The call of the mountain.

A weekend in 1972. The sedan, gold metallic and book-ended with doomed chrome, hums its new-engine tune as it sails east along Canterbury Road. Somewhere near Camberwell it passes beneath a railway viaduct bearing a garish advertising poster, and the seven-year-old sitting next to my mother in the back seat sniggers at the suggestive bath towel brand painted across its width. Beside my father in the front seat I roll my eyes at the boy’s juvenility, while slowly rotating the volume control on the car radio, so that Marc Bolan can drown the back-seat sniggers. (Slowly, because if the volume goes up too fast or too much, my father will snap the radio off with a punctuation-like punch of his left hand. It happened once before with the Rolling Stones’ 'Honky Tonk Women', although I was never sure if it was the volume or the song’s content that made my father kill the song. I never asked him and he never told me. He was the weak silent type.)

The gold car draws closer to that blue graph in the east; the rolling, seductive line of the Dandenong Ranges etched against the sky. Something weird about Melbourne’s topography makes the mountains visible from almost everywhere. The range is not high, but if you look down almost any east-heading road, you’ll see that linear graph in truncated sections; a rise or a fall, in that Delft shade of blue-purple, like a periwinkle on a cloudy day. It is probably why the Dandenong Ranges holds such an allure for 1970s day trippers, not to mention those who fancy living in a eucalypt forest, and spend their Saturday mornings studying houses for sale in the real estate section of The Age. Clematis? Ferny Creek? Kallista? The Patch? Gembrook? Silvan? My parents must have scanned the papers, but I don't recall. Memories are like alluvial gold flecks. You think you see them and then they're gone. So we revert to the past tense.

*

An hour later, we turned off the asphalt and onto a rising switchback, and the car rumbled along gravel for five minutes before rolling to a stop at the base of a steep sloping section of eucalypt forest. ‘That’s it,’ said my father.

I wondered how he knew. Sixty thousand gum trees all looked the same to me, but an investigation revealed partially concealed wire fencing enclosing an oblong that rose alarmingly up the block. Get Frank Lloyd Wright onto the job. But no river. We spent the afternoon climbing the steep slope, wondering where the house would go. 

*

If approaching the purple-blue allure of the mountains held an anticipatory pleasure, the drive home hours later was a drowsy descent into a golden bowl, a vision of Melbourne’s skyline backlit by the pale fire of a late afternoon in early winter. Halfway down the mountain, flickering shadows intercut with shafts of chromotropic light suddenly fell into sync with the reggae-like chop of a new song on the radio … I reached out, twisted the volume …  5 … 6  … 7 …

*

But I would not give you false hope - no
On this strange and mournful day
When the mother and child reunion
Is only a motion away