2013
1
After a slow circumnavigation we choose a grassy spot by the creek between two large gums. Paying careful attention to the condition of branches and where they hang, we face the tent east so that the tree on our northern side will shade us for most of the day and the awning will make shade in the late afternoon. The creek is 5 metres away and the water is fine for washing. There is no-one close on either side and we have a view of bush.
At dusk an anarchic cacophony of cockatoos, kookaburras and crows is threaded with the melodies of magpies and wattlebirds and the cheeping of smaller birds. The noise overwhelms the other senses. Retiring, we leave the tent open, looking out horizontally from our sleeping bags at the sky, but the chill of the night surprises us and we shut down the tent.
When we emerge in the morning, the birds greet us again. We look around and we are happy with our spot. There is where we will stay.
We do what the other campers do: we sit. A duck sails down the creek. We observe the other campers, as they observe us, occasionally waving small acknowledgments (‘We see you’) but otherwise leaving one another alone. Later in the day, we watch new arrivals make their circuits and selections, relieved when they do not camp next to us. We comment on their vehicles and gear (‘Look what a great big set-up those people have!’), on their choice of spots, how competent they are, on their dogs.
If someone shouts at their children, everyone knows. This is a transparent, self-regulated world. There are no police, no rangers, no exchanges of money. The rules are understood. Or not. Transgression of invisible boundaries can be met with a glare, or in severe cases, the shifting of a camp. Nobody has to be where they are, for other possibilities exist.
We sit and read; occasionally we make more coffee or tea, or go for water or to the toilet or wander a little. Mainly we just sit and stare. As do the other people, despite all the canoes and fishing rods and other paraphernalia of activity they unload, for the main thing is simply to sit around. Only children are restlessly on the move. Adults become tortoises or echidnas, hardly moving at all and then only from necessity, and very slowly. Despite appearances to the contrary, camping is the antithesis of travel. It defies the hegemony of mobility. It is about being stopped, being still. It is a moment of orientation.
Time lengthens. On the third day we enter that meditative condition for which serious campers wait, knowing it will come: a permanent brown study in which life proceeds only in a slightly dazed condition. Camping is intoxicating.
I watch a stationary cloud, waiting for it to move. A leaf spirals the long way to the ground. Four kookaburras sit on a log, shaking their gowned shoulders. A hundred screeching cockatoos wheel in the blue, blue sky. Our camp is a sundial marking the passage of time by the moments of shade. As the sun moves, we move the esky, the table, reposition our chairs. Then we take up our books again and try to focus on words, only to be distracted by two young magpies companionably watching us from a gum branch as smooth and creamy as a Michelangelo arm . . .
2
It is as if we have wandered into an episode of The Twilight Zone. Yet once we have set up the tent under a beautiful spreading elm and pumped up the li-los and got the stove going, we become aware of a great peace. Nothing is moving. Any sounds, and there are few, are muted: a dog barking far off, a lone cockatoo on sentry duty, a semitrailer changing down on the highway a kilometre away.
We park our chairs with our backs to the waning sun and get out our books, but instead of reading we just sit. It is New Year’s Eve, and here we are, poised at the end of one year and the beginning of another in a place that is not only quiet, it is completely still. Around us, a dream of permanent settlement is slipping back into the earth. We have pitched our tent on the cusp of time.
Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian,
NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2013