The city was designed radially, its outbranching main roads like spokes in a wheel. I grew up on a north-west spoke that impaled the blunt mercantility of Moonee Ponds and Essendon on its way to Keilor's thistle-infested basalt plains, where the wind cried nothing. Not that it was a cultural wasteland. At school as a seven-year-old I used to gaze at the face of a smiling whale as it surfaced in the Southern Ocean on a giant world map pinned to the wall behind Miss Burns’ desk while she played Tchaikovsky on the mono record player I had carried, boxed in its case, laboriously from home. The basic timber church across the schoolyard, a half-acre of knee-ripping gravel embedded in asphalt, still practised Benediction, that most aesthetically and psychically rewarding of Christian rituals.
Later, having bought a car, I discovered a new spoke, a new vector in the broken circle of Melbourne. This new trajectory, pointing north-east, pierced suburbs aroused by the semi-rural Heidelberg school of painting; and the walls of their flat modern shadowed white box-houses concealed in Ellis Stones gardens were hung with the ethereal eucalypts, misty timber fences and unearthly mornings of the dead artists. The radial spoke contorted past hidey-hole villages whose names were suffixed with -creek, -hill, -gully, or -bridge; and the cottages dotted in between had muddy boots outside their front doors, and stone floors, and clear glass uncovered windows even at night to let in starlight: neighbours were obscured by trees and anyway, swag curtains had stopped at North Balwyn. I had friends in these valleys, and drove on glad Friday nights to the semi-farmlets and hamlets populated by academics and professionals to visit their children of my teenage vintage, to read Nation Review and to listen to The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Desire, and The Pretender. If I may generalise outrageously, the wild-haired daughters of these semi-rural enclaves read Dickinson rather than Dolly, and preferred Dylan to the AC-DC favoured by the Sharpies of the north-west.
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It was probably in search of lost time that I drove again along this north-east compass point into arrow-sharp sun, one sere summer day in 2009. Insane hairpin bends revealed cinematic-like stills of vast valleys, opening and closing according to the will of the bitumen snake beneath the car. On board I had two toddlers, age two and three, muttering to themselves as toddlers do. Look at the trees. There's a motorbike. Now one's asleep. Now both. Another vista: great gusty stands of giant eucalypts loom threateningly out of the gas-blue heat of the middle- and far-distance, reaching rigidly skyward out of impossible cliffs and cathedral-roofing the road with horrifying appendages. In six days, they will explode.
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I drove the road again last week. The toddlers are 18 and 20 now. They were in the car, still muttering. This time, I left them there, in the middle of the forest, nowhere near a town, in a garden, at the end of an unpaved one-kilometre driveway. Another car strayed slowly in, as if the driver had had difficulty finding the place. University friends. At the end of the track, cabins; an old 1970s caravan. A clearing. Jonquils in a square flat lawn. A vegetable patch - all overgrown leaves and stems gone to seed - proof that an Eden exists, just a little tangled. Hills rising away on either side, and around, like a bowl, with folds that horsemen once sought. To ride out of the valley by.
I drove back to town, radio for company.
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