That mountain is actually a series of small ones, an observation I might already have made in the post about Miss Marple’s Tearooms; or the one about the transcendent slope of land in that cool, shady, towering canopied garden of Eden that bears the kindergartenesque name of ‘Dandenong Ranges’.
Garden of Eden? Indeed, during the Hurdy Gurdy days of the late 1960s and early ’70s, the steep, winding roads to the villages and hamlets of the Dandenongs echoed not just to the bellbird’s transcription and the kookaburra’s machine-gun burst, but also to the staccato approach of the tangerine Volkswagen Kombis that clattered their way up the impossible slopes; transporting their orange-tinged loads of pumpkins and kaftans and hippies to the share-houses and rental bungalows - or their Camberwell-based parents’ holiday houses - for weekends or entire summer holidays of mountain-air-flavoured curried lentil feasts with a backdrop of progressive rock played on woodgrain Kenwood stereograms, and a gentle haze of smoke drifting like shards of the veil of Isis.
Idyllic, of course. But what if you lived here? Was it the quasi-supernatural magnetism of the hills due to its commanding view over Melbourne, its forested isolation, and its sheer elevation? Or was it the actual pilgrimage from the city's flatlands to a destination always in sight, hanging over the city like a giant misty blue painting, an inescapable tapestry of seduction?
Possibly the latter: years ago, on the occasion of a visit to her sister's house in the Dandenongs on a broiling day, the mother of my teenage children had been non-commital about the call of the mountains: ‘I spent my teenage years here,’ she reminded me as we pulled into a thirty-degree driveway, parking on the angled slope under a stand of eucalypts that must have been two hundred feet. Each was shedding bark in long looping strips. They looked like giant half-peeled bananas.
‘The winters were freezing. It rained from April to September. The house leaked. The bathroom was mouldy. To get to school I had to walk along the road because there were no footpaths. So I got soaked by both rain and cars.
‘In summer CFA alarms went off day and night. Amazingly, we didn’t burn to death.’
(Bushfire records show that severe bushfires occurred in the Dandenong Ranges in 1841, 1880, 1898, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1913, 1914, 1919, 1920, 1922, 1923, 1925, 1926, 1928, 1932, 1934, 1936, 1939,1944,1954, 1949, 1960,1962, 1968, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1980, 1983, 1991, 1997, 2001, 2002, and 2009.)
*
The picture window in the sitting room of the sister's house looked over a fern gully from which rose giant mountain ash and eucalypts. You could see the heat shimmering in the atmosphere. A northerly was jerking at the trees’ upper canopies while reaching down and skittering the dried bark that littered the slope, in a volume beyond any form of broom. Beyond the valley a road winds south, out of the mountains to the openness of Gippsland: the only escape route from the endless eucalypts, waiting silently, patiently, evilly, oil-filled, for someone to drop a match.
*
Later we descended the mountain and returned to our flat square suburban block where the mountain ash is a Queen Elizabeth rose, and the sea of bark is a neat square of mown green lawn. I looked across that, at the pale misty shape in the far distance, darkened now; and imagined orange Kombis climbing its slopes at midnight on Friday nights in 1971, their Janis Joplin cassettes at full volume blocking the incessant roar of their engines.
Comments
Post a Comment