Day 129 | Giles Creek, I think: a (dry) creek and distant hills, finally
51 km | zzOz total: 6,591 km
The wind has died and I made the easiest travel since I left Beegull Waterholes two weeks ago.
I confess that with the wind and ridiculously slow progress, I mean, almost exactly 10 km/hour yesterday, much of which was on a slight decline downhill, I’ve been plugging into my iPod, the trip after all is not supposed to be slow torture.
I spent much of the day listening to 15 quarter hour episodes of Anna Funder’s book, Stasiland, her search for firsthand stories from behind the Iron Curtain in the old East Germany. I originally downloaded it to make sense of the alien parts of my ex-Polish ex-partner’s mind.
I’d visited Berlin before The Wall fell, by night train from Frankfurt, sliding into that last East German station before Zoo, snow, Alsatians, heavy green uniforms, peaked caps, machine guns hanging loosely from the shoulder, basically a surreal experience for a bloke from NZ. Then passing through Checkpoint Charlie, exchanging 25 marks for the GDR supposedly worthless dosh, a wintery Sunday a poor choice for spending it, a cup of bizarrely tasting coffee, 50p I think, in the end going to a garish 4 star hotel for lunch and even then having to give plenty away, you weren’t allowed to return with any. The changing of the guard, the Altes museum with a fine exhibition of social realist painting lined up near the Pergammon treasures, I just couldn’t work out the rationale of it all.
I couldn’t work out Funder’s motivations either, she studied German at high school in Melbourne, won a few scholarships to study in Berlin and then started interviewing people from East Germany once the Wall came down: a 16 year old who put up subversive posters around town and then very nearly succeeded in getting through to West Berlin, then had her husband murdered in prison; a girl who fell in love with a foreigner and had the State intervene to stop her even getting a job despite her enormous skills; a officer in the Stasi whose job had been leaking rumours to the Western press; someone who made a weekly propaganda show for TV and still raged against the capitalist filth; a member of the most highly successful rock band that was suddenly banned and the records withdrawn from sale overnight but all re-recorded by the more pliable members of the band under a different name.
The stories are simply told, they are powerful enough to stand on their own but there’s a sense in which the players were completely ordinary before the authoritarianism of the State fell upon them.
I read her book, Stasiland, when I was in Perth but it’s with the podcast that Funder finds her real voice: it’s fragile, empathetic, but at the same time impassive, matter of fact, when she reveals what horrors she’s been told.
She won a few literary awards for the book, so confident, assured and with hindsight an easily understood examination of the mechanics and effects of an authoritarian state.
A strange sort of subject to while away the grim hours into this unceasing wind, tales of unfreedom when I have so much freedom out here. We have so many choices in life in this country, it’s relatively easy to drift into a well paid temporary job, there’s no hassles about just roaming over the landscape and at least out here camping where ever you like.
I’m happy just to blog on with my own take on the heart of this huge, underpopulated, somewhat desolate country.