This is Spud’s Roadhouse, 5k from Woomera, S.A. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been here. The last time was at 4am sometime in 2010 en route Alice to Adelaide, the clear winter sky a sumptuous canopy of resplendent fiery diamonds. The moon had already climbed down the rungs of that star-studded net to hang, crescent and amber, for just a moment on a distant and incomprehensible horizon. I smoked a ride with Jodi (our hitching chauffeur) and his ute, carrying the precious cargo of a shiny new Harley Davison. It was absolutely freezing and I stood there in shorts and thongs on this concrete slab in the middle of miles of red dirt desert, jogging on the spot to stay warm as I looked up and tried to print this memory forever. The time before this, I got a self-serve instant coffee and shared it later in a park with friends, where there were exotic animals and birds stored in cages around the perimeter. It looked like no-one had been there for years. We tried to break the locks so they could play in the sails of the wind for just a moment, feel a rush of freedom through the feathers of their rusty wings – but then grew sad at their prospects of dusty abandoned soldiers’ barracks, playgrounds that groaned with rust and emptiness, or the broken cameras and barbed wire of the detention centre. A hollow freedom. Woomera is a strange place.
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