En Route

by Juliana Engberg

  Stony Creek, Big Ben Creek, Snowball Creek, Coopers Gully and the evocatively named Black Stump and Black Dog Creeks—the strip map, with its line-drawn road and incidental markings, illustrated all the toponyms and points of interest, which conjured in my child’s mind images of dusty pioneers coming to rest at water’s edge after trekking vast distances in an effort to see where the country led.

  If time permitted and you had already booked your Zebra Motel in advance of arriving (not booking ahead meant pushing on beyond dusk, and the fraying of already fractious nerves, but that’s another story), sideways adventures could be indulged off the Princes Highway. A segue through places like Cooma, Berridale and Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains put you within eyeshot of Mount Kosciuszko, named by Paul Edmund de Strzelecki (as in Magda Szubanski’s character, Sharon) in homage to the Polish–Lithuanian General Tadeusz Kósciuszko. No mention, that I can recollect, was made on the map of Mount Kosciusko originally being named Mount Townsend and vice versa. The switcheroony of names was made to maintain the claim that Kosciusko was Australia’s highest peak by the New South Wales Land Authority in 1892. Sneaky, capricious cartography!

  As far as I can remember, no significant mention was made of the Aboriginal place names for these national points either. The Indigenous language groups had a number of names for the European-assigned toponym Kosciusko, such as ‘Jagungal’ and ‘Tackingal’, but they remained unwritten in the legend. When, occasionally, they were mentioned on the map, Indigenous place names were translated, perhaps dubiously, so we learned Wodonga meant ‘bulrushes’; Wagga Wagga was the ‘place of many crows’; Ulladulla, ‘safe harbour’ and so forth. Whether these translations were accurate or not, I do not know. Not a lot of detail about the history around these names was provided.

  That might change. An important project that was launched in 2016 by the State Library of New South Wales, the Weemala (Big Lookout) archive has digitised hundreds of documents that record Indigenous place names as told to agents of the Royal Anthropological Society of Australasia between 1899 and 1903. This amazing trove containing ledgers filled with written records indicates the vivid links between language and landscape, and confirms the deep knowledge of country and the early navigational clues that were imbedded in Indigenous languages.

  Going through the papers you can learn that ‘Boondi’ (Bondi) refers to the noise made by waves breaking on the rocks; ‘Minna-Murra’ (Minnamurra) indicates a place where there are plenty of fish and ‘Koojah’ (Coogee) means bad smell from decaying seaweed—which goes some way to explaining an all-too-glum family holiday there in the 1970s. If the strip map had mentioned this helpful Indigenous tip we might have pushed on to ‘Elowera’ (Illawarra), which is a ‘pleasant place’. It would be a great thing if the strip map were reinvented with this new ancient knowledge. Perhaps it could be plotted into the GPS.

  For all its shortcomings I still feel affection and gratitude for the histories and descriptions provided by the RACV. Without them I would not have learned about the ‘Dog on the Tuckerbox’ at Snake Gully, 5 miles (4.7 actually) from Gundagai, not far from Walla Walla (originally named ‘Ebenezer’ by German settlers moving from South Australia to New South Wales, but converted to Walla Walla, ‘place of many rocks’, to avoid a duplication of place names).

  These snippets read in advance of arriving instilled not only expectation but also a sense of national narrative that lodged firmly in the psyche—the little dog and the unfortunate bullock drover whose food is eaten by his four-legged friend; the monument itself, a tribute to the Australian pioneering spirit and the blokes that forged the way, which launched a highway.

  That highway is gone now. The Old Hume Highway has been re-routed, ring-roaded and deviated from the necklace of towns that once linked storytelling with travel and was one of the reasons one went: to learn about the wilful, lavish land that was now navigable by Australia’s ‘own car’, secure in the knowledge the strip map conveyed.

  The strip map provided useful information about road conditions, topography and the distance between towns, which was handy for plotting the next loo break. If you augmented the RACV strip maps with the Shell Service Station road games booklet, you were in for a good ride with the windows down, the radio playing and Mum snoozing in the front seat, bound for ‘Coolonggatta’ (Coolangatta), the highest land.

  Before the invention of GPS, and without a map even, one of my most profound encounters occurred as a result of being lost.

  An artist research trip had taken me to Vietnam. This was 1991, before the American-imposed embargo had been lifted and Hanoi lived in an impoverished state with a lack of modern facilities.

  It was a beautiful but dilapidated place. The golden light fell on the wide French-built boulevards—tropical versions of the Haussmann scheme—lined with peeling, dusty architecture resembling the grand apartments of Paris. The place teemed with bicycles and their riders who, miraculously, were able to balance any number of large items on their backs, handlebars and wheels, while swerving and jostling between themselves.

  My companions and I arrived in the searing mid-afternoon heat and were driven to our accommodation. A place called the Military Hotel. A concrete bunker of a building with a suite of sparse rooms running off the external corridor. My recollection is of dark green paint with brown trimmings that reminded me of industrial buildings and other utilitarian architecture. At any rate, it was very fundamental and basic. Before arriving, we’d been advised not to drink the water. Someone had mentioned sleeping with a tennis ball in your mouth to avoid rats chewing your tongue. Once settled in I found the overhead fan to be sluggish. The electricity supplied from a generator was weak and sporadic. It was uncomfortably humid.

  Acclimatising in our new surroundings, we seemed mostly alone in this facility, bar a quiet couple of other guests—we gathered they were French researchers. Vietnam and, in particular, Hanoi was still resolutely communist. The Military Hotel, we were told, was the place that foreigners stayed—one assumed somewhat under surveillance.

  To get our bearings my colleagues and I decided to go for a walk. Confident we would find our way via orientations and observations, we wandered for a couple of hours soaking in the atmosphere of small, colourful shops, steaming street cooking and the intense, dusty, bustling urbanity of sideways and little streets.

  Without any real warning, it suddenly got dark. There were no electric streetlights and we became increasingly disoriented. After several attempts to retrace our steps, noting saucepan sellers, wooden stool makers and poultry shops that we were certain we had already passed, we finally admitted defeat and sought assistance from a pharmacy, hoping that the proprietor might speak a little English. At that time Russian and French were not uncommon foreign languages, but English was very rarely spoken or understood in Hanoi.

  After a bit of awkward French and some mutual sign language, the chemist indicated we should wait a minute or two and called upstairs for someone. Soon after, a woman of around thirty-five came down and in very good English asked if she could be of assistance. ‘We are lost,’ we told her, ‘we are trying to find our way back to the Military Hotel.’

  ‘I will take you,’ she said. This seemed an extraordinary act of kindness. It was a long way and she would have to get back alone, but she insisted and we were in no position to resist. A suggestion of calling a taxi seemed too implausible an idea to her. Perhaps there just were not any to call. We never did ride in one.

  When, after about a forty-minute walk, she had succeeded in guiding us back to our base, she refused any suggestion that we might offer her some money as a gesture of thanks. Instead, she asked if we would honour her by coming to her house for tea the next day or the one after. We said we would work it into our schedule and ask our hosts to deliver us to her house.

  The next two days we spent meeting with our hosts at the Hanoi art school. Impressionism was still considered the avantgarde in this teaching academy that followed the Beaux-Arts traditions.
It was surprising to step back in time in this way. We were also taken to a variety of museums. The National Museum of History, which displayed amazing crafts, silks and decorative arts items, showed the long traditions of beautiful work. They told the history of a place with many episodes of colonisation and reinforced the extent to which the sophisticated Vietnamese culture stretched back for centuries.

  We were taken to a museum displaying items and documentation from the Vietnam War. It included the confronting photo of the self-immolating monk engulfed in flames, which had been torched into my brain from when it was first shown on television news; the famous image of the execution of a Vietcong soldier, taken by photojournalist Eddie Adams; and numerous other pictures depicting the devastation of a city, country and people gripped by the destruction of war. In truth, it was heavy.

  Our hosts were unfailingly polite. Cheerful. Kind and generous. The worlds we were discovering—the ancient artistic world, the world of devastating war and the contemporary world of these open-hearted people—collided explosively in my head.

  We arrived in the mid-afternoon for our tea rendezvous. Minh, our rescuer, invited us upstairs and into her house. She had a small table and three small stools. A bed. A wardrobe. She had prepared tea and some small cakes. We talked for a little while. She was happy to know we came from Australia.

  She had experienced the war as a young girl, she told us. The Americans were brutal, but the Australians were kind. She had a friend, an Australian soldier who looked out for her and her family. He had sent her a book.

  She went to her wardrobe, where there was just one book on a ledge. She took down a well-thumbed copy of Tim Winton’s That Eye, the Sky to show us. She hugged it like a precious thing. She loved that book. She would like to go to Australia one day, she said, the Australia she read about in the book. Something in it had tremendous meaning for her. Perhaps it was the stranger who comes to have such importance for Winton’s young protagonist, Ort, resembling her own Australian friend, who said he would return but had not at that time.

  The basic necessity of Minh’s home, her quietly regal courtesy, the lack of any rancour or bitterness in her about a war so devastating and circumstances so sad, and her life lived, at that time, in the hardship of embargos, left me feeling very moved and somehow bereft.

  We left her house as dusk was falling; this time collected by our hosts. But in getting lost and seeking assistance we had found something significant—a human face and an experience that revealed to me a Vietnam that had become obscured by war, the media and prejudice. The memory of this brief interlude with Minh and her resilient and open humanity has stayed with me ever since.

  As anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m hopeless with a mobile phone, but of course I do use my pocket gadget occasionally. It is particularly helpful for locating obscure studios in parts of cities only artists dwell. Abandoned warehouse spaces, forgotten factories, converted car-repair buildings, lower Manhattan walks-ups, outer- periphery satellites, studio ateliers in unfashionable arrondissements, the east and west ends of cities and places outside the tourist grid. Nevertheless, I have a self-irritating habit of second-guessing the map and on occasion go off-advisory on the assumption that I have a better sense of my destination and of how to find a shorter, more scenic way there. It’s okay if you have the time.

  That way leads to re-found streets, untrodden for years on account of creating your own workaday groove in the pavement, repeated, returned to, re-rehearsed until the familiar becomes just that and your experience has been shrunken to a pocket handkerchief of space. This is particularly true if work and travel keep you in a loop.

  If time permits I will always travel a different way to and from work. I guess I cannot help myself. I have an ingrained music track in my head from the 1960s and ’70s full of songs about searching, travelling, going on the hippy trails, looking for America, faded jeans and romantic encounters, so I take the winding road and go home by another way as often as I can. I enjoy taking the long way home, even if it’s not the quickest, most efficient route. At least I’ve seen something different from the morning journey—noted the changes, checked the sea, watched the streetscape transform with new buildings, renovations or losses, and monitored the progress of urban design innovations or dis-improvements. I’m convinced it’s good for my mind and spirit. I know it’s annoying for the person making the dinner.

  It seems the cognitive researchers agree with me. Going different ways, exploring new places, getting lost and found again apparently develops ‘dendrites’—brain sprouts that enhance the brain’s cerebral function and capacity. The brain actually wants to go feral and learn new things, or at least be stimulated by adventures—even if the challenge is just a local deviation. It also seems that meandering delivers benefits from de-stressing.

  If you link this to travel and the recalling of routes via what’s referred to as ‘method of loci’—which utilises mnemonic stimuli such as remembering things, songs, incidents—and join these to spatial navigation techniques, including points of interest, ‘wayfinding’, or what the London cabbies refer to as ‘The Knowledge’, your brain expands and gains elastic capacity. Travelling this way also helps one to store happy memories.

  No doubt this is another reason for the rise and rise of the pilgrimage, and the emergence of what the travel industry now refers to as the ‘experience economy’. People want to discover, feel, lodge reminiscences in their minds (and their photos in the iCloud) and learn some new things. Better to have a great brain than a trophy watch any time.

  So three cheers for the new navigation systems. Because the terrific thing about the GPS is that in fact it enables you to twist and turn and go and get lost. If you have the time, or want to make the time, I recommend you punch in ‘least use of freeways’, take the longest time to reach your destination and then, when you feel like it, turn the thing off. That way leads to winding paths, little detours and meanderings that take you into the less-travelled trails and reveal the hidden worlds behind the speedy system.

  There you might discover small waterfalls, glorious viaducts, pebbled creeks, hidden lagoons. Discover or rediscover old towns now off the super-highways and the history they represent. Or perhaps find the small café popped amazingly on a bluff, where an impossibly short mama still prepares a meal from local produce and likes that you have dropped by. Drive down a bush track, and meet the old rover who has reared a baby kangaroo rescued from the road. Roam along the beach, and find the improbable house clinging on for dear life at the edge of a sand dune. In the French Alps buy some ugly, bruised yet delicious clementine from the smiling Syrian refugee, Mohammad, selling fruit at the foot of a geological wonder rock formation. In a detoured agricultural cul-de-sac, pause to watch the duck that sits on a cow’s back, happily cohabiting, and see the suckling pigs who have a million-dollar view of snow-capped mountains.

  It’s okay. You can turn the thing back on again, reset the navigation and ask Marcella, Penelope, Bodil, Roxanne, Heidi or even Jeremy for guidance. Or in a pinch, seek out a Mary in a grotto. But, just for a while, you can open your mind, and see new horizons while you are free to meander.

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to Marg and Wes for the corner of the castle; to Maggie for all the Venice wisdom; to Louise O’Neill for the ‘Marys’; Helen for coming on the hike; and to the lovely people at MUP—Louise Adler, Sally Heath, Louise Stirling and Meaghan Amor.