A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER ONE
It was in the May of 2004 that Clare and I decided we should travel around Australia in a mobile home. Neither of us had done much in the way of travel in Australia and figured that, as the Aussie dollar was so low overseas and people in headscarves were blowing holes in things, now would be the best time for a vacation on our home soil.
The reason that we’d both, independently, avoided Australia up until that point is that Australia is the World’s most boring continent with the possible exception of Antarctica. If you’re inclined to disagree with this notion simply take a map of the world and trace Australia’s outline on a piece of clear plastic. Then put that clear plastic outline over any land mass on the planet and see what your outline of Australia encompasses. See how many countries, peoples, different cultures, foods, climatic zones, mountain ranges, rivers etc. etc. you come up with.
That’s not to say that Australia isn’t an interesting and fascinating place with lots to see and do within its “Girt by Sea” boundaries. All it means is that those things are further apart with a lot of nothing in between. That’s cool – no worries. The best way to see Australia is undoubtedly by helicopter. We didn’t have one. We decided to do it by campervan.
First we had to find the right van and as we lived in Tasmania, where the choice of anything other than fresh air is limited, we thought we’d have to go to the mainland to find one. That though, proved unnecessary when we first clapped eyes on Erasmus. It was advertised in the Hobart Mercury one Saturday morning and an hour after we’d first seen it we’d decided that this was the van for us. It had a four door, dual cab which we didn’t know if we’d need but thought that the back half would make a good shed if nothing else. The living accommodation was already like a shed, at least in size. It was so big that after we’d had it for a month we found a Japanese soldier wandering around in one of the wardrobes who hadn’t heard that WWII was over. You don’t believe me do you? Well, what follows is an account of our travels and they’re even more unbelievable.
What really impressed me about Erasmus was the guy we bought it from. His name was Baden and he had a wooden leg. At least I think it was wooden but it could have been made from plastic or aluminium or an old drainpipe or whatever. Come to think of it, it was probably a prosthesis but I wasn’t going to type that because I can’t spell it. Still, I thought I’d give it a go and, sure enough, the editor has corrected it for me. Now I just have to hope that prosthesis is the right word and that it doesn’t mean something smelly or religious.
Anyway, Baden wore shorts all the time, even in winter. He was totally un- self conscious about his wood …….uh……. pros ……about being a unidexter with an artificial walking aid; so much so that nobody else noticed he even had one. Well, I noticed it but only fleetingly. Now that I think of it, I guess he only had the one leg to get cold so wearing shorts in winter was only half as cold an experience as it would be for me. Perhaps having only the one leg meant that his heart had less blood to pump around so it would get back inside him, to the thing inside you that warms the blood, quicker than if he’d had two legs. That would mean that his blood would get warmed a bit more than mine as it went through the blood warmer thingy so his other, non wooden leg, would probably have been a good deal warmer than either of my two legs. Isn’t it amazing how nature compensates?
He took us for a drive in the van. The most recent of his two legs he wore on his right side – the accelerator pedal side. The ride was a bit jerky but otherwise nobody would have suspected that he was wearing a prosthetically enhanced walking aid with a shoe on the end to accelerate and brake with. I thought that if he could drive the thing, then I should at least try. Sometimes I can’t stop my brain from thinking things. I can hold what seems to be a perfectly intelligible conversation on one subject while my brain is actually off on a trivia trip. Baden was talking to me and showing me how to let the awning down, how to check the oil, the water, the brake fluid and all those things a really competent mobile home driver should know about. All I could think of was what if he kicked the tyres with his non-blood carrying walking appendage and it flew off.? I mean, imagine if you were mowing the lawn next door and suddenly this pretend leg thing came over the fence and hit you in the head or something?
Baden told me he used to be a log truck driver so his leg could be a hollowed out log I guess. I reckon he could have got plenty of spare one’s in that business too. One man’s log could be another man’s leg – that’s how I look at it. Well…I didn’t really look at it; not while he was looking at me anyway. As I said, I hardly noticed he was wearing one – leg that is. I hope I don’t ever have to have an artificial lower valency. I’d be worried that people were looking at it all the time. I think I’d wear a jackboot on the good leg to draw people’s attention away from the counterfeet one. I’d hate to be pedometrically challenged like that.
We decided to call it Erasmus. No, not Baden’s ersatz ass kicker – the van. But not right then. No, we decided to call it Erasmus when I started to write this book because we didn’t have a name for it. If we get fed up with the name Erasmus this book could be called something else by the time I’ve finished it. Get on with the fucking story I hear you cry. Well, it’s my book and I’ll get on with it when I’m good and ready.
Right, where was I? Oh yes. Well, we took the van out for three weekends in Tasmania so we could gain all the experience we would need for life on the road on the Australian mainland. We didn’t learn much and we made all our major mistakes (like driving off with the electric cable still attached) after we’d left Tasmania on our first trip. That first trip was quite a big drive for us. It took us all the way from Hobart at the bottom of Australia, up through inland Victoria and New South Wales on up through coastal Queensland right up through the Daintree rainforest to Cape Tribulation almost at the very top of Australia.
Of course, life on the road in this huge mobile home wasn’t going to be cheap. Erasmus only did 5.5 kilometres to a litre of fuel and we were looking down the barrel at many thousands of kilometres. We needed a way to earn money on the road. The idea I hit upon was that of selling gum leaves to American budgerigar owners. The idea came to me one night in a friend’s kitchen. We were trying to talk over the chirping and chattering of their incredibly verbose and noisy budgerigar.
“What’s wrong with that bloody budgie tonight” I asked.
“The man at the pet shop told me that if I wanted a happy budgie I should give it gum leaves” Replied Kathryn.
“And that’s what makes it go all vocal like that?”
“Yes, works a treat doesn’t it. She’s never been happier”
“What kind of gum leaves? Where do you get them?”
“Just outside hanging over the pavement.”
It kind of made sense to me that budgies were Australian and so were eucalyptus trees so I researched it. I went to the University of Tasmania library and read up on them. I’d only just finished doing a BA in history there and had been asked to do honours and the semester was due to start in a month’s time. I was soon to attend an honours orientation day at which I should have to announce my chosen subject for my thesis. I was deeply engrossed in books with budgie pictures at one of the reading cubicles when I felt someone behind me. It was my history professor. He’s such a nice, soft voiced and unassuming Englishman in his mid fifties who students tend to think is perhaps a little weak and somewhat eccentric. In fact the man is as sharp as a cactus spine and an innovator who’s prepared to take a risk and go out on a limb with his superiors if he thinks a student’s project has some merit.
“Getting stuck into it already Peter? My God you’re keen. What’s that you’re looking at?” he said as he leaned over the top of my cubicle. “Are they budgerigar illustrations?”
“Yes, I’m thinking about doing the History of the Budgerigar as my history honours thesis.”
“Good, good. That’s what I like to see, something original for a change. See you at the orientation day then”
With that he left me to my budgie research. I thought he’d think I was a loony but he wasn’t phased at all. As it turned out, the history of the budgerigar was a really good story and would have made a great subject for my thesis. A British ornithologist named Gould had taken a few natural, wild budgies to England in 1840. Wild budgies are all green but there, at the other end of the earth in an unfamiliar land; they had been selectively bred into a whole range of colours. They wound up being introduced to over a hundred countries and by the 1950s there were an estimated five million of them in cages all over the world. When this happened the poor old budgie that used to supplement its predominately seed diet with gum leaves never saw this native tucker again. That is, not until I started a website aimed at selling gum leaves to budgie owners. Along with it I advertised perches made from eucalyptus branches and toys made from gum (eucalyptus) nuts.
By the time we left for our first trip the website had begun to perform and the business was coming in. We loaded Erasmus with stocks of toys and perches and everything we needed to run the business. Gum leaves we would pick up along the way every time we received an order. The orders we would collect through the website which we’d access in Internet café’s and libraries.
We said our farewells to friends and Clare’s family, gave them all our email address and off we went on the boat to mainland Australia one cold July night. From disembarking at Port Melbourne in the morning we drove north determined not to stop except for meals and sleep until we reached somewhere warm. We had the address of a Dutch couple, Tonia and Fred, who I’d met briefly in Tasmania the year before. They lived in Maryborough Queensland where they said it would be warm in July. They suggested we call in on them and said they’d give us a few suggestions on where to go in Queensland.
About three hours after leaving the boat we entered the small Victorian country town of Nagambie. It had a nice lake alongside the road and we stopped for coffee. While the kettle was boiling I heard Clare say “hey look at that” “What?” I asked. “There’s a Post Office right next to an Internet café and between them is a gum tree. That’s the perfect set up for you isn’t it?”
I thought the opportunity too good to miss and strode into the Internet café. I paid my two bucks for access to the net and collected two orders for gum leaves. Back out on the sidewalk I broke a few twigs with leaves off the gum tree and went back to Erasmus where I cut them off with the scissors and put them in a plastic bag. I walked back over the road to the post office and mailed them to my two new American customers. The whole operation had taken only fifteen minutes. “Turn the kettle off” I yelled to Clare “We’re having cappuccino and cakes at the cafe.”
Two other memorable things occurred at Nagambie. The first was that when I was sitting on Erasmus’ steps with the scissors cutting gum leaves off twigs and putting them in plastic bags, a grey haired couple strolled by and stopped to watch me. I looked up and the woman said “cutting up the gum leave are ya mate?” I nodded and smiled and they walked on until they came to a campervan which they drove off in. About a month later in a park in Bundaberg Queensland I was again engaged in the same activity when the same couple walked by and stopped to look at me. This time they didn’t say anything to me but just walked off muttering something about “well, it could be anything, you never know with people do you”
The second thing I remember about Nagambie is that when we pulled up at the side of the lake there was a great heap of building rubble on the nature strip stretching back from the road for a few metres. It was all fenced in with wire mesh and it had two enormous doors in amongst it. I remarked that Nagambie was a pretty little place, what with its lake and all, but that great heap of rubble somebody had dumped in the wire mesh compound really took the edge off the place. When the waitress came with our coffee I asked her about it and she said “oh that was our church, it was hit by a bloody great truck a few weeks back.”
I think the people of Nagambie must be some of the biggest sinners on the planet if God chose their town to let this happen to his house. Like MacDonald’s he’s got plenty of branches I guess but what a way to close one down! Nagambie’s shops were still selling postcards with pictures of the church as it was before the destruction. I wondered if the truck driver had been wearing his St. Christopher medal. St. Christopher, for those unfamiliar with the Catholic faith, is the patron saint of travellers. I don’t know if there’s a patron saint for churchgoers who’ve been flattened by Mack Trucks. If not I think Araldite, Goddess of the Sticky Situation, would probably suffice.
On our first day out of the starting blocks the fridge packed up. We were in Shepparton in Victoria when we started to look for an auto electrician. When we found one it was getting late in the day but the guy traced the problem to a little clear plastic box that plugged into our “magic black box” which lived under the wardrobe and did all sorts of things like transforming 240 volts to 12. He told me where to get another little clear plastic box and how to fit it and sent us away without charging. Well, it was charging, that was another thing the magic black box did. It charged the batteries whenever we had 240 volt power on. No, what I meant was that he didn’t charge us any money. We bought a new little clear plastic box at an electrical wholesalers and I plugged it in. The fridge was OK again but by this time it was getting dark and we drove about frantically trying to find a place to stop for the night.
We drove past a service station with a huge gravel car park. There was enough space there to turn even a very large road train around in. We considered ourselves lucky to have found a place to park so close to dark and I fitted the TV aerial up and played with trying to get reception for long enough for Clare to have finished cooking dinner. It had been along day and we watched TV in bed for about an hour before going to sleep at around 9.30 pm. The very large road trains didn’t start to arrive until some time after 11pm but when they did it was frightening. The reason the garage we’d parked alongside had such a huge parking area was so as to allow the very largest of trucks to circle around and line up the diesel pump with the side their filler caps were on. As they turned they came within a few meters of Erasmus and the noise made the whole van vibrate. We left there at about 4 am and drove north.
We crossed the mighty Murray River somewhere unmemorable into New South Wales. We’d been advised to get on the Newel Highway and not stop until the weather became warm and the advice was sound. What could have been a very uninteresting inland journey was made agreeable by the fact that there had been recent rains all the way from Melbourne almost to the Queensland border. There was green grass instead of dry brown stubble everywhere and at almost half hourly intervals there’d be flurries of white or pink as sulphur crested cockatoos or galahs took to the wing.
Although it may not have seemed warm to us there were plenty of insects on the wing and Erasmus, having such a large, flat front, was becoming plastered with them. The really juicy large ones made a real mess of the windscreen and using the washers and wipers only served to smear them across our line of vision. We stopped in a town and bought some insect remover specially formulated, so it claimed, “for cleaning dead insects off of auto paintwork and glass.” I was surprised to find that it really worked. I was intrigued to know what was in it. When I worked in the oil industry I learned that solvents are usually made from a lighter version of the same substance that the stain or whatever is made from. Like, if you want to remove grease, you can use gasoline because it's just a lighter version of the same crude oil product.
Insect remover though, had got me baffled because, following the same logic; I was inclined to think that it was manufactured from something like dragonfly vomit. Clare didn’t agree because she reasoned that the average dragonfly was probably only capable of disgorging something like 100th of a millilitre at a time and, given that the bottle contained 500 mill, they would never be able to produce it for the price. She also pointed out that you couldn’t guarantee that every dragonfly would produce every day. I disagreed. All you'd have to do is get them all together in a big cage and play Kylie Minogue records to them all day and you'd never run out of the stuff.
We went through a barrage of inland towns that sounded like they’d been named by people with speech impediments; Jerilderie, Narrandera, Narrabri, Gilgandra. We drove as fast as we could through places like Gunnedah, which sounded to us like a venereal disease, and Coonabarabran which I had always thought was a cheesy flavoured breakfast cereal. Parkes went by the widow so fast that we forgot it was the town that starred in the film called The Dish that the thoroughly nice Sam Neil managed to reduce to the level of background music.
Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo was the only place we found worth stopping in. It’s a 300 hectare open range animal park and much better than any I’d seen in Europe. We spent a glorious day there walking around and wished we’d taken the bikes from Erasmus in with us. I couldn’t think of any way in which the place could be improved it was so good. Well, maybe they could put some kind of chastity belts on the male monkeys so they can’t jerk off in front of parties of schoolchildren but that’s all part of the entertainment and, anyway, they’re probably not Christians.
I still remember my father catching me masturbating. He told me what was, I suppose, the standard story in those days, that I’d go blind. I looked across at Tugger Wilson in class the next day. He wore glasses and seemed to be getting on alright. That’ll do me I thought. I’ll just do it a little bit and wear glasses like Tugger Wilson. I was only twenty seven.
The only other improvement that could possibly be made to Dubbo Zoo is to move it to Sydney, or Melbourne, or anywhere. Dubbo’s in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where the name Dubbo came from? It sounds like some kitchen product from the 1940s like OXO or Draino doesn’t it. Clean your plimsolls with new ultra white Dubbo. I can just hear the jingles “Dab a daily dob of Dubbo on your Doberman.” On the third day out I kissed Clare on the Warrumbungles. She’s got lovely Warrumbungles.
Generally the inland route we took to get through New South Wales wasn’t very interesting. There were maybe six or so places to spend half an hour looking at and a lot of driving. One place we stopped at in the north of the State was a cave system that was above ground so didn’t have the usual stalactite/stalagmite cave junk that all looks the same after you’ve seen a few of them. I really tire very quickly of looking at illuminated snot dribbles with names like “the giant’s elbow” or the sleeping beauty” or whatever so it seemed like a refreshing change to go up into a cave system instead of down into one. Although it wasn’t particularly spectacular it was nice and cool on what was a hot day. There was a party of about twenty American teenage schoolkids being taken around by the guide, an Australian teacher, an American teacher and a couple of American parents. The guide said we could wait an hour until the next tour or tag along with the group which we did. We came to a cave with a natural stage in it that the guide said had perfect acoustics and the American schoolkids had learnt to sing that old Australian favourite “Put Me Among The Gum Trees.” Without even asking permission to annoy us they all lined up and sang it as a choir. They expected us to clap but we didn’t and then a girl sang Amazing Grace through braces and a fellow girl student massacred “Bye Bye Miss American Pie. She had a voice like a small furry rodent caught in a trap and we giggled.
When she’d finished the guide said that he was going to demonstrate to us what complete silence and complete darkness were like. He said he was going to turn the light switch off and let us know when two minutes were up. He did and it was like sitting in a dry flotation tank. All my senses were heightened and I shut my eyes because it was pointless keeping them open in the utter, absolute and complete darkness. I could hear myself breathing and hear my heart lub dubbing. Then, after what I judged to be about a minute, I farted a great fart. Clare dug me in the ribs and I could hear suppressed sniggering. When the guide turned the light back on he didn’t mention it but as we left the room/cave the American teacher beckoned to one of the boys to stay behind. As we wandered down to the next level I could hear the boy protesting his innocence. “I swayer on mah life it wasn’t me maaam” he said.
Finding somewhere quiet and out of the way to stop each night while it was still daylight was becoming routine. We’d soon learnt that bumping the top of the van into overhanging trees in the dark was going to become expensive. Reversing it into the bottoms of trees wasn’t quite as bad because the bumpers often saved us but, nevertheless, it had already cost us a hundred and twenty dollars in rear lights. The top of the van though, was going to be difficult for a panel beater to get at.
Charging up the highway somewhere in northern New South Wales, I can no longer remember where, we saw a sign to our right saying Kelly’s Landing. It was a little before dusk and we were looking for a place to stop for the night. I figured that a place with a name like that must be on a river or a lake so we turned off the highway to look for it and park up. We drove for a couple of kilometres without seeing anything and we were having doubts about the dirt road we were on and whether the trees were going to become too low for us to get through. We stopped the van and took to the bikes to see if the road ahead was passable. We rode for another two kilometres or so and didn’t find anywhere to park but the unsealed road was excellent. It was getting dim as we hurried back to Erasmus, threw the bikes inside and drove further on.
We came across forks in the road and after taking half a dozen of these we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to retrace our steps. The roads though, got better and wider but they didn’t seem to go anywhere. After about half an hour of this we had to admit we were hopelessly lost. All these well maintained, wide dirt roads must have been for something but there was no sign of logging or heavy vehicle tyre marks.
By now it was well after dark as we emerged from the forest onto what looked like a causeway. There wasn’t any point in driving around lost any longer so we pulled up at the side of the road and stopped for the night. It was cold and blustery and we couldn’t watch the news because the TV aerial was blowing around so much. We slept well in spite of the wind buffeting Erasmus around. Somewhere about 6am I got up for a pee. I opened the door and stepped down onto the gravel road. As I slammed the door shut a great cloud of white storky looking water birds shrieked and took off. They circled around a couple of times and then settled back down in the marshes.
We’d parked in a real, full on, juice of the fruit wetlands. It was our first wetland experience, the sort of thing we’d seen on David Attenborough TV shows in Africa’s Okavango Delta. Dubbo Zoo eat your heart out – this was the real thing! There were herons, egrets and huge flocks of ducks. Spoonbills spooned and waders waded. And inside Erasmus two breakfasters breakfasted with the windows opened up to one of the best sights we’d ever seen – and it was just for us – no other humans in sight.
We were completely intoxicated. It was as if the whole world had just us two people in it, no buildings or anything to show where the hand of man had ever been. We eventually came around to thinking that the hand of man had, indeed, been in the area along with the bulldozer and grader of man leaving behind mile after mile of roads that didn’t go anywhere. And we had diesel enough left for only about thirty kilometres. It was useless looking at the maps. Kelly’s Landing didn’t appear on any of them and we hadn’t encountered a soul since turning off the main road the previous evening.
We knew that somebody who knew the area would come along sooner or later so Clare got her painting gear out and I started writing. Pretty soon a battered old 1970s Commodore came galumphing along towards us in a cloud of dust and I stood in the road and waved at the driver. His name was Des. He pulled a wedge out of the window and lowered it. He looked at me.
“How the fuck did you get in ere?”
“We came in last night looking for Kelly’s Landing”
“Well, yooze are in it”
“Yeah, but how do we get out?”
“You can spend a week in ’ere an not get out. ‘Op in an’ I’ll show yooze how to get out.”
His car was full of empty beer cans and he leaned forward grabbing handfuls of them throwing them from the front seat into the back where the seats had been removed and replaced with two huge blue eskys. I got in and it was then that I saw that his bare feet and arms up to his elbows were caked with dried mud. As we travelled he explained the reasons for all the well maintained roads.
There was a resort close by and this land was all theirs. A couple of years back the resort was bought by a large Malaysian concern who changed nothing except that they had put in roads, bird hides and observation towers for their guests safari tours. I asked if he lived close by and he said he had a shack built of iron and driftwood that he spent a couple of nights a week in. He went there to catch fish which was how he earned his living. He said his family had always lived close by and he was raised in these marshlands. I asked how the new Malaysian owners felt about his fish poaching activities. He said they never visited and left the land in the hands of a ranger who was a good bloke.
He took me to a few of his favourite fishing spots in the marshes where, at night, he would bait is hooks and tie them with a short line to empty plastic soft drink bottles which he painted white. In the morning just before dusk he rowed around with a powerful torch picking out the white bottles and lifting them and the fish into his dingy. He spent half an hour showing me around these wonderful marshlands which he seemed to have all to himself before taking me to the entrance of the resort where, I suspected, he didn’t want to be seen. At any rate he turned around and took me back to Erasmus where Clare was getting anxious for my safety having seen me leave with such a fierce looking individual. I asked him in for a cup of coffee which he refused but reciprocated by opening up one of the eskys in the back of his car and asking me to help myself to the Malaysian resort owner’s fish.
I was once in Malaysia with time to kill and wandered into a supermarket where I came across a whole wall of fish. The wall was taken up by some twenty or so tanks, all full of brightly coloured tropical fish. It was very soothing to the eye, calming and tranquil and I stood for a while to watch them. My doctor’s surgery back in Melbourne had a big aquarium which, Doctor Andrews told me, made his patients relax while they were waiting to see him. I must admit that I’d always been too impatient to spend time watching Doctor Andrews’ fish but the display in this Kuala Lumpur supermarket was so much bigger and it really did have something of a calming effect. Birds and animals get all stressed and dart about but fish just glide around changing direction with hardly any perceptible movement, all serene like.
Suddenly a hand appeared in one of the tanks and dashed around until it grabbed a large, pretty blue and yellow striped fish and then the fish and the hand disappeared. It all happened so quickly, and I was feeling so relaxed and laid back, that my tiny brain couldn’t quite work out what was going on but I knew that the hand was too big to have been on the end of a kid. The rest of the fishes in the tank didn’t look at all serene now; they were left spinning around like they’d been sucked into a whirlpool. The water was all misty and they were banging against the sides. I was just thinking about telling the guy who was stacking the long white radishy things with blotches on the shelves when, around the edge of the aquarium wall, I saw a "fish butcher" whack the head off of my nice blue and yellow striped fish with an axe. He popped it into a plastic bag and threw it on the scales, slapped a price tag on it and handed it across the counter to a lady who stood in line at the checkout with the unfortunate creature still flapping its last feeble throes.
I got to thinking about how we view fish, or is it fishes? They’re not terribly warm and friendly creatures as far as we humans are concerned but they’re still sentient – they still feel pain. But fish don’t scream when you chop their heads off do they? If you fancied a lump of pork for dinner you wouldn’t just lop the head off a pug would you? Of course you wouldn’t. It was a spelling mistake. It should have read pig. And, anyway, pugs are dogs. Pigs would scream like hell while their heads were being hacked off and we’d feel sorry for them. Pugs too for that matter. But, if you’re a voiceless fish, who gives a toss about you? I’d never thought about it before but I vowed to in future – every time I sprinkled the salt and vinegar on one. But meanwhile, back in real time New South Wales somewhere, we stowed the fish Des gave us away in the freezer, quickly tidied ourselves up and headed straight for the resort.
It was luxurious and palatial, with a golf course, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, the works. We sat around one of the sandy beached outside pools under gently swaying palm trees with a bottle of chilled chardonnay for an hour or so. It was so incongruous, we had woken up lost in the middle of a wetlands surrounded by great flocks of migratory water birds. Then a ride in a mobile wrecker’s yard driven by a mud encrusted crab catcher and now it was only 11am and were hob-knobbing it in a luxury resort.
As we travelled north and on into Queensland the weather gradually became warmer and we were able to change into shorts and T shirts and stay that way for weeks on end. The scenery too, became much more inviting. Hibiscus and frangipanis started to appear along with palm trees and sub tropical monsterias in people’s gardens. By the time we reached Toowoomba enough ingredients had combined to create the holiday mood and we slowed down so as to be able to drink it all in. Toowoomba is at quite an elevation and has over a thousand hectares of parks and gardens. The views from points around this biggest of Queensland’s inland cities are beautiful when mist doesn’t obscure the picture.
Leaving Toowoomba we cruised up and down mountain ranges covered with banana and pineapple plantations, saw macadamia orchards and pawpaw patches. It was glorious and I wondered why it had taken me so many years to get up to this part of Australia. If I’d suspected that it existed I’d have come much sooner.
It was in the early afternoon that we finally drifted into Maryborough to catch up with Fred and Tonia, the Dutch couple I’d met the year before in Hobart.
CHAPTER ONE
It was in the May of 2004 that Clare and I decided we should travel around Australia in a mobile home. Neither of us had done much in the way of travel in Australia and figured that, as the Aussie dollar was so low overseas and people in headscarves were blowing holes in things, now would be the best time for a vacation on our home soil.
The reason that we’d both, independently, avoided Australia up until that point is that Australia is the World’s most boring continent with the possible exception of Antarctica. If you’re inclined to disagree with this notion simply take a map of the world and trace Australia’s outline on a piece of clear plastic. Then put that clear plastic outline over any land mass on the planet and see what your outline of Australia encompasses. See how many countries, peoples, different cultures, foods, climatic zones, mountain ranges, rivers etc. etc. you come up with.
That’s not to say that Australia isn’t an interesting and fascinating place with lots to see and do within its “Girt by Sea” boundaries. All it means is that those things are further apart with a lot of nothing in between. That’s cool – no worries. The best way to see Australia is undoubtedly by helicopter. We didn’t have one. We decided to do it by campervan.
First we had to find the right van and as we lived in Tasmania, where the choice of anything other than fresh air is limited, we thought we’d have to go to the mainland to find one. That though, proved unnecessary when we first clapped eyes on Erasmus. It was advertised in the Hobart Mercury one Saturday morning and an hour after we’d first seen it we’d decided that this was the van for us. It had a four door, dual cab which we didn’t know if we’d need but thought that the back half would make a good shed if nothing else. The living accommodation was already like a shed, at least in size. It was so big that after we’d had it for a month we found a Japanese soldier wandering around in one of the wardrobes who hadn’t heard that WWII was over. You don’t believe me do you? Well, what follows is an account of our travels and they’re even more unbelievable.
What really impressed me about Erasmus was the guy we bought it from. His name was Baden and he had a wooden leg. At least I think it was wooden but it could have been made from plastic or aluminium or an old drainpipe or whatever. Come to think of it, it was probably a prosthesis but I wasn’t going to type that because I can’t spell it. Still, I thought I’d give it a go and, sure enough, the editor has corrected it for me. Now I just have to hope that prosthesis is the right word and that it doesn’t mean something smelly or religious.
Anyway, Baden wore shorts all the time, even in winter. He was totally un- self conscious about his wood …….uh……. pros ……about being a unidexter with an artificial walking aid; so much so that nobody else noticed he even had one. Well, I noticed it but only fleetingly. Now that I think of it, I guess he only had the one leg to get cold so wearing shorts in winter was only half as cold an experience as it would be for me. Perhaps having only the one leg meant that his heart had less blood to pump around so it would get back inside him, to the thing inside you that warms the blood, quicker than if he’d had two legs. That would mean that his blood would get warmed a bit more than mine as it went through the blood warmer thingy so his other, non wooden leg, would probably have been a good deal warmer than either of my two legs. Isn’t it amazing how nature compensates?
He took us for a drive in the van. The most recent of his two legs he wore on his right side – the accelerator pedal side. The ride was a bit jerky but otherwise nobody would have suspected that he was wearing a prosthetically enhanced walking aid with a shoe on the end to accelerate and brake with. I thought that if he could drive the thing, then I should at least try. Sometimes I can’t stop my brain from thinking things. I can hold what seems to be a perfectly intelligible conversation on one subject while my brain is actually off on a trivia trip. Baden was talking to me and showing me how to let the awning down, how to check the oil, the water, the brake fluid and all those things a really competent mobile home driver should know about. All I could think of was what if he kicked the tyres with his non-blood carrying walking appendage and it flew off.? I mean, imagine if you were mowing the lawn next door and suddenly this pretend leg thing came over the fence and hit you in the head or something?
Baden told me he used to be a log truck driver so his leg could be a hollowed out log I guess. I reckon he could have got plenty of spare one’s in that business too. One man’s log could be another man’s leg – that’s how I look at it. Well…I didn’t really look at it; not while he was looking at me anyway. As I said, I hardly noticed he was wearing one – leg that is. I hope I don’t ever have to have an artificial lower valency. I’d be worried that people were looking at it all the time. I think I’d wear a jackboot on the good leg to draw people’s attention away from the counterfeet one. I’d hate to be pedometrically challenged like that.
We decided to call it Erasmus. No, not Baden’s ersatz ass kicker – the van. But not right then. No, we decided to call it Erasmus when I started to write this book because we didn’t have a name for it. If we get fed up with the name Erasmus this book could be called something else by the time I’ve finished it. Get on with the fucking story I hear you cry. Well, it’s my book and I’ll get on with it when I’m good and ready.
Right, where was I? Oh yes. Well, we took the van out for three weekends in Tasmania so we could gain all the experience we would need for life on the road on the Australian mainland. We didn’t learn much and we made all our major mistakes (like driving off with the electric cable still attached) after we’d left Tasmania on our first trip. That first trip was quite a big drive for us. It took us all the way from Hobart at the bottom of Australia, up through inland Victoria and New South Wales on up through coastal Queensland right up through the Daintree rainforest to Cape Tribulation almost at the very top of Australia.
Of course, life on the road in this huge mobile home wasn’t going to be cheap. Erasmus only did 5.5 kilometres to a litre of fuel and we were looking down the barrel at many thousands of kilometres. We needed a way to earn money on the road. The idea I hit upon was that of selling gum leaves to American budgerigar owners. The idea came to me one night in a friend’s kitchen. We were trying to talk over the chirping and chattering of their incredibly verbose and noisy budgerigar.
“What’s wrong with that bloody budgie tonight” I asked.
“The man at the pet shop told me that if I wanted a happy budgie I should give it gum leaves” Replied Kathryn.
“And that’s what makes it go all vocal like that?”
“Yes, works a treat doesn’t it. She’s never been happier”
“What kind of gum leaves? Where do you get them?”
“Just outside hanging over the pavement.”
It kind of made sense to me that budgies were Australian and so were eucalyptus trees so I researched it. I went to the University of Tasmania library and read up on them. I’d only just finished doing a BA in history there and had been asked to do honours and the semester was due to start in a month’s time. I was soon to attend an honours orientation day at which I should have to announce my chosen subject for my thesis. I was deeply engrossed in books with budgie pictures at one of the reading cubicles when I felt someone behind me. It was my history professor. He’s such a nice, soft voiced and unassuming Englishman in his mid fifties who students tend to think is perhaps a little weak and somewhat eccentric. In fact the man is as sharp as a cactus spine and an innovator who’s prepared to take a risk and go out on a limb with his superiors if he thinks a student’s project has some merit.
“Getting stuck into it already Peter? My God you’re keen. What’s that you’re looking at?” he said as he leaned over the top of my cubicle. “Are they budgerigar illustrations?”
“Yes, I’m thinking about doing the History of the Budgerigar as my history honours thesis.”
“Good, good. That’s what I like to see, something original for a change. See you at the orientation day then”
With that he left me to my budgie research. I thought he’d think I was a loony but he wasn’t phased at all. As it turned out, the history of the budgerigar was a really good story and would have made a great subject for my thesis. A British ornithologist named Gould had taken a few natural, wild budgies to England in 1840. Wild budgies are all green but there, at the other end of the earth in an unfamiliar land; they had been selectively bred into a whole range of colours. They wound up being introduced to over a hundred countries and by the 1950s there were an estimated five million of them in cages all over the world. When this happened the poor old budgie that used to supplement its predominately seed diet with gum leaves never saw this native tucker again. That is, not until I started a website aimed at selling gum leaves to budgie owners. Along with it I advertised perches made from eucalyptus branches and toys made from gum (eucalyptus) nuts.
By the time we left for our first trip the website had begun to perform and the business was coming in. We loaded Erasmus with stocks of toys and perches and everything we needed to run the business. Gum leaves we would pick up along the way every time we received an order. The orders we would collect through the website which we’d access in Internet café’s and libraries.
We said our farewells to friends and Clare’s family, gave them all our email address and off we went on the boat to mainland Australia one cold July night. From disembarking at Port Melbourne in the morning we drove north determined not to stop except for meals and sleep until we reached somewhere warm. We had the address of a Dutch couple, Tonia and Fred, who I’d met briefly in Tasmania the year before. They lived in Maryborough Queensland where they said it would be warm in July. They suggested we call in on them and said they’d give us a few suggestions on where to go in Queensland.
About three hours after leaving the boat we entered the small Victorian country town of Nagambie. It had a nice lake alongside the road and we stopped for coffee. While the kettle was boiling I heard Clare say “hey look at that” “What?” I asked. “There’s a Post Office right next to an Internet café and between them is a gum tree. That’s the perfect set up for you isn’t it?”
I thought the opportunity too good to miss and strode into the Internet café. I paid my two bucks for access to the net and collected two orders for gum leaves. Back out on the sidewalk I broke a few twigs with leaves off the gum tree and went back to Erasmus where I cut them off with the scissors and put them in a plastic bag. I walked back over the road to the post office and mailed them to my two new American customers. The whole operation had taken only fifteen minutes. “Turn the kettle off” I yelled to Clare “We’re having cappuccino and cakes at the cafe.”
Two other memorable things occurred at Nagambie. The first was that when I was sitting on Erasmus’ steps with the scissors cutting gum leaves off twigs and putting them in plastic bags, a grey haired couple strolled by and stopped to watch me. I looked up and the woman said “cutting up the gum leave are ya mate?” I nodded and smiled and they walked on until they came to a campervan which they drove off in. About a month later in a park in Bundaberg Queensland I was again engaged in the same activity when the same couple walked by and stopped to look at me. This time they didn’t say anything to me but just walked off muttering something about “well, it could be anything, you never know with people do you”
The second thing I remember about Nagambie is that when we pulled up at the side of the lake there was a great heap of building rubble on the nature strip stretching back from the road for a few metres. It was all fenced in with wire mesh and it had two enormous doors in amongst it. I remarked that Nagambie was a pretty little place, what with its lake and all, but that great heap of rubble somebody had dumped in the wire mesh compound really took the edge off the place. When the waitress came with our coffee I asked her about it and she said “oh that was our church, it was hit by a bloody great truck a few weeks back.”
I think the people of Nagambie must be some of the biggest sinners on the planet if God chose their town to let this happen to his house. Like MacDonald’s he’s got plenty of branches I guess but what a way to close one down! Nagambie’s shops were still selling postcards with pictures of the church as it was before the destruction. I wondered if the truck driver had been wearing his St. Christopher medal. St. Christopher, for those unfamiliar with the Catholic faith, is the patron saint of travellers. I don’t know if there’s a patron saint for churchgoers who’ve been flattened by Mack Trucks. If not I think Araldite, Goddess of the Sticky Situation, would probably suffice.
On our first day out of the starting blocks the fridge packed up. We were in Shepparton in Victoria when we started to look for an auto electrician. When we found one it was getting late in the day but the guy traced the problem to a little clear plastic box that plugged into our “magic black box” which lived under the wardrobe and did all sorts of things like transforming 240 volts to 12. He told me where to get another little clear plastic box and how to fit it and sent us away without charging. Well, it was charging, that was another thing the magic black box did. It charged the batteries whenever we had 240 volt power on. No, what I meant was that he didn’t charge us any money. We bought a new little clear plastic box at an electrical wholesalers and I plugged it in. The fridge was OK again but by this time it was getting dark and we drove about frantically trying to find a place to stop for the night.
We drove past a service station with a huge gravel car park. There was enough space there to turn even a very large road train around in. We considered ourselves lucky to have found a place to park so close to dark and I fitted the TV aerial up and played with trying to get reception for long enough for Clare to have finished cooking dinner. It had been along day and we watched TV in bed for about an hour before going to sleep at around 9.30 pm. The very large road trains didn’t start to arrive until some time after 11pm but when they did it was frightening. The reason the garage we’d parked alongside had such a huge parking area was so as to allow the very largest of trucks to circle around and line up the diesel pump with the side their filler caps were on. As they turned they came within a few meters of Erasmus and the noise made the whole van vibrate. We left there at about 4 am and drove north.
We crossed the mighty Murray River somewhere unmemorable into New South Wales. We’d been advised to get on the Newel Highway and not stop until the weather became warm and the advice was sound. What could have been a very uninteresting inland journey was made agreeable by the fact that there had been recent rains all the way from Melbourne almost to the Queensland border. There was green grass instead of dry brown stubble everywhere and at almost half hourly intervals there’d be flurries of white or pink as sulphur crested cockatoos or galahs took to the wing.
Although it may not have seemed warm to us there were plenty of insects on the wing and Erasmus, having such a large, flat front, was becoming plastered with them. The really juicy large ones made a real mess of the windscreen and using the washers and wipers only served to smear them across our line of vision. We stopped in a town and bought some insect remover specially formulated, so it claimed, “for cleaning dead insects off of auto paintwork and glass.” I was surprised to find that it really worked. I was intrigued to know what was in it. When I worked in the oil industry I learned that solvents are usually made from a lighter version of the same substance that the stain or whatever is made from. Like, if you want to remove grease, you can use gasoline because it's just a lighter version of the same crude oil product.
Insect remover though, had got me baffled because, following the same logic; I was inclined to think that it was manufactured from something like dragonfly vomit. Clare didn’t agree because she reasoned that the average dragonfly was probably only capable of disgorging something like 100th of a millilitre at a time and, given that the bottle contained 500 mill, they would never be able to produce it for the price. She also pointed out that you couldn’t guarantee that every dragonfly would produce every day. I disagreed. All you'd have to do is get them all together in a big cage and play Kylie Minogue records to them all day and you'd never run out of the stuff.
We went through a barrage of inland towns that sounded like they’d been named by people with speech impediments; Jerilderie, Narrandera, Narrabri, Gilgandra. We drove as fast as we could through places like Gunnedah, which sounded to us like a venereal disease, and Coonabarabran which I had always thought was a cheesy flavoured breakfast cereal. Parkes went by the widow so fast that we forgot it was the town that starred in the film called The Dish that the thoroughly nice Sam Neil managed to reduce to the level of background music.
Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo was the only place we found worth stopping in. It’s a 300 hectare open range animal park and much better than any I’d seen in Europe. We spent a glorious day there walking around and wished we’d taken the bikes from Erasmus in with us. I couldn’t think of any way in which the place could be improved it was so good. Well, maybe they could put some kind of chastity belts on the male monkeys so they can’t jerk off in front of parties of schoolchildren but that’s all part of the entertainment and, anyway, they’re probably not Christians.
I still remember my father catching me masturbating. He told me what was, I suppose, the standard story in those days, that I’d go blind. I looked across at Tugger Wilson in class the next day. He wore glasses and seemed to be getting on alright. That’ll do me I thought. I’ll just do it a little bit and wear glasses like Tugger Wilson. I was only twenty seven.
The only other improvement that could possibly be made to Dubbo Zoo is to move it to Sydney, or Melbourne, or anywhere. Dubbo’s in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where the name Dubbo came from? It sounds like some kitchen product from the 1940s like OXO or Draino doesn’t it. Clean your plimsolls with new ultra white Dubbo. I can just hear the jingles “Dab a daily dob of Dubbo on your Doberman.” On the third day out I kissed Clare on the Warrumbungles. She’s got lovely Warrumbungles.
Generally the inland route we took to get through New South Wales wasn’t very interesting. There were maybe six or so places to spend half an hour looking at and a lot of driving. One place we stopped at in the north of the State was a cave system that was above ground so didn’t have the usual stalactite/stalagmite cave junk that all looks the same after you’ve seen a few of them. I really tire very quickly of looking at illuminated snot dribbles with names like “the giant’s elbow” or the sleeping beauty” or whatever so it seemed like a refreshing change to go up into a cave system instead of down into one. Although it wasn’t particularly spectacular it was nice and cool on what was a hot day. There was a party of about twenty American teenage schoolkids being taken around by the guide, an Australian teacher, an American teacher and a couple of American parents. The guide said we could wait an hour until the next tour or tag along with the group which we did. We came to a cave with a natural stage in it that the guide said had perfect acoustics and the American schoolkids had learnt to sing that old Australian favourite “Put Me Among The Gum Trees.” Without even asking permission to annoy us they all lined up and sang it as a choir. They expected us to clap but we didn’t and then a girl sang Amazing Grace through braces and a fellow girl student massacred “Bye Bye Miss American Pie. She had a voice like a small furry rodent caught in a trap and we giggled.
When she’d finished the guide said that he was going to demonstrate to us what complete silence and complete darkness were like. He said he was going to turn the light switch off and let us know when two minutes were up. He did and it was like sitting in a dry flotation tank. All my senses were heightened and I shut my eyes because it was pointless keeping them open in the utter, absolute and complete darkness. I could hear myself breathing and hear my heart lub dubbing. Then, after what I judged to be about a minute, I farted a great fart. Clare dug me in the ribs and I could hear suppressed sniggering. When the guide turned the light back on he didn’t mention it but as we left the room/cave the American teacher beckoned to one of the boys to stay behind. As we wandered down to the next level I could hear the boy protesting his innocence. “I swayer on mah life it wasn’t me maaam” he said.
Finding somewhere quiet and out of the way to stop each night while it was still daylight was becoming routine. We’d soon learnt that bumping the top of the van into overhanging trees in the dark was going to become expensive. Reversing it into the bottoms of trees wasn’t quite as bad because the bumpers often saved us but, nevertheless, it had already cost us a hundred and twenty dollars in rear lights. The top of the van though, was going to be difficult for a panel beater to get at.
Charging up the highway somewhere in northern New South Wales, I can no longer remember where, we saw a sign to our right saying Kelly’s Landing. It was a little before dusk and we were looking for a place to stop for the night. I figured that a place with a name like that must be on a river or a lake so we turned off the highway to look for it and park up. We drove for a couple of kilometres without seeing anything and we were having doubts about the dirt road we were on and whether the trees were going to become too low for us to get through. We stopped the van and took to the bikes to see if the road ahead was passable. We rode for another two kilometres or so and didn’t find anywhere to park but the unsealed road was excellent. It was getting dim as we hurried back to Erasmus, threw the bikes inside and drove further on.
We came across forks in the road and after taking half a dozen of these we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to retrace our steps. The roads though, got better and wider but they didn’t seem to go anywhere. After about half an hour of this we had to admit we were hopelessly lost. All these well maintained, wide dirt roads must have been for something but there was no sign of logging or heavy vehicle tyre marks.
By now it was well after dark as we emerged from the forest onto what looked like a causeway. There wasn’t any point in driving around lost any longer so we pulled up at the side of the road and stopped for the night. It was cold and blustery and we couldn’t watch the news because the TV aerial was blowing around so much. We slept well in spite of the wind buffeting Erasmus around. Somewhere about 6am I got up for a pee. I opened the door and stepped down onto the gravel road. As I slammed the door shut a great cloud of white storky looking water birds shrieked and took off. They circled around a couple of times and then settled back down in the marshes.
We’d parked in a real, full on, juice of the fruit wetlands. It was our first wetland experience, the sort of thing we’d seen on David Attenborough TV shows in Africa’s Okavango Delta. Dubbo Zoo eat your heart out – this was the real thing! There were herons, egrets and huge flocks of ducks. Spoonbills spooned and waders waded. And inside Erasmus two breakfasters breakfasted with the windows opened up to one of the best sights we’d ever seen – and it was just for us – no other humans in sight.
We were completely intoxicated. It was as if the whole world had just us two people in it, no buildings or anything to show where the hand of man had ever been. We eventually came around to thinking that the hand of man had, indeed, been in the area along with the bulldozer and grader of man leaving behind mile after mile of roads that didn’t go anywhere. And we had diesel enough left for only about thirty kilometres. It was useless looking at the maps. Kelly’s Landing didn’t appear on any of them and we hadn’t encountered a soul since turning off the main road the previous evening.
We knew that somebody who knew the area would come along sooner or later so Clare got her painting gear out and I started writing. Pretty soon a battered old 1970s Commodore came galumphing along towards us in a cloud of dust and I stood in the road and waved at the driver. His name was Des. He pulled a wedge out of the window and lowered it. He looked at me.
“How the fuck did you get in ere?”
“We came in last night looking for Kelly’s Landing”
“Well, yooze are in it”
“Yeah, but how do we get out?”
“You can spend a week in ’ere an not get out. ‘Op in an’ I’ll show yooze how to get out.”
His car was full of empty beer cans and he leaned forward grabbing handfuls of them throwing them from the front seat into the back where the seats had been removed and replaced with two huge blue eskys. I got in and it was then that I saw that his bare feet and arms up to his elbows were caked with dried mud. As we travelled he explained the reasons for all the well maintained roads.
There was a resort close by and this land was all theirs. A couple of years back the resort was bought by a large Malaysian concern who changed nothing except that they had put in roads, bird hides and observation towers for their guests safari tours. I asked if he lived close by and he said he had a shack built of iron and driftwood that he spent a couple of nights a week in. He went there to catch fish which was how he earned his living. He said his family had always lived close by and he was raised in these marshlands. I asked how the new Malaysian owners felt about his fish poaching activities. He said they never visited and left the land in the hands of a ranger who was a good bloke.
He took me to a few of his favourite fishing spots in the marshes where, at night, he would bait is hooks and tie them with a short line to empty plastic soft drink bottles which he painted white. In the morning just before dusk he rowed around with a powerful torch picking out the white bottles and lifting them and the fish into his dingy. He spent half an hour showing me around these wonderful marshlands which he seemed to have all to himself before taking me to the entrance of the resort where, I suspected, he didn’t want to be seen. At any rate he turned around and took me back to Erasmus where Clare was getting anxious for my safety having seen me leave with such a fierce looking individual. I asked him in for a cup of coffee which he refused but reciprocated by opening up one of the eskys in the back of his car and asking me to help myself to the Malaysian resort owner’s fish.
I was once in Malaysia with time to kill and wandered into a supermarket where I came across a whole wall of fish. The wall was taken up by some twenty or so tanks, all full of brightly coloured tropical fish. It was very soothing to the eye, calming and tranquil and I stood for a while to watch them. My doctor’s surgery back in Melbourne had a big aquarium which, Doctor Andrews told me, made his patients relax while they were waiting to see him. I must admit that I’d always been too impatient to spend time watching Doctor Andrews’ fish but the display in this Kuala Lumpur supermarket was so much bigger and it really did have something of a calming effect. Birds and animals get all stressed and dart about but fish just glide around changing direction with hardly any perceptible movement, all serene like.
Suddenly a hand appeared in one of the tanks and dashed around until it grabbed a large, pretty blue and yellow striped fish and then the fish and the hand disappeared. It all happened so quickly, and I was feeling so relaxed and laid back, that my tiny brain couldn’t quite work out what was going on but I knew that the hand was too big to have been on the end of a kid. The rest of the fishes in the tank didn’t look at all serene now; they were left spinning around like they’d been sucked into a whirlpool. The water was all misty and they were banging against the sides. I was just thinking about telling the guy who was stacking the long white radishy things with blotches on the shelves when, around the edge of the aquarium wall, I saw a "fish butcher" whack the head off of my nice blue and yellow striped fish with an axe. He popped it into a plastic bag and threw it on the scales, slapped a price tag on it and handed it across the counter to a lady who stood in line at the checkout with the unfortunate creature still flapping its last feeble throes.
I got to thinking about how we view fish, or is it fishes? They’re not terribly warm and friendly creatures as far as we humans are concerned but they’re still sentient – they still feel pain. But fish don’t scream when you chop their heads off do they? If you fancied a lump of pork for dinner you wouldn’t just lop the head off a pug would you? Of course you wouldn’t. It was a spelling mistake. It should have read pig. And, anyway, pugs are dogs. Pigs would scream like hell while their heads were being hacked off and we’d feel sorry for them. Pugs too for that matter. But, if you’re a voiceless fish, who gives a toss about you? I’d never thought about it before but I vowed to in future – every time I sprinkled the salt and vinegar on one. But meanwhile, back in real time New South Wales somewhere, we stowed the fish Des gave us away in the freezer, quickly tidied ourselves up and headed straight for the resort.
It was luxurious and palatial, with a golf course, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, the works. We sat around one of the sandy beached outside pools under gently swaying palm trees with a bottle of chilled chardonnay for an hour or so. It was so incongruous, we had woken up lost in the middle of a wetlands surrounded by great flocks of migratory water birds. Then a ride in a mobile wrecker’s yard driven by a mud encrusted crab catcher and now it was only 11am and were hob-knobbing it in a luxury resort.
As we travelled north and on into Queensland the weather gradually became warmer and we were able to change into shorts and T shirts and stay that way for weeks on end. The scenery too, became much more inviting. Hibiscus and frangipanis started to appear along with palm trees and sub tropical monsterias in people’s gardens. By the time we reached Toowoomba enough ingredients had combined to create the holiday mood and we slowed down so as to be able to drink it all in. Toowoomba is at quite an elevation and has over a thousand hectares of parks and gardens. The views from points around this biggest of Queensland’s inland cities are beautiful when mist doesn’t obscure the picture.
Leaving Toowoomba we cruised up and down mountain ranges covered with banana and pineapple plantations, saw macadamia orchards and pawpaw patches. It was glorious and I wondered why it had taken me so many years to get up to this part of Australia. If I’d suspected that it existed I’d have come much sooner.
It was in the early afternoon that we finally drifted into Maryborough to catch up with Fred and Tonia, the Dutch couple I’d met the year before in Hobart.
