“Adaminaby”

or

Marginalian Capital Territory

ChorusWe travel for the most part in darkness.  On B roads, mostly C roads and routes unposted.

We go pretty slowly actually.  Yet it’s still superhumanly fast.

You don’t stop too long in the cold.  Yuh can’t afford to switch off.

NarratorFirst things first:

Off-mic“First”?

NarratorAdaminaby is not within the Australian Capital Territory.

Adaminaby is varying megalitres deep in a lake.  And it is also several kilometres away from any overflow: off to the margins of the Snowy Hydro Scheme.  Here, the evicted town keeps notes in a museum on the engineering mythos that displaced it.

When the water gets low, silty traces of the old Adaminaby start emerging.  Where flows have been gentle enough, dammed villages can be reborn, drought after drought, as early-career artists.  Underlying these humble pop-up displays, making the old-timers cry at the shock, are complex processes and histories obscured, as in some terrible iceberg analogy.

NarratorThe Territory lingers.  There’s no sign to say you’ve left the ACT, down that way.

Without G-force to brace unto, entire swathes of body lurch.  Mown down.  When I close my eyes, a road, the road, Road reels before me.  Its spectral aggregate underscores my vision for days.

NarratorDon’t you just adore the fuzzy little pufferjacketed ground covers pricking up through the fog?

NarratorThis is near Honeysuckle campground, downslope from the exposed foundations of the observatory that picked up that first step on the moon.

A sparse, proud installation where the basement was.  Towering dish since reassigned.

The everfresh banners reaching along the Aboriginal Tent Embassy—y’know, over the road from what was a Provisional Parliament House.

The newer Parliament House, webbed in bitumen.

The surprisingly wee premises of National Institutions, archives…  An arboretum packed with saplings, teeming with school groups and dignitaries from young governments.

There is a concrete poetry to the ACT.  A lot of fresh cement pouring through the fire cycles.

NarratorS’posedly the far northern centrepiece, Canberra, is all about the roundabouts, but if you’ve been around eastern towns of similar traffic density design intent, they are’t quite so distinctive.  Except maybe the ones with the ponds in them.

Personally, I’ve never been stuck with such a frequency at semi-rural electric lights.

Anyway, welcome to the Hyperdome.  Even the shopping plazas sound space age, ’round here.

NarratorOutside these suburban enclaves—even sometimes in them—there’s this sense of wandering around a soundstage, or a backlot that’s always on-call for spectacle.

The great civic symbol that Australia’s capital embraces above, perhaps, all others—alongside the internal combustion engine, often in concert with it—is the lawn.

NarratorThose swanky production values are still evident beyond Canberra, but unless you’re just skipping the nearest border to Queanbeyan, the cast and crew plummet.  You can—and if travelling alone, just about must—spend hours travelling well-kempt country roads without meeting any other human beings.  Especially at night.  And if you then keep on down the Great Dividing Range, during the off-season.

Heading home to the old capital, it’s pelting down.  Bats, moths, rain, 8 books on a doorstep…