The Bunbury Train

I’m sitting on the slow train from Bunbury to Perth, contemplating the strange beauty around me.  There is only a slow train, twice a day, trundling through the coastal bushlands of Western Australia.  They stretch away to the East, over gently rolling hills, through to the incomprehensible vastness of the Australian interior.  Miles and miles of arid scrub and meek eucalyptus, their flaky trunks, gleaming white, brown, salmon and umber in their own fragile shade.  Closer to the line, flocks of sheep and herds of cattle crop away at the ochre-dry grass, patiently ruminating, while occasional ibises search expectantly with their long curved beaks in the sparse marshy pools, and the hot sun burns in its endless southern sky.

It is a harsh, raw beauty.  One that screams out at you: ‘you must fight to survive!’  This is not a place for the timid.  Life is here to be lived.  Fast.  This slow, bumbling Bunbury train doesn’t really fit in; trundling gently through the sultry afternoon heat.  No.  If you want to get by here, you live life fully.  You play, you party.  You join your beach-bronzed mates at the surf club, or for a beer by the pool.  And if you do get burnt, you bounce back quickly with a fresh covering of green when the next rains come.