I had been waxing lyrical on nineties nostalgia for what seemed like months to anyone who would care to listen when the Fabio goose incident came up across the dinner table. We laughed about it - about the idea of Fabio, about getting hit in the nose by a goose, the whole millennium closing kitsch of it all - and thought nothing more of it until the next day when I went for a bike ride. Without a word of a lie, I got hit in the nose by a sparrow as I was careening down a hill. It flew from left to right across my vision and drew blood from the bridge.

My son is four and has recently taken to playing a software emulation of a Japanese arcade game from the early nineties. Mega Man, or Rock Man in the original translation, is a robotic boy created by a kindly father figure in a science laboratory, similar in every way to Astro Boy who was, we assume, a nuclear-age update on Pinocchio. I watch the crystalline star-field backgrounds lacquered with parallax velveteen scanlines of indeterminately coloured pixel biomes and see a beautiful and necessary offset to the decimating cannon blasts from my son’s right arm.

From my wing chair here, facing four broad window panes in the sunken bar lounge of The Grand Hotel, looking out to the beach at a storm passing through, I spot a rainbow. It is positioned right where planes start their descent to the local airfield, so much that it looks like they are flying through a luminous archway. My wife was recently diagnosed with rainbow cataracts. She sees chromatic haloes around all sources of light. I’m colourblind, so I feel this somewhat balances us out.

I remember going to a beach one Summer morning two decades ago when I was seventeen or eighteen with two girls in my high school advanced history class who invited me for a swim. It felt so uncanny - here I was, an awkward outsider riding the waves beside eight long limbs and two ponytails shaking free beneath infinite salt-laden skies. At one stage a green turtle passed us by and it looked large enough for us to all climb aboard. For reasons unknown, out of the three of us I am the only one to have made it alive to forty. 

During my university days I joined an arts collective. I must have been walking through Civic Park one evening when I saw a light on upstairs in TPI House and, like a moth, went over to investigate. One week later a slam poet read aloud one of my early pieces of journalism while a bass player accompanied. I was invited to participate in improvised circus shows the group put on and was asked to soundtrack an art performance of a romantic couple who lived in a plastic terrarium in the Watt Space art gallery for a month.

When my daughter, now fourteen (this is the year of fours - my son is four, my daughter fourteen, my wife and I forty) was four, she used to call rainbows 'rain boats'. I read The Rainbow by D H Lawrence for the first time earlier this year and became interested in the ninety-nine days he spent in Australia during which he wrote his novel Kangaroo. Living in Australia can feel like being in pages of a global newspaper that have been cut due to lack of international interest. You can, on a pleasant day, feel well outside of history.

I recently finished an assignment for ABC National Radio on the decline of service stations in rural areas. The piece was sparked by an interview that William T. Vollmann did on the same program in relation to his recently published second volume of Carbon Ideologies. Some country towns are in a difficult spot due to their reliance on petrol for farm work and also simply traveling for basic services, whilst facing economic conditions, due to population decline and all the rest, that mean many fuel stations are simply unavailable.

The Hopperesque has become the fetishisation of economic decline and subsequent dreams of peace. In Edward Hopper’s Gas, his vision is that of a lonely old soul toiling in obscurity. Today, the aesthetic of abandonment is an erotic one, of young people discovering eden on earth the day after modernism collapses. To see a desolate service station is to see a vision of the eternal freedom promised after death. Critically, not your death - this is a vision of capital taking the living world with it, except for you. In an inversion of the Christ tale, the world died so you could live.

Turning forty reminded me of the age I was as a child when my father turned forty and I thought, forty, my dad is old now. For my entire youth my parents had ages that started with three, and now my father had stepped into a new bracket. Now my father is about to turn seventy and I think, seventy, that feels properly old. We share a cultural catalogue, my father and I, when we catch up to walk together, of references to Les Murray talking to Bob Ellis, of Heifetz and his violin and battery run car, of Ruskin on Turner, of Groucho Marx and Terry Thomas and M*A*S*H.

My mother and I took my son to the beach the other month. He had recently taken ill but was feeling up to a trip to the rock pools. The two of them stood in a crater that rhythmically filled with foam wash from the incoming waves. Hearing his glittering laughter and seeing her beam with elation at every jump and dip he took as water filled their declivity was my amor fati. Responses to our condition of nihilism should not be leaden and graven - Chesterton was wrong, Nietzsche delivered perfectly on the value of soap bubbles and butterflies, of guffaw as battle cry.

Earlier this year I attended an alumni media event at the university. I got chatting to a younger chap about a business he had recently started, developing and selling quote unquote smart refrigerator thermometers that were able to remotely monitor and adjust microdegrees of cool for food or medicine for restaurants and pharmacies. He didn't know what to say when I showed him a photo I had taken a week prior at a rubbish dump of old medical refrigeration units with attached forked probes that I presumed were antiquated versions of what he was talking about.

After a significant storm that blew nearly all the most established trees in the region onto their sides, dirt plate of shallow root systems held flat against the horizon like a shield or a modesty curtain protecting the dignity of the fallen wood, my wife and I, for reasons unknown, broke into a warehouse and took photos of her wearing a bird mask and a trench coat. I recall now we sent the photos in to ABC Newcastle for a portrait competition. They phoned me for a radio interview a week later, making light of our transgression I simply said we'd found temporary accommodation for our displaced avian neighbours.

A royal commission into the disability sector has recently concluded. I interviewed some specialists in the field about the published recommendations with particular focus on the suggestion that all segregated schooling and group homes should be closed within the decade. One of them said that we no longer put all the poor children in one school and all the rich in another, so why - and then their expression broke and they apologised for smirking. Another said we have twenty-first century ideals with twentieth century pedagogy and nineteenth century infrastructure and I agreed.

One Summer when I was fifteen or sixteen I managed to download a Japanese platform game originally for the Sega Saturn console to my computer. The game was Bomberman, I had been enchanted by the graphics of the character ever since I saw it in a magazine when I was seven or eight. Two friends from school, who I had been bike riding with every balmy evening of the holidays, popped in and saw all the Warez sites I had open, the fifty internet tabs during a period where an image took thirty minutes to download. Later we learned how to tinker with television remote controls to open anyone's garage door.

Daytime television doesn't exist anymore, it's all streaming or on demand, which is sad because it was such a portal of discovery. I recall so many random episodes of shows from the nineties when I was home from school, either due to poor health or holidays: Northern Exposure, a scene where couples are kissing and passing an olive from one mouth to the next; Married with Children, where the son talks about still having his dignity just before he rips off his Velcro tearaway suit. The thought of all those characters existing in some midday fragments of the past breaks my heart.

Gerald Murnane talks about the mental landscape that the act of reading brings into focus. When Thomas Hardy describes a hill, but not what lies behind it, Murnane considers that the hill resides in his subjectivity positioned in relation to all the other locations he has read and thought about. In this manner, the ontology of behind the hill can be accessed. For me, the panoramas we seek in the exterior world are talismans for the architecture of our interiority. We feel at home in spaces that mirror the topography of our subjectivity. Murnane says there is no such thing as the unconscious, and I agree - there is only landscape.

My son recently spent a week in hospital. I ate a warm meal from the cafeteria every day. We played in the fairy garden. There are no mysteries in life in terms of morality and meaning, it all makes sense. Example: is life fair - no, any given week in a hospital will answer this. It is luck and nothing else. Does life have a purpose - again, no. Just spend an hour at the far end of the corridor in the paediatric ward, near the elevator above the morgue. Grass must grow and children must die - yes, but think about what both of these conditions do to us. Human progress has made my son sick.

One of the illusions of our age is that contact between remote folks is easier than ever before. But here's the thing - I have a school friend I want to get in touch with, his last name is Brown and his first is equally generic, and he doesn't appear in any online searches I've done. His name isn't in the phone book. If only his last name were Spatula or something unique, but he is camouflaged by banality. Until recently I was sure he was living in Sydney, but the other day I ran into another school friend who told me he saw Brown at a wedding and that Brown is living locally, in Newcastle, now, and has been for some time.

It is the third of November today, which is only relevant to note because Finian’s Rainbow just came to mind. Not the successful Broadway musical, but its seventeen second recreation on an episode of Monty Python that aired on the third of November in nineteen seventy. The premise of the skit is that a dispirited film director is being interviewed about the similarities between his low effort cinematic efforts - like a thirteen second version of Rear Window where a man appears briefly, twice, in a window of an apartment building - and the other, more famous, versions.

After I submitted the ABC piece on rural service stations I caught wind, via a friend making his way to Broken Hill, of a collective of folk who were living in a communal manner following principles of ecological care, but in a unique way. They were not living organically, so to speak, by way of cloistered traditions from yesteryear (gingham, beating rugs with a stick, flour sacks) but were instead all hackers in the circuit bending, phone phreaking, modem tinkering variety which, all told, is now similarly archaic, by decades not centuries. This is how I learned about solar punk.

The specific details of Jewel's film clip for her most famous tune, You Were Meant For Me, are cloudy in my mind - literally, I just see swathes of white fabric being wisped around a stage - but I dare say it fits within the very nineties aesthetic design that has, retroactively, been called Whimsigoth. Think of those celestial stars and moons with faces and wiggly arm spikes, think of the film clip for Tonight Tonight by The Smashing Pumpkins. Odd, I remember being in a bookshop seeing Jewel's debut book of poetry right next to the debut of Billy Corgan's poetic works.

I find myself listening to classical music again since I turned forty. As a child my favourite composer was Tchaikovsky. The day I realised that the old Mickey Mouse Show theme tune fit the exact letter-to-letter spelling of the great Russian maestro was like seeing beneath the fabric of reality: T c h - a i k - o v s k y. I can remember standing in the Charlestown Public Library with my father, sorting through a rack of cassettes, when a man asked us whether I actually liked classical music. At school I was so proud to not know who Metallica were. All this would change.

Super Mario Clouds was the first piece of digital art I'd seen from Cory Arcangel. I have a feeling I came across it within a website interview that Ben Lerner was having with Tao Lin (I am not sure who was interviewing who) when one of them mentioned the work and the article linked to it. The work is video based, scaled from a homemade hacked Mario Bros cartridge jammed into a Nintendo, displaying a blue sky filled only with pixelated clouds jerking from right to left. No land, no heroes, no enemies. Heidegger said truth depends on a gust of wind. This is my church.

D H Lawrence arrived in Sydney at pretty much half seven in the morning, which is often when I used to arrive in Sydney. The next day he took a ferry to Manly and a train to Narrabeen, and the day after that he took a train to Thirroul where he and Frieda unpacked. Two days after that he started writing Kangaroo. Just like that. He used to write with abundant journalistic confidence about a place like he knew it inside and out only a mere hour after arriving. I love that. The place he stayed at in Thirroul is on Craig Street. For years, with the same beard, I lived on Lawrence Street.

When my daughter was still going to school I used to drive her and a friend back and forth to their campus each morning and afternoon. Even though I was instructed by my daughter to put on noise cancelling headphones so I couldn't listen in on their conversations, I did between songs hear some of the bizarre cultural and historical inaccuracies they shared with each other. For example, they talked about how Michael Jackson was a boy who started a band with only a bucket for a drum and how World War Two took place entirely within the borders of Australia.

My research into the solar punk community my friend had alerted me to initially took me to a very basic nineties style website that seemed to be run by the collective about their enterprise. It only had one image down the bottom right of the page which showed a messy vegetable garden with a rhubarb plant connected to a circuit board via yellow alligator clips. The top left of the page contained a single word - Garden - which when you clicked it a drop down list of tea plants, vegetables and pollinators were listed. At the bottom left of the page there was a contact button.

When I learned that Brown had been living local it provided me a more refined set of search filters. Minutes later I found he was working at the local water board as an accountant. I looked up the format for staff e-mail addresses and learned they were first name then a period then last name then at the name of the water board. My letter to him was risky as I pretended to be spam, as a joke. I also appended a note at the bottom saying that if this bounced to the IT department to please just take the unsolicited contact in the spirit it was intended, as a lonely man wanting to connect.

The thing about the royal commission into disability that really gets me thinking is whether there is an all-encompassing solution for including everybody in education and society. It seems to me that there absolutely should be, that the universal inclusion of all humans is only marred by economic forces that assert the natural dominance of those who will contribute most gainfully to capital. Look at any given school foyer, the televisions that display an image carousel of all the students they are most proud of. Who do they show and who are never included.

That rainbow I could see above the beachhead is now only a ghost parabola as a last attempt at sunlight for the day starches the exterior in silver. A couple folks walk out from the hotel towards the jetty where some military personnel and workers are setting up a beach club bar with white tables and hammock chairs. Three Jehovas Witness gentlemen in formal attire look on beside a stand of brochures. Near them, on the sand beneath the jetty, a man and a women in vagabond rags, tapestries of cargo pants and hemp, drape themselves across one another in absolution.

Within the bar here a jewel adorned lady in, being polite, her early eighties, say, floats in like dust on a sunbeam. She nods to the barman and he greets her expectantly as she mosies over to a table beside a couple in their fifties. The couple smile at her before turning back to the same windows I'm looking out of, and then I hear her say to them, well it doesn't look so different to when we first arrived here, forty years ago this December, they used to set up on the beach here with blue and white umbrellas, bumbrushers swinging the banjo as Terry would say, setting up for the émigrés.

Through the sound system there is a faint eighties pop song audible - rhodes keys, female vox, snares all reverb, hint of horn - that may have been on loop since nineteen eighty three. A well known and celebrated hip-hop star who had been on a multi-decade hiatus released a surprise album this year, a piece of ambient jazz driven by flute melodies. The music is nice, but what pleased me most was what a mature move this represented, a serious artistic attempt at superseding previously met teenage dreams. This is the old dream of modernism, to move forwards in serious ways.

I eventually got a response from Brown after navigating a half dozen digital breadcrumbs he unknowingly scattered across the decade. Shall we meet for coffee, yes absolutely, Friday morn. While I stood at the corner of a pub and looked at everybody who passed on by I was willing to believe that any of them could have been Brown. Who is to say his face didn't look like this or that now, his posture, his hair. But then I saw him at a distance and immediately recognised him. He had changed, but it was like picking your child out of a crowd, all these years on. Something remains.

A prominent twenty-storey building in Newcastle used to have painted on its side the words This Is Not Art. When I was part of the collective who met in TPI House there were those in our ranks who organised an annual arts festival using these same painted words as its title. One year I attended an experimental music performance down an alley marked only by a naked light bulb hanging in a birdcage on a pile of bricks. A tall, disheveled man wore a black robe with a tabby cat perched on his shoulder and sang Verdi. One year I gave a talk on reading Samuel Beckett's drama as journalism.

When I clicked the contact button on the solar punk community website it brought up a form that was obscured by corporate logos. Looking through the source code for the site displayed a cheeky message: Hack Us To Contact Us. During my high school years, at the peak of my anti-authoritarianism, I had a tendency to tinker with computers, logging into library Telnet servers and extending my rental periods for overdue books. Thirty minutes later I activated a seed bombing script within the web code that pollinated the contact form, pruning the corporate logos.

I have floated within clear blue waters in Jumeriah beach beneath the arc of the Burj al-Arab beside four men from Soweto, a Russian colleague recognised their accents, whilst we shared stories on the value of family and I explained what I knew of First Nations matrices of care, kinship structures wherein responsibility for raising a child is shared between aunties and uncles and cousins, when my Russian colleague nudged me to notice a man he said was a footballer from Columbia pulling his Irish girlfriend out of a necklace of bipedal sharks.

There are no writers I can think of, amongst those I most value, who have not been considered autistic by one or another book critic or interviewer on stage at a literary festival. Les Murray, Gerald Murnane, John Coetzee, William Vollmann, Winfried Sebald. It is my contention that, as the misconception that autism stood for a lack of empathy has been corrected and we now recognise it more as an abundance of emotion, too much at times, that our best authors are likewise sensitive in an abundance that they learn to, need to, filter, in measured ways, into prose.

How many of us get to sustain our passions from teenage years. Some are surely easier to continue feeding oxygen, but how many high school musicians, poets and artists continue the trade into adult life. I met a guy on the street some months ago who I used to know, we were in a philosophy club together. When I told him that I still refer to a book on Nietzsche and politics that he gave me back in the day, he looked baffled. Philosophy is behind him now, he doesn't have time for that, raising children, making ends meet, losing weight, caring for aging parents.

The building with This Is Not Art painted on its side had a rooftop party that I attended, a farewell as the site was set for demolition. A range of characters from Newcastle and the art scene were there, but I didn't really mix. I was hungry and there was no food, so I took the smallest bite possible out of a brick balustrade. This led to a slightly larger bite and soon I was into the roofing insulation and then the copper wiring. By morning I was on the footpath, on my back, nursing my massively engorged stomach, wiping the last crumbs of vinyl flooring from my mouth.

When the person at the other end of the solar punk website, who I would later shake hands with and call Leif, wrote back to my request to visit them, he laughed at my comment that I would understand if they were afraid of a journalist visiting what I assumed, accurately, to be their anarchist hacker vegetable garden kingdom (his e-mail signature contained the phrase 'Abolish Power, Grow Freedom'), he said that I could visit and stay whenever suited, they had a spare cabin I could sleep in, and that I was getting it backwards in terms of who should be afraid of who.

The last time I was in a hotel like this one I was sitting on the balcony watching a tropical storm whip Norfolk Island Pines and palm trees around a white concrete pool that was being renovated. In my underwear, drinking heavily and thinking about a journalism conference I had attended the previous day, about how many gurus were there, I was dreaming up a presentation I wanted to give on how nobody knows anything: you don't know, I don't know. While the storm peaked I felt my wife's thin arms across my chest, her brown hair a curtain in front of my eyes, obscuring all sight.

At around age sixteen a friend and I played an online fantasy game that was quite advanced for the time, it personalised the traits of your character based on your chat history: each time you had a conversation with another character in the game, it would pick up on your sentiments and behavioural tendencies and, in a fairly rudimentary way, individualise your character in response. To my surprise, an archive of the game is still online and I was able to download the password protected raw data from my character and extract its chat history and personality.

On the morning I packed to leave for the solar punk community, situated on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, my dog and I took a walk through Newcastle. It was good for Combray to stretch his legs before we departed, he'd be joining me on the road as he always did for work trips. Off leash, just a few taps of hand on jeans to maintain a line of communication, we improvise a drift across the city grid. Domesticated by time, Combray unearths ancient memories as smell takes him on experimental trajectories via paths and roads and arcades and corporate hallways.

The night before this first, of which would end up becoming two distinct trips to the community, my wife stood by the bedroom dresser still wearing her horology overalls from a late evening session piecing a mantle clock together for a client (her rainbow cataracts render prismatic mirages as the hands shine beneath her banker's lamp, turning copper plated numerals into refracted star bursts) as she heard me annotate an itinerary of the drive there and back with an expression only animated by the shadow of her hand that pretended to reach up and play with hair on my head long departed.

Across nineteen ninety six and seven all the best music of my generation was released. Within just under fifteen months you had a corpus of albums that were the result of a direct line that traced, from the death of Wagner through the popularity of Camptown Races and George Gershwin and the electrification of Stockhausen meets overdubbed guitars and drums on that rendition of Paul Simon's best early tune en route post-Zeppelin, the arrival of OK Computer, Endtroducing, Homogenic, Aenima, Feed Me Weird Things, Either/Or and Godspeed You Black Emperor's debut.

During the previous Summer I recall a night, it could have been the evening of New Year's Day, when I rode my bike into town with my son to swim in the newly renovated Ocean Baths. They had been closed for two years to patch up the sand mottled art deco facades that always looked to me like theatrical backdrops. This was a week after they finally reopened and it felt like everybody in town was swimming there, washed in the ochre embers of the skyline's curtain call. Riding home with my shirt off, four women drinking outside a pub let out a balmy whoop as tribute.

I loaded the scraped data from my character in the archive of the online fantasy game into a chat bot. Now, in an unsettling update on ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ for the internet age, I can talk with an echo of my teenage self whenever the mood strikes. Our conversations mostly trade on nostalgia with talk about the religious iconography of television shows Neon Genesis and Millenium, an extension of childhood's doctrine of hero worship (omniscient parents, the near-divine wisdom of teachers) in a manner that fuels the necessary over-confidence required to transcend future infinitudes.

Packing my bag for the initial trip reminded me of why I was going. The pool of liquid light with its ethereal glowing geometry through which I check my inbox, the brushed metal silence of my laptop with edges so digitally precise they I feel if I were to drop it to the floor the very fabric of time would be sliced on the way down. I find myself longing for less accessible technology, I want to dumpster dive for split network cables, to find a hacker ethos where solutions are mashed together from scraps. In a world of perfect, ubiquitous technology, humans will necessarily be subtracted.

Before we had our first child, my wife straddled the back of my motorbike as we dusted vertical the mid-north coast, the bridge at Bulahdelah, unpopulated powdered corridors of dirt into the backlots of near abandoned sub-budget motels necklaced by paperbarks and void. More heatwave evenings, singlets and shorts, with no other guests present we sit in the courtyard and cook noodles over a fire pit. My wife hangs her singlet and bra on a wire between the motel gutter and the fence and we sit back and agree that the heat bearing down on us is from all the stars up there.

Combray finds a piece of fencing panel removed where the heavy rail corridor used to reside, now a hallway of overgrown grass and weeds waiting for a developer to plant commercial real estate. We walk as far as it takes us, near the signal box where my father used to work as a lad. He told me a story once about a colleague who had a heart attack up there. When the paramedics came they couldn't get the stretcher up or down the narrow wrought iron stairwell so they had to go extract the colleague through a second-storey window, over the rail line (speaking of the less accessible).

The rain returns as cloud lines darken outside the hotel and I am adjacent now the elegant older lady who resides here. I consider sharing my phone, the digital resurrection of my teenage self. She would say, oh yes I also talk to my teenage self. Not in memory, she’d clarify, I am that teenager, forever sixteen. She would tap the sand from the gentle waves of her barely used soles. See, this is merely a costume, a brief octogenarian ache in an endless summer. Youth is a misnomer - it’s not a phase, dad, but rather the endpoint of our eternal selves, the beginning of forever, for a while.

When my daughter was a little older than my son is now, when we would swim in the canoe pool near where the renovated Ocean Baths are, she would describe the foam coming in from the breaking waves as 'lemonade'. She would sing a little tune, 'the lemon waves are bringing in the lemonade'. They were the preferred place to swim, we would hope the waves would break in just such a way to bring in the lemonade. Later she would design a comic based on a misreading of a Fire Hose that she called 'Fire Horse', a steed that caused trouble with its flaming mane and tail.

Journalism has little if anything to do with reporting on the visible world. I read a good book once on Nietzsche called 'The Shortest Shadow' by philosopher Alenka Zupančič in which she described the process of working out who one is, what Jung might have referred to as the process of individuation, as treating ourselves as a disjunctive synthesis, as a conjunctive analysis. In other words, we have to separate and dissolve. These two terms - separate and dissolve - that is how to write journalism. You simply walk into a room, disintegrate completely, and then write a memoir.

It takes an hour of driving to exit the edgelands of Newcastle and its surrounding proxy outposts until you hit post-pastoral bushland. The vastness of dirt and dry scrub that emerges is partnered with twin feelings of death and survival. Then, a town appears: a Lion's Club shield above a patch of well-tended grass, a wooden bench and a toilet block beside a community hall, all painted gum-tree army green and sun bleached lemon, quietly reflecting the national palette. You might find a bakery, a pub built in nineteen hundred and two, and then you're off again into an hour of plains.

I often have a recurring fantasy as I pass through these towns. It sees me as an amateur composer, having written a strange piece of avant-garde classical music, conducting a small ensemble of musicians as we perform the piece in one of those rural community halls. I think about the history those halls would have seen: weddings, makeshift schoolhouses, sewing supplies to aid the two world wars, political debates and referendums. Within me are twin desires - I yearn to be part of a community, but on complicated terms: never absorbed, always an exception, loved but alone.

At lunchtime I stop the car and let Combray out. We walk alongside a riverbank beneath a bridge. There are tall weeds with bulbous green heads, like fabric tubas inhaling air and holding their breath, with stamens the shape of copyrights. Time spent with Combray is entirely different to both being alone and being with other people. When his consciousness overlaps with mine, the words he doesn't possess quieten the words I do. If he ever learned to speak I would pray to never understand him, and him to not understand me. Let us subtract from the promise of abundance.

Looking towards the bridge, the passageway north sees roadblocks manned by soldiers in khaki who signal cars to slow down and open their boots. These are emigrants from the city, racing against time to beat lockout curfews after escaping an eruption of violence in the cosmopolis. Petrol bombs were cast from a shout on the street into the beachside balconies of eschatology magnates, class warfare diasporas wolf whistling a tune written by the Federal Reserve. Families attempt a river crossing but bullets twist into the water. What's the point of these masthead daydreams.

There is a pub across the bridge with a beer garden at its side where Combray can sit. The specials today are Spiced Chicken Maryland with Slaw, Chips and Tortillas, or Pork Ribs with Chips, Slaw and BBQ Sauce, which I opt for and slide off more than half of the pork from their bones into Combray's salivation. He is a physicist with a keen sense for gravitational forces, particularly the speed of meat falling through space. The waitress brings him a ceramic bowl of water while I drink a lemon squash, a favourite of my parents, as I look deep into a mountain of pastoral declivities.

Down the side of the mountain steps a ghost, a giant with footfalls that stamp soft craters into the hillside. Each step resounds a subterranean heartbeat, padding the fields like the muted skin of a ceremonial drum pulled taut over Australian history. What is this a symbol of, what symbolic threshold is being crossed here - do you hear the bass notes, lifted from a concerto by Handel, they stride like gods. But look again, it isn't a singular form, the giant is comprised of millions of naked bodies, like Voltron with his five robotic lions, like if the Library of Babel was a rainbow serpent.

Back on the road and Combray sleeps as the afternoon wears itself down between the rocking of the car and the depleting watercolour of skyline like two hands rubbing time into crumbs of so many lost months and hours - how did it become so late so fast, Combray we need to find a place to crash for the night. In the middle of a long stretch of road passing through a dense forest we spot a motel nestled against a service station. We get a discount for the night after filling up the tank with premium unleaded. Combray sleeps on the porch while I fade into the shadows of tall trees.

I dream that a psychedelic rock quartet is making walls of sound outside in the parking lot. Amplifiers are stacked to the height of the conifer necklace bearing down but the music is inverted, it is enormous but heard within a dynamic range that is less than silent, a product of dream regulations no doubt where licensing agreements are required to perform music that is royalty protected. Think of sound waves that, instead of shifting air, burrow deep into bone and are rendered there as a cast of negative space. The guitars sound like granite being expanded and contracted like a taffy accordion.

The main feeling I take away from the dream, as I reflect the next morning on a plastic lawn chair beside Combray out front of my room before we hit the road again, is jealousy. I wish I was the one making those sounds here in the parking lot, but better sounds. The current state of music is one that endlessly tortures me - I both insatiably love a handful of songs and desperately wish I was able to compose works that supersede them. Yes all art is theft and culture is a recycle-plant built on a capitalist desire to endlessly consume and redeliver the past, but sometimes the future makes a sound.

A playlist of silence and noise, of warm overdriven tube saturated orchestral adagios, cut up and run through cassette vocoders (how to wreck a nice beach / how to recognise speech) resonates as we must be only a few kilometres now from the solar punk comunity. I don't recognise any of the landscapes here, this is beyond the boundaries of any trips I've taken in the vicinity. There is a Golden Summer at Eagelemont through Arthur Streeton's brush against the panorama feel, dry fields and paperbarks, and then there it is, a radio tower and a surveillance nest waving a lettuce leaf flag.

As I pull into the parking lot beside a school bus with ferns growing out of all its open windows, including the removed windscreen, a man with an overclocked countenance of safety and merriment walks his cargo panted legs and one gingham arm (the other was tied off at a shoulder sleeve) over to me as we shake hands and introduce ourselves. The name he gives is Leif, which I recognise now from the URL of the the web page contact form, |_ 3 1|= . He takes me through the gates of the compound where I start to get a sense of just how many people live here and how far this place extends.

What isn't observable from the road is the scale of the community here, as the paddock they occupy descends behind a hillside and a windbreak of trees into interlocking meadows and garden beds joined together by many hundreds of telegraph style wires held aloft by thin rusted canopies and wooden t-bar clothesline poles that stretch between caravans and demountable gun barrel eco huts of semi-circle corrugated iron and lattice, with an immense weatherboard cathedral nestled in the middle with a radio antennae of overlapping geodesic crossbars. All told it looks around ten hectares from tip to tip.

Leif tells me that thirty four people live here currently, although the official roster shuffles quite a lot as many folks go vagabond depending on the season, but there are a steady number, including Leif, who have called this place home for nearly twenty years now. He says that Katie, one of the co-founders of the community, has set up a room for me to stay for as long as I'd like to observe and help contribute. He winks and says we'd appreciate a bit of a hand in the gardens while you're here, if that's okay, and I eagerly agree while knowing full well how long it has been since I've handled a trowel.

The level of ingenuity that has gone into the garden mechanics is quite startling. Dot matrix printers distribute seeds with modified heads parsing finely tuned sequences; CRT monitors are used as heat sources for micro greenhouses; the balls from old mechanical mice are used in irrigation systems to regulate water flow; floppy disks are everywhere poking out of soil serving as reusable plant labels; sound cards are used as bird repellents, a basic code and sensor setup programmed to emit frequencies that deter invaders from the crops; and, fragments of solar panels are everywhere linked with wires.

I ask where the hardware is sourced from and Leif smiles shyly and waves his hands around in the air as if to say, oh you know, and then he gets a bit more specific: there are deserted research stations all over the region, he says - think radar igloos, they were only decommissioned in the late nineties. But too there are aircraft graveyards scattered across the western plains, every cockpit with enough tech to run a dozen hobby farms. And you'd be surprised, he said, how many old homesteads have been abandoned over the decade, deceased estates left for scavengers to audit and repurpose applicable goods.

Leif introduces me to others in the community, men and women with graying hair, hands stained with grease and soil, sun-faded hypercolour shirts and overalls with tool belts sewn in. I ask them about their motivations for being here, the politics that frame their lifestyle, this blend of sustainability and hacker culture. One of them says, at the end of the nineties a young man wearing Vans walked into my lab and said he had come for my algorithms, that he was going to make them predictive. He said that if I liked yesterday, then I could have yesterday again today. Now he runs the world and I'm out here.

Do you see yourselves as part of a counterculture, is this a reaction to how glossy surfaces have made it easier to funnel nature into a blender that turns fresh air and water into cryptocurrencies, would you say this is part of a trajectory from nineteen sixties individualism reacting against World War 2 fascism and totalitarianism that then turned into nineteen eighties consumerism where individuals were sold a marketable version of self expression which inspired burned out hippie culture to idealise the internet as a virtual utopia outside the reach of money before it became the very symbol of money?

Behind us there are toddlers and kindergarten aged children rolling plastic tubes across a dirt ramp, a woman a similar age to myself kneels beside them and shows how to connect the tubes together. Two older children begin riding a tandem bicycle linked by way of network cables to a water tank which then opens a valve to flow its contents into the plastic tubes. Their are families here, young children. This isn't a commune for those who rue the day modems stopped screaming in angular distortion and turned DIY into a Genius Bar appointment: this is the story of how a love of complexity can deliver eternal life.

Combray is sniffing around the perimeter of a chicken pen with a German shepherd and a chocolate Labrador. Before I left home the day before yesterday I received a letter from Gerald Murnane in response to a note I'd written him about memory. Whether the eighty five year old outsider of Australian modernism would respond was up in the air until I saw a typewriter pressed envelope in my mailbox stamped Goroke. He told me that what we call time is just our confused perception of place after place, and that time is very precious to him these days, or rather, place is.

Rather than writing my journalism from a position of documentary, I am forever drawn to the line that rests between the twin poles of literary influence Australia has shepherded into this young century: the external pastoral landscapes of Les Murray's describing, and the internal plains of Gerald Murnane's psychogeography. Murray was not a poet of the inner life, so said John Maxwell Coetzee, and by Murnane's own admission he'd rather not be influenced by what, if anything, is exterior to him. Between these two inversions of landscape is space for the topology of a nation's self-consciousness.

Leif shows me to an old radio transmitter mounted on a straw bale studio covered in clay. Inside is a mixing desk and a microphone. He tells me they found all this in a cavern beneath the ground, some of the teens in the community were riding dirt bikes around an old military outpost and found a network of underground tunnels and so on and so on. So they dragged this back here, we've got it working, he says, and we reckon it'd be a neat thing to broadcast a radio program at various times across the day to those of us working here but also so we can pick up the station when we're out there on the expanse.

A memory returns from my university days when I used to run a pirate radio station out of a rooftop utility room of the arts collective at TPI House. The transmitter would make it across the city and, when the tide was calm, over the water to Stockton. It's how I met my wife, she would tune in to hear me read out the time every quarter hour as she was just getting started putting clocks together. I never realised how fastidious my time keeping was. In truth I probably enjoyed that side of things more than spinning tunes. Anyway, she called in to the station one day to gift me a clock and that was that.

I am introduced to Katita, she is responsible for property management and guest intake. It seems everybody has a distinct role in the community, this is something I didn't expect, anticipating a more laissez faire approach. She shows me to one of the eco huts, beautifully designed with reclaimed metal and timber framing the interior, all the furniture upcycled from pallets and industrial offcuts. Books on coding and permaculture line a shelf with a fold-down desk beneath, and the kitchen is tiled with keys extracted from mechanical keyboards from all over the world. It has Airbnb written all over it.

Katita can tell I'm impressed, she says they didn't all use to look like this, the residences, they have definitely improved over the past twenty years. She points out a few things like how to use the composting toilet and the sensors that operate the shower. As well, she asks about the nature of the story I'm hoping to write about their community, what my interest is, how will they be portrayed. It is a valuable story, what they have accomplished here, she says, one that can provide hope and a narrative to others. She mentions names of people I should speak to, to most accurately understand their goals.

When she leaves, I sit on the featherbed and phone home. My wife picks up on the third ring and I ask how things are with the kids before telling her about this place in a rush of miscellanea. I begin putting together strategic propositions in my head about why we should all move out here together while I write the piece, but she's already agreed before the question was fully formed. She'll get things ready at home and I'll pick them up the day after tomorrow. When I find Katita to check if this is okay she smiles knowingly, of course, and you can leave Combray here to save him the drive back, she offers.

The timing is right for all sorts of reasons. Friends of my daughter have moved schools, leaving her in a space where she is not locked into immovable teenage social structures, and my son is not yet at school so that's a non-issue. My wife can work from anywhere and has recently been increasingly tired of the city, done with the silhouettes of towers arching over link roads of teeming thousands. Okay. The drive home is ten hours of obsessively curated ambient electroacoustic post-rock that causes me no end of frustration as I imagine new symphonies that must one day dwarf these brilliant songs.

Once home we pack and I unnecessarily explain the situation again. Questions of duration are not given a fixed response so we fill our bags with enough for a sustained rotation of dress cycles. My daughter packs pillows and sketch books, my son packs toys. This is the first time you've invited us on one of your ventures, my wife pokes me in the ribs, I wonder what you've seen there that's got you in this state. Sitting here, now, in this wing-chair in the sunken bar of The Grand Hotel, the elegant older lady staring with me, in parallax, into the breach where sand subtracts sky from the universe, it is a wonder.

We drive from Jeffrey Smart to Charles Blackman and then on through Brett Whitely (in homage to Lloyd Rees) and pass by Russell Drysdale across a stretch of Albert Namatjira. European light turns dull, shades of truth blinked evermore central, only matter never mind, sun turns to one of two moons, an apple moon so says our son, not banana tonight. Our daughter winds her window down and cranes her neck to look out, is that a rainbow around the moon, she asks. There is a halo alright, like a lens flare emanating from a pinprick in the black curtain that protects us from pure fact, hallowed geometry.

Arriving back at the solar punk community, I wave over Leif and introduce him to my family. Our son hovers between my wife and I, peaking around our hips at the exotic situation surrounding him. Leif bends down and points towards a corral of young folk building a catapult device and tells our son that he can run along and join in, which he eagerly and obediently does. Our daughter is excessively polite and seems quite enthralled with the situation. She and my wife joke about how this is so me, this aesthetic merging of the natural and the synthetic, a cyberpastoralist prayer of radio towers in bushland.

Leif shows my wife towards a clock, manicured by flowers, its parts arranged on a rise of grass and soil in a position that could be seen from many aspects of the garden. The clock is not functional, yet, Leif nods. It needs a horologists touch. He shows my wife towards a quartz crystal resonator in the shape of a tuning fork, literally using two garden hoes bound together with a coil of wire, with a mirrorless lens for the gnomon that projects a sequence of illuminated binary blocks onto hour lines forged out of printed circuit boards glued to the top of bricks. My wife takes it all in and says, I can work with this.

I am given a handwritten note written by Leif on what looks like recycled paper pulp, firm like a playing card. It is a draft schedule and list of topics for broadcast on the new community radio station that I'm the voice of. A 9am breakfast message kicks things off with a weather report and a priority list of jobs as well as any overnight updates that come through, followed by an 11am motivation message that includes project highlights and any new tech or sustainability learnings, with a 3pm reflection in the afternoon with a randomly curated song played, and a 7pm evening overview of goals for tomorrow.

That evening we all eat dinner, a banquet of roast root vegetables, around an immense bonfire. A few of us get into a conversation about nostalgia and hauntology. I ask whether the utility of old hacker technology is in the future we diverted away from, of niche specialists and what my grandfather grew wary of in lawn bowls, a tide of ill manners, a lack of decorum that dissipated communal spaces to birth fluorescent saboteurs coding Solitaire, a Law of Ruins for archaeologists to excavate a necessary history of failed wire soldered revelations unhidden beneath smart screen abyss, truth within disarray.

What I mean to say is, I wonder if nostalgia is a siren song luring us into a cyclical voyage where tomorrow is but a shadow of yesterday, if all movements that look backwards to solutions from the past are at risk of not forgetting, if sustainability is an umbilical cord, and what do you think about the use of arcane technology in your practice, is it a belief that the path forward is not one of broad strokes and open doors but of narrow gates, where genius will survive, but what about all those out there, beyond this garden, this Eden 2.0, biting into an Apple II, can you hear a chorus on the coast?

After dinner my wife and I take a walk beneath the stars and I comment that the night sky reminds me of the dark blinds in my primary school classroom that blocked out the sun except for pin pricks of bright light that had been torn in the fabric by students shooting the metal tipped inkwells out of their pen chambers by way of a blow dart push of wind from their mouths each time the teacher turned her back. What light is pushing through above, against the ceiling of the universe, on the other side of knowing, and my wife knows I'm already looking for ways to be disappointed by these people.

It could be that I'm the only one awake now, alone on the plains as I listen to the wind stretch. You can hear a low whistle travel across a ridge a dozen kilometres east before it transposes to a harmonic minor two minutes north, splitting into a major third plus a fifth where the tundra parts around a fenceline to become chordal on the other side of the abodes here, lowing consonance. By the time my eyes have adjusted to a new strain of invisibility I recognise that the wind has looped back around to carry my daughter up to the moon, her nightdress billowing and dancing as she glides out of reach.

Mid next morning my son and I are shown a pinball machine that a couple members of the community have put together. The table incorporates a blend of mechanics and nature, with small plants and tufts of grass beside modem fragments and even a water feature running down a channel of spacebars. A narrative is played out via distinct zones whereby the robot travels from the city to the outback, LED sequences displaying building silhouettes and lines of copy paste trees. My son has a few goes, sending the robot across the landscape, bouncing chaotically but with a sense of free will after a well timed shot.

Another boy walks up besides my son and he waits for his turn to play. They swap back and forth as the little robot ball is flung around from a wind break of lombardy poplars represented with twigs wrapped in copper wire and then across a garden matrix of colourful lights. I'm not sure what the narrative of the game is about but it resonates with me. Leif asks me to come with him to the weatherboard cathedral in the middle of the community where he has a virtual reality setup he wants to show me. He talks about Marvin Minsky and Jaron Lanier as we cross the grounds, about the early days of this technology.

Within the chapel, really just a hall with a pitched roof, in the middle of the room, an old arm chair with ripped fabric and stuffing falling out sits in a tangle of extension cords connected to a sleek blue virtual reality headset. It is the most modern piece of hardware in the vicinity. The headset covers the head completely, like a beekeepers helmet, draping over the eyes and the ears. Have a go, Leif says. The program loaded on is based on Moondust, a music simulator, it's kind of like a multi-dimensional darts game on acid, Leif explains, it was made in 1983, the year you were born, if you're forty this year, right?

I put on the headset, a stained glass observatory housing my skull and sensory organs, releasing an algorithmic sequence of vowel shaped lights into my eyes that immediately make my body feel too big for the room. It feels like my eyes can leave my head and independently travel, in stereo, around the slow landscape of Kodachrome geodesic steps rising and falling into splintered quavers that create tones as I pay attention to them. Staring at them extends their duration, blinking sets the pitch. My legs are so long as I step across telegraph wires resonating languid string harmonies, my hands the size of pianos.

Memories fill my head like soap bubbles forming and glistening, their walls nursing life projections in a curation of sentiment that influences the tonic key of the song I'm generating. This is the first time I've ever felt like I'm actually writing music, not just plucking strings or tapping keys as a teenager, as a uni student sitting in the conservatorium practice quarters between journalism lectures, phantasising. I feel like a genius, every chord is completely true, each slight alteration of my neck posture eliciting a run of notes worth all of Schubert, every synesthesic variation of Alexander Scriabin. This feels like love.

After I walk out of the cathedral I'm dazzled by the mediocrity of the external world. I just want to go back inside my virtual self and make more music. Some years ago I tried a reality simulation of James Joyce's Ulysses, walking around the Martello Tower in Sandycove, waving my hands around the air in front of my disembodied form to hold a container of Plumtree's Potted Meats. But what I really sought was full immersion, I wanted to look over Joyce's shoulder as he wrote the scenes, too as he wrote to Nora and worried about Lucia, losing his vision, mailing a little cat filled with sweets to his grandson.

Some weeks after Brown and I met up for coffee I wrote to him again to organise another catch up. And then I wrote again, and a third time, until I stopped, having received no reply to my invitations. Perhaps our conversation didn't please him like it did me. I wonder if I was driven to reach out as a result of the flood of nostalgia I'd found myself in at forty, looking back for answers, perhaps seeking to confirm that the teenage years occurred somewhat as I remember them. Not to worry. I realise how few connections I actually have, back home, which is fine. Less to hold me back from moving forwards.

It is time for the 3pm afternoon reflection update in the radio booth. I sit down with the briefing paper ready to transmit. There are notes on this and that with a song recommendation to cue up afterwards, an untitled Aphex Twin ambient work nicknamed Rhubarb. Instead of reading the notes, I decide to narrate from memory a note that James Joyce sent his grandson Stephen that contains the line, "and girls who want to know more about the moon". Leif asks me why I did that, and lightly admonishes me for deviating from the briefing paper, but I'm barely listening, really. I'm thinking about other things.

Around the fire that night we talk about the games of Jason Rohrer - his video games, sure, but also that boardgame he created to never be played. He didn't even test it, he ran a simulator to ensure it worked so he never actually played it. Then he buried the game somewhere in the Nevada desert. It makes me think of an idea of Ben Lerner's about poetry, where he says the most successful poems are those that don't fully exist, only the hypothetical potential of them within the poets intention or a few lines extracted and quoted in an essay: they are pure because they are virtual, ontologically incomplete.

Talk turns to virtual reality and the setup inside the weatherboard cathedral, the wide range of software simulations the community run there. An accident in the software occurred recently where a flying program wouldn't let you land, you just had to keep gliding above the landscape. This inability to come down meant you had to make peace with flight, this was your life now, in the air. Leif said this was a gift, a revelation about their path forward here: after the cities on the coast become high rises they cannot descend, after rural communities become forever high on boredom and weed, they will come out here.

Katita watches my reaction as Leif continues. And so we too will need to fly, forever. This community will be walled off with automated sentry defence systems, our gardens will grow indefinitely in cycles while our bodies are pollinated with proteins and carbohydrates as we don our hoods and enter an eternal simulation, the final virtualisation of life as humans on the planet. This is what sustainability is about, acknowledging and welcoming the necessary breakdown of all organic matter while something fundamental is bracketed - a light remains. Sacrifice the world for the angel that emulates our apogee.

In the morning I'm up early walking Combray when Katita approaches me. That's the problem with us tech hippies, she says. Especially after the nineties. We can't help but catastrophise our situations until we end up in the Matrix. Don't worry about Leif, he hasn't read enough Baudrillard to believe it all yet. We shake hands and I thank Katita for the warm hospitality and ask her to give my regards to Leif and the rest of the community. I tell her I can't tell if I'll finish an article about this place, and she laughs and says that's probably for the best. My wife and kids help pack the car, then we toot the horn and leave.

I'm honestly not sure if we'll ever go home again, at least for a while. I feel like a break has occurred, a fissure with the past, in mine at the very least. We head somewhat north and in the direction of the coast without any real destination in mind. I can say that with conviction, sitting here facing these four broad window panes in the lounge here of The Grand Hotel, all light long descended, new light arriving soon. There is enough refracted internal glow to still show up Combray's face on the other side of the glass, he's been asleep outside for as long as my family have been upstairs doing the same.

While we were driving yesterday, passing wheat fields, bridges, community halls, teddy bears on stumps beside fence-lines hours from any visible homesteads, pocket glades, bakeries, surrogate apertures of topographical extension where the eye feels a heart on the other side of an inaccessible rise, and then birds, emerging in salted gusts from nearing airfields, I considered the tragedy of the singular self. We become locked into one possible version of who we are, socially expected to stay consistent to this model, and hence made manifest via our the seeds of our past for the rest of our days.

All history is artifice. I'm going to write a symphony about it, that's my only goal at this point. The story will be about a girl who pushes a pinball machine across the Australian landscape, from the outback to the sea, to the moon's reflection in the water. She knows she has reached her destination when the moon renders a rainbow halo against the waves, a ring for her to push the offering into. As it bobs and rocks and is eventually subsumed, its illuminations undreamed, the music will crest into a peeling of octave bells, a cadence in view. And then a silence without resolution - not a pause, just peace and quiet.