In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere

"Words generally don’t spring up from nowhere. By and large they each have some lengthy backstory behind them, an origin back that goes thousands of years, often into a different part of the world." Surrounded by books, and listening to the chatter of birds, I have a lot of opportunity to reflect on the nature of language. Join me in my train carriage for a long journey to nowhere, where the local...

"And, said another of us, we must remember that not all seasons are for growing or producing fruit. Some are for building strength, for staying dormant, for simply enduring. Some hard seasons you simply must survive." Here are five stories from winter. They're about wine, birds, frogs, football, bushwalking and solitude. And there's a train that travels through the bush into the future.

"It turns out that the word ‘tree’ is part of a cohort of the oldest words we’ve got in the English language...If we meander into this linguistic past, we find a word something like ‘doru’, the ancestor of today’s ‘tree’ words in not just the English language but also in Persian and Albanian and Sanskrit, among others. There’s more to it than that though: the same word seems to have been the origi...

"After all this rainfall, the soil is black. From this dark source, what will soon come forth is a suite of the brightest colours." I have been enjoying the change of season, as the southern hemisphere turns towards long nights. Join me as I lie under the stars contemplating darkness.

"But this all begs the question: must we just get used to catastrophe? Is it now time to accept the fact that all our landmarks are out of whack, that our life with the world is turning out all wrong? Must we get used to uncertainty, chaos, a future defined by fires and floods? What do we do when the river raves, sky is screaming, and country has curled its lip at us?" Sometimes the river murmurs,...

"Through the fruit we might get to know the plant better. And if that, then why not concern ourselves with the whole ecological habitat in which this piquant fruit comes to being – to learn about how it relates to rainfall, soil, fungal filaments, pollenating insects; oxygen, light, others in its own species, us?" A variety of plants are putting out fruit in the bush around the train carriage in w...

"He told me to forget my notes. You can’t go around foreign countries pretending to understand what you see, especially when you come from the west. What about a nice love story? We Indians, he said, we like a good love story. He went on: especially here in Bombay." This is a story set in India. But much more it is the story of a young man travelling into his own naïve ideas and emerging with eyes...

"Legend has it that there’s an island in a lake on a walking track in the Tasmanian highlands on which, on a lucky day – and if you’re game enough to swim out there in the cool temperature of an alpine lake – you might find a beer. The Isle of Ale, they call it. A mysterious, magical place." My train carriage shack is not far from the centre of Tasmania. From here I can ponder how islands are stra...

"I have seen currawongs come together in great restive gatherings, a score of them or more, babbling in their garbled language, yapping and arguing, talking over the top of each other. How is it that such sounds well up in them? How do they push these songs through their throats? And what is it that they’re saying?" I am lucky to live in the midst of a forest full of birds. Among other curiosities...

"For a very long time humans have entrusted memories to rocks, transferred stories to stone and had it tell our tales throughout the ages." Great quantities of stone are scattered around the train carriage in which I live. Behind me is a mountain range of dolerite, and there are rocks of all sorts of shapes and sizes in my memory.

"The gusts and gales imprint themselves on one’s memory; as with those trees you might see in exposed spots, that bend or lean or bear a hunchback, our experiences in different locations are pruned and shaped by winds. Even the gentle breezes bring reminiscences." In Tasmania we've had some windy weather. From my train carriage in the bush I watch the birds and trees wrestle with the gusts that bl...

"So the road trip yet again had me contemplating things slowly. Stillness has made me often think of movement, and now I learned that it was true when the concepts were put vice versa too. It was as though I’d travelled 1000km to go nowhere." At long last I left the train carriage, to go on a road trip, somewhere that was simply elsewhere. And then I came back again.

"I am realising that at some point I must come to terms with the fact that some separations will never again be sutured up. I have plotted out much of my life in the past ten years with travel in mind, and although partings are commonplace, I am always thinking of returning to certain countries, of reuniting with old friends and revisiting past experiences. But now I am in a train carriage, going...

"But in the end, from map to map, these landscapes have been altered by the decisions made about what to do with the land." I have gone looking through my box of maps to find what stories lie within the lands sketched out in them. Join me on the journeys I take through these countries of many colours.

"I begin seeing fungi of exquisite blue growing from fallen timber in the bush around me. Some call them pixies’ parasols: little brollies for the fairies to shelter beneath when the rainfall comes down hard." It's autumn again, and interesting colours have appeared in the bush around my train carriage -- encouraging interesting reflections on landscapes and history.

"And I empathised when I heard a fellow storyteller in Edinburgh reflecting on his life thus far and comparing himself to a racehorse who has left the blocks with all the others but isn’t looking so crash hot yet. He looked at me and said, would it not seem to most punters that were the wrong horses to have backed? But like me, I think he was counting on, at some point, a lucky break." I have been...

“I was in the ocean, she said, when I saw an orca. I swam fast towards it in a sort of spiralling motion, like I’d made myself into a torpedo. As I got nearer I could hear that the orca was making a series of ethereal sounds; it was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard.” I have spent part of the past months half-deaf, hearing only part of the sounds of the bush around my train carriage. So, her...

"The writer Gustav Flaubert suggested that if you look at anything closely enough, you would find it interesting. I reckon that’s about right. Take something as mundane, as fundamentally bland as my computer. I’m glaring at it right now from the other side of the room." I live in a train carriage that's been converted into a shack; it's not very big, but even still, I find myself surrounded by obj...

"There was another animal I could name in childhood: the sugar ant. You see, I was a bit of a sweet-tooth as a boy: and when they told me it was called a sugar ant, and I saw its amber-coloured thorax, I was sure it would taste like a flake of caramel. Like I say: every ecosystem is ready to explode with surprises, and surprises sometimes teach the most poignant lessons." I live an old train carri...

"He would emerge, gasping for oxygen, dripping wildly. Hoisting himself from the river and onto the rocks, he saw his chest had been sculpted by the water. Looking out on the river he saw a reflection so warped that he thought he might be beautiful, and when he walked away, you could see that he was a little different, that day by day he was carrying himself with a bit more satisfaction." I have a...

"When I was a teenager I was almost dashed, like so many ships, against the sharp granite of King Island: caught in a current, I struggled to swim against it, lost a flipper in the process, and was carried to a baroque-looking rock to which I clung and from where I eventually managed to extricate myself." It's summer at the bottom of the world, and time to go swimming. Here are some stories from c...

"The word they use in Greece is philoxenia, ‘love of strangers’. It takes a lot to craft that sort of hospitality; in some cases, when you suffer from a lack of trust, it must be close to impossible. But for myself at least, I’ve come to think that such relationships are at the heart of a good life. For me they are close to the highest priority." In a motionless train, I contemplate more stories o...

"When I was seven years old I left Tasmania for the first time. I didn’t go so far, only to the mainland, but just putting some distance between myself and my home was enough to open up opportunities and possibilities. Something existed in that ethereal space, it seemed. I came home and crouched on my hands and knees with an atlas spread in front of me. So, the world was a patchy quilt of pastel c...

"If you let the weather into your imagination, into your ideas, your bloodstream, you will find it shapes you. Like the sorts of plants my botanist mate is into. You may will begin to adapt -- into something rare and unlikely." The Bureau of Meteorology forecast some days of wild weather, so I bunkered down in my train carriage shack and began to reminisce on rainy days.

"And what a blessing and curse it is: this in-built function of language, the engine at its core, this grammar that keeps track of the time, the way these words innately catalogue what’s lost, the syntax of people with both history and destination. Poetry with its long bloody memory." I live alone in an old train carriage, and yet in telling stories and remembering various people with whom I've me...