A 13 hour walk from Lilydale to Brunswick on Australia Day 2010, with David Mutch.

Article written for Condiment:
Invasion Day Lunch

This is half the story of an indulgently pointless exercise in walking, culminating in a ritual lunch. A friend of mine came with me on a daylong suburban hike from the furthest point of the eastern suburbs of Melbourne to the centre of the city.

We had been talking about it over beers for almost a year. It is possible that we had been reading something like Will Self’s Psychogeography. We were thinking about how in Australia the traditional landscape was replaced very quickly — if you look at it from a greater perspective. For forty-thousand years or so, people had been walking great distances over grasslands and through forests as part of their everyday lives. These days walking is an inconvenience, and two kilometres on a sidewalk is considered far.

On the eve of Australia Day we catch the last train out to the end of the line. It’s the middle of summer. We mean to go to Belgrave, but miss a change and end up in Lilydale. This renders our Google maps printouts useless. Upon leaving the train station we align our westward path to the stars and begin to follow it.

There was not much of a plan other than to try to walk as much as possible in a straight line. For some reason we felt the significance of the walk might be compromised if we relied too much on what would be around us. We had packed a tent, sleeping bags, a Trangia, and all the water and food we would need. We chose not to bring any money.

Past a few suburban streets, along a main road and over some hills, we cut across a field only to find we need to walk around a power plant. Roads and streets out here didn’t follow the same convenient grid as the inner city. For light there is not much help offered by the moon, and since we don’t want to alert any paranoid residents we keep our headlights off. We occasionally turn a flashlight on and off when we can’t see what we’re about to step through.

A couple of zigziggy hours later we find a spot in a small triangular area that is decently covered by the foliage of large bushes and some old trees. Communicating is whispers we raise the tent as silently as we can. We don’t want to frighten anybody who might react to our presence by calling the police or sending the dogs on us. We try to get to sleep but our ears have become hyper-sensitive to the faintest sound.

At sunrise we crawl out and quietly cook some beans. Looking around us we realise we are almost in somebody’s backyard. A dog is barking somewhere. Cars occasionally pass close by. We eat some bananas, some peanuts and share a pot of “Stag” chili beans with gelatinous chunks of stewed beef from a can. We repack our backpacks as to have easy access to what we might need during the day and set off.

It’s sparse suburbia. Small family houses and narrow streets. Rusty cars and tiny tightly mowed front lawns. We pass a circus and a football field, then find an open storm drain. Following it along for a while we then cut across to a dirt path through a grove of Eucalypts. There is some kind of place of death marked out by a home made cross nailed into a tree trunk. Some flowers are duct taped to the tree as well.

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Eventually we find the railroad tracks. Alongside it are plastic chairs smashed to pieces, a burnt spring mattress, rusty pieces from old machines, plastic sacks, legless dolls and rain warped books. We arrange some of the objects into a sort of cairn and leave a coin on the rails for the train to make a wish on.

Further along there is a small bridge that looks to be the improvised roof of a delinquents’ outdoor living room. The dirt is trampled hard and dusty by frequent feet. Some crates make crude chairs and a table. Wrappers from candy bars and fast food litter a corner. The walls are painted thick with layer upon layer of spray paint. The cave like features of the space makes the graffiti seem almost ancient.

We arrive at some suburbs the names of which we recognise. Nothing is open because it’s a public holiday. We stop to eat bananas and drink water. A couple of hours pass as we westwardly trudge along the sidewalks, then we arrive in freeway territory. The sky is completely clear and it’s hot.

The original houses must have all been levelled here to make room for huge intersections, layers of bridges, entrances and off-ramps, all fringed by monstrous malls and then parkland. We feel we are increasingly passing through places humans are not meant to travel, and we walk along huge artificial cliffs above the sprawling freeway.

At one point the freeway system disappears underground into a tunnel. There is a monumental sculpture, in the hard-edged corporate style, perched above the entrance. Above the tunnel, there is a strange parkland. It is weirdly wild in comparison to the suburban fields and parks, but also seems vaguely managed and manicured. There are tracks where people jog and ride mountain bikes. There are info boards describing rare birds and plants.

Somewhere in the middle of this overgrown artificial forest, down by a little creek, we set up to cook lunch. Exhausted by now, we are barely a third of the way home. Putting down the packs feels good. We unpack the Trangia and assemble all its pieces. I pour the alcohol into the burner and light it. I open two cans of Stag with a Swiss army knife and pour them in. One is “Dynamite hot” and the other is “Chunky stew.” I have to take the pot off and add the burner cap to prevent it from sticking in the bottom.

We eat the beans with Lebanese bread and we understand in unison how this kind of food is meant to be eaten exactly in a circumstance like this. It is functional eating. Not eating to indulge, or as a social or creative endeavour, but eating to give our stomachs the opportunity to break these beans down into the sugars and nutritions our muscles need to carry us home. Not a complacent act of eating performed out of habit, but one of great attention and simple gratitude.

I wash the cooking gear, pots and cutlery in the creek with hard grass and then dry it off on my shirt. I put it back together and in to my pack. It is quarter past two on “Invasion Day” — 26 January 2010 — and we have ten hours of walking ahead of us. Staccato bird song weaves through the dappled sunlight, and on top of a log we leave two black rocks as a totem in our songline.