Good Friday

Good Friday.

Should this be good Good Friday. Well, bus 1073 is now sitting back at the depot, fuelled with the keys on the hook. She will sit there for two weeks now as it is school holidays in NSW and someone else will take the wheel from here after. This morning I have driven the 200 odd klm’s from Katoomba to a place affectionately called the ‘Wombat House’. It is a secluded 100 acre property owned by various family members, friends and so on. It is absolutely remote and surrounded by National Park. It borders the Wollemi National Park to the south and the Gouldburn River National Park to the north. It is actually a freehold title and exists as an island surrounded by national park. National Parks would love to buy the title and add it to their park system but they might be waiting a while for that. The property has acted as a bit of a retreat and escape hatch for over ten years now. The house, or rather cabin/hut, has a little history. The house was bought off a couple of hillbilly brothers who we later found had been growing dope for sale to a ready market in Newcastle. We found out later still that one of the brothers was shot dead by police in a drugs raid a few years after we had bought the property. Another surprise some ten years later was the concealed underground room below the floor of the cabin, obviously a dope drying and storage area. Luckily though the dope history ended at the time of purchase of the property. Don’t think we would have been too happy, or felt particularly safe, if leather clad bikies had been travelling out here with pockets full of cash looking to score and been mighty peeved at wasting their time travelling so far for nought. I suppose it is some credit to the previous owners that they didn’t do business from their property. Hell, the only herb that grows out here is an amazing rosemary plant that seems to survive everything.

I don’t get out here too often. In summer it is far too hot, I mean really hot. Around 40 C. There is no power out here so it is all fairly basic. I suppose that is part of the appeal. There is something energising about sitting around a fire, basic cooking and talking rather than TV. We have been bringing our children out here since they were crawling and getting entangled in ‘tiger pear’ was a bigger danger than the more mundane suburban, eat button/fall down stairs. About four years ago my five year old nephew came into the cabin on new years eve obviously distraught. My sister asks him what’s wrong Will? “Snake bite me”! Oh shit, this is going to be a New Years Eve like no other. Outside the hut there is a King Brown snake, two and a half metres long. Oh hell, is this going to be the tragedy of the Wombat House? Luckily no. The Care Flight helicopter was duly dispatched from Newcastle’s John Hunter Hospital and within twenty minutes young Will was being air lifted to send NYE in Newcastle with his story splashed as a good news story across local television and newspapers the next day. One reporter asked Will, ‘how big was the snake’ and Will put his hand apart as wide as he could and said, “huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge!”

I suppose we can do without such excitement. Most times out here it is fairly tame and eventless. It is an opportunity to unplug from the modern world and contempt life with out the gadgets and gismos. I suppose it is a way of being naked, figuratively. We live in a world with everything at your finger tips and at instant call or beckoning? Food, services, electronics are often evaluated in just how quickly it/they can be made available and consumed. So, it is nice to escape to a world from time to time where things take time and there is not one thing in the house that beeps at you, nothing that needs to be recharged, no power adapters, no LED lights to illuminate the corners of the room at night, no street lights, no barking dogs. Just a whole lot of nothing, naked on the face of the earth. That is the Wombat House. And that is where I leave this blog sitting in total darkness sitting at my laptop. OK, OK sitting at a laptop is not exactly a total escape from the modern world I suppose but at least I am writing, constructing and being creative in some degree whereas I could be sitting here watching a DVD engaged in someone else’s world. Good Friday, goodnight.