What's Out There

Going up the Newell Highway towards Queensland one passes through an array of anonymous towns, big and small: Dubbo, Forbes, Parkes, West Wyalong, all highway towns and 'anonymous', or should I say 'homogenous'? That is, they tend to be more or less the same, at least on the surface. It's the chain stores that give them that sameness: the Newspower chain of newsagents, the Targets, the Subways, the MacDonalds. Once past Dubbo the character of old country towns begins to assert itself and the homogeneity starts to fade. Swing back closer to the Blue Mountains, closer to Sydney, and the country town character is retained in places like Mudgee.

There are plenty of stories out there. Country music, Ned Kelly, the surprising string of observatories that start at the huge Parkes radio telescope and stretches into a cottage industry of homebuilt observatories up and around Coonabarabram where the Siding Spring Anglo-Australian Observatory is located inside the Warrumbungle National Park. The skies are wide up there, the nights are dark and there's a sweet quality in the air.

The area around Mudgee is Henry Lawson territory. There's a Lawson Museum in Gulgong, just north of Mudgee and the town has an annual Lawson Festival.

In Mudgee I sat for a while on the Lawson Seat, an old stone seat set into the wall that surrounds St. John's Church of England. A plaque records the date of Lawson's birth, 17 June, 1867, and his death, 2nd September, 1922. It also records a lovely fragment from one of his poems:
'I come with the strength of the living day
And with half the world behind me.'
Further up the road the beautiful Lawson Park is surrounded by a huge stone wall built in 1933, possibly as a Depression-era project. The plaque there reads that the wall was 'built by virtue of a government grant and voluntary labour gangs. The stone was brought from the Mt. Frome quarries by local farmers using their Clydesdales and wagons.'

As we drove along from town to town listening to the sound of falling stock markets on the car radio I wondered who are the poets of this Depression-era? Will we also build walls round parks dedicated to poets?