Australia by Jilliane Bruffey

Our cheap rental car cruises down the deserted two-lane road, my mind still fighting the disorientation of watching the giant anthills of dusty red earth, themselves a foreign sight, fly by on the left side of the road, the same side our car is coasting along. I rest my hand on the edge of the open window, my fingers twining languidly in the arid breeze, inhaling deeply of the familiar, yet newly intense scent of the towering, creaking eucalyptus trees that line the empty highway.

I feel strangely at home in Australia, despite only having visited one other time many years before. Yet, why shouldn’t I, when I have fought my way to survival in the early days of the convict settlement in Van Diemen’s Land, watched the snakes dance on the banks of the Murrumbidgee, and strolled the outback with the last of the Nerambura tribe? I’ve lived along with the Macintoshes and the Duffys as they fight back from a mythical curse that ties their families together in an endless quest for revenge and survival. I’ve cheered along the improbable success of Mary Abacus, an unlikely hero driven on by her own unswerving ambition, strength, and independence despite the harsh reality of life in the convict settlement. I’ve cried for Jessica Bergman as she struggles back from unimaginable situations; after losing her child and the love of her life, first to her sister’s schemes then to the devastation of World War, she still finds the power to fight for the rights of a friend, an aboriginal woman who has had her half-caste children taken by the government for assimilation.

I’ve lived all of these lives and more, following the history of Australia from its unlikely beginnings as the dreaded Van Diemen’s Land through its christening as a country and beyond. I’ve been entranced by the rugged outback, the seemingly endless deserted stretches void of civilization to this day that still manage to inspire awe. I’ve strolled the bustling streets of Sydney and Melbourne, imagining them as they were decades ago, not yet the towering cities I’ve visited, but still impressive in their own right. And, of course, I’ve adored the animals, the cute and curious kangaroos and koalas, the brilliantly plumed lorikeets and galahs, and the endearingly confusing platypus.

The founding of Australia still intrigues me: a brilliant new frontier, ripe for exploration, full of limitless possibilities is found beyond the edge of the known world. Naturally, its discoverers, brilliant people that they were, decide to send their criminals, the dregs of their flourishing society, to populate it. Rather than seeking to explore the possibilities of the wide-open spaces, they write off the continent as nothing more than a garbage dump for the waste of society. Despite these humble beginnings, the nation rises up and succeeds. It is fitting that a nation with such an exciting, exhilarating beginning have its story told in the epic sagas that I have come to love. Each book numbers many hundreds of pages of cramped print, as if the authors couldn’t bare to include that one extra word, extra sentence, endlessly wracking their minds to pick out that one perfect word to capture the sights and sounds unique to Australia, those that make the books as amazing as they are.

As the print of these books has woven tales connecting families across generations in twisting and turning plots, it has also connected generations of my own family. Every spring, when my grandparents return from visiting my uncle in Australia, my grandmother, from whom I have inherited my insatiable need for books, brings with her a new novel, which she passes on to my father, who tears through it before handing it down to me. This shared interest binds us where no similarity could be expected. It seems that we are in our own elite club, tied by the love of these books hardly even heard of in our country.

As we continue down the road, clipping along at one hundred kilometers per hour, I can hardly tear my eyes away from the scenery as it rushes past. Despite the long road I know lies ahead of us before we stop for afternoon tea at another idyllic town, I refuse to crack open a book as I typically would on a long car ride. After all, the exotic atmosphere I often imagine surrounds me. Why should I live with a crudely imagined idea of Australia when the sights, sounds, and smells that authors can only attempt to describe are at my fingertips? Sparing scarcely a passing thought for the brand-new paperback stashed in the backpack at my feet, I gaze rapturously out the window, attempting to take in as much as I can from my surroundings, storing it in my memory for dreary days back at my home imagining myself here with the raucous calls of the birds; the tangy, dusty scent of a very different kind of forest; the curved leaves of the eucalyptus reaching down towards me as the tips of the trees graze the too-blue sky.