A year in Australia

Because I can’t think of anything to write about at the moment, I’m reproducing here the start of something I wrote for a creative writing course way back in 1993. Let me know if you want more. If I don’t hear from you, you won’t get any more!
 
The brief was the ‘loss of a place’ and as far as I remember it was meant to be autobiographical, which this is.
 
I intended to copy it out exactly as I wrote it at the time, but I haven’t been able to resist tweaking it – and improving it, I hope, not killing it.
 
 
Early 1975
 
I’ve got a job grape-picking’ said Bella’s letter. ‘Why don’t you come too?’
    Bella was in Australia pursuing a lover who’d been coming over to England on business once a year for the last few years, picking up with Bella for a mad few weeks, and then going back home to his wife and children.
    I was 21, eking out an existence in London, trying to forget a failed university career and treading gingerly round the broken glass of a dying romance. My days were propped up with bars of chocolate and my nights with interminable parties.
 
Six weeks later I stepped into the arrivals lounge of Sydney airport.
   ‘Welcome to Austrilia,’ said a large sweaty man in a pale grey uniform.
    I was pleased to be welcomed but it was disconcerting to travel halfway across the world and find people still speaking English.
 
After a few days with friends in that brilliant white-blue-and-green city . . . 

Here is Sydney and some members of the family I stayed with

. . . I set off in an ancient bus piled with mail and newspapers. Every few hours we stopped at one-horse towns with wooden sidewalks and saloon bars.

   People hurried from side to side of the street. The older men wore immaculate baggy white shorts with long white socks and brogues, the younger ones flipflops and tiny, bum-hugging black items which I later learned were called ‘stubbies’.
    I wandered round to the back of one of the rows of buildings only to find stretching to the horizon a pulsating plain of red earth dotted with squat blue-grey bushes. I couldn’t breathe. It was terrifying. There was nothing human anywhere. What on earth had I done?
 
At last, along with a bundle of newspapers, at the intersection of two dirt roads, it was my turn to be dumped. I sat on the bundle and waited. Bella and I had arranged our rendezvous weeks ago by letter. How could it possibly work? What would I do if it didn’t?