Feeling the Contour Lines of History

I am trying to prepare myself for going to Australia. Beyond the 22-hour flight, beyond travelling into the 11-hour time difference future, I have to be ready for total dislocation from my land.

Wherever I walk in England – from London’s event patined streets to Dorset’s fossil rich beaches – I am always connected. On the green lanes and sweep paths of Kent or Sussex, in the woods of Hereford and copses of Essex, I am connected. I can see the shimmering temporal projections mapping past, present and yet to come. I navigate through feeling the contour lines of history.

Atop the remains of the North Thames Cliff still bearing its Ice Age scars or squeezing through the cobbled claustrophobia of a York alleyway, I can pick out ancestral footsteps. They resonate through earth and stone, resonate through myth and folklore to carve out the invisible, underlying topology of place. In England I can always sense the undertow of temporal currents that manifest in the drifting patterns of psychogeographers.

Under railway bridges, on uncared for industrial estate mud or overgrown boneyards, I can always find imaginary fire. There is forever magic I know I will never fully capture with my words. At every crossroads I am but a step away from English Hoodoo. A step away from being in the English Dreaming.

However, all of this is about to become meaningless. The ley lines of my English imagination are about to give way to Australia’s dreaming tracks, it songlines. I am travelling into the Aboriginal sacred landscaped defined by their ‘Footprints of Ancesotrs’, the ‘Way of the Law’. There is no way to escape the fact that in less than two months, I am going to become an alien.