After 13 hours, the Ghan crosses a bridge and I finally understand what is happening to my brain.
I have been watching the same train since 2.30am, and it has shown me more of my country than I could ever remember, and wrapped my life, for one day, around the very simple but compelling promise of movement.
I have seen nearly 3,000km of Australia top to bottom, and the bridge crossing – which I see out of the corner of my eye – is so unexpected it becomes one of the most beautiful parts of the trip. It is up there with the pre-dawn, tree-lined entry into the Northern Territory’s Never Never, and Port Augusta at sunset.
I now understand slow TV. I have stared into it and it has stared right back.
On Sunday I watched SBS Viceland’s The Ghan: The Full Journey – a 17-hour documentary of the famous passenger train’s journey from Adelaide to Darwin, from the bottom to the top of Australia. The original three-hour version, broadcast on SBS last week, was marketed as our country’s first entry into slow TV – a Norwegian genre of meditative documentaries that has previously featured a 134-hour broadcast of a cruise ship, and 12 hours of a sweater being knitted.
It was a cruel and horrible dare from my editors – The Ghan is mostly shots of endless outback, train tracks, ambient noise and occasional announcements, for 17 hours. I made the error of telling them I thought the three-hour version was cool; the next minute I’d been commissioned to watch the full thing. This was fair, because I’m a public dork.
20 minutes in, I have loaded the 3 hour version on my laptop to compare it to the 17 hour cut so I can see if they have the same historical facts #TheGhan pic.twitter.com/7Icz8zDYwn
— Naaman Zhou (@naamanzhou) January 13, 2018
I’m not alone; the “director’s cut” was so popular it became SBS’s highest rating show of the past 12 months. Two days later SBS announced the 17-hour full version. I would watch the full thing as it was broadcast.
It begins horribly. After 30 minutes, I feel like I have been in Adelaide my entire life. All I can see are different kinds of school ovals. I yearn for the parts of the track and bush that I know are coming up.
In the three-hour version, my favourite bits were the historical facts which pop up above the scenery, telling the story of Indigenous history and early European and Asian immigration. How Australia’s first mosque was built in the 1860s, by the tracks in Maree, for Muslim cameleers from Pakistan, India and Iran. Or Port Pirie’s short-lived Mussolini-inspired fascist group, founded by Italian residents in the 1920s.
But in the longer version, the rate of facts is slowed, coming maybe twice an hour. I feel bereft. For some reason, the train driver appears about 10 times in one hour. I have decided he is the villain of the piece. He does nothing, and does not seem to move, even as the landscape does. I did not sign up for this.
After an hour though, my laments have given way to a slow sense of creeping beauty and small changes. I see the hated ovals slowly turn to redder dirt, and buildings I don’t recognise, which are small joys.
Time really does seem to pass quickly. At two hours, I decide to take a nap, but when I go to turn off the TV I realise we are passing some kind of farm – an arrangement of small, mysterious fruit-bearing shrubs in a perfect and monotony-breaking pattern. The ground looks different. I immediately turn it back on to watch a little more. This is how it gets you.
Viewed occasionally as something to pop in and out of, slow TV is relaxing, inoffensive. Viewed intensely, it becomes a journey of highs and lows, more stark the closer you zoom in. If you engage with it, it pushes back. As the timeframe approaches infinity, the odds of something becoming interesting becomes certain.
I decide to go to sleep, which has the sensation of stepping off a treadmill. Everything seems to keep gliding forwards for a little while.
After five hours, I wake up to Port Augusta. The sky is a beautiful dark bruised purple – the land too, like milled jacaranda flowers. It matches my sunrise. The show is in sync with my circadian rhythms. It is unlike anything I have seen, or will see for the next 12 hours. At the very least, the beauty of slow TV is that I could fall asleep for three hours and still not miss the moment.
Hello everyone, I am back - thanks to my colleague @mnurkic, I have arrived to see Port Augusta. Absolutely the best part about slow TV is that I went to sleep for 3 hours and did not miss the thing I wanted to see #TheGhan pic.twitter.com/6316R9HzkY
— Naaman Zhou (@naamanzhou) January 13, 2018
The Ghan is also genius feat of social history: a cross-section of our country drawn through the heart; the red centre that is always talked about but never actually remembered. Landmarks like Darwin’s Chinatown, destroyed by Japanese bombs and never rebuilt – and the Indigenous history that of course runs through it all. In the context of 50,000 years of civilisation, and centuries of historical amnesia, 17 hours isn’t really that much.
I realise it is sort of Stockholm syndrome for TV: with so much time sunk in, you want to hang on until the next reward or minor change, no matter how infrequently they are doled out. It’s mesmerising in the same way pets become mesmerised by an automatic feeder. It’s how people get addicted to those apps that give you notifications just when you want to stop using them.
I see what I think is a cow (I hear a moo), and it is the most exciting thing to happen to me in hours. A map overlay implies I am really close to Alice Springs, so I postpone getting lunch for an hour. I fall asleep and miss the moment the train crosses the border from South Australia to the Northern Territory. I feel a profound sense of loss.
At one point, I realise my love for historical facts has essentially kept me in thrall for 10 hours. SBS has found a way to weaponise nerdiness.
The promise of movement is so powerful and so satisfying that The Ghan becomes a lesson in fixation and reward; a 17-hour experiment you end up performing on yourself. To prove my point, when I do finally go to lunch and come back, everything is green. A sped-up, overnight leg has delivered us to the leafy top end. I have spent 12 hours looking at what was more or less the same thing, but then I blinked, and it had all changed.
Maybe too late in my day-long saga, I discovered that this is the difference between documentary and slow TV; between the three hours I easily handled, and the 17 I struggled with. I shouldn’t have tuned in expecting a normal density of facts or events, or for them to arrive in the way I thought they would.
With this realisation, I find true relaxation. As the train pulls into Darwin, I realise that maybe watching 17 hours of The Ghan relies, in many ways, on being already willing to be mesmerised.
• The Ghan is available to watch on SBS On Demand
