn into this writing like it is the most important thing in my life. A repository of feelings and thoughts that seeks expression in words and resonance in readership. It is my sense that you, by the act of reading, are the borders that stop my mind drifting into some far off oblivion. Or at least I hope so.

And lastly I can tell you that on the final night of the trip we sung with the Hermannsburg Women's Choir. We sung for them, they sung for us, we all sang Amazing Grace together in the Aranda language. It is best to close your eyes and imagine that sound and that union.

C ya

Raymond