is this a desert ?

A friend visited me not long after I moved to Alice Springs from Sydney. We bought a waterproof camera, one of them disposable ones.

There's a photo of me as I am slowly flying underwater, all is blue.

not ordinary blue ... that brilliant blue of chlorinated water. My goggles strapped to my skull making my eyes look bizarre.

Like I was in a large zero-gravity tanning salon under UV lights ... I s'pose I was really.

I saw that photo later and it seemed to me somehow surreal that I had moved to the middle of a dried up crisped up desert of a continent with nothing in it.

as time went on I bought a Beautiful Toyota Landcruiser named Emily and went on many an adventure ...

as time went by I learnt more about this continent ... it always seems that the more you know - the more realise you don't know.

Places and names sprung out of the deserts. It's not so empty as you'd think.

My mother hates the idea of desert. I keep telling her it's not a desert desert! There's trees and birds and grasses and rocks and mountain ranges and roads and people who speak many languages.

I read the newspapers ... mum sends clippings of the Age and whatnot. I occurred to me that it wasn't just mum who thinks there's nothing here ...

hell there's noone out there, why don't we dump some toxic shit in the ground . . . . . if it's over there where there's nothing around and noone to see ... it won't bother us over here on the east coast.

And since the territory ain't a state ... they ain't got the clout to put up a fight.