fair bloody dinkum.

i have yet to find any sense of cohesion or consensus here. australia has been a flood of vivid colors and aching, moments stretched out over unknown periods of time. cigarettes cost anywhere from 8.50 to 11.90 a pack, and i forgot to break in my shoes. but i haven't figured out what i am doing here or how i am working right now, other than following the pack from behind (and getting annoyed when someone interrupts my lagging by asking if i am okay). we are a dynamic bunch - most mornings we wake up sore in face and abdomen from laughing. everything here has a punchline.

sydney was not my favorite place - beautiful, yes, but those cities are no longer for me. too many people, too many choices, too little conversation. i walk too slowly for such a city. but we have found canberra recently, a city that i want to lick and stick to the back of my notebook like an exotic stamp. today, black swans with red beaks and white cockatoos, and a museum exhibit called cirque - all video displays and moving chairs, so beautiful it made my teeth hurt.

we chose the right time, i think, to be here - it's fall in canberra (-4 celsius when we left for city center this morning) and the foliage is a sight to behold. beyond that, both the film festival and the annual writers festival spanned our time in sydney and i found myself pushing harder than i thought possible to find a space in every thing i could. i missed frank moorhouse and clive hamilton, naomi wolf and maya angelou.

but the highlight of sydney, i think, was probably the panel of indigenous writers at the writers festival, to which i followed ian (up up up uphill) on a whim - it gets dark around 5pm and i was frozen to my toes, but went anyway for the chance to hear what they had to say. joseph boyden (canada), tara june winch (australia), alootook ipellie (baffin island), and sherman alexie. my heart sputtered with their words, some so powerful that you had to look away from them - alootook ipellie read a poem about the most unimaginably destructive force that the white men brought with them as they made their way onto baffin island, which was noise. the white man effectively ended nature's silence.

and sherman alexie, he stood up and made everyone gasp with laughter - the desperate kind because we were momentarily kindred and we all knew that to laugh at these situations was the only way to look past them. he was astonishing, all brash reality and calm truth, telling us about the death of his alcoholic father and his son playing gameboy in a windowseat over a stunning view of darling harbor ("portrait of oppressed indigenous youth").

truth be told, everything has been so tough, so rigorous, so painful thus far that i have little will to focus on academics. reality's not given up, and will continue nipping at my heels until i sit down with her, but for now it's early dinners with the rest of the group (dr. ian spaghetti mcintosh, who once defeated an attacking shark by snapping his fingers and making the ocean around them boil, presiding), and those tiny moments of breathtaking beauty.

we head to darwin on thursday and i can't say there's anything i've anticipated more - i'm tired of these cities and these endless skyscrapers against an unfathomably perfect (endless) blue sky.