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VICTORIA: THE ANCIENT MARINE TRENCH
The Victorian landscape is low lying. It always felt as if I was in a ditch or a depression with the mist settling into a valley the size of a state. Once he pointed to a tiny little creature as it ran along the window sill of a hut we were camped in overnight. 'What's that Coral? What's that?' The internal solitude of its nocturnal habits just on dawn, and its tiny tail like a bottlebrush were its main features. It was a Victorian marsupial. It began to open my eyes to things existing here, but they seemed smaller, flatter and more low lying than New South Wales, which seemed largely perpetuated by mountain valleys and clouds, lifted and blown by sun and wind - in itself, blustering, blowy, gales and high clouds traveling west and from the south - the land that was of myself - the original landscape that I had moved through and that had moved through me. All of Australia was ancient, but Victoria seemed to be at a standstill like moss, lichen, or a large swamp, primordial and moist rather than boisterous and timeless. He was from Victoria, a landscape that had never appealed to me. It was leading me into a world I had driven through without having understood. Later at a meeting on the geology of Victoria, I found out that the entire state is literally part of an ancient marine trench. This would explain why I felt this way, and when driving from Melbourne to Sydney. I felt elated at the border, like New South Wales was lifting me up and out of this low lying land state and into another. However it wasn't the borders that I had been accustomed to and influenced by, but the natural border, the geological border of the ancient marine trench. |
