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I love watching the world slide away along the freeways heading down to Canberra. Looking at the dry shades of green with not much inbetween, thats if you don't count scenery as being something. Stopping at one of those big roadside complexes of a petrol station with its oversized carpark and only a handful of cars stopped, and one of those American style 'Diner's'. I'm reminded of Deep Blue Something's Home, 'Lost in East Texas and no one would mind'. I do so much love this country with its wide expanses of land.
Our sheep are flatter, skinny scrawny flat things, not those white cotton fluffballs you get in England. Oh and we build big things, The Big Merino, there's also a Big Banana, a Big Prawn, a Big Pineapple, and a lot more to boot.
The only thing here that casts a shadow is the few bits of clouds, nothing else is big enough or capable enough to have an impact on this large expanse. Only the clouds can make shadowed patches of darker green on the hills covered in gums, roundy hills of that dry silvery grey brown green, dark green only where the shadows are cast by the clouds.
You fly by through the landscape just as the fire does when it rips through come summer, feeding off the dry gums filled with euculptyus oil that just explodes at the touch of flames.
Dry, dull, sunsoaked, silvery, warm, not bright, lush, cool, luminous, vibrant.
Silvery ghostly trunks, dry sunsoaked leaves, oil waiting to be lit.
Gums always look old and weathered but they're not old. The old trees are the big ones which are fire resistant, not filled with oil and dry to catch the flames.
Passing by Lake George now, well at least half the time it's a lake, right now theres sheep grazing on the grass and not a drop of water in sight. I think the lake's meant to fluctuate between being a lake and being a plateau of grass. It is a very large expanse of flatness, not a bump in sight unless you count the few sheep. It is ringed around with hills and the road doesn't cut across it, instead it edges round one of the outside skirts at the base of one of the hill sides which rises steeply up with its gums. Another incongruity to Lake George is its fence markings, the lines of fence posts that divide it up as a field. You don't think of farmers farming on a lake come plateau, sheep and grass and the like. You don't have fields in the middle of a lake, nor do you have sheep much. I can't see any farm houses to go with the paddocks and the sheep though, its just sheep and paddocks and I'm not sure where the water comes from when its a lake. It provides the most distinctive landmark along this journey and its hard to miss it.
Canberra - often called boring. Perhaps 'flat' is more accurate, apparently it has a sister city of Nara in Japan, I don't tend to think of National Capitals being 'twinned'. I've not heard of Nara before either and I do know a decent number of Japanese cities. Canberra is flat and spreadout, with not much in it. It never has really seemed like a capital city other than its all formally laid out in little patterns. Theres no sense of people's lives, it's not a place to be 'lived' in.
