Alice Springs

Desert Cicadas

What does it mean, to make a place home? How do you learn to love a place you have never lived before?

In the centre of the wide central deserts of Australia there is a small town, huddled along a dry sandy river bed, at the point where that river carves a gap in the orange quartzite ranges which dominate the plain.

We arrived there in Summer, with two small children, and this was our introduction to Alice Springs….

It is early morning. The sun is already baking the land. My free range children have bolted for the open air to see what they can find…..

Alice - view towards Ntaripe (Heavitree Gap).

Orange Drummer Cicada - emerging from shell. (Photo by Ausemade.com.au )

Alice Springs

The day after we moved in
the cicadas hatched in the morning,
waking into the dry flinty desert smell 
as if we had somehow triggered them,
and casting off the earth the way my children
cast off the night - a discarded shell.

It was hot - the range of rock above Ntaripe
shining orange in the sun - a one bar radiator
turning its long resistance into heat,
and I had the strangest sense that two ends of my life,
though each started somewhere different,
had in this place managed somehow to meet.

Having felt it all before I knew how transient it  was,
like the faint trace of dew I found that morning
lying in the shadow on the grass -
long and straggly and brown on the dusty gritty earth -
baked by the sun on the galvanised iron fence but moist at dawn.
I knew each day it would evaporate faster

than my words could  capture it, so I didn’t try, 
choosing instead to take this morning 
with the shutter of my eye and  print it in memory;
my head a darkroom, my life a film
dipped in developer, fixative, rinsed
then pegged up to dry - recorded imperfectly.

The cicadas were drying too. It was my children who alerted me, 
calling me out of the shell of our house
into the light and the heat and the dessicated air
of their new life in this new place on this new day
into a back yard of dead grass, bindies, and crushed quartzite
in a strange town pegged out beneath the mountain where,

like the cicadas, everything could begin again.
Though survival came first - the ants were up before us with the sun,
finding  the soft fresh vulnerable bodies with cellophane wings still unfolding
and cut crystal eyes blind to the sight of a danger they could not understand.
Already the ants had found them, swarming black across this new orange feast.
I wanted instinctively to help them - found my four year old son holding

a cicada helplessly while the ants flowed off its body, over his fingers
and up his smooth arms like a plague - like fear -
like the sharp unnecessary panic I felt at the sight.
Rushing over I brushed them from his skin and showed him how to wash them away
using a thin stream of water from the tap which splashed about his feet
onto the dry, cracked earth with a foreign liquid tongue and a soft wet spark of light.

And now the empty morning was suddenly full –
full of the smell of water on parched brown dust so sudden
it was like some explosive entry to a new dimension of sense
and even I felt new, like my son and his two year old brother,
as we worked together, collecting cicadas and washing them clean of ants
then placing them up to dry on the posts of the old tin fence.

The children of the poem. Photo taken in a dry river bed, Alice Springs.

Then there were three!

Alice Springs, back yard scene: Kids - Dirt - Action!! (Tin fence in background).