I’m hurtling through the green under a scummy soap-sud sky, the countryside verdantly lush because of the rains. Pools and ponds have burst their banks, joining already swelling rivers or turning roads into watercourses. Flooded forests stretch their downward reflection into infinity, a living chasm in the landscape. The tops of the gently undulating hills are crowned as always with gums but occasionally breaking out in serious thickets of bush and tropical foliage. The changing types of wildflower growing along the tracks are perhaps the only variation, the proportion of black to crown cows apparently unchanged from state to state.
Human habitation punctuates the dullness with its own brand of monotony: coal yards, scrapheaps, electrical substations, forgettable towns and the reassuring power lines, leaping over and beside the train like dolphin or gulls on more buoyant transports. Lying sometimes in gullies, riverbeds or in distant clearings are mysterious piles or deliberate constructions of corrugated irons in various states of decay, begging to be explored. The train, unfortunately, has no sympathy for my curiosity and roars on in its own bullheaded, implacable fashion. Charging into the primeval darkness of a tunnel and out again, only to plunge into another a few steps along the mountain. In these passages the train windows become completely reflective, and we are without warning confronted by our own faces, ravaged by sleeplessness, discomfort and boredom. It is very disconcerting, and the end of the tunnel is eagerly anticipated. Back in the foliage again, a bright yellow and green portable toilet splashes its antiseptic fluorescence by the rails, a curious contrast to the lack of people. Perhaps the local cows are modest.
In the late afternoon the taller, more fully forested hills in the distance are smothered by the sky dropping under the weight of all that boorish rain. Oh look, black and white spotted cows, the only herbivore Frances will allow the title of “real” cow.
