It took me a long time to even begin to wrap my head around the Territory.
At first, it was red dirt, the humming hulk of Uluru, the strange mystery of Kata Tjuta, or the Devil’s Marbles, of a place that seemed to be a temporal cul-de-sac, a sanguine stream of unconsciousness where spacetime seemed sluggish.
I passed through, engine thrumming at illegal speeds, astonished at how quickly the WA border loomed up after bleary hours of heatwave-shimmer.
Years and miles later, layered greens and browns, the muggy, muddy, mangrove expanse of Arnhem Land, from Kodak reds to Velvia blues and that hazy cerulean cyclorama of ocean and sky, of a wildness to be hunted, a haunting wildness that seems to stare back into your fear.
As impossible to capture in a bottle as a ship at sea, nonetheless, these are my impressions, and nothing more.
THE END
