Where've you been, Banksy?

WHERE were you last week, Banksy? I hear you asking (actually, to be honest, I don’t hear many of you asking; and the editor says he hasn’t been exactly flooded with calls from panicky readers demanding my immediate return).
But I do know my Uncle Davie in Duns worries when my weekly witterings fail to appear, so for his sake alone I thought I should explain myself: I was, dear reader, on a train crossing the Nullarbor Plain in Australia
An amazing place, the Nullarbor: 77,000 square miles of scorched, shrubless desert between Adelaide and Perth; hour upon hour of bleak countryside that looks like Farmer Morebottle’s tattie fields after he’s sprayed them to kill off the shaws. And nothing else.
Towns? The only brief stopping place 1,000 miles out from Adelaide was the ghost town of Cook (Elevation 0, Population 2), long since deserted by the navvies who laid the tracks for the Indian-Pacific 97 years ago and now looking like I imagine so many Northumbrian villages will look once the breathalyser has killed off the last of our pubs, the supermarkets have demolished the small shop trade and the Post Office has turned its last outpost into another wind farm.
And communications? No East Coast line, this: after leaving Adelaide not so much as a tweet from a mobile phone for three days (no bad thing, perhaps?) and the internet has not flung its web worldwide enough to be useable until our half-kilometre-long train finally lumbered into the sidings at Perth, days past my deadline.
So what was a workshy journalist to do for seventy-two work-free hours other than visit his favourite ‘inns’ . . . IN the dining car and INcommunicado!

IMPOSSIBLE to escape the North-east, even 12,000 miles from home.
First, driving from Sydney via Melbourne to Adelaide (and THAT’S no quick trip to the shops, let me tell you!) I was cut up at a traffic light in Lorne, Victoria by a 4x4 bearing the number plate ‘NUFC 2’, it’s back window smothered in ‘Toon Army’ stickers. One of you must know him/her and I expect an apology!
Then, on a beach hut further down the Great Ocean Road, I came across a plaque commemorating the feats of one “Alexander Weatherhead, born on Tweedside in 1809 and died here in 1901”.
This north-east Byreman of yesteryear is famed in south-east Australia as the cattle drover who successfully herded hs beasts “one flaming hot summer” from Nooroonga via Gundagai to Adelaide, cheating death thanks only to the survival skills of local aborigines and by drinking the blood of two of his cattle.
As I told the local café owner who lauded ‘the great Scotsman’, “They breed them tough on Tweedside - and there are TWO sides to the Tweed!”

NEWS that the Barmoor windfarm has been given the go-ahead reached me on my return to Sydney, thanks to The Journal’s (mercifully) still-free website.
My reaction is mixed: I am instinctively in favour of exploiting renewable alternatives to fossil fuels but sympathise with that minority of Turbin-aters who must pay the price in loss of amenity while the majority reaps the unburdened benefit.
I have friends on both sides of the argument (indeed, I have already demanded drinks for life from Klondike Barry, who stands to gain from the Barmoor ‘windrush‘) but it is ironic that I hear the news while travelling the breadth (if not the length) of this sun-drenched, windswept continent. For there is precious little sign of renewable energy sources Down Under.
Thousands of square miles of Nullarbor and barely a solar panel to be seen; thousands of miles of surf pounding the coastline and never a tidal barrage; bleak, windswept and uninhabited regions and only eight wind turbines spotted on our entire journey.
While the world worries about China’s rising consumption, the Third World’s deforestation and even little Northumbria’s unequal share of the renewables burden, who will point the finger at this ‘lucky, sunburnt country’ and ask Australia:
What are YOU doing to save the planet?
First published in The Journal, Newcastle on January 29, 2010