Aura Australis
September 13th, 2023: we emerge from an endless tunnel of long haul air travel into the damp streets of regional Rhine-Main outside Frankfurt, the night sky lit up like a tent of low-hanging flocculence. The houses we walk past have steeply-sloped roofs and timber beams splayed across their facades, with wide, wild empty space between each block of land; in one of them, a rush of leaves and the flash of a fox’s back.
We walk to the only pub on Google Maps that’s still open. It’s a narrow, long room of a tavern, all wood everything, with a single slot machine in the back. The elderly barkeep does not speak English; the sole patron does. It’s cash only—of course, we have none—so he shouts us our Fränkisch Dunkel and Apfelwein, then talks endlessly of beer and of Dresden. He has greasy, greyish chin-length hair and glasses, the particularly unfashionable oblong kind only worn in highly practical, form-follows-function cultures. During our conversation he mistakes us for Americans, and I’m offended. I thought my accent was fairly neutral, maybe even a little twinged with the flavour of ‘international school’ by my German mother’s infectious stiff vowels. How does a middle-aged German man expect an Australian to sound? I’m not sure. I think something older, broader.
When I think of ‘Australiana’, I think of a way of speaking that died out (or at least ceased to be inherited by the new generation) at the millennium. Not just the ‘dag’ and ‘spunk’ dichotomy, but the singsongy, nasal tone, the hollowed-out ‘R’ sound—too Ṟight, mate—that we now let flop off our bottom lip with little bending of the tongue. Did people born after 1981 simply let their jaws go slack? Was it too much TV? Did the advent of the internet wring out of the last facets of our linguistic identity uncontaminated by America’s sticky influence? Whatever it was, it’s cast ‘gee whiz’ and the whiny cadence of Collette’s Muriel back into the strange hole from whence they came. It’s generally accepted among linguists that certain distinguishing features of the Australian accent have their roots in Indigenous language: the upwards inflection at the end of sentences, the nasal drone, the way we stick a superfluous ‘o’ on the end of a word. These characteristics are synonymous with the ‘broad’ accent—the Irwin, not the Blanchett—and they’re slipping fast off the teeth of the young and tertiary educated, if they’re still there at all.
I recently watched an Australian indie film that held a mirror up to my flaccid way of speaking. In James Vaughan’s Friends and Strangers, two girls gossip about a bad date in a Glebe or Surry Hills cafe and groan out their vowels with that disinterested inner-city inflection mantled by the vocal fry of New York it-girls. In another scene, an older man at a campground shares with the young protagonists his memories of Sydney in the wild sixties and seventies. He speaks of a former intellectual curiosity that is, in his view, now missing from the culture. Friends and Strangers is Postcolonial Gothic for the new millennium; the characters appear well out of their element in the scrubby bushland where this conversation takes place, flushed and squinting teeth-grit in the midday sun. One character groans that the tent has no air, while his camping companion takes awkwardly posed photographs of herself at the summit of a hiking trail. It calls to mind Picnic at Hanging Rock; in Peter Weir’s portrayal, the central Victorian landscape is unknowable at best and perilous at worst, inducing in the settlers—a people habituated to ‘small country’—a kind of vertigo. The terrain is nothing like gentle green England, with its remote risk of natural predators or getting lost. They wear white gloves on a rocky outcrop in the middle of summer and then vanish into thin air.
In the Gariwerd calendar, spring is known as Petyan, the season of wildflowers. Indigenous weather period distinctions are made largely by observing the specific changes in animal and plant life. Petyan sees the emergence of butterflies: wanderer, common brown, caper white. Lizards are out and active. Native orchid varieties are well in bloom: leopard, hare, flying duck, leek. Moths and beetles pool around lights as the bush rings out with mating calls of birds and frogs. The inner city arranges its smells and sounds arbitrarily, less the harmony seen in the Grampians than a series of strangers speaking over the top of each other. It can be dizzying, and sometimes lovely—the scent from a sprawly hedge of star jasmine somewhere along the Canning strip fires off a synapse that’s been asleep since last year, the last time it was exactly this temperature. The fragrant mantles of soil and wet, warm bitumen, downpipes weeping green, the histamine haze of plane trees hanging over the roads—everything in the plant kingdom of nature strips and terrace front courtyards feels close and lush. The new builds with natural timber facades and solar panels on the roof always have native grasses and mulch beneath grevilleas or wattle trees, never lawns, and so many bees. A “YES” sign is still cable-tied to the fence. And then the sun hits the earth at an angle that’s altogether different, not just closer. I have to shut the curtains of my south-facing window around five o'clock to stop my linens from getting bleached and myself from being blinded by the light refracted through the frosted glass panel. There’s sweat and sunscreen clogging the pores on my neck and torso, tiny atopic bumps blooming at the site of contact between the skin below my clavicle and the leather strap of my handbag.
None of the smells are that different from anywhere else on the urban east coast. The wood chips in the playgrounds, mown buffalo grass, bushfires. Or the sickly pollen of papery coastal trees and salt air, but where could that possibly be coming from in the northern suburbs? More Coffin Bay oysters received into chittering maws. The short-haired girls are picnicking on the median strip and the gallery patrons are blocking the footpath outside the entrance. It’s time for an acrid skin-contact. It’s time to drive to a country town one or two hours out of Melbourne, maybe in the goldfields, something historic. Not like the Central West, no Big W or hard rubbish on the side of the freeway and no lads in the plaza, no plaza, just a ‘square’ with oak trees and old couples who say hello when they pass you on the footpath, and there’s always a mill market, a too-big hollowed out brick shell that’s too hot inside and host to far too many objects, all tightly packed and spilling over the top of each other, to ever plausibly reconnoitre as a customer. Twelve thousand square metres of clothes and antiques and maybe some artisan candles and pashminas and vegan lollies if that kind of thing has trickled down yet from the bowels of the big city and Pinterest, enough to make your eyes ache and the room spin. The building next door was erected in eighteen twenty-something—it has a plaque to commemorate this, complete with details of its former use, something bureaucratic—but is disused, facade peeling, the filigree balustrades bent and rusted. You wobble on the edge of sunstroke on the walk back to the car, even with your new fake $15 akubra wrest from the bric-a-brac to keep your face from burning.
I know of artists driven out to the regions by disillusionment with cosmopolitanism and inner-city social hierarchies; they want to trade in their keyboard jobs for wholesome, honest work, put their hands in the soil, drink unpasteurised milk. It’s odd—those who grew up in a small town seem to write and sing so much about boredom and paralysis and marginality, as if the cultural cringe experienced outside of major cities is a second squamous layer over the broader national lump. And yet Australian art seems obsessed with the country as a site of grounding identity. Maybe that’s because the cities are only two hundred years old at most and there’s little that meaningfully distinguishes them from one another or from other ‘young’ western cities like Toronto or Seattle. The bush, on the other hand, is unmistakable—it can distinguish itself from the rest of the world easily. But there’s not much mind paid in settler impressions to the unspeakable traumas in which the bush is steeped outside of some empty notion of ‘hauntedness’, where the landscape remembers so we don’t have to.
A few weeks ago we drove out to the goldfields for a hike and ran out of daylight, nearly. The time estimates on the trail signs were generous. We powerwalked the wide dirt track to outrun the dark and got back to the car when the sun was still up, its setting underway but not well underway, the light on the sprawly young gums golden with particulate. The landscape here was mangled, the mark left by mining not yet lost to time. Something about the place felt like it was designed to trick us—the vague signs, the exploded earth, the eeriness itself—there were the trees frail and prone to snapping, growing in strange directions out of the metal-leeched ground; the brickshed ruins you could mistake for cairns and the neat patch of jonquils growing wild at its foot; man-made hillocks and quarries and the rusted remains of machinery therein returning to the dirt under a sheer carpet of new grass. 'Hauntology' and all the rest, yes. Of course it felt haunted—people lived and worked here and it's been scarcely documented. There were so many other more prolific mining towns to write about that this one's become little more than a scenic bypass for mountain bikers.
Here at the ruined Welsh Village, the thick needle-foliage of imported pines block out the last bits of light. Something screams down the side of the gully. We stand still for a moment. It sounds to me like a fox and Leland thinks it’s the shriek of a woman, but the high guttural pitch doesn't quite convince me. I've heard reports of panthers in these parts of rural Victoria; apparently, circuses brought the things over long ago and then released them into the wild once they went out of business. There's a massive community of people on Facebook who believe they're still at large, with many claiming to have seen one themselves. There’s been no credible evidence as yet, though. Most of the posts go something along the lines of: About 1:43am on bruce’s creek road in whittlesea last night I seen what looked very much like a massive black cat, saw the back end of it with the very long black tail run into the bushes. definitely wasn’t a roo as it didn’t hop and the tail was curved like a feline. I pulled over the side of the road but it was gone before I could take out my camera phone and unfortunately I don’t have a dash cam. Has anyone else seen one in this area? 66 reactions, 49 comments. Top comment, Had you been drinking??? 16 reactions, 10 replies. Why are you people even in this group if you’re just going to be juvenile. I thought this was a community for people to share their experiences not get made fun of??
I never thought the stories held any water until I’d heard it from two level-headed friends who’d just returned from a hike at Lerderderg Gorge, where they said they’d locked eyes with a cat the size of a retriever on the trail in broad daylight. Leland and I were there the same day, but didn’t hear their account until after we got home. When we walked back along the riverbank, we heard thick branches snapping in the brush below and loud, breathy snorting. Wild deer, wild pigs? It got closer. Whatever it was had to have had hooves to be destroying the thicket so loudly and easily, but the sound coming from its mouth was deep and gruff. There’s something ancient and paralysing about ‘nature fear’; being out of your man-made element at the mercy of an unknown animal makes everyday anxieties about telling your friend that they hurt your feelings or answering the phone to an unknown number feel almost unthinkably small and stupid. I told Leland I was scared, nails dug in his arm, and we scurried away like the food chain middlers we were.
Presently, at the floor of the Welsh Village pine gully, the sun is nearly set. It’s meant to be an hour and a half walk back to the carpark, so we truncate our contemplation of the ruins. There are the crumbled walls of tiny brick cottages, as well as a few mine shafts fenced off with metal stakes and red and white tape. If you stand close to the edge, you can see the bed of brown she-oak needles and plastic bags at the bottom. On the trail, we see a young man further up the incline shouting in complaint. There are two others in tow, an older man and woman. As they pass him by, he cries out that he doesn’t want to keep walking uphill, and they don't appear to respond. He runs after them, shrieking.