A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER TEN
We left Port Hedland and I was happy about it. We were heading for Mount Newman. It was a sort of temporary diversion of around five hundred kilometres to see a distant relative of Clare’s from Tasmania. The general direction in which we’d been heading was to the left of the map but Newman is in a downwardly direction and it’s almost slap bang on the Tropic of Capricorn. It’s a mining town and one of the local mines is the largest open cut in the world. Driving the Great Northern Highway to Newman we experienced yet another kind of nothingness for as far as the eye could see, even with the telescopically assisted eye, and I thought that digging a bloody great hole in the landscape would do wonders for the view. At, I guess, about halfway down the map page, dusk was spreading is brooding shadow across the land and I turned into a roadside camping spot. It was the first time I’d been through the process of metamorphosis and it pained me fair in the groin. I quickly turned back into the splendid, silver haired smoothy of an author you see before you and parked up. Now, where was I? I just read the last couple of sentences and I have to candidly admit that writing a book in such isolated conditions seems to be getting to me.
While there was still a soupcon of daylight left in the orange glazed punchbowl of the evening sky (shit, that was impressive wasn’t it?) we watched the grey nomads collecting their wood. It’s a little known fact that before the advent of your actual grey nomad, Australia was covered in forests. How many of you readers know about the Great Sahara Forest where our grey nomads used to go on holidays until our dollar hit the skids? I think it’s a blokey thing; the collecting of wood and lighting the fires. There are certain things that are male. Testosteroney type things. Cutting meat at Sunday lunchtimes used to be one of them when I was a kid. Back then every household in the English speaking world used to have Sunday roasts and fathers, who shunned anything to do with the preparation of anything edible all week, had to cut the meat on Sundays. Women weren’t allowed near it. They could spend a couple of hours lovingly basting and caring for it but once it was out of the oven they weren’t allowed to go near it. It was man the hunter’s job. It’s much the same with barbecues these days.
Grey nomad males, the primeval slime long since dried on their backs, now have to rely on butchers to supply the meat they used to hunt. That’s why they love fishing – they’re too old to catch anything on the land that moves in sustained bursts at more than five kilometres per hour. But the term grey nomad doesn’t necessarily mean grey gonads and what they can do, with all that musty testosterone, is take to trees around campsites with axes and bow saws. At low revs old, silver backed, male grey nomads still have the staying power to keep chopping at trees for bloody hours. Some of them stop their engines and park up at four in the afternoon and spend two hours slowly dragging wood back to the campsite. Then they light huge fires that last well into the night. They let them die down a bit at about six o’clock when the Enids, Marjories and Graces emerge with the cling wrapped dead animal portions but as soon as they’re cooked the guys get stoking again.
We usually like to get our evening meal cooking done outside on the gas if it’s daylight or inside on the gas if we’re late. On this night though, we were just too fascinated by the hunter gatherers and their fires to spend time cooking. A little after dark two big expensive BMW motorbikes roared into the campsite. In the light of the campfires we saw one of the riders set about erecting a tent while the other, larger one of the two, headed straight off to the scrub with a tomahawk in search of wood. There was a heap of dried wood right outside Erasmus which was there when we arrived and we weren’t going to use so I went across to offer it to them. When I got to see them in the light I realised that they were both women in their forties. One was slender and feminine while the wood getter was butch, bulky and had a white skeleton painted on her leathers. Even among lesbians wood getting and fire lighting seems to be a blokey thing. I could almost smell the testostrogen.
The name of the camping spot was Bea Bea creek and I would advise people not to spend the night there. The area was below the level of the road and the only spot left for us when we arrived was the one nearest the road. After dark the road trains started to go past at two hourly intervals and kept going past all night. The noise from these body builders of the truck world, these juggernautical overblown wheeled leviathans, carries for miles on a still night. But on this night, and probably every other night during the tourist season, they all blew their horns to keep us awake. Bastards! We’d be lying there, covered in a veil of sleepiness and just on the cusp of dropping off when we’d hear an engine in the distance. Then, as they closed in on us, we’d grit our teeth and wait for the horn that was so loud it made the kettle vibrate on the stove top. We got up and read. Sex just wasn’t working under these conditions. Well……..you try keeping an erection going when there’s a much bigger horn than yours hanging over your head like that – so to speak.
The next morning saw us up early and back to a hard day’s grind sitting in the cab wishing something exciting would happen. Just around the next bend there could have been something interesting going down. But there were no bends. A couple of hours into the journey, as we neared a small stand of dwarf shrubby things, a small flurry of green swirled up and flew a little way away into the general shrubbiness landing on another stand of dwarf shrubby things. They were budgerigars………um…. not the dwarf shrubby things but the things they landed on. I was excited. I’d been looking for wild budgies. I needed some pictures of wild budgies to put on my website. With camera in hand I scrambled down the embankment and stalked them for twenty minutes or so but every time I got within range they flew another ten metres further away. They were all green, their natural colour, and making that same course chirruping their captive cousins make. I didn’t manage to take a single picture and I was disappointed. I’d also wandered so far from the van that I couldn’t see it and had no indication of where I was in this; Gods last great shrubbery project. I had to shout for Clare so that she could guide me back to the road. We’d been travelling on an elevated road but I hadn’t realised that the low scrub I’d been looking at was, in fact, higher than I was.
As we were pulling away again Clare shouted “dead cow, dead cow.” My disappointment at not being able to take a budgie pic was forgotten. I was excited all over again. Elton was a Hereford/Brahmin cross. He’d only gone to meet that big that big bovine in the blue in the last week or so and I couldn’t decide whether or not he was deserving of my mortuary skills. But this was no time for vacillation and, anyway, I didn’t know what the word meant. Elton was very close to the road with his back towards the bitumen and what really attracted me to him was that his back was straight. Most dead cows were wrinkled and, having had no formal artistic training, I could only paint short names on them like May or Lil before a wrinkle got in the way. You see, I had wanted to give them all recognisable female pop stars names like Madonna and Brittney but I didn’t plan for the wrinkles. I was sad to find that my first straight backed dead cow was, in fact, a bull. That’s why I called him Elton.
I donned my new Ronald MacDonald wig and was in the middle of spraying the word Elton on his back when Clare, who’d been playing the part of “madam la photographerie” and taking a picture of “l’artiste est travaille sans sensibilite,” suddenly disappeared. I heard a car door slam shut. I stood up and turned around and there stood a grey haired grey nomad of the female persuasion next to a Toyota Land Cruiser followed closely by a caravan. I waved. She didn’t. I waved again. She took a photograph of me and Elton and got back in the car. It drove away. Clare’s head appeared out of the ground followed closely by the rest of her. We giggled. I carried on working, she carried on photographing.
We called in at a National Park. It was called Karajini. In the car park was a van with “Andrew and Linda Worley, Apiarists” painted on it. I stood looking at it for a few seconds just as the female Worley arrived back from their walk. I was a little embarrassed she’d caught me staring at their car.
“Apiarists?” I said
“Yes” replied Linda “apiarists.”
“So, ow many apes ‘ave yooze got….like altogether in total then” I said
“No, it’s not apes. It’s bees. Apiary is a very old name. Apiary’s a very old profession. It goes back to Roman times, bee keeping”
“Oh. Does ape mean bee in old Roman Latin like then?”
“I’m not sure but it’s probably something like that.”
“Yeah, funny Latin innit? I mean about apes ‘an that.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah, you now…….like.….. the Roman Catholic church uses Latin and they call their cardinals primates don’t they?”
Then the old B……. she was keeping appeared and I said goodbye.
We carried on down to the start of the walk. It was a good gorge with a lovely green limpid pool at one end and a waterfall at the other where I slipped over on some slimy water weedy stuff and lost my sunglasses. When we arrived at the pool we were alone. There was a notice explaining that it figured as a sacred place in the local Aboriginal tradition and asked us to approach the place quietly and, while we could swim, we were requested not to make loud noises or jump into the pool. According to local Aboriginal creation stories all the main players that created the world originally came out of the ground, worked their magic and then went back in again. The places where they went to ground after creating the mountains, rivers and whatnot, are sacred. This pool in Karajini Gorge was one of these places and so was the waterfall at the other end of the gorge.
There was no wind and the pool was as flat as a sheet of glass mirroring all of the delicate little ferns that clung tenaciously to the rocks above. Even as an atheist I could sense why this place could have spiritual meaning for others. It was so tranquil and still and out of sight of the parched red earth and the relentless heat of the sun up above. I thought about some of these Aboriginal creation beings. Some of them seemed to be very nasty and vindictive; they stole each others wives and killed each others babies and all sorts. They were very much like ancient Greek Gods. I thought about the Hindu religion too. Hindus have some horrific nasty bastards in their pantheon of gods. I wondered why the Christians had this God that made you feel guilty about having a good time, bonking other people’s spouses and getting pissed. With most other religions, save those that sprung from Judaism, the gods weren’t faultless. And if your role model gods weren’t perfect you didn’t have to feel so guilty about not being perfect either.
There was a scream and someone yelled “WooHoo, you bloody beauty.” We hadn’t heard the two families sneaking up on the water hole until we heard the screams. A group of six stood at the water’s edge while two teenage boys climbed the rocks. Then, waiting until the party below had trained their video cameras on them, they joined hands and jumped screaming into the water. I looked on and prayed to some god I didn’t believe in that a fucking great Aboriginal mythical frog would open its mouth and swallow them. Insensitive pricks. We walked to the waterfall at the other end of the gorge and twenty minutes after we arrived the two families turned up and repeated the performance. I didn’t now what to compare it with but I figured that if a bus load of Aboriginals turned up outside the Vatican and shat on the Pope’s doormat it would maybe have balanced things up a bit.
Newman eventually appeared on the horizon and after a further fifteen minutes I got to meet Clare’s distant ex relation Biddi and her husband Gerry. It was a really good time for us to have arrived because that very day was the first day of their holidays and they were spending the entire vacation at home. Biddi has for thirty years or more been in the nursing profession and for a lot of that time has been a remote area nurse. This meant she’d been treating Aboriginals for various complaints for most of that time and still was. During the week we spent with them we discussed white Australia’s Aboriginal problem and black Australia’s white problem at some length. We found little common ground but I learned a lot about the way that white people in that part of the world regard Aboriginals.
My background was purely theoretical whereas hers was practical. She was fed up with the way theoretical people down south think they know more about the problems than those northern whites who are dealing with the Aborigines from day to day. I, on the other hand, was horrified at the way remote area nurses are plonked down in communities without any grounding in the culture of the people they were supposed to be helping. Nor did anybody give them any grounding in the languages of those they were expected to treat. Some of the day to day practices she described I considered would have been deeply offensive to her charges but she didn’t know it because she knew nothing of the culture other than through her own observations. The week after we’d left them we watched the Andrew Denton show which had the Northern Territory administrator Ted Egan as one of the guests. He said that in every community where whites had learned the language there had been outstanding successes in terms of health but everywhere else had been a disaster. My personal thoughts about what I heard in Newman concerning Aborigines are best left until the next book (assuming I can get a publisher to buy this one).
Biddy and Gerry were extremely hospitable to us and we were more than a little surprised to find that in this small mining town there was great food in the hotel restaurants. There were good hamburgers at the Capricorn roadhouse ten kilometres away too. What’s more they keep the doors closed to keep the red dust off them and the hint of diesel was purely imaginary. We went there for lunch twice. The second time we were there I was about to launch into my cheeseburger when a shadow was cast over the table. I turned around to see that a house had turned up at the diesel pump on the back of a big truck. I dashed outside for a photograph, not of the house but of the door of the prime mover. The name of the business was proudly displayed in blue against the white door. TWO DOGS TRUCKIN PTY. LTD.
When it comes to fine dining in Newman though, the local gentry have a further option. Candlelight suppers in dry creek beds! No, I’m not making it up. On special occasions they dress up and with candles in glove box they drive out of town with their tables and chairs, table cloths, food and wine into the bush where they sit in dried up creek beds and have dinner. It doesn’t sound particularly romantic though, does it?
“Mum?”
“Yes?”
“Where did you first meet dad?”
“At a candlelight dinner my dear”
“Whereabouts was that?”
“In a creek bed three hundred kilometres south of Port Hedland”
Dry as these creek beds are in winter, they’re raging torrents at some times of the year and these floods are not entirely predictable. Everyone had a story of being unexpectedly cut off from civilization. When it rains elsewhere in the catchment area a sudden flood can be expected downstream at some time later. The problem is that it’s difficult to know exactly when it’s going to hit wherever you are. You may be experiencing beautiful clear blue skies but heading toward you at a very fast rate could be a great big wall of water. Vegetation is so sparse in some arid areas that there are no plant roots to suck up the rain when it falls, no swamps for the rain to soak into. It just charges downstream.
Biddy & Gerry work in a remote settlement two hundred kilometres out of Newman and come home for one month in every four. She was sleeping in her clinic one night and was woken by somebody throwing stones at the window and shouting. She found herself laying in bed but up to her shoulders in water. She hadn’t noticed it because it was warm, at body temperature. The flood had come raging down the dried up river bed but only slowly enveloped the settlement as it spread out over the land. She managed to get through door but then found she couldn’t open the gate to the compound as all the settlement’s rubbish had pushed up against the wire mesh fence and the weight of water was pushing against it. Somebody on the other side of the fence helped her and when their joint efforts finally managed to open the gate, a great flood poured through the gap taking everything Biddy was holding in her hands. An RAAF Hercules dropped fuel a couple of days later so that the settlement’s generator could be started to provide some much needed power. This wasn’t a particularly remarkable story, just the one I best remember from a conversation over dinner one night. I’m told that more people die from snake bites than drowning as the snakes are panicking too.
Newman’s main attraction - Yes, it has one – is the mine. We went on a two hour tour of it, a lot of which was taken up by statistics, but it was, nevertheless, interesting. My abiding memory of it though, will be the kids. Four children were on our tour and they, like everyone else, had to wear BHP Billiton safety gear. Two and three year old kids in adult hard hats, adult Day-Glo orange jackets and adult safety glasses look so cool. I took twenty photographs of them and three of the mine. The hard hats were so big on them that they covered their eyes and when their parents called them their heads swung around in the direction of the call but their hats stayed still. They spent most of their time bumping into the back of people’s knees and putting red dust into the plastic sample bags we were each given.
At one point in the tour the guide said that “running away to the east are the Ophthalmias”
“Ophthalmia?” I said. “Isn’t that some sort of eye problem?”
“Yes” she said. “The explorer Giles had conjunctivitis when he discovered those mountains and so he named them the Ophthalmia Ranges.”
“That’s a bit dangerous, naming mountain ranges after diseases isn’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well… what if he’d had diarrhoea or a sexually transmitted disease? You’d have to say running away to the east are the diarrhoeas”
She got an attack of the giggles and everyone who wasn’t listening to her commentary now wanted to know what was said. She was too embarrassed and told them to ask me.
The statistics, though I’m usually bored with them, were astonishing. Mount Whaleback was the name of the mine. It used to be a mountain 805 metres high but they dug it up and sold it. Now it’s a hole 405 metres deep and they’re still digging it up and selling it! The hole currently stands at 5.5 kilometres long and over a kilometre wide! Out of this single mine they’ve dug up and sold over 900 million tons of iron ore. The daily trains that take the ore to the coast are 2.5 kilometres long and, once rolling, take 3 kilometres to stop. The train takes 30,000 tons of iron ore out of the mine per day. Once they broke the world record with a train 7 kilometres long. The ore, as it comes from the earth, is nearly 70% iron and the ground beneath your feet goes rusty when there’s any moisture around.
The guide seemed awfully proud of what her company was doing for Australia and quoted company bullshit ad-nauseum but I was appalled. Thirty thousand tons of iron ore a day from just one mine (and there a lot of them in W.A. alone) goes to keep thousands of people employed processing it in other countries. The Mount Whaleback mine only employs something like one hundred and fifty people here in Australia. Furthermore, the energy used to smelt the 43 percent of this ore that goes to Japan comes from the Bass Strait in the form of LPG. The North West Shelf gas project, when complete, will send gas (LNG) in much larger quantities to China where they’ll soon be outdoing Japan in buying iron ore and gas from Australia. China already takes over 20 percent of Whaleback’s ore.
In Japan, where they have bugger all in the way of resources (and went to war back in 1942 to get their hands on some) they make Toyotas out of our gas and iron ore and sell them to us. In China they make pick axes, tools and appliances out of our gas and iron ore and sell them to us. So what does that make us? Idiots? We already have all the resources in the ground but every wagon load of ore that goes out of Mount whaleback and every barrel of LPG that leaves the Bass Strait en route to Asia and elsewhere, is exporting jobs along with it. Why can’t we have the jobs instead? If we can’t get our act together, or don’t have the ready cash to exploit our own resources, why don’t we get the Japanese and Chinese to come and employ us making Toyotas and pick axes here? After all, when the holes are all dug, and the goodies all sold, there’ll be nothing left for us because for the last two hundred years, we’ve been busy destroying our farming land. And what will we do after years of watching other countries economies boom by helping them get rich using our resources in a smarter way than we did? We certainly won’t have any forests left if the current rapacious practices are maintained. In Tasmania they are chopping old growth trees down that are hundreds of years old and sending them to Japan in the form of wood chips. There, they’re made into particle board and craft wood and a variety of other building materials and sold back to us. The Japanese could be forgiven for thinking we’re a nation of dummies.
Ant hills. I want to talk to you about ant hills. There are ant hills in these parts that are unlike any other ant hills we’ve come across. They’re shaped a bit like silicone boobs sitting upright with a nipple on top. Clare says they’re shaped like WWI Prussian soldiers helmets, the ones with the spike on top. Anyway, they’re about a metre in diameter at the base, reddish and scattered in clumps all over the landscape. I’ve only just realised what they actually are. They’re fossilised dinosaur droppings. Brontosaurus droppings, to be precise. The termites that occupy them didn’t actually make them you see. They just moved in a few million years after the Brontosaurus’s dumped them.
Although I have only a basic grounding in palaeontology (I saw Jurassic Park three times) it wasn’t too hard to work out. You see, the tapered nipple bit on top evolved that way to stop the Brontosaurus’s arse closing with a bang and alerting predators as to their whereabouts. Before this evolutionary adaptation life was painful for the old Bronto. The word Brontosaurus itself is a contraction. It was originally Bronto-sore-arse.
Out round Newman way gold prospecting is big. Biddi & Gerry introduced us to three people in their early thirties who’ve been prospecting for years. These days metal detectors can locate gold a metre under the surface and that, combined with GPS that lets you know precisely where you are, has led to a huge revival in prospecting. These days, we were told, satellite telephone is relatively cheap as is the satellite connection of laptops to the internet to send emails. Making use of these technologies it’s unlikely that even amateur prospectors should ever be uncontactable or hopelessly lost. The biggest advantage though, is that you can fix the exact position where you found gold and go back to it at any time in the future. There’s no longer the need to stay out until you’ve worked the whole area, you can maintain a fairly civilised life by retreating to a caravan park somewhere at weekends. These guys even had commercially available CDs showing all the abandoned, worked out gold mines in the area.
I asked the prospectors at Biddi & Gerry’s what gold nuggets looked like when they came out of the ground and one of the guys went out to the van and came back with a plastic baby formula container half full of gold nuggets ranging from shirt button size up to lumps as big as my thumbnail. I asked roughly how many dollars worth was in the container and he told me that he knew exactly what it was worth. It was worth $13,000 but he didn’t need the money right then so he was hanging on to it until the gold price was higher. One of the other guys then went back out to the van and came back in with a piece of rag which he untied to reveal a larger nugget which he said was worth about $1,250. It wasn’t very big but weighed around three ounces. He’d found it on the surface in an area where, a year before, somebody had found a twelve ounce nugget. He said that news of that find had caused a flood of prospectors who’d combed the area but, nevertheless, he’d gone back months afterwards and still found his three ounce nugget on top of the ground. These three guys worked together pooling what they found. To make sure they covered every inch of an area they selected they “chained” it. This involved dragging chains behind the four wheel drive that left a mark on the ground so they’d be able to recognise which parts they’d covered. The prospectors we met stay out from Monday to Friday living in tents and come into town on the weekends. We were regaled with stories about people getting rich quick and the stories appeared to me to be genuine. They told us about loners, hermit types who manage to stay out for weeks at a time and won’t tell anyone where they’ve been when they finally hit town again. They told us too that Aboriginal women will sit in streams after the rain picking up individual specks of gold until they have half a 35mm plastic film container full which they take to the pub at Nullagine and exchange for a slab of beer. The publican, according to our prospectors, had amassed a small fortune by providing this “service.”
Clare borrowed a book from Biddi. It was a photographic book and each photo had a narrative accompanying it. One story was of an Aboriginal woman who had consulted with a station manager about what names to give her sons when they were born. The first she named Churchill and the second she called Roosevelt. However, when she had her third son the station manager had left so she called him Puddin. We stayed with Biddi and Gerry for a week and then headed back up the road we came into Newman on. It was exasperating having to cover a couple of hundred kilometres of the same old ground again. This road shortage in Australia becomes more acute the further west you travel.
On our way out of Newman there was a bridge with a sign on in saying “maximum load ten tons.” We saw a truck stop just before it and the driver got out with a stick and ran around hitting the sides of the vehicle before he drove across. On the other side I caught up with him and asked why he hit the side of his van like that at the ten ton bridge sign. He told me that he was carrying fifteen tons of budgerigars and he had to keep them flying while he crossed the bridge.
The next stop along the way west was on the Point Samson Peninsula at a small town/village called Roebourne. There, in the old gaol, were information boards telling the most horrific stories about the early treatment of the local Aboriginals. The history sheets covered organised slave catching and trading; men having to labour all day chained to each other by their necks and then being chained to a ring in the jail wall at night. It’s worth noting that Britain abolished slavery and slave trading in 1833 at a time when America was fighting a civil war to end slavery. At the same time settlers here in Australia were escalating their enslavement of Aboriginals with the full knowledge of authorities. Once rounded up, many men were dumped on islands where they couldn’t escape and where they’d be easy to round up again when needed by passing pearling luggers.
Aboriginal women were forced into labouring on pearling vessels and the death rates from scurvy and diseases were high – up to forty on some ships. It really was abominable and few Australians will ever know about it. Under the 1905 Aborigines act (four years after Federation when Australia was undeniably making its own decisions on such matters) Aboriginal women were prevented from entering some townships, their children could be forcibly taken away from them and they were even prohibited from marrying without the permission of the Aborigines Department.
There was a lighter, albeit tragicomic, side to some of the information supplied on the tourist information boards on the Point Samson Peninsula. It was at a place called Cossak which was another one in the long list of abandoned settlements we’d come across so many times since starting this trip. It was a cute little place on the warm waters of a small inlet of the Indian Ocean and the buildings that remained were built in the early 1900s to withstand the cyclones that from time to time ravage the country thereabouts. They were good looking and very solid. One of them had a café in it which sold the best flat whites for hundreds of miles around. Come to think of it, they were the only flat whites for hundreds of miles around. But they were excellent.
On the walls there were some stories about the town and its early inhabitants. One story concerned an American Negro called Wilson who worked as a cargo handler and blew off one of his hands while fishing with dynamite. The hand was replaced with a hook and he carried on at his old job. At a later date he blew the other hand off – a second hook was attached and he still carried on in the same job. There’s a joke in there somewhere about second hand shops but I couldn’t help thinking of something else. He’d have had to have been very, very careful when wiping his arse wouldn’t he? I bet it made his eyes water.
Another story was about a guy called Harry Best. In Cossak’s early days a canon was fired whenever a ship arrived to let the residents know it was coming. Harry Best rammed a load of assorted metal objects down the barrel and sat astride the cannon as he lit the touch hole. Some of these metal bits and pieces jammed in the barrel and the canon blew to bits blowing Harry to bits with it. What a way to go!
At the end of the Point Samson Peninsula lays, predictably, Point Samson. There’s not much there but for a caravan holiday gulag, a lovely beach with clear warm waters and a fairly sizeable fishing port. We didn’t want to stay in the holiday gulag and there were signs all over the place telling us that we couldn’t camp for the night anywhere else. It was a lovely area and hardly anybody was there even though it was a weekend. I don’t know what happened to the grey nomads. There may have been a curfew in the holiday gulag or something. We drove around the wharf area and found a great spot to stay. It was perfectly level, asphalted, had rubbish bins and was right there next to the fishing boats. At night the area was lit and was so attractive that I took about a score of photographs of fishing boats and mangroves reflected in the water. I awoke at half past two in the morning and drew back the curtains. I didn’t recognise the place. There was barely a drop of water anywhere. It was one of those places that has six metre tides and the water was visiting some other shore of the Indian Ocean at the time.
One reason for choosing the wharf to stay was that it had toilets, or, rather, a toilet. It was really cool. It was made by a New Zealand company and was called, an Exeloo. I’d first used one in Broome and thought it was a wonderful concept. They’re a unisex piece of equipment with wheelchair access and even popes can use them. The space age design, I’m sure, represents the first step in the way that all public toilets are heading and soon they’ll probably be offering them as an optional extra on space shuttles.
It had everything including a used syringe box and an automatic hand washer. Outside were illuminated status buttons to tell you what mode the Exeloo was in at any time. A notice told the prospective bowel and bladder emptier how to operate it and what would happen to them if they failed to obey the instructions. It said that it would give you a certain number of minutes to perform your bodily function and then it would set off an alarm. Then, if you didn’t press the door open button, it would go into the automatic door opening mode and expose you to the queue outside. It played canned music (not chamber music unfortunately) as soon as you entered and you couldn’t leave without flushing it because the flush was set off when you pressed the door open button. Hand washing was automatic - when you put your hand over the sink it dispensed a set amount of water. Toilet paper was dispensed at the press of a button and the system would only let you press the button three times. After that, having let you have half a metre of paper, it shut up shop. This was my kind of toilet. I marvelled at the mind of the genius who sat in an office in New Zealand somewhere and invented this fully automated, computerised, thinking shithouse.
There were a few bugs in the system still but I’ve no doubt they’ll be ironed out with Version II. When I approached it, it was in vacant mode so I pressed the door open button on the outside of the box and the door slid sideways. I already knew what to do because I’d used the one in Broome where, by the time I’d read and digested the instructions, the alarm went off and it was time to get out. The door had opened and I found myself back on the pavement where I took my place at the back of the queue again. This time I was already programmed and knew what to do. I sat down and the alarm went off immediately. I got up and waited for the door to open but it didn’t and I pressed the door open button. It opened and I rushed out. People walking along the wharf with their kids all looked at me as if I’d been doing something kind of dirty in there like shooting up, or down or wanking or whatever.
The alarm wouldn’t stop so I skulked off back to Erasmus and told Clare. She said I must have got something wrong so we had a cup of coffee and went over the instructions as we remembered them from Broome. I was scared to approach the thing again but when the noise stopped Clare bravely entered the “Doctor Who Cubicle” as we now called it. She’d been in there about the same length of time as me and the alarm went off again but this time it didn’t stop. Now everybody was looking at both of us. We got back in the van and drove off to another parking spot where they had old fashioned toilets. We went back to the wharf again that night. The alarm had stopped and I went around the back of the Doctor Who Cubicle and peed on it from the outside.
I’m sure that Exeloo are on to something good with their interactive poo shed. I’m sure Bill Gates has one in every room, but they do still have a few teething problems. Still, I can wait for Version II to come out although if it has a sanitary towel extractor I’ll be sure to cover my testicles with a saucepan before pressing the button.
For some reason this chapter has turned out to have fifty percent lavatory humour content. I don’t like smutty lavatory humour any more than you do dear reader. But, having got to fifty percent I may as well throw in a story from Tioman Island in the South China Sea and bring the content up to seventy percent thus cramming all the lavatory humour into the one chapter.
His name was Andrew and I met him on Tioman but he’d just come from India where he’d been on an organised tour with his wife Julie. He said that when they came down for breakfast one morning only half the group had turned up because the other half had all got the dreaded Delhi belly and were on the toilet for the day. This was the day they were all due to visit the Taj Mahal and they would only get the one chance as the next day they were due to go somewhere up country. His wife Julie had always wanted to see the Taj Mahal since she was a kid and visiting this place was half the reason that they'd chosen India as part of their holiday.
They were both feeling perfectly well and since they'd followed religiously the travel agents advice "drink only bottled water" he thought that this was the reason. As they got on the bus for the trip he remarked to his wife that all those silly sods back at the hotel should have known better and that everyone knew that the drinking water in India was not to be trusted.
They travelled out to the Taj Mahal and he was standing with the group listening to the guide when it suddenly hit him that he had express diarrhoea in quantities industrial. He reckoned that he only had 30 seconds to find a toilet or do it in his pants.
He said they were on the lawn right in front of the Taj' when he left the party and started running around in circles looking for a bush or anything to hide behind. There was nothing but grass. It was all over in no time, he just couldn't hang on and he pulled his trousers down and shat on the lawn right there in front of the Taj Mahal, which his wife had always wanted to visit. He said that there were hundreds of tourists walking around and elegant Indian ladies strolling past in beautiful saris and if his nails had been long enough he would have burrowed into the ground and hid in the hole.
It was the most embarrassing time in his entire life and he had no paper so he took off his T-shirt and wiped his bum thinking that he could throw it into the first rubbish bin they came across.
He eventually stood up and turned around to face the rest of the group, who were all looking horrified, when he noticed a Japanese tourist standing a few yards away who was just putting his video camera back in its case after having filmed the event. His wife almost died of shame and refused to walk around the Taj Mahal. She got straight back on the bus and waited for the rest of the party to return.
She hardly spoke to poor old Andrew for the rest of the week they were in India and the rest of the group didn't want to be seen with him. The final humiliation came a couple of days later when they were all in a restaurant somewhere and on his way back from the toilets he glanced over someone's shoulder and saw that they were all looking at a photograph of him evacuating on the grass with the Taj Mahal in the background.
He said that although there were hundreds of people walking about on the day, the photograph was taken from a low angle and all that could be seen was the Taj' with this tranquil pond in front of it and him in the foreground shitting on the grass.
The sea on the Point Samson Peninsula was as clear as water can be and the beaches were clean. We thought we’d ask around about the possibility of a boat trip to some of the nearby islands and perhaps some snorkelling. We didn’t end up doing it but a man at the tour company suggested we might like to “dive the wrecks.” He gave me a brochure entitled “Port Walcott Delambre Wrecks.” It sounded exciting. Delambre, was it French? In my tiny brain I was already swimming the light fantastic around an old French square rigger with cannons poking their barrels out of the sand and looking over my shoulder for sharks until I came to the part that read “The pearling vessel Kunmunya sank off Sams creek in 1995…..It was moved to its present site by the being towed underwater suspended from the Samson II (now the second wreck).”
Karratha, the biggest town in the Pilbarra, was less than fifty kilometres from the Point Samson Peninsula and we had an open invitation to visit a couple of ex Tasmanians who lived there. They had no idea which month we’d be arriving in and, when we did, it couldn’t have been more inconvenient for them. We arrived on a Sunday evening and they were moving house on the Wednesday. Despite the bad timing they made us exceedingly welcome and we stayed the night on a vacant block next door to the house they were living in. Dave worked in the LNG (liquefied natural gas) business which around Karratha is kind of big. The gas comes ashore near Karratha from the rigs operating in the North West Shelf. Once on land it’s liquefied, stored and then exported mainly to Asia. Japan was the big buyer a few years ago when the project was begun but more recently a contract has been signed with China which will dwarf the already huge amount that’s presently being sent to Japan.
Sitting outside drinking beer around the table on Sunday night I told Dave where we’d been and how we saw these massive amounts of iron ore being shipped out on trains at Newman. He knew a lot about what went where from the Kimberley and the Pillbara and told us that what we’d already seen was small in the grand scheme of things. What worried him was that digging these holes in the ground and sending the contents to other parts of the globe was upsetting the balance of the earth. This, he told us, was moving the earth nearer to the sun and causing global warming. It recalled for me a conversation I once had with a guy in a pub in England in 1969 when I told him I was going to Australia to live. We were both pissed and he said that what amazed him was that when the plane got to Australia it had to come up to come down.
“Woddja mean Ian?”
“Well, the earth’s round iznitt?”
“Roundish, yeah”
“Yeah, well… If you get a graypfroot or sumfin and put a machboks on top of it…. an that’s the plane see?”
“What, the machboks?””Yea, shuddup fer a minnit. An you takes the machboks/plane round underneath the graypfroot it’s ‘angin upside down iznitt?”
“Yeah”
“Well, stans to reezon dunnit. To come down to earth the fuckin fing ‘as to come upwards”
Ian told me that what really happened was that the plane went up and stayed there until the earth rotated and then it came down again. It all sounded reasonable to me.
“An annover fing Pete”
“Yeah?”
“When you get out there in Stralia”
“Stralia?”
“Yeah – Ozfuckinstralia - the water goes down the plug ‘ole the uvver way”
“Don’t believe you”
“Does, fuckin does, fuckin right it does. I got a mate….did you ever know Len Bull?”
“Who?”
“Len Bull”
“No”
“Well, he was in the Merchant Navy an ee told me that at the equator it runs strait down the plug ‘ole - ‘ardly touches the fuckin’ sides.”
While in Karratha I managed to buy a can of white spray paint for the cows at KMart. The paint cabinet wasn’t locked up like the one in KMart Alice Springs so I guess they don’t have the same problem with people sniffing the stuff. We also went to the LNG visitors centre. It was impressive for anyone who’s into statistics. Looking out of the windows we saw one of the specially designed ships that takes the LNG to Japan. Protruding from its deck were the top halves of the four massive spheres that contained the liquid gas. Sideways it looked like Pamela Anderson sun bathing on an inflatable mattress when viewed through somebody else’s inverted bi-focals.
On the way to the LNG visitors centre we visited a great beach called Hearsons Cove because we’d heard that there were thousands of Aboriginal rock carvings there. It was an hour before we found one but having found that one we now saw hundreds. Our eyes weren’t attuned to them at first. I guess we were looking for something that resembled rock paintings on the walls of a cliff overhang. These were carvings on rocks; loose rocks. There were hills everywhere made from red rocks the size of garbage bins all looking as though they were put there by giant bulldozers. In fact if we hadn’t been told we would have thought that they actually had been put there in this fashion. Most of the rocks had one exposed flat edge and it was on these that the Aboriginals some twenty thousand years ago had practiced carving. They never did get it right though.
I can’t imagine what they carved these rocks with as they were very hard. I think they were granite; their red appearance was only a coating that came from thousands of year’s worth of red dust flying around the place. There was no harder rock to be seen anywhere and the carvings were very shallow. To me they were poor examples of Aboriginal art but, had I seen them before starting out on our trip I’d have most likely been very impressed. By this time though, we’d seen some of the best Aboriginal rock paintings around. Nevertheless, what we were now looking at was carvings in rock, something we’d never before come across. Not that I hadn’t seen rock carving before mind you. I’ve seen carvings on English churches on genuine Old English stone or, as it’s known in the stonemasonry trade, Pommygranite.
Another export from the area around Karratha is salt. It took up a lot of space and was a really low tech business. There weren’t even any pumps involved. There were brine channels cut in from the sea that filled huge ponds that just sat there evaporating until it was dry and then it was mechanically harvested. Driving along through these brilliant white brine fields was blinding. It was so white and pure that angels would have looked dirty if they’d been sunbaking in the nude on it. There was a big notice saying Dampier salt. Dunno if it was tastier or saltier but Dampier wasn’t a quality I’d have been advertising if it was my company.
Dampier was close to Karratha – probably still is – and I particularly wanted to go there. I knew that there was a causeway from Dampier to one of the Intercourse Islands and a friend of mine in Turkey asked me many years ago if I could get him a photograph of a road sign to it. His name is Tony Marciniec and it was him that first alerted me to the fact that these unfortunately named islands existed. Tony also has a few theories about how they came to bear the names they do. He told me he thought that in the 1700s when they were discovered, the ship had been at sea for three months without sighting land. Suddenly the soon to be named Intercourse Islands were spotted by the lookout in the crows nest. He yelled “land ahoy” and a sweaty cook struggled up from the galley below, looked around and said “where the fuck are we.”
Tony Marciniec knows a lot about Australia, in fact he’s quite an Australophile even though he’s never been here. His father used to work in the sugar cane fields in Queensland and was hung by the Kanakas. I don’t know for how long but apparently he was never the same again. Had to walk with one foot on the pavement he did.
East Intercourse Island is a loading terminal for something I couldn’t determine as the security guard wouldn’t let us drive across the causeway but we could see big ships being loaded from a conveyor belt. Dampier though was very welcoming and we liked it. It was very small and existed only to service the mining industry but it was neat, clean and tidy and had a nice little beach which we stayed on overnight. There were hot showers and toilets there too. The ranger that threw us off in the morning was nice as well. He could have thrown us off the night before but left us to enjoy it. He told us we were contravening the West Australian Caravanning & Camping Act and in the morning he told us to enjoy our breakfasts and be off the beach by noon. Looking back to Port Hedland, I don’t now why it was such an ugly, dirty dump of a place as Dampier performs much the same functions but has green grass and palm trees instead of red dust and cracked concrete.
We stayed off and on with Dave and Chrissie for a week going out for days in between them moving house. When we finally left to continue our trek we got about half an hour up the road and saw a sign for a place called Gnooreah Point which, when read quickly, looks as though it has something to do with the Intercourse Islands. I just had to take a look. It was off the road by some fourteen kilometres and when we got there we came across a big colony of grey nomads. These were long term people who were staying on the beach for up to three months at a time. I was impressed by their organisation and ingenuity. A few were in old forty seater buses but even the smaller rigs had large tent annexy things attached to them. Some had petrol generators for their electricity but most had solar cells and some even had wind turbines. They were all running TV’s and fridges full time and some had freezers too for the fish they caught. Two couples had full size satellite dishes attached to metal posts in the ground and were getting TV from all over the world. One guy told me he was settling in for the Olympics which he was going to watch live every night on Dutch and German TV. Out of the forty or so couples we saw I guess fifteen of them had dinghies with outboard motors on them and by the time we got up in the morning they were all far out to sea. People had scoured the beach for rocks and boulders and from them had built fireplaces which they filled with wood from who knows where – there wasn’t a sign of a tree anywhere.
The couple next to us, whose bus sported the names Des and Norah Channel UHF 38 and was called Travelling Along, were retired, They had a house near Perth which they’d rented out and were living in their bus which had just about everything one could need in the way of comforts. Here they were in the sun for twelve weeks and when the weather warmed up down south they were going to the Margaret River area somewhere to do the same again for two months. Des told me that they did this every year and the wear and tear on the bus was minimal as it spent most of its life parked. “It’s probably not roadworthy if truth be known but it doesn’t have to do much work.”
The grey nomad colony looked somewhat incongruous stuck up there in the dunes overlooking the Indian Ocean like that. Quite a few of their caravans, campervans, buses and motor homes had poles with Australian flags flying. I couldn’t help thinking that if an Indonesian submarine had rocked up out there at five in the evening and stuck up its periscope, the occupants would think it was Australia’s forward line of defence. A tropical Dad’s Army with the ranks all standing around barbecues in shorts and no tops.
“What can you see out there Able Seaman Chandra”
“I’m not quite sure captain. They have many different model tanks though”
“And the personnel Chandra, can you tell their regiment by the uniforms?”
“It seems they’re all wearing camouflage captain – grey wigs to blend in with the pebbles on the beach. Some of them are wearing brown skin-like suits that haven’t been ironed in weeks.”
“Have they spotted us do you think?”
“Perhaps they have sir. Some of them are sending smoke signals.”
“Smoke signals Chandra?”
“Yes sir. They’re throwing lumps of red stuff on a fire”
“Red stuff Chandra?”
Yes sir, sort of………sort of………animal pieces sir.”
It was quite lovely staying there on the shores of the Indian Ocean – sounds good doesn’t it? But we still hadn’t come across something we’d been looking for since day one. That was a warm weather, clear water, a sandy beach, preferably with palm trees although not essential, where we could rock on up, take all our clothes off and stay for a week without seeing a soul. This place had most of the ingredients and could have sufficed but for the fact that eighty other people had found and occupied it before we did. Surely there was going to be somewhere. By now we’d covered half the accessible shoreline of the continent.
We were under the impression that this place was free to camp in. There were no toilets or showers, just rubbish bins. On our third day one of those four wheeled Honda motorcycle things arrived outside the door of Erasmus almost on dusk and the rider - or is it driver? – shut off the engine. I looked out and I couldn’t see the guy but on the back of his FWD motorbike was a red plastic crate with a poodle in it. The caretaker stuck his head around the door as I was looking at his poodle. He followed my gaze.
“What dya think ay? Is she a good lookin’ poodle or what?”
“Yeah but we’ve already eaten thanks”
“What?”
“We’ve already had dinner thanks. We don’t usually have Vietnamese anyway”
“Jesus. What!?”
“Oh sorry, I thought you were selling dogs. I thought that was the last one left”
“No, she’s me mate….. Jesus bloody Christ!!”
“Sorry”
In the morning the guy next door to us told me that the caretaker had told everybody about the conversation and somebody had told him that a couple of weeks ago they’d seen us dressing up a dead cow along the roadside. People started, not exactly taking an interest in us, but looking at us. They smiled those kind of smiles that relatives of the recently bereaved smile at funerals when they notice people they forgot to notify but who have come to pay their respects anyway. The smile of the recently bereaved I think it’s called.
WARSAW FUNERAL
I recall that I once disgraced myself at a Polish military funeral. It was in 1989 for a man who had been an army Colonel and which, apart from the family, was attended by four busloads of army personnel. They were tall young soldiers with straight backs, razor sharp creases in their trousers and bags of spit and polish or was it…?. This may need clarification. I didn’t mean Polish. I didn’t forget to use the upper case P. I didn’t mean to imply here that they were Polish and carried bags of spit. Heavens no - I don’t know what they were carrying in their bags!
The coffin arrived in a grey van just like the regular vans you see driving around Warsaw - no distinguishing features at all to let one know that it was a hearse. The coffin was placed on a gun carriage and a mournful sounding military band led the way with the slow marching soldiers behind them, followed by the coffin with friends and relatives bringing up the rear.
At first I had the impression that it was going to be an impersonal affair with the army taking over the proceedings and the family being somewhat left out of it. But it was well organized and when we arrived at the grave, the army stood in line to one side and let the family go to the front. They had organized a microphone for the military Master of Ceremonies and throughout the entire proceedings, three soldiers stood at the graveside straight as ramrods holding red cushions on which were displayed the man's medals. The army's demeanour in the event was respectful and dignified. In fact I formed the impression that it was a good way to run things because people weren't left wondering what to do, what protocol should be observed, and so forth.
There were, at various intervals, orders being given to the dozen or so soldiers who were standing behind me - orders which I couldn't understand, and when the order came to fire the salute, I didn't know what had been said. Suddenly, very suddenly, from out of the grey, an officer standing in front of me bellowed out a word. There was an enormous bang as a load of rifles went off simultaneously. I screamed "FUUUUCK" and hit the ground. I thought he'd seen a bomb dropping or something.
When I opened my eyes and took my hands away from over my ears I was lying on a heap of freshly dug mud staring over the edge of the grave straight at the coffin. I was dressed in my brother-in-law’s suit which now had mud all down the front of it and his cuff links were all gummed up with mud too.
Of course, I did know that this wasn't exactly the way in which I should deport myself at such an occasion, but it was automatic. I looked up to see if anyone was left standing. Of course, everyone was. Although they didn't speak English I was sure they were all familiar with the word fuck - it's international. I got to my knees. They were all horrified at my behavior and stood there looking down at me with gaping mouths. All, that is, except for this one guy of about thirty years of age who started giggling under his breath and had to excuse himself. I saw him standing at the gate smoking as we were on our way out and he took one look at me, turned away, and almost collapsed giggling again.
The cemetery was beautiful, covered in trees, it was like being in a forest and quite unlike Anglo Saxon burial places which by comparison seem cold and reserved and lack feeling. There were small bench seats at the ends of many graves that had obviously been built by the relations so that they could come, sit quietly and remember. There was a touch of unruliness about the place that seems to me to reflect the Polish spirit. I don't mean scruffiness, no, it was more cared for than most Anglo Saxon style cemeteries. It was more a naturalness, a wildness, a few weeds, primroses, lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots and that sort of thing.
One thing which did strike me as being unusual was that there were a number of newish graves on the headstones of which there was a persons name and birth date but no date of death. I was told that they had already been built, bought and paid for by people who are still alive but presumably don't want their death to be a burden on others. I regarded it as plain morbid and defeatist and I wanted to kick the owners up the ass and tell them to start living again because people with that kind of mindset are already a burden to others.
Anyway, when I was at the cemetery I saw a peculiar thing. In amongst all these strange Slavic names on the headstones, some in the Cyrillic alphabet, one stood out. His name was Edmond Russell and I wondered how come he ended up there. Perhaps he was a tourist like me who went through a red light or maybe he'd been at a military funeral and had a heart attack when they'd fired the guns. I want to meet him when I get to heaven. I want to get pissed with him and have a good laugh about Polish cemeteries.
Meanwhile, back in this life, we left Gnooreah point and continued Westwards into the great boring, treeless expanses of indescribable……………..I can’t describe it. There must surely be more going on in the average black hole.
CHAPTER TEN
We left Port Hedland and I was happy about it. We were heading for Mount Newman. It was a sort of temporary diversion of around five hundred kilometres to see a distant relative of Clare’s from Tasmania. The general direction in which we’d been heading was to the left of the map but Newman is in a downwardly direction and it’s almost slap bang on the Tropic of Capricorn. It’s a mining town and one of the local mines is the largest open cut in the world. Driving the Great Northern Highway to Newman we experienced yet another kind of nothingness for as far as the eye could see, even with the telescopically assisted eye, and I thought that digging a bloody great hole in the landscape would do wonders for the view. At, I guess, about halfway down the map page, dusk was spreading is brooding shadow across the land and I turned into a roadside camping spot. It was the first time I’d been through the process of metamorphosis and it pained me fair in the groin. I quickly turned back into the splendid, silver haired smoothy of an author you see before you and parked up. Now, where was I? I just read the last couple of sentences and I have to candidly admit that writing a book in such isolated conditions seems to be getting to me.
While there was still a soupcon of daylight left in the orange glazed punchbowl of the evening sky (shit, that was impressive wasn’t it?) we watched the grey nomads collecting their wood. It’s a little known fact that before the advent of your actual grey nomad, Australia was covered in forests. How many of you readers know about the Great Sahara Forest where our grey nomads used to go on holidays until our dollar hit the skids? I think it’s a blokey thing; the collecting of wood and lighting the fires. There are certain things that are male. Testosteroney type things. Cutting meat at Sunday lunchtimes used to be one of them when I was a kid. Back then every household in the English speaking world used to have Sunday roasts and fathers, who shunned anything to do with the preparation of anything edible all week, had to cut the meat on Sundays. Women weren’t allowed near it. They could spend a couple of hours lovingly basting and caring for it but once it was out of the oven they weren’t allowed to go near it. It was man the hunter’s job. It’s much the same with barbecues these days.
Grey nomad males, the primeval slime long since dried on their backs, now have to rely on butchers to supply the meat they used to hunt. That’s why they love fishing – they’re too old to catch anything on the land that moves in sustained bursts at more than five kilometres per hour. But the term grey nomad doesn’t necessarily mean grey gonads and what they can do, with all that musty testosterone, is take to trees around campsites with axes and bow saws. At low revs old, silver backed, male grey nomads still have the staying power to keep chopping at trees for bloody hours. Some of them stop their engines and park up at four in the afternoon and spend two hours slowly dragging wood back to the campsite. Then they light huge fires that last well into the night. They let them die down a bit at about six o’clock when the Enids, Marjories and Graces emerge with the cling wrapped dead animal portions but as soon as they’re cooked the guys get stoking again.
We usually like to get our evening meal cooking done outside on the gas if it’s daylight or inside on the gas if we’re late. On this night though, we were just too fascinated by the hunter gatherers and their fires to spend time cooking. A little after dark two big expensive BMW motorbikes roared into the campsite. In the light of the campfires we saw one of the riders set about erecting a tent while the other, larger one of the two, headed straight off to the scrub with a tomahawk in search of wood. There was a heap of dried wood right outside Erasmus which was there when we arrived and we weren’t going to use so I went across to offer it to them. When I got to see them in the light I realised that they were both women in their forties. One was slender and feminine while the wood getter was butch, bulky and had a white skeleton painted on her leathers. Even among lesbians wood getting and fire lighting seems to be a blokey thing. I could almost smell the testostrogen.
The name of the camping spot was Bea Bea creek and I would advise people not to spend the night there. The area was below the level of the road and the only spot left for us when we arrived was the one nearest the road. After dark the road trains started to go past at two hourly intervals and kept going past all night. The noise from these body builders of the truck world, these juggernautical overblown wheeled leviathans, carries for miles on a still night. But on this night, and probably every other night during the tourist season, they all blew their horns to keep us awake. Bastards! We’d be lying there, covered in a veil of sleepiness and just on the cusp of dropping off when we’d hear an engine in the distance. Then, as they closed in on us, we’d grit our teeth and wait for the horn that was so loud it made the kettle vibrate on the stove top. We got up and read. Sex just wasn’t working under these conditions. Well……..you try keeping an erection going when there’s a much bigger horn than yours hanging over your head like that – so to speak.
The next morning saw us up early and back to a hard day’s grind sitting in the cab wishing something exciting would happen. Just around the next bend there could have been something interesting going down. But there were no bends. A couple of hours into the journey, as we neared a small stand of dwarf shrubby things, a small flurry of green swirled up and flew a little way away into the general shrubbiness landing on another stand of dwarf shrubby things. They were budgerigars………um…. not the dwarf shrubby things but the things they landed on. I was excited. I’d been looking for wild budgies. I needed some pictures of wild budgies to put on my website. With camera in hand I scrambled down the embankment and stalked them for twenty minutes or so but every time I got within range they flew another ten metres further away. They were all green, their natural colour, and making that same course chirruping their captive cousins make. I didn’t manage to take a single picture and I was disappointed. I’d also wandered so far from the van that I couldn’t see it and had no indication of where I was in this; Gods last great shrubbery project. I had to shout for Clare so that she could guide me back to the road. We’d been travelling on an elevated road but I hadn’t realised that the low scrub I’d been looking at was, in fact, higher than I was.
As we were pulling away again Clare shouted “dead cow, dead cow.” My disappointment at not being able to take a budgie pic was forgotten. I was excited all over again. Elton was a Hereford/Brahmin cross. He’d only gone to meet that big that big bovine in the blue in the last week or so and I couldn’t decide whether or not he was deserving of my mortuary skills. But this was no time for vacillation and, anyway, I didn’t know what the word meant. Elton was very close to the road with his back towards the bitumen and what really attracted me to him was that his back was straight. Most dead cows were wrinkled and, having had no formal artistic training, I could only paint short names on them like May or Lil before a wrinkle got in the way. You see, I had wanted to give them all recognisable female pop stars names like Madonna and Brittney but I didn’t plan for the wrinkles. I was sad to find that my first straight backed dead cow was, in fact, a bull. That’s why I called him Elton.
I donned my new Ronald MacDonald wig and was in the middle of spraying the word Elton on his back when Clare, who’d been playing the part of “madam la photographerie” and taking a picture of “l’artiste est travaille sans sensibilite,” suddenly disappeared. I heard a car door slam shut. I stood up and turned around and there stood a grey haired grey nomad of the female persuasion next to a Toyota Land Cruiser followed closely by a caravan. I waved. She didn’t. I waved again. She took a photograph of me and Elton and got back in the car. It drove away. Clare’s head appeared out of the ground followed closely by the rest of her. We giggled. I carried on working, she carried on photographing.
We called in at a National Park. It was called Karajini. In the car park was a van with “Andrew and Linda Worley, Apiarists” painted on it. I stood looking at it for a few seconds just as the female Worley arrived back from their walk. I was a little embarrassed she’d caught me staring at their car.
“Apiarists?” I said
“Yes” replied Linda “apiarists.”
“So, ow many apes ‘ave yooze got….like altogether in total then” I said
“No, it’s not apes. It’s bees. Apiary is a very old name. Apiary’s a very old profession. It goes back to Roman times, bee keeping”
“Oh. Does ape mean bee in old Roman Latin like then?”
“I’m not sure but it’s probably something like that.”
“Yeah, funny Latin innit? I mean about apes ‘an that.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah, you now…….like.….. the Roman Catholic church uses Latin and they call their cardinals primates don’t they?”
Then the old B……. she was keeping appeared and I said goodbye.
We carried on down to the start of the walk. It was a good gorge with a lovely green limpid pool at one end and a waterfall at the other where I slipped over on some slimy water weedy stuff and lost my sunglasses. When we arrived at the pool we were alone. There was a notice explaining that it figured as a sacred place in the local Aboriginal tradition and asked us to approach the place quietly and, while we could swim, we were requested not to make loud noises or jump into the pool. According to local Aboriginal creation stories all the main players that created the world originally came out of the ground, worked their magic and then went back in again. The places where they went to ground after creating the mountains, rivers and whatnot, are sacred. This pool in Karajini Gorge was one of these places and so was the waterfall at the other end of the gorge.
There was no wind and the pool was as flat as a sheet of glass mirroring all of the delicate little ferns that clung tenaciously to the rocks above. Even as an atheist I could sense why this place could have spiritual meaning for others. It was so tranquil and still and out of sight of the parched red earth and the relentless heat of the sun up above. I thought about some of these Aboriginal creation beings. Some of them seemed to be very nasty and vindictive; they stole each others wives and killed each others babies and all sorts. They were very much like ancient Greek Gods. I thought about the Hindu religion too. Hindus have some horrific nasty bastards in their pantheon of gods. I wondered why the Christians had this God that made you feel guilty about having a good time, bonking other people’s spouses and getting pissed. With most other religions, save those that sprung from Judaism, the gods weren’t faultless. And if your role model gods weren’t perfect you didn’t have to feel so guilty about not being perfect either.
There was a scream and someone yelled “WooHoo, you bloody beauty.” We hadn’t heard the two families sneaking up on the water hole until we heard the screams. A group of six stood at the water’s edge while two teenage boys climbed the rocks. Then, waiting until the party below had trained their video cameras on them, they joined hands and jumped screaming into the water. I looked on and prayed to some god I didn’t believe in that a fucking great Aboriginal mythical frog would open its mouth and swallow them. Insensitive pricks. We walked to the waterfall at the other end of the gorge and twenty minutes after we arrived the two families turned up and repeated the performance. I didn’t now what to compare it with but I figured that if a bus load of Aboriginals turned up outside the Vatican and shat on the Pope’s doormat it would maybe have balanced things up a bit.
Newman eventually appeared on the horizon and after a further fifteen minutes I got to meet Clare’s distant ex relation Biddi and her husband Gerry. It was a really good time for us to have arrived because that very day was the first day of their holidays and they were spending the entire vacation at home. Biddi has for thirty years or more been in the nursing profession and for a lot of that time has been a remote area nurse. This meant she’d been treating Aboriginals for various complaints for most of that time and still was. During the week we spent with them we discussed white Australia’s Aboriginal problem and black Australia’s white problem at some length. We found little common ground but I learned a lot about the way that white people in that part of the world regard Aboriginals.
My background was purely theoretical whereas hers was practical. She was fed up with the way theoretical people down south think they know more about the problems than those northern whites who are dealing with the Aborigines from day to day. I, on the other hand, was horrified at the way remote area nurses are plonked down in communities without any grounding in the culture of the people they were supposed to be helping. Nor did anybody give them any grounding in the languages of those they were expected to treat. Some of the day to day practices she described I considered would have been deeply offensive to her charges but she didn’t know it because she knew nothing of the culture other than through her own observations. The week after we’d left them we watched the Andrew Denton show which had the Northern Territory administrator Ted Egan as one of the guests. He said that in every community where whites had learned the language there had been outstanding successes in terms of health but everywhere else had been a disaster. My personal thoughts about what I heard in Newman concerning Aborigines are best left until the next book (assuming I can get a publisher to buy this one).
Biddy and Gerry were extremely hospitable to us and we were more than a little surprised to find that in this small mining town there was great food in the hotel restaurants. There were good hamburgers at the Capricorn roadhouse ten kilometres away too. What’s more they keep the doors closed to keep the red dust off them and the hint of diesel was purely imaginary. We went there for lunch twice. The second time we were there I was about to launch into my cheeseburger when a shadow was cast over the table. I turned around to see that a house had turned up at the diesel pump on the back of a big truck. I dashed outside for a photograph, not of the house but of the door of the prime mover. The name of the business was proudly displayed in blue against the white door. TWO DOGS TRUCKIN PTY. LTD.
When it comes to fine dining in Newman though, the local gentry have a further option. Candlelight suppers in dry creek beds! No, I’m not making it up. On special occasions they dress up and with candles in glove box they drive out of town with their tables and chairs, table cloths, food and wine into the bush where they sit in dried up creek beds and have dinner. It doesn’t sound particularly romantic though, does it?
“Mum?”
“Yes?”
“Where did you first meet dad?”
“At a candlelight dinner my dear”
“Whereabouts was that?”
“In a creek bed three hundred kilometres south of Port Hedland”
Dry as these creek beds are in winter, they’re raging torrents at some times of the year and these floods are not entirely predictable. Everyone had a story of being unexpectedly cut off from civilization. When it rains elsewhere in the catchment area a sudden flood can be expected downstream at some time later. The problem is that it’s difficult to know exactly when it’s going to hit wherever you are. You may be experiencing beautiful clear blue skies but heading toward you at a very fast rate could be a great big wall of water. Vegetation is so sparse in some arid areas that there are no plant roots to suck up the rain when it falls, no swamps for the rain to soak into. It just charges downstream.
Biddy & Gerry work in a remote settlement two hundred kilometres out of Newman and come home for one month in every four. She was sleeping in her clinic one night and was woken by somebody throwing stones at the window and shouting. She found herself laying in bed but up to her shoulders in water. She hadn’t noticed it because it was warm, at body temperature. The flood had come raging down the dried up river bed but only slowly enveloped the settlement as it spread out over the land. She managed to get through door but then found she couldn’t open the gate to the compound as all the settlement’s rubbish had pushed up against the wire mesh fence and the weight of water was pushing against it. Somebody on the other side of the fence helped her and when their joint efforts finally managed to open the gate, a great flood poured through the gap taking everything Biddy was holding in her hands. An RAAF Hercules dropped fuel a couple of days later so that the settlement’s generator could be started to provide some much needed power. This wasn’t a particularly remarkable story, just the one I best remember from a conversation over dinner one night. I’m told that more people die from snake bites than drowning as the snakes are panicking too.
Newman’s main attraction - Yes, it has one – is the mine. We went on a two hour tour of it, a lot of which was taken up by statistics, but it was, nevertheless, interesting. My abiding memory of it though, will be the kids. Four children were on our tour and they, like everyone else, had to wear BHP Billiton safety gear. Two and three year old kids in adult hard hats, adult Day-Glo orange jackets and adult safety glasses look so cool. I took twenty photographs of them and three of the mine. The hard hats were so big on them that they covered their eyes and when their parents called them their heads swung around in the direction of the call but their hats stayed still. They spent most of their time bumping into the back of people’s knees and putting red dust into the plastic sample bags we were each given.
At one point in the tour the guide said that “running away to the east are the Ophthalmias”
“Ophthalmia?” I said. “Isn’t that some sort of eye problem?”
“Yes” she said. “The explorer Giles had conjunctivitis when he discovered those mountains and so he named them the Ophthalmia Ranges.”
“That’s a bit dangerous, naming mountain ranges after diseases isn’t it?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well… what if he’d had diarrhoea or a sexually transmitted disease? You’d have to say running away to the east are the diarrhoeas”
She got an attack of the giggles and everyone who wasn’t listening to her commentary now wanted to know what was said. She was too embarrassed and told them to ask me.
The statistics, though I’m usually bored with them, were astonishing. Mount Whaleback was the name of the mine. It used to be a mountain 805 metres high but they dug it up and sold it. Now it’s a hole 405 metres deep and they’re still digging it up and selling it! The hole currently stands at 5.5 kilometres long and over a kilometre wide! Out of this single mine they’ve dug up and sold over 900 million tons of iron ore. The daily trains that take the ore to the coast are 2.5 kilometres long and, once rolling, take 3 kilometres to stop. The train takes 30,000 tons of iron ore out of the mine per day. Once they broke the world record with a train 7 kilometres long. The ore, as it comes from the earth, is nearly 70% iron and the ground beneath your feet goes rusty when there’s any moisture around.
The guide seemed awfully proud of what her company was doing for Australia and quoted company bullshit ad-nauseum but I was appalled. Thirty thousand tons of iron ore a day from just one mine (and there a lot of them in W.A. alone) goes to keep thousands of people employed processing it in other countries. The Mount Whaleback mine only employs something like one hundred and fifty people here in Australia. Furthermore, the energy used to smelt the 43 percent of this ore that goes to Japan comes from the Bass Strait in the form of LPG. The North West Shelf gas project, when complete, will send gas (LNG) in much larger quantities to China where they’ll soon be outdoing Japan in buying iron ore and gas from Australia. China already takes over 20 percent of Whaleback’s ore.
In Japan, where they have bugger all in the way of resources (and went to war back in 1942 to get their hands on some) they make Toyotas out of our gas and iron ore and sell them to us. In China they make pick axes, tools and appliances out of our gas and iron ore and sell them to us. So what does that make us? Idiots? We already have all the resources in the ground but every wagon load of ore that goes out of Mount whaleback and every barrel of LPG that leaves the Bass Strait en route to Asia and elsewhere, is exporting jobs along with it. Why can’t we have the jobs instead? If we can’t get our act together, or don’t have the ready cash to exploit our own resources, why don’t we get the Japanese and Chinese to come and employ us making Toyotas and pick axes here? After all, when the holes are all dug, and the goodies all sold, there’ll be nothing left for us because for the last two hundred years, we’ve been busy destroying our farming land. And what will we do after years of watching other countries economies boom by helping them get rich using our resources in a smarter way than we did? We certainly won’t have any forests left if the current rapacious practices are maintained. In Tasmania they are chopping old growth trees down that are hundreds of years old and sending them to Japan in the form of wood chips. There, they’re made into particle board and craft wood and a variety of other building materials and sold back to us. The Japanese could be forgiven for thinking we’re a nation of dummies.
Ant hills. I want to talk to you about ant hills. There are ant hills in these parts that are unlike any other ant hills we’ve come across. They’re shaped a bit like silicone boobs sitting upright with a nipple on top. Clare says they’re shaped like WWI Prussian soldiers helmets, the ones with the spike on top. Anyway, they’re about a metre in diameter at the base, reddish and scattered in clumps all over the landscape. I’ve only just realised what they actually are. They’re fossilised dinosaur droppings. Brontosaurus droppings, to be precise. The termites that occupy them didn’t actually make them you see. They just moved in a few million years after the Brontosaurus’s dumped them.
Although I have only a basic grounding in palaeontology (I saw Jurassic Park three times) it wasn’t too hard to work out. You see, the tapered nipple bit on top evolved that way to stop the Brontosaurus’s arse closing with a bang and alerting predators as to their whereabouts. Before this evolutionary adaptation life was painful for the old Bronto. The word Brontosaurus itself is a contraction. It was originally Bronto-sore-arse.
Out round Newman way gold prospecting is big. Biddi & Gerry introduced us to three people in their early thirties who’ve been prospecting for years. These days metal detectors can locate gold a metre under the surface and that, combined with GPS that lets you know precisely where you are, has led to a huge revival in prospecting. These days, we were told, satellite telephone is relatively cheap as is the satellite connection of laptops to the internet to send emails. Making use of these technologies it’s unlikely that even amateur prospectors should ever be uncontactable or hopelessly lost. The biggest advantage though, is that you can fix the exact position where you found gold and go back to it at any time in the future. There’s no longer the need to stay out until you’ve worked the whole area, you can maintain a fairly civilised life by retreating to a caravan park somewhere at weekends. These guys even had commercially available CDs showing all the abandoned, worked out gold mines in the area.
I asked the prospectors at Biddi & Gerry’s what gold nuggets looked like when they came out of the ground and one of the guys went out to the van and came back with a plastic baby formula container half full of gold nuggets ranging from shirt button size up to lumps as big as my thumbnail. I asked roughly how many dollars worth was in the container and he told me that he knew exactly what it was worth. It was worth $13,000 but he didn’t need the money right then so he was hanging on to it until the gold price was higher. One of the other guys then went back out to the van and came back in with a piece of rag which he untied to reveal a larger nugget which he said was worth about $1,250. It wasn’t very big but weighed around three ounces. He’d found it on the surface in an area where, a year before, somebody had found a twelve ounce nugget. He said that news of that find had caused a flood of prospectors who’d combed the area but, nevertheless, he’d gone back months afterwards and still found his three ounce nugget on top of the ground. These three guys worked together pooling what they found. To make sure they covered every inch of an area they selected they “chained” it. This involved dragging chains behind the four wheel drive that left a mark on the ground so they’d be able to recognise which parts they’d covered. The prospectors we met stay out from Monday to Friday living in tents and come into town on the weekends. We were regaled with stories about people getting rich quick and the stories appeared to me to be genuine. They told us about loners, hermit types who manage to stay out for weeks at a time and won’t tell anyone where they’ve been when they finally hit town again. They told us too that Aboriginal women will sit in streams after the rain picking up individual specks of gold until they have half a 35mm plastic film container full which they take to the pub at Nullagine and exchange for a slab of beer. The publican, according to our prospectors, had amassed a small fortune by providing this “service.”
Clare borrowed a book from Biddi. It was a photographic book and each photo had a narrative accompanying it. One story was of an Aboriginal woman who had consulted with a station manager about what names to give her sons when they were born. The first she named Churchill and the second she called Roosevelt. However, when she had her third son the station manager had left so she called him Puddin. We stayed with Biddi and Gerry for a week and then headed back up the road we came into Newman on. It was exasperating having to cover a couple of hundred kilometres of the same old ground again. This road shortage in Australia becomes more acute the further west you travel.
On our way out of Newman there was a bridge with a sign on in saying “maximum load ten tons.” We saw a truck stop just before it and the driver got out with a stick and ran around hitting the sides of the vehicle before he drove across. On the other side I caught up with him and asked why he hit the side of his van like that at the ten ton bridge sign. He told me that he was carrying fifteen tons of budgerigars and he had to keep them flying while he crossed the bridge.
The next stop along the way west was on the Point Samson Peninsula at a small town/village called Roebourne. There, in the old gaol, were information boards telling the most horrific stories about the early treatment of the local Aboriginals. The history sheets covered organised slave catching and trading; men having to labour all day chained to each other by their necks and then being chained to a ring in the jail wall at night. It’s worth noting that Britain abolished slavery and slave trading in 1833 at a time when America was fighting a civil war to end slavery. At the same time settlers here in Australia were escalating their enslavement of Aboriginals with the full knowledge of authorities. Once rounded up, many men were dumped on islands where they couldn’t escape and where they’d be easy to round up again when needed by passing pearling luggers.
Aboriginal women were forced into labouring on pearling vessels and the death rates from scurvy and diseases were high – up to forty on some ships. It really was abominable and few Australians will ever know about it. Under the 1905 Aborigines act (four years after Federation when Australia was undeniably making its own decisions on such matters) Aboriginal women were prevented from entering some townships, their children could be forcibly taken away from them and they were even prohibited from marrying without the permission of the Aborigines Department.
There was a lighter, albeit tragicomic, side to some of the information supplied on the tourist information boards on the Point Samson Peninsula. It was at a place called Cossak which was another one in the long list of abandoned settlements we’d come across so many times since starting this trip. It was a cute little place on the warm waters of a small inlet of the Indian Ocean and the buildings that remained were built in the early 1900s to withstand the cyclones that from time to time ravage the country thereabouts. They were good looking and very solid. One of them had a café in it which sold the best flat whites for hundreds of miles around. Come to think of it, they were the only flat whites for hundreds of miles around. But they were excellent.
On the walls there were some stories about the town and its early inhabitants. One story concerned an American Negro called Wilson who worked as a cargo handler and blew off one of his hands while fishing with dynamite. The hand was replaced with a hook and he carried on at his old job. At a later date he blew the other hand off – a second hook was attached and he still carried on in the same job. There’s a joke in there somewhere about second hand shops but I couldn’t help thinking of something else. He’d have had to have been very, very careful when wiping his arse wouldn’t he? I bet it made his eyes water.
Another story was about a guy called Harry Best. In Cossak’s early days a canon was fired whenever a ship arrived to let the residents know it was coming. Harry Best rammed a load of assorted metal objects down the barrel and sat astride the cannon as he lit the touch hole. Some of these metal bits and pieces jammed in the barrel and the canon blew to bits blowing Harry to bits with it. What a way to go!
At the end of the Point Samson Peninsula lays, predictably, Point Samson. There’s not much there but for a caravan holiday gulag, a lovely beach with clear warm waters and a fairly sizeable fishing port. We didn’t want to stay in the holiday gulag and there were signs all over the place telling us that we couldn’t camp for the night anywhere else. It was a lovely area and hardly anybody was there even though it was a weekend. I don’t know what happened to the grey nomads. There may have been a curfew in the holiday gulag or something. We drove around the wharf area and found a great spot to stay. It was perfectly level, asphalted, had rubbish bins and was right there next to the fishing boats. At night the area was lit and was so attractive that I took about a score of photographs of fishing boats and mangroves reflected in the water. I awoke at half past two in the morning and drew back the curtains. I didn’t recognise the place. There was barely a drop of water anywhere. It was one of those places that has six metre tides and the water was visiting some other shore of the Indian Ocean at the time.
One reason for choosing the wharf to stay was that it had toilets, or, rather, a toilet. It was really cool. It was made by a New Zealand company and was called, an Exeloo. I’d first used one in Broome and thought it was a wonderful concept. They’re a unisex piece of equipment with wheelchair access and even popes can use them. The space age design, I’m sure, represents the first step in the way that all public toilets are heading and soon they’ll probably be offering them as an optional extra on space shuttles.
It had everything including a used syringe box and an automatic hand washer. Outside were illuminated status buttons to tell you what mode the Exeloo was in at any time. A notice told the prospective bowel and bladder emptier how to operate it and what would happen to them if they failed to obey the instructions. It said that it would give you a certain number of minutes to perform your bodily function and then it would set off an alarm. Then, if you didn’t press the door open button, it would go into the automatic door opening mode and expose you to the queue outside. It played canned music (not chamber music unfortunately) as soon as you entered and you couldn’t leave without flushing it because the flush was set off when you pressed the door open button. Hand washing was automatic - when you put your hand over the sink it dispensed a set amount of water. Toilet paper was dispensed at the press of a button and the system would only let you press the button three times. After that, having let you have half a metre of paper, it shut up shop. This was my kind of toilet. I marvelled at the mind of the genius who sat in an office in New Zealand somewhere and invented this fully automated, computerised, thinking shithouse.
There were a few bugs in the system still but I’ve no doubt they’ll be ironed out with Version II. When I approached it, it was in vacant mode so I pressed the door open button on the outside of the box and the door slid sideways. I already knew what to do because I’d used the one in Broome where, by the time I’d read and digested the instructions, the alarm went off and it was time to get out. The door had opened and I found myself back on the pavement where I took my place at the back of the queue again. This time I was already programmed and knew what to do. I sat down and the alarm went off immediately. I got up and waited for the door to open but it didn’t and I pressed the door open button. It opened and I rushed out. People walking along the wharf with their kids all looked at me as if I’d been doing something kind of dirty in there like shooting up, or down or wanking or whatever.
The alarm wouldn’t stop so I skulked off back to Erasmus and told Clare. She said I must have got something wrong so we had a cup of coffee and went over the instructions as we remembered them from Broome. I was scared to approach the thing again but when the noise stopped Clare bravely entered the “Doctor Who Cubicle” as we now called it. She’d been in there about the same length of time as me and the alarm went off again but this time it didn’t stop. Now everybody was looking at both of us. We got back in the van and drove off to another parking spot where they had old fashioned toilets. We went back to the wharf again that night. The alarm had stopped and I went around the back of the Doctor Who Cubicle and peed on it from the outside.
I’m sure that Exeloo are on to something good with their interactive poo shed. I’m sure Bill Gates has one in every room, but they do still have a few teething problems. Still, I can wait for Version II to come out although if it has a sanitary towel extractor I’ll be sure to cover my testicles with a saucepan before pressing the button.
For some reason this chapter has turned out to have fifty percent lavatory humour content. I don’t like smutty lavatory humour any more than you do dear reader. But, having got to fifty percent I may as well throw in a story from Tioman Island in the South China Sea and bring the content up to seventy percent thus cramming all the lavatory humour into the one chapter.
His name was Andrew and I met him on Tioman but he’d just come from India where he’d been on an organised tour with his wife Julie. He said that when they came down for breakfast one morning only half the group had turned up because the other half had all got the dreaded Delhi belly and were on the toilet for the day. This was the day they were all due to visit the Taj Mahal and they would only get the one chance as the next day they were due to go somewhere up country. His wife Julie had always wanted to see the Taj Mahal since she was a kid and visiting this place was half the reason that they'd chosen India as part of their holiday.
They were both feeling perfectly well and since they'd followed religiously the travel agents advice "drink only bottled water" he thought that this was the reason. As they got on the bus for the trip he remarked to his wife that all those silly sods back at the hotel should have known better and that everyone knew that the drinking water in India was not to be trusted.
They travelled out to the Taj Mahal and he was standing with the group listening to the guide when it suddenly hit him that he had express diarrhoea in quantities industrial. He reckoned that he only had 30 seconds to find a toilet or do it in his pants.
He said they were on the lawn right in front of the Taj' when he left the party and started running around in circles looking for a bush or anything to hide behind. There was nothing but grass. It was all over in no time, he just couldn't hang on and he pulled his trousers down and shat on the lawn right there in front of the Taj Mahal, which his wife had always wanted to visit. He said that there were hundreds of tourists walking around and elegant Indian ladies strolling past in beautiful saris and if his nails had been long enough he would have burrowed into the ground and hid in the hole.
It was the most embarrassing time in his entire life and he had no paper so he took off his T-shirt and wiped his bum thinking that he could throw it into the first rubbish bin they came across.
He eventually stood up and turned around to face the rest of the group, who were all looking horrified, when he noticed a Japanese tourist standing a few yards away who was just putting his video camera back in its case after having filmed the event. His wife almost died of shame and refused to walk around the Taj Mahal. She got straight back on the bus and waited for the rest of the party to return.
She hardly spoke to poor old Andrew for the rest of the week they were in India and the rest of the group didn't want to be seen with him. The final humiliation came a couple of days later when they were all in a restaurant somewhere and on his way back from the toilets he glanced over someone's shoulder and saw that they were all looking at a photograph of him evacuating on the grass with the Taj Mahal in the background.
He said that although there were hundreds of people walking about on the day, the photograph was taken from a low angle and all that could be seen was the Taj' with this tranquil pond in front of it and him in the foreground shitting on the grass.
The sea on the Point Samson Peninsula was as clear as water can be and the beaches were clean. We thought we’d ask around about the possibility of a boat trip to some of the nearby islands and perhaps some snorkelling. We didn’t end up doing it but a man at the tour company suggested we might like to “dive the wrecks.” He gave me a brochure entitled “Port Walcott Delambre Wrecks.” It sounded exciting. Delambre, was it French? In my tiny brain I was already swimming the light fantastic around an old French square rigger with cannons poking their barrels out of the sand and looking over my shoulder for sharks until I came to the part that read “The pearling vessel Kunmunya sank off Sams creek in 1995…..It was moved to its present site by the being towed underwater suspended from the Samson II (now the second wreck).”
Karratha, the biggest town in the Pilbarra, was less than fifty kilometres from the Point Samson Peninsula and we had an open invitation to visit a couple of ex Tasmanians who lived there. They had no idea which month we’d be arriving in and, when we did, it couldn’t have been more inconvenient for them. We arrived on a Sunday evening and they were moving house on the Wednesday. Despite the bad timing they made us exceedingly welcome and we stayed the night on a vacant block next door to the house they were living in. Dave worked in the LNG (liquefied natural gas) business which around Karratha is kind of big. The gas comes ashore near Karratha from the rigs operating in the North West Shelf. Once on land it’s liquefied, stored and then exported mainly to Asia. Japan was the big buyer a few years ago when the project was begun but more recently a contract has been signed with China which will dwarf the already huge amount that’s presently being sent to Japan.
Sitting outside drinking beer around the table on Sunday night I told Dave where we’d been and how we saw these massive amounts of iron ore being shipped out on trains at Newman. He knew a lot about what went where from the Kimberley and the Pillbara and told us that what we’d already seen was small in the grand scheme of things. What worried him was that digging these holes in the ground and sending the contents to other parts of the globe was upsetting the balance of the earth. This, he told us, was moving the earth nearer to the sun and causing global warming. It recalled for me a conversation I once had with a guy in a pub in England in 1969 when I told him I was going to Australia to live. We were both pissed and he said that what amazed him was that when the plane got to Australia it had to come up to come down.
“Woddja mean Ian?”
“Well, the earth’s round iznitt?”
“Roundish, yeah”
“Yeah, well… If you get a graypfroot or sumfin and put a machboks on top of it…. an that’s the plane see?”
“What, the machboks?””Yea, shuddup fer a minnit. An you takes the machboks/plane round underneath the graypfroot it’s ‘angin upside down iznitt?”
“Yeah”
“Well, stans to reezon dunnit. To come down to earth the fuckin fing ‘as to come upwards”
Ian told me that what really happened was that the plane went up and stayed there until the earth rotated and then it came down again. It all sounded reasonable to me.
“An annover fing Pete”
“Yeah?”
“When you get out there in Stralia”
“Stralia?”
“Yeah – Ozfuckinstralia - the water goes down the plug ‘ole the uvver way”
“Don’t believe you”
“Does, fuckin does, fuckin right it does. I got a mate….did you ever know Len Bull?”
“Who?”
“Len Bull”
“No”
“Well, he was in the Merchant Navy an ee told me that at the equator it runs strait down the plug ‘ole - ‘ardly touches the fuckin’ sides.”
While in Karratha I managed to buy a can of white spray paint for the cows at KMart. The paint cabinet wasn’t locked up like the one in KMart Alice Springs so I guess they don’t have the same problem with people sniffing the stuff. We also went to the LNG visitors centre. It was impressive for anyone who’s into statistics. Looking out of the windows we saw one of the specially designed ships that takes the LNG to Japan. Protruding from its deck were the top halves of the four massive spheres that contained the liquid gas. Sideways it looked like Pamela Anderson sun bathing on an inflatable mattress when viewed through somebody else’s inverted bi-focals.
On the way to the LNG visitors centre we visited a great beach called Hearsons Cove because we’d heard that there were thousands of Aboriginal rock carvings there. It was an hour before we found one but having found that one we now saw hundreds. Our eyes weren’t attuned to them at first. I guess we were looking for something that resembled rock paintings on the walls of a cliff overhang. These were carvings on rocks; loose rocks. There were hills everywhere made from red rocks the size of garbage bins all looking as though they were put there by giant bulldozers. In fact if we hadn’t been told we would have thought that they actually had been put there in this fashion. Most of the rocks had one exposed flat edge and it was on these that the Aboriginals some twenty thousand years ago had practiced carving. They never did get it right though.
I can’t imagine what they carved these rocks with as they were very hard. I think they were granite; their red appearance was only a coating that came from thousands of year’s worth of red dust flying around the place. There was no harder rock to be seen anywhere and the carvings were very shallow. To me they were poor examples of Aboriginal art but, had I seen them before starting out on our trip I’d have most likely been very impressed. By this time though, we’d seen some of the best Aboriginal rock paintings around. Nevertheless, what we were now looking at was carvings in rock, something we’d never before come across. Not that I hadn’t seen rock carving before mind you. I’ve seen carvings on English churches on genuine Old English stone or, as it’s known in the stonemasonry trade, Pommygranite.
Another export from the area around Karratha is salt. It took up a lot of space and was a really low tech business. There weren’t even any pumps involved. There were brine channels cut in from the sea that filled huge ponds that just sat there evaporating until it was dry and then it was mechanically harvested. Driving along through these brilliant white brine fields was blinding. It was so white and pure that angels would have looked dirty if they’d been sunbaking in the nude on it. There was a big notice saying Dampier salt. Dunno if it was tastier or saltier but Dampier wasn’t a quality I’d have been advertising if it was my company.
Dampier was close to Karratha – probably still is – and I particularly wanted to go there. I knew that there was a causeway from Dampier to one of the Intercourse Islands and a friend of mine in Turkey asked me many years ago if I could get him a photograph of a road sign to it. His name is Tony Marciniec and it was him that first alerted me to the fact that these unfortunately named islands existed. Tony also has a few theories about how they came to bear the names they do. He told me he thought that in the 1700s when they were discovered, the ship had been at sea for three months without sighting land. Suddenly the soon to be named Intercourse Islands were spotted by the lookout in the crows nest. He yelled “land ahoy” and a sweaty cook struggled up from the galley below, looked around and said “where the fuck are we.”
Tony Marciniec knows a lot about Australia, in fact he’s quite an Australophile even though he’s never been here. His father used to work in the sugar cane fields in Queensland and was hung by the Kanakas. I don’t know for how long but apparently he was never the same again. Had to walk with one foot on the pavement he did.
East Intercourse Island is a loading terminal for something I couldn’t determine as the security guard wouldn’t let us drive across the causeway but we could see big ships being loaded from a conveyor belt. Dampier though was very welcoming and we liked it. It was very small and existed only to service the mining industry but it was neat, clean and tidy and had a nice little beach which we stayed on overnight. There were hot showers and toilets there too. The ranger that threw us off in the morning was nice as well. He could have thrown us off the night before but left us to enjoy it. He told us we were contravening the West Australian Caravanning & Camping Act and in the morning he told us to enjoy our breakfasts and be off the beach by noon. Looking back to Port Hedland, I don’t now why it was such an ugly, dirty dump of a place as Dampier performs much the same functions but has green grass and palm trees instead of red dust and cracked concrete.
We stayed off and on with Dave and Chrissie for a week going out for days in between them moving house. When we finally left to continue our trek we got about half an hour up the road and saw a sign for a place called Gnooreah Point which, when read quickly, looks as though it has something to do with the Intercourse Islands. I just had to take a look. It was off the road by some fourteen kilometres and when we got there we came across a big colony of grey nomads. These were long term people who were staying on the beach for up to three months at a time. I was impressed by their organisation and ingenuity. A few were in old forty seater buses but even the smaller rigs had large tent annexy things attached to them. Some had petrol generators for their electricity but most had solar cells and some even had wind turbines. They were all running TV’s and fridges full time and some had freezers too for the fish they caught. Two couples had full size satellite dishes attached to metal posts in the ground and were getting TV from all over the world. One guy told me he was settling in for the Olympics which he was going to watch live every night on Dutch and German TV. Out of the forty or so couples we saw I guess fifteen of them had dinghies with outboard motors on them and by the time we got up in the morning they were all far out to sea. People had scoured the beach for rocks and boulders and from them had built fireplaces which they filled with wood from who knows where – there wasn’t a sign of a tree anywhere.
The couple next to us, whose bus sported the names Des and Norah Channel UHF 38 and was called Travelling Along, were retired, They had a house near Perth which they’d rented out and were living in their bus which had just about everything one could need in the way of comforts. Here they were in the sun for twelve weeks and when the weather warmed up down south they were going to the Margaret River area somewhere to do the same again for two months. Des told me that they did this every year and the wear and tear on the bus was minimal as it spent most of its life parked. “It’s probably not roadworthy if truth be known but it doesn’t have to do much work.”
The grey nomad colony looked somewhat incongruous stuck up there in the dunes overlooking the Indian Ocean like that. Quite a few of their caravans, campervans, buses and motor homes had poles with Australian flags flying. I couldn’t help thinking that if an Indonesian submarine had rocked up out there at five in the evening and stuck up its periscope, the occupants would think it was Australia’s forward line of defence. A tropical Dad’s Army with the ranks all standing around barbecues in shorts and no tops.
“What can you see out there Able Seaman Chandra”
“I’m not quite sure captain. They have many different model tanks though”
“And the personnel Chandra, can you tell their regiment by the uniforms?”
“It seems they’re all wearing camouflage captain – grey wigs to blend in with the pebbles on the beach. Some of them are wearing brown skin-like suits that haven’t been ironed in weeks.”
“Have they spotted us do you think?”
“Perhaps they have sir. Some of them are sending smoke signals.”
“Smoke signals Chandra?”
“Yes sir. They’re throwing lumps of red stuff on a fire”
“Red stuff Chandra?”
Yes sir, sort of………sort of………animal pieces sir.”
It was quite lovely staying there on the shores of the Indian Ocean – sounds good doesn’t it? But we still hadn’t come across something we’d been looking for since day one. That was a warm weather, clear water, a sandy beach, preferably with palm trees although not essential, where we could rock on up, take all our clothes off and stay for a week without seeing a soul. This place had most of the ingredients and could have sufficed but for the fact that eighty other people had found and occupied it before we did. Surely there was going to be somewhere. By now we’d covered half the accessible shoreline of the continent.
We were under the impression that this place was free to camp in. There were no toilets or showers, just rubbish bins. On our third day one of those four wheeled Honda motorcycle things arrived outside the door of Erasmus almost on dusk and the rider - or is it driver? – shut off the engine. I looked out and I couldn’t see the guy but on the back of his FWD motorbike was a red plastic crate with a poodle in it. The caretaker stuck his head around the door as I was looking at his poodle. He followed my gaze.
“What dya think ay? Is she a good lookin’ poodle or what?”
“Yeah but we’ve already eaten thanks”
“What?”
“We’ve already had dinner thanks. We don’t usually have Vietnamese anyway”
“Jesus. What!?”
“Oh sorry, I thought you were selling dogs. I thought that was the last one left”
“No, she’s me mate….. Jesus bloody Christ!!”
“Sorry”
In the morning the guy next door to us told me that the caretaker had told everybody about the conversation and somebody had told him that a couple of weeks ago they’d seen us dressing up a dead cow along the roadside. People started, not exactly taking an interest in us, but looking at us. They smiled those kind of smiles that relatives of the recently bereaved smile at funerals when they notice people they forgot to notify but who have come to pay their respects anyway. The smile of the recently bereaved I think it’s called.
WARSAW FUNERAL
I recall that I once disgraced myself at a Polish military funeral. It was in 1989 for a man who had been an army Colonel and which, apart from the family, was attended by four busloads of army personnel. They were tall young soldiers with straight backs, razor sharp creases in their trousers and bags of spit and polish or was it…?. This may need clarification. I didn’t mean Polish. I didn’t forget to use the upper case P. I didn’t mean to imply here that they were Polish and carried bags of spit. Heavens no - I don’t know what they were carrying in their bags!
The coffin arrived in a grey van just like the regular vans you see driving around Warsaw - no distinguishing features at all to let one know that it was a hearse. The coffin was placed on a gun carriage and a mournful sounding military band led the way with the slow marching soldiers behind them, followed by the coffin with friends and relatives bringing up the rear.
At first I had the impression that it was going to be an impersonal affair with the army taking over the proceedings and the family being somewhat left out of it. But it was well organized and when we arrived at the grave, the army stood in line to one side and let the family go to the front. They had organized a microphone for the military Master of Ceremonies and throughout the entire proceedings, three soldiers stood at the graveside straight as ramrods holding red cushions on which were displayed the man's medals. The army's demeanour in the event was respectful and dignified. In fact I formed the impression that it was a good way to run things because people weren't left wondering what to do, what protocol should be observed, and so forth.
There were, at various intervals, orders being given to the dozen or so soldiers who were standing behind me - orders which I couldn't understand, and when the order came to fire the salute, I didn't know what had been said. Suddenly, very suddenly, from out of the grey, an officer standing in front of me bellowed out a word. There was an enormous bang as a load of rifles went off simultaneously. I screamed "FUUUUCK" and hit the ground. I thought he'd seen a bomb dropping or something.
When I opened my eyes and took my hands away from over my ears I was lying on a heap of freshly dug mud staring over the edge of the grave straight at the coffin. I was dressed in my brother-in-law’s suit which now had mud all down the front of it and his cuff links were all gummed up with mud too.
Of course, I did know that this wasn't exactly the way in which I should deport myself at such an occasion, but it was automatic. I looked up to see if anyone was left standing. Of course, everyone was. Although they didn't speak English I was sure they were all familiar with the word fuck - it's international. I got to my knees. They were all horrified at my behavior and stood there looking down at me with gaping mouths. All, that is, except for this one guy of about thirty years of age who started giggling under his breath and had to excuse himself. I saw him standing at the gate smoking as we were on our way out and he took one look at me, turned away, and almost collapsed giggling again.
The cemetery was beautiful, covered in trees, it was like being in a forest and quite unlike Anglo Saxon burial places which by comparison seem cold and reserved and lack feeling. There were small bench seats at the ends of many graves that had obviously been built by the relations so that they could come, sit quietly and remember. There was a touch of unruliness about the place that seems to me to reflect the Polish spirit. I don't mean scruffiness, no, it was more cared for than most Anglo Saxon style cemeteries. It was more a naturalness, a wildness, a few weeds, primroses, lily-of-the-valley, forget-me-nots and that sort of thing.
One thing which did strike me as being unusual was that there were a number of newish graves on the headstones of which there was a persons name and birth date but no date of death. I was told that they had already been built, bought and paid for by people who are still alive but presumably don't want their death to be a burden on others. I regarded it as plain morbid and defeatist and I wanted to kick the owners up the ass and tell them to start living again because people with that kind of mindset are already a burden to others.
Anyway, when I was at the cemetery I saw a peculiar thing. In amongst all these strange Slavic names on the headstones, some in the Cyrillic alphabet, one stood out. His name was Edmond Russell and I wondered how come he ended up there. Perhaps he was a tourist like me who went through a red light or maybe he'd been at a military funeral and had a heart attack when they'd fired the guns. I want to meet him when I get to heaven. I want to get pissed with him and have a good laugh about Polish cemeteries.
Meanwhile, back in this life, we left Gnooreah point and continued Westwards into the great boring, treeless expanses of indescribable……………..I can’t describe it. There must surely be more going on in the average black hole.
