I spent most of my twenties driving around remote Australia in a self-built tiny home, researching from the road while attempting to live a life connected to the natural world. I loved this for many reasons: one reason was that life looks very different whether you are 50 kilometres, 500 kilometres or even 5,000 kilometres down the road. Everyone’s normal is different. I was also struck by how different my experience of space from the middle of the outback was.
As a political scientist with no more sophisticated a stargazing tool than my own eyes, I couldn’t believe it the first time I truly saw the Milky Way. I must have been in my mid-twenties, some five hours from the closest town – Alice Springs – on the edge of the Western Desert, tucked up in a swag, listening to wild dingoes in the distance and watching the branches of mulga trees around me dance, backlit against the majesty of the sky. I kept wishing the pale white clouds above me would clear so I could see the stars properly.
