Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [5]
Camera
Canister of film
Pair of flip-flops
Outback Australia Lonely Planet
Cairns postcard (with meeting time and place in your handwriting)
Address book
Passport
$743.50
And the clothes on my back, a solid silver cross, one watchful skeleton, and of course this pen and paper, you.
This is what all the preparation was for. I have medicine and shelter, maybe two weeks of food. 4.5 litres of water seems enough, but this depends on how long my desert sojourn will last.
I think of the stranded glider pilot who survived by drinking his own urine. An amateur flyer, he’d confused north from south over the MacDonnell Ranges and touched down hundreds of kilometres from the airfield. The TV docu-drama cut from survivor in the studio to actor in the desert, wiping his brow and screwing up his face at another swig of life-saving piss. He’d already been marooned for two days, and after gulping down his one Coke, he began urinating back into the can. Less and less each time. Between toilet refreshments he licked drops of condensation from the Perspex cockpit of the glider. When he ran out of piss and condensation he descended into delirium. He chased monitor lizards in the vain hope of catching them and drinking their blood. He dug a hole, waited for a spring to fountain from the earth. He watched a mob of kangaroos bury themselves in the sand to keep cool, and did the same. Scorching dehydration headaches wrecked his brain. He crawled back to the glider and waited to die.
But we know he survived because he’s in a studio telling the camera how on the fifth morning he woke and stumbled far enough to find tyre tracks. He carved SOS on to the road and collapsed. And because he’s in a studio before a camera, and because an actor is playing his parched self, we’ve already guessed that someone happens to drive past and come to his rescue.
So I wait for my own farmer in a beaten-up ute. Someone taking a short cut through a dried-up creek bed, too narrow for cars or trucks.
What are my odds of rescue?
Strange to be lost, yet know where I am.
Show Me the Sky
14 September 1834
On the suggestion of Rev. Lilywhite, to assist him in the continuing advance of my English, and to make the both perilous and tedious sea voyage to the South Pacific an educational one, I, Nelson Babbage of Whitechapel, London – formerly Naqarase Baba of Lakemba, Fiji – commence this journal.
Stowaway on the ship Fortune in 1824, a boy without clothes, I had no more idea of what lay beyond the horizon than what I could see. Now I sit in a London chapel, dressed as dapper as pampered gentry, dipping my quill from ink to page and writing in English. Although this is not my language, these are my words, and with my hand guided by my spirit, and, I pray, the good Lord above ever watchful, I will bring my life to these very pages.
After such an announcement I am unsure of what I am supposed to record. And for whom? My people do not collect such private thoughts. We are not afflicted with the busy and restless spirit of the white man, and find no merit in a mind not shared with our family and brothers. Though after ten long years upon these shores, much of England and her peculiar ways has no doubt marked my soul.
Ten years in the lands of Europe! Ten years of walking the mighty cities and tumultuous towns, the great speeding streets that swirled with all the vim and vigour of a tropical storm.
Cast into this kingdom as a boy, dizzy with wonder at the feats of construction and engineering, at the mountains of stone and glass, the hissing and clanging machines with fire in their bellies, I believed I were a hapless mortal snagged in the dream of Ndengei, our Great Spirit, and that when He awoke, I would open my eyes on the golden sand and glittering surf of home, believing once more that the world contained no more than our verdant land and the deep blue sea.
But the great ships had already split the sky. We had chosen not to heed the warnings of our Tongan neighbours. We did not believe that pale gods stepped down from the height of the sun, that