‘OK,’ Tony said. ‘Better ring your mother and tell her not to meet you.’
‘What?’ Ant’s eyes were on his father. He had to be joking.
‘Why not?’ Tony asked. ‘You’ve got another week of holidays, I haven’t got any work till August. We can go up to Broken Hill, poke around a bit, and then I can drive you back to Adelaide. Check out this school you’re so keen on, have a word with Mum about it . . .’
‘Do you really mean it?’ Ant had read about Broken Hill in an art magazine: lots of painters lived there. Just from photographs, Ant knew why: it was the colours of the landscape. Then he thought of something. ‘What about, um, money? Won’t a trip like that cost a lot?’
His father smiled. ‘There should be a disposal store in one of the bigger towns, where we could buy another tent pole and a fly. I don’t know about you, but I feel like going camping.’
‘Great,’ Ant agreed, and meant it.
(16) RECORDING THE JOURNEY
As they headed inland, the road began to open out before the windscreen. The sky was getting bigger and bluer, by the minute.
Ant propped his sketchbook against the flap of the glovebox, got out a pencil, began a rapid record of the journey.
Glancing over as the folds of the landscape began to flow across the page, Tony asked, ‘How on earth do you do that?’
‘It’s easy,’ Ant told him. ‘You just put down what you want to remember.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author and publisher would like to thank New Directions Publishing Corporation for permission to quote Ezra Pound (pages 132 and 133). The 'Jonathan Jo' verse on page 3 is from When We Were Very Young (Methuen, London, 1924font-weight: bold;) by A.A. Milne. The scientific information about the caves in 'Land/scape' is derived from publications of the National Parks Service – Victoria
Listening to Mondrian Page 13
