Mundi 2026
Updated: Sep 29
After caring for a partner through the long shadow of chronic illness, I learned how to sit with gentle good-byes. I had been the other half of a partnership that adapted to setbacks and lived with rewritten plans, always searching for softer alternatives and telling our hearts that we were drawing strength from the darkest corners of adversity.
When the long good-bye became the last, the music stopped and I stayed frozen for a while, held still by grief until I opened my eyes to a world where I was finally moving forward – not just my heart or my mind, but the whole of me.
Which is how I found myself riding shotgun in a fourby, towing a caravan southwest to a music festival called the Mundi Mundi Bash. Moving forward did not mean moving fast. We stopped for beers and bakeries; sometimes just to take a breath, to make ourselves feel whole again and let the world settle inside our bones.
The southwest felt like a long-lost stranger; a place I should have known but had somehow forgotten. I passed through border towns and over red dirt roads, following dusty capillaries into the beating heart of Australian history, where stories of love and death lay close together in country graves.
For three weeks we travelled highways where roo carcasses were as frequent as bent guideposts while brown goshawks and black kites picked over what the road had left behind. My eyes softened to a landscape dusted with yellow wattle, roadsides lined with purple wildflowers, and country plains of white cotton. We followed bridge crossings over gravy creeks while rail lines and roads stretched out together, ruler-straight beneath a wide winter sky.
Having been a camper for decades, I was graduating to a caravan. Diehard campers would argue there was no better way of connecting with nature than having nothing but canvas separating our bodies from the stars. All of that crumbles in the face of caravan luxury, with the whisper of one small but glorious word: ENSUITE.
As thankful as my aging bladder was, toileting in a caravan created a new level of intimate conversations which included the where’s and when’s of number 2’s, distance and days between dump points, and toilet paper – how much is too much?
With no room in the van for bulky winter woollies, the fourby’s backseat became our makeshift wardrobe. Technically, we travelled without baggage – not the suitcase kind anyway. The other kind of baggage – grief, loss, love and memory – came along quietly for the ride, tucked in beside our flanno’s, boots and camp chairs. We were barging headlong into an adventure, but the loves we had lost were coming with us—in our hearts, in our stories, and in those quiet moments by the fire when we searched for them in the stars, somewhere between the Milky Way and the wine.
Our purpose had been the Mundi Mundi Bash, an outback music festival held on the Mundi Mundi Plains outside Silverton in far west New South Wales – population forty-eight; that is, until the week of the festival when it becomes “Mundiville”, a village of fifteen thousand where the road warriors we once battled on highways suddenly became our neighbours.
We had traveled in convoy with the “Nana Train”, and with the lovely Sam and her LAMB, who were Banjo’s parents, a four-legged ‘bear’ who identified as a dog. Along the way we met up with Vick ‘n Mary ‘n Paris in the “Vengabus”. We got lucky with new Mundiville neighbours who turned out to be sensational humans and were Mando’s parents, a very handsome but spirited Belgian Malinois, who sometimes got nippy. Mando and I understood each other because I had been accused of getting nippy at times. Or maybe that was snippy? (I think it might mean the same thing.)
Rain had already rerouted our journey to Mundi with roads closed to Tilpa and Louth. When that old familiar cloud of detours rolled in and plans were once again rewritten, we did what we had learned to do best—found the silver lining and declared loud and proud that ‘Life is too short,’ making a pact to ‘say yes to everything, all the way to Mundiville.’
“Vanilla slice from the Dirranbandi Bakery?” Yes!
“Dip in an Artesian Spring?” Yes!
“Wanna go in a helicopter?” Yes!
“How ‘bout a paddle steamer?” Yes!
“Reroute the trip home and visit the Opal Fields?” Yes!
“Another beer?” Yes!
We said yes to thirteen pubs in total; Commercial Hotel Boonah, Aratula Hotel, Darling Downs Hotel aka. Sandy Creek Pub, Nindigully Pub Thallon, Hebel Hotel, Broken Hill Outback Resort, The Palace Hotel Broken Hill, Empire Hotel Cobar, Grawin Club in the Scrub, Sheepyard Inn Grawin, Glengarry Hilton Grawin, Jolly Swagman Hotel Mungindi, Karara Tavern.
For three whole weeks I was channeling Lucky Starr, living out the lyrics to “I’ve Been Everywhere Man.”
I’ve been to… Boonah, Aratula, Goodooga, Wilcannia, Brewarrina, Nindigully, Goondiwindi, Dirranbandi, Mungindi, Hebel, Cobar, Bourke, Broken Hill, Emu Vale, Silverton, Thallon, and Grawin.
If I had to bottle the best bits, they would be these: Warrawong on the Darling – ah the serenity; Sturt Desert Pea in flower – breathtaking; Jandra Paddle steamer – graceful; watching wild emus run – spectacularly ungraceful; “Broangus” at Emu Vale – idyllic; red river gums – majestic; the sunrises – humbling; the sunsets – achingly beautiful; the people – unforgettable.
Eleventy-billion photos will never do justice to the beauty of our country. Those who have been out there and seen it know that there are no words to express its vastness and how alive it is at every turn.
Still, we were merely visitors. We may not have been the pioneers who attempted to tame the country out the back of Bourke, but in our own way, we felt like pioneers of the second-chance romance and this trip was about unbreaking the broken. We had been navigating the things which were uncharted, like the pain and heartbreak of deep loss and the way it rewires us. For those who have also been in the trenches of grief and know the dark shadow that dwells quietly in the hidden chambers of a heart, there was something extraordinary about having my eyes shaken open on dirt roads to a world that still held light.
I have sat bedside and the message was always, keep going, keep living for me. The ones you thought were lost, never leave you and you do not leave them. You find them in the spinning whirly-whirly that dances in the campfire, in the lost shadows of charcoal branches that reach for the rain, in the blonde grass that waves to you from the roadside, in the steel grey cloud on the horizon, in the silver frosted leaves and in the iron rusted dirt. If you take them forward with you and keep living because of them, they are with you always.
This was more than a road trip to a festival — it was the slow unfolding of another heart beside mine, the discovery of a travel mate who became my best friend, and somewhere between the red dust, the mud, and rewritten plans, love found us and became home.
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