Night walking should be a woman’s nocturnal pleasure, too

“Why can’t I go night walking alone at midnight? Why will I never be able to do this, relaxed?” Picture: iStock

Chewing up the clicks, pushing the car on and on into the back end of day, then further into deepening night. The smell of the onrushing black lures me into the star-eyed dark, to the lovely promise of the night walk at the end of it. In the bush, alive with its scent. Into that silvered world like an old-fashioned negative where humans are on the back foot; at a disadvantage in this reverse state, wary and alert and wondrous in moonlight. My need, like Robert Frost’s, to be “acquainted with the night”; my need, to have “outwalked the furthest city light”.

But how easy is it, for females, to exist with ease in the thrilling dark? How relaxed can we be, walking in the black. When was it you last walked alone, comfortably, in the dark? Left the nest of your home for the crack of the twig in the bush and the rustle of retreat - of what? Possum, fox, cat or something more slithery and sinister than any of that. Man? Who’s out there, watching? As a female, that thought so often accompanies us alone in the black.

The Australian bush is not benign, especially in the dark. Amplified sounds, amplified smells, shallow breath. Yet if we know we’re safe in it it’s exhilarating. My favourite bed – a swag in a dry river bed in the centre of this continent, with a sweet breeze smoothing me into sleep like a hand of God unclenching the day’s rush from shoulders and face. The thought of the bush at night sung me home from foreign places, lured me back into the lovely, alive black. Like Banquo I dreamt of becoming a “borrower of the night”, at home, in the bush.

I step into it now after a ten-hour road trip. The restlessness of the day is overtaken by the poise of evening, the still watchfulness of the nocturnal amphitheatre. “What is the night?” asked Macbeth, nervously. It’s the thrill of ghosts and the glare of moonlight, wonder and danger and all senses alert as I’m spined up tall, breathing it in deep. It feels like animals reclaim the night, away from those stomping, yabbering, bush-bashing humans. The evening presents to us a rackety world that’s not quite to be trusted; danger rubbing up close to thrill, especially for a woman. This is not our domain and how infuriating that is. We’re alert for predators, human most of all. Night walking feels like extravagance combined with stupidity and none of this is our fault; in the black we’re stripped of daylight’s veneer of safety.

The night stroll for us is haunted by the ghosts of Jill Meagher, Aiia Maasarwe, Sarah Everard, by all the beautiful, vivid women who’ve lost their lives to men in the dark. Picture: iStock

It’s the time, biologically, for nesting in the lair with the brood; this animal fact in our blood and bones. Hence the subversive nature of night walking for women. If only we could do it danger-free. But the night stroll for us is haunted by the ghosts of Jill Meagher, Aiia Maasarwe, Sarah Everard, by all the beautiful, vivid women who’ve lost their lives to men in the dark, in alleyways, suburban parks and homes. So we walk outside with keys clutched between fingers and heels swapped for flats, hyper alert while raging inside at the unfairness of this. Why can’t I go night walking alone at midnight? Why will I never be able to do this, relaxed?

Because it’s all so beautiful out there, revelling in Byron’s “dim and solitary loveliness”, while learning “the language of another world”. The bowl of the heavens above us, and how lucky we are not to have so much of our vast continent stained by light pollution. Night walking is a refuge from the sticky stare of the world in daylight, a secret loveliness, a sacred privacy, when the chest expands with the smell of the nocturnal. We go off-script in the night, slip away from the bonds of civilising light. These are the hidden hours, the secret hours, private hours. What glory to be out alone in the night, in the thrilling world of the dark; not looking at it, wistfully, through glass.