FIELD NOTE 55: Instructions For Leaving The City

I spent the recent London heatwave mostly drunk, cycling between parties, and laying in bed stripped naked before the cheap fan. It was hot, and everything was melting, and people were afraid. It was wonderful. Somebody recently asked me to compare the heat in England to Australia. I said, it’s difficult to explain. The heat in Australia is expected. We’re always ready for it, even when we say we’re not. It’s ancient. It belongs there. We’ve built our lives around it. The houses know it. The gum trees know it. The cicadas know it. The dogs dig themselves little hollows beneath the shed. The gum trees peel themselves another skin. In England, I think, the heat feels supernatural. A warning. Like there’s been some freak meteorological mistake. The stranger nodded his head, satisfied. I don’t think he understood.

This same stranger, whom I met at a party on Friday eve, informed me he was planning on running away to Melbourne come English winter upon picking up my accent’s lazy drawl. I told him I lived in Melbourne for five years after running away there myself at the age of seventeen. Prime age for running, wouldn’t-ya-agree? He asked me if I ever miss it, Melbourne, assuming my remark was doused in fondness, and my answer, immediately, was no. I didn’t live there long enough. Two out of five years were spent in my bedroom, the city entirely locked down, curfew enforced by the government like that would stop-the-spread. I feel no attachment to the place, no sentiment. What’s another city in a world full of ‘em? But if he had asked me if I missed Victoria - not Melbourne, no, but the state that surrounds it - the answer would’ve been yes. Always, always, yes. I miss the Goldfields in their dry, yellowing glory. The Macedon Ranges blue with cold and eucalypt. Border towns with their wide streets and old pubs and weatherboard houses peeling beneath the sun. I miss the Goulburn River thick with yabbies and bottle-green light, splitting the state in two like a vein. I miss dust on the dashboard, magpies on the fence posts, petrol-station pies too hot to bite into, the smell of rain before it arrives. I miss the part of the country that made me up without ever pretending to be kind. The cities do that to ya, y’know. They pretend to be all sweet. Somewhere1 coerces you. It sells-ya-a-dream.

Of course, the stranger didn’t ask me that, no. Why would he? He frowned, instead asked me for my recommendations in the city, the places I’d haunt in my youth when I was still more or less a runaway delinquent with a snaggle tooth and a dream. Figured, I could tell him where to get good coffee along Degraves Street, but all of Melbourne is good coffee. I could point him towards a good book at Metropolis or Reading or the big Dymocks on Collins Street, but to him they'd all look the same. I could show him the supermarket where I stacked shelves to make rent, the museum steps where I'd sit watching shirtless skateboarders throw themselves at concrete, the rooftop carpark my friends and I broke into just to get drunk above the city lights because we couldn't afford anywhere prettier. But none of those places were Melbourne. They were just the backdrop to being seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, even twenty. He wanted the best bar to watch the World Cup, the best beach to ogle at girls, the best rooftop to drink lukewarm beer, the best whatever. God. I don't know. That wasn't my Melbourne, no. My Melbourne was grittier, more desperate. More Anywhere2. It was learning exactly how hungry I could become before it frightened me.

I lit a cigarette, inhaled a third of the damn thing, and instructed the Melbourne-bound stranger to find time to leave the city for a while. To head Nowhere3. To go on a Field Trip4. To conduct your own Field Research5. To make note of the itch of the tram seats on your way out. To listen to the magpies sing louder than the traffic. To look for the possums tight-roping across powerlines, their young screaming on tin roofs somewhere nearby. To drive until the radio gives up and all that's left is static and paddocks. To buy roadside oranges from an honesty box and leave more money than they're asking for. To pull over for sheep who decided the road belongs to them. To swerve for roadkill. To wait for kookaburras at dusk. To wave at farmers who'd never wave back if they knew you were living in Melbourne. To realise a three-hour drive is considered nearby. To learn what eucalyptus smells like after rain and hot bitumen smells like before it. To find a town with only one pub and one bakery and one old fella who’ll teach you how to predict the weather by the colour of the ants. To remember that every place already has a name unfathomably older than the one printed on your map. To sit beside the Goulburn River until you can tell the difference between a cormorant and a darter. To rise before the sun at least once. To stand completely still while the honeyeaters begin. To understand silence isn’t the absence of sound. To stop asking Australia to entertain you. To let the land introduce itself. To shake its hand. No, to kneel down. To kiss it. To kiss the parched cracks between it. Then, and only then, may you return to the city. Melbourne or London. You decide.