Dumfries
August 1995
Something weird happened to me in Dumfries, although to describe it as having 'happened' isn't exactly right maybe. I discovered something that surprised me, something that brought back echoes of other places and strange, sort of spiritual undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of my life.
In 1989, while i was living in the hills near Mullumbimby in northern New South Wales, i started writing a novel. I called it "Needles In The Haystack", which was originally a joke - a name for a soap opera i was talking about writing, about the melodramatic lives of the rural junkies i knew. It was set mainly around that area at first, although the action moved around Australia and around the world, as i did over the next year and a half. I don't know what it all meant, but a lot of things in that book had a more or less prophetic connection with events, places and people that came into my life after i wrote about them.
Not long after i started on it, when maybe a quarter of the story had been written, i left the hills on the coastal strip of northern New South Wales, where i'd lived for most of the previous nine months of so, to go and live in a community a couple of hundred kilometres inland. A few days after arriving there, i was high up on a hillside, overlooking the camp i was staying in, working on a water pipe with a couple of others. I looked around at the hills and the trees covering them and remarked to Chris, one of people i was up there with, "This would be a good spot for a pirate radio station. You could reach Brisbane from here with the right aerial and they'd never find you."
"Needle in the haystack." he said, a minute or two later.
"What?!" i was surprised, he didn't know anything about the novel i was writing.
"Needle in the haystack." he repeated. "That would be a good name for the pirate radio station. That hill over there, that dominates this whole area, is called Mount Haystack."
I told him that was near enough the name of a novel i was writing, but he didn't seem too surprised.
A day or two later, i was sitting on the rocks by one of the beautiful swimming holes in the river that flows along one side of the community, and chatting to Baz, another of the people who lived there. For no particular reason, he told me there used to be a bushranger who lived around those hills. "He was called Captain Starlight" he said.
"Shit!" i thought, "the Starlight's the name of the cafe in me book!"
Then, not long after that, at dawn one morning, i was working on the thatch of the humpy i was building myself, when Chris came past.
"Goonabah's here." he said.
"What?!" I did a double-take. At first i thought he meant this place was like Goonabah, which was the name of the town in my book (which i'd made up). But then i realized he hadn't read it and knew nothing about what was in it. "What do you mean?" i asked, puzzled.
"Goonabah, the aboriginal elder, who Desi went off to get."
"Oh!" I was slightly shocked by this latest connection. At some point during his stay, i told Goonabah i'd been writing his name at least several times a week for the last couple of months. But he didn't seem nearly as surprised as i was.
There was also someone there called Max, which is the name of the rather elusive character Sally and Anton were searching for in the novel.
I had to go to Sydney a couple of weeks after i'd arrived at that place and, although i'd fully intended to live there permanently when i first went there, i never really returned - except for several shortish visits. However, i kept in constant contact with the people who did live there, most of whom, like me, lived a very nomadic lifestyle. One of them told me a long time later, well after the book was finished and she'd read the complete story, that a lot of other things i'd written about had happened there too.
On one level, i understood it all fully, although i could never quite work out why it was - what it was all about. But anyway, it gradually faded from my life, although the novel remained an unpublished millstone around my neck. Until a few years later, when it suddenly leapt back into my consciousness in Dumfries - a very unlikely place to find a connection with that other life.
I'd felt a sort of connection with the place straight away, although i couldn't quite put a finger on it. I thought it might have something to do with the fact that my great grandfather came from there. He ran a brewery in the town and was apparently a friend of Robbie Burns, who also lived there for a while. But then something suddenly hit me - the river that runs through the centre of town and that my aunt's house looks directly onto, is called the Nith. NITH is the abbreviation i'd always used instead of the rather cumbersome title for my novel, "Needles In The Haystack"!
I couldn't say i understood it in a conscious way really, but it made some kind of sense, somehow, i supposed!