In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere

"The whole purpose of my journey across the world had been in pursuit of this sensation...the same thrill that I'd felt in my patch of bush as a kid. It was a life-long search, a search that would never end." Recording in the train carriage from which I think about the nature of movement, here are a series of stories about the motives and meaning of adventures.

"Poets and storytellers like to look at things from side-on. We like to combine images, make weird comparisons. Might I suggest that sometimes, at least some of us we must come at life from a tangent?" Sometimes I like to look at things from a different angle - so I take this train carriage on a series of detours through stories that may never truly be. Join for all sorts of twists and turns on the road to nowhere.

"But it is true that if you wait for perfection, you may walk away emptyhanded. The best-laid plans can fall in a heap, and I can't promise that the stores I've cached in the ground won't be squandered. The fruit may rot, the flowers may wilt." The sun has spun. A new yarn begins. With it comes a new set of days. We may plot our route way across them or just plunge in. Wander with me as I ponder the making of plans from the vantage point of my train carriage in the woods.

"The sunflowers turned towards the light and filled with a ferocious yellow. The sorrow still overwhelmed you. The end was near. But you made good work before then. What a story you could tell." I have had cause to contemplate sorrow over the past year - from the small internal sorrows of solitude to the large-scale suffering of the world. Here's a set of stories wound around the idea of sorrow.

"Seeing can be a perfect pastime, a form of meditation. At the heart of my identity, seeing is the central mechanism for wonder." Vision is a magical, mysterious phenomenon. Around the train carriage, I watch - and write what I see.

"The season's end is signalled, once again, by eight-pointed stars scattered across the path." I have been taking opportunities to sit at the base of trees, investigating their lives, contemplating how they overlap with our own. And I've written poems about the trees.

"All night long I've kept a vigil, for nothing in particular, perhaps just keeping watch over solitude. My eyes sting; my body has lost all muscle tone; my bones ache. I have dipped in and out of a dream landscape, the world blurring into polymorphous figures, the earthly blending with the ethereal, the world beginning to crumble." I have been learning about the stars, pondering their history, trying to measure my life by their movements. In spring, over the train carriage in which I live, they shine bright. One of them is especially powerful.

"I sometimes write secret wishes on scraps of paper, let them glow in the moonlight, then press them down onto the tip of a flame. I'm a creature of rhythm, of habit: habitually, I keep hoping." I am in the southern hemisphere, at the change of seasons, looking up at the night sky. I am trying to understand my place in the universe.

"We must take it upon ourselves a responsibility to improve the health of these habitats: that's where the hard yakka comes into it. In some ways, the act of picking up rubbish from the beaches of the south-west is the perfect activity for connecting with the spirit of the place...It's almost meditative." In autumn, I joined a long-running marine rubbish clean-up project in south-west Tasmania. These are the reflections that came from ten days in that special part of the world: thoughts on ecology, history, ethics and change. Follow @teamcleantas on Instagram to support the project.

"The nest of a pink robin is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. Imagine, in the palm of your hand, a hollow bowl built of feathery moss and ice-blue lichen, stitched together with spiderwebs and stuffed with a fern's light-brown fur." Recorded as live performance from A Festival Called Panama 2024, this series of stories honours the feathered friends who share the forest with us. A special thanks to sound engineer Henry Rippon, as well as everyone involved with Panama for having me.

"There are places you can go only in summer – over the high passes or down the long peninsulas. Up honey-coloured creeks that climb to craggy façades. Across meadows matted with colourful flowers." Reading a book called 'The Last Summer', I find myself thinking about the way memories fuse with the phenomena of summer.

"There are other ways to look at it. You might say that as a body gets burnt, as it turns into wisps of smoke, the atoms of which a human is made get separated, wander off into the atmosphere, change form, and become rearranged so that they link up with other operations in the universe." I'm living in a train carriage on the edge of the bush, on the verge of a bushfire season. Such circumstances elicit a lot of thoughts and stories about the nature of fire.

"Standing on the stump of an old eucalypt, glaring at the yellowy-grey of the forest and the fields, she let out an almighty scream. It echoed through the woods, off towards the new neighbourhoods, running up the avenues and out to the mountains that rose on the horizon." The Youngtown Regional Reserve is a small patch of bush in the outer suburbs of Launceston. These stories are a personal and ecological study of this modest bit of country. There are tales of ghosts, games, love affairs and magpies. As it happens, so many yarns pass through even a simple little place like this. The soundtrack is produced in collaboration with my good friend, the ever-creative Yyan Ng.

"The pathways broadened into promenades, and the irresistible route zigged and zagged through innumerable pedestrians, who made bottlenecks and bridges; I twisted my torso and stretched my lanky legs out to squeeze by them. " I thought I should account for my travels in Venice. But I have only been there for one afternoon; they are mostly travels through my imagination. A collaboration with Emily Sanzaro on harp.

'The southern brown bandicoots have been busy, pressing their snouts into the earth in the search for subterranean mushrooms. This time of year must be their favourites: they root around, sniffing out the fruiting fungi and feasting on it. When I see them, I notice their almost feverish motion; the way they twitch and scratch their way through life. No moss will grow on a bandicoot's back.' I'm delving deeper into the world of moss, and everything that might be associated with it. Everything from bandicoots to poets seem to be connected with this simple plant.

"And when he fell asleep, it was like the moss had him in its embrace. And the sense he got from his dreams was that the ultra-fine rhyzoids of the moss had spread throughout his brain, that he was being held in place by it, and that he too had squeezed into a mysterious shadowy realm where anything could happen." I have been looking closely at mosses around the train carriage. Who knew that something so small could prompt so many stories?

"'All my life, my way of loving was to say goodbye.' That's what the poet Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote. Perhaps it's also true of the world: its way of loving is to present us with phenomena that are always poised to leave us." I have been watching things come and go in the world around me, and trying to pin down those phenomena in words. Join me as I ponder that which is fleeting in the bush, and in the universe.

"No, there's no end to the tales that might be told, the tentacles spreading and sprawling across the seas, deep into them, and onto land as well." This is the second part of a 'cephalopodcast', made in collaboration with the Spring Bay Squid Festival in Tasmania. It's great if you're listening to it on your way home from the festival. Whatever the case, dive deep into this collection of tales -- history, folklore and fable about cephalopods. squidfest.com.au/

"Sometimes when I see a veil of surf lift and then collapse on itself, I imagine it as a shining curl of life, schools of fish, plankton, crustaceans; a symbol of the whole fleeting, flashing vision of existence." I have made this 'cephalopodcast' in collaboration with the Spring Bay Squid Festival in Tasmania. It's best listened to on your drive to the festival, Friday, November 25. But even if you're not attending, you're allowed to listen to the podcast. You'll learn a lot. Or at least you'll learn that I've been learning a lot. https://squidfest.com.au/

"I've long known you can be in two places at once. Or, in three, or four, or five – more to the point it actually takes practise to stay where you are, to be fully present and focused and in the moment, not unmoored on seas of fantasy, imagination, memory." Near the train carriage in which I live is a river that started to rise. I got to imagining it being turned into an ark in which I might make voyages to distant places, or different times.

"Words generally don't spring up from nowhere. By and large they each have some lengthy backstory behind them, an origin back that goes thousands of years, often into a different part of the world." Surrounded by books, and listening to the chatter of birds, I have a lot of opportunity to reflect on the nature of language. Join me in my train carriage for a long journey to nowhere, where the local lingo changes every few minutes.

"And, said another of us, we must remember that not all seasons are for growing or producing fruit. Some are for building strength, for staying dormant, for simply enduring. Some hard seasons you simply must survive." Here are five stories from winter. They're about wine, birds, frogs, football, bushwalking and solitude. And there's a train that travels through the bush into the future.

"It turns out that the word ‘tree' is part of a cohort of the oldest words we've got in the English language...If we meander into this linguistic past, we find a word something like ‘doru', the ancestor of today's ‘tree' words in not just the English language but also in Persian and Albanian and Sanskrit, among others. There's more to it than that though: the same word seems to have been the origin to the word for our word ‘true'." I live in a train carriage, surrounded by trees. So it's no surprise that often my thoughts and ideas grow into a forest, intricate, interconnected, and verging on wild.

"After all this rainfall, the soil is black. From this dark source, what will soon come forth is a suite of the brightest colours." I have been enjoying the change of season, as the southern hemisphere turns towards long nights. Join me as I lie under the stars contemplating darkness.

"But this all begs the question: must we just get used to catastrophe? Is it now time to accept the fact that all our landmarks are out of whack, that our life with the world is turning out all wrong? Must we get used to uncertainty, chaos, a future defined by fires and floods? What do we do when the river raves, sky is screaming, and country has curled its lip at us?" Sometimes the river murmurs, sometimes it raves. I have spent much of the past summer alongside waterways, thinking of their secrets and mysteries, and the shelter they give various animals and swimmers. But I have also had to reflect that rivers give us a sense of the uncertainty of the future.

"Through the fruit we might get to know the plant better. And if that, then why not concern ourselves with the whole ecological habitat in which this piquant fruit comes to being – to learn about how it relates to rainfall, soil, fungal filaments, pollenating insects; oxygen, light, others in its own species, us?" A variety of plants are putting out fruit in the bush around the train carriage in which I live. Join me for yarns about different fruit, and how our encounters with these can lead us into an understanding of ecology.

"He told me to forget my notes. You can't go around foreign countries pretending to understand what you see, especially when you come from the west. What about a nice love story? We Indians, he said, we like a good love story. He went on: especially here in Bombay." This is a story set in India. But much more it is the story of a young man travelling into his own naïve ideas and emerging with eyes wide open -- and a strange obsession for telling stories. This work uses field recordings made throughout Maharashtra in 2011-2. The recordings were made in streets, temples and quadrangles and on public transport. Music was recorded with the knowledge of performers. I have no way of tracking them down, but I would like to give a hearty thanks to everyone whose music is included in this production.

"Legend has it that there's an island in a lake on a walking track in the Tasmanian highlands on which, on a lucky day – and if you're game enough to swim out there in the cool temperature of an alpine lake – you might find a beer. The Isle of Ale, they call it. A mysterious, magical place." My train carriage shack is not far from the centre of Tasmania. From here I can ponder how islands are strange, fortuitous, curious places.

"I have seen currawongs come together in great restive gatherings, a score of them or more, babbling in their garbled language, yapping and arguing, talking over the top of each other. How is it that such sounds well up in them? How do they push these songs through their throats? And what is it that they're saying?" I am lucky to live in the midst of a forest full of birds. Among other curiosities, I find myself pondering what we I can learn from their strange languages.

"For a very long time humans have entrusted memories to rocks, transferred stories to stone and had it tell our tales throughout the ages." Great quantities of stone are scattered around the train carriage in which I live. Behind me is a mountain range of dolerite, and there are rocks of all sorts of shapes and sizes in my memory.

"The gusts and gales imprint themselves on one's memory; as with those trees you might see in exposed spots, that bend or lean or bear a hunchback, our experiences in different locations are pruned and shaped by winds. Even the gentle breezes bring reminiscences." In Tasmania we've had some windy weather. From my train carriage in the bush I watch the birds and trees wrestle with the gusts that blow through from south and west. It prompts thoughts about memory, connection, and climate.

"All I needed was some movement, and something to move towards. A place of wooden shingles in which to etch an alphabet of memories, to record the names of those I've loved." For years I've spent time around Liffey, Tasmania. It's a place that has prompted all sorts of ideas about land, country, habitat, houses and home. This work is a collaboration with musician Thomas Mitchell, who has produced original work for this project, as well as opening up his own cabin in the bush for further reflections on this topic.

"So the road trip yet again had me contemplating things slowly. Stillness has made me often think of movement, and now I learned that it was true when the concepts were put vice versa too. It was as though I'd travelled 1000km to go nowhere." At long last I left the train carriage, to go on a road trip, somewhere that was simply elsewhere. And then I came back again.

"I am realising that at some point I must come to terms with the fact that some separations will never again be sutured up. I have plotted out much of my life in the past ten years with travel in mind, and although partings are commonplace, I am always thinking of returning to certain countries, of reuniting with old friends and revisiting past experiences. But now I am in a train carriage, going nowhere, and realising that in all likelihood there are people I will never see again, good mates, worthy companions." Living in a train carriage out in the bush, I find myself thinking about the meaning of separation, of being apart.

"But in the end, from map to map, these landscapes have been altered by the decisions made about what to do with the land." I have gone looking through my box of maps to find what stories lie within the lands sketched out in them. Join me on the journeys I take through these countries of many colours.

"I begin seeing fungi of exquisite blue growing from fallen timber in the bush around me. Some call them pixies' parasols: little brollies for the fairies to shelter beneath when the rainfall comes down hard." It's autumn again, and interesting colours have appeared in the bush around my train carriage -- encouraging interesting reflections on landscapes and history.

"And I empathised when I heard a fellow storyteller in Edinburgh reflecting on his life thus far and comparing himself to a racehorse who has left the blocks with all the others but isn't looking so crash hot yet. He looked at me and said, would it not seem to most punters that were the wrong horses to have backed? But like me, I think he was counting on, at some point, a lucky break." I have been spending some time contemplating the nature of luck. Join me for a series of stories looking at the philosophy of fortune and fate.

“I was in the ocean, she said, when I saw an orca. I swam fast towards it in a sort of spiralling motion, like I'd made myself into a torpedo. As I got nearer I could hear that the orca was making a series of ethereal sounds; it was the most beautiful music I'd ever heard.” I have spent part of the past months half-deaf, hearing only part of the sounds of the bush around my train carriage. So, here, I find myself contemplating sound, music, ears, and silence.

"The writer Gustav Flaubert suggested that if you look at anything closely enough, you would find it interesting. I reckon that's about right. Take something as mundane, as fundamentally bland as my computer. I'm glaring at it right now from the other side of the room." I live in a train carriage that's been converted into a shack; it's not very big, but even still, I find myself surrounded by objects.

"There was another animal I could name in childhood: the sugar ant. You see, I was a bit of a sweet-tooth as a boy: and when they told me it was called a sugar ant, and I saw its amber-coloured thorax, I was sure it would taste like a flake of caramel. Like I say: every ecosystem is ready to explode with surprises, and surprises sometimes teach the most poignant lessons." I live an old train carriage surrounded by bush, and frequently visited by animals. Lately I've been wondering: what would I have made of this landscape if I was here as a child?

"He would emerge, gasping for oxygen, dripping wildly. Hoisting himself from the river and onto the rocks, he saw his chest had been sculpted by the water. Looking out on the river he saw a reflection so warped that he thought he might be beautiful, and when he walked away, you could see that he was a little different, that day by day he was carrying himself with a bit more satisfaction." I have a great deal of love for the Cataract Gorge in Launceston. These stories are about how a person can connect with a place in such a way that it changes them entirely and sets them up for a different type of life. This work is a collaboration with harpist and Launcestonian, Emily Sanzaro, to who has produced original work for this storytelling project.

"When I was a teenager I was almost dashed, like so many ships, against the sharp granite of King Island: caught in a current, I struggled to swim against it, lost a flipper in the process, and was carried to a baroque-looking rock to which I clung and from where I eventually managed to extricate myself." It's summer at the bottom of the world, and time to go swimming. Here are some stories from creeks, rivers, seas, estuaries, straits and dams.

"The word they use in Greece is philoxenia, ‘love of strangers'. It takes a lot to craft that sort of hospitality; in some cases, when you suffer from a lack of trust, it must be close to impossible. But for myself at least, I've come to think that such relationships are at the heart of a good life. For me they are close to the highest priority." In a motionless train, I contemplate more stories of those who have travelled here and there on the Earth. Some have learned, some have given, and some have taken -- far too much.

"When I was seven years old I left Tasmania for the first time. I didn't go so far, only to the mainland, but just putting some distance between myself and my home was enough to open up opportunities and possibilities. Something existed in that ethereal space, it seemed. I came home and crouched on my hands and knees with an atlas spread in front of me. So, the world was a patchy quilt of pastel colours, with sacred words printed all over it. I read these place-names out loud, like they were the names of saints: Douala. Omsk. Valparaíso." Although travelling has been a part of the rhythm of my life as an adult, it hasn't been an option for me this year. From this stationary train in Tasmania, I contemplate movement and the world.

"If you let the weather into your imagination, into your ideas, your bloodstream, you will find it shapes you. Like the sorts of plants my botanist mate is into. You may will begin to adapt -- into something rare and unlikely." The Bureau of Meteorology forecast some days of wild weather, so I bunkered down in my train carriage shack and began to reminisce on rainy days.

"And what a blessing and curse it is: this in-built function of language, the engine at its core, this grammar that keeps track of the time, the way these words innately catalogue what's lost, the syntax of people with both history and destination. Poetry with its long bloody memory." I live alone in an old train carriage, and yet in telling stories and remembering various people with whom I've met in other parts of my life, it feels like I am sharing this space.

"Spring is spontaneity. Spring is emergence, things popping up. Spring is dreams you an ease into life. It's strangers, or cobbers who pop up happily when you least expect them. Nights at the pub that turn into mornings elsewhere. Road trips to nowhere. And conversations that could go anywhere." On the long journey to nowhere, I look out the windows of my train carriage and see that the seasons have changed. Hello, spring.

"Yet as the wings opened, I found something I had not expected. And a strong feeling came over me, one which I have experienced before, a premonition that I had stumbled upon something significant, that my life had reached a kink in the track and that I would not be the same from here on out." Sometimes I just feel like telling stories about the birds I see and the way they affect my imagination.

"I dreamed that I packed up my car for a short drive and never stopped. I dreamed of a life that was spontaneous and solitary, where I needed nothing more a pair of sandals and a canvas tent, a life lived on the banks of lakes or the shores of beaches, cooking up my evening grub in the bachelor's pot of my trangia stove." I have been quite contemplative in my train carriage shack of late -- living alone, pursuing solitary activities, but wondering about the relationships in the midst of which I find myself.

"But sleep is a miracle, which, like swimming or eating pears or falling in love, is no less wondrous for the fact that it's common." I live in a train carriage in the bush in Tasmania. In these winter months I sleep, I dream, and I tell stories.

"So that's me, she said, a yabby going back into the bog, returning to the unknown, clad in a colourless cloak, armoured with a flimsy grey carapace. Churning up the past. Re-evaluating history. Not letting it rest." While I sit in this train carriage going nowhere, various animals come visiting me. Their stories weave with my story and help me understand myself a little more.