The trees in Australia are spindly.
Their silhouettes spread like flat fans.
The foliage is sparse, dry.
Their silhouettes spread like flat fans.
The foliage is sparse, dry.
The leaves are a muted green. The bark peels away in papery layers, revealing a pale grey, almost white trunk, wrinkled in places. Like someone’s skin. More like an old person's.
At dusk, though, those trunks become something else. Catching the last light, they turn slightly uncanny.
The branches twist and bend. In the dry summer heat, they fall with dull thuds. Eucalyptus sheds like that, adjusting its own energy.
Fallen branches lie scattered through the forest. Like the bones of some large creature. Sometimes someone gathers the thinner ones and leans them against a fallen trunk, making a small shelter. Little huts appear here and there. Something might live in them. I hesitate to look inside.
Nature in Australia is vast. In summer, it is so dry that sometimes it catches fire on its own.
Pasture dotted with low shrubs. Parched dry. Dark green trees and gold grass stretch on and on. The summer sky is electric blue—piercing, impossibly high, clear. Through a pinhole camera, it looks like the sky in an old film studio.
The kind of landscape you barely notice, at the edge of your vision. From a long-distance train, it seems endless.
Another day, under a grey sky, light rain drifts through the air. The wind loosens my braid. In front of me, nothing but that enormous landscape. Hardly any cars. No one in sight.
A vast, empty space.
Dryness.
It just stretches out before me.
A place like that.
Dryness.
It just stretches out before me.
A place like that.
