Driving: The Australian Form of Meditation

We took one last look along the freezing cliffs, we organised the rental house and we left things as tidy as we could. Things moved in ways we could never have imagined. We were healthier, more relaxed; while I kept thinking better times lay ahead. And if they didn't, if there was no bolt hole, no way to escape the creeping forces that were overwhelming us, no way to get to the magical financial figures which would allow him freedom and courage, no way to thoroughly adorn, or augment, the story of our lives; then there were the crowded streets of Calcutta and the insane milieu of all the world's desperates, gathering in the same places. Once it was Goa, once it was Amsterdam, once it was everywhere we chose to plop ourselves, reflected images in train windows, fragments of books, scattered hope and manufactured outrage. It worked when you're young; not now. Now he just tried to dredge enough guts to face another day.

I was reading Leviathan: the anauthorised biography of Sydney. I came to the realisation that part of the problem, my problem, was that I regarded my environment as entirely toxic. Not just the dry, bleaching, air conditioned offices, the all pervading ennui, the sad fates and the high staff turnover, but the grey streets themselves, the pollution ridden air, our drunk brethren on the corner, not just the political environment, which was simplistic, from the Stalinist left marked as progressive; holding the high moral ground to themselves; destroyed by a class who did not go to work, who lived off everybody elses sweat; not just the snarling yuppies and the undeserving rich and the conservatives who all thought their positions were due to their own hard and deserving work; but the fabric of things themselves.

For the underclasses at least, Sydney had never been an easy city. Always the bible of the middle classes; now the bible of the bourgeoise left and the progressive, green, doctor's wives, the Sydney Morning Herald, where I would work 130 years later, had warned in the 1850s, as Buckingham records, that the denizens of the dark would only emerge to rob bullock drivers and country folk "like certain loathsome reptiles", their sort "only come out at night from these dark recesses".

"Ask them a question in the daytime, and reptile-like, they hiss at you, unaccustomed to sympathy of any kind, they conclude your only object is to mock them in their misery. They feel....that society has cast them from its bosom to perish in dirt and dishonour... As they are not respected by society, so they have ceased to respect themselves - careless of life, and heedless of death, they sink into the grave leaving nothing behind them but a vicious example."

The alarm went at 5am and we organised ourselves in the dark; preparing for a 30 hour drive towards a city I no longer loved.