Highways to a War Read Online Free PDF Page B

the hop fields had begun. The narrow, winding side road to Clare was two miles out from the township of New Norfolk; the white signpost was still here, and I took the turn.
    Mike Langford belonged to this southern zone of the island, with its towering hills, extinct volcanic peaks and Roaring Forties winds. I belong to the north: to open, pastoral distances and kinder weather. The north-south difference is as real here as in other regions of the world, and our two small cities have been locked in rivalry since the island’s name was Van Diemen’s Land. But here the difference stands on its head. Southern Hobart, the capital, once the center of the nineteenth-century penal administration that continues to frown in our collective memory, is the last city before Antarctica, its spirit cold and forbidding. Northern Launceston, founded as an innocent market town, is more lighthearted: closer to the continent, looking to the warmer latitudes across Bass Strait. So when Mike came north as a boy, he was making his first move towards the world beyond the island: I imagine he heard it throbbing on the breeze.
    It was late afternoon. Getting down to the south had been only a matter of two hours or so, on today’s highways. It used to be a day trip: the island has shrunk, since my childhood. But the side road taking me into the long corridor of the valleys hadn’t changed: it was still unpaved, throwing up white dust, and it was taking me back thirty-odd years.
    I’d forgotten the height of these hills. Enclosing, steep, almost overwhelming, they rose above the road on my left and right: bush-covered, dark olive, glowing in patches with dreaming sienna tints in the last hour of sun. The grass beside a small weatherboard farmhouse sitting on a knoll was dark green as grass in a storybook Northern Hemisphere, and scattered with yellow wildflowers; black Angus cattle grazed, but there was no other sign of life. The valleys still felt remote, and utterly self-sufficient: intimate, claustrophobic, brooding, shut in forever by their beautiful but jealous hills. Not an easy place in which to hide anything; not an easy place to escape. Of all the Langfords, only Mike did.
    Here were the upright golden flames of the poplars lining the road, and the willows yellowing down by the creek. Here were the hop fields, and elms and pines and cedars: the country of early settlement, rich and Europeanized. Driving over the white wooden bridge that led to the farm, I found I was nursing an odd, melancholy excitement. I swung the Mazda to a halt in front of the gate, and the white dust billowed up the way it used to do in front of my father’s old Buick. In the field on the other side of the road, the stripped wires and poles, bare of hops, were like ruined structures in a war zone, and I wondered why it all looked so desolate.
    Then I realized that it was always summer when I came down here as a boy, and that time was constantly rerun. The English oak trees in the drive were always out in leaf, and powdered with the road’s white dust, like the roadside poplars. The ancient, baby voices of crows complained always in the heat, and white cabbage butterflies were jerked as though on strings above the bush grass and wildflowers.
    The last time I was here was in the summer of 1952, when Michael Langford and I were sixteen years old. There were six summer holidays before that: the first when he and I were ten, at the end of the Second World War. The holidays were a return of hospitality, in a way. Because old John Langford had gone to boarding school in Launceston, he’d insisted on sending his sons up there as well, instead of educating them in Hobart; Mike and I became friends at school, and I often had him to stay at my parents’ house on weekends. But another reason the Langfords asked me to the farm, I suspect, was that Mike’s three brothers were grown up, and his parents wanted him to have company of his own age out here: a surrogate brother.