flat on my face

Sheltered under tall eucalypts my home was a friend’s old caravan lazing outside the gate of their home at the end of the road in a small country town in the hills. Its condition and location were a metaphor for how things had worked out for me. The roof leaked. The water pump was broken. The gas stove didn’t work. Both tyres were flat. The whole thing felt like it might collapse in a heap at any moment. Yet this had become my home and within its thin walls was stored everything I owned. The scents of nature – pine mixed with eucalypt and, on cooler days, the smoke of wood fires – drifted through on the gentle autumn breezes as if there were no walls at all. The birds were my neighbours. Squawking galahs. Screeching white cockatoos. Cawing crows. Gossiping magpies. And an occasional laughing kookaburra. I could hear the endless rushing of water from the creek which had cut a deep gully beside the caravan. It was here along Doctor’s Gully some 150 years earlier that Swiss-It...