A personal journey

To be able to read is a privilege. Reading transports one from the immediate surroundings into a world created or described by an author who themselves have been moved by what they saw or wished to create as a story. The fertility of the authors mind and the skill, with language to capture the images they want us to see is, in essence one of the most important advances that mankind has undertaken in its history. 

Where would we be without the written word to pass on our knowledge and develop a civilisation fit for our children.
I have been this last couple of weeks transported back to the 1930s following the journey into the Australian outback of Ernestine Hill and her book, The Great Australian Loneliness, a tale of the people she met who richly provided a story of endeavour and hardship, a shift of mindset far from the paradigm we consider a normal way of life.
When we think of Australia we think of Sydney, its bridge and opera house, we think of the long rolling surf sweeping in onto pristine beaches, we think of chipper Aussie batsmen and bowlers out to prove how good they are and not at all reticent to tell us !! But there is another Australia, which starts 50/100 or so miles inland and stretches 2/3000 miles to the east, the Interior. It is exemplified by a people with not only a tenacious spirit but a life long desire to escape the corral of city existence and make their own mark on the life they choose to live. 
The book was written in the 30s  and portrays an even more remote outback than the present day. Much of it concerns the North, that vast space, untrodden except by Aborigine who form, to this day, a link into a prehistoric past a world of magic images, of superstition, of unworldly values where the ancestors play an immediate role in todays events and the famous "go walkabout" is the quest to reconnect with something more important.
She takes us into the world of the drover, the sheep sheerer, the fencer, the stockman. She introduces us to the heroic, isolated settler, the vital camel train delivering mail and provisions. She describes the lonely existence of, mainly men but also some women, who know no comforts other than a basic dwelling with no communication for months at a time. The fence repairer who sets off on horseback on a trip of 3 months, alone, to check the thousands of miles of fencing. The miners scratching for gold or opals living a most rudimentary existence, year in, year out.

Only through reading can we gain perspective. A perspective which gives us a measure of our own existence when set against others, a measure of our fellow man as we ponder our own fate in this our personal journey.