To the squadrons of mossies, her naked curves glistening under the fluorescence must have made them think they were about to feast on Lancelin’s tribute to Venus de Milo, but instead of an open clam she had left the door of her shower cubicle open as she dried herself in the open space of the caravan park’s rundown women’s amenities block.

“Which one is she?” I asked Kel, as I studied the small van park from Florence’s windows.

“I can’t see her,” Kel replied. “In fact, I never see her unless I’m in the toilets.”

“The first time I saw her, she came into the toilet while I was putting my makeup on. She said hello, and it’s not uncommon for women to greet other women in the toilet, but there was a weirdness to it. It was too long a hello, if that makes sense.”

“There was another woman in there too, older than me, and as she went to leave she stopped in the doorway and just stared at me.”

“Like you were turning her on?”

“No, it wasn’t warm, like the other woman. This was like I was being evaluated.”

“But the next time I was in there, the nicer one was in the cubicle having a shower, but the door was wide open.”

“You women do that?”

“Oh no, no no… Not as a rule. And my door, that is always locked. But there I was at the mirror doing my thang, and I noticed that I could see her lingerie hanging up. You know, bras and panties on the hooks.”

“So you saw her naked then?”

“Oh no. I finished doing my face and I left.”

The caravan park had missed the upgrade most van parks we sometimes stayed at had received. Modern toilets, codes to get in everywhere, wifi, a pool, well-decked-out laundries and laminated rules stuck on all the communal walls. And all of this justified them raising their prices. This park didn’t even have a camp kitchen, but in modern-day Australia, it was cheap.

Located on the edge of the seaside town, it looked like a remote, sandy filter that was capturing those on the way down and suspending them here before they became homeless, went into care or died.

Next to us was a tiny abandoned HiAce van. Decorated by rust, it was missing windows but still connected to power. I wondered, every time I walked past it, why the owner of the park would let such a fire risk be.

But today, since we were packing up to leave, and since Kel was in the shower, I decided to take a photo of the van. It was only then that I noticed there was a figure inside. A man.

This was Glen.

He had a Worzel Gummidge hairdo and no meat on his bones, though his left forearm had a vibrant green tattoo that he kept gently rubbing with his other hand as though it was new and valuable.

When I asked him about it, he told me that when he’d been twenty-eight, and he was sixty now, he had been trapped in a car accident, unconscious, and before some good Samaritan had managed to pull him free he had been severely burnt. But you couldn’t see those scars now for the beauty of this tattoo.

He’d lived here, in this van, for seven years. He was a chippy by trade and still did a few cash jobs here and there.

“It’s good here,” he said. “I can leave my van unlocked and go to the pub and when I come back nothing is touched.”

He went on to tell me that his parents were both dead, and after sharing his inheritance with his grown kids, he had bought this second-hand van and moved here.

He agreed to a photo, but we didn’t have time for a recorded interview.

In leaving I asked him what he thought of the current state of the country.

“Too many migrants,” he said. “There’s no place left for us anymore.”

Back at the bus I unplugged the power and filled her water tanks, then checked all the drawers were locked before starting her up.

She’s an old bus, 1987, and her reconditioned engine has well over half a million kilometres on it.

But here she was, starting the first time, and after her morning cough of diesel smoke had dissipated she was purring away, as excited to be on the road as we were.

I had decided, on this trip, to just try to see and record what I can actually see and observe. We live in a world of filters: left lens, right lens, all looking for evidence to bolster their tribes’ facts.

But what facts were here to be seen?

Was Glen the detritus of the Lima Agreement? Content to drink as the comma of his situation moved steadily towards a full stop that would never make the news.

Would the van park be bought out, once a developer saw that there was more money to be made once you moved these nobodies on, and renovated the place to attract the cashed-up grey nomads?

For that was the only way to make money out of these places. The empathy the women had who ran the place could be seen as suicidal.

For the low rents she was charging these nineteen regulars, and all of them, like her, were white people, would have been cheap ten years ago. Now it was charity.

Not that she cared. With her great smile and huge boobs she reminded me of the small, headless carvings of a woman that archaeologists often find on prehistoric digs. The one they claimed was a symbol of the mother goddess.

When Kel came back she had more tales. This time the woman, whose name we never learned, had left her cubicle to dry herself in the communal space as Kel once again applied her face in the mirror.

She was in her early fifties, soft around the middle, had a neat bush and large pendulous breasts that danced as she publicly dried her back.

“I think she wanted you,” I said, as I threw Florence into gear.

“She wanted something,” Kel said, as once again we left.

Michael Gray Griffith

October, 2026.

AUSTRALIA’S BROKEN HEARTLANDS

THE SERIES