LOOKING FOR AUSTRALIA Part 5

THE BLUE LAKE AND MOUNT GAMBIA

The air smells like Pine-O-Clean, only natural. I'm entering the lush pine forest surrounding the city of Mount Gambia. Years ago as a dopey kid hitch-hiking through the area I had thought all these pine trees had sprung up of their own accord. I know now however they've arrived courtesy of the hand of man, one man in particular who had the perspicacity and vision to be able to see the area's potential for such a valuable co-operation with nature. It's late in a day of baking heat and I've been beginning to droop but the pine air has revived me like a dose of smelling salts.

I'm soon in the centre of the city, riding up a steep hill which is actually an extinct volcano, relatively young as extinct volcanoes go, coming in at a mere 4,800 years. Aborigines would have been present during its active life and indeed myths still exist in the uniquely creative way Aborigines have of explaining natural phenomena.

What I like about this particular volcano - admittedly I haven't seen many although the sight of the aftermath of Mount Pinatubo's last eruption in the Philippines is one I won't soon forget - is the lake held in the crater. By the time I reach the rim still enough light is left in the sky to paint the lake its unique bluer-than-blue colour. Scientists, volcanologists and geologists have scratched their brainy heads over this phenomenon but alas in vain. No-one has a clue why the lake is the colour it is - it just is.

I take some time to drink in the strange beauty then ride off to pitch my tent in a caravan park conveniently close to the lake. It's an upmarket park with fees reflecting the fact and if I wasn't feeling so good I'd be stewing over how much I have to pay for the minuscule patch of grass my tent takes up. I know I won't be using the swimming pool as I prefer a real swim as opposed to a splash and I definitely won't be using the huge inflated rubber "jumping cushion" although it's amusing to watch kids doing their moon-walks, or rather moon-runs along its length.

It's a Friday night and in town the joint's jumping, the pubs are full of drinkers still in the happy stage before their individual personalities take them to whatever mood in which they are destine to end up.

My road-diet fails to improve as I strategically ensconce myself in a pizza joint across the road from one of the big pubs from where I can keep an eye on the dolled-up girls exiled to the footpath outside the pub while they smoke their all but outlawed cigarettes. Blondes predominate. In my mind, trained as I have it in my own peculiar way, blondes are somehow quintessentially Australian (no telling how many times I've been fooled by the peroxide variety). Perhaps the sentiment is not completely groundless; early observers of Australia, including DH Lawrence, noted the suntanned bodies and blondness of Australians. I'm no sport's fan but I'm oddly gratified at the sight of handsome female Nordics representing Australia at international sporting events - Valkyries prowling the battlefield.

 The male companions of the footpath girls, some of whom are not even smoking so it's easy to tell their real reasons for being outside while the beer remains inside, are healthy looking, strapping specimens lacking the pallor one often sees in office workers.

As I confirm in my wandering about the city in the couple of days I stay, this is another solid Australian town, suspended in amber to show how all of Australia once was. It is so far from Sydney and Melboune in ways in which distance is only a bit player, it could be an alternate reality. It is Australia before the Fall.  Here one hears only pure Australian accents, not the Babel-like mixture of languages one can hear on any street corner in the central business district of Sydney, not the English so heavily accented it is incomprehensible, just the English we've styled for ourselves.

Unsurprisingly, the volcano in which the Blue Lake nestles was not a solo outburst of the Earth's internal furnace; the entire area saw forms of volcanic activity. Virtually in the city's centre is a deep sink-hole. It is now the site of a nightly light show with projections of images telling of the spiritual characters and their conflicts that caused so much fiery mayhem so long ago.

An English couple I meet in the caravan park who have been touring the country on, from all accounts, an indestructible BMW bike for the last eight months - given I'm starting to wilt after a mere couple of weeks in the saddle, I can't help being impressed - tell me of another extinct volcano sans lake about twelve K out of town, so I decide to investigate.

No road leads to the rim of this one. Shank's pony (for non-Australians, this is Australian English for going on foot) is the only mode of transport. Very considerate I think, noting the well-fashioned steps and smooth inclining paths of the initial climb but I change my opinion and decide that these exist simply to lure the unwary into a climb that soon dispenses with the helpful paths and steps in a return to an au naturel state, that is, a rude, rugged track. Luckily, showing rare foresight, I’d decided motorcycle boots weren’t exactly ideal footwear for climbing volcanoes but to save weight the only other shoes I've packed are a pair of light sneakers. After a short distance on the new, unimproved path it's apparent that neither are these the ideal apparel for the task at hand. It seems I'm feeling every little pebble and for preventing ankle twisting I might as well be barefooted. But I have no choice but to continue - that is if I want to continue living with myself. 

After a slog, although and liberally punctuated with rest breaks, that has my shirt soaked with perspiration, I finally reach the rim of the volcano and am able to look down at the bottom of the crater far below. For souls far more ambition than myself, another track leads down the inside wall of the crater and across it’s floor. Why does a floor exist and not a hole leading somewhere like in Jules Vern’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth? Being the ultimate layman in this regard, I can only surmise that after a volcano finishes its hell-raising and settles down, the hole becomes plugged with lava. I can see that some energetic person is taking the alternative route but from my lofty perch he or she appears only as a moving dot.

Looking outward from the rim affords me a magnificent view of the surrounding countryside of patchwork farms. I can see so far, the curvature of the earth is easily discernible. As far as I can tell, views like this provide the only reason people climb mountains, besides of course because they are there.

After the effort of getting up here, it seems a shame to go straight down again so I set off on what is about a five kilometre hike around the rim, stopping periodically to look back down into the crater and try to comprehend the energy necessary to blow a hole this big in the Earth’s crust. The dot is now moving up the wall opposite the part of the rim on which I’m standing.

The sign at the border welcoming me to Victoria should be accompanied by another adding “and we apologise for not spending nearly as much on roads as is done in South Australia”, because right on cue the smooth bitumen ceases as though its been neatly guillotined and on the Victorian side of the invisible line the road becomes like someone would design to test automotive suspension. There is though a sign a little further along that informs in hilarious understatement “Rough Road Ahead”. How about the road behind? If that wasn’t rough, I grimace at trying to imagine what Victorian’s consider true roughness. I’ll find out later that the two very hard-boiled eggs and small coffee plunger, which I can’t do without and has survived some serious punishment, and which I have stored in the bike’s rear top-box have shattered and have formed a mixture of specks of broken glass, tiny pieces of eggshell and almost atomized egg that has become evenly dispersed throughout everything else in the tightly packed top-box.

However, blissfully unaware of this, my attention is lasered on the road ahead as I try, sometimes standing on the pegs to absorb the shocks with my legs, to pick paths through the worst of the bumps, holes and corrugations.

I’ve left the calming scent of the pine groves surrounding Mount Gambia far behind. Now, reaching high, are drab green and, in comparison to the orderly and well-dressed pines, wildly non-symmetrical and unkempt natives, mostly eucalypts. In an uncanny flash of synchronicity, I spot a huge tree, evidently of great age, the trunk of which bears a long scar. It’s an obvious memento of, as I’ve learnt only a few hours earlier, while reading over coffee, Blainey’s The Triumph of the Nomads, the Aboriginal practice of removing bark with which to fashion one-man, throw-away canoes. The missing bark would never regenerate, leaving an elongated bald-patch, but no injury would be caused to the tree which would continue to grow.

 Here and there, creepy, pale and misshapen dead trees are transformed by my overactive imagination into emaciated, bony-fingered crones lying in wait for an unsuspecting Hansel and Gretel. 

To be continued