3 July

We’re just back from Broken Hill (see, I do travel, occasionally). The Australian ‘outback’ (a stupid term) holds a secret, a mystery. Why I most wanted to go there. Lots of caravans and 4WDs out there. And goats, thousands of goats. All of those dots connect, it’s a tourist destination that we conquer with our 4WDs, or camp in to ‘see the sights’. But it’s really none of those things. It’s the last remnant of an ancient world in a modern land. Like having a time machine to go back billions of years. If you stand quietly there you can somehow feel it. Time and space merge into a single experience. You get a fleeting glimpse into the thing I post about so much, a sense of *place*. A shimmering, almost impossible to define thing, that merger of time and space. Place is space, with time added, I now think. You can’t experience it in Europe, where every square centimetre of land has been worked by humans in annual cycles. The deep past is cut off. But you can feel it in the ‘outback’. I was standing there feeling that, and a couple of Ford Rangers roared up, left the engines running (for no reason except to make ridiculous amounts of petrolhead noise), and got out to take selfies against the view. Then drove off, spitting up sand and rocks. That’s Straya in the outback, that and caravans. Tourists in our own land. And goats, a symptom of our neglect.