PODCAST · arts
In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere
by Storyteller Spinks
I'm a storyteller, writer and bushwalking guide from Tasmania.
Episodes
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (54: Insects)
"A person ought to count themselves as rich if they live among insects." In this train carriage in the bush, I am often visited by insects - flies, wasps, beetles, butterflies and bugs. Buzz along with me as I think more about the little six-legged critters with whom I share a habitat.
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (53: Mythical Birds)
"Maybe all birds are mythical birds. They at least have the vibe of creatures that are make-believe: you can imagine a child sketching out a ragged outline and blurting the monosyllable, bird. That could be their creation myth." I have been seeking out birds of all shapes and colours, breeding...
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (52: Flowers)
"The place was alive with birdsong. Insects crawled on the ground or flew through the air in iridescent colours. And there were more wildflowers than you have ever seen in your life..." The forest slowly transitions into spring. Day by day, I see the flowers open up and say hello. Join me (with...
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (51: Absence)
"I take a deep breath. The air is still moist; it has the freshness of moss. I have been away and I have missed the forest here, but maybe the forest hasn’t been so bothered by my absence." Sit with me as I return to my shack in the bush after a time away, wondering what my absence means in a…
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (50: Stations)
"I remembered that something like this happened once to the poet Edward Thomas. He was in the hills of Gloucestershire in 1914. June 24: the express train drew up there unwontedly, as the poet later wrote; the platform of the village station was empty, the heat was intense, and it was so quiet…
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (49: Searching)
"The whole purpose of my journey across the world had been in pursuit of this sensation...the same thrill that I’d felt in my patch of bush as a kid. It was a life-long search, a search that would never end." Recording in the train carriage from which I think about the nature of movement, here…
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (48: Twists and Turns)
"Poets and storytellers like to look at things from side-on. We like to combine images, make weird comparisons. Might I suggest that sometimes, at least some of us we must come at life from a tangent?" Sometimes I like to look at things from a different angle - so I take this train carriage on a...
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (47: Plans)
"But it is true that if you wait for perfection, you may walk away emptyhanded. The best-laid plans can fall in a heap, and I can’t promise that the stores I’ve cached in the ground won’t be squandered. The fruit may rot, the flowers may wilt." The sun has spun. A new yarn begins. With it comes a...
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (46: Sorrow)
"The sunflowers turned towards the light and filled with a ferocious yellow. The sorrow still overwhelmed you. The end was near. But you made good work before then. What a story you could tell." I have had cause to contemplate sorrow over the past year - from the small internal sorrows of…
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (45: Seeing)
"Seeing can be a perfect pastime, a form of meditation. At the heart of my identity, seeing is the central mechanism for wonder." Vision is a magical, mysterious phenomenon. Around the train carriage, I watch - and write what I see.
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (44: Poems for Trees)
"The season’s end is signalled, once again, by eight-pointed stars scattered across the path." I have been taking opportunities to sit at the base of trees, investigating their lives, contemplating how they overlap with our own. And I've written poems about the trees.
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In a Train Carriage Going Nowhere (43: Stars)
"All night long I’ve kept a vigil, for nothing in particular, perhaps just keeping watch over solitude. My eyes sting; my body has lost all muscle tone; my bones ache. I have dipped in and out of a dream landscape, the world blurring into polymorphous figures, the earthly blending with the...
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (42: Moon)
"I sometimes write secret wishes on scraps of paper, let them glow in the moonlight, then press them down onto the tip of a flame. I’m a creature of rhythm, of habit: habitually, I keep hoping." I am in the southern hemisphere, at the change of seasons, looking up at the night sky. I am trying to...
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The South West Coast
"We must take it upon ourselves a responsibility to improve the health of these habitats: that’s where the hard yakka comes into it. In some ways, the act of picking up rubbish from the beaches of the south-west is the perfect activity for connecting with the spirit of the place...It’s almost...
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Birds of the Panama Forest (Live at A Festival Called Panama)
"The nest of a pink robin is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. Imagine, in the palm of your hand, a hollow bowl built of feathery moss and ice-blue lichen, stitched together with spiderwebs and stuffed with a fern’s light-brown fur." Recorded as live performance from A Festival...
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (41: The Last Summer)
"There are places you can go only in summer – over the high passes or down the long peninsulas. Up honey-coloured creeks that climb to craggy façades. Across meadows matted with colourful flowers." Reading a book called 'The Last Summer', I find myself thinking about the way memories fuse with…
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (40: Fire)
"There are other ways to look at it. You might say that as a body gets burnt, as it turns into wisps of smoke, the atoms of which a human is made get separated, wander off into the atmosphere, change form, and become rearranged so that they link up with other operations in the universe." I'm…
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Youngtown Regional Reserve (with Yyan Ng)
"Standing on the stump of an old eucalypt, glaring at the yellowy-grey of the forest and the fields, she let out an almighty scream. It echoed through the woods, off towards the new neighbourhoods, running up the avenues and out to the mountains that rose on the horizon." The Youngtown Regional...
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Venice (with Emily Sanzaro)
"The pathways broadened into promenades, and the irresistible route zigged and zagged through innumerable pedestrians, who made bottlenecks and bridges; I twisted my torso and stretched my lanky legs out to squeeze by them. " I thought I should account for my travels in Venice. But I have only…
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (39: Moss II)
'The southern brown bandicoots have been busy, pressing their snouts into the earth in the search for subterranean mushrooms. This time of year must be their favourites: they root around, sniffing out the fruiting fungi and feasting on it. When I see them, I notice their almost feverish motion…
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (38: Moss I)
"And when he fell asleep, it was like the moss had him in its embrace. And the sense he got from his dreams was that the ultra-fine rhyzoids of the moss had spread throughout his brain, that he was being held in place by it, and that he too had squeezed into a mysterious shadowy realm where...
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere: (37: Flüchtigkeit)
"'All my life, my way of loving was to say goodbye.' That’s what the poet Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote. Perhaps it’s also true of the world: its way of loving is to present us with phenomena that are always poised to leave us." I have been watching things come and go in the world around me, and...
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II: The Museum of Recalcitrant Cephalopods (with Spring Bay Squid Festival)
"No, there’s no end to the tales that might be told, the tentacles spreading and sprawling across the seas, deep into them, and onto land as well." This is the second part of a 'cephalopodcast', made in collaboration with the Spring Bay Squid Festival in Tasmania. It's great if you're listening…
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I: Our Deepest Dreams and Fears (with Spring Bay Squid Festival)
"Sometimes when I see a veil of surf lift and then collapse on itself, I imagine it as a shining curl of life, schools of fish, plankton, crustaceans; a symbol of the whole fleeting, flashing vision of existence." I have made this 'cephalopodcast' in collaboration with the Spring Bay Squid…
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (36: Voyages)
"I’ve long known you can be in two places at once. Or, in three, or four, or five – more to the point it actually takes practise to stay where you are, to be fully present and focused and in the moment, not unmoored on seas of fantasy, imagination, memory." Near the train carriage in which I live...
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In a Train Carriage Going Nowhere (35: Language)
"Words generally don’t spring up from nowhere. By and large they each have some lengthy backstory behind them, an origin back that goes thousands of years, often into a different part of the world." Surrounded by books, and listening to the chatter of birds, I have a lot of opportunity to reflect...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (34: Five Winter Yarns)
"And, said another of us, we must remember that not all seasons are for growing or producing fruit. Some are for building strength, for staying dormant, for simply enduring. Some hard seasons you simply must survive." Here are five stories from winter. They're about wine, birds, frogs, football,...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (33: Trees)
"It turns out that the word ‘tree’ is part of a cohort of the oldest words we’ve got in the English language...If we meander into this linguistic past, we find a word something like ‘doru’, the ancestor of today’s ‘tree’ words in not just the English language but also in Persian and Albanian and...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (32: Darkness)
"After all this rainfall, the soil is black. From this dark source, what will soon come forth is a suite of the brightest colours." I have been enjoying the change of season, as the southern hemisphere turns towards long nights. Join me as I lie under the stars contemplating darkness.
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (31: River)
"But this all begs the question: must we just get used to catastrophe? Is it now time to accept the fact that all our landmarks are out of whack, that our life with the world is turning out all wrong? Must we get used to uncertainty, chaos, a future defined by fires and floods? What do we do when...
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (30: Fruit)
"Through the fruit we might get to know the plant better. And if that, then why not concern ourselves with the whole ecological habitat in which this piquant fruit comes to being – to learn about how it relates to rainfall, soil, fungal filaments, pollenating insects; oxygen, light, others in its...
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Mumbai
"He told me to forget my notes. You can’t go around foreign countries pretending to understand what you see, especially when you come from the west. What about a nice love story? We Indians, he said, we like a good love story. He went on: especially here in Bombay." This is a story set in India....
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (29: Islands)
"Legend has it that there’s an island in a lake on a walking track in the Tasmanian highlands on which, on a lucky day – and if you’re game enough to swim out there in the cool temperature of an alpine lake – you might find a beer. The Isle of Ale, they call it. A mysterious, magical place." My...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (28: My Birds)
"I have seen currawongs come together in great restive gatherings, a score of them or more, babbling in their garbled language, yapping and arguing, talking over the top of each other. How is it that such sounds well up in them? How do they push these songs through their throats? And what is it...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (27: Stone)
"For a very long time humans have entrusted memories to rocks, transferred stories to stone and had it tell our tales throughout the ages." Great quantities of stone are scattered around the train carriage in which I live. Behind me is a mountain range of dolerite, and there are rocks of all…
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In a Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (26: Wind)
"The gusts and gales imprint themselves on one’s memory; as with those trees you might see in exposed spots, that bend or lean or bear a hunchback, our experiences in different locations are pruned and shaped by winds. Even the gentle breezes bring reminiscences." In Tasmania we've had some windy...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (25: On The Road)
"So the road trip yet again had me contemplating things slowly. Stillness has made me often think of movement, and now I learned that it was true when the concepts were put vice versa too. It was as though I’d travelled 1000km to go nowhere." At long last I left the train carriage, to go on a…
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (24: Apart)
"I am realising that at some point I must come to terms with the fact that some separations will never again be sutured up. I have plotted out much of my life in the past ten years with travel in mind, and although partings are commonplace, I am always thinking of returning to certain countries…
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (23: Maps)
"But in the end, from map to map, these landscapes have been altered by the decisions made about what to do with the land." I have gone looking through my box of maps to find what stories lie within the lands sketched out in them. Join me on the journeys I take through these countries of many...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (22: Colours)
"I begin seeing fungi of exquisite blue growing from fallen timber in the bush around me. Some call them pixies’ parasols: little brollies for the fairies to shelter beneath when the rainfall comes down hard." It's autumn again, and interesting colours have appeared in the bush around my train...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (21: Luck)
"And I empathised when I heard a fellow storyteller in Edinburgh reflecting on his life thus far and comparing himself to a racehorse who has left the blocks with all the others but isn’t looking so crash hot yet. He looked at me and said, would it not seem to most punters that were the wrong...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (20: Hearing)
“I was in the ocean, she said, when I saw an orca. I swam fast towards it in a sort of spiralling motion, like I’d made myself into a torpedo. As I got nearer I could hear that the orca was making a series of ethereal sounds; it was the most beautiful music I’d ever heard.” I have spent part of…
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (19: Objects)
"The writer Gustav Flaubert suggested that if you look at anything closely enough, you would find it interesting. I reckon that’s about right. Take something as mundane, as fundamentally bland as my computer. I’m glaring at it right now from the other side of the room." I live in a train carriage...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (18: In Childhood)
"There was another animal I could name in childhood: the sugar ant. You see, I was a bit of a sweet-tooth as a boy: and when they told me it was called a sugar ant, and I saw its amber-coloured thorax, I was sure it would taste like a flake of caramel. Like I say: every ecosystem is ready to...
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The Gorge (with Emily Sanzaro)
"He would emerge, gasping for oxygen, dripping wildly. Hoisting himself from the river and onto the rocks, he saw his chest had been sculpted by the water. Looking out on the river he saw a reflection so warped that he thought he might be beautiful, and when he walked away, you could see that he...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (17: Swimming)
"When I was a teenager I was almost dashed, like so many ships, against the sharp granite of King Island: caught in a current, I struggled to swim against it, lost a flipper in the process, and was carried to a baroque-looking rock to which I clung and from where I eventually managed to extricate...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (16: Travel Pt. II)
"The word they use in Greece is philoxenia, ‘love of strangers’. It takes a lot to craft that sort of hospitality; in some cases, when you suffer from a lack of trust, it must be close to impossible. But for myself at least, I’ve come to think that such relationships are at the heart of a good...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (15: Travel Pt. 1)
"When I was seven years old I left Tasmania for the first time. I didn’t go so far, only to the mainland, but just putting some distance between myself and my home was enough to open up opportunities and possibilities. Something existed in that ethereal space, it seemed. I came home and crouched…
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (14: Rainy Days)
"If you let the weather into your imagination, into your ideas, your bloodstream, you will find it shapes you. Like the sorts of plants my botanist mate is into. You may will begin to adapt -- into something rare and unlikely." The Bureau of Meteorology forecast some days of wild weather, so I...
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere (13: Memory)
"And what a blessing and curse it is: this in-built function of language, the engine at its core, this grammar that keeps track of the time, the way these words innately catalogue what’s lost, the syntax of people with both history and destination. Poetry with its long bloody memory." I live…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
I'm a storyteller, writer and bushwalking guide from Tasmania.
HOSTED BY
Storyteller Spinks
CATEGORIES
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How many episodes does In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere have?
In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere currently has 63 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere about?
I'm a storyteller, writer and bushwalking guide from Tasmania.
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In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere has 63 episodes. Check the episode list to see recent publication dates and frequency.
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Who hosts In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere?
In A Train Carriage, Going Nowhere is created and hosted by Storyteller Spinks.
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