Here and now, a deer disappears over the distant mound. Three ducks peacefully paddle, winding their way ahead of the flowing waterfall gently calling me towards the steep terrain of my nightmares.
We are a nation of Indigenous peoples and immigrants, a new world with an ancient past, a land of many melodies
Now here I am, in a country town, in a pub of good spirit, in a song without end, in the company of people content to play their role, with the ghost of Walt Whitman hovering at my side.
Greensleeves is the sound of anticipation. The sound of promise and summer. The sound of hot days. The sound of ice-cream on your tongue, melting over your fingers, dripping onto your toes.
Every morning I ride a few minutes to my school crossing and park my bicycle under my Detectorists tree.
For a time I was transported to a place that's hard to explain. It was sublime, an experience one might call spiritual. Confirming even an atheist can be touched by the unknown.
The next thing I knew I was on the ground. A paramedic was talking to me. I didn’t know what they were saying.
When I was 10, my aunty moved from that house and we no longer had the uncle with the big red truck. There was no more chipped white paint and no more tyre swing.
Our flight back to London is delayed by a day, and we battle with a lecturer who threatens to fail us for missing a mandatory class. I don't know where the set-list we collected lives now.
A quarter of a century later, I hear this song again, rising spontaneously through the eucalypts.