Sunday, December 18, 2005


trapped in tassie?

currently i'm in the far mountains of queenstown, tasmania, where the weather has been unseasonably poor. i'm stuck in the devil's end of nowhere huddled in a half-heated, ramshackle winnebago waiting for the rain and hail to end.

i'm trying to get transport to hobart, which is a lovely town, but the tasmanian public bus doesn't run today and the only "taxi" in queenstown has engine trouble! hobart is 5 hours away through the most gorgeous virgin forest where there's no communication -- it seems as if much of western tasmania works on little satellite phones.

i just can't chance being stuck overnite by the macintosh dam in a dead ute (this is what they call these kind of mad max flat-bed vehicles that everyone uses around here) while a tow truck comes down from strahan to rescue me as packs of tasmanian devils circle and howl. . . tho' apparently the extremely poisonous tiger snakes are more of a problem. . .

there is probably no place left in the u.s.a. outside of farthest alaska as wild as western tasmania!

i could take a helicopter down to hobart, but the weather's so bad -- headline: "new york woman lost in helicopter crash over the pieman catchment." maybe i should hire a captain and attempt to flee the clashing tides thru hell's gate at cape sorrell?

will i ever escape the beautiful the northwest forest of tasmania? oh, to see the great western tiers again!

indiana jones has nothing on me. . .i'm subsisting on dead leaves and strawberry pavlova. . .

thus i amuse myself by reading the so-called great australian novel, patrick white's riders in the chariot. this novel, combining elements of joyce and faulkner but finally transcending them into a unique style, metaphorically considers australia ("god's own country") as the former garden of eden.

half-blasted into desert and half-verdant with twisted menacing trees, its iron gates rusted, the lock broken and hanging, the guardian angel sleeping, 4 eccentric but archetypal aussies -- a half-mad aristocratic spinster, a holocaust survivor, an aborigine, and an immigrant washerwoman -- slip into sydney's landscape and find it offers the first step up into the kabbalistic chariot, the vehicle of grace.

they themselves unknowingly become the tetramoulon or 4 angels who direct the merkabah, whose platform serves as the holy infrastructure of the world.

thus white appears to consider a special spiritual and redemptive path in the struggles of the australian identity and the australians' relationship to their vast continent.

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