The last time I flew on an international flight it was in August, 2020 when i was one of 35 people leaving Vietnam on what was the last flight for a long time and returning to Australia after an absence of almost 4 years.
This morning I sit at the airport in Adelaide ready to board a flight to Sydney and then another flight to Denpasar, Bali.
Over the past few years I’ve managed to traverse the country boundary riding with loads of road trips from Adelaide to Melbourne and out again as soon as the threat of COVID lockdowns loomed. Driving across the countryside of the shifting Australian landscape, through country town some thriving and some on the edges of decay and abandonment, small towns with traces of fear from what the city dwellers would potentially bring in.
There have been a few work trips to Canberra, to Sydney and to Melbourne by air. The small containers and deserted airports now open and beating with human throng.
Today I sit in the airport in Adelaide awaiting my flight to Bali. I lived in Bali for almost a year in 2011 and worked as the International Program Director with the Ubud Readers & Writers Festival and then visited regularly spending most Christmas and New Years there. It is a holder of memory for me as well as a place now distinctly unfamiliar.
I have places that hold memory, riding through the jungles of Ubud in the night when my Mother lay dying in Australia, past the village cremation site where nightly ceremonies were held to ferry the dead across from this life to next, singing Nick Cave’s ‘Death Is Not The End’ at the top of my voice. Expansion.
