Transcribed from journal written on European grid-pattern paper. Undated.

I’m on a train*. Blackness outside, the occasional light lives and dies, streaking past like a glow worm. Brown vinyl seats, crumbs from the packet of butter biscuits. My destination is Greece.

I’m on a train, FS. Destination Greece, because I want to get my passport stamped, not a good reason. And I wouldn’t mind seeing the Acropolis, blue sky, white stone buildings and olive trees; a slightly better reason. Blackness outside, I could be anywhere, although the man in the corner gives this compartment an Italian feel. He’s squat, dark, asleep.

Brown vinyl seats, crumbs from my packet of butter biscuits. “Finish sandwiches sorry,” so I paid 900 lira for the biscuits. But I don’t have a good reason for being here. To be brutally honest, I’m doing it to be “interesting”. To have been & seen & done. The stamped passport.

The man has opened his eyes. He caught me resting my head on the window. He gives me a steamy look.

Bridgette said, always get into a compartment with other women & children. Never sit alone in a compartment with a man. But it’s alright because the door is wide open, the light on, and there are women in the next compartmnet. In in the corner, resting my pad on my knee. The train is slowing down, stopping, orange lights outside. My glasses are lying brokenly on the pull-out table, beside a plastic cup.

I don’t want to reach Bari. I don’t know what will happen when I do. Im a long way from home. Where’s home? New Norcia. Mum, Dad & Debbie live there. I lived there for a while this year. But when people ask me where I’m from, I say, “Perth.”

I’m getting pissed off. I’m writing badly. I’m trying to write and nothing is happening. My mind has gone into relapse. I may have to wait till next year, when I start studying, for it to work again.

PISSED OFF PISSED OFF PISSED OFF

* Here’s a link to a train on Flickr. I Googled “train to Bari, 1982”. This would be about right.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/34147934@N07/4533403993/

The following (undated) must have been written in London, towards the end of the trip:

I want a Vegemite sandwich. Fresh brown sliced bread & margarine and vegemite spread evenly in between. The sandwich is wrapped in Glad wrap and put in the bottom of a fishing bag. The sandwich is eaten a few hours later, a mile or so from its birth, in the open air. Every bites are alternated with sips of hot strong tea; the water having been boiled over a little campfire. Actually there are 2 or even 3 rounds of the Vegemite sandwiches, and a green apple to have after.

I am, of course, hungry, with no hope of food until 7.30 tomorrow morning. So when I get back to New Norcia, one of the first things I must do is eat Vegemite sandwiches beside a campfire. Knowing that I will do this gives me something to look forward to and when I get to Perth I’ll go to a bad little cafe and have chicken with greasy chips & a cup of over-milky tea, which is what I’d like to have now, in this setting. Perth is a poor substitute for London.

I’ve just been to Brixton; rubbish in the streets, reggae, spiritual singers, “get the police off the streets”, a white man selling pro-Black papers, police everywhere on the streets, shabby

Flunked maths. Human biol was unbelievably easy. My spirits soared when I opened it up and found a great big picture of the heart, all ready to label. I’d studied and studied the heart; also the brain, and there was a diagram of the brain, too. I was so happy that I filled it all out in CAPITAL LETTERS. Some of the multiple choice was unfamiliar, but mostly it could be done by a process of elimination. For instance, “A complaint often suffered by older men is …” Well, you can cross out cancer of the cervix straight away. That’s how easy it was! We had to pick two essays from a choice of six. Most of them asked for detailed factual information, on subjects I knew little of. Then there were two very general questions concerning evolution and puberty so pounced on them and wrote exactly three pages on each. Anyway it was all very simple. After that there was a long period of waiting for five o clock with absolutely nothing to do. After one has checked and checked and looked at the clock and Michael Caunt’s back and the ceiling, one gets kinda bored. I tallied up all the points I would definitely have gained; they came to 72%. So I should be fairly right.

But maths. Didn’t even finish the stupid thing, bombed out completely on one question and probably made stupid mistakes. Can’t bare to think about it. How ill I ever get to WAIT if I go on like this? Oh well, year 12 again isn’t such a dreadful thought … oh yes it is! I want to go to WAIT!!

I’m going over in my mind the words I wrote in the English exam. Yes, 9.20am is over and now it is 3.20pm. Tracy [Scott] and I bought lunch at the Outlet and drove out to Rotary Park to eat it there. There’s new park benches now, that have new paint and new cement around their feet. We had chicken and salad sandwiches and orange juice and pavlova. The sandwiches were delicious but the pavlova, to me, tasted funny, like the smell of those floral air fresheners.

Anyway, the real air was fresh and clean and free. I stared around at the great big twisted white-trunked gum trees. The wide river bed was dry, gravely and warm. We walked out on it and found a stagnant pool that contained tiny darting fish. I gazed dreamily up the river bank, where the gum trees stretched themselves towards the centre of the dry brown bed. Long, lush green grass grows around the water pump … Tracy called, “Come and help me catch the little fishies!” So I did, but didn’t quite relish putting my hand in the blackness of the water.

She put them in her clear plastic orange juice container; they flipped and wriggled. We went home after that. I enjoyed the ride home, feeling free and mature, sitting in the front, the driver a friend, not an adult. Carnarvon whizzed past. I didn’t ever want to reach the flat.

But I’m here now and thinking about that English exam. I can hardly bare [sic] to now, even though as I walked out of the Civic Centre I was quite confident. In one essay I went right off the track – I know now, when I think about it, what should have been written in it and how it varies from what I did write! As much as I hate to go back over it, I will tell you what I wrote. The question asked whether or not an Australian culture existed. Where I should have perhaps explained Henry Lawson and Banjo Patterson I instead went off on a tangent, with Anzac Day and (how could I?) Barry Humphries. So I guess I bombed out on that rather miserably. The other question I chose was concerned with sexism in language. Perhaps I’ll get a fairly good mark for that. Perhaps. Lastly, I did the compulsory section, where we had to pick out the implications and undercurrents in a dialogue between two strangers. We also had to discuss casual conversation based on what we’d learnt from the passage and from our own experience. I did not really understand the passage. Without this basic grasp, one is doomed from the start. But I waffled on for maybe four pages; structureless, confusing and aimless waffle. How could even the most sympathetic examiner give me much of a mark for that?

But what is most painful, in remembering what I wrote, is the smarty-pantsy way in which I wrote my essays. I wrote like a know-all, in a self-satisfied kind of way. It makes me so embarrassed to think of it – why did I have to go like that? I salve the pain by remembering that the paper is marked as an anonymous number. The examiners will be marking so many nameless numbers that mine will not be of any importance. Then my mark will be attached to the name of “Tracy Sorensen” – only the mark, and not the dreadful essays I did today. The writing will not be attached to my name. But still I feel ashamed of it.

And I am tired. All the worries in the world, I wish they could go away so I could lay down and go to sleep for ever. But tomorrow there’s another exam, and all next week other exams, and on the Monday after; perhaps when it is all over I’ll be neurotic rather than relieved. And now the next thing is tomorrow, 9.20am.