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A spiritual science writer embarks on journey of self-exploration in dreamtime Australia, skillfully weaving ancient
Aboriginal stories with tales from her women’s circle and her own interior landscape. The result a travel memoir like
no other. ISBN: 978-0977353-0-3
Perfect bound. 208 pages.
$18.95
Available from independent bookstores
or at Beechworth Press.
Bookstores may order through
Baker & Taylor and Ingram's
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From the book:
Called by the Voice of the Earth
Exposed to the power of the elements for so long, Australia's desert face is scoured clean, scraped to bedrock bones.
The heart of Earth's oldest continent is the Red Centre, an immense desert too vast and powerful to be contemplated as
a whole. White settlers named the desert bit by bit: The Tanami, the Tirari, the Strzelecki, the Simpson, the Sturt Stony
Desert. One is rimmed with crimson flowers that cry like hearts turned inside-out; another crusted with diamonds of salt.
Some are paved with desert varnish -- rocks burnished shiny red-brown as if shined with oxblood shoe polish. Some undulate
with orange dunes; others are raw maroon rocks flicked with mere skiffs of sand. Each name has its own story, each desert
its own character. All the deserts glint with a promise of clarity. Through the eastern quadrant of the continental basin,
maps show the vein-like lacework of the ghostly Dimatina River, a netting of sandy rivulets and dusty watercourses that lie
empty of water for years on end, open in aching anticipation.
"Camel handlers from Afghanistan were the first non-natives able to cope with these deserts," said my newly acquired
friend Robin as we sat outside our musty-smelling canvas tent. The desert sun dropped slowly, its softening light transforming
nearly colorless sand dunes into dreamy ocean waves.
According to the sketchy maps we’d been given, Robin and I were somewhere near a tiny settlement called Maree along
the Birdsville Track, the remnants of an old camel route that skimmed the edge of Australia's great artesian basin. We
were heading for Alice Springs, tracing, on the ground, the route flown by Australia's legendary Royal Flying Doctor Service.
Its small planes are still the only practical way to provide medical care to people scattered over more than five thousand
miles of desert.
"Naturally, the Afghanis brought
their camel saddles from home and whatever stuffing they used to pad saddles a century ago happened to contain the seeds of
rosy dock,” she continued, waving toward the improbable purple flowers fringing the roadside, her dark eyes gleaming
as she warmed to the tale. “Hard desert riding loosened the saddle stuffing bit by bit so that now, whenever spring
brings a trace of rain, the old camel tracks erupt with an extravagance of pink and purple blooms," she said, her gentle
British accent incising each detail with assurance. Robin, I was learning, easily dipped into decades of stories gathered
while living in Denmark, in Peru, and now Australia.
The accidental blossoms of rosy dock, as hearty as the cameleers who spread them, seemed both a jubilant relic and a promise
of renewal for those like me who came to Australia to track their dreams. Feeling an odd kinship with long-gone camel traders
criss-crossing these alien deserts, I wondered what stray bits might escape from my own baggage, what serpentine trail my
own remnants might trace.
The path that brought me
to Australia emerged from listening to my own dreams, awakening each morning to record what wisps I could. Some glimmering,
elusive dreaming had led me here, to seek the clarity of desert starkness; I marveled that after months of dreams, at last
I sat, opening myself to the glinting, knife-edge beauty of salt crystal springs. The red sand and orange dust hummed with
dreams. I strained to hear their muffled harmonies as a wordless excitement sang through every cell of my body, alive to the
haunting magic of this place.
Evening stillness enveloped
our tent, pitched where scallops of salt marked the ghostly edges of the phantom Lake Eyre; unfamiliar stars danced above
the desert dreamscape, cloaking us with enduring comfort, drawing us close within their stately tapestry of change.
A highlight of our trek would be a visit to that icon of the Australian outback, Ayers Rock, an immense stranded inland dune
turned to stone, standing more than a thousand feet above a scalded inland sandscape. Its real name is Uluru, say the Anangu
people, those to whom the land belongs, those who keep its stories. I longed to learn the meaning of this name.
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