I had just come back from clambering over a very big hill…. walking over the oldest land on the planet which is exposed. I sat on the hill and watched the sun set and the moon rise over the ‘lollipop ridgeline hills” and listened to the dingoes howling. Guided by the moonlight (my headlamp was presently a ‘pocket lamp’ J ) and my acute night vision… I descended the hill amongst tufts of spiky Spinifex grass and ducked under long, glistening structural ropes made by Golden Orb spiders which spanned expansively from tree to tree. I was feeling inspired… creativity and words were frolicking in my thoughts… and I was excited about coming back to camp and sitting quietly with dinner and writing my inspirations.

Back at camp, I opened the car door into the moonlit darkness and Lou Reed, Pink Floyd, Dolly Parton and an unidentified 70’s band all entered my car. I stood beside our camper at the Karijini Eco Resort on a Saturday night and I felt I had been teleported in the Tardis to a mish-mash oldies Splendour in the Park! (Australian Music festival)

As I prepared dinner I noticed the volume increasing…as everyone turned up their own music – just a little bit…and a little bit more…..to be heard more clearly over the other songs.

Bob Dylan entered the mix and wailed in the dust…and Simon and Garfunkel tried unsuccessfully to lighten the mix.

Here we all were…”getting away from it all” in an amazingly beautiful and remote National Park…. with my memory of last night’s sounds of the dingoes howling, the night birds doing their thing – and a mournful screeching which I was hoping to record and identify tonight;, frogs and cicadas clicking like castanet’s;  and tonight everyone is turning their own music up louder so ‘theirs” could be heard over everyone else’s.

I sat quietly and made a game in my own mind to see if I could play “Spicks and Specks” (For my international readers this is a very entertaining Australian music quiz show) by myself. It wasn’t as fun as on the telly without any other team members!  J ) The ‘chai tent drumming’ monotonously thudded from the other side of the camp ground. Guitars were being strummed in a frenzy three tents down… and beer tinged karaoke added to the cacophony.

I sat and watched the shadows of the trees shift as the moon rose higher in the sky. I’m not sure though whether Pink Floyd’s stairway was headed where it was intended to go….and mournful screeching tonight was not from the feathered variety.  I made wishes on shooting stars. The meteor shower helped me laugh at the mayhem.

It was really funny. If it wasn’t so funny it would be tragic. Actually the more I think about it… the more tragic I think it really was.