Queensland here we come! Our dear Tania welcomes us at the airport. On the way in, Brisbane’s skyscrapers glimmer in the sun; a storefront says « Jimmy Possum »… maybe a distant aboriginal cousin? Our home for tonight will be a mansion in the New Farm area, surrounded by fat tropical trees which exhale a sweetly suffocating animal smell. Down at the Powerhouse there’s no trace of last year’s floods. They cleaned it all up. At 7pm they tell us that Asa is cancelling her show tonight, and we have to rush onstage and start the concert an hour earlier, without being fully prepared… in boca lupo! We end up playing a full two hour gig. Fair enough, because some people in the audience flew in from Alice Springs to come to the show. Others drove over 2000km in a small van – straight from Mount Isa in the Northern Territory to Brisbane – sometimes ending up without drinkable water supplies, driving on endless desert highways, sleeping in the Nullarbour plains, through giant termite mounds looking like alien sculptures, bushfires that almost burnt them alive, in the sole company of emus, kangaroos and dingos…
