The Place With No Fences

I look back and see an adventurer, an explorer with no cultural tools to tie me down. I don’t see a broken young woman as some have tried to hang on me. Once I shucked the prison of living under my father’s strict rules, in his house and then in the city, the limits were over. At last, the dreams I had of being an astronaut, or Daisy Bates living in the desert with aboriginals, when I would escape to the roof of my childhood home and all the noise below, were coming true. There were no limits. None. Thank God my father threw my scholarship in the bin. Thank God he did not believe in keeping intelligent children in school and then encouraging them to take up ‘free university (as it was in Melbourne at that time). His strict working class rules on getting out and getting independent had in fact honoured me. His verbally expressed hatred of me because I had supported my mother through their marriage break up, gave me no excuse to cling to his leg for protection. Should I have had support, I guess I might have become a lawyer, a very clever political animal, or an academic. I was not trapped in a cultural container full of more patriarchal rules, which may well have fast tracked my professional life but more likely would have filled me full of fears and doubts. I hit the road, and headed West into the remote desert to work in isolated and odd occupations, and to carve out my morality upon eccentric hunters and loners views, and to work within the container of the meanest bitch on earth, Mother Nature. Her rules were the only ones I paid heed to. In the desert, with 50 degrees celcius days, and no water, if you fuck up, you die.