Chapter 3

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER THREE

I saw a sign in Hobart that read “OCCASIONAL CHILD CARE.” I didn’t now what it meant. It certainly didn’t sound too reliable. I imagine you turn up with your kids on the way to work and say “so, are you going to have them today or what?” How would one go about booking one’s kids into an occasional child care centre? “When do you think you could have the children then?” “Oh, now and again I suppose. Give me a ring Tuesday and I’ll see how I feel.”

In furniture shop in Hobart there was a small wooden thing labelled as an occasional table. What was the bloody thing for the rest of the week then, an air conditioner or what? Then, in a sandwich bar in North Hobart there was a sandwich on their menu board that said in the description of a focaccia that it came with “with a hint of basil.” I asked what a hint of basil actually meant. The guy said

“It’s just what it says, a hint of it.”

“So does it have any basil in it or not then?”

“You can just detect the taste I suppose is a better way of putting it” he said.

“OK. I’m allergic to basil. It makes my airways swell up and I choke. So now has it got any bloody basil in it or not?”

“Yes, it has.”

“Good, then I’ll have one.

There’s a bakery in Elizabeth Street called Banjos where, if you ask for a loaf of bread, the girl behind the counter says “would you like it sliced at all?” If you say to her “yes, completely” she can handle it. But if you say “just a little thanks” she doesn’t know what to do.

At the Post Office further down Elizabeth Street there’s a guy with a bow tie behind the counter and when he’s finished with the customer in front of you he looks up at the queue and says “yes thanks.” The first time I heard him say it I was thrown for an instant. I’m used to hearing yes please or no thanks but I couldn’t quite get my head around yes thanks. It was like saying no please. What he’s actually doing is ultra polite. He’s thanking you in anticipation, before he’s even served you. Isn’t that kind of nice? I guess it can be likened to the phrase “good on you” which is nice too. It’s a little piece of praise for doing bugger all. There’s a guy called Tim Cox on Hobart’s ABC radio and one day I heard somebody call him on a talk back show. “Where are you calling from?” asked Tim Cox. “Queenstown” said the caller. “Good on you” said Tim Cox. I wondered why Tim Cox had showered good on the guy just for living in Queenstown. But that was before I saw Queenstown – it’s ghastly.

There’s a furniture restorer in North Hobart in an alleyway next to the Mexican restaurant. He does a bit of upholstery and repair work for other people but mainly he repairs furniture for himself to sell in his shop. I used to live behind his workshop through a hole in the fence which was a short cut to the shops and which I used every day. The furniture restorer had a clipboard with little sheets of paper and a pencil affixed to his door so that people could leave messages for him. Three or four times a week - whenever he was out – I took a sheet of paper and wrote GZORNDENPLAD on it and put it back under the clipboard. I did this for three years and one day, as I walked past, I saw him showing one of my pieces of paper to the Mexican restaurant chef who was out the back having a smoke. The chef was shaking his head and saying “never heard of it mate.”

The day before Clare and I left Hobart on our trip I was walking past his shop and decided I’d have a look inside. I’d never actually met the furniture restorer but he came up to me and asked if he could help. I asked if he ever got any really big old sideboards with mirrors in the shop. “No” he said. “But if I come across one I can let you know if you have a phone number.” “How about an email address” I said. “that’ll do” he said. He gave me a card to write on and I wrote GZORNDENPLAD@Hotmail.com, which was entirely fictitious, and left the shop. As I walked away towards the main street he called me back. “What does this word mean?” he said as he pointed to the word GZORNDENPLAD on the back of the card. “I didn’t think anyone would ever ask me that, it’s Mongolian actually” I said, adding “it’s a swearword.” “Oh really? would you mind telling me exactly what swearword?” “Yes”, I said. “It means asshole.” He thanked me and I carried on walking towards the shops.

When I lived in North Hobart my friend Tony used to come down from Sydney one weekend a month and stay at my place while he visited his kids who lived nearby. He sent me an email one Wednesday asking if I could pick him up from the airport and informing me that he had changed his phone number. I rang him back twice but there was a guy’s voice on the answering machine saying “hi, we’re out so could you please leave a message after the beep.” When Tony arrived on Friday evening I asked him who the guy on his new answering machine was. Tony said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He didn’t have an answering machine. We checked and found that he’d made a typing error in his email to me and I’d rung somebody else and left a message for Tony on their answering machine. Tony rang the incorrect number to listen to the message and when the beep came on he said “Hi, this is Tony, are there any messages for me?” The guy, who was at home and had been listening to the answering machine, picked up the phone and old Tony he was “a friggin’ parasite” using other people’s phones to receive messages like that. Tony countered with “Parisite? I’ve never even been to France.” Later that evening we went out to a restaurant and when the waiter came up to our table we couldn’t order for laughing about it.

Tasmania is a strange place populated by less than half a million people, a large percentage of who are also strange. It’s a place were they’ve conducted the most complete genocide in recorded human history and don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual about it. Whenever I’ve broached the subject of the missing Aborigines with Tasmanians they say things like “well, there were only about seven or eight thousand of them to start with.” This seems to imply that had there been twice as many Tasmanian Aborigines they wouldn’t have killed them all. The fact is that they killed, or caused to die, one hundred percent of the native population – every one they came across. The few Tasmanian Aborigines from which the present day population of that race emerged from were not on the main island of Tasmania at the time their brothers and sisters were exterminated.

As one moves around Tasmania there is no record of Aborigines ever having lived there. If you walk around Hobart for a day imagining yourself to be a Tasmanian Aboriginal descendent, it is highly unlikely that you would be able to find any record of your ancestors ever having existed. There are no statues to the Aboriginal dead that fought for their country when it was invaded. However, in almost every country town, you come across memorials to white people who unquestioningly went off to fight Turks on behalf of Britain without even knowing where Turkey was or why they were doing it.

There is, nevertheless, a record of Tasmanian Aborigines to be found in gardens around Tasmania in Cygnet, Sheffield, Queenstown and other small towns and villages. These take the form of Aboriginal garden gnomes. I wonder at the mentality of a people who, having exterminated a whole race of people, would further denigrate their memory by making garden gnomes of them. To my mind it is a gross exercise in tasteless ignorance and exhibits a great lack of feeling and compassion. Imagine, if you will, what we would say of Germans if they made stereotypical Jewish garden gnomes and placed them on their lawns! In Germany it wouldn’t be safe for you to do such a thing but in Tasmania you can do this safe in the knowledge that the rest of the village isn’t going to object.

Tasmanians seem to put little value on living things or on their interrelationships. They seem to despise trees. They’ve exterminated the Tasmanian Tiger just as they did the human population of the island. It now seems certain that another long term Tasmanian resident, the world’s largest freshwater crayfish, will soon be extinct. It’s a huge creature that takes fourteen years to reach maturity. So too the Huon Pine; a once prolific tree that lives predominately in the south west of the island and takes five hundred years to achieve its full height. These days it’s a protected rarity but even in the late 1970’s the Tasmanians were chopping down two thousand year old trees. But it’s the roadkill that’s the most evident to visitors. Nowhere in the world has such a high roadkill rate. Each year the number of native animals killed on Tasmania’s roads equals or exceeds three times the number of humans living on the island.

The treeless wastes of Hobart and its northern suburbs seem to go un-noticed by those that live there. As you stand in the centre of Hobart and look up and down the street in any direction your vision won’t be obstructed by pestilential trees. Not for Hobart the avenues and boulevards of other Australian cities and country towns. Their destruction of old growth forests has been well documented and continues to be in the media in various parts of the world.
It was to Tasmania, in the early years of the nineteenth century, that the mighty British Empire, obsessed at the time with a notion of the existence of a criminal class, transported the people who formed the bulk of Tasmania’s population. The men and women that were thought to make up this “criminal class” were considered to be beyond redemption. Their sad & sorry state was not thought to have been a result of their environmental programming but, rather, something like a genetic defect. It was reasoned that Britain could rid itself of this class of people by exporting them thus rendering the country a land more fit for honest people to live in.

After the American Revolution in which Britain was roundly defeated by its own colonists, the newly emerging United States refused to take any more of Britain’s criminals. The Cape Colony in South Africa was considered for a while and then abandoned in favour of Australia as the dumping ground for Britain’s criminals.

Of course, not every convict transported to Australia could be termed a criminal. There were educated Irish political prisoners and there were people who fell foul of the law for no reason other than that they did, indeed, steal a loaf of bread. Others were unjustly accused after upsetting the local Lord of the manor and so forth.

Nevertheless, genuine criminals formed the overwhelming majority of those convicts transported to Australia. The notion that Britain somehow trawled the nation looking for bread and handkerchief stealers to send to Australia is historically without credence. Now, the average criminal is usually somebody who’s not terribly smart and most of them get caught. Sure, you get the odd mastermind, the odd genius, but criminals are usually so unintelligent that they get caught through not covering their tracks in some way. Every town has an area where these people seem to gravitate to. They’re down-market areas with pubs where people fight, spit, do shady deals, have mullet haircuts and swear a lot. It was ever thus (apart from the mullet haircuts) and was so back in eighteenth century Britain.

Those criminals who ended up in Tasmania were the very worst of a bad and none too bright bunch and they formed almost forty percent of the total human flotsam and jetsam cargo transported to Australia. A large percentage of these criminals had already been filtered through New South Wales. These were the habitual recidivists, the repeat offenders so thick or intransigent as to be incapable of learning. Among them were a certain percentage of mentally deficient people too. These were not wanted in Sydney and so were sent down to Tasmania which, at the end of the line, had no option but to take them. Sydney kept the “best” most useful and skilled criminals for itself.

When we think of the convicts that were transported to Australia we usually think of them as being male, and the majority were, but in Tasmania’s case it had a disproportionately high percentage of women criminals and mental deficients too. Not a brilliant start to filling the gene pool of the fledgling colony one would have thought? Because of the reputation of Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land as it was earlier known) as being some sort of punitive hell hole, free women were reluctant to go there. A few schemes were tried by the various governors to attract women but, although a few did go of their own free will, these schemes were a disaster. The women simply didn’t want to go there.

When a free man arrived in Tasmania to start his enterprise he needed the services of a woman to run the house while he was out all day supervising the convicts that were assigned to him to work his land. Similarly those convicts that, having kept their noses clean for seven years and obtained their tickets of leave, were granted a piece of land and set up house. They too faced a life of celibacy if they thought they’d be able to attract a woman to this “devil’s isle.”

So what did they do? There was only one choice – a convict woman. These convict women, despite what the now discredited crop of feminist historians wrote about them in the 70’s, were a particularly bad lot. For a woman to be transported to Australia she had to be a hopeless case, usually a prostitute, thief or a mentally sub standard person who habitually re-offended. She was someone the system had completely given up on.

Female convicts were “available” for assignment to work on people’s farms and in their businesses. There was a small charge levied by the State Government of the day for this legalised slavery and the women, before being assigned, were kept in either of two female prisons called female factories. When a man, rich or poor, wanted a woman to keep house and share his bed the female factories were his only source of supply. Of course some free women did come to Tasmania and, indeed, one of them even succeeded in having her convict husband assigned to work on her farm. Nevertheless, by far the larger percentage of women comprised pickpockets, liars, arsonists, drunkards and prostitutes who were habitual re-offenders.

When a man in search of a woman called at the female factories he invariably chose the youngest, strongest woman on offer. An old feeble woman wouldn’t have been much use to him around the farm or as desirable to him in his bed. And in his bed children were conceived. It was usually in the advanced stages of pregnancy that “honest women” were made of these convict lasses when they found themselves saying “I do” to the preacher in order to prevent the farmer’s sons being born as bastards. There were also two added incentives that encouraged the farmer to marry his convict assignee. Firstly a legitimate son would have an easier time with the legal system when it came to inheritance than would one born out of wedlock. The second incentive was the avoidance of the social stigma that was attached in those times to fathering a bastard.

Marrying a younger woman, however, could have repercussions further down the track – she more often than not outlived him and ended up owning the farm. This of course made her a more attractive potential wife than she had been the first time around and many a Tasmanian farmer’s son found himself swindled out of his inheritance by his step father.

But in 1840 an event that would drain Tasmania of a large number of its able minded males occurred. Gold was discovered in Victoria. Everybody with any get up and go simply got up and went! This one event in Tasmania’s short [white] history did more to drain the State’s gene pool of healthy DNA than anything that happened before or since. Tasmania already had a much higher proportion of mentally deficient people in its population than the rest of the British Empire and now it became further distilled.

Mental featherweights, both male and female, found themselves in possession of vast tracts of land purchased for little more than the cost of the previous owner’s ticket to Melbourne. At the time of the gold rush Governor Arthur was sending off letter after letter to his superiors in England requesting more “men of good quality and standing” because the cream of Tasmania’s human crop, such as it was, was fast disappearing to the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. At this time anybody in the British Isles who had been intending migration to Tasmania went to the goldfields instead and so poor Governor Arthur had to promote convicts to public offices throughout the State – there was simply a shortage of non-convict people. Tasmania now had idiots in high places, ex convicts that were able to swindle other idiots out of their land and little by little Tasmania’s landed gentry became infiltrated with, and watered down by, sub standard genetic material.

The church and State have never completely separated in Tasmania. They have a long and intertwined history together. As in many other towns in the colonial British Empire the Glebe system operated. Under this scheme government gave Aboriginal land to the church so that it could earn a part of its keep from it (this is one of the present day reasons that pubs and shops aren’t to be found in Glebes). The church would title the land and distribute or lease it and the tenants or buyers would go forth and shoot the Aborigines off it. As you travel through Tasmania you’ll see chapels in places where there are no populations. In many cases there never were any people settled near those chapels. When the church wanted land it would apply to the government who would tell it to go and build a chapel on it and the land would be granted. Corrupt Government officials who wanted land for themselves would turn this situation to their advantage. They would approach the church and do a deal. First the church would build a chapel, the land would then be granted, and a part of it would be signed over to the corrupt official who’d granted it. With ex convicts in positions of authority the wheels of corruption were kept well oiled.

These days Tasmania plays on it’s convict history although only on a superficial level – don’t scratch the surface too hard or you’ll find yourself ostracised. The tourist industry now promotes the islands time as a penal colony and would be floundering without it. It wasn’t always so. Tasmanians at one stage in their short history changed the name of Port Arthur, their infamous convict prison settlement, to Carnarvon such was their shame at being labelled the British Empire’s number one hell hole.

Tales of brutality and the macabre, it was realised, bring in the tourist dollar and nowadays Port Arthur is promoted as being some sort of antipodean Auschwitz which of course it most definitely was not. Not a single person was ever executed there, nobody starved to death, was worked to death or had operative medical experiments conducted on them without an anaesthetic. The inmates of Auschwitz were there for a vastly different offence – that of existing – and could only leave the place by surrendering their lives.

Port Arthur by contrast must be the most perfect landscape that ever played host to a jail; backed as it is by the most luxuriously abundant green forests and fronted by the most beautiful of tranquil waters imaginable. What the tourist brochures omit to tell the reader was that this was the most successful prison, in terms or rehabilitation, the world had ever known. This was the only prison anywhere where the rules were posted on the walls together with a list of rewards available for inmates who kept their noses clean. For good behaviour in Port Arthur inmates were actually granted a piece of land at the completion of their sentences and many rose to become not only upstanding and moral citizens but government officials! Hardened criminals brutalised by the system and existing in rat infested hulks in the Thames with no hope in life whatever could, if transported to Van Diemens Land, make a life for themselves far better than the average law abiding Briton could ever hope for.

It comes as no surprises then that people in Britain actually began committing crimes with the sole intention of being transported to this “Devils Isle.” Again, in the Sate archives we see letters from the British Home Office urging Governor Arthur to increase the punishment regime so that people would stop committing crimes in England so as to get sent to Tasmania. Governor Arthur wrote back protesting that he’d been sent to the island with a charter under the heading of Penal Reform – he was achieving it with a stupendous success rate - and asked how his results stacked up against those of the Mother Country. Many criminals, It must be said, didn’t take advantage of the rewards offered and continued to re-offend. A large percentage of them couldn’t help themselves and ended up in Tasmania precisely for that reason. Others were there because they had been helping themselves and couldn’t stop it. Tasmania’s present day population is in decline, it has been for decades. Maybe it’s time for an injection of DNA from elsewhere.

Of course, everywhere has something good and in Tasmania’s case it’s scenery. Tasmania is the lumpiest place in Australia and from the slopes of the lumps one gets to see the splendour of the hollows down below. A large percentage of Tasmania’s population have views from their lounge room windows that people in other States would die for. Sea views in other States are usually just that – sea views – but in Tasmania many of the sea views incorporate stunning views of islands, inlets and channels. Bus drivers in Hobart live in houses with better views than millionaires in France.

Some time ago Clare and I visited the Arthur River on the west coast and took a trip on a boat through forests that had never been logged. It was the real, primordial and pristine environment that only people on TV seem to get to see but it was easily accessible in a family car. The forest that pushed against the river banks may have been changed over the millennia by fire and flood due to natural causes but not by the hand of man. To see such a thing in other parts of the world you have to spend heaps of cash, travel great distances, brave dangerous animals and risked being ripped off or killed by the locals. After the river trip we wandered on down to the beach only to be greeted with one of the weirdest sights I’ve seen anywhere in the world. The beach for mile after mile was littered with giant trees strewn in all directions as if by some angry, childlike God in a tantrum. It would have been easy to imagine a forested island offshore somewhere that had been hit by a tidal wave and the forest thrown up on Tasmania’s west coast.

We asked the ferry’s skipper about it. He told us that at the mouth of the river was a huge sandbar and that now and again the forests up river get hit by titanic and torrential storms. These storms knock down the forest giants which float in the river for months unable to get out. Then, once a year or so after a downpour, the river is in such heavy flood that the sandbar at the river mouth can no longer contain it. When this occurs the floating trees are pushed out into the ocean only to be thrown back on the beach by the wild seas of the Roaring Forties. The aftermath which we’d seen on the beach was breathtaking. Trees much larger than most Australians will never encounter in their lifetimes (because all the big ones will soon be logged) had been smashed in two by the violent waves as if they were no more than match sticks and then heaped upon each other. The sheer amount of useable timber to be seen was staggering but all but impossible to salvage due to the terrain and its remoteness.

Unfortunately the trees on farming land in the State have not fared so well. The sight that greets the traveller on the drive from Launceston to Hobart along the Midland Highway is, in some places bordering on the surreal. Almost all the trees on farms are either dead or dying. It’s a ghostly sight like something from a Tarkovsky art house movie. Dead Eucalypts both great and small stand out stark white on the horizon. They litter the fields; their whitened limbs lying on the ground beneath them like the bleached bones of the long dead original human inhabitants of this island.

Tasmania’s old growth forests are eminently accessible. They can be seen on the back of log trucks going through Hobart at night. On one night in November 2003, it was reported in the Hobart Mercury, eighty of them were clocked going through town. They go to the Triabunna wood chipping mill where they’re exported to Japan so that Japanese workers can enjoy full employment manufacturing building products to sell to the world including Australia. One would have thought that, even if the State Government is so short sighted that it chops down old growth forests it can’t re-create, it would at least see to it that we export the manufactured chipboard and craftwood to Japan. Exporting jobs along with the base product is not, of course, unique to Tasmania. That’s what Australia does for a living.

The area where much of this wood comes from is the hauntingly beautiful Huon Valley in the south of the State where orchards line the roadways and the Huon River slowly moves its waters out to the sea. The scene is one of pastoral innocence. Mountains, rivers, apple blossoms and little wooden houses in sylvan clearings with wispy chimney smoke lazily ascending skywards greet visitor and resident alike. Then a fucking great log truck roars past you and the idyllic prospect shatters. Behind the concealing mountains and hills, away from the eyes of the tourists the utter devastation is sickening, the more so because the industry down there is expanding. My advice to any prospective visitor to Tasmania is, get down there and see it quickly because it’s not going to last long and it won’t be recreated.

It was during the last week of October that Clare’s daughter gave birth to Clare’s first granddaughter and we were free to leave Tasmania again and resume our travels in Erasmus. However, we now had a time limit on the next leg of our trip as the next grandchild was due on Christmas day. Grandchildren were falling thick and fast – the third one was due less than a month after the second. I felt a bit sorry for Clare. Being told you’re about to become a grandmother is shock enough to the system when you thought you weren’t old enough for the title. In Clare’s case she’d been told within a fortnight that she was going to be a grandmother by each of three of her kids. We had to plan our wanderings to fit in with the new arrivals but to get out of Tasmania again before the baby sitting started. In the first week of November we flew up to Brisbane and caught the train on up to Maryborough in order to get on with our peregrinations - it’s a posh word that means travels.

Fred “vosh dare” at the railway station to meet us and soon enough we were, for the third time, in the now familiar surroundings of their house and garden. Fred had looked after Erasmus as if it was his own. He’d washed the bird shit off of it and started the engine up once a week. All we had to do was to throw out the dead flies and it was all ready to go.
TAMBORINE
A day or two later saw us on the road again and heading south for Mt. Tamborine a little to the west of Brisbane. There we would stay for a couple of weeks in a house in return for the owners staying at my apartment in North Hobart a month down the track. After picking up the keys from Barbara and Harry in Brisbane it was getting close to dusk. By the time we had reached the foothills it was around ten at night. We drove ever onward and upward zig-zagging all the while and playing tunes on Erasmus’s gearbox to get to our destination atop the mountain. The road was narrow and difficult to drive even in daytime. At night it was murder and if it hadn’t been for the fact that much of the road was flanked on both sides by unbroken forest we would have given up and spent the night in the van. As it was there was nowhere to park so we just had to press on.

The cottage, when we eventually arrived, was better than we’d hope for but we were dog tired and went to bed straight away. In the morning after we’d had breakfast we set out to find the shops. Outside the newsagents was a billboard advertising the Gold Coast Bulletin on which was written in bold black letters “Special Flood report – 4,000 Homes at risk” on the same sheet of paper underneath it in red were the words “Free Fishing Book.” I thought it wouldn’t have gone down too well with some of the 4,000 home owners but perhaps it was just a matter of the Gold Coast Bulletin trying to be practical. Just imagine being trapped by the rising flood waters on top of the roof of your house when the paper delivery boy rocks up in a dingy and offers you a free fishing book. I’d rip the bricks from the chimney one by one and sink the sick little bastard.

At the fruit and vegetable market a few minutes later the guy who served us had four studs at the base of his neck and when we saw him the next day he had the same 4 studs but lower down his back. I couldn’t see what was on the other end of the studs to hold them there. He didn’t have four opposing stud holders in his throat and I could only think that the holes in his neck were so deep that the studs just stayed in there. With all his studs removed he must have looked like a walking cribbage board.

It reminded me that at university I used to sit next to a girl in one of the weekly lectures who had a stud in her nose. Before the lecture started one day she told me that she had a shocking cold accompanied by catarrh. I noticed that she didn’t have her nose stud in as usual and that the stud hole was on my side. Every time she held a tissue up to her nostrils and sneezed I ducked just in case.

Again at the shops later in the week Clare came looking for me in the supermarket to tell me that there was an old car that she thought I’d like to look at. I used to be very interested in old cars because my first job was as an apprentice in the workshops of a motor museum where we restored all sorts of antique transport. This car turned out to be something of a rarity. It was a Railton built probably in the mid 1920s. They were very fast sports cars and we had one at the museum that, driven by John Cobb, had once held the world land speed record. This one, however, looked as if it had been in continuous use since new with very few dents in what had once been its polished aluminium bodywork. It was parked in the shopping centre car park with the passenger, an old cocker spaniel, taking care of the supermarket shopping alongside him.

I managed to attract the attention of the owner, a grey haired, slack trousered individual in his mid fifties, who had until then been heavily engaged in conversation with what appeared to be a Yeti impersonating a park ranger. It had hair down to its waistline and the face of a clumsy beekeeper. It looked as if it had learned to walk upright some time earlier in the week - a quality that these days is most likely an essential qualification for the job of park ranger in Queensland - and it sported a Queensland park rangers shirt. The Railton owner told me that he’d brought the car with him when he’d emigrated from the UK many years ago and that he bought it from a journalist friend in Ethiopia who had fallen foul of Heilie Selassie. Highly Unlikey was what I thought but, then again, so was an open topped Railton cruising around a mountain top in Queensland with a dog in the passenger’s seat and no seat belts or roll bars.

The Railton we had in the museum when I was a lad was called the Napier Railton because it was powered by a Napier aircraft engine. In the days immediately after John Rhodes Cob had broken the world land speed record in the car it had disappeared and it was rumoured to have been taken to bits. This was believable because it wasn’t unusual for this fate to befall record breaking automobiles. The reason this used to happen was in case the car fell into the hands of a rival. Then, and with perhaps something like the possibility of a higher octane fuel being available a year down the track, the same basic car could be used again to set a new record for the new owner.

One day when I was about 19 years old and working at the museum we were visited by a man in his 40s who said he’d seen the old Napier Railton record breaker. It was, he said, doing service as a test bed for a parachute manufacturing company. We didn’t believe him at first but he was right and it came to stay a while at our museum workshops a few weeks later. The parachute company, I was told, had used the car because it was so heavy that when the parachute opened at speeds of 100mph plus, it didn’t pull the back end out of it. We, however, were horrified to see that they’d welded a huge sub frame to the back of this historic piece of high speed airplane engine on wheels.

Some four years prior to this, when I was new to this, my first job, I was asked if I would like to learn to ride an “Ordinary.” I’d never heard of an ordinary but thought that whatever an ordinary was it didn’t sound like anything special. I was taken over to the bicycle section of the museum by Bob Warne, the workshop foreman, and introduced to the Ordinary. It was a huge pre-historic looking bicycle. I’d seen penny farthing bikes in pictures and there was one standing alongside it but the Ordinary was, well, it was…. colossal…that’s what it was.

It was so high that it had two steps up the cross bar to get to the seat. Bob told me that there was to be a procession, a sort of cavalcade of transport, across the bridge that went out to Hayling Island in a fortnight’s time and the museum would be taking a few cars and motor cycles to it. As I was the only person in the workshop without a driving licence it made sense to have me in the procession riding the ordinary. The occasion was the lifting of the toll on the bridge which had been a toll bridge for over 60 years.

For the next two weeks Bob and I went across to the bike section of the museum every lunch time for me to practice riding. Bob would hold onto the cross bar as I climbed up it and then he’d run alongside pushing me up to take-off speed until I was away on my own. As time went on I learned to dismount by cycling up to a telegraph pole and clinging onto it. I’d then slide down the pole and push the bike back to the museum. On the last day before the Hayling Island Bridge procession I rode the thing home to my village. It was a distance of some five miles which was covered in next-to-no time because the ordinary was very fast on the flat once you got it up to speed. There was no chain or any other mechanism. The pedals were connected directly to the huge front wheel and one turn of these little pedals turned the big diameter front wheel all the way around.

On the approach to my village I put on an extra spurt to show off and came down the main street at the speed of a chemical reaction. All heads turned to watch the daring young man speeding down Beaulieu Road with his arse ten feet off the ground and coat tails flying out behind him. Tubby Wilson’s brindle terrier that always ran alongside cyclists didn’t know what to make of it and gave up the chase after about fifty yards. I was feeling pretty bloody cool until, as I approached our house, I realised that in our village they’d put the power lines underground the previous summer. What this meant to my current situation was that there were no telegraph poles to rock on up to and dismount.

All eyes were upon me as I cruised straight on through the village and kept going. I cycled around the highways and byways of three adjacent villages until dusk unable to get off the fucking thing. Eventually I came up behind a friend called Tugger Smith and I yelled out to him to run alongside me and hold onto the cross bar so that I could get off. The first time around he wasn’t quick enough but I went around the block and he caught me the second time.

I’d told my dad that the Hayling Island procession was to be on the local TV news and, proud father that he was, he went out and bought me a new tweed jacket and grey flannels for the occasion. He also told everybody in the neighbourhood that his son was going to be on TV and at 6pm he and about ten other people were sitting in our lounge room in rapt anticipation. What they saw though, wasn’t quite what they were expecting.

The Ordinary wasn’t easy to control at low speeds and so when the procession started we let all the cars and motor cycles go on ahead so that I could start off and maintain a reasonable speed at which the thing would be stable. A suitable telegraph pole was lined up for my dismount upon return and they told me there was a big roundabout at the other end of the bridge so I could keep going until I got back to base. With the help of a couple of locals I set off in my new tweed jacket and grey flannels with my highly polished brown brogues glinting in the sunlight with every turn of the pedals.

Everything went well for the first half mile or so until I was about half way across the bridge and had caught up with the cars that had gone ahead of me. As I crossed the hump of the bridge and looked down the other side the Lord Mayor was standing in the middle of the traffic with his hand raised and saying something like “oh here ye, oh here ye, all who pass this way must now pay the last toll.”

As the traffic began to slow I looked around desperately for a telegraph pole or anything else that I could cycle towards and cling to. Nothing! Shit! I was caught between the kerb on my left and a line of vintage cars on my right. As I looked to my left past the kerb all I could see was the sea below and the traffic was slowing. Then some idiot in a leather flying helmet sitting on some two wheeled scrap heap threaded through the line of cars and came to a halt in front of me.

I teetered towards the sea for an instant and, reminding myself that I couldn’t swim, chose to fall off the machine to my right. To my right was a 1920’s Vauxhall touring car with a black canvas full length hood. I couldn’t see what was under the hood but I heard it as I plunged head first into it. An unsuspecting middle aged lady dressed in period costume screamed her head off as the canvas roof under which she was sitting was suddenly rent in two by a fifteen year old spotty youth clad in a tweed jacket and grey flannels sent, as if from heaven, to bury his head in her nether regions. Needless to say, by the time I arrived home that evening I was already a laughing stock in the village

Meanwhile, jumping onwards a few decades, we stayed for a fortnight on Mt. Tamborine and took it easy. Clare painted pictures which I played with on the computer putting borders around them and publishing them on my website to see if we could sell them. Seven small parks make up the Tamborine National Parks and each one is spectacular in some way. Some have waterfalls and rock pools while others have unusual birds or strangler vines or maybe something like stag horn or bird’s nest ferns festooning the trees. A lot of the mountain is covered in rain forest and avocado orchards with a smattering of wineries and a bakery that does the best cheese and bacon pull aparts in the universe. It all adds up to a very agreeable way to spend a dirty weekend if you live in Brisbane which is only an hour away.

Anyway, all good things come to an end and one day we went up to the bakery and they were out of cheese & bacon pull aparts. We left the next day.

First we went to Lamington National Park which was a lot about babbling brooks and moss and mist shrouded valleys full of strangler vines. It was big – twenty thousand hectares worth. There were tropical orchids and weird coloured fungi and ferns all over the place. Walking around it felt very much like I would imagine an ant would feel if dropped into a terrarium. We saw lots of those little sugar glider things gliding between trees looking like somebody’s toupee had blown off. There were carpet pythons there as well and we saw what we thought was one. I thought it was an Axminster but Clare said it was a Berber.

We both wanted to catch a glimpse of the wonderfully rare and beautiful birds we’d seen on a David Attenborough TV show about the area. Wonderful and beautiful they turned out to be but on Mt. Lamington all around the famous O’Reilly’s Guest House they weren’t rare at all. We don’t know a lot about birds but some of the Australian parrots and bower birds are outstanding. We pulled up in the car park and straight away Clare recognised a rare satin bower bird patrolling the rubbish bins. Then, as we walked around behind the restaurant there were literally dozens of king parrots, crimson rosellas and regent bower birds being fed by the tourists. In the restaurant there was a signed picture of David Attenborough with regent bower birds on his arm. I wanted one of those photos but with me in it instead of him and we weren’t going to get it with all these tourists hanging around. Now, the regent bower bird is one of God’s most wonderful creations second only to Jennifer Lopez. It’s black and gold in equal proportions with very striking markings second only to Jennifer Lopez in a black and gold G string which God wouldn’t have created because he’s not into that sort of thing.

We wandered off for a couple of hundred metres and took the bread out of the bag we were carrying. In no time flat we were surrounded by regent bower birds, satin bower birds and a whole bunch of other birds we didn’t know the names of and didn’t like much because they weren’t as pretty as the bower birds. At first we gave them too much bread and they flew away to eat in the trees where we couldn’t get a photo of them but pretty soon we leant how to handle them. I got a small piece in my hand between thumb and index finger (I knew that the old opposing thumb would come in handy one day) and didn’t let them take it. They stood on my hand trying to prize the bread out from between my fingers. After we’d done this a couple of times I found that if I waited for the bird to really dig its beak down between my thumb and forefinger and then closed the gap, it couldn’t get away. They just let go with their feet and tried to fly backwards. It was then that I noticed a bus load of Japanese tourists taking videos of me. I smiled a Steve Irwin kind of smile and held on to a bower bird’s beak as it fluttered flat out in reverse gear and they all snapped away. When I let go it somersaulted backwards twice and fell into the bush behind it in a flurry of dust and feathers. I would thoroughly recommend Lamington National park to anyone wishing to study Japanese tourists and their affinity with digital video cameras.

From Mt. Lamington we travelled to the Gold Coast to stay with friends of Clare’s that I’d never met. They were very welcoming and lived on an up-market Queensland klong in a palatial house. They took us up flying in their ultra light and we saw the Gold Coast from the air. It was streets ahead of the Gold Coast from the ground as we looked out over South Stradbroke Island and the prawn farms below. Flying in an ultra light makes you realise just how close you are to death. I didn’t dwell on it but as I sat in the thinly upholstered seat I could feel that my arse was less than the length of a magpie’s beak away from the outside of the plane.

We borrowed our hosts’ car for a couple of days and one day we wound up in a shopping centre where I asked a girl for a hot chocolate and a cappuccino. She said “would you like the cappuccino in a cup?” I said “no, that’s OK, I’ve brought a paper bag with me” She said “sorry but we’re only allowed to use our own cups and mugs.” My abiding memory of the Gold Coast is that almost everybody that lives there is from somewhere else and their favourite topic of conversation is the price of real estate. We couldn’t hold a conversation with anybody in a moving car without hearing that everywhere we passed had been bought or sold by somebody for a fortune. The Gold Coast is on the move and everybody wants a slice of the action so they’re constantly talking about it. It’s a strangely insular little world that blatantly apes parts of the USA even down to copying district and street names like Monterey, Santa Clara Boulevard, Florida Sands and so on. There’s very little Australian about it including the designs of the houses and apartment blocks. I found myself wondering why we still can’t develop an identity or, if we have, why we can’t bring ourselves to trust it.

On top of the million overseas visitors the Gold Costs gets every year several million Australian tourists turn up on its doorstep. With figures like that it must have a lot of what people on vacation are looking for. For me though, I thought it ghastly. Its growth rate is four times the national average too. All it had that I liked was good weather and this it has in abundance – 300 sunny days a year! The area is a maze of canals and windy corridors between high rise buildings and it’s full of “Worlds.” Movie World, Sea World, Dream World, Tropical Fruit World, Cable Ski World. It’s in desperate need of a Get Real World. People who like shopping must think the Gold Coast is a cool place. It has swag of the biggest air conditioned shopping centres in the country

After three days in Klongsville we headed south into New South Wales and decided to call in on Nimbin which I remembered from the 70s TV news when it had been declared the hippy capital of Australia. The way there took us through delicious lush green hills and river valleys and I could quite see why the area would appeal to earth friendly pot smoking, Centrelink assisted, self sufficient idealists. Nimbin itself was roughly what we expected but more entertaining. Erasmus, being a long rig, needed more parking space than the main drag afforded us so we drove on through to the town centre and parked opposite the cop shop.

The hippies didn’t seem to me to have changed at all until it occurred to me that these hippies were not the same people that founded the hippy colony back in the early 70s. They looked like the hippies of the 1970s but this crop was aged mostly between twenty and thirty five. We had no way of telling whether they were the children of the originals or whether hippies were still emerging from macrobiotic compost heaps all over Australia and gravitating towards Nimbin.

The ideals on which the “colony” was originally founded were painted on walls in a couple of places in the main street. It was a kind of hippy manifesto with points such as make love not war, don’t be greedy, take from the earth only what you need etc. etc. Most of those ideals no longer seemed extant. The place was full of souvenir shops with psychedelically painted facades, each with a token incense stick burning on the pavement outside. There was a hippy museum in an old house with psychedelically painted VW Kombi vans in it and a generous helping of general Australiana which we took a look at. It was boring and, fed up with looking at it; I stood at a window overlooking an alleyway. There were people doing deals all over the place. The business was being done right there with little pretence of covering it up. I watched as a girl of about nineteen handed a plastic bag over to a tourist and took $50 off him. When he’d gone she took a wad of notes out of her hemp bag and started counting. She had at least $5,000 in there.

Around three months prior to us going to Nimbin we’d met another couple who were travelling and we compared notes. They said that in Nimbin they saw a Kombi van on the street and somebody selling marijuana out of the hole where headlight should be. Now, as we came out of the Nimbin Hippy Museum the Volkswagen we’d been told about was right there, it was part of the museum that stuck out onto the pavement. The headlight hole was there too and the bottom of it was covered in marijuana dust and clippings. We watched as a guy stuck his hand under the bumper and pulled out a brown paper bag which he stuffed into the headlight hole. Another guy was sitting on a bench opposite with an ordinary shoe box doing deals keeping both his stock and money it. It would have been impossible for the cops just a little way down the street not to know what was going down. They were either in on it or turning a blind eye.

In a supermarket there we bought a tray of twenty scrumptious, ripe mangoes for five dollars and they were the best mangoes either of us had eaten. Just down the street from the shop was a sign outside the public toilet that said “Sniffer Dogs Prohibited.” There was a great painting of the crucifixion in a coffee shop we went into – the Christ was female and had a fair pair of knockers to boot! Anyway, all in all, I thought the whole, original hippy thing, the hippy raison d'être, had died a sort of hashish to hashish dust to dust death long ago.

We only spent half a day in Nimbin before heading out of the gorgeous gorges and the verdant valleys and east towards the coast. There we turned right and went south down along the New South Wales beaches. Byron Bay looked great but we didn’t stop. It was the Schoolies Week, a time when school leavers spew out of their native habitats like sperms from a ruptured condom and head for Surfers Paradise. The overflow, because Surfers Paradise can only accommodate 30,000 of them, ends up in places like Byron Bay. We didn’t know about Schoolies Week and thought Byron Bay was hosting the annual convention for the pimple cream models union. The beach we thought was spectacular but as we travelled south we came across so many spectacular beaches that a week later we would have rated it as rather ordinary.

All the way down the Pacific Highway from Byron Bay to Coffs Harbour the road barely glimpses the sea and I couldn’t see why it was called the Pacific Highway. What a disappointment it must be to overseas tourists. I don’t know the reason why it couldn’t have been constructed closer to the ocean but most likely it was because it’s cheaper to build roads inland. Australia doesn’t have enough people paying taxes to supply the money for anything but a bare minimum of roads. Well over ninety percent of Australian roads are second class or worse compared with Western Europe, Japan or the USA. The Pacific Highway is one of them, it’s a national disgrace. The road surface in places isn’t bad but it’s full of humps and hollows and the continual up and down motion for kilometre after kilometre distracts the driver from some of the prettiest stretches of agricultural scenery. Banana and pineapple plantations and lush green sugar cane all grow here in withering profusion.

Along this part of the highway we didn’t take so many side roads down to the ocean because the distances were so far and there was scant information available about what was likely to be there when we arrived. One exception was a little place called Minnie Water south of Grafton. Grafton, incidentally, is the jacaranda capital of Australia and most probably the world. It’s good that it has that going for it when the jacarandas are in bloom because it had sod all else going for it at the time we visited it. The mighty, muddy mangrove lined Clarence River was no different to the Maryborough River or a score of others we’d already seen and the bridge over it was purely industrially functional and unattractive. Like an overblown Meccano set put together by some communist futurist architect, it belonged in Silesia or the shipyards of Gdansk. The town itself, like most Australian riverside towns, shunned the river. It wanted nothing to do with it and was built to exclude it from view.

I never could quite figure out why it is that Australians hate rivers so much when Europeans makes so much of them. Australian towns are built to hide them as if they’re sewers that should be apologised for. All over Europe one finds rivers as the central attraction in towns and villages. They build promenades along their banks. Coffee houses and restaurants proliferate and for centuries past the wealthy have built their grand houses to incorporate river views. In Australia they seem only to have served as purely functional arteries to move goods to and fro and to discharge effluent into. With so many Australian towns the river is only encountered on the way in or out. Typically the traveller crosses the bridge and then carries on up the main street which is built at right angles to the river. In most other countries I’ve visited the town is built along the banks of the river. Nor do I buy the argument that Australian rivers are prone to more flooding than those of the old world. They aren’t.

In Tasmania the Hobart Rivulet, the year round stream that fed the early town, has been piped underground like a sewer. The Rivulet is the very reason that Hobart is positioned where it is. The first settlement was founded further up the Derwent at Risdon Cove but had to be shifted to the town’s present location because it ran out of water. For many a decade it’s been hidden underground in pipes emerging only for a short length away from the main thoroughfare in a concrete channel where people won’t have to see it. I’ve seen smaller streams in Turkey and Syria dammed up into cascading pools with ducks and overhanging trees, outdoor tables and restaurants. But Hobart doesn’t deserve its Rivulet.

Minnie Water nestles timidly up against the ocean beach about 25 kilometres off the highway south of Grafton. It’s a merely a cluster of holiday houses on a beautiful beach with clean toilets and a shop. It’s surrounded by trees full of parrots and cockatoos and there’s a lake called Lake Hiawatha. It’s just a lovely, beautiful, peaceful and well cared for place to be. There’s a national park there with camping grounds for tents and caravans but we stayed for a couple of nights right next to the no parking sign in the small gravelled beach car park. The lady at the shop opposite was incredibly helpful and knowledgeable about the area and told us not to worry about the no-parking sign. Nobody had bothered anybody for parking there in years she told us. We walked the walking tracks for hours and cycled all around and ended up thinking it would be a nice place for old farts to retire to.

The name Minnie water had apparently been coined after that of Lake Hiawatha which I thought was kind of cute. Australian place names, of which I will make mention later, are predictably boring and uninventive being, for the most part, second hand English names. Even so Aboriginal place names aren’t much more exciting. They seem to suffer from an overdose of tautology. “I tracked him from Mount Baw Baw to Wagga Wagga your honour. And I hit him with a nulla nulla and threw him in the Mulla Mulla during a Willy Willy.” What sort of talk is that?

When we reached Coffs Harbour, a coastal town said in the guide books to have what most Australians consider the perfect climate, it was too hot. We cooled off in an air conditioned shopping mall and then went to the botanic gardens. They were big and straggly and not terribly interesting but the car park looked level and shady and we thought we’d stay the night there after all the cars had gone and the gates were closed. We unloaded the bikes from Erasmus and went off on a long cycle ride along a boardwalk in a mangrove swamp which was, well.....uh…..swampy I guess is the word that best describes it. There were mangroves and there was a lot of mud, which was nice, and I thought it may have looked different if the tide had have been in. Despite that I can say without fear of contraception that it was the best mangrove swamp I’ve ever cycled through.

When we got back to the van it was dark but we’d already eaten out so we went straight to bed. I woke up at some early hour of the morning for a pee. It was still warm and humid as I struggled out of the door in the dark, around to the other side of Erasmus and took a few paces forward. I came across a step and, stepping up, found myself standing a large plinth. It was nice and cool and smooth on my feet and I peed off the edge of it. As I did so I heard my pee splashing. This was unusual, it usually goes fairly silently straight into ants nests or sand or leaf litter or something. As my eyes became accustomed to the lack of light I saw that I was peeing on a large, flat shiny construction like the one I was standing on. I lifted my gaze and saw that I was standing on a long line of flat shiny rectangles aligned with military precision. They were graves.

The Coffs Harbour botanical gardens shares a car park with the Coffs Harbour cemetery and it’s a really cool cemetery to be buried in – the only qualification being that you have to be metabolically disadvantaged to get in. But the graves are something special. A large percentage of them are tiled with 1970s and 80s kitchen and bathroom wall tiles! The most undignified one I saw was done in tiles I recognised the next day covering the floor of a public toilet near the beach.

I guess they were practical but as kitsch and tasteless as it’s possible to get. There were some double graves where the occupants had died twenty five years apart. I wondered if they’d bought a double lot of tiles when the husband died and stored them under the house or whether they had the whole thing re-tiled when the wife went to that big grouter in the sky. Anybody who was around in the early 1960s can walk through the Coffs Harbour cemetery and tell roughly when each tiled grave was made by recalling their friends’ kitchens and bathrooms of the time. My will now specifies that if I should die in Coffs Harbour I want blue grout. One gravestone said that someone called Ernest Farley was buried beneath it. I couldn’t help thinking that the worms down there were living in dead Ernest.

As we travelled south from Coffs Harbour my thoughts returned to the reasons for the origins of the mundane place names I’d first thought about back in Minnie Water.

How terribly blinkered the early immigrant Brits were when it came to naming places. No doubt the White Australia Policy was partly responsible for this lack of originality too. Towns and villages were occasionally named after something Aboriginal but more often that not after places in Britain. However, when it came to the names of rivers, beaches and so forth the same old names crop up wherever you go in Australia. I lost count of how many Deep Creeks and Seven Mile Beaches we came across.

How dreadfully unoriginal can these English explorers have been when they trekked across Australia all those years ago and named everything they came across after the bleedin’ obvious? Mind you, the anthropologists were just as boring. Just think how exciting it would have been to have been married to a man who gave the snakes he discovered names like Black Snake or Brown Snake.

“Good evening dearest wife, what’s for dinner tonight?”

“Well, dear husband, tonight I’ve cooked you roast lamb with roast potatoes and traditional English gravy with a tiny touch of rosemary.”

“ Rosemary, why do we need rosemary? I’ve been eating roast lamb and roast spuds for twenty seven years without rosemary. Why do we need it now?”

“Sorry dear husband. I’ll away to the kitchen and make the gravy you’re used to”

“Good. I found a new snake today. Totally new and unknown to science, never been classified”

“My word. A new snake, how exciting. What colour is it?”

“Brown”

“What will you call it? They have such lovely sounding names for snakes don’t they? Let’s see, there’s anaconda, boa constrictor, taipan, python, cobra. There’s so many of them. And then there’s that American water moccasin snake isn’t there? Have you thought of a name for your new snake yet dear husband?”

“Yes”

“What is it pray tell? Don’t keep me in suspense any longer dearest husband”

“Brown snake”

“Brown snake?”

“Yes, brown snake”

“Oh……..brown snake…..mmm……..Well, I suppose cobra could mean brown in the Sanskrit language couldn’t it?” Did I mention to you that the Governor’s wife told me that everyone up at parliament house is doing it doggy fashion these days?”

“Yes, dozens of times”

“Oh…..well, if you ever….you know……?”

“No thank you dear wife. We’ve been doing it missionary position for twenty seven years now. I see no reason to change.”

“Twenty one dear. We stopped doing it altogether in 1837”

When you travel the United States you come across names that are not only from all over Europe but from all over the world. I guess the difference is that the USA had been accepting immigrants from all points of the globe for almost two hundred years before the Whitlam Government kicked out the White Australia Policy in 1972. This cultural starvation is evident not only in the place names but in the architecture too. There’s a boring sameness to the styles of houses throughout Australia compared with the USA where one can see different dwelling styles in areas originally settled by the Russians, or the or Spanish, the Germans or the French.

I’ve been tossing up in my mind just how I would design the typical Australian country town and what it would have in it. On the outskirts there would be a couple of big green artillery pieces from WWI. Then there’d be a Deep Creek and a Five Mile Creek to be crossed as you come in from the north. There’d be an Elizabeth Street, a Collins and a Flinders Street. I guess a McQuarrie Street should be thrown in too and a Joseph Banks memorial park. Down by the shore there’d be a Beauty Point overlooking a Seal Rock with Pelican Point in the distance overlooking seven mile beach. There would, of course, be a monument to those who fell in the numerous wars in which we have, uninvited, involved ourselves. It would need to be of modular design and easily expandable to encompass the wars we’ve been in and the wars we will, no doubt, be involved in as time goes by.

Down the coast we dawdled south through Nambucca Heads and Kempsey. Sometimes, on a whim, we took roads to our left that led to down to some of the most wonderfully clean and near deserted beaches where I took lots of photographs of the exquisite yellow tailed black cockatoos that feed on the local coastal banksias. Occasionally we’d put a CD on and just lay outside on the grass by the sea with a bottle of wine or two until we felt like moving on or decided we were too pissed to drive.

In one of those seaside towns, I can’t remember which; we stopped for lunch in a supermarket car park. Afterwards I went off to an Internet café while Clare went into the supermarket to do the shopping. I came back with a heap of orders for gum leaves so we drove around town until we found a car park with suitable trees. It was a pretty place on the edge of the water. We wished we’d had lunch there instead. I took Cindy the tree lopper and wandered around the place taking the choicest twigfulls of leaves from the uppermost branches. I took them back to Clare at the van and she sat inside on the step with the scissors. By now Clare was a dab hand at recognising the best quality leaves on the twig and clipping them straight off into the bag so they landed right way up. She has a great eye for the length of leaf too. If they’re too long the ziplock bag won’t seal and if they’re too short they form a bump in the middle of the bag which ends up too thick to be classed as a letter at the post office.

The climate was in the mid twenties with a gentle sea breeze and I thought what a really cool occupation this was, just going around Australia raiding gum trees and sending the leaves off to American budgerigars to remind them of something they’d never had in the first place. My theory is that as the budgerigar evolved with the gum tree there’s some kind of affinity between them. Just as a woman isn’t complete until she’s experienced widowhood, so the budgie isn’t complete until it’s reunited with the smell of eucalyptus oil.

I’d gather a few twiglets (sounds better than twigs don’t you think?) and hand them into the door of the van to Clare then I’d put my arm through the window onto the draining board to pick up the twiglets she’d discarded. I’d then walk over to the rubbish bin and drop off the used twiglets. We’d been doing this for around half an hour and all the time I’d been conscious that a family picnicking in a mini van on the other side of the car park were watching me.

When they finally finished their picnic and packed everything away in their van the father hoisted his youngest child onto his shoulders and the whole family strolled on over to the van. I quickly clipped off a twig and scurried over there too to tell Clare they were coming. She stood up and moved further inside just as they arrived at our van door. I don’t know what nationality they were but the Grandmother wore a headscarf.

“G’gay folksh. Can ve shee?” The father said to me

“See what?”

“ Shee ‘im, ‘er, woddever id ish”

“This is my partner Clare” I said

“No…da koala. That’s wot you got in der ishinitt?”

I laughed and told him we didn’t have one.

“Come on” he said “I know you nod shupposed to ave wun. Das OK. I jush wan da liddle wuns to shee ‘im.

I smiled at all of them and told him we were just putting the leaves in bags.

“Wot for you doin’ dis?”

“I’m going to sell them in the USA”

“Ooze gonna buy em den?”

“Budgerigar owners”

“Oo?”

“People who own budgies….you know budgies?”

“No”

“They’re little birds”

“You bullshit me”

“No, really”

I showed him a couple of packets.

“You doin sumfin not legal. Drugs or sumfin. I dunno. Come on we go ome”

With that they left. They stared daggers at us as they left the car park and we waved back.

Heading in a downwardly direction Port Macquarie was next and a trip to the supermarket to stock up again. It began life as a penal settlement and if you think that’s something that just happens to old men, you’re wrong. Actually, I must confess I don’t like being in supermarket queues at all. I hate it when somebody’s behind me and getting impatient because something I bought didn’t have a price sticker on it or the bar code on it was stuffed. It’s at these times I get that piece of wood with “Next Customer” written on it that divides their stuff from mine on the conveyor belt. I show them the bit that says Next Customer on it and say “see that? that’s you.” Then I say “and I want you to stand….over there” and I throw it right up the other end of the toilet paper aisle. Sorry, I lied about that, but I’ve always wanted to do it. It’s just the rebel in me I guess. I once bought a return bus ticket and walked home just to cheat the bus company. It’s just the kind of guy I am.

We re-stocked Erasmus and carried on south all the while taking in some of the most beautiful coastal scenery of its type we’d so far seen. This coast had better swimming beaches than Queensland and didn’t have the dreaded jellyfish problem they get farther north.

A lot of the places on the coast road south of Port Macquarie aren’t particularly attractive. The exception is Nelson Bay on the south eastern shore of Port Stevens. It’s a trendy little place with far too many tourists in it but it copes well with them. The beaches were exceptional and while standing on one we saw a pod of at least fifty dolphins that cruised up and down for so long that we’d had enough and moved on. The water was clear and blue like tinted Absolut Vodka.

Newcastle was marginally more attractive than the city in England for which it was named but that was mostly due to the better weather. It certainly didn’t pretend to be anything other than the industrial city that it is. It’s not for tourists but it’s a good place to go and live if you’re ever reincarnated as a fly or a cockroach. Nevertheless I enjoyed walking around Newcastle. I hadn’t been in one of those cities for a while. People there seemed to me to be doing it tough though and there seemed to be an inordinate number of shops selling second hand clothes which is always an indicator that people don’t have the money to buy new ones.

It was the only town in which we’d seen racist graffiti on our trip; some of which was aimed at both Jews and Muslims. I saw a couple of Orthodox Jewish men and several headscarved Muslim women in the street and, of course, they do stand out and attract a certain amount of attention. The clothing identifies and defines them as immigrants in the minds of many Australians unlike, say, New Zealanders who form such a large proportion of our “alien” population and look exactly the same as “mainstream” Aussies.

I lived in Istanbul for some time where the girls dress well in up-to-the-minute fashions that don't lag behind Europe at all. But there was also a small percentage of traditional Muslim women who, in Turkey’s secular capital, wore headscarves all the time and for some reason unknown to me, wore gaberdine raincoats no matter how hot it was. You could see them all over the place queuing for the bus, walking around the shops, everywhere, while their husbands wore normal comfortable clothing. Their husbands were sometimes very fashionable but these poor women must have been perspiring terribly underneath all that weight of clothes during the summer.
I could never understand male Orthodox Jewish dress code either. I used to live in a Jewish suburb in Melbourne and practically all the Orthodox men wore 1930's business clothing. They all had trilby hats and wore dark blue pin striped suits with waistcoats and ties all year round. Melbourne absolutely swelters too on some summer days. But in their case the women all dressed quite normally. There was a synagogue at the end of our street and on religious days we would see them all pile out of their cars, the women dressed up to the nines and the men all looking like Al Capone clones but with beards and glasses

I could never understand why God wanted all these people to be so bloody uncomfortable, and how come it's the Jewish women but the Muslim men that are allowed to get away with it? There must have been a misprint somewhere along the line mustn't there? Perhaps Moses wasn’t that hot at shorthand when he took down all that stuff about coveting they neighbour’s wife’s ass etc. onto the stone tablets. I could maybe go part of the way to understanding the whole subject if these styles of dress were a couple of thousand years old but gaberdine raincoats and pin striped suits - I ask you. At what point did the Lord actually indicate that he wanted his flock to wear this garb? I put it at around 1933.

And The Lord Spake Unto Them Saying

"I have cast down upon the earth the material that shall be called gaberdine and the technology to make more thereof.

Makest though not sexy undergarments out of this material nor shalt thou make of it thy socks or the socks of thy husbands or thy husbands sisters husbands.

Maketh only that which is called the Full Length Gaberdine Raincoat and wearest thou this garment in the sight of the Lord.

For I the Lord thy God findeth the Full Length Gaberdine Raincoat to be a real turn on.

And unto the Jews, my chosen people, I give to you the blue, pin stripe, pure wool suit material and an abundance thereof that you may make that which is called the double breasted business suit.

And for the trilby hats which covereth thy heads in the sight of the Lord - Felt, I give to you and an abundance thereof.

And seekest though not to get felt in any other place".


We left Newcastle at three thirty on a weekday morning after spending the night in a supermarket car park where we weren’t threatened by anyone but the police. The police told us that if we stayed in the car park we’d almost certainly be threatened by people more threatening than them. They advised us to go and stay in a caravan park and threatened to fine us if we didn’t.

It was around about this time that we thought about booking our passage from Melbourne to Devonport so as to arrive in Tasmania in time for Christmas day when Clare’s second grandchild was scheduled to be introduced to the world outside. We had no idea what sex it was going to be Nicole hadn’t wanted to have an ultrasound and the baby didn’t have a womb with a view. A cursory study of the map and some basic arithmetic showed us that we’d spent far too long ambling down the coast. We still had a long way to go before Melbourne and there were things to see and do there that we didn’t want to miss out on before boarding the boat. We decided to sacrifice a few towns and places of interest and go hell for leather down the map. We vowed though, that on leaving Tasmania after the grandkids were all up and running we’d stay away until we’d seen the lot.

Gosford with all its agricultural and pastoral greenness went past the window in a flash. The outskirts of Sydney went by in a cloud of carbon monoxide and salvo of tyre, brake, clutch and exhaust workshops. Wollongong, which looked good, went by in the clear sunshine but nearby Port Kembla looked like something from 1950’s communist China. It was all about steel production and its associated industries at the expense of the environment. It was dirty and smoggy and had a road signposted as a tourist route. We took it. It was disgusting. The only redeeming feature was the sea which hadn’t been scattered with ugly iron warehouses conveyor belts and sheds. Batemans Bay, Narooma and Merimbula all looked inviting but we hadn’t the time to stop for anything other than meals and fuel until we got to Eden where we visited their whaling museum.

I wasn’t terribly interested in the whaling boats and bits of maritime junk that all those places have but there was a great whaling story there. A party of whalers in a whaling boat rowed out to attack a few whales one day in the 1800s and one guy fell overboard straight into the mouth of a whale. The next day they caught a whale and noticed something moving around its stomach. They cut it open and found that it was one of the lost man’s gumboots. Inside his gumboot was his foot and the rest of him was still attached to it. He had survived for eighteen hours inside the whale but he was now blind and his hair and skin were bleached white. He lived for some years after the event. Accompanying the story was a scientific explanation about how there had been enough oxygen in the whale’s stomach for him to have been able to survive for so long. I didn’t understand it but I was very impressed.

I was impressed too by another story about how a pack of killer whales, led by a whale I shall call Nobby, used to herd other whales into the bay at Eden and then alert the human whale catchers. Nobby would lead the human whale catchers straight to the whales they’d herded and the men would kill them and then leave them for the killer whales to eat their tongues which are, apparently, a killer wale delicacy. The story said that Nobby would actually grasp the rope on the front of the whaler’s boat and tow it to the scene. I was inclined to think the whole story was a bit far fetched until I saw Nobby’s skeleton and the two teeth that were worn away from dragging on the rope for many years. I dunno about whales really. I mean...... they’re supposed to have these enormous great brains, God knows how may times the size of a human brain, but what do they actually do with them? Just show me one piece of whale poetry for instance.
MORNINGTON PENINSULA
We carried on south across the New South Wales border into Victoria and drove straight across towards Melbourne. It was very unpleasant countryside to me, all dried up and supporting only scraggy looking vegetation. The much vaunted town of Lakes Entrance was scruffy compared with most of the towns we’d seen all the way down from Northern Queensland. We were heading for the Mornington Peninsula where I used to live and of which I still had fond memories. We weren’t disappointed; it was still beautiful and the beaches were the best swimming beaches all the way from Cape Tribulation on down. Our idea of a great swimming beach is one without big waves where the depth remains roughly at chest height for a long way out. The Mornington Peninsula has these in abundance on its Port Phillip Bay side while the opposite (Westernport Bay) side has surf beaches with big rollers.

It’s a spectacular part of Australia and the ridge down the spine of the peninsula is home to a couple of dozen wineries where one can get legless on weekend wine tastings for free. Of course, it’s best if you have an Erasmus like us that you can park up somewhere and sleep off the effects of the alcohol at any point in the day. We were in no fit state to drive anywhere after about ten tastings. Sorrento, almost at the tip of the peninsula was a fantastic little town with good coffee and cakes and a good Ferry to Queenscliff across Port Phillip Bay. Portsea is at the end of the peninsula and the national park there was, until recently, out of bounds. It was there at Cheviot beach that Harold Holt, an Australian Prime Minister back in the 60s, went missing presumed drowned whilst swimming. We took a look at the beach and decided the guy was a bloody idiot to go swimming in such a treacherous place with such a strong undertow. As a Prime Minister how responsible was that?

In one of the Melbourne suburbs there’s a swimming pool called “The Harold Holt Memorial Pool” which I though was enormously funny but upon enquiry found that it was called that before he drowned. It seemed a contradiction in terms like The Genghis Khan Child Minding Centre or the John Denver School of Flying.

But what a way for a head of State to go! Turkey’s Ataturk died of sclerosis of the liver through too much alcohol. Mussolini was strung up, Hitler took poison and Ceausescu was shot; Louis XVI was guillotined and Ghandi assassinated. In 1327 Edward the III of England died from a central heating complaint when he was held down and a red hot poker rammed up his arse. But our Aussie Prime Minister was out there swimming somewhere dangerous on his day off when he disappeared.

From Portsea we drove north to the Dandenong Ranges and along the way stopped at Lake Aura Vale where I went into the men’s urinals. They were very nice urinals and spotlessly clean but with one feature that distinguished them from all other urinals I have seen in Australia or abroad. Slap bang in front of me when I was peeing was a stainless steel handrail. I took a photo of it and showed my friends (both of them) but they hadn’t seen a urinal with a handrail either. I couldn’t get it off my brain – things like this intrigue me. I could only see the use for a handrail in a men’s urinal either on a rolling ship or during an earthquake. Or perhaps it was to chain slack wobbly idiots to who may be in danger of toppling over. Do some people pee with such force that it thrusts them backwards? Is it for when you’re too pissed to stand up? It’s just one of life’s mysteries to me like why lemmings don’t buy life insurance or whether or not Mormons all have the same pressure in their bicycle tyres.

What makes the Dandenongs so special is, perhaps unfortunately, the European trees which compliment the tall native eucalypts and the European flowers in people’s gardens. Many Europeans live in those lovely ranges and here and there they’ve built grand houses modelled along the lines of Swiss chalets and houses with those steeply pitched roofs to be found in many European mountain areas. They’ve also long ago planted the trees that would accompany them if they were in those countries. Mount Tamborine in Queensland has tried to achieve this type of atmosphere but there the climate is too hot for the right trees to grow. The Dandenongs get so cold that they sometimes have snowfalls in winter and this climate suits European vegetation. It all fits very well there. The Dandenongs were impressive with imposing views and would have benefited from the closing down of all the Agatha Christie type tea shops, the Laura Ashley soap, petal & pot pourri shops and any place that sold fucking Teddy Bears.

Healesville wildlife sanctuary wasn’t as good as I remembered it but it was still among the top ten in Australia. We got to see either one platypus several times or vice versa. No, it definitely wasn’t one of them. It could have been a Habeas Corpus though I suppose. When you see a platypus close up in an aquarium or in this case, a platypussery, you get to see what a weird thing it really is. It’s one of God’s little cock ups. I reckon he put the thing together from bits he had left over from making other things. But where he really fell down was in the eyes. The platypus gets its food from creek and river beds and a lot of it is hiding under stones which it has to turn over to get at. But, and here’s where God was really cruel, it has to close its eyes when it goes under water. Imagine that! The poor little things have to feel around with their beaks to find their food. It’s like blindfolding your kids out on the lawn at dinner time and telling them “dinner’s in the oven kids – go find it.”

One thing we saw at Healesville that was extra special was an albino kookaburra. It was completely bleached from beak to claw. I once bleached twenty nine goldfish when I lived in the Dandenongs. At the back of our house was a cliff with a terrace on which I put an above ground swimming pool which, after a year or more, began to sink at one edge as the ground settled under the weight of it.

At the bottom of the cliff was a pond with the goldfish in it which used to catch the rainwater when it ran down the cliff. One Saturday morning in summer I decided to empty the pool and reposition it on the terrace. First I had to drain out the water which I did by syphoning it out with a couple of garden hoses down the cliff. It was taking a long time for the water to go down so I took the kids out for the day. When we returned I walked around to the back of the house and found that the pool water which contained chlorine had totally bleached all the pond plants together with the water snails and the twenty nine goldfish.

The water in the pond was clearer than it had ever been and the snail shells were all white. The goldfish though were surreal looking and had Salvador Dali seen them the old phoney would have turned the idea into money. They were transparent. They were cruising very slowly up and down the pond with what seemed like invisible fins and tails and the larger part of their bodies were see through. Some of them displayed almost all of their skeletons and the thing I found the strangest about the whole experience was that all their eyes were still black.

It wasn’t the first calamity I’d had with goldfish. Both the kids had a goldfish each in a bowl in their bedrooms when they were young. One day I was showing three year old Clare how we change the goldfish bowl water. We went out to the pond so we could get rainwater because the chlorine in the tap could have poisoned her fish. After this we left the new water overnight in the same room as the goldfish bowl so that it would be the same temperature.

The next day we gently poured the old water out of the bowl tipping the fish into a jug of his familiar old water and we cleaned the bowl out using the pond water taking care not to use a pot scourer that might have dishwashing liquid on it. Clare was standing on a chair up at the sink as I lifted the jug with the goldfish in it and began to pour it, and him, into the clean bowl. It was a double drainer sink and my wife walked up and switched on the waste disposal unit just at the instant that I missed the bowl with the water from the jug. The water overshot the bowl and the goldfish, Lawrence, flew straight down the waste disposal opening. There was a short buzz that lasted only for a millisecond and Lawrence had gone to meet his maker. Clare cried and we told her that he’d be back in the morning and that this was a perfectly normal part of the fish bowl cleaning process. That night we went out to the pond and trawled it until we found Lawrence’s first cousin and dropped him in the bowl. I told my Jewish work colleague about it at the office on Monday and he just shrugged, parted his hands, turned them skyward and said “gefilterfish.”

The house was in Upper Fern Tree Gully and while we lived there we had a series of disasters with, not only fish, but animals too. We lived on a large sloping block on the side of a rocky mountain that had next to no topsoil. To keep the grass and brambles down we bought a goat. We called it Xenophon and the kids loved it but one day my wife rang me at work to tell me that it had died. We knew the kids would be upset and, as the first thing they did when they got home from school every day was to go up and feed it, she asked me to come home and bury it. I dragged the late Xenophon from the top of the block down to one of the terraces and tried to put a spade into the ground but it was too rocky to dig a hole. Time was running out and the kids would soon be home from school so I desperately ran all over the block with a pick axe trying to find a place where I could dig a hole deep enough to accommodate a dead goat. When I at last scraped the soil away from in between two rocks and rolled the goat in, the only way he’d fit in the hole was on his back. The problem was that riga mortis had set in and his legs refused to fold down below ground level. I ran across to my neighbour George and asked if I could borrow his hacksaw. George followed me back up the block and sawed one leg off for me and then, eyeing up the remaining three said “they’d make bloody good cricket stumps but.”

One day we saw a marsupial mouse in the garden and we thought it was rather special but we were worried that if it hung around our place the cat next door would surely kill it. We talked about what to do and decided that the best thing would be to capture it somehow and release it further up the mountain where there were no houses. I found an eccentric humane animal trap manufacturer in the village of Upwey called Kevin Elliot. He had just the trap I was looking for and his wife, a zoologist, suggested I bait it with peanut butter. This we did and one morning we went out into the garden to see the trap was sprung and we’d caught the mouse. It was half an hour before I was due to go to work so I bundled the kids and the mouse in the car and drove up the mountain to where there was a pull in. We parked the car and opened the trap but the mouse didn’t want to come out. I picked up the trap and shook it. The mouse came out in a hurry, took one look at the forest, found it daunting and ran straight out into the middle of the road where it stopped. A car was on its way down the mountain and the three of us stood at the side of the road shouting at the mouse to move but it wouldn’t listen and the car ran over it.

Out the back of the Dandenong’s, starting at Lilydale, we slowed our pace due to the wine tasting opportunities presented by the Yarra Valley wine growing region. This area is so suited to the production of sparkling wines that both Moet et Chandon and Devaux have set up shop there! Gently sloping hills sporting lines of grape vines always look good to me but in the Yarra Valley the surrounding area was green too; unlike the Barossa valley which is dry and not so striking between vineyards.

Further on past Healesville we crossed the Black Spur, an amazing drive over the Dividing Range through a forest of tall mountain ash trees and towering tree ferns that grew right down to the road.

We went through the forest as far as the small town of Marysville which surely must be the quaintest town in Victoria with its deciduous tree lined streets contrasting with the darker tree covered mountains that surround it. Close by we visited two waterfalls and returned to town to sample the cakes and coffee which were superb. I couldn’t fault anything about the place. The cute little wooden houses wouldn’t have looked out of place in Switzerland and it was all as neat and clean as German window box.

From Marysville we drove down closer to Melbourne where our friends Loretta & Steven lived at McLeod. As they hadn’t seen me for a while, and they new I used to be into the vodka when I lived in Poland, they had a bottle on hand just for me. Steve played old Beatles songs on his guitar while I played the harmonica. I became most horribly pissed after having a thoroughly good time and we slept in a real bed for a change in their spare room. In Melbourne I wanted to buy a Middle Eastern style men’s, full length robe and we went into Victoria Market to look for one. When I lived in Turkey I always wore a robe in the hot weather and they were so much more comfortable than trousers, light and airy with no constrictions around the waist. Victoria Market though didn’t have one so we headed for Brunswick St. Fitzroy which is a lot of fun.

Brunswick St. Fitzroy these days is a lot like I think New York was back in the 1920s. In Australia we’ve only allowed immigrants here from all over the world since 1972 but America started out by accepting anyone from anywhere. Melbourne has now come of age in that regard and in Fitzroy you can get your hair cut by a Turk, the shoemaker is Armenian, your fish & chips are cooked by a Greek and you get your cappuccinos from an Italian all in the space of fifty metres. It’s a great shame that our founding fathers were so paranoid and xenophobic with regard to immigration. If we’d had a War of Independence and kicked the British out as did the Americans we could have been enjoying the fruits of multiculturalism for a couple of hundred years longer than we have.

In Brunswick St. I saw a sign in a fish shop window. It read “Sorry customer Angelo Fish man Today Closed Not Fil Well.” I hoped the “customer” wasn’t inconvenienced. I found my robe in one of those Lebanese shops that sells trinkets and stuffed vine leaves, gaudy pictures of the seaside and tea sets with gold rimmed saucers. The lady had shelves full of them and I chose a business robe with a pocket to put my scientific calculator and glasses in. She was pleased I’d bought it so I thought it would be a good time to ask what some of the delicious delicacies were in the glass case. It worked and she gave us a couple of pistachio nut cakey somethings I couldn’t pronounce; all sticky and sweet. We found another robe in the Salvation Army Op Shop in the same street for four dollars. It was a green and white striped one with gold braiding at the neck. Clare liked it so I bought it and it made me look like Osama bin Laden doing an impression of a halal butcher.

On the way back down town we passed a place that used to be a downmarket Egyptian restaurant years ago. I recalled how I went in there late one night with my friend Jay who looked into their refrigerated glass cabinet and, seeing nothing with which he was remotely familiar, looked up at the weary proprietor and said “I’d like you to do something typically Egyptian for me”. In an upper class English accent the proprietor replied “very well sir, perhaps you’d like me to block up the Suez Canal for you?”

By now it was the third week in December and Christmas was sneaking up on us fast. We had to be across the Bass Strait in Tasmania before then or face the wrath of Clare’s kids for not being home for the first time on Christmas day. Reluctantly – at least for me – we drove Erasmus onto the ferry and settled down for the trip back to reality.

This had been our first trip albeit broken in two. I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything but a much bigger trip was to begin a couple of months down the track. This time I’d be prepared properly. I’d shelve my camera equipment and get into the twenty first century with a digital and I’d begin making proper notes like a real author does. That meant getting myself a laptop computer too with a word processing program to save me time and frustration.

In all the distance we travelled and all the towns we’d visited I still hadn’t found anything that really defined Australia and Australians for me. I’d found nothing in the culture that I could recognise as being Australian had I been elsewhere else in the world. In other parts of the world I could recognise something as being, for example, French, in Canada’s Quebec or America’s New Orleans. In Tokyo or Manilla there’s so much that is recognisably American such as MacDonald’s or baseball. In South America there’s so much that is instantly recognisable as Spanish and so forth.

Throughout Australia I found a lot that was typically English like some towns in Tasmania or the cricket or roast beef. I found even more that was typically American, the whole culture smacked of it from MacDonalds to theme parks. Too, I found places that were identifiably Italian like Carlton or Vietnamese like Richmond. Souvlakis, rollmops, pizza, satay, chow mien, Yorkshire pudding. I knew where all these things came from too. The Australian two food items that readily sprang to mind were the Lamington and the ubiquitous Pavlova but nobody overseas has ever heard of them.

All the time we were away I’d been quietly looking for something I could put my finger on as being quintessentially Australian. Something that, if I was overseas somewhere, I could say “coo, look at that, it’s very Australian isn’t it?” The only thing I could think of was sport, we’re good at sport. Rugby, soccer, tennis, swimming, basketball, lacrosse, skiing? All those things came from somewhere else and Australian Rules football is just that. It’s only played in Australia. Perhaps there was something out there that could be seen as typically Australian when travelling through Russia or China or even Britain and America. Vegemite, that’s all our own and so are Speedos but they don’t quite stack up against brand names like Electrolux or Hoover.

Perhaps there’s an invention like the telephone or the……automobile……or the….. I know, if I see a stump jump plough being used somewhere I’d know it was invented right here. Problem is, I can’t tell a plough from a combine harvester. If there was something Australian out there I thought I stood a good chance of finding it between Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin and Perth.