ACCORDING TO THE LABEL IT’S A FOUR-MAN TENT, BUT THEY’D HAVE TO BE PRETTY SMALL MEN. IT FITS MY SON AND ME SNUGLY. Their campervan hums and glows cosily as they heat up some pies for us in the microwave and pop the telly on for the kids. My son stares, wide-eyed, at the bunk beds, the huge fridge. But he is ever loyal. ‘I prefer our tent,’ he says when the kids question him. He steals a backward look though, as we stroll through the evening down the path to the ‘unpowereds’. We’ve forgotten to bring a torch and peer through the rising blackness for our own little home of ancient Toyota, card table, camp chairs and tent. Some nights it feels almost unbearably claustrophobic. The relentless heat, the shrill wall of insect song, the stillness, the moon blazing through the tent like a spotlight. ‘Why are we doing this?’ I occasionally ask myself as other campers emerge fresh into the day from the air-conditioned comfort of their caravans. The tent netting starts to get small holes in it. From embers? Insects? Being rolled up on stony ground? I get out the duct tape and cut a dozen pieces. My son stands outside the tent and I sit inside. We stick the pieces of tape together over the holes, our palms pressed together. Every few weeks we add a few more squares of tape to our increasingly mosaiced tent. On windy nights I worry about falling branches. Sometimes I adjust the car’s position three or four times before I’m satisfied that if a casuarina tree goes over, the car will break its fall before it hits the tent. There’s a lot to worry about. Water and fuel supplies. The state of the car. The heat. That snake I spotted on the edge of camp earlier in the evening.
70
But in the tent, we feel safe, peaceful. After even the longest, dustiest days, it’s a sanctuary; more than the sum of its modest parts. One night on the Tanami Track in the Kimberleys, after changing a blown tyre in forty-degree heat, we camp beside the dusty, deserted road where the tyre forced our stop. There’s a small clearing in the spinifex, just big enough to pitch the tent. A gentle breeze comes up as the sun sets peachy gold across the desert. We wash the dust from our skin with water from the billy and eat avocado on crackers, sliced pepperoni and chopped apple. Then we fall into the tent exhausted. The desert night cools fast. No need for the fan. The bush pulses up against the fine membrane of our tent. Sometimes gently, sometimes with blustering force. From our tent we watch for shooting stars and shine our torches to catch the eyes of possums and, one night in the rainforest, a cuscus. We feel but never see the swoop of a silent owl flying by in the dark. In the mornings we wake to birds. Some days it’s a few sweet coos from peaceful doves and spinifex pigeons or the pretty warble of magpies. On other days it’s a riot of squawks and screeching from budgies, lorikeets and corellas. We open our eyes to dawns pink and orange, to lightning and gathering clouds, to the clearest of blue skies. Around us are the traces of the night’s activities: tiny tracks in the sand or the dust made by the smallest of marsupial paws and tails. We make our own tracks as we break camp, our tent leaving just the faintest shadow of a square in the dirt. n
