There’s a track winding back…

Driving long distances in our vast countryside, the mind grips on many things – tonight’s destination, the gas getting low, the kids grumbling in the back, that niggling ache in your left shoulder. Yet, at the same time, quietly, subtly, peripherally, your mind is storing images from the roadside verges you pass, laying down your vision of Australia.

Whoosh. A row of grand old gums. Whoosh. A patch of purple Paterson’s curse. Whoosh. A flock of galahs swooping up from their paddy melon feast in clouds of grey and pink. Whoosh. A corrugated iron shelter for the station kids to wait for the school bus. Whoosh. A stand of remnant forest with the sound of bellbirds.

Ask any Australian outback driver. Hed’d probably grunt, “Just miles and miles of bloody scrub”. But he wouldn’t swap our roadside verges for all the hedgerows in the world…our wide and generous corridors of natural bushland along which animals and birds can move about the country too.

March 2019

Answer to LP1.  beet