It was only yesterday, on my homeward trip from the salty south coast, that I realised how deeply and beautifully the sights and smells of the wheatbelt have affected me.
Laid out before my awe-struck eyes, a pastel moving picture show – the kind to conjure only the sweetest childhood memories of those bygone afternoons in the Cunninam Tarago. Dadda behind the wheel, quietly ta-ta-taaing his own merry little tune. Mama’s head gently nodding in the sleepy sun. My freckled little legs hanging down between the door and the side seat, head peering out the window and eyes drying in the rushing wind, my nostrils greedily drawing in lungfuls of the earthy air. No greater feeling of content has a child since felt, nor an adult yet longed for.
Even then, a child free of duty and responsibility, I didn’t want the journey to end. Those driving days are the days that ruined me.
Through my windscreen now, a lens peppered with the lifeless anatomy of many a doomed bug, it all comes sweetly back. I had forgotten how the sky, pale and cloudless, can take up two thirds of the sprawling vista. How the hues can change so quickly with the shifting sun, and that anyways, only nature could dream up such a palette. Great swathes of combed and wheated land rolling in the breeze, a golden ocean of feathers and sunlight, and rows upon rows of harvested crop standing stiff as the bristles on a bore-hair brush, perfecting the scene’s composition.
And all of this, this man-made spectacle, punctuated by dignified stands of mallee and salmon gums, their silvery trunks and oily canopies the only remnants of a landscape that once was.
Yes, the land, she’s been plucked and been pillaged – taken for all that she’s worth, but through it all, it’s still easy to see her fair beauty. It’s still easy to feel the spirit of the land. For after eight solid hours of driving, I still wished for more.
As the sun began to sink, and the shadows began to lengthen, I realised this landscape inspires in me a nostalgia that I cannot truly claim. Perhaps that’s always the way with nostalgia? I longed for days gone by, but not days that I’ve known. Days when the little towns pulsed with life, or maybe the days before those, when the rightful owners stood quiet and calm. But all that’s just romance.
For now, my own travels and the sweet remembrance of those wheatbelt sights and smells shall suffice. I’m happy that my little heart can expertly tap into their memory and paint them all over the settings of many a fine story – both my own, and those that are shared.
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