Well, she was a great traveller. On her first trip she drove south in her van for seventeen hundred kilometres while I looked after her garden cats and worked at my mapping. She was gone for months. She would write to me every week asking for maps showing particular features. I’d send them rolled up in cardboard tubes to Poste Restante at the central western towns she was expecting to pass through. Sometimes the maps she wanted were hopelessly specific, such as an Australia-wide geographical representation of variances in butcherbird song, or a certain stand of clouds in the Maude district that suggested rain, later. I did what I could, inventing features which didn’t exist in my database. When she returned from her great southern trip she showed me how she had stitched all the maps together in a patchwork, sewing on leaves or feathers in some places and adding figure drawings in smears of red. She pulled it out in a roll from under the wooden sleeping platform in the back of her van and unfurled it like a coloured sail. When I held it to my face it smelt like all Vasco’s things – campfire smoke, fragrant oils, bitter herbs.

I seldom travelled far in those days. On weekdays I had my work, often having to meet with state mandarins or land barons about what map needed to be made. It might sound strange, but I don’t have to go anywhere to make a map. Everything I need is in my computer’s geographic information system. Others have done the exploring, they have surveyed the contours and named the rivers and ranges.

Contours are indispensable. If you want topography, ask for contours. Or if it’s bathymetry, if you want to know how deep the seabed lies, contours will tell you. When I click to display contours on a map, the fine lines spread slowly en masse up my screen, from bottom to top. It reminds me of vipassana meditation, when awareness spreads like a flush through your whole body from the tip of your head to your feet and up again. Vasco would smile at that. Unlike cadastre, contour is nothing to do with territory. It’s about slope and gully and the points of mountains. It’s about curve, fold, the feel. Contour runs its hands over the land’s surfaces. Cadastre binds it.

Before I learnt mapping, I thought contours resembled thumbprints. But it turned out that a thumbprint is about a person’s unassailable singularity, while a contour is just the vertical dimension of land. This kind of geographical fact was disappointing to Vasco, a romantic. She feared for my imagination. But as I often reminded her, I had debts and responsibilities which forced me to stay at my mapping.

Although I didn’t travel great distances, we took many weekend trips together in her van, often taking the forest roads of the Great Dividing Range. Once, when we were driving down a mountain, her bonnet flew up. We screamed as the old van took the bends blind, the bonnet like a great sail, the wheel next to the edge. Afterwards, pouring shiraz, we laughed and laughed.

We used to be children, skinny, with our hair in bunches. I grew up a thousand miles away from her until, at twenty-nine, I settled in her home town here on the floodplain. I brought my old childhood blanket with me, orange and black knitted squares like ploughed paddocks. I’d used it as a saddle blanket and it smelled of horses. When I showed it to Vasco she buried her face in it. She was a great horsewoman. The oatmeal I bought in calico bags might have come from those flat paddocks. I saved my empty bags for her so she could embroider them with cats and lines of poetry.

These days I travel. After I’d paid off my debts, I bought a small utility truck. Before I left, I sticky-taped her letters from her first trip together in chronological order. Those letters used to arrive in fat yellow envelopes, instantly recognisable. There were poems, drawings, Post-it notes, and notebook pages with the sentences curling out in all directions. Tiny messages scrawled in the corners, there always being one more thing to say. Stuck together they made a tatty, coloured thing which I rolled up and tucked into a calico bag, thinking I’d use it to navigate. When I spread it out on my bonnet I had to rest my arms on it to stop pieces coming adrift and blowing away.

So Vasco, did your wheel really come off on the Moonbi Hill?

I’m trying to reach the places she described in her letters. I’m trying to run our lines over and over this country. I want the maps to show our traces. I’ve had to devise new symbols to show the landscape: old camps, fireplaces where bread was baked, boggy tracks. Where she emptied her bucket. Things dropped: a dollar, a pen, a lid. Cafés she liked, owls heard, mechanics who had an affectionate pat for the old van, the post offices where she posted my letters.

Almost too much for a map, and it’s going to take me a long time.

Despite the mapping difficulties, I’m well-equipped. My utility has a khaki canopy on the back. I like your set-up, says an ancient farmer at a petrol station, and I know Vasco would have been jealous. I sleep on the tray in a swag, rolling the canopy sides down if I want. Like Vasco, I take a box of brown rice, mustard oil, and dried beans, setting my beans to soak in the morning.

I like Vasco’s slow old country. I enjoy the long-leaved eucalypts, black-soil plains, silver and purple clouds, the swirl of budgerigars. One afternoon, I waded into the fast water of a Murrumbidgee channel and anchored my heels in the mud. The current slipped around my fingers like wind. Once she would have swum across. She was the swimmer, not me. She would have loved those rough old river redgums. I prefer that country to the coastal valleys where the cold comes down early and it gets dark in a minute, oppressively. Sometimes I think I’ve found a tree she meant, and I draw it on my letter-map. I mark my route, leaving a stick arrow at a turn-off or a button from my shirt on a stump. I circle showgrounds in red and yellow. You can always camp in a showground. I wrote a letter on paperbark and stuck it in a fork where I saw a butcherbird. But it’s not an ecological exploration, or an anthropological one. I have nothing to discover. It’s not a search party either. Too late for that.

Vasco liked following tracks down to swimming holes and making a campfire. She was brave. She camped in the unconsolidated areas where there are no zones to permit or prohibit anything, where people have to use their own judgement about what is possible. Once a brown snake slipped between her feet as she sat at her camp table. They’re deadly, Vasco! Or that maniac in the state forest. But the van was like a big safe horse moving along the back roads or at rest in clearings. I know she was happy.

What else, Vasco?

Vegetation is a commonly used mapping layer, although unreliable in areas where forest is being cleared. Saltbush, saltier than salt, makes me feel happy. I like the stoop and crouch of mallee country. But the she-oak was the tree for us. Droplets sparkling on the tips after the rain, and the silkiness of the old needles when you lie down. The first time we ever spoke was in the she-oak grove at the end of our street where twelve young trees grew. There was a tiny bird that would also visit, which Vasco said was a weebill.

Our houses in Vasco’s hometown were side by side. It was a bird street with lorikeets at morning and evening, and magpies, and butcherbirds. The houses were weatherboard with ferny verandahs and mosquitoes. Even though we were neighbours we still wrote notes to each other with all the things we meant to say. We thought we’d always been a pair of shy laughing she-oak girls, only that there’d been a mistake with the geography. We even looked like she-oaks, complimenting each other on the elegant droop of our branchlets and our fine leaves.

There’s a story behind every cadastre. Sometimes the shape is odd, a rhomboid, two blocks consolidated into one or a small block excised from a larger one. The old explorers went questing through hard country dreaming of boundaries. We drew our own territory, making our cadastral line out of hay twine and red wool and the twigs we picked from our hair, and from mud and sticks arranged into figures dancing at the sky. The lines were in our faces and hands, we carried them in our fingerprints and as pictures drawn on a fogged windscreen, photographed and posted in a fat envelope. The body is a sensor, an indicator, a symptom. It helps us know where – and when – we are. Without a body we would float without legal boundaries in the air, or in the sea where there is no cadastre. We’d be lost like a star, unknown to our loved ones.

A map can help. Let it fold itself, it will find its familiar creases. But a crumpling started. I noticed her messy handwriting and how she craned over her steering wheel. I helped her rearrange her house. There’s a trick to everything. We used sofas and tables to make navigation routes so she could feel her way from lounge to bedroom. We ran a rope, round-turn-and-two-half-hitches, out to her back garden. She gripped it as if she was in a storm and it was the world that pitched and rattled. Once I found her under a loquat tree, overturned.

But this is not about that. I wanted to mention the cheek kiss she tried to teach me – mwah! – that I never could master. Our faces would slip, I’d miss and it meant we always greeted each other with laughter. We danced any way we could. We sat back to back on her floor to eat our brown rice with red onion steeped in golden mustard oil. Late at night we’d dip into a little bag of Twisties each, yellow pollen on our lips, glass of red wine in the other hand. Nobody else said my name the same way. My heart soars when I see you, she told me once.

We loved words. We’d open her dictionary. Duramen. Durance. Dwindle: to languish, waste away, to vanish.

In winter the battery in her van went flat. She started talking about going sailing, but I didn’t want those conversations. When I was seventeen, I went out in a sailboat with my sister. A westerly came streaming in, I felt it warm on my cheek. Sailors can be taken by surprise, too busy looking at their sails to see the weather pile up silent behind them. The main sail jammed in the mast and we couldn’t pull it down. The sky went black and the land vanished. We went yawing sideways into the waves, hoping for nothing else but to reach shelter. Vasco knew I didn’t want to hear about sailing. She knew how I felt about the wind. But still she kept raising it.

Once in wheat country a big willy-willy raced over dust paddocks and crossed the road right in front of me. It was only red wind but I slammed on my brakes. The wind is so unpredictable. You can’t see it. Weather maps have contours, but, like many people, I only half understand them. It’s green land, white cloud, blue sea, and black contours, but apparently the lines are not about the shape of the wind. She-oaks let the wind slip through their branchlets. The young she-oak I planted in my garden is six feet high now. When I hold a branch the leaves are warm and coarse, like a horse’s mane.

Cadastre is a lonely sound. Everyone is gone. Rusty iron banging in the wind. Look, the southerlies have blown sand against the seaward side and it’s half buried. A tree has blown onto a bush cemetery fence and snapped the old wire. Cadastre is only a fine black line but I can’t shake off the sound. In my camping utility I’m trying to reach places where cadastre is not a feature, but there is always something – a fencepost, a sagging gate, a mailbox.

You’re not supposed to abandon your cadastre, but Vasco did.

Depth is one of the boundaries of water. Most of what we know about depth is from soundings of the seafloor. But ninety per cent of the deep-sea bottom is uncharted. It’s a terrible place to rest, believe me. I’ve thought about it often enough.

There is so much more to say. Years ago I wrote on a spray of turpentine leaves and gave it to her. She stuck it on her dashboard for her first trip. It was a miraculous, faded, brittle thing, liable to crumble in a breath. When she came home she stuck it to the window frame in her bedroom. It eventually formed itself into the shape of a little boat with a spinnaker full of wind.

See, she-oak gal, Vasco said.

But I still said no to any sea voyage. I couldn’t bring myself to wave my great friend off into a toss of foam-speckled water.

But Vasco, you understood the weather maps better than I did because in the autumn you chose a gusting southerly. You let it catch your cape of hair and raise it aloft like a spinnaker, and all alone you sailed off the map.