Noodlin'

And remembering not to forget.

After the rain. That’s the best time to go noodlin’. When the white mounds of opal dirt that lie around the opal fields have had a good drenching, when the rain has washed away the layer of dirt and dust that covers everything out that way, if it stays too long in one place – abandoned cars, abandoned tools, abandoned men. It helps if the sun is out too.

You need a tool for noodlin’. Without a tool you’re just speckin’, walking along trying to spot opal lying on the ground. But when you have a tool in hand, and this can be anything from a screwdriver to an old bone-handled butter knife, well, then you’re noodlin’, turning over the dirt looking for that sparkle of opal, waiting for the thrill of discovery to jolt your body.

I have finally been caught. Or maybe I turned myself in. I’m not sure what the difference is to be honest. Maybe it’s the difference between selling out and buying in. But that too is an arbitrary judgment, largely influenced by which side of the line your feet are planted. Either way, I’m back in full time work, back in the office two days a week. My life on the run from conformity is over.

That’s how the last eighteen months have felt. Like being on the run, or how I imagine being on the run must feel. A bit thrilling, ever-changing, and quite tiring, but the kind of tired that leaves you able to sleep deeply at day’s end.

I wrote while I was on the run. I edited. I worked at an election, I worked at a winery. I worked at a music festival. Casual employment is precarious, and it is for the hardy. I am not hardy.

In December of 2022, Australian author Gabrielle Carey wrote, “At the age of 63, I realised I would have to sell my house in a falling market. I also realised there was a real danger that my super would run out before the pension kicked in at 67. And even when I did get the pension, how would I pay for my many middle-class indulgences, such as, say, books, or a piano tuner? … Why had I spent my life being a writer, thereby deliberately leaving myself in this perilous financial state?”

A few months later Carey took her own life. I didn’t know Carey personally, but the news of her death shocked me. Carey wasn’t an aspiring author or a failed author. Carey was a successful Australian author.

The starving artist is a romantic trope for everyone but the starving artist. For me it was just tedious. It was wondering if it’s worth driving 20 kilometres down the road to the next town because a litre of fuel was a few cents cheaper there. It was despair at getting a royalty statement and discovering that I owed money to the publisher.

It was coming home to my wife with a bottle of cheap wine and explaining that it made economic sense to buy the wine this week because there may not be any money for it the following week. It was an argument I never won, which is why I always bought the wine beforehand.

I was never great at math, but even I could see that when weekly income is less than weekly rent, it’s only a matter of time. And at that point, whether you turn yourself in or you get caught, it’s the same thing.

The dream was never to be a writer. The dream was to live from writing, and there were brief times when that dream shone and shimmered. I did writerly things and thought writerly thoughts. And it was magical. I would not change those shimmering moments for anything.

Two years ago, I sat in a government office while a grey-faced lifer instructed me to make cold calls to people who didn’t want to receive cold calls. When I pushed back, he told me it would be character building. Turns out he was wrong. Turns out it was soul destroying.

My new job is different. Officially I’m a senior communications advisor. In reality, I spend my days editing, hunting down passive voice, eradicating split infinitives, liquidating abstract nouns. I enjoy the work and polishing the dirt and grit from the sentences of others allows me to see my own writing faults more clearly.

But beyond the day-to-day enjoyment of the work, I now have a job that fulfils a clear purpose. The job is at the service of my life, I am not at the service of my job. The difference feels important. The job allows me to live where I want to live, it funds my writing dream, the dream that still shimmers and shines somewhere out of sight.

The thing about noodlin’ is that when you first see that sparkle of opal, you get a shot of excitement. It matters not if you’ve found something worth five thousand dollars or five cents. In the moment, there is no way to know the monetary value. It’s just a physical reaction to a tiny flash of light that has been hidden from the sun for 60 million years.

The money is never what brings you back to the opal dirt, screwdriver or bone-handled butter knife in hand. What brings you back, like the devout to the altar, is the flash of colour followed by that sharp shot of adrenalin, fleeting, magical, addictive.

I didn’t learn anything new during my time on the run. But I did remember a lot of things, things that I’d forgotten to remember somewhere along the way. I remembered to dream big, pointless, ridiculous dreams. I remembered that the unreachable things are the only things worth dreaming about. They are the ones that shimmer and shine after the rain. They are the ones I’m still searching for, they are the ones that lead me onwards.