You know whenever I put Neil Young on the stereo, I find myself 15 years old, learning to drive on the long free roads of Australia’s Northern Territory, a bauxite redness in the land and the pale, ghost greys and lean tawns of the gum trees jittering past like wilting bones. The air seems to burn in the bush, to crackle in the sun, hot breath in an old man’s ribcage. Nothing is moving, but the whole place seethes. This big, vast silence, crackling, while Vampire Blues pumps on the cassette player and my mother has to keep seizing the wheel and pulling it towards her as I keep getting hypnotised by oncoming cars, drifting toward them as I watch them approach. Took me a while to get the hang of watching where I was going. Watch the fucking road, for God’s sake, watch the road. Jesus. 

I’m 38 year’s old now, listening to Neil Young in New York City, snowflakes out my window, getting carried home to Australia and the dry heat of growing up in an isolated mining town. To those times. It’s his voice. The weight of his guitar. Both embedded in me. 

My mother had picked up on Neil Young from a couple of Canadian hippies who lived across the road in Nhulunbuy. They were mostly famous for smoking pot, walking around their house nude, and their two young sons, who had nearly waist length blonde hair and seemed to run feral, although Carol their mum - who the kids called by her first name - used to teach them herself and they usually got good grades that no one felt they deserved. The boys were twins. One would grow up to be an artist in Sydney, the other stayed in town as a miner.  

It could be a brutal town for choices. I used to watch the next door neighbour’s husband falling asleep standing up at the 6am bus stop opposite our home. His wife was fucking another guy, and he was trying to literally work it out, doing ‘doublers’, these long 24 hour shifts in solid blocks of 2x12. As if he could pummel himself back into shape. Eventually he couldn’t take it anymore, and he left town in a 4-wheel drive. There were no roads in or out, so this was a dangerous business at the best of times. About a week later they found his truck bogged in a dry river-bed, with him crouching dead beside it. My father was called in to identify his friend and neighbour, but he came home weeping, not able to recognise his dark-haired workmate at all: his whole body had been cooked black by the sun, his hair had turned white as a ghost. The sun had made him into something else. 

Down the road from us were the Stevenses. Nothing but trouble. The older brother Tim was a skinny guy with black hair, a bad tattoo of a heart on his arm and a leather jacket in tropical weather. Just fucking dumb acting cool without even knowing what cool was. By the time he was 17 he would already be in some kinda jail for a few break-and-enters in a town so small everybody knew who was having affairs with whom, and when you went out to buy groceries, and probably what you bought as well. 

My best friend when I was 14 was his younger brother Steven. Steven Stevenses. You’d think they coulda come up with something… more. He always seemed to be in the shadow of his brother, who hadn’t been arrested then, and I didn’t understand what I feel today: that there was an anger starting to sprout up inside of him. I can’t even remember Steven’s face now. Just the sinews on his arms turning tighter. And how there was something prematurely male about him, as if the boy in him didn’t last long. But when I felt I knew him there was a looseness to what we did. We could just wander all day. Things weren’t hard. Whether we took an axe to the tops of termite mounds just to see how long they would take to grow back, or simply walked down to the local garbage dump to scrounge in the smoke, we were animated slowly, hovering in our scenery, not quite shaped in what we did, what we were. 

I was also slowly drawn to his sister Jenny, who was just a year older than me and Steven. The way she could glance at you. The cup of her neck.  

One time I went to Steven’s place to see if he was there. I knocked, called out and walked in. It seemed like no one was home, even though the door was open. The Dry Season heat streamed in like a balloon sagging over the entrance and into the air-conditioned room. I was glad to get inside, to pull myself beyond its weight and into the center of the room. It was midday. Most sensible people were staying still, staying under cover. I stood there nervously in the lounge room, and called out again. 

I heard a voice call me back deeper into the house. It was Jenny. So I walked down the white hall, past paintings of horses drinking and purple-blue impressions of Spanish senoritas. When I came to Jenny’s room, she was still getting dressed. It’s the first time I can recall having an erotic moment, her back, its nakedness, the false way she pretended to cover up, but unhurried, brazen, inviting me into her room without saying a word - if I wanted to make my own decision, I could. 

I backed away, frightened, wishing I could somehow step forward. Not even understanding what I was feeling. She just called out then that Steven wasn’t home. “Okay, see ya later. Tell him I came over,” I said in a flat, hollow way, making how I spoke rougher, as if to protect myself from her. To sound further away, less interested, drier than I really was. 

Later that same season Steven and I would go spearfishing in a local mangrove. We had our own spears of bamboo with three metal prongs made out of cloths-hanger wire, and we chased fish through the open, undulating shadows and shallows that faced onto the sea. The water was so peaceful you could still see footprints in the sandy beds where Aboriginal people had been here hunting earlier and smarter that morning. I didn’t know what sunstroke was, and after a few hours I began to feel faint. Eventually I went to sit under a saltbush. But it made no difference to the nausea spinning over me. Steven didn’t give a fuck and went back to hunt in the mangroves. Eventually I realised something was seriously wrong and I started to walk home, staggered really, losing my head to the sky. 

It was a half-hour through the bush to town. The noisiest silence you could ever struggle through. A goanna came running, like a fuse along the dry ground, so fast, rattling twigs and leaves. I had startled it, and it me. Its whipping run caused me to go off-balance and almost vomit with a rush of fear. It slithered up a tree and some bark peeled slowly to the ground from where it had furiously scratched its way up the trunk. Birds screamed, something whistled a way off in the distance, I heard my own footsteps as if they were coming from someone near me.  

Finally I passed through the local ‘golf course’, really just cleared ground then on the outskirts of town. The greens weren’t anything more than flattened sand and clay beds. Pathetic shit. It mocked itself and the fantasies of leisure that the town was trying to have. 

I had that head-tipping momentum, where you start to fall forward rather than walk. It may have been 30 or 40 minutes since I had left the mangroves, but it felt like hours. 

Later my mother would tell I had walked straight through the fertilizer sprays. I was so out of it I didn’t even know. Walking through all these trucks set up to spout out some noxious shit to make this new world grow. Just desperate to make it home. 

It was a brand new mining town and the whole place was still being set up. Still being civilized, from cyclone proof homes to the golf course. The sprays were part of the making of the town, the invention of lawns. Quite a process. It had taken weeks. First off people were encourage to dig up and soften their yards with hoes. Then trucks had come round with decent quality dirt to make a topsoil. They’d dumped it in giant mounds out the front of each person’s home. Then it was a case of spade or wheelbarrow, just spreading the dirt, beautiful and sweet, shit brown, rich, all over your yard. People had then been encouraged to go out in the bush and look for grass roots and runners to help with the next phase. So we went out and pulled them up like green rope, then replanted them, yellowing already. Giant trucks then came around and sprayed the lawns on, with what were like fire hoses spouting out this blue-green algae, a high powered mix of seeds, mulch and fertilizer. Then it was a case of water the hell of it in this Dry Season. And water it some more. A whole suburban landscape drenched in psychedelic blue. 

I came stumbling through a fortnight later, having spread some of the original dirt myself, the blue magic already comfortably, normally green, blades sprouting in fresh earth. A new round of trucks was respraying with a softer, clearer essence. And I just staggered through the fertile mist. 

My mother started yelling at me about what the hell I was doing you bloody idiot, swearing at me in a kind, worried way. I just tried to act like I was allright. Not wanting her to know what I had been up to. They hadn’t wanted me going to the mangroves, didn’t even know I’d gone – now I remember the day, it was probably lucky we didn’t get taken by the crocodiles that hunted there. Innocence is bliss sometimes. 

Whatever my story, it became pretty apparent to my mum that I was in a fucked-up state. She was relieved to realise it was sun stroke rather than the sprayed poison I’d been blasted with. Figuring I was dehydrated, she made me drink water, lots of water, then she offered me a cold, sweet, strawberry lemonade that I promptly vomited back out. 

Don’t remember much else. Apparently I lost almost 24 hours in a delirium. Thinking of fish in pools darting away from me, cars coming towards me, bush ghosts, lizards, blue grass, blue skies, sweat, and me running, staggering, not even knowing my own name, not even lying down on a bed, just spinning through space. 

When I came out of that world, I felt so weak it was unbelievable. Sticky and drained. My mother had water for me, bread, some chicken soup with not too much chicken. I could barely make it through this geriatric’s meal. Where had I been? It was frightening to land back in my own body and realise I could go so far away from it. 

I didn’t see Steven after that. And I was kinda pissed off with him for leaving me to make my own way home when I was so sick. For deserting me so he could keep spearfishing. 

Then all of a sudden the holidays were over and I went away again down south to school. Didn’t see him for a whole year. When I came back it had all changed. By now Steven’s brother was in jail, no longer the rebel, just a dickhead loser. Steven’s sister Jenny looked sexier than ever, but she was known as ‘the town bike’, easy to ride. No decent guy should go near her. And Steven was headed down the same road as his brother, dropped outta school, no job, getting pissed, doing casual vandalism on phone booths and street lights, and small time theft that everybody knew he’d done, or said he’d done, though somehow he hadn’t been caught yet. 

I’d already been told to stay away from him and his family as soon as I arrived. His sister smiled at me down at the shopping center and I had to just smile back and ignore her then with a nod of the head and I’m on my way. She knew straight away what I was doing and I burned with shame. She was wearing tight jeans and a soft, old checked green shirt. She didn’t look like a slut to me. 

Steven called round a few times but I didn’t call back. He finally caught me at home reading one day - there wasn’t much else for me to do that holiday - and we sat on the morning verandah in the rising heat and talked. But it was all stiff. I couldn’t invite him inside, though my mother did relent and bring us out some soft drinks. Then Steven tried to intimidate me into being his friend, to threaten me somehow. He had become much harder and I was repulsed by this toughness and frightened too. I did not know how to remake our old familiarity. Or even if it had existed. 

He’d get busted trying to break into my parents’ car a week later. My father just kicked his arse. Told him to fuck off and never show his face anywhere near him again. And that was the absolute end of Steven Stevenses for me and my family. I don’t know where he or Jenny ended up, what happened to them - eventually they just all moved out a town. I heard stories about jail and babies, but nothing certain. I was away studying and when I came back they were just gone. That was what a mining town was like. New people were living in their house. It was like they didn’t exist anymore, except in old talk - and because of it being a mining town, with lots of people coming and going, not many people could talk the old talk anyway. 

Funny to think how it all began with whispers that I could sorta hear. Then it became a fact without hardly anything being said. They were just an untouchable family. Then they didn’t exist any more. 

I felt like a guilty witness to something. And I found it hard to go from being best friends with someone one year to not speaking to them at all the next. It just wasn’t my way. But it was imposed upon me - by my family, by circumstances, by Steven too and the way he behaved. Like he challenged our friendship out of existence.  

I was pretty bored whenever I came home after that. So bored I used to kill time riding around town on the free bus, just sitting up the back, looking at the streets, watching the few passengers get on and off.   This wasn’t an uncommon way for Nhulunbuy youths to entertain themselves. Round and round a two-suburb circuit. 

Alternatively, I’d cruise the sports shop, mostly running my hands over fish-hooks, diving masks, snorkels and shark chains, feeling the thickness of lines and weights, all the murder of the water. Or I’d go down to the chemist, which had a records section where I pondered  Kiss Alive for a whole three months like it was an indecipherable mystery before I finally bought it. Read Catch 22 in like three days. Then ploughed through a bunch of Archie comics, plus my dad’s collection of crap westerns, a lesbian vampire novel and heaps of science fiction. A highlight was seeing Bruce Lee in Enter The Dragon at the local pictures when he had to fight in a hall of mirrors. I gave the trees, the lamp-posts and my sisters hell on the way home after that.  

In the end though, I was experiencing most things on my own, trying to deal with how my world had shifted. Trying to fill up the space. Or live with it in my head. 

My mother had changed a lot in this time too. I arrived back from studying to find her doing the vacuuming to Get It On. She switched me on to T-Rex’s Electric Warrior completely and at least a little Neil Diamond, though I could never hack my father bellowing Song Sung Blue. I started to explore music then, to find out about stuff that wasn’t in the Top 40. To listen to things I didn’t even understand. That was when my mother started to teach me to drive me on red dirt roads just off the highway to get me away from those oncoming cars. We’d listen to Neil Young’s On The Beach, our mutual favourite, and sing “they’re all just pissing in the wind” and laugh and drive down to the sea, where a blue-pocked moon could sometimes be seen on pale afternoons, half-formed, hanging like an ear in the sky.