The weekend found Danksta Downunder recuperating at home after a brief excursion to a 19th-century neighbourhood.

Five days of archaeological investigation of Mill Point certainly caused my middle-aged body to protest at the onslaught of effort. I was painfully reminded of my own creaking and groaning body of ligaments, joints, sinew, musculature and appendages that all expressed a reluctance to do what fieldwork was expected of them.

My own infrastructure is in need of an upgrade, or at the very least, a massage in a bottle.

However, it was well worth it to go time travelling armed with little more than a trowel, brush, gloves, sunscreen and insect repellent - the latter two items probably had not even been invented at the time of the site in question.

For five days out there in the scrubby, boggy, marshy, weedy, ticky, leechy and mossie-inhabited sweep of Cooloola National Park, there was little to remind me that it was actually 2007.

For five days, the 20 of us involved in the Mill Point Archaeological Project were out of range of mobile phone coverage and had no access to news of the outside world via the online tentacles that grapple it digitally and daily.

Not that I have a mobile phone anyway, I do confess. The internet is more than ample for my needs - and the internet is available enough for my purposes either at the local internet cafe or the mobile library.

Still, the excursion was a welcome respite from the constant cacophony of today's incessant multimedia mayhem.

Five days wandering through fields and forests searching for evidence of prior existence. The thrill of finding various objects such as a glass bead, a perfume bottle glass stopper, an abandoned well, pieces of porcelain or ceramic or earthernware, or an Aboriginal flake stone.

The direct engagement of all the senses rather than resorting to the remote control pad. Frosty dew underfoot at dawn. Pale pebble stars and edam moon.

The venerable horse in the adjacent paddock stalking me for apples. The scent of the grass, the mud, the lake, the leaves, the moss and the earth.

The sting of the mossie, the bite of the tick, the blood under the ankle with a dangling leech.

Traipsing back to the base tent for a cuppa and a sandwich. Peeling off the grubby gear and standing under a shower without a drum to get sprayed for a few minutes by lukewarm tankwater.

Conversation face-to-face over a self-catered, home-away-from-home stew with a new mixture of people gathered right here rather than over there from the speakers or the screen or the download.

Warming up by a log fire playing Uno (you know) with a glass of cask red before retreating into the sleeping-bag coocoon only to re-emerge by 6am for the next day's site survey.

It might seem tedious, uncomfortable, grotty, painful and purposeless, yet it's more entertaining and enlivening than all those chattering channels, tangled links and delayed downloads. In the end, I enjoy nothing more than the chance to transfer from the time of the here and now, if only for an interval, because I'm often at a scheduled distance from here and now while living in it.

Archaeology is a multilayered and meandering and cascading dream that keeps waking me up each time I try and remember what went on then, now and next.

Anyway, c'est Bastille Day au'jourd'hui! So it's time for Danksta Downunder to give chase along the local version of the Champs Elysee, and then break open the barricade of his having been away and storm you with whatever words he has left to throw over your firewall.

Libation, equilibrium and fraternisation will have to suffice for now, since it's already well into Saturday afternoon.

Until next time we meet by the ruins of times gone by! That means you, Steve and Karen, Luke, Nathan, Amy, Rose, Justin, Alison, Victoria, Geraldine, Nick, Tom and whoever joins us for some further milling about and pointing at whatever that thing in the ground is!

Where do you escape to when you want to be out of reach of the mobile phone, email and the general cacophony of the busy modern world?

Hamish has two MySpace websites. On one he writes about poetry, writing, music and other interests such as performing, reading, history and archaeology link to site, while the other focuses on amalgamation and other local issues link to site.