Heat roils up from the tarmac, shimmers in waves from the car and hangs heavy in the air. Trailing a hand from the open window and tracing the brown horizon line with a moist fingertip, I can almost feel the claydust and dessicated grass husks sticking to my sweating skin. Hot wind rushes in and cracks my parched lips. The swill of water in the bottle is hot and tastes of plastic. The dry hills roll past in thirsty waves of hard-baked earth and stubbled fields, drooping grey trees and crumbling gutters of erosion where once creeks and rivers ran.
Victoria. February. Hot.
Heat from the sun, crisping my skin like cooking chicken. Heat from the air, sucking moisture from every breath. Heat from the motor, thrumming under my feet through the hot metal. The heat and the endless black track reeling in below us and streaming out behind are so mesmerising that passing slow trucks and cars pulling caravans feels like a game. It's hard to believe we are flying along at a real speed, one wrong move away from crumpled metal and blood and death. This isn't a badly air-conditioned game of Daytona.
We went to the NSW coast for a family wedding. We drove inland on the Hume to get there as directly as possible. Four hours of monotonous arid Victorian countryside, the drought in all its brown-skinned, blue-eyed tragic glory. A night in a
caravan park in Albury, lolling in the pool - sheer luxury - then limbs flung asunder in the stifling tent, listening to the trucks passing by the whole night through. (If you close your eyes and imagine really hard, it almost sounds like the ocean!)
The next day, the rest of the journey... more dryness, then a few hours from the coast the drought hid itself ever more slyly until we were coiling down ferny mountain roads, breathing in warm, moist rainforest air and marvelling at the green - a salve for our eyes. The NSW coast... what an eden! Picture-perfect green hills, lush juicy grass on the roadside like set decorators had just been through, parrots, white-fenced stud farms, the stuff of dreams. The idyllic countryside from the stories of my childhood, usually set in England, was laid out like a fresh picnic on a crisp cloth.
The weekend itself was lovely, although the eden, with its ceaseless humidity had me constantly clammy-feeling. But there was bonding with family, jive-dancing with my awfully proper British Airways pilot uncle, holding of the baby until my arms cramped, sleeping in twin beds (just like
Basil and Sybil...not a highlight, nor portentious I hope!), thrashing and being thrashed in the robust surf (my $20 kmart bikini struggled to rise to the challenge!) and the general feeling of holiday, albeit crammed into one weekend. We did the return trip in one long day, getting increasingly snappish as the heat, the fucking heat, drilled into our very cores.
At one point, the comment was heard to be made, "Why would you buy land in Victoria? Victoria sucks dicks!" No, not an overly mature commentary on the state of the state, but one that felt succint at the time. And I have to say, these past months enduring this horror of heat and beating sun have me muttering more and more, "Melbourne - I can't do it anymore, the heat, it's doing my head in".
As it is today. Again.
Please let it rain.
