Travels in the Northern Realm

I would like to spread before you a world of rhythm and light; a world of beauty and fear; of rushing water and slow-burning dry-season fires: it is a realm where lightning strikes for nights on end, where clouds form ranks and phalanxes that stretch for hundreds of kilometres across flat plains, where rivers rush down bare savannah watercourses and enliven the dead earth. Here, in far northern Australia, that separate kingdom that reaches from the tip of the Western Australian coastline at Exmouth all the way across the Top End and the Gulf country to the narrowing mountain chains of Cape York, things go very differently from elsewhere. Not only is this region part of a rare climatic zone, often designated as the hot tropics: it is distinct, in culture and history, in look, feel and spirit, from the remainder of the continent lurking over the horizon. The north has been a place of penance, hope, dream and disillusion, and it is doubtless all those things still - but above all it is a place of different tendencies and meanings. It is not temperate, but intemperate: it is a place of excess, and scarcities, of silences and elusive, hidden keys. It has produced vast religious systems, but they are religions and cults of ritual and ceremony, rather than of doubt and faith, and the land and its look point towards a belief based solely on awe and reverence, on certainty instead of ambiguity.