The question of why the word jarosite won’t satisfy as a term describing our local ground is for me not a question of mere nomenclature or linguistics, but of metaphysics, of ceremony and ritual. Sure, jarosite, kaolin, and the rest, can suffice in a functional sense as commonly agreed upon terms, or repeating sonic agreements, but not in a deeper, more psycho-geological sense that will connect to the landscape of my/our dreams. A philosopher who claims then to have no regard for how spiritually fragile humans are, how we are pelt-less, clawless, and often clueless in the face of the mystery of death, will likewise have no understanding of why we need a ceremony and ritual to cope with that vulnerability, and why the quality of certain substances of the ground where we have lived and loved would become critically important to such ceremony and ritual. A man who insouciantly requests that his corpse be thrown over the city wall, even if he is just being an egoic provocateur, would, within the confines of that role he has defined for himself, most probably scoff at the recent increase of our yearning to connect with the hydrosonic, terraphonic language of the first peoples of this land.

For myself this yearning began as a teenager, and over the last twenty years it has become not just a key issue of my writing life, but of my life more generally. I realise now, thanks in part to the unlikely trigger provided by those roadworks last spring, that it is a yearning that actually springs from a place beyond ideas of justice, reparation, mending, preparation, responsibility or ethics. It concerns an issue that, in an Enlightenment sense, defies such rational or worthy motivations. But it is a human and creaturely yearning that itself cannot be tarmacked over. Despite Diogenes the cynic and his anarchic bitumen-thinking, I am not embarrassed to admit to my need for a richly variegated and ceremonial road to travel on. Sure, it will be messy, marbled, striated, smelly, rutted, puddled, abrasive and dusty. It will wear out our expensive chariots of steel and slow down our facile momentum. But it will be bright, vivid, recursive, season-sensitive and full of life. Well over 200 years after the European invasion of this continent, and all the sounds and sights that have been covered over as a result of it, it seems the only kind of road that will take us home.