Conversation with a hermit living in the Northern Territory of Australia in the early 1960s:
Quote:
We were sitting on the steps at his shack. Around us stretched a sea of tin cans and broken rum bottles.
‘Been doing a bit of drinking?’ I asked.
‘No,’ said Mull stoically. ‘Don’t get a chance, really. Most of those bottles would be twenty years old.’
‘Ever thought of tidying the place up?’
Mull looked at me severely.
‘Tidiness,’ he said, ‘is a disease of the mind.’
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And another (seems the remote parts of Australia were crowded with hermits at this time):
Quote:
But Roger had gleaned more than mere words from all his reading. He had a taste for poetry and was fond of quoting Gray’s ‘Elegy’, Shakespeare, Omar Khayyám, and the Bible. He recognized, too, that he was an abnormal character.
‘But I’m not sub-normal,’ he added quickly. ‘Don’t run away with that idea. I used to live in towns once with other people and got on perfectly all right. But that was before I got this superiority complex – before I decided that I could find no company better than my own. I came out to the wilderness looking for peace. This here is as far as I can go. In a sense, I suppose, I’m at bay.’
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About the desert west of Alice Springs in central Australia and the people that live in it:
Quote:
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But only the Aboriginals living in their traditional manner can survive in it unaided. Unlike the white man, they make no attempt to dominate it. They do not try to tame its animals or to cultivate its sands, but to them it yields enough to keep a man’s soul in his body. In return, the Aboriginals worship it.
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-- David Attenborough,
Journeys to the Other Side of the World, 2018. From the section
"Quest Under Capricorn" first published in 1963.