S Sorrensen
Broadwater. Monday, 2.15am
There’s this place I go to where no-one else can go. I am here now.
Okay. Maybe not no-one. I like you. So, come and sit on the sand beside me…
To the north, Byron Lighthouse flashes like the hazard light of a starship crash-landed. Warp drive replacement bits are not that easy to get this far out from the galaxial centre (27,000 light years), but you can get just about anything from the Byron industrial estate.
Above this dune where we sit (and it’s lovely to have you here), our galaxy, the Milky Way, lies smashed across the sky like a shattered wine glass.
Look up. This is where we are.
There are 300 billion stars in our galaxy; and there are more than 200 billion galaxies in the universe.
Don’t say anything, just think about that for a minute while I pour us a wine. This fine red has aged for a long time, six years, and will help you understand what I want to share with you.
The lighthouse is a spark plug screwed into where the darker darkness of the land meets the lighter darkness of the sky. Because of a national park, there are not many other lights between the lighthouse and us. A brightly lit trawler scrapes the bottom of the sea for the last prawn; a 4WD with blinding halogens races along the beach squashing pipis and gouging expensive tyre treads into the soft coffee rock.
Of the 300 billion stars in our home galaxy, the nearest to us (not counting the sun) is Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away.
The reason I come to this place is to get some perspective. In lives crowded with joy and grief, hope and fear, there seems to be no space or time to see where we are. But I tell you, if you want perspective, look around.
More wine?
If I drove my Subaru Forester from Earth at 100km/h (best speed for fuel economy) it would take me 144 days to reach the moon, 160 years to reach the sun, just over a billion years to reach Proxima Centauri, and 7,000 billion years to reach the centre of our galaxy in this universe of at least 200 billion galaxies.
And that’s if you have no breakdowns (NRMA has limits) and drive non-stop. You would need a relief driver, a spare CV joint, a copy of Dark Side of the Moon and lots of coffee.
To the south, a string of yellow street lamps marks where Evans Head is nestled into the flank of Dirawong (the goanna spirit). Between Dirawong and us, the heath sparkles from skylight glinting off leaves waving in the southerly breeze, creating an earthy mirror of the stars above.
The universe is 13.7 billion years old. The earth is 4.6 billion years old. There has been life on this planet for 3.6 billion years. Homo Sapiens has been around for about 200,000 years. I am 58 years old, but every atom in me is older than the Earth.
Are you comfortable? Can you feel the starlight on your face? Most of that light started travelling to you before Homo Sapiens existed. Now it has found you. Sitting here in big space, you are being bathed in big time.
Someone calls my name. Behind that calling I hear party sounds: the doof of the DJ, the crackle of laughter, the rumble of conversation, the hum of the generator.
Excuse me now. I must plunge back into a small universe of minutes and hours, of centimetres and kilometres, of love and death, of more wine.
But you can linger here a while, and look at where you are.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
