Buffel Grass: An Augmented Landscape

Abstract

One year I deliberately chose to spend time in Alice Springs during early summer.Until then I had only visited in winter, the peak tourist season. This time I flew in rather than drove and met the first wave of heat through the parting glass doors at the airport.I stayed at the usual place but was surprised to discover that it had come to life.At nightfall, the walls and windows hosted numbers of small pale geckoes lying in wait for insects, and chirruping loudly through the night. There were two that hunted from the outside glass panes of the window next to the kitchen table, and as I ate dinner I had an intimate view of their pale fawn underbellies and the sticky discs at their fingertips with which they clung to the sheer surface of glass. Their dark bulging eyes glistened as they lay in wait for the moths attracted by my kitchen light.At dusk, when I went walking through the ironwoods and hakeas, a sacred kingfisher darted through a low submerged greenish light that lingered beyond sunset. In the heat of the day a wasp came and went outside the door, building a nest against the side of the stone steps. Its nest was composed, so far, of three small mud cups joined together in a cellular pattern. In the undergrowth, lizards rustled when I passed; along the gravel driveway was a resident goanna about a metre long, and out on the road a large brown snake sunned itself on the bitumen. The first couple of nights were quite cool; but then, in the middle of the night, around 3 a.m., I was Saskia Beudel-Buffel Grass 335 woken by the sound of distant wind approaching across the landscape-that particular sound wind has when it is imminent, a roil of motion approaching a pocket of stillness. I was sleeping with the door open and when the wind struck it was hot. A hot wind in the middle of the night was completely counter--intuitive to me, when one associates nights with cooling. A wave of heat was crossing the desert in the darkness.