Nhill, Rainbow, Jeparit, and the return of touring

Sometimes there is power in the new. For we need help if we are to remain (or rather become) alive to existence, and the novel captures our attention. Sometimes that same aliveness is achieved through repetition. Of course, every repetition dwells in a new moment. And every new thing is an extension of the old. I value repetition, the cyclical deepening of an experience or a place. I remember that I first motorcycled these roads, first placed my body in these places, twenty years ago. I think it all started on the back of my Yamaha SR500. I would have been in my late twenties, when I first rode from Stawell to Halls Gap, over its mountain and across to Natimuk, then up through the Little Desert at the end of the day. When I am on a motorcycle, it is deserts which call to me more than anything else. So that journey would become an annual event, but it was a long way when I was living in Melbourne. Often times since then I have noticed an absurdity: I now live much closer to that region--I am on the western edge of central Victoria--but that I stopped riding when I moved here. Later, when I took up riding again, it was only locally, despite the fact that any tours would no longer involve city freeways, and would instead start and finish in ideal riding country. Perhaps it was the recent re-purchase of my Yamaha SR500 (the very one I owned in my twenties and which I rode on the first journey out there, but which I sold in 2012) which awakened in me the desire to put my body out there again, in that wind, under that sun, flowing through those places out west, with a tent and with open days. Of course, right now it is the middle of winter, and I am middle-aged. The days are cold and the nights are chill. At dawn the land is frozen or wet with fog. But the pull toward that land out there--Nhill, Rainbow, Jeparit, the deserts--has grown, and become a compulsion. Last week I could no longer deny it. I set out on Friday morning.

I am still tuning the carburettor of the SR500, so I rode my Honda CB250, which is the motorcycle I chose for my return to motorcycling a year ago. As I drove the bike out west toward Natte Yallock, the fog become increasingly dense, and vision obscure. At times I squinted to see the roag, as tree trunks emerged like ghosts beside me, and I feared for kangaroos in my path. The small motorcycle achieved only 80km per hour, but that fine in these conditions. At Natte Yallock, and within the space of a couple of hundred meters, the fog completely dissipated and I was bathed in sunshine. Laid out before me was a route of back roads to Stawell. Indeed this whole journey would be one in which the road was mostly mine, mostly a joyful emptiness.

At Halls Gap I sat eating my bakery lunch when a kookaburra dove in from above and plucked my pie right from my hands with shocking force. Then, with all the confidence of a bully-boy who knows his victim will not retaliate, he sat at my very feet and ate my food in front of me.

Following this ritual of humiliation I revved my little engine and began a slow but wonderful upward sweep, out of Halls Gap and over the mountain.

In the vallee again, I took back roads through places with names like Mockinya--it seemed appropriate--and eventually reached Natimuk, which is one of my favourite stops on this journey which I have now repeated for twenty years. For Natimuk is the beginning of the journey into the Little Desert. I have ridden through there on almost every motorcycle I've owned since that first journey, plus I have cycled it twice. The first time I came this way, it was late in the day and I remember proceeding with anxiety into the desert. Was I low on petrol? Or worried that my old paper map was faulty such that I might become lost in a desert before nighfall? I cannot remember. I recall only that feeling, which at the time gave a striking pathos to the silhouettes of dead gums, as I pushed forward on single lane roads with no houses in sight. This time there were no such feelings. So many competencies and resources have come my way since those days, and the road is now an old friend. What once were a set of mysteries which held me captive, are now so many mechanical and fluidic and electrical systems that my mind can range across and my hands analyse and repair. What was once the young man's concern to get things right and to be alright, has been replaced with the older man's Stoicism and spirit of fate's acceptance, even despite the loss of a youthful body.

One of life's greatest joys lies in the moment before, the moment of anticipation of a pleasure whose time has come. So I rode on toward the desert, toward the silence and big skies and primeval flora and the sand of an ancient sea floor. The desert did not disappoint me, though it was very different this time. At first it was the moody sky which gripped me. This time it was the sky that was so full of pathos, but of a detached kind. Peter Falconio's murderer died last week, and I had been reading about Joanne Lee's horror night on that lonely road in outback Australia. I felt no fear myself, of course, but it was a background context which made me more alive to this sky and this silent landscape. To the beautiful strangeness of the places in which we live or through which we pass, as we get further and further from the coast.

As I rode further, however, something else emerged. Fire-fighting friends had told me of the devastation of the Little Desert during the fires last summer. Now, in mid-winter, I saw the outcome of its ferocity. The brush was gone. Places in which I had picnicked, setting myself down amongst that low jungle of endless salt bush, hidden from view even to a nearby bushwalker, were now stripped naked. There was only sand, and the trunks of blackened trees whose stubborn density had alone been able to withstand the destruction.

I have to admit, I loved this too. This too was beautiful. Repeatedly I stopped and simply stood, looking.

In time, of course, the desert came to and end, as my Honda carried me forward across the miles.

Finally I came to Nhill, and to the caravan park where I always stay. I set up my tent, and walked to the pub for pints in the main bar, then dinner in the restaurant. Afterwards I walked the town, stumbling through shadows and guided by street lights. I have a special love for Nhill, and especially for the old flour mill in the centre of town, whose silos stand like a medieval Tuscan castle surrounded by Renaissance palaces.

I love the Nhill pub with its old-time generous restaurant. I love the silos with their high mystery. I love the Vietnamese cafe, which is open late into the night.

My partner and I met six months after I moved to Maryborough. I encouraged her to buy in the region, and she now owns the 1890s undertaker's residence in Tarnagulla. Before we met, we lived in the same Melbourne suburb, at the same time, frequenting the same post office and fish and chip shop. Before we knew each other, we were both in love with Nhill, including with the same pub restaurant. If we were to move now, it would probably be to Nhill. One of our favourite Friday night treats is to watch John Hadley's North West Real Estate channel on Youtube, and to fantasise about which latest $150k house we could buy in the region. I thought about all this the next morning. The morning was cold. At least, that is what everybody else said, however I was acclimatised. My winter sleeping bag had kept me comfortable, but the Kmart tent was a different story. Sure, it was sound in almost every way. However, it was too short. My head touched one end, while my feet touched the other. You know what happens when the night is wet and you touch the sides of a tent. I tried sleeping in the fetal position but that kept me awake. So I struggled all night, trying not to become soaked by the sides of the tent, which would have been miserable in winter. I was grateful to be sitting at Mr Le's again, sipping my breakfast coffee.

It suggested above that this is one of the greatest pleasures of life: to consciously savour the anticipation of a longed-for moment which has almost arrived, which is about to be. That always happens at Natimuk, and it also always happens the next morning, in Nhill. The road north out of Nhill is less a stretch of tarmac, and more a memory of what life can feel like, an unpseakable sense of what it can be, when one is in love with the very elements of physical existence, experienced through the mechanical miracles of the twentieth century, especially the motor cycle. Often cold, often swallowed by wind, looking toward Wyperfield National Park, this road with its orange dirt is magic to me. And so I rode. My first stop was the silos at Yamac.

The roads in this area are indeed magic to me. The tarmac feels like a river. It bends and sweeps. It rolls up and down as if afloat on constant waves. To left and right, trees, old farm houses, and great paddocks of green, whose crops shine wet and translucent in the morning sun. That light was like a promise of the day. And so I rode on, through Netherby and further, until my favourite silo appeared in the distance. That silo appears to bob up and down, as one rounds the corners and crests the hills and the whole landscape feels like a kind ocean. In time, that which was up ahead, was present. You can feel the perplexity of time out here, where the present moment one notices is suddenly the past, and the time wrapped around a place up ahead seems, when it comes, to be a moment one was always making for. And if that is true, how far back does its truth go?

Further along there was a fork in the road. Would I go to Jeparit, or save that and head north west around Lake Hindmarsh, to Rainbow? I chose the latter. As I noted earlier, the roads were mine, shared with very few. Not a single vehicle came up behind me, despite my reduced speed on this small bike, which would drop even to 70kph when driving uphill and headlong into the wind. If I came off the bike I would have to wait for help. But I would not come off. The day was too good. It was kind. It had nothing to offer but beauty, as well as that hint of mystery that came to me as I stared at those ancient pines, and wondered at what lay beyond my vision--the struff wrapped up in the folds of time as much as the stuff that was there but unseen now.

At Rainbow I drank coffee at the coffee, and then headed south to Jeparit for lunch. And so I had circumnavigated the ancient lake. In Jeparit, the birthplace of Robert Menzies, I chatted with a 90-year-old motorcyclist who had ridden all over Australia. He had been shopping in the general store where I ate my fried chips. He didn't mean to, but what that man was doing as he spoke, was pointing to a possibility which has been unlived, and which perhaps might remain so. But it could also be a moment up ahead, toward which I am making, and if I get there then it will always have been there, a truth about now that is waiting up ahead. Until I get to that moment--if I do--then I will not know which is true, of course. Such journeys across this wider country would need the right bike, of course, and the time from my work which I value so highly. It would be very different to my previous many tours around Victoria and Tasmania. Most of all, such a journey, or journeys, would need to become a longing which compells me. We shall see. What lay before me now, was the route home. It remained a path of back roads: to Warracknabeal, Minyip, Banyena. At one point a swarm of cockies flew alongside me for a kilometre with clear intention. It was one of those moments when, like so many, I felt the need to use the word "joy", and to perhaps over-use the word, for language constantly fails us in the face of such realities. At St Arnaud I stopped for coffee, then rode out through Emu, Bealiba, and Dunolly. Then it was south on my usual local roads, late in the day and so with eyes out for kangaroos. As I pulled into my street it began to rain. It was indeed a joy, this tour, and although only two days, it was a re-entry: another of those moments in life when one dusts off a neglected part of the self, and begins a new chapter woven out of an old passion.