WALKABOUT - ARCHETYPAL SOUL OF AUSTRALIA

Generally this has been a crap week. It's assessment time and I have students with the gall to query my judgement when they haven't even engaged in their own education. In reality they are just lazy, ungrateful, self-deluded little shits who don't want to make the transition into adulthood. It's ironic nevertheless, that I am one of those who has to try and mould them to a system that I don't even believe in myself. I am conflicted - but my job is to help them survive out there in the 'real' world and they won't if they don't learn the 'rules' and can't play the stupid game. It's not just them that has made me grumpy, it's the culture I live in - I am not only world weary, I am fucking exhausted. It must be time to go walkabout.

I have always loved wandering, not far, just around. When I was younger I lived right in the middle of the city. Apart from working in an office during the day I had no timetable, no real agenda, no responsibility - except in treating others as well as I could. In my attempts to try and inhabit the urban landscape I wandered at night, at will. I would walk through Northbridge (carrying a small knife) to King's Park where I dined alone, shimmy down the embankment, scale fences and explore the network of intersections at the edges of the freeway. I didn't really know what I was doing or why, it was instinctual. I guess I was trying to make some sense of a world that even then seemed completely crazy to me. Motorists probably just thought I was crazy.

Later I lived in my Kombi between Fremantle and Albany for almost a year. I had minimal income from my rental property, would help out at a friend's cafe for a feed, bunk down on her floor, sleep out in the Kombi at marina carparks where I could sneak in and get a free hot shower (inside knowledge). I remember parking on the limestone escarpment in North Freo for a few nights with million dollar river views - just enough scrub for a bush toilet and residents opposite who kindly let me be. Lying on my bed looking out of the Kombi's sliding door was pure and simple bliss.

Some nights I would wander around Freo. On one occasion I walked into one of the old historical limestone halls to find the joint cranking - a really great band on stage and a crowd of young people jumping. No agro, no alcohol. It took me a while to realise I had crashed a Christian rock revival. I stayed and had a really good time.

One summer afternoon I found myself at some kind of picnic on the grass at a gathering of mixed cultures with a great folk band. One family asked me to join them. They had brought food - it was ethnic, delicious and I thought somewhere from the Middle East. They were genuinely nice people and eventually I discovered that they were of the Baha'i faith - basically religiously tolerant people who believe that God reveals 'himself' through many divine messengers and therefore embrace Abraham, Krishna, Zoroaster, Moses, Jesus, Buddha and Muhammad. Pretty damn cool.

I know I am nostalgically pining for a time that is no more but I really need my life to be simpler. And I know also that I have wandered verbally here but I do have a point. I regularly get this desire to chuck my responsibilities and run away. I know this is not a viable strategy for life but I attribute it, partly at least, to what I think is the influence of the soul of this country on its inhabitants. There is a real wanderlust in Australia. Given that its traditional inhabitants have been going walkabout for millenia, it seems reasonable to suggest that even its immigrant residents feel the pull. I know traditional Aboriginals had a hard life but 200 years after white settlement I think we might still learn something from that.