Koala Diaries: No Human Traffic

It is a Thursday evening in Adelaide and I have just met friends for dinner and a play at the Space Theatre in our lovely Festival complex. Food was great, service fast and excellent.

The play was wonderful - a vibrant performance of Moliere’s Hypochondria with some witty modernisations of the script.  It was an absolute hoot and a great way to cheer up as our weather struggles between winter and spring - the perfect mid-week antidote to the long holiday-free work worn winter.

So I bid my friends goodnight and make my way back to the car three blocks away.

It is about 9.45 pm and the walk takes me through the marvelous old Adelaide railway station. The original central terminus was built in 1856 but in 1926 it was upgraded to a three storey grand neo-classical building, complete with a lofty domed main entrance and highly varnished timber stair rails, service desks and telephone booths. 

A substantial and gorgeous building, today its upper floors house our neon palace of the pokies, Sky City Casino.

But I remember it in its heyday.  As a school girl I took the train every day from grade six through to the end of high school.

It was a bustling hub in those days, still the central point for all interstate train travel, it was full of suitcases and tearful farewells right into the evening.

It was where I took my first rail trip to Melbourne as a 10 year old. It was where my family stood hearts in mouths as we waved my brother off to military training when he was conscripted for the Vietnam war.  It was where we hugged teenage cousins as they stopped through on their post school adventure trips around the nation.

A place to meet schoolboy sweethearts to share ice blocks on summer afternoons, somewhere to sneak that first furtive cigarette – it was where you bumped into people you knew and at the same time felt refreshingly  anonymous.

But tonight it is a like a scene from one of those day-after-the-disaster films. I count four other humans beings as my boot-clad footfall echoes off the marble floors and they don’t look too happy. They might well be zombies – but there is no tell-tale drooling or decaying flesh.

Now it is kind of spooky. I stride on, remembering the theory that confidence builds a protective wall around you. I make it up to the street and feel safer playing in the traffic as I cross North Terrace, a main perimeter road of the city, dubbed in a rather overblown fashion, our cultural boulevard.

I see no culture - only a few folk scurrying into taxis as the wind picks up. Oh yes, there is some beer drinking culture happening in one of the pubs across the road but it is all indoors under the yellow glaze of appropriately dimmed evening lighting.

I make the turn down a narrow connecting street. It is bare. There is a trail of empty beer bottles in alcoves and doorways along the street accompanied by the faint smell of urine.

I suppose what goes in must come out but I wish there were more public urinals.

I approach Hindley Street prepared for party time. This is the street of bars, broads and beer. It is notorious for its seedy nightlife and it is atypical to walk through without at least one drunk asking for money for food or a fare home.

I’ve turned the corner and …nothing.  One, two, three…five…I peer into the distance…six people.

As my footsteps ricochet along the next laneway I wonder what the news broadcast might tell me when I get to my car – has there been an earthquake, a leak of noxious gasses, a tidal wave that I missed as I laughed my way through Moliere?

I unlock the car, do a quick count and realize than in the three blocks I have walked I have seen about 25 other pedestrians on the streets of our capital.

I am thinking about London at the end of winter when I was there.

In the five week stay, there was only a single one-hour period at about 2 am when I had taken the wrong bus that I had found myself so isolated. Maybe I should have been more aware or wary but there was not a second in all the human hubbub of that city that I felt as alone as I do now.

I start the engine, Bob Dylan mewls from my CD player, the lights are on and I am off and into the company of the rest of the population who are also in their cars. It makes me feel normal again.