ballarat

I climb down from my first night in the loft bed at 6:07. I catch the 8:07 from Croydon to Southern Cross and the 9:07 from Southern Cross to Ballarat, my first country train trip since finishing work in Bendigo. Travelling to a different destination makes me feel like an unfaithful spouse.

Ballarat and all places in between are a mystery to me. I have some history here, a nightmare car trip with an over-solicitous girlfriend and a silent sexless night in the last available room at Craig’s Royal Hotel in 1975.

My good woman begins her first job as a psychologist in Australia in Deer Park, but both Deer Park and Ardeer mean nothing to me. I can find them on a Melway without resort to the index, but I have no mental picture of either.

Rockbank is a windy, gravelled platform surrounded by thistles. Someone has scrawled a C in place of the R. The one distinguishing and distinguished feature is the beautiful stark white dome of St Petka’s Serbian Orthodox church just south of the tracks. Does my good woman know of this magnificent edifice?

Melton is the growth satellite of Melbourne’s west. I have never set foot in it.

The flat thistly wasteland of Melbourne’s occident gives way to strange geography as the train climbs towards Ballarat: rocky gorges with no creeks apparent in them; a sudden panorama looking north over Gordon, a town close to but completely ignored by the railway; symmetrical knolls of some height rising from the plain like pimples on unblemished skin near Ballarat.

I’m in Ballarat for 90 minutes to meet the organisers of a new mentoring program. In two months I will train the mentors they are recruiting. After a cuppa and an hour’s chinwag I‘m escorted to an office for an online police check called Fit2Work. No stray jots or tittles here.

On the 12:12 back to the city I engross myself with Jack Irish, enjoying every page more than its predecessor. The Seinfeld theme invades the carriage. My son is calling to say he and Katie have finally scored a house to rent.

“Fantastic. I’m on the train. Talk later.” I hate the phone on the train. Seinfeld again. Sarah. “Did we have a phone appointment today?”

“No. I need you to put the legal and employment policies into one document asap.”

I promise to do it the moment I walk in the door this afternoon and the line drops out.

   

At Southern Cross I bound up the stairs, barge through the barrier, leap four stairs at a time down the moving escalator and hurl myself onto the Lilydale train as the door slides shut. I pant, but I save half an hour on a cold windy platform, cursing.

Half that half hour is lost when the train driver locks himself out of his cabin while laying out the metal carpet for someone in a motorised chair at Box Hill.

   

Rock on.