underground pond lit up like a night-time city seen from an aeroplane by the fairy-lights threaded through the stalactites above it, but that might’ve been a different cave system altogether. I ask Tony about it because he came here in 2005, with an ex-wife, but he’s never heard of it. Ah well. That miniature underground city. It’s somewhere in the world. Wish I could remember where, though.
More tea and a chat with the lady in the caff at the Visitor Centre, next to which are some houses which can be rented out and I go off, again, into a reverie about spending a winter there, writing, walking, sleeping, drinking. I’d love that. I think. Full of these reveries, I am. Don’t know why; I’m perfectly happy with my home life. But kind of addicted to dreaming.
Later, we pass through Holbrook, with a sign on its outskirts declaring that it is ‘Australia’s Submarine Town’, and sure enough it is; there’s a huge sub half-buried in the ground. It’s massive. What on earth? We stop, get out, look around and yes, that’s exactly what it is; a huge sub half-buried in the ground. I’m reminded of the same thing at Wallasey, on the Wirral, the rusting hulk on the dockside still with its ack-ack guns on the deck, but that’s a shipyard; Holbrook is hundreds of miles from the sea. What’s it doing here? I ask a passerby and he says: –Don’t know, ey?
Ah well. Fair enough. ‘Australia’s Submarine Town’; doesn’t need any reason to be that, really. If it wants to have a huge U-boat half-buried in its centre, then let it. Curious. But a word about that ‘ey’; Aussies tend to put it at the end of every sentence, whether inquisitive or declamatory. It’s just a verbal tic, of course, and means less than when affected Brits do it, because they’ve consciously adopted it, but it’s like the ornithological observation that the beauty of a bird’s song in Oz is in direct proportion to the blandness of its plumage; the more lovely the song, the drabber the bird that makes it. Pretty-looking birds just squeal and screech. As if they know, somehow, that humans must be pleased and propitiated in some way, if not through the eye, then through the ear. They must make themselves useful, in some way, to humans. What’s this got to do with the Australian ‘ey’? Fuck it, I don’t know. I’m rambling, ey?
Anyway, onward. Albury, Wodanga, Barnawartha. A tiny place called Everton. Beechworth and Glenrowan, Ned Kelly country. Poor old Ned.
THEN
There’s something about Ned Kelly that provokes an emotion in the boy which he can only equate with liking something. He’s been told that Kelly was ‘a crook, a killer, a thief, a bushranger’, but there are things about him… the armour, the last words, the last stand, the bullets pinging off his helmet, even the internally-rhyming name… the boy finds a part of him being drawn to all this, slowly, like a houseplant towards a window. He’s heard the Fonz use the word ‘cool’ on Happy Days and hethinks that that word, in the way in which Fonzie uses it, might be applicable to Ned. He thinks . He’s very young.
They stop in Beechworth to see the courthouse where Ned was incarcerated and sentenced to death. Dark wood and velvet clothes and coats-of-arms and plaques and everything else designed to impose and intimidate. Not much available info about Ned or his exploits, really, and the boy wants to know more so he asks his dad and his dad tells him what he knows but the boy wants more. Ned Kelly should be looming in his imagination like a bogeyman, with that blank helmet and those guns, clanking robotically out of the bush, but he’s not and the boy is puzzled as to why. Wants to know more. He thinks he should but he doesn’t have bad dreams about Ned. Wants to know why.
Back at the car, the dad discovers that he’s locked the keys inside. He swears. The boy thinks that if Ned were here, he’d use his skills to break into the car and retrieve the keys and
More tea and a chat with the lady in the caff at the Visitor Centre, next to which are some houses which can be rented out and I go off, again, into a reverie about spending a winter there, writing, walking, sleeping, drinking. I’d love that. I think. Full of these reveries, I am. Don’t know why; I’m perfectly happy with my home life. But kind of addicted to dreaming.
Later, we pass through Holbrook, with a sign on its outskirts declaring that it is ‘Australia’s Submarine Town’, and sure enough it is; there’s a huge sub half-buried in the ground. It’s massive. What on earth? We stop, get out, look around and yes, that’s exactly what it is; a huge sub half-buried in the ground. I’m reminded of the same thing at Wallasey, on the Wirral, the rusting hulk on the dockside still with its ack-ack guns on the deck, but that’s a shipyard; Holbrook is hundreds of miles from the sea. What’s it doing here? I ask a passerby and he says: –Don’t know, ey?
Ah well. Fair enough. ‘Australia’s Submarine Town’; doesn’t need any reason to be that, really. If it wants to have a huge U-boat half-buried in its centre, then let it. Curious. But a word about that ‘ey’; Aussies tend to put it at the end of every sentence, whether inquisitive or declamatory. It’s just a verbal tic, of course, and means less than when affected Brits do it, because they’ve consciously adopted it, but it’s like the ornithological observation that the beauty of a bird’s song in Oz is in direct proportion to the blandness of its plumage; the more lovely the song, the drabber the bird that makes it. Pretty-looking birds just squeal and screech. As if they know, somehow, that humans must be pleased and propitiated in some way, if not through the eye, then through the ear. They must make themselves useful, in some way, to humans. What’s this got to do with the Australian ‘ey’? Fuck it, I don’t know. I’m rambling, ey?
Anyway, onward. Albury, Wodanga, Barnawartha. A tiny place called Everton. Beechworth and Glenrowan, Ned Kelly country. Poor old Ned.
THEN
There’s something about Ned Kelly that provokes an emotion in the boy which he can only equate with liking something. He’s been told that Kelly was ‘a crook, a killer, a thief, a bushranger’, but there are things about him… the armour, the last words, the last stand, the bullets pinging off his helmet, even the internally-rhyming name… the boy finds a part of him being drawn to all this, slowly, like a houseplant towards a window. He’s heard the Fonz use the word ‘cool’ on Happy Days and hethinks that that word, in the way in which Fonzie uses it, might be applicable to Ned. He thinks . He’s very young.
They stop in Beechworth to see the courthouse where Ned was incarcerated and sentenced to death. Dark wood and velvet clothes and coats-of-arms and plaques and everything else designed to impose and intimidate. Not much available info about Ned or his exploits, really, and the boy wants to know more so he asks his dad and his dad tells him what he knows but the boy wants more. Ned Kelly should be looming in his imagination like a bogeyman, with that blank helmet and those guns, clanking robotically out of the bush, but he’s not and the boy is puzzled as to why. Wants to know more. He thinks he should but he doesn’t have bad dreams about Ned. Wants to know why.
Back at the car, the dad discovers that he’s locked the keys inside. He swears. The boy thinks that if Ned were here, he’d use his skills to break into the car and retrieve the keys and
Similar Books
