Fictocritical Innovations. Pawel Cholewa

destitute simplicity. The echoes from the crashing surf and bustling city centre and the general roar of the population subsides and penetrates no longer. Our silence turns into contemplation, turns into meditation, turns into a respectful isolation, and still we continue to drive onwards, breaking free from the edges of the world as we drive further away from its fringes.

      Music is playing. In fact, it has always been playing in the car, but we have only just realised that. We are waiting for something: something big, ominous, threatening perhaps. We’d all heard stories about road trains leading up to this journey, but none of us had ever actually seen one, and nobody wanted to be the one who had to tackle a road train within the insignificance, vulnerability and (dis)comfort of our automobile. The music grows louder, or maybe merely seems louder. A throbbing and cyclical bass line, and in the midst of a wailing and harmonious yet dissonant harmonica growls the vocal sensibilities of a young impassioned Peter Garrett, proclaiming: “There’s a road train going nowhere.” And coincidentally, right at this moment, the road train manifests itself. The great mammoth of Australian pride and industry, transportation and solidity looms out of the darkness. A beast foreboding, forbearing and ingraining itself into the earth around us, trembling, shaking, determined it growls rising up from the horizon before us. Lights. A dark shape lurching ever so carefully forward as we hurry or scuttle towards it. Eyes sparkling, lustrous and moon-shaped, our irises recede into the background of our minds. It is a giant, a titan of production and productivity. Rogue and nomadic in essence, it knowingly owns and rides that road.

      Australia is one of the only continents or countries to have road trains in use. The only other countries that have and use them are Argentina, Mexico, the United States and Canada (as far as I know).

      A monochromatic sheen coats its body, its armour. Too many wheels and too many metres long. Signposted in black and yellow, a fair warning is given to the oblivious, to the naïve and to the overly ambitious. A blackened, darkened cockpit. An anonymous driver never to be seen by others on the road, except for perhaps other drivers of other road trains and the ‘other’ of more metaphysical realms. These are the dominating species. They control the habitat of these barren roads. We must be respectful to them or perish.

      Shrubbery flies in front of and behind us. A kangaroo leaps. Cicadas chatter and chime away somewhere and everywhere in the distance. But the ratios of the animalistic and natural world are all skewed and wrong in comparison to this towering object. So grand, so large, so overwhelmingly powerful it dominates the night sky creating a black hole of some sort unto itself. All the powers of the world seep into it. The night turns light by comparison. I think I can still see the sun gleaming somewhere off in the distance, but I can’t exactly pinpoint it—the road train is silhouetted by the powers of the world.

      But where is the road train going? Is Garrett correct? Is it going nowhere? It’s certainly not stuck or stationary. It has motion and momentum and speed, yet it continues to drive into nothingness, into the outback of absurdity and delirium, into nowhere, in fact. It goes because it needs to go. It propels and projects itself. Its purpose is grander than what we are simply led to believe. Its journey and travels are both the means and the ends of its existence. Through universe and time and change it persists and endures as an icon of Australian industry and power.

      Across the great red plains of the Australian outback the road spirals into the centre of an old prehistoric world now dried up. The road train conquers, controls, manoeuvres this road. These road behemoths were built to exist here together; an enforced harmony with our indigenous history and our industrial and multicultural present and future; an uneasy synchronisation, unified by the smoky black tires that the road train attaches itself to the road with, gliding, soaring further into the tranquil inverse universe that is the National Highway.

      Very close now. We are right behind it. It shudders. No, we shudder at the prospect of having to somehow actually ‘pass’ this titan. No, no one will do it. Respect the giant. Leave it be. It owns the road. It owns the night. It owns itself. We will not overtake the road train this night.

      After long absences from living in Australia, when I have lived in Poland for instance, the Australian landscape does change and look very different to me. It becomes fluorescent, like the brightness and contrast has been turned way up on a television screen or monitor. I find myself squinting a lot more due to the intensity of the sun reflecting against the burnished surfaces of Australian flora and fauna. Normally, when I am residing in Australia, the landscape of the bush seems quite barren, bleak, brown, light green and grey. But from a European or migrant perspective, and depending on which season a migrant is travelling from their country to Australia in, the landscape of Australia can appear quite different and distorted through compromised eyes.

      The imagery employed by many Australian writers, including the contemporary Rowe, and going back to the beginnings of white Australian writers in the works of Lawson and Paterson, all tend to grapple with the conflict or contrast between the bush and the city, nature versus industry, an old world versus a new world.

      The “bush” and the “city” were symbols that somewhat negated each other (Whitlock 197). “The city and the country were established as separate moral universes” (200). This conflict, and the Australian art and writing that has come about over the years highlighting it, creates “a staging point for immigrants; a haven for the drifter, the outcast, the man or woman with a past; a twilight zone of rootlessness and anomie” (194). “So we will never arrive at the “real” Australia. From the attempts of others to get there, we can learn as much about the travellers and the journey itself, but nothing about the destination. There is none” (Whitlock 25). This is highly relevant for me, and my endlessly dispersed selves.

“The Writer on Holiday” or Clockwork (2014)

      Pure sentiment and a godliness that comes from the rejuvenation and reunion of soulful companions, a band of brothers separated by time in the form of years, and space in the form of long, cross-continental distances:

      And yet, still and quietly, in sequential rushes of euphoria:

      Tidal forces churn again

      To flow aside the current trend

      I walk for miles

      I wonder through hazy trials

      Change the course of modern men

      To race against the clockwork bend

      I run for miles

      In exalted, exhausted strides

      Now look for truth beyond the fair,

      Where I alone become the heir

      I walk for miles

      I wonder through hazy isles

      Rekindled vigour, an energy formed through bonds and heartfelt leaps of faith: bounding, cyclical, beautiful, ecstatic, genuine. A short-term breeze and a rather cool summer in which the warmth has been reduced and absorbed by men who have taken a break, a holiday from themselves, and instead embraced themselves and one another.

      In Barthes’ Mythologies there is a chapter entitled “The Writer on Holiday” which states that a writer on holiday may stop working or physically writing, but that he never stops “at least producing” (30). The writing or the thoughts and processes continue to exist in the back of the mind. One doesn’t choose when inspiration comes—ideas and thoughts that often and sometimes happen to permeate and invade the conscious configuration of the self. The “writer is the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times, without bothering, tyrant that he is, with the holidays of his medium. Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop” (Barthes 30). The creative writer definitely takes their work home with them, and also away with them when they travel, where they inevitably suffer from a pestering doom, a conscience that is incessant and insatiable—an unrequited will.

      In her piece “Hemingway’s Typewriter” Robyn Ferrell’s says, “The writer has a vocation, not a job, so that even while on holiday he is working, whether he is reading