Dances with
Dingoes

"Shit!!!"

I was jumpy. Having already driven 1,700 km's that week, meeting clients in Central QLD's cropping towns, Friday had come and I was caffeine fuelled and pushing hard to make another 7 hour drive out to a special wilderness spot for the weekend. Having passed no-one for 2 hours, it was a surprise to see the logging truck suddenly appear out of the dust with its B-Double payload. The truckie, having successfully claimed exclusive rights to the single lane dirt road, simply raised his index finger in acknowledgement for my sacrifice, and continued blowing rooster tails in my rear view mirror. I continued my push deeper into the wilds….

I'd been to this spot before. Some 13 years ago with a previous partner. I remembered a suspension in time out there. Probably the wildest I've ever felt before. Vast sandstone escarpments. Ancient native heritage sites. And this knowledge was my inspiration for the slog fest I knew the drive would be.

Dusty, I arrived to camp with a feeling of being watched. It's a one way road in. 160km's sandwiched between escarpment bluffs. The roar of the diesel engine reverberating along the sand track of the valley floor — a juxtaposition noticed by whatever locals, living or dead, called this area home.

The first night at camp high on the escarpment was uneasy. The dark has a way of playing tricks on the mind, and it was truly dark that night. Cloud had come in. There had even been a few drops of rain. Unusual for here; not what I was expecting this far inland.

I was also running an anxiety program. My mind had been "g'd" up with work, caffeine, long drives… Where was the cliff edge again? Did I bring enough water? Is the world going to end? There had been documented murders out here. The Kenniff bandits…bodies of 2 policemen found charred in a fire back in 1902. Just over there across the valley; I could see the exact spot from the bluff. Is this place haunted? It does seem like the kind of place where you get abducted by aliens.

Several times I jumped as the head torch cast animated shadows with my movements. There was a deathly quietness. How can somewhere so vast have so little sound? Then suddenly an ungodly screech of something not from this world. Twigs would break under a heavy foot deep in the forest somewhere. I'm usually very good with this stuff, but something had me rattled that night. I barely slept — fever dreams from the darker parts of my mindscape. And as I lay there in the swag, wishing to let go, my bladder forced me to go outside and face the demons.

Crystal jewels sparkled all around me. I was in a solar aquarium. Stars so bright it had the sense I was in it. Not just viewing it in 2 dimensions as is my usual experience, but actually inside the whole thing, 1,200m high on the precipice of a cliff escarpment, with nothing but endless flat planes below me. It was around and in me. I made a cup of tea. I put on Alan Watts lecture series "The Power of Space and Re-incarnation". I tucked into some almond and chocolate protein balls on the ute tray.

The flash of shooting stars. The complete arc of the Milky Way overhead twisted one way and then another over the course of the night. A sliver of crescent moon slipped out from behind a sandstone bluff for 10 minutes before disappearing again, hiding from the first light of the rising sun that began animating the landscape before me. I noted East and West, North and South. Where the light was coming from at which time of day — photographic purposes. I watched first light. Blue light. Pink hour. The bleached white 10 minutes before sunrise. Then the sun throwing beams at the red sand ochre on the highest precipices. A full orchestra.

Kookaburras laughed at my unease the night before. A new dawn rose. I fixed my JetBoil to brew some morning caffeine and porridge.

This landscape is geologically old. 200 million years. And of course that's not the only old thing in Australia. It is home to the longest surviving culture. 65,000 years of inhabitation (under current estimates). But time as a concept, at least to traditional custodians, seems less important than connection — to spirits past, present and future.

I'm staring at a wall I've hiked to. Underneath the structure in front of me, not unlike Ayers Rock, is where ancestors have been laid to rest; the Bidjara and Gunggari people. Wrapped in cloth and placed within crevices that are now buried under the sandy soil layers, the idea was they become part of the mountain again. They understood the mountain was part of the transitory process like us. Flowing from one energy to the next like an ocean wave. And that it makes perfect sense to place the body within the rock…merge into the sleeping rock phase of transition. This rock held their spirit. The tombs have been raided over the last 300 years and little remains physically.

Ceremonies around the site had been immortalised onto the walls with red and yellow ochre. Burial practices, medicine traditions, and general ways of being. It looked like people did it yesterday. There was the full outline of a person. It was hard for me to accept it was real. I'm told this site is 9,400 years old. It is an orphan; the last of its custodians with the authority to maintain it were driven off this land and into missions. It is merely preserved now. This is why sites like this are disappearing fast. I stared at it all morning trying to let its reality sink in.

"…and she said 'Doesn't he look well?' What do you mean he looks well??? He's fecking dead"

This popped into my head as I stared at the wall. It's a quote from my mum. She relayed an interaction that she'd had at a funeral. I laughed because it was indeed a completely absurd comment. It led me to think about the sanitary inclination we have with death. The body is cleaned and pumped with chemicals and made presentable for the audience to see one last time. Joints are manipulated to hide the effects of rigor mortis and they are slotted into a beautiful and expensive polished casket. Made just like a bed. "It's just like they are sleeping". There is an urge to resist what we really are — temporary. I thought of the book I just read — The Picture of Dorian Gray, with his selling of the soul so that he could remain young and beautiful forever.

I thought about all this as I stared at the rock that morning.

I packed the ute on the last morning in no particular hurry. I knew the drive was going to be long and slow.

I got into the car and started the descent from the mountain.

That's when I saw it. Ginger-tan. Shaped like a dog, sitting in the middle of the road. Dingo!

Were you the presence I felt watching me on the first night? Possibly.

I've thought about that dingo since. About how it arrived in Australia the same way I did — from somewhere else, some thousands of years ago. Initially uninvited into a landscape that was already ancient. And how, given enough time and enough stillness, even a stranger can be absorbed. Can become part of the pattern.