Read Online Ten Pound Pom by Niall Griffiths - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Niall Griffiths
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bright blue glow as we turn a corner and there surrounded by soot-black air stand three luminous blue crucifixes, each about thirty feet high, free-standing, star-bright in the thick black night. Bright, bright blue. I stand at the foot of one and hear the electricity crackling in it; the hairs on my arms prickle erect. My face bathed in the bone-white blue-bright light and all around me is blackness so thick that it’d be like swimming in ink if I left the thrown illumination of these bizarre and unexpected totems.
Christ but this is getting strange.
We park up in a layby in the darkness and sleep. In the morning we find the Colo River campsite which is closed for thewinter months but we knock and a Kiwi feller answers. We tell him what we’re doing and he agrees to show us around. He smokes American Spirit roll-ups with filters, as I do, and I like him. Colo is now a private park; all the caravans here are owned. It’s a misty morning, as it was three decades ago, but in that mist the remembered beauty can be seen. That river, that rockface rising up. I recall walking down to this river, standing on this very beach in the morning after we slept in the caravan that my mum called ‘grotty’. Which it was. I recall something of the wonder. And feel again this new wonder of encountering the younger me on the opposite side of the planet.
Christ but this is getting strange.
Drive on. Deeper into the Blue Mountains. The ground rises up. At Blackheath we park up and look out for Govett’s Leap. Our youngest sister – who was born in Perth, as you’ll discover – had been here a year earlier and advised us to visit it and, when we find it, we’re glad she did; it’s a suspended patio looking out over an abyssal drop between sheer cliff faces, spectacular, astonishing. Vast plunging space, tree’d escarpments far below immense slashes of bared stone. The waterfall off to the right is such a plunge that the water is gas rather than liquid before it reaches the valley floor all those skull-spinning metres below. I never came here as a kid. I think of the settlers, the explorers, encountering this for the first time; I imagine they felt as I do as they regarded this landscape, both stuffed with terror and bursting with possibility. It’s vertiginous, immense. What lies atop those distant plateaus, across those great gulfs of blue and shimmering air? Oceans of space, here. I feel wonder.
At the gift shop I buy a Jacaroo hat and some information books and sit at a table with a can of cold cola and read themwhile Tony goes off to find internet access. I haven’t checked my emails in days and I know that there’ll be several that will require an urgent response but I’m enjoying myself here, it feels like a holiday, and I don’t want to waste time at a keyboard so I sit in the shade of my new titfer and drink my cold cola and read my new books. Or flick through them, at least. I’ll go online when we reach the next big city, when I’ve got a few hours to kill. Meantime, I read what Steve Parish has to say about this area in his Discovering Blue Mountains. What, no definite article? ‘Sixty-five kilometres west of Sydney’, he says, ‘the Blue Mountains parts its shimmering veil to reveal the beauty of its sculptured cliffs and forested valleys’. Grammar, Steve, grammar; sort out your pronouns, lad. Think that should be ‘sculpted’, as well. Still, he’s informative; twenty-four towns, apparently, occupy the main plateau. Chief settlement is Katoomba, the area’s long been a resort for those Sydney-ites wanting to temporarily escape the big and nearby city. Another booklet, called Layers of Time , tells me that where I’m sitting is called the Evans Lookout, and Govett’s Leap Creek is below me; to the left, at the end of the gorge, is Mount Banks, then Mount Wilson, then Mount Tomah to my right, and, after that, Mount Hay. Charles Darwin explored the region, in 1836. He stayed at the Weatherboard Inn,
Christ but this is getting strange.
We park up in a layby in the darkness and sleep. In the morning we find the Colo River campsite which is closed for thewinter months but we knock and a Kiwi feller answers. We tell him what we’re doing and he agrees to show us around. He smokes American Spirit roll-ups with filters, as I do, and I like him. Colo is now a private park; all the caravans here are owned. It’s a misty morning, as it was three decades ago, but in that mist the remembered beauty can be seen. That river, that rockface rising up. I recall walking down to this river, standing on this very beach in the morning after we slept in the caravan that my mum called ‘grotty’. Which it was. I recall something of the wonder. And feel again this new wonder of encountering the younger me on the opposite side of the planet.
Christ but this is getting strange.
Drive on. Deeper into the Blue Mountains. The ground rises up. At Blackheath we park up and look out for Govett’s Leap. Our youngest sister – who was born in Perth, as you’ll discover – had been here a year earlier and advised us to visit it and, when we find it, we’re glad she did; it’s a suspended patio looking out over an abyssal drop between sheer cliff faces, spectacular, astonishing. Vast plunging space, tree’d escarpments far below immense slashes of bared stone. The waterfall off to the right is such a plunge that the water is gas rather than liquid before it reaches the valley floor all those skull-spinning metres below. I never came here as a kid. I think of the settlers, the explorers, encountering this for the first time; I imagine they felt as I do as they regarded this landscape, both stuffed with terror and bursting with possibility. It’s vertiginous, immense. What lies atop those distant plateaus, across those great gulfs of blue and shimmering air? Oceans of space, here. I feel wonder.
At the gift shop I buy a Jacaroo hat and some information books and sit at a table with a can of cold cola and read themwhile Tony goes off to find internet access. I haven’t checked my emails in days and I know that there’ll be several that will require an urgent response but I’m enjoying myself here, it feels like a holiday, and I don’t want to waste time at a keyboard so I sit in the shade of my new titfer and drink my cold cola and read my new books. Or flick through them, at least. I’ll go online when we reach the next big city, when I’ve got a few hours to kill. Meantime, I read what Steve Parish has to say about this area in his Discovering Blue Mountains. What, no definite article? ‘Sixty-five kilometres west of Sydney’, he says, ‘the Blue Mountains parts its shimmering veil to reveal the beauty of its sculptured cliffs and forested valleys’. Grammar, Steve, grammar; sort out your pronouns, lad. Think that should be ‘sculpted’, as well. Still, he’s informative; twenty-four towns, apparently, occupy the main plateau. Chief settlement is Katoomba, the area’s long been a resort for those Sydney-ites wanting to temporarily escape the big and nearby city. Another booklet, called Layers of Time , tells me that where I’m sitting is called the Evans Lookout, and Govett’s Leap Creek is below me; to the left, at the end of the gorge, is Mount Banks, then Mount Wilson, then Mount Tomah to my right, and, after that, Mount Hay. Charles Darwin explored the region, in 1836. He stayed at the Weatherboard Inn,
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