013: Mirage

Charles Sturt, the Australian Desert and the utility of hope

It was not however until after we had run down every creek in our neighborhood, and had traversed the country in every direction that the truth flashed across my mind, and it became evident to me, that we were locked up in the desolate and heated region, into which we had penetrated, as effectually as if we had wintered at the Pole. 

— Charles Sturt, from his 1847 “Narrative of an Expedition into Central Australia”

In the late ‘90s, my family and I spent two very happy years living in a brick bungalow on a leafy side street in a town called Harbord, (now Freshwater) which is one of a long line of villages that comprise Sydney’s Northern Beaches. 

Home in those days was an alizarin bougainvillea, tall as the house; gardenias that bloomed in numbers so profuse they fell off their stems into heaps of scented petals, and a three and a half meter tall poinsettia tree whose blooms drew flocks of rainbow lorikeets that animated its scarlet and green. We even had leathery neighbors called Joan…