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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere
In A Train Carriage, Going NowhereSubscribed: 5Played: 48
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Description
I'm a storyteller, writer and bushwalking guide from Tasmania.
63 Episodes
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"A person ought to count themselves as rich if they live among insects."
In this train carriage in the bush, I am often visited by insects - flies, wasps, beetles, butterflies and bugs. Buzz along with me as I think more about the little six-legged critters with whom I share a habitat.
"Maybe all birds are mythical birds. They at least have the vibe of creatures that are make-believe: you can imagine a child sketching out a ragged outline and blurting the monosyllable, bird. That could be their creation myth."
I have been seeking out birds of all shapes and colours, breeding habits and habitats. Some of them are clad in invented feathers and fly through the air of the imagination. You are invited to the train carriage, to twitch for mythical birds.
"The place was alive with birdsong. Insects crawled on the ground or flew through the air in iridescent colours. And there were more wildflowers than you have ever seen in your life..."
The forest slowly transitions into spring. Day by day, I see the flowers open up and say hello. Join me (with boisterous wind and cranky birds) as I contemplate the petals of so many bush blossoms.
"I take a deep breath. The air is still moist; it has the freshness of moss. I have been away and I have missed the forest here, but maybe the forest hasn’t been so bothered by my absence."
Sit with me as I return to my shack in the bush after a time away, wondering what my absence means in a place like this.
"I remembered that something like this happened once to the poet Edward Thomas. He was in the hills of Gloucestershire in 1914. June 24: the express train drew up there unwontedly, as the poet later wrote; the platform of the village station was empty, the heat was intense, and it was so quiet that the sound of a man clearing his throat on board the train was remarkable."
I have been coming and going from this train carriage, which, even though it never moves, seems to serve as a base for travel. Like a station, I reckon. Join me on another set of journeys to and fro my home in the bush.
"The whole purpose of my journey across the world had been in pursuit of this sensation...the same thrill that I’d felt in my patch of bush as a kid. It was a life-long search, a search that would never end."
Recording in the train carriage from which I think about the nature of movement, here are a series of stories about the motives and meaning of adventures.
"Poets and storytellers like to look at things from side-on. We like to combine images, make weird comparisons. Might I suggest that sometimes, at least some of us we must come at life from a tangent?"
Sometimes I like to look at things from a different angle - so I take this train carriage on a series of detours through stories that may never truly be. Join for all sorts of twists and turns on the road to nowhere.
"But it is true that if you wait for perfection, you may walk away emptyhanded. The best-laid plans can fall in a heap, and I can’t promise that the stores I’ve cached in the ground won’t be squandered. The fruit may rot, the flowers may wilt."
The sun has spun. A new yarn begins. With it comes a new set of days. We may plot our route way across them or just plunge in. Wander with me as I ponder the making of plans from the vantage point of my train carriage in the woods.
"The sunflowers turned towards the light and filled with a ferocious yellow. The sorrow still overwhelmed you. The end was near. But you made good work before then. What a story you could tell."
I have had cause to contemplate sorrow over the past year - from the small internal sorrows of solitude to the large-scale suffering of the world. Here's a set of stories wound around the idea of sorrow.
"Seeing can be a perfect pastime, a form of meditation. At the heart of my identity, seeing is the central mechanism for wonder."
Vision is a magical, mysterious phenomenon. Around the train carriage, I watch - and write what I see.
"The season’s end is signalled, once again,
by eight-pointed stars scattered across the path."
I have been taking opportunities to sit at the base of trees, investigating their lives, contemplating how they overlap with our own. And I've written poems about the trees.
"All night long I’ve kept a vigil, for nothing in particular, perhaps just keeping watch over solitude. My eyes sting; my body has lost all muscle tone; my bones ache. I have dipped in and out of a dream landscape, the world blurring into polymorphous figures, the earthly blending with the ethereal, the world beginning to crumble."
I have been learning about the stars, pondering their history, trying to measure my life by their movements. In spring, over the train carriage in which I live, they shine bright. One of them is especially powerful.
"I sometimes write secret wishes on scraps of paper, let them glow in the moonlight, then press them down onto the tip of a flame. I’m a creature of rhythm, of habit: habitually, I keep hoping."
I am in the southern hemisphere, at the change of seasons, looking up at the night sky. I am trying to understand my place in the universe.
"We must take it upon ourselves a responsibility to improve the health of these habitats: that’s where the hard yakka comes into it. In some ways, the act of picking up rubbish from the beaches of the south-west is the perfect activity for connecting with the spirit of the place...It’s almost meditative."
In autumn, I joined a long-running marine rubbish clean-up project in south-west Tasmania. These are the reflections that came from ten days in that special part of the world: thoughts on ecology, history, ethics and change.
Follow @teamcleantas on Instagram to support the project.
"The nest of a pink robin is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Imagine, in the palm of your hand, a hollow bowl built of feathery moss and ice-blue lichen, stitched together with spiderwebs and stuffed with a fern’s light-brown fur."
Recorded as live performance from A Festival Called Panama 2024, this series of stories honours the feathered friends who share the forest with us.
A special thanks to sound engineer Henry Rippon, as well as everyone involved with Panama for having me.
"There are places you can go only in summer – over the high passes or down the long peninsulas. Up honey-coloured creeks that climb to craggy façades. Across meadows matted with colourful flowers."
Reading a book called 'The Last Summer', I find myself thinking about the way memories fuse with the phenomena of summer.
"There are other ways to look at it. You might say that as a body gets burnt, as it turns into wisps of smoke, the atoms of which a human is made get separated, wander off into the atmosphere, change form, and become rearranged so that they link up with other operations in the universe."
I'm living in a train carriage on the edge of the bush, on the verge of a bushfire season. Such circumstances elicit a lot of thoughts and stories about the nature of fire.
"Standing on the stump of an old eucalypt, glaring at the yellowy-grey of the forest and the fields, she let out an almighty scream. It echoed through the woods, off towards the new neighbourhoods, running up the avenues and out to the mountains that rose on the horizon."
The Youngtown Regional Reserve is a small patch of bush in the outer suburbs of Launceston. These stories are a personal and ecological study of this modest bit of country. There are tales of ghosts, games, love affairs and magpies. As it happens, so many yarns pass through even a simple little place like this.
The soundtrack is produced in collaboration with my good friend, the ever-creative Yyan Ng.
"The pathways broadened into promenades, and the irresistible route zigged and zagged through innumerable pedestrians, who made bottlenecks and bridges; I twisted my torso and stretched my lanky legs out to squeeze by them. "
I thought I should account for my travels in Venice. But I have only been there for one afternoon; they are mostly travels through my imagination.
A collaboration with Emily Sanzaro on harp.
'The southern brown bandicoots have been busy, pressing their snouts into the earth in the search for subterranean mushrooms. This time of year must be their favourites: they root around, sniffing out the fruiting fungi and feasting on it. When I see them, I notice their almost feverish motion; the way they twitch and scratch their way through life. No moss will grow on a bandicoot’s back.'
I'm delving deeper into the world of moss, and everything that might be associated with it. Everything from bandicoots to poets seem to be connected with this simple plant.
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