Charleville Revisited: Outback Odyssey

In 1979, a shy young man fresh out of college took a job as health inspector for the Murweh Shire and drove some 750 kilometres west of Brisbane to Charleville, an outback town where he knew no one. He had spent the previous year daydreaming about the Desert Fathers of early Christianity and the enlightenment they found in solitude. Now he had his desert. It was nothing like he had imagined.Charleville Revisited is David Tuffley's account of those eighteen months, written forty years later after he drove the Warrego Highway west once more. It is part outback memoir, part spiritual reckoning, and part portrait of a Queensland town that has barely changed since the 1970s.The town is vividly drawn. There is the rent-free weatherboard house on Alfred Street, where the author spent his first night on a mattress on the floor, dreaming of a chasm he could not cross. There are monthly council meetings presided over by a grumpy Scottish Shire Clerk, and a local newspaper editor who teaches him his first hard lesson in journalistic spin.The townsfolk are unforgettable. A red-haired giant answers a complaint about the horse in his backyard by mentioning casually that his girlfriend has just stabbed him. A truck loaded with several hundred feral goats parks overnight in a suburban street. A policeman steps out of the scrub to fine a young health inspector doing 150 kilometres an hour on an empty highway. And an elderly widow across the road makes a final, shocking decision about how her life will end, one that the whole town quietly accepts.Beneath the humour runs something deeper. Isolated and lonely, the author finds the desert stripping away the comfortable layers of civilised life. He confronts the darker possibilities of human nature, asks why evil exists, and arrives at a hard-won answer about choice and responsibility. Walking alone along a pitch-black highway after a kangaroo wrecks his car, with feral pigs grunting in the darkness, he hears for a few seconds what sounds like a thousand-piece orchestra playing the sweetest music he has ever known. He has never forgotten it.On the long drives home to Brisbane, he resolves to cure his crippling shyness by building what he calls a Completely Integrated Social Interface. Then comes a fork in the road. A chance conversation with a circus publicist leads to the offer of a cadet journalist's job at Channel 9 in Brisbane, and he turns it down. That missed opportunity resurfaces decades later, when he becomes a university academic and a well-known "e;techsplainer"e; on radio and television.The final chapters recount a dream that came a year after he left Charleville. In it he journeys to a twilight desert beneath a star-filled sky, where he is greeted by his ancestors, among them his grandmother as a young woman, and is shown how ideas are seeded into sleeping minds. He wakes convinced that a loving intelligence guides everything, and that simply being alive is a great blessing.Honest, reflective and often funny, Charleville Revisited will appeal to anyone who loves the Australian outback, anyone who has ever felt like an outsider, and anyone who suspects that life's detours lead somewhere after all. It asks a question every reader will recognise: how did I get here?