Incursions in one of the biggest outdoor mine - Former Aboriginal Land

Mount Isa, Australian desert

Altervivance 3, Mount Isa, Songline of the 17 walks

Songline of the 17 walks (French - use headphones if you can)

For those who grew up in a world
with deeply real walls,
with virtual borders.
Here, the only limits are the strenght of your legs,
and the lightness of your thoughts.

This is our experience and you will increase it as well.

1
There, where roads don't go, starts you path.
Your ephemeral with you, you become transparent,
you let the Red passing through you,
leave the city back on you,
and you become the soil.
One becoming-Land.

Move forward only looking at the Red.
The Blue is deceiving, and attracts you on the burnt spinifex.
Shaggy and harming bushes.
Keep your body with you and leave your mind just forward.

2
Knolls standing to the sky,
the ones that look like eternity.
This territory that is red
that is burning your eyes and cutting your face,
that is mazing you, where
Before and After gather
in a right now, a right here.
This is Kalkadoons'.
They would tell you
that they belong to it.
Man belongs to the land.

Confront the first knoll,
and leave all the others behind you.

3
You will see a path,
Bad instinct to follow it.
Many take it.
It will bring you to the built, to the smokes,
and will make you discovered.
Prefer the sweetness of the surrounding hills
to the hardness of straight track on the floor.
Not even a corner, not even a fold
Only a line dictating to your steps.
Prefer the surrounding hills and the Earth will open your path.

One day, these lands used to be free of buildings, of fences,
Man haven't dig some tunnels.
And one day, in 50 or 10000 years,
when you walk here, they will be like this back again.
Kalkadoons eventually won.

4
Down the hills
two dogs are waiting for you.
Burning jaws and muscular limbs.
Fear will gnaw on your legs and make you go backward.
See them as yourself:
"on their way".
Reach out and give some water
for them to become your companions.

Laterite slab, awfully plane.
Here machines flattened geography.
Kanyini, it's connectivness of everything.
You are already these lands.
Flatness rest your legs but hurts your heart.
Flatness used to be the Blue.
The Red, should have stayed sharp.

5
After the flat knoll,
you will see an empty camp.
The man who used to live here is a bit earlier the mines.
At the edge of edges,
in a time of anger,
our thirsty Earth compacted space in matter,
chiseled the horizon,
You are still not there, but us
we have already been there.
Thousands before me,
and after you.
Between us, who knows?

6
You face the dry creek,
the rocks laying there stopped their run.
Walk with steady steps,
if you speed up, distances will expand.
The dry creek's spring will be unreachable
and your starting point will have already vanished.
Desert, him, has time.
At the end, he gets you back, he lends you to the movement,
lets you leave the motionless.
You are only the desert in his moving dimension,
until you rejoin the static.

7
Keep your legs packed
Don't climb frontly the mount,
Each won step will make you lose two.
Whereas they burnt your freshly cut hair,
that it leaves no tracks of you,
each slide would mark the soil with your presence.

Devisse on right, on left
and again on right and reach the summit.

Move forward only looking at the Red.
The Blue is deceiving, and attracts you on the burnt spinifex.
Shaggy and harming bushes.
Keep your body with you and leave your mind just forward.

8
You see a lake, remind to cover your face.
Here blows an invisible dust,
and winds bring its toxic burn.
They'll confuse you until you discerne nothing.
World will become flat.

Around this lake where water is solid,
air carves your lungs, dizziness fly you away.
Your feet, not execatly on the floor anymore, don't carry you.
Come back on your steps – here you get that this lands doesn't exist anymore.
We rejected all we took from the Earth, and didn't want.
What should have stayed in the deep,
came up to the surface.
And this place wants to go back deep and bring you with.
Water is white and solid – Alkaline,
it was inappropriate,
Water had no place here.
The Red on bottom, and the Blue on top:
Taking down the Blue on bottom, they brought the Red fire on top.

That line at the back, between the Blue and the Red, forget it!
Come back on your steps – here you get that this land doesn't exist yet anymore.