Life’s Little Journeys

Driving down a backstreet in Currumbin, steering wheel in one hand, servo sausage roll and sauce in the other, I couldn’t help but marvel at how I had gotten here. Not how I had gotten here from Main Beach (that was easy) but how I had arrived at this particular point in my life.

Somewhere along the trip I had one of those Hollywood style out-of-body experiences. You know the kind where you can see yourself in film quality? Well, there I was, on an adventure! Rattling along the road, windows down, hair tousled- nothing between me and my destination but a few hectares of greenery and an expanse of hot black bitumen.

Admittedly I felt like a bit of a cool kid, driving deep into the Currumbin Valley with no phone reception to trek up a ridiculously steep hill, all in the name of poking around an abandoned hippy village. It was a quest I fancied even Indiana Jones could be proud of.

Aside from impressing the world’s greatest explorers, the personal significance of this road trip, was immense. To understand it, I’ll take you back approximately 9 months to October 2010. A couple of states south in Melbourne, at 20 years old I had already been in a co-dependant relationship for 4 years. I was living at home, struggling through a University degree, which I despised, and agonizing over how many calories I had consumed during the day. It was a pretty typical life’s experience, but a suffocating one at that. Somewhere along the line I had gone from a fresh-faced, feisty teen to feeling like a fifty year old.  I knew it wasn’t normal. Deep in my gut I knew that my nightly ritual of watching TV like a married couple was going to transform me into a grandma before my time.

To say it made me feel uneasy would have been an understatement.  Getting chaperoned around by either a partner or a parent, running every decision I ever made past said family members, was more than a little debilitating- soul destroying is probably overkill, but not far off how hopeless I felt. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life but I did know that I wanted to live it! To experience what the world has to offer: to be outdoors, to travel, to see amazing things and in ‘eat, pray, love’ style, to “marvel at something”.  In the least I just wanted to live my life on my terms.

So, a handful of months and misadventures later and a fair few miles north and there I was- maybe a few kilos heavier, but hey, I’d made it! Sure, I still don’t know what I want to do with my life, but at that moment I felt like every kilometre that caught under the tyres was taking me closer.

When I had eventually heaved my way up to the shantytown, puffing and spluttering and peering through waist-high grass, I was overcome by another sense of nostalgia. There was a certain presence in the air, some thick sense of people past. The type of thing that a superstitious me may have equated with ghosts. As I took in the rusted old bikes, chairs and kitchen utensils, the discarded homes, I couldn’t help but wonder what inspired this community to settle here and where their journeys had taken them since.

Perhaps they were searchers too- travelling as I did with an insatiable appetite for more than the mundane. Or maybe they were running- from debt, from troubled relationships, from responsibility. It’s probable that they just wanted a safe place to smoke some weed, man.

Regardless of the content of their dreams, I silently congratulated them as I walked through the ruins- against all odds and conventional belief, these hippies were able to make those dreams their reality, albeit for a short time. Who knows what made them decide to turn back to the big smoke- guilt, boredom, illness? Perhaps they discovered that their dream lives weren’t so dreamlike after all. Or maybe the adventure had simply run its course.

It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that for whatever reason, they were able to muster the courage to put thought into action. This, in my opinion is what distinguishes those who simply survive from those who really LIVE. Yes, it’s true, there is more risk involved in the latter and much, much more opportunity for failure as I’m certain the hippies would have discovered- what with the tree snakes, goannas, ticks, leaches and questionable sewerage system, catastrophe was always close by. But don’t let that hold you back. They sure didn’t! You might be one step, one phone call, one plane ride, one car trip away from discovering your life’s greatest passion. I am convinced that this is what drove these fringe dwellers to lead such an extraordinary existence. Well, it’s what keeps me going anyway.

Okay so maybe you’re ideal isn’t living in a hippy town in the bush. Maybe your journey won’t even take you interstate or overseas, it might not take you further than your own backyard, but do yourself a favour and embark on it! Don’t let your life’s journey pass you by. I wouldn’t be here writing this if I hadn’t fought for mine nor would these pictures of a bygone era be possible without the daring of a group of people from years past. Perhaps it won’t work out, perhaps like the hippies your dream will fade or fail, but by golly, as I reminisce the striking scenery of that village set in the Australian outback, the thick foliage, the blue hills and the red clay earth, it seems appropriate to slip this one in-  in the words of Ernie Dingo: “You’ll never never know, if you never never go”.