AustLit

'I was with friends, high up on a range looking west and down through a long and beautiful valley just south of Alice Springs, mountains in the far distance gauzy in the late light. A few cars came and went, windows lit up in scattered houses. It was warm but we made a small fire for company. We'd brought food and wine, music and reading. The best of times, yet as the sun sank, I felt a deep melancholy. It can come at that hour, quietly, but that evening, in that place, it rushed in like a wave. I wondered why, and as I did my mind's eye lifted like a bird over the range, across a narrow valley and into the next, to the military base known as Pine Gap. You can see its white domes against the red earth, like a cluster of giant golf balls or spider eggs, when you fly into Alice Springs. From elsewhere, it is out of sight - and out of mind for most of us most of the time, here in Alice as in the rest of the country. But it has moved to the forefront for me, ever since I followed the 2017 Supreme Court trials of six peace activists who dared to trespass into this prohibited domain.' (Publication abstract)