Cairn Curran

Riding the motorbike that summer, through the hot yellow grasslands of central Victoria and around the expansive waters of Cairn Curran, wearing only shorts and sandals, crystallised in me a sense of freedom that I possessed earlier, but never so fully, and which I always associate with that time in the country. I felt I could do anything provided I was respectful of others. The law and other kinds of regulations seemed only rules of thumb, regulative ideals, to be interpreted by individuals according to circumstances and constrained by goodwill and commonsense. From my father and from Hora I had already acquired a sense that only morality was absolute because some of its demands were non-negotiable. But I was too young to be troubled by that. I was eleven years old, riding my father's motorbike to collect the mail and visit friends, yet no one was troubled by this breach of the law. It left me with a sad, haunting image of a freedom, impossible now to realise, and which even then the world could barely afford.



Yesterday I rode my motorbike around those same, expansive waters. I was riding there fifty years after one of Cairn Curran's, and the world's, best living philosophers was an eleven year old riding his father's BSA Bantam along those same roads.





Later I wound my way back to Melbourne via constant side-excursions, discovering new single lane roads. These roads took me to the tops of mountains and to the base of great symbols.





Autumn is a wonderful time, but I look forward to winter too, when I shall wrap myself in lambswool and lose myself in grey skies and the smell of wet roads.