The Ghan Train

 The Ghan train shakes rattles and rolls north and further north.

 

Through brown paddocks with stubble from a grain crop. Anaemic barbed wire fences create a chessboard of different shades of brown. An irregular  dark shadow from the clouds moves over the chessboard of paddocks.

A meandering line of trees line a dry river bed. A straight avenue of trees lines a road.

 

Houses wrapped in trees appear. Powerlines flow without end. No people walking, wandering or working their tractors. All tractors and machines stand still.

 

Only activity outside the train is a silver stream of cars flowing up or down the highway.

 

Onboard the train is an oasis of retirees, drinking and eating food. The ubiquitous staff are neat, young, fit and healthy looking. Us passengers are older, slower, fatter, greyer. Us passengers have less hair and more money.

We lounge in air-conditioned comfort, divorced and separate from the hot dry dusty desert we peer at. We peer looking for any sign of any activity.

 

The cabins are small. We enter and have to decipher. What does this nob do? This switch works what? How do we turn the lights on?

 

The paddocks are replaced by scrawny, scraggly scrub. Short trees ashamed and apologetic dot the red dust.

The unchanging vistas roll on and on. Recent rain has gone and left a carpet of green grass.