Jackson's Ephemera

We are on the edges of Werrima, a dream-town in remote South Australia. Here there is a desert with no red earth or Shutterstock-ready sculpted dunes. It’s instead a low expanse of brown dirt, silt-like, in which nothing can grow but tussocks of dried plain grass. This grass is the reason why this place is in fact a steppe, even though most Australians (myself included) think of it as a desert.

It’s not entirely flat. It undulates in many small mounds, maybe two metres high at most, intermittently topped by these scant and sunburnt grasses. The grasses only grow on top of the mounds, so between them lies a sprawling network of featureless tracks whose earth is so hot and fine that even animals will not tread there.

I’m doing my best to describe Australia’s Central Steppe even though I have only ever skirted its periphery. Because it sprawls for hundreds of miles in every direction without landmark, venturing more than a kilometre into the Steppe is a sure way to becoming lost and inevitably perishing as you try to find a way out.

It’s not so much the harshness of the terrain (although it is harsh) that distinguishes this place as its sprawl, its sameness. And where a desert like the Simpson is so sweeping and abstract that you would surrender to it – just lie down on those smooth, undulations of red dirt and let yourself be absorbed into the landscape – the Central Steppe’s endless, spinifex-capped hillocks give the mind just enough promise of finding a way out via the tracks that run between them, even though they are not tracks at all but absences of the mounds and grasses that surround them. So every time I find myself in the Steppe I never get very far into its network before hurrying back to Werrima, which is itself a place of thin comfort.

I’ve seen people in the Steppe. I have dim memories of watching some 4WD expedition about to set out from Werrima, but even then it’s likely that the drive traced the outskirts only. The soft sand of the Steppe bogs even the most deflated tyres and cooks engines with its heat. No, they must only have driven around its fringes, which are traversed often enough by people on stock routes, farmers, and desert gangs which lie in wait for unsuspecting travellers. I’ve watched one of these gangs attack a hapless caravan of grey nomads, shooting a German Shepherd dead before overturning the van itself and possibly killing the occupants – I cannot be sure. But even these hardened desert people venture no further than a kilometre inward.

I’m fascinated by the Steppe because it has something to do with the horizon of my own thought. A point beyond which my mind can no longer construct something out of nothing, and therefore has no choice but to replicate a simple, meaningless landscape over and over. Of course the fact that there is a horizon to one’s thought won’t come as a surprise to anybody, but it’s the land that exists beyond that horizon which is so fascinating, and so terrifying.

This land is inaccessible for the most part, and for obvious reasons. You can’t see what you don’t know. If you could see it, it would be known. So just as walking for an eternity can never get you beyond a physical horizon, its virtually impossible to transcend into the land beyond knowing.

But that’s assuming one can only traverse the terrain of the mind in a chronological, linear way; steadily walking toward the horizon of our knowledge as we learn and experience things in waking life. Yet in dreams or altered states, this sort of mental travel does not apply at all. Instead, we are transported by huge leaps into unfamiliar landscapes with zero context or understanding, so it’s entirely possible to find yourself on the other side of the horizon – in that absurd landscape which lies outside knowing.

The best analogy I can draw is from the video game Minecraft. In earlier versions, at the very far reaches of Minecraft’s infinite map, the game would reach a point where it could no longer render the geography in a meaningful way. So instead of forest and desert biomes and the like, the map would glitch into “The Far Lands” – a dense and honestly terrifying jungle of schizophrenically-generated terrain that towers into the sky and extends on forever.

The fact that this landscape existed beyond the game’s own horizon of understanding did not make it inaccessible. If you typed in the coordinates of the Far Lands, the game would still produce a landscape, albeit a meaningless one that is virtually uninhabitable. The mind has a similar capacity, and in that sense is much more powerful than we give it credit for. It contains entire landscapes where consciousness has no footprint, and which can only be accessed via chance transports during sleep or intoxication.

In these states, however, we can do little to map the terrain. The field notes we emerge with are written in a language we cannot understand, and they begin to decay as soon as we return to consciousness. Our lasting impressions are refracted through the waking logic we need to make sense of them and commit them to memory. Which is to say that they are almost always inauthentic; corrupted because we reshape them in ways that make more sense to us.

In my case, I cannot be sure that the town on the edge of the Great Australian Steppe is actually called Werrima. It is more likely that this is a mistranslation of its real name into waking language that feels familiar – a garbled corruption of Merriwa, which is the name of a Perth suburb and a regional Victorian town, the latter of which is named after a Wiradjuri word thought to mean ‘grass seeds’.

And I cannot ignore that in Werrima I saw the vine covered sandstone of an old European convent building backing onto cobbled streets, so incongruous amidst the decrepit weatherboard. I choose not to acknowledge this in favour of remembering an outback town where volatile men drink deep into the night on trash strewn verandahs, bare light bulbs burning bright overhead. A frontier settlement that feels more congruent with the hostility and heat radiating off the Central Steppe.

As for the Steppe itself, the same distorting fate has begun to fall upon it. I am searching for analogues in the treeless wastes of the Gnangara Pine Plantation and the grasslands of Kazakhstan, clinging to those images in my descriptions of this place, when in fact it resembles nowhere I have ever seen.

As I do this, the landscape itself becomes more familiar. I develop a vocabulary for what I am seeing. I venture further into the Steppe with less fear. But it’s not the same landscape, because in the process of becoming more familiar it becomes another place entirely: a known one. The horizon moves ever forward. Until one night I wake and realise that I have crossed the Central Steppe, and outside my knowing lies another landscape which I will have to discover anew.