Brisbane, Queensland

The last few weeks end up being like a holiday at the end of the trip – moving from Melbourne along the South Coast of New South Wales to Sydney and eventually to my family’s home in Scone. We drive through an endless pall of bushfire smoke, with much of the south east of Australia being swallowed in unprecedented blazes.

We finish the final leg to Brisbane in two cars, with additional passengers. I drive with the dog Tex, while Sandi is with the boys along with Gary, the cat.

It’s close enough to a ten-hour drive, and throughout I am filled with strange mix of melancholy and excitement, a curious pudding of cream and spice.

The house looms tall and familiar on the top of the hill in Brisbane. We stand as a group of four outside, and hug. There’s a sense of ‘we did it!’ but that feels unusual because the trip was never a challenge to conquer. This is more of a consciousness that right now, as this little non-descript huddle on a street, we are a family that has somehow changed inside while more or less looking the same from the outside. And this moment, like the multitude that have passed in the last seven months, can never be repeated.

A strangled meow comes from Gary in the cat cage.

We go in and walk through the empty rooms, hearing the floor boards shift, door hinges creaking, steps murmuring.  These are sounds we had forgotten we had known. It smells slightly antiseptic – the tenants only moved out the night before, but it’s unmistakably home. We forget where lights switches are and what showerheads we have. I need a three minute tutorial from Eddie on how the work the television again. But overall, it’s familiar.

There’s much to be done in moving back, going back to work, preparing kids for school so inevitably it feels like a split second and we are back into this urban life again. Kids are taken to sports, dropped for sleepovers, rubbish is put out and the mower rumbles back into life.

Gary does an enormous wee all over our bed that we had only just reconstructed and made.

While all this movement and sound surrounds us, the places we have been and the spaces we have entered just carry on. Birds still flit and dance around the Gregory River, dolphins still ripple and shimmer through turquoise waves in the Bight, stones bake red and twisted in gorges in Karijini, brilliant sparks of vivid colours explode in reefs along Ningaloo, dust still boils outside of Mildura and the endless tides still surge. There is no start and end, no time on or off for the unending beauty of nature. It cares not for the artificial obstacles we build, the arbitrary times we schedule to meet, the unnecessary things we have to have.

It just is.

It continues its unavoidable existence, as it will long after we have vanished. It is the darkness that remains after the last bottle from the most outrageous party of all time slowly clinks into the gutter and the glitter falls softly to the floor.  

Whatever we do, she will always be.

Despite the sense of being back to regular life, there is a lingering light in us all that refuses to extinguish. Like the soft depth of the evening gloaming, it creates a new perspective and we reacquaint with the familiar from a changed viewpoint. A sense of good pervades, that we are happy, enthused but overall, unbelievably fortunate. We are the lucky ones.

While I write, Gary slinks between my legs and drops at my feet, a soft hum coming from deep within.

Home.