Day 127 | Another gravel pit, near Tjulun Waterhole: you might want to know

74 km | zzOz total: 6,444 km

Only one topic of thought today: wind.

Taken a bashing crashing into it today: it never let up. Would have cracked out 100km with the effort if it had been a cross wind.

Like most of what’s happened in my life I feel like I’m swimming upstream, except today I’ve encountered more rapids. Unlike Aaron Lisco’s recent run through here where with prevailing gale force winds he traversed Yulara to Laverton in 10 days, I’m with the consequence of a large High terminally resident far to the south and its anticlockwise winds.

A couple of sightings of large congregations of large camels were the highlights. They tend to pack up and depart when they catch wind of me, running quickly to the horizon, surely I’m not smelling that bad, although there might be a certain pungency of camel I tend to carry with me. One group a splendid sight as 6 trotted vigorously, enfile, over a red sand dune.

No choice but to plug into my iPod to distract me, prime listening currently is an intense podcast of a recent speech by one of the few Australian authors who can communicate with me through his writings, the Tasmanian, Richard Flanagan. A Rhodes Scholar, ie, Oxford graduate, he decided to return to the back blocks, ie, Tassy, and make his contribution to society from there, not really interested in the bright lights.

A humorous, engaging speaker this time he turned his attention to the malaise which is not particularly unique to Australia but is a stultifying blanket thrown across the country: conformity. How it is eroding our society and allowing inhumanity to be accepted, mostly without question, the ongoing issue of boat people, mostly found to be refugees, an obvious case.

While I agree with his basic thesis I also think he missed the more chilling conundrum: we have chosen conformity, our Golden Handcuffs, this is what we want.

And we make up the crummy excuses that fail to bear up to closer examination.

To me it’s clear the material benefits aren’t even close to compensating for the handing over of our soul. But that’s just me with my proven track record of failure to understand human motivations.

Somehow I think we need the winds of change to whistle through our world and allow us to see what is really important.