1. One hundred years of solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

I wonder if I just hang onto this one out of stubbornness. Will it one day fall away like my obsession for Latin America unaccountably faded away after 22 solid years?

2. Evening is the whole day, Preeta Samarasan

3. Son of man, Augusto Roa Bastos

4. The Greenlanders, Jane Smiley

This civilisation of Norsemen lasted on the giant island of Greenland from 984 to sometime shortly after 1408, then vanished from the face of the Earth. This epic story imagines its interlocking farm-based communities in its dying days of 1350-1420. Life is a battle to survive each winter; rival family enmities rise and are unaccountably resolved a generation later; children become adults, marry and move away; the Church of this Middle Ages community parasitically lives off the farmers’ sweat and are certain of their unalienable right to do so; and all the while they are all trapped on the island slowly awaiting but not realising their impending extinction from starvation, as the resources on the island slowly run out. Jane Smiley’s writing is top notch.

5. Requiem, Shizuko Go

This Japanese book left me feeling truly wretched when I finished – I have never felt more despondent from simply reading a book. It is 1945, and the citizens of Japan are convinced that they must fight the War until they are annihilated, and resist the upcoming U.S. invasion of their island homeland at all costs.

The main character, 16-year-old girl Setsuko, has already established by Page 20 that the certainty that she will die is the only thing that sustains her to keep on living – all people close to her have already perished that year, one month after another.

Meanwhile I realised just how dirty WW2 was fought, even away from the Nazi Holocaust death camps. The Americans raze (“firebomb”) entire Japanese civilian suburbs into ash. (The United Nations is founded later that year and the rules of warfare become more serious after this; likely everyone realised they had all gone too far.) Although the desolation of the unexpected Japanese surrender is central, the book avoids the subject of the two Atomic Bombs.

The second main character Naomi’s neighbourhood is vaporised with her in it. Characteristic of the book is that it happens right when Setsuko is intent on a reconciliation – this book is designed for everything to go as wrong as possible. Another clever character avoids the draft as a conscientious protester and is shunned. He sees the War as all wars really are, simply a cynical grab for resources forced through by leaders who don’t give a shit about their people and force them to pick up the bill – but he too dies before he gets to see the vindication of the War’s end.

And yet, Setsuko and the younger Naomi find a gentle love as the country is falling to pieces. This gives the book its devastating emotional edge – how was this friendship ever going to end well, in these circumstances?

6. Creation and destruction epic, Marty Gleason

See Version 2020 here.

And then she came… Selah. I never seem to get Lauryn Hill out of my life, despite the many years that have passed since I thought about her.

I arrived in Portugal an hour before she gave a free concert for the city of Lisbon in 2010, so I went and stood waiting for hours, making that perhaps Part 2 and this one Part 3. This time I have a job and money and can afford comfort, can shell $280 (for two tickets) on someone who will no longer make me happy – but what will?

I knew her story, shit the whole music world does, about an unused talent who stopped after one album (and one previous one with her band) when she could have moved people for years. What was I to see this time, age 41, with my Dad dead and the whole world moved on?

Was 1998 honesty the same as 2023 honesty? No surely it isn’t, not any more. What had she tried to communicate to us then, and what did it mean now? The despair of love gone wrong? But this isn’t Love in the time of cholera, where the guy pines for the same married woman for thirty years until her husband dies – even the most wretched losses of people have surely been tempered after 25 years.

So, what? Her tapping into old, forgotten hopes, feelings that moved her and us once but that she needs to keep revisiting no matter how irrelevant they might be now?

What had happened in that time? This hope that we were going to be the revolution, with our pure and sincere feeling that she had been able to magically tap into? We weren’t. I’ve read about power structures in the last five years, lasting revolution is virtually impossible. So were we still supposed to sing the songs, more importantly to feel them?

What about me? Oldish. I am vaguely keeping my body in track but up top I’m as grey as the London fog. 21 years, for me, since I had found her album and looked at the photos of Lauryn Hill’s pretty face in the CD booklet. And in that time? Well, it went, that’s all I can say, I learnt a few nice things, fulfilled the occasional goal.

What about her? I realised at the concert that not a single one of her songs had stuck around in the greater musical consciousness. Maybe she knows that too. Her set could only last 70 minutes – 80 with the usual contrived fake leaving/encore sequence. There were simply no other songs she could sing, besides her 1998 album, plus Killing me softly, Fu-Gee-La and Ready or not from the Fugees’ album, plus her inferior Turn your lights down low as a result of marrying a Marley.

And yet, and yet. She sang the song The miseducation of Lauryn Hill and I started crying in the darkness. Deep in my heart, the answer was in me. Was it? The answer to my Dad’s cancer was not in me, it simply made crying a lot easier these days. I can cry, silently, keep my head steady and look like I’m simply continuing with my task. As long as no one looks at my face – and why would they?

Oh Lauryn. That song. My god. It was about being in the ghetto, getting out of the ghetto, and the money it made literally got you out of the ghetto, where, who knows, you maybe led a normal, happy life with your grown, musical children. But you’ve gone on tours and had to sing the same 15 songs all the time. How tiring.

So what truth were we there to get from her, after 25 years? There were people there of various ages and races, who had been touched by her once and still believed. Like me. Well, I could see her for what she was now. A washout. No longer a mystic. But she wondered how she had been able to touch so many people, she literally asked that to us. The answer was probably honesty, as she acknowledged to us on Tuesday night, and I myself am certain that was true. Deep in my heart, the answer was in me.

Would I ever care about an artist that much again? No, the older human heart rejects extremes, it never lets itself get carried away like that again. I had had moments with the love of my life, even though it didn’t last, and the Bulldogs actually won a premiership, and I found someone else who is loyal to me, and my Dad is no longer with us. And then what was next? None of these things seemed remotely likely in 1998. In 1998 there was simply the hope of a song, and Lauryn Hill’s pretty face, and her youth, and my youth.

Will there be a Lauryn Hill and me, part 3? (Or part 4 if you count Portugal, or whatever, pardon the semantics.) What have I got left? I assume at least 30 more years to find something, anything, to do in my grown-up life. It can be nice, I have money and a decent job, for now. Maybe I still have my mind, and body, for the moment.

But I feel a bit sad for Lauryn Hill. Does she regret her premature, emotionally pained withdrawal after 1999? Is she sad that she didn’t wring it all out of herself when she had the power? Shouldn’t we all be grateful that at least such musical and lyrical beauty happened once? I could see her vulnerable, still pretty 48 year-old face on the screen on Tuesday, inseparable from the knowledge that musically she went nowhere after 1998 and here she is on a mere nostalgia tour.

So, Lauryn Hill and me, partie 3, circa 2035? I guarantee nothing for myself. I will keep going but as was proven to us this year, it’s really up to the world, and its casual injustices. Is there anything more I could wring out of Lauryn Hill from this experience, since she was not able to wring it out of herself? I don’t know. She was there, she survived, maybe that is enough.

I want to put across my feeling, the fullness of it

There are moments when in a song they express that fullness, and I think

I can do that. I should do that.

I read Jessica Laser today, she wrote ambiguously about getting fingered

I could describe the vulnerability of getting fingered, the emptiness

The emptiness and low-key disgust of getting used by guys

But I am male, and unexotic, and no one is interested

In my musings about getting fingered

Nor in my story about my Dad dying

With his brain decimated but still fun, he could still laugh

And the horror he went through

And how we lived with him for six days

And at the end of the sixth day he died, and I went back to work, and no one noticed

And two months later my mate laughed in my face about my old, fearful fuck-ups

I could express the fullness, but no one cares

I am 41, and boring, and my body, which was always my friend, is as ambiguous now as Jessica Laser’s fingering

And my mind has been decimated by my job, and by my trauma

And the shocked realisation that no one cares

I speak Spanish, French and Portuguese, but no one cares

My Dad knew a bunch of stuff, and loved deeply, and then he died, and I realised how meaningless life might be

We had our self-mission, aged 18, I am going to have exotic lovers, and give myself to the world, and change the system

Then, re: the system, I learned the nature of power, but more relevantly the nature of human indifference

If you don’t trust any hairdressers in Australia, it’ll be a while before you can get your hair done?

“Three weeks,” she apropos of nothing breezed, and fucked off back to Croatia without a care in the world

A different step-by-step description of my Dad’s fucked November elicited two generic lines, a breezy mention of a trip to La Paz, and nothing more for a month

Apropos of a not particularly relevant conversational lead-in, Remember when he went to the World Cup without telling his girlfriend? Haha.

I’ve betrayed people too, see above, but fuck, at least I knew I had betrayed them

This head of mine, playing its tricks

This circle of looking for someone to help, realising they don’t give a shit, avoiding them because they don’t give a shit, and then having them more not give a shit because I don’t show my face

I had my 15 minutes of being a champion in the hardest times. Then afterwards I went back to being a whiny nobody

I found him on the floor. He wasn’t dead but only had three weeks, maybe only two of full-on consciousness

Dad, I said on the floor, we’re going to Taylors Lakes today, let’s try to get to the chair

Then someone wandered past and in came the cavalry. I sat stunned in the armchair next to the scene.

“His son saw it”, I heard in the hallway

He had tried to walk to the bathroom at night with now uncertain legs and brain and ended on the floor. Did he cry? Did he think about how shocking life is when you don’t understand anything?

He didn’t come home after November, the night three of us drove to the hospital, not the last three months

The night he died, we left the hospital in an Uber without saying a single word. The driver didn’t say anything to us, my Mum said. Well, we didn’t say anything to him, I reasoned. That was the last month of me being a champion.

I drove them home the night he died and suddenly I was living at home again, once again apropos of nothing

And no one cared.

Oh, I love him. It’s an obsession. I think about him when I work. I can’t concentrate on the minute little numbers on the screen that I really must focus on; these black stick figures dance in front of me on the white screen and then my mind is gone and I think of him again.

How long has he been stringing me along? Two years? He was suave, cool suave, liar suave. Jordan: even his name was suave. I liked his suits, his combed hair, his general smoothness. I found out he was married a few months into it, after I asked him to move in and he told me straight: I’m married.

I was stupid. I thought, we are all grown ups, and we don’t have to run our lives life by yesterday’s rules. We are just two people, out there in the world, and if we strip everything down we enjoy each other, there is happiness in his presence. I like that idea, when we’re alone in a closed room and I can’t get enough of him physically, the idea that we are both stripped down, not even clothes, and all there is is just him and me.

I though it worked the same in reverse, that there was happiness in my presence for him, but who really knows?

He is polished, and that certainly attracted me. But that is actually meaningless long term. Is he true? I mean, I’m giving him my life, more or less, I like to think he appreciates that but in reality he probably doesn’t. I may just be a plaything for a smooth criminal.

I want to matter to him, I really want him to love me. There are moments where I am convinced that he does. There is a photo of him looking at me, and the tender look on his face, surely he can’t have faked that? But there are more moments where I can definitely see that I don’t matter, his mind is elsewhere. It is on leaving, how he’ll explain this new absence to his wife, what flowers he’ll have to buy to make it up to her, the planning he has to do for his child’s birthday.

He’s not a man. He can’t be, deep down, living like this. He is not giving everything to his wife, and what he gives to me goes up and down, but it can’t be one hundred percent either. He talks about how much he loves his kids but that is a mask, I think, I don’t think he can love anyone outside of himself.

There are moments, when he is getting dressed in a hurry, when I hate him. I feel a sinking sensation against myself as well. I know I should respect myself, love myself, treat myself like a queen. But I need him, I can’t imagine a world without him. It would be so sterile, just people going past without stopping. There would be nothing for me.

***

I would like my friends to be people who cared, who I could just unburden myself, tell everything to, let them know that sometimes I’m not handling. But they are people I pass time with, they have their judgements and I cannot open myself up more to those judgements. My friends already consider themselves morally superior to me. The know about the affair but tell me to get rid of him and will not dwell on the subject. They say emotionally I am going in circles. They are right, but not in a way that they are with me. I am suffering, but they are not on board with it, they think I’m a silly woman just doing dumb things to myself.

I talked to my psychologist today. I tell her these things, that I wish someone were on board with me, who gets me. She gets me, but she gets me only as a professional, after all. It would be nice for someone who gets me for free.

There are moments when Jordan gets me. I can see them, feel them. They feel good. They make me feel that we are so relaxed with each other and understand each other so well that we really should be married. He says he doesn’t have those moments with his wife. I don’t enjoy him mentioning her, it is not good vibe conversation. I don’t want to know anything about her, about his life with her, that collective life they have that I don’t have with him.

He seems unhappy when talking about her. He says they are not doing well, and that he wants be with me, but he never sets a plan into action, he won’t have any concrete conversations on the subject. Living in limbo is always terrible. Everyone says he won’t leave her, they never leave their wives. These types of men just string their mistresses along because they don’t have any courage to break the status quo of their lives. Their mistresses may matter to them emotionally, they may not, but they never leave their wives. Everyone says it.

I ask my psychologist how can people supposedly “love”, then turn it off like a tap, segment that so-called love, and say, “Ok, that phase is over and closed, she is nobody now, now I supposedly “love” this new person with all my heart, until that time runs out, then my “love” moves on frictionlessly over to this new one. When you love someone, you should love them, goddammit! If it can be turned off then it was never love, it was just a type of temporary infatuation.

She says that love is messy and clean breaks are the only way to carry life’s emotional burden. Otherwise you just have loose ends dangling around everywhere, and they tie you up, you can’t live life.

I am jealous. I am jealous of people with families, husbands. People my age, people younger than me, even young single mothers who have no hope, I am jealous of them. These days my work is not pleasant because I am surrounded by people with partners, real partners, not just my sex partner. Partners, people they count on, people they will forsake all others for, people who were brave enough to say, “You are it, you are all” and not miss shutting off the rest of the world. How did they do it? Why can’t I do it?

One time I considered driving to his house and sitting in my car outside, wondering if I could see his set-up through his front window. What his family would be like, his décor, the way his wife sets up his house, even a glimpse of a small child running past. Then I came to my senses.

I can’t live like this, I’m going crazy. I can’t move on with my life, I’m tied up. But when I’m with him I’m happy, for an hour maybe. Then comes is the worry that he will go away, and the emptiness I feel when I have a suddenly empty house again. I feel this fear even while he is still with me, I miss him even while in the same room as him.

“Tell me how you feel about me, in 100 words”, she appealed.

“What do you mean? I love you.”

“That’s only three. Don’t you know how to express yourself?”

What he felt was big but blunt, inexpressible. “100 words? What is this?”

“I’d say you keep my life up, afloat. With you I’m happy and believe in the goodness of everything. With you I am better because I want to strive to reach your heights and yet know I don’t necessarily have to. What can you say about my effect on you?”

“I don’t know. But don’t leave, you know.”

The two facts, I suppose, that sum this whole thing up and save you the reading time:

Footscray Bulldogs won 14 finals in 90 years. They then won seven finals in five years.

And I was not in Australia to see the 2016 premiership.

2002: I attended my last ever voluntary church service on Easter Saturday. In the darkness they read out the story of Abraham and I felt like remarking to the straight-laced youngish-middle-aged mother standing on the wall next to me that that was the most horrible story I’d ever heard. After that day, independently of Abraham’s tale, I didn’t see any more point to going to church.

I began my book that year, while I was still going to uni. I was twenty. I had no friends at uni and thought being cool, having funky activities, was something only for other people, people who lived in the inner north of Melbourne and had hip mates and parties.

I’ve considered uni a waste for twenty years, but I now realise it wasn’t: I learned Spanish and could indulge my basic creative writing in sloppy Spanish and French. I started my book influenced by the sadness of the Life in Hell cartoons and like a lot of people, the magical stylings of One Hundred Years of Solitude, where a drop of blood leaving a cadaver jumps curbs and makes 90° turns across the town until it finds its occupant’s mother.

Apart from my classic line, “Let there be light blue,” I didn’t deviate from script too much. The world of contrary physics is created.

2004: What the fuck was I doing in late-autumn Chicago in November? I rectified that one by never setting foot in America again, even though I have a passport. I was really desperate for a girl, any girl, to be interested in me, and to give me the benefits of that that everyone else seemed to be getting copiously.

I was staying for free in a house in south Chicago, and could see with my eyes that Australia was a far better place than America, but my propaganda-addled brain rejected this – how could that be? Wasn’t America the richest society in history? The decade of the 2000s the rest of the world was as suckered as I was: it was the decade that America successfully pretended that everything was still A-OK while underneath the façade the interior was decaying in secret until 2008.

The strange-ish Dad of their difficult familial situation (but I was selfish and oblivious), who intimidated me but who I warmed to over time, told me one of the truest things about me I’ve ever heard: “Your problem is that you’re too happy sitting down not doing stuff.” It prevented me from getting out there, seeing and doing more.

The only productive thing I did all year was to finish the first chapter and I couldn’t believe I was actually producing something this beautiful. Eve and Adama continued following the script and were kicked out of the magical garden into a world with solid lines, where bumping into those lines hurt, substantially.

2005: It was my first magical months in Bolivia, but rather than getting out working I was, true to form, too happy for my own good sitting around doing nothing. But I was learning Bolivia my way, going dancing and enjoying the nightlife almost nightly for an entire year, spending incredible numbers of hours on the phone with the Goddess in Spanish, getting to know the world with my Swedish housemate/sister Talajeh and her crew. We lived with a Bolivian family who I was too positively simplistic a person to fight with – at least some things never change there. All was light and joy, except for my crazy overwhelming obsessional love for the Goddess.

For a couple months I got back into it. God destroyed the world with a flood. I had thought I only knew how to describe sadness in my writing, but on the couch there I found a new string to my bow – how does a cataclysm happen, what is the step-by-step in otherworldly destruction, how exactly do people fight and scramble as they die, what is the pain, what is the trauma?

I still believed in God at this point, and believed what I was writing was slightly wrong, even though God was perhaps funnelling me this story himself, that’s how inspired the whole enterprise was. Each Bolivian girl I hung out with who said she believed in God moved me.

In 2007 I read fuckhead Dawkins’ book for just something to read, and unintentionally the light switched off. I was not taken in by any arguments, it just sort of happened. As odd for a borderline communist to admit this: Ceasing to believe in God was completely devastating.

2008: After ten weeks of being enrolled in teaching I flunked out. I don’t really know how to describe the why. I’d even done a month-long stint teaching Spanish at Victoria Uni on a student round. It’s simply that as the deadlines approached I realised that I simply could not force my brain to write this fucking essay. One of the projects I recognised that I was intellectually capable of completing – but realised with sadness that I wouldn’t be doing it. I met two people at – of all places, Australian Catholic Uni – who I really liked, a guy and a girl, and the guy even sent a message saying “Get in touch” when he realised shit was pear-shaped for me, but I felt too humiliated to ever talk to either of them again.

The same thing happened to me two years later, miraculously – given 2008 – as a Spanish teacher at a middle school, officially (certified) the worst experience of my life. I’d been chummy with my colleagues until I realised how terrible I was at the gig. I couldn’t show my face in their women’s circles after that, not while kids were visibly murdering me and each other in my open-faced classrooms.

So that left me with an open-slate 2008, more so as at the same time I completely fucked it up with the Goddess, and we didn’t speak to each other for six months.

I didn’t finish mercilessly slamming Abraham before I got a brainwave. I described the Devil’s (undefined) infatuation with God in the same terms as I had rolled with the Goddess in 2006: the itinerant, free-time Devil had all the time in the world to pine, while God, while flattered and moved, was busy living a real life with all its other problems and really didn’t have time for the Devil’s weak-minded bullshit.

On Friday late afternoon, the day before lockdown began, I walked through the affluent Melbourne suburb of Albert Park on the way to the beach. Just like mid-March 2020, the outdoor cafés did not give an impression that drastic lifestyle changes were on the way.

Middle-aged men with shaved heads sat outdoors with their beers. They were relaxed and made flippant comments about how disappointed they were to not go out for Valentine’s Day dinner. I couldn’t tell how serious they were. Pretty blond middle-aged women in dresses complemented the tables. One was reading a novel in the sun.

This was not the area of Melbourne where lockdown would be felt the hardest. At the pier, skinny but confident teenagers hovered shirtless apart from their backpacks, a bearded young man chatted up a young lady holding a dog on a leash, and the fishermen discussed burley and pinkies as their untouched rods dangled out to sea.

The next day the state of Victoria was to be locked down for five days and we pray not any longer. Memories were perhaps going back to the half-forgotten four-month hiatus we took in winter, and the seven total months we spent under key in 2020. I had taken an illicit walk along the grey, shuttered Clarendon Street in October surrounded by continuously closed businesses, wondering how much longer this could go on.

Summer lockdown is a bit crueller. The restaurants, who had ordered their Valentine’s Night food supplies, would now have to bin them. The owner of my local remarked that the cumulative effect of this lockdown on his business would last longer than the prescribed five days, as people avoid their old café habits once they are broken even after lockdowns finish. He said these five days would set him back a month.

Although the hated five-kilometre curfew began at 11:59, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews stated that he hoped people would begin a self-imposed lockdown instantaneously, but he knew the score. Besides Friday night drinks, February 12 was Chinese New Year. The restaurants would still be full that night, although by 7:30pm traffic was relatively deserted. The virus rate was still low – 19 active cases by Friday – but would the virus find some new homes on our last night of freedom?

Australians have separately rallied around their leaders, Federation be damned. Nonetheless, we will debate for a decade if we needed to be more balanced in the virus’ treatment, with more consideration of mental health, young people and businesses alongside the quarantine. It’s surprising: in the land of Ned Kelly, do we revere our authority too much in this country?

It is generally still the best of times here in Melbourne. On Friday at least I could still stroll to the beach during a global pandemic. Friends in Bolivia have reported some truly end-of-days occurrences. Bodies uncollected for ten days; unofficial neighbourhood-organised cremations; US$60,000 hospital bills for families of the deceased in a country with a pre-pandemic US$3,550 GDP per capita.

Here, in contrast, we collect Job Seeker from a Centrelink whom the pandemic taught to finally treat people as human beings, and play another round of Words With Friends. Australia can side-step any crisis.

We can handle the five days locked down for sure, there is no alternative – we took 80 and then 120-day stretches last year. Certain people even welcomed the previous hated lockdowns as a way to catch up with frazzled 21^st Century life.

In my anecdotal experience people are split on this eternal issue, but generally accepting. But what government in history has ever had the moral authority to say that you can’t meet up with your mate?

I started driving home around 10pm, everyone needing to beat the buzzer and get home. In the next car a guy called, “Have a good lockdown. Whisky and Netflix, that how you get through it.”

I feel a lot of “this land” moments.

I sometimes think that loving a certain land of a country, warts and all, the nationalism of it, is just an extension of loving planet Earth and its landforms. But it’s easier to love local concepts than the entirety of something.

A couple months ago I wanted to write about the winding course of a river, the villages it passes and what happens to it. It would start high up in the cold, rocky mountain trails, winding past villages where people live remote, hard lives, away from abundance and scraping together something sparse to survive. They live in basic rock shacks and seldom smile, and farm a rough, jagged plot of rocky land. It would be clean, clear water that occasionally freezes to ice. Surrounding them is the mountains with brief hours of sun.

As it descends, the river passes factories and gets dirtier as people wash their laundry in it. Eventually it flows into the tropics, where jovial brown-skinned people wear shorts and flip-flops, and have fun swimming in it. The warm-water river opens up wide and becomes flat, flowing past jungle and sunny grasslands. People here would have nothing as well, tropical shacks, and would grow plants in the fertile soil.

These ideas were inspired by the mountain countries that I’ve visited, Bolivia and Nepal. Both countries, packed with rivers, unfurl into tropics eventually, where the races and the culture change.

Sometimes I think I’m more in love with the idea of the land that belongs to a particular country. I read about the backwoods of a place in books and get moved by imaginary words on paper rather than by actually being out in nature. A friend once remarked that he liked “Civilised nature”, as he filmed himself talking while lost in the burning Bolivian Chaco.

Australia

I live in south-eastern Victoria, the only main green patch of the Australian mainland. (The south-west also has a bit.) So it’s an affectation to say that I feel I’m in my country when the landscape is dry and scratchy, and the trees ugly, hardy things fighting against nature. But I do feel that. Every summer our grass turns yellow even in Victoria and we are subject to bushfires.

Somehow we made a nice country despite our wretched, ancient, infertile, waterless land. The book The Bush by Don Watson is a rolling cacophony of unordered ideas of this land that somehow works. He details the Aboriginals, the farmers and drovers, our unique animals, the imported ones, the crude plants, the dominant but nutrition-less eucalypts.

As a tour guide I would sometimes talk about the Aboriginal Songlines (Watson did not have the presumption to discuss this non-Anglo concept himself). There are supposed to be a series of paths through the continent that exist in the Aboriginals’ mind. These can be followed by singing the song relating to the creation moment of each and every rock, tree, hillock, river, which the various Aboriginal peoples are supposed to know in excruciating detail. Singing it ‘creates’ the land, which cannot exist outside of Aboriginal conception and must always be ‘recreated’ correctly by singing the correct song and thus finding your way through the land.

I visited Sweden and Norway two years ago, whose lush green forests mirrored those of Minnesota where my Mum is from, but the lushness did not feel correct to me. I could easily imagine North Americans and Europeans feeling weirded out by Australia’s sparseness, but I’m weirded out by what should be normal.

Paraguay

“Man is like a river, who is born and dies in other rivers,” begins Macario Francia in the Paraguayan book Hijo de Hombre. “A bad river is one that dies in a swamp.”

Paraguay is cut in half by the tranquil Paraguay River, one half the Chaco Desert, the other a sensuous tropical fantasy east of Asunción. I’m incredibly moved by the idea of Paraguay, that tucked-away, magical, faraway land of forests and rivers and flowers and animals.

Bolivia

… But I have little experience of tropical places. The two emblematic South American countries are Peru’s mountains (and Inca culture) and Brazil’s jungle (and forest indigenous people), but Bolivia is a beautiful combination of these two landscapes. The mountain is what I came to know living in Cochabamba for 2.5 years of my life, non-consecutive. Facing north, the city featured the most beautiful mountain range right outside my bedroom window and looking up the street.

I can look at something as simple as a broken footpath, a traffic light with the mountains overlooking, and feel love for this place, for its look, its feel. It is broken and run-down but it is there, different, the opposite of polished Australia.

We had bad water shortages in mountain Bolivia the last time I was there. Mountain life is not easy, even in a city. 4,000 metres up, there is possibly the poorest and highest main city in South America, the dangerous El Alto which overlooks La Paz. It is the where Aymara people from the Altiplano have retreated from sparse, high-up villages on the dry high plain, to roll the dice in the city.

In the dead of winter 2011 I took a climatically unwise week-long tour of the Altiplano. From La Paz’s slanted city climbing the valley I went to the semi-mountain-tropical, semi-Afro-Bolivian Coroico, back to the oddity of the flat, wealthier southern zone of La Paz, across to the dour, high city of Potosí where the Spaniards stole all their silver in the 1600s and where I got altitude-related headaches and nausea, to the Salt Flats of Uyuni down south, and back up to Tiwanaku near Lake Titicaca and Peru where thousand-year-old ruins stand on the high plain.

Meanwhile tropical Bolivia has three-quarters of its territory but is traditionally dominated politically by the mountain. It contains “every shade of green”, a Camba girl once told me. It has rivers and a relaxed but sparse rural life that matches my description of Paraguay above.

“This land” is an instrumental from The Lion King soundtrack, where I borrowed the phrase. My first ever day in Bolivia was 3^rd September 2005, the best day of my life. I sat in the Santa Cruz airport for hours and was absolutely amazed. I saw a tree on a plain that reminded me of The Lion King.

Nepal

Nepal is the last landscape that moves me. There were mountains and cold, clear rivers running through them. The mountains had impossibly long ropes of Buddhist prayer flags stretching across one peak to another. Each village was sparse and basic and made me feel grateful and on top of the world. The glory of saying we were trekking through the Himalayas, surrounded by first pine trees and then nothing but rocky scrub, was divine.

Nepal reminded me of Bolivia a lot. Kathmandu was a chaotic place without footpaths or traffic lights, which crumbled away but also features small ‘temples’ on every street corner, in the middle of the narrow streets. It was the only city I’ve seen that was as atmospheric as La Paz.