On The Road To Swan Hill
by Tris Kerslake
A place of meditation and of thoughtless speed. No wonder that the kangaroos keep silent in the scrubby eaves, or hold a stillness that defies the beating pulse.
So dry and yellow, I track the wounded road and rubber remnants into deepest country where there are no birds, not one, between the grinding borders framing slants of shallow ground and empty trees. A vagrant cow perhaps, a unique sheep, the only ones that ride with me along the Swan Hill road.
Little living on the bark-scree slopes, along the edge of circumstance and drought where drivers stop to piss in accidental shade and where the clanking engine means an S.O.S.
Isolation falls on me, pushes knowledge far behind to telephones and TV screens where only natives of this distant trail could need its dizzy solitude, and crave its parallels of sky and tree-top lines. The vague dominion of some passing jet thunders, calling me to mind my bit of Swan Hill road.
In leaving civic confines by this pass I had not thought to leave my urban urgency as well. At dusk the only lights are those that move with me, that blink at doubtful ghosts.
And so I rush the hours dividing me from busy streets and placid country town. I wait for screams of sirens in the dark, commuting faces watchful at the paving’s edge, the yell of feral music from some reeking truck. There is no life beside this passive artery, no heartbeat and no flowing down the Swan Hill road.
Nor are there cars to mark my passing nor homes nor fields to make me civilised and slightly tame. I drive by skid-marks, endless tails wagging through the night, stories having no outside world to tell.
And measured city needs are useless now, why count the rules where they cannot count? The engine comforts me and rolls me down the silent miles that drink us dry. I long for other sounds, for sights of pilgrims, spoor of greater travellers than I reminding me with tactful signs that swans were here.