This is the beach at Sunset Strip in Central Australia; a very long way from its American namesake. Lake Menindee is dry now and there are swarms of flies wherever you move. I arrive early to avoid the swarms, driving as always long distances in pointless pursuit. There are holiday houses lined along the edge of the beach, selling now for around $80,000. The water has gone. I remember, maybe 15 years ago, first coming here when it was a spectacular sight, the pelicans skimming across the water, birds everywhere, tourists and the lucky few who owned holiday houses along the edge, frolicking along the edge of the lake, having late afternoon barbecues, families from Broken Hill and surrounding farms, tourists drawn to the extraordinary sight in the middle of the outback. None of its there now. Drought and cotton farmers have dried up the water. The houses still look well maintained, most of them, and the occasional retiree stands in their front lawn chatting with their neighbours. A large sign at the turnoff from the main highway declares that the Sunset Strip Progress Association meeting has been deferred until the next month due to illness. All those stories ago, all that time ago, before I had children, before I changed jobs, before the undertow of depression dragged me completely under, when the one skill I had propelled me on to the front page time and time again. And nothing happened. No futune accrued. No serenity arrived. Enlightenment never came. Here, in another country, the future, we stood on the same strip of beach. But now, without water, the lake stretched to the horizon, green, a paradise, no doubt, for snakes. Already he was frightened of them, keeping a wary eye out, as he stopped repeatedly to piss and stare and wonder, what had happened to it all? The empty boats were pulled up on the shore. A dock for the boats spread out into the non-existent water; and the flies buzzed; and when he fantasised that here, here was the place where he could finally retreat from the world at large, he knew it had been a mistake, the feverish dreams of Sunset Strip nothing but that, dreams. There would be another place, another life, but not here, on the beach without a sea, the lake without water, the holiday houses with barely a soul pottering amongst them. The flies buzzed and that was it, gone. He got back in the car and drove on, into diminished circumstance, under the vaulting sky. 
This is Sunset Strip, a line of holiday houses in the middle of the outback, set on Menindee Lakes. Except there's no water in this part of Menindee Lakes anymore. It's about 110 kilometres out of Broken Hill, which in itself is about 1200 kilometres west of Sydney. I got in the car and drove 2500 kilometres in five days. The kids didn't want to come, they're sick of beetling or pottering around the country with dad - who wants to drive all night or potter from cafe to cafe, depending on the mood. Out there, there are different reasons for being. He slept in the car and heard the birds wake at dawn. He picked up the wierdest hitch hiker outside of Forbes, and delivered him eight hours later to an isolated part of the river outside of Menindee township. He didn't seem the least bit surprised to be plucked from one obscure part of the state and placed 500 kilometres away exactly where he wanted to go. Delivered at one a.m. down a sandy track. He was alcoholic, plus, pills or something. He couldn't talk properly, but seemed harmless enough. Everyone says I shouldn't pick up hitch hikers. I hitch hiked so much as a kid, it doesn't seem right to drive past them when I'm an adult. He was meeting up with a friend of his and they were camping by the river. He said they liked Menindee because it was free, no camping charges. I've lived this life for 20 years, he said. I believed him. At the end of the sandy track, where no cars could pass and I had been forced to turn around, he had apparently found his friend. For I saw the pair of them in the pub the next day, where I was having a steak sandwhich and gazing at the television as if it was a bit of civilisation at last. They were both bent out of place in a different time warp, and if he was wierd, his friend was equally so, equally unable to speak properly, of the same shortened stature. They didn't spot me, thankfully, as I crawled into the corner and disappeared. They bought their carton and departed, and the locals looked at each other when they had left. What's that, pot? Asked one, what does that to you? They shrugged and grumbled into their beers, the world was just too wierd and out there, where the city folk lived, was getting worse. Even they could feel it, way out here.
This is Martin Portus and Katherine Brisbane. Katherine was a former reviewer at The Australian and established Currency Press, which has published plays and artistic debates and all this sort of thing for many years. Martin is now director of communications for the Australian Museum. We draw blinds across the past. We giggle and we think everything will be alright. I was standing on the footpath yacking to a neighbour, Sunday afternoon, as one does, the heat and the infinite all combined in the boiling sky, and he drove past and tooted. I used to know Martin more than a quarter of a century ago; in rambling old Adelaide houses and a world far removed. He tooted, in his old blue BMW, and I didn't recognise him at first, thinking, who the hell is this tooting at me; doing the usual how to be polite while desperately trying to remember whoever the person is. Sometimes you loom large in their lives; and they don't loom at all in yours. Or the other way around. Twisted turns. We had some good times; way back then; in shadows and curtains and cool rooms; when there was an infinite future not an infinite past. I show up, I do my time in the brutal reality of it all, and go. He sniffs; you've always been funny about money; over stray comments and strands from the past and foyers. He was going to a launch of a book on What Is Wrong with the Australia Council, the government funding body for the arts which like almost all government institutions ends up in a bureaucratic mire while virtually no money is actually dispensed to where its meant to go. Sydney is caught up in the drama of the Cross City Tunnel, an infrastructure farce from the Carr era which is costing a fortune and creating massive traffic jams and is hated by all and sundry. It is making the NSW state government look like a bunch of incompetent fools; which has never been far from the truth anyway. Carr had them boxed; sweeping into press conferences, making his announcements, picking the two softest touches in the press pack, answering their questions and sweeping out. A busy man. Far too important to dally. Or to make mistakes. Or to befriend journalists. We shared so many hopes and they never worked out. Things were complex; more complex than they need have been. It was the era. And then, with the veil drawn, he swayed and laughed, sober these days, drinking lemonade in the foyer while the usual suspects got drunk on white wine and crapped on about the allegory of the methaphor of the allegory. I couldn't understand what they were talking about, and I doubt they did either. Nothing like a few wines to rid one of the need for common sense. Hardened hack. Cynical noiw. The socialism of our youth burnt out on the flames of a thousand stories. You could chop 90% of what the government does and we'd all be better off. The dreams and the grand speaches and the white limousines; their air conditioning running in the heat; it was all a waste. Some poor bastard had worked hard in some factory so the secular left middle class could sip their wine and jostle to have the most progressive, most perfectly political views. He didn't bother. He stared and he glared and he kept on going. In those caves in Malaysia, when you had looked so beautiful, when he had been so much, so surprisingly in love, were not just decades, but universes away. He skulled his lemonade and headed for the door; after the working of a foyer barely worth working. Goodbye, goodbye, see you on Tuesday. They danced around, argued about Australian politics and what he deemed the poor state of Australian journalism. It's so boring, so conflict focussed, he said. Don't you think? No, I don't think, journalism is all about conflict, but I demur. We part and I draw the veil; but don't ever think I don't remember.
This is my friend Joyce. She is eighty years old. She is a wonderful person. We go to movies together. She lives down the road in Refern, Sydney, Australia. Yesterday we went to see Cinderella Man with Russel Crowe. There were so many things calling beneath the surface. He was propelled into greater light. It's funny being friends with an 80 year old woman, I said to a colleague at work. And she said: you just get each other. Yeh, I said, that's it. We laugh at the same things. I often laugh at different things. Emotional roller coasters. Appalling scenes. We see the earing pain of someone elses Bali disaster on all the front pages. We make as if to stoop and solve something that cannot be solved. He had known this was coming for a very long time. We all waited for it to happen here, for Australia to change for ever. She joined Legacy and goes out with the other old ladies, tells funny stories about them; and her with them. Good old country girl, Pete said, and we stood there transfixed. Too many things were going wrong in a terrible way, while his own ship righted. The sails were cut to fit. He acquired an image that bore some shred of dignity. He washed his clothes and bought new undergarments and bathed every day, as if he could never get clean enough or healthy enough. He felt coherent and focussed, and his mind swam rapidly across pools of data. This wasn't going to be the final time, or even the final triumph. His own flowering began in the renaissance. He saw the new possibles of everything before him. And blood poured all over them and the death toll mounted and he felt sick in his stomach with encroaching fear. This was the world we had created now. There was no way back.
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