There’s nothing in the red center of Australia.

If by nothing you mean echos of endless wide spaces and wide sky that holds the world together like an eternal ribbon of Australian blue around a package of rainbow colours that can only be unwrapped slowly.

Beneath the thin veneer of “nothing” are layers of something stunningly, historically, culturally, naturally, creatively beautiful.

• The earth is simultaneously desert-hard and sand-silt soft, as if the entire surface was sifted through a flour sieve.
• “Red” is not the right word. I’m not sure there is a right word.  The soil is a particular shade of burnt sienna that Crayola never thought of.
• “Green” runs the gamut from dusty sage, almost grey, through every subtlety of Mediterranean olive, to garish lime. There is plant life everywhere, even where it seems there is not.
• Where there are trees, they are black and gnarled; an aboriginal crone’s hand reaching out of the parched soil, grasping desperately at the sky, begging for water.

There’s nothing in the red center of Australia.

Except life in unexpected places:

• Lizards, big and small. Under rocks, in the shade, waddling awkwardly through the camp kitchen, picking at scraps.
• Great big, tick shaped beetles, huddled beneath pieces of curling bark on the trunk of a tree.
• Snakes (even though I don’t like them)
• Enormous, Wedge-tailed eagles whirling overhead, crouched over road-kill-a-roos, perched majestically on bare branches.
• Dusty children perched on piles of old rubber tires on turn offs to dirt roads leading nowhere.
• Flies; god, the flies.
• Wildflowers, in white and yellow, the tiniest things, blooming in a blooming desert! Against all odds, laughing at the sun.
• Heat is a living thing, dancing in an iridescent ball gown to music only she can hear.

There is nothing in the red center of Australia.

Except the beating heart of a continent:

• Dirt the colour of dried blood.
• A rock, like an enormous, petrified heart jutting out of the earth.
• I can hear the heartbeat, if I stand still, in the pounding of my own blood at my temples, agitated by the incredible heat, the searing sun, the blinding reflections.

At night, the “nothing” sings.

• Insect songs, celebrating relief from another day’s heat.
• Star songs, sung for thousands of years over sleeping souls by watchful guardians.
• The drumbeat of the darkness.
• The long, low hum of the moon; perhaps it’s echo inspired the didgeridoo.
• The grass whispers behind the melody, wind through long, feathery reeds.
• It’s a lullaby.

There’s nothing in the red center of Australia.

Unless you take the time to look.