Psyche & place.

Perfect weather and an interstate friend in town meant that we spent most of the weekend outdoors. Today we headed off for a drive out of Alice Springs and into the East MacDonnell Ranges. After following the Ross River Highway for a while, we took a turn-off onto a 4WD track to go the back way to Ross River.

It was stunning countryside: deep reddish-brown ancient rocky hills set against the bluest of blue skies, towering ancient river red gums, and a carpet of vivid green hinting at last week's rain. 

We drove through wide sandy riverbeds and creeks with permanent water that splashed and rippled into a wake behind the car. 

At Trephina Gorge we wandered, enthralled, through the wide passage formed between textured red-ochre rock faces. Underfoot was sand, cool and coarse against my bare feet. We stopped and I stretched out on my back on the sand, feeling it mould and cup my arms, back, legs, feet. Further down the gorge, a family was singing rhymes to their small children, whose laughter rippled and reverberated through the space. 

Back in the car, I was reading a graphic novel called 'The long weekend in Alice Springs'. It is an illustrated adaption of an essay that explores the notion of cultural complex from the perspective of a mental health worker in Alice. It delves into place and space and psyche, and the ripple effects on the psyche when there is a forced disconnection imposed and people are removed from their place and space. 

From the author's website:

The Long Weekend is a graphic novel that has been adapted from an essay that explores the idea of the Cultural Complex; one of Carl Jung’s early ideas about group behaviour that was left largely unexplored until very recently in the academic world. Craig San Roque, the author the original essay, acts as narrator and protagonist in the graphic novel. He takes the reader throughout a long series of poetic thoughts, places and over the course of three days in the surreal and troubled central Australian desert town of Alice Springs. A town which provides a stark setting within which he grapples with the meanings of his analysis of his own culture and the pain which it intentionally and unintentionally inflicts upon other cultures.

Moving, challenging and dangerous, the Long Weekend is a haunting comic, both shockingly funny and supremely uncomfortable to read. It will stay with you long after you put it down upon your bedside table and turn off the lamp and settle into a restless sleep.

He's right. And lingering alongside and mingling together in my own psyche is the quiet magnificence of the country we spent today within.