'Buffel Grass: An Augmented Landscape'
Cultural Studies Review, 18: 3, 2012
One year I deliberately chose to spend time in Alice Springs during early summer. Until then I had only visited in winter, the peak tourist season. This time I flew in rather than drove and met the first wave of heat through the parting glass doors at the airport. I stayed at the usual place but was surprised to discover that it had come to life. At nightfall, the walls and windows hosted numbers of small pale geckoes lying in wait for insects, and chirruping loudly through the night. There were two that hunted from the outside glass panes of the window next to the kitchen table, and as I ate dinner I had an intimate view of their pale fawn underbellies and the sticky discs at their fingertips with which they clung to the sheer surface of glass. Their dark bulging eyes glistened as they lay in wait for the moths attracted by my kitchen light. At dusk, when I went walking through the ironwoods and hakeas, a sacred kingfisher darted through a low submerged greenish light that lingered beyond sunset.