Rain Dance

It's raining in Sydney, Eastern Standard Time 19.43. It's raining! Rain! Il Pleut ... etcetera. Commuters run home from the station without umbrellas. The sky lours. There's a smell of mould as the long dried spores in the gutters are released into the air. Maybe that patch of scarlet-pink sick that's been glued for weeks to the pavement two doors down in Morris Street will shift? But already the shower is fading ...

On the nightly weather bulletin maps it is usually the case that Australia, the 'island continent', is surrounded by cloud masses, most days it rains over parts (many parts of island Asia, over New Guinea, over the archipelagos of Melanesia, over New Zealand; most days it doesn't rain here, we are as if sequestered behind a cordon sanitaire so far as precipitation is concerned.

That was last night. It didn't rain much after all though the patch of sick has gone. I don't know why thinking about these things makes me wonder if we shouldn't rewrite Australasia as Asiaustralia? Something to do perhaps, not just with the weather, but with our skewed relationship with our near neighbours. The Big Dry can seem emotional as much as meterological ... Australia is like a dessicated fruit, with a green rind and nothing much except dust within.

Now it's a few days later, and it's still raining, off and on. 18th May. The anniversary of my first arrival in Sydney, way back in 1981, full of rock 'n' roll dreams, looking for the way to movie heaven. I couldn't believe how drab were the streets you drive through from the airport into town. We stayed at the Springfield Lodge, a residential hotel in Kings Cross, with a view west over the City. It rained for ten days solid, the red and blue neon appearing and disappearing in the murk, the ragged banners of cloud rent and torn on the towers, the incessant gurgle and laughter of the gutters ...

I had imagined a land of blue and gold, celestial colours, not the dreary wet bedraggled streets through which I walked each day to the taxi training school in Paddington. Now, it is different: I long for rain like I have longed for it in other places I've lived, even San Francisco, not such a dry city, but where it did not rain for the first I don't know how many months I lived there. Are we living on the banks of an extinct river?

The promotion of Asiaustralia as an alternative designation for this part of the world might then be seen as a kind of sympathetic magic, a way of bringing the wet our way, a way out of the dryness of our present state, our Age of Beige. We are as if choking on dust: dust of detention, dust of rationalism, economic or otherwise, dust of the deserts within. Oh, the water ... let it run all over me ...