It, love, made itself readily apparent near the small town of Mullengandra, roughly 40 kilometers from Albury following the Hume highway north.
She was driving, returning to Sydney from the Mallee region of Victoria but via Albury/Wodonga, where she had attended a chemistry conference and presented a paper on the purification (via sublimation) of certain elements useful in the medical sciences. She had wanted to visit the town of Glenrowan, where Ned Kelly fought his last, but had dallied a little too long in Mildura, walking, stunned, amongst the mallees with a book of botanical taxonomy. It was near the town of Mullengandra, or thereabouts, that she first saw him. She was stretching her legs, impulsively following a desire path that shyly snaked its way around a tall, straight eucalypt.
He was at an honesty box trying to decide a fair price for the three pears and the small punnet of blueberries he had chosen. He had chanced upon the box when he had stopped to get a better look at the way-too-big, tacky fibreglass horse screwed to a fence, advertising what? he still couldn’t tell. He, too, had followed the desire path around that tall, straight eucalypt, and when hunger got the best of him, he headed straight for the pears.
He said he was from New Zealand, doing a tour of the regional hospitals of Victoria/New South Wales as part of a survey commissioned by NZ’s Nelson Hospital. He was to produce a report, though to what end, he still wasn’t sure. She said that she had always wanted to visit New Zealand and that she, in particular, loved the archipelago music that came out of the region. A Cappella, he asked, but in such a way as to not embarrass her. This perspicacity – the not wanting to embarrass her, not the guessing what she meant – was the beginning.
He liked The Monkees, which she felt was – perhaps a little defensively – more embarrassing than the whole archipelago incident. It was charming, though. That was also the beginning.
a kenneth branagh-like earthiness
Written on Saturday, 5 December 2009