Chapter 4

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER FOUR

We had intended to use Erasmus to tour Tasmania before we were again due to leave the island in late February but the summer of 2004 wasn’t at all pleasant. In fact Tasmanian summers are much colder than most of the country’s winters and any Tasmanians that do appear to be sun-tanned are, upon closer inspection, usually found to be suffering from rust.

One weekend we went up to Launceston and we unhitched the bikes and rode around the city. I noticed that every time I turned left the front brake dragged and little by little I adjusted it until there was no adjustment left to adjust. Still it kept dragging every time I turned left. At one point I was stopped on the pavement playing with the brake and an old guy stopped to help. He couldn’t sort it out either but he told me where I could find a bicycle repair shop. We located it and I went in and told the proprietor about the trouble I was having. He followed me outside and pointing to the bike asked “is that it there?” “Yes.” I said. “Your handlebars are round the wrong way” he said. I could see Clare giggling as he told me.

I’d bought a Chinese bike from Kmart with absolutely straight handlebars made from a piece of disused aluminium gun barrel with no topographical features in it whatsoever. When I’d lifted it off of Erasmus the handlebars were back to front but I hadn’t noticed.

When I was about twelve years old I was playing with my mates on our bikes in a disused quarry and we saw a snake. Farty Clark, who was one of those kids that always had insects in matchboxes in his pocket, captured it with a forked stick and wanted to take it home to the menagerie he kept in a now defunct air raid shelter at the end of his dad’s garden. We didn’t have anywhere to put it and we were scared it might be poisonous. After much deliberation another kid called Chappie Hayles found just the spot. It was in the handlebars of his sister’s bike which he was riding at the time. We took off one of the rubber hand grips, shoved the reluctant snake down it and rammed home the grip again. We could tell the snake didn’t want to go down there but once we had the head in it was too narrow for it to turn around and it had no claws or fingernails to grip the sides with

When we got back to Farty Clark’s house we took off the rubber grips and tried to shake the snake out but it wouldn’t budge. We lit dried grass and tried to smoke it out but to no avail so we put the hose down one end of the handlebars. Chappie Hayles sister’s bike took on the appearance of the Trevi Fountain during a plumber’s strike. Water even came out from the pipe that the saddle was attached to but still there was still no sign of the snake. Farty Clark’s mum yelled out of the window that it was time for his tea and this made Farty uneasy so he, being the amateur herpetologist that he was, declared that the snake had hibernated down there and that we should leave it until spring. Walking back to Chappies house he voiced concern that, after seeing the water coming out from under the saddle, the snake could find its way down to that end of the bike and bite his sister on the arse. Looking back on the event I don’t think Chappie Hales was concerned as much about his sister being bitten on the arse by a venomous snake as he was concerned that he’d get belted on his own arse by his old man if he was found out.

We took the bike to our house where we sawed a couple of inches off the end of my dad’s rake handle and plugged up the saddle pipe hole. I still remember looking out of the kitchen window at my dad a few days later. He had just emerged from the tool shed and was holding his rake and looking down at the handle shaking his head. Things like that were always happening and the reasons for them always mystified the old man.

We all forgot about the snake in Chappie Hayles sister’s handlebars until Farty Clark decided some months later to check on his hibernating tortoise. The tortoise, he thought, should have by now put in an appearance but it was still there hibernating under three feet of straw down in the air raid shelter. I went down there with him. It was dark in there and the acrid smell of stale menagerie pervaded the already dank atmosphere. Farty went about un-hibernating the tortoise grabbing big handfuls of straw which he threw behind him eventually emerging with his quarry. He handed me the tortoise and began ramming the straw back into the box as I made for the entrance and the light. I held Farty’s much loved pet up to my eyes – and saw a framed picture of his dad’s shed. The tortoise had died during the winter and tribe of ants had cleaned out its living accommodation.

I presented my condolences, as best I could, to Farty and reminded him that there was still a snake hibernating somewhere in Chappie Hayles’ sister’s bike. We went around to see Chappie about it but his sister had grown too big for the bike so his dad had sold it and Christine McLeod was now riding around on it. Christine McLeod went to the Catholic School and Farty Clark devised an ingenious plan for stealing the bike from their cycle sheds so that we could release the snake but Susan Chambers wouldn’t cooperate with it so the idea was shelved. I never did find out what happened to the snake and I still watch archaeological documentaries if only to see if anyone’s discovered it.

Clare, having lived in Tasmania for most of her life, knew it well and was able to tell me where she thought was worth staying away from. One of these recommendations was Queenstown because she didn’t think I’d like it. I wanted to see it though because I’d heard so much about their famous Abt railway. The hills on the way down into this ugly, God forsaken small town have traditionally been Queenstown’s major tourist attraction. Now, however, the Abt railway had been restored and it was going to bring more tourists and prosperity to the town. At least, that’s what they’d been saying on TV for months.

What’s different about Queenstown’s hills is that they’re completely bald. So bald are they that when you get home from your vacation and show people the holiday snaps you’ve taken you can claim to have been to either the moon or Queenstown. Nowhere else looks like it. The baldness though is not natural. It’s a result of the unbridled rape of the area by The Mount Lyell Gold Mining Company with the encouragement of successive State Governments that, like all subsequent Tasmanian State Governments, were willing to ignore pollution and deforestation as long as it kept a few Tasmanians employed. The Mount Lyell Gold Mining Company, which gave up on mining gold in the mid nineteenth century, then started mining copper. It chopped all the trees down in the hills for miles around to feed its furnaces and the acid rain they produced killed everything else that was growing on the slopes and would have served to hold what little soil there was.

Queenstown’s King River is claimed by some Tasmanians to be the most polluted river in the world. A stroll along its banks close to town presents the visitor with a surreal aspect. The water is copper coloured and the rocks in it are plated with a copper patina. Nothing lives in it and nothing can live on its banks.

The town itself is a collection of tiny gardenless, ramshackle iron and wood miners dwellings strewn along a few roads that wouldn’t look out of place in Bolivia were it not for the eighty inches of rainfall that dumps on the town each year. It’s not attractive like the Appalachians where miners are traditionally dirt poor but have musical traditions going back for a couple of centuries; where they still have the skills to fashion musical instruments no longer obtainable back Europe. No, this place has nothing like that. A significant percentage of people in Queenstown live on the dole, have no traditions whatsoever beyond getting pissed as much as the money from Centrelink allows and, unlike the Appalachians, there’s hardly a tree or a bush anywhere to be seen.

The saving grace of the town is the recently built Abt railway station. It’s beautiful. On the day we arrived there was a Welsh male voice choir on tour all the way from Cardiff standing on the far side of the platform singing Men of Harlech. They gave a twenty minute performance of throaty, hairy-chested Welsh ballads delivered in a sort of Tom Jones sing along karaoke style. On our side of the platform stood the audience – Clare, me, the singers wives, their mini bus driver and the ticket lady. The waitress and the girl from the souvenir shop watched from behind the steamed up window of the coffee shop.

The Abt railway is one of those funicular things but don’t quote me on it. Whatever it is it’s designed to climb mountains without the use of cables and was named after Roman Abt, the engineer who designed it. It began life as a copper ore carrier to the coast at Strahan and it should have stayed that way. Instead it was resurrected at a cost of some millions of dollars and declared one of Tasmania’s top two man made tourist attractions. In fact there are only two man made tourist attractions if you discount the Cadbury’s chocolate factory. After we’d heard our fill of the Tom Jones sing along karaoke show we attempted to purchase two tickets on the said railway “Sorry dear, we need a minimum of nine people or we don’t run.” A guy behind us had bought his five year old daughter all the way from Hobart to take the trip. It was his monthly access weekend with his daughter and he was furious. He asked the ticket lady why they didn’t warn people about the situation in their brochure. She said that it was worth keeping in mind when they reprinted their advertising material.

We managed to get a ride on the train the next day only because we met two other couples in Strahan who’d had the same experience as us and we jointly rang the railway operators with an order for six tickets. The carriages were magnificently restored each being a showcase for a particular Tasmanian wood. I think we were in the Tasmanian Blackwood or was it the Myrtle? Anyway, I looked for the one featuring wood chips for which the island is most famous but couldn’t find it. When they restored the carriages they made them wider than the original rolling stock had been and we were instructed not to put our arms out of the windows because the edges of the carriages were, these days, closer to the walls of the cuttings. To check that our arms were inside the carriages the train first went past two long brush heads which would have brushed against our elbows had we not obeyed the instructions.

I’m not terribly well travelled when it comes to trains but I remembered that what I’ve usually seen of towns through the windows of trains isn’t as picturesque as I’ve seen when driving through them on the road. Queenstown was no exception. Appalling, disgusting, ghastly are all words that spring to mind. We lurched past a sea of broken down fences, cannibalised cars and broken kids tricycles. The most attractive things in the backyards of Queenstown were the oversized new satellite dishes. They still had the paint on them. On we went past that awful copper coloured river again and up the Sawback Ranges towards the port of Strahan.

We climbed up into temperate rain forests of tall brooding eucalypts dripping from the drizzle which permeates the atmosphere in the area for most of the year. It rains a lot in rainforests, they’re famous for it, but in tropical ones it’s not as noticeable because they’re warm. By now we, and our ten fellow passengers, were shivering because nobody down at the ticket station where it was warm had told us what to expect. The train was unheated!

The carriage windows were of roll up clear plastic material which everybody had rolled down because of the drizzle. A lot of the trip was about looking at the walls of the cuttings which were so close on either side that we could have reached out and touched them. At times ferns brushed the side of our carriage and after this had occurred a couple of times we saw people move away from the sides to sit in the centre. I asked one guy if he was scared of getting slapped in the face with a tree fern. “No”, he said. “If a limb falls off one of those trees down into a cutting it will go straight through you. Those plastic windows won’t stop a thing.” We moved into the centre too.

There was a stop at an unmanned station where the attraction was a gold panning experience consisting of a series of sluices under a corrugated iron roof. Nobody was keen to look at it and we wandered fairly quickly through it and were glad to get back on our cold train where the clear plastic roll downs cut out some of the wind. There was a guide on the train, a lady who apologised for being relatively new to the job but was, nevertheless, informative and personable. As we clacked upward through the forest on Dr. Roman Abt’s magical mystery machine she gave us a running commentary on the trees, the mountains and the valleys. She pointed out of the carriage windows in the general direction of Myrtles, Leatherwoods, Blackwoods, Mountain Ashes, Celery Top Pines, King Billy Pines and trees I didn’t know had even been invented yet. What’s more she knew all about what they were used for and why. She knew how tall they grew, how long it took for them to get that tall and all sorts of really good stuff. The only problem was that we couldn’t bloody see them.

We arrived at the second station an hour and a half or so after departing Queenstown. At that stage it was the end of the line as the second stage down the mountain into Strahan wasn’t yet open for business. At the station we were told we’d be able to buy a cup of tea. It was misty and visibility was limited to half way up the trunks of the trees. It was a nicely designed and painted brand new station set in a sleepered slice through a wilderness so green that it looked as though a battalion of leprechauns had just finished painting it; like a giant frog had just exploded all over a chopstick factory.

We disembarked which is a word that always sounds to me as though it’s an operation done on dogs vocal chords. The lady guide and her assistant went into the station and switched the lights on while the train driver and his assistant put the train on the turntable and swung it around to face back down the mountain. We followed the two ladies into the station where they’d just switched the urn on to make the tea. We were cold and damp but the lady who was in charge of making the tea said we wouldn’t be there long enough to make it worth while lighting the fire. It was alright for her, she was the only one with her hands around the tea urn. People were stamping their feet and swinging their arms to keep warm. I asked where the toilet was. The tea making lady, although reluctant to take her hands off the urn in case her colleague should jump in, pointed to the outside. I could just make out the toilets through the mist and drizzle and I trudged over here only to find somebody else was in there so, not wanting to get too wet, I trudged back. The urn still wasn’t boiling and the tea making lady was bailing some of the water out with a saucepan to speed things up. When my turn in the toilet eventually came it was so cold that steam came off my pee.

On the way back to Queenstown I asked our guide how long the trip to Strahan would take when the line was finished. “Three and a quarter hours” she said. Three and a quarter hours on that thing would bore the pants off kids and then you’d have to get them back to your car again at Queenstown. All we’d seen in our hour and a half trip was the junkyards that Queenstown residents called their gardens and the copper coloured King River. The rest was all cutting walls and mist. I’d recommend that anyone considering going on the Abt railway should get on at Strahan and go backwards to Queenstown. That way Queenstown seems much more acceptable because of the experience you’ve just had on the train. When we arrived back at the Queenstown station I showed Clare the copper plated rocks in the King River. She reminded me that there were even worse looking coated rocks to be seen from the beach at Burnie on the north coast where the Titan Paints factory had discharged its waste into the sea for decades turning the rocks a rusty red.

Back in Hobart I mentioned all this pollution to somebody I knew at the University of Tasmania who’d studied the subject as I’d always considered Tasmania to be the green state. He told me that he considered the jarosite pollution of Hobart’s Derwent River by the Electrolytic Zinc works to have been more dangerous as it affected more people. There, the zinc works had been dumping toxic waste into the river for years. When it was finally brought to public attention and they were ordered to desist from the practice they took the offending material out in barges at night and dumped it where it simply washed back into the river. Even to this day fisherman are warned not to eat fish that feed on the bottom of that river. A couple of days later we saw on the TV news that the Abt railway had been derailed for the third time.

The Tasmanian Tiger. Now there’s a funny thing. They’ve all gone. They were exterminated and they won’t be back but still people persist in saying they’re still around but hiding somewhere. Every so often some group of tiger searchers will descend upon Tasmania with all manner of electronic gadgetry and spend lashings of money trying to detect the tiger’s presence but they never quite find one. They can find where they’ve been and they can find people who have seen them. They can come up with indistinct photos like those of the Loch Ness monster too. But, like the Loch Ness Monster and the Yowie, they can never come up with a living one – or even a smelly dead one. They may as well claim that there are Aborigines still out there too.

The Tasmanian Tiger was killed, so I’ve read in numerous books, because it was partial to sheep. These things ate sheep because they were easier to catch than anything else that lived and breathed on the entire island. So why aren’t the tigers, if they aren’t extinct, still taking sheep? Did they one day suddenly discover that there was a relationship between sheep and bullets and go on a diet? No, of course they didn’t. But if anyone wants to catch one of these animals all they’d have to do is tether sheep near wherever the tigers are supposed to be and stick up a video camera.

I have a friend in Hobart who has asked me not to name him but he saw on a stall in Hobart’s Salamanca place a striped dog coat made to resemble a Tasmanian Tiger. He had a big long mongrel dog called Spike and he thought it would be a good laugh to buy one of these striped coats and put it on him. The stall didn’t have one big enough to fit Spike but he had a mate with an upholstery business in a Hobart suburb who custom made one for Spike out of a kangaroo and a wallaby skin. It really looked the part. I went for a walk with him and Spike in the forest at the waterworks reservoirs up behind Hobart and from forty paces most people spotting Spike would swear they’d seen a Tasmanian Tiger. The last time I saw Spike’s owner he claimed that Spike, dressed in his striped coat, had been responsible for two Tasmanian Tiger sightings reported in the media.

There was plenty to do to Erasmus to get it ready for the upcoming big trip and lots to organise. I was leaving Tasmania for good and so had to pack the contents of my tiny apartment into boxes light enough for me to lift. I didn’t know where I was going to end up but I was hoping Clare would agree to be there with me when I finally settled down. Meanwhile my stuff was going into Clare’s basement and I’d send for it when I had seen Australia and found what I considered the best place to live.

I rang Baden, the guy we’d bought Erasmus from, and told him we were going away on our big journey and he kindly offered to show me how to service it. The knowledge I gained I hoped I wouldn’t ever need but I knew it may well prove to be invaluable and it saved us a couple of hundred dollars to boot. Baden told me exactly what spares to buy like oil and fuel filters etc. which I wouldn’t be able to buy at any old country town. He showed me how to install them too. I was glad he did because fitting the fuel filter entailed removing the driver’s seat and all the cab carpets before unscrewing two access plates on the floor. “There” he said. “Even if you don’t do the work yourself you’ll be able to show any mechanic who’s not used to this model exactly how to do it. This will save you the hour or two’s cost in labour they’d have to spend learning how to get at the filters. Carrying spare filters too, will save you up to a week if you’re stuck in some outback town where they’re not available”. He showed me how to check the batteries too. He did this by sitting underneath the cab, undoing the bolts of the battery carrier and then lowering down each of the big, heavy batteries on the knee of his artificial leg. I made a mental note to be on the lookout for mechanics with wooden legs.

Our bicycles were mounted on the bike rack that was bolted to the front bumper of the van. However, they’d bounced all over the place for four thousand kilometres and the bike rack was already starting to fall to bits. We’d bought a new one. Baden noticed it and asked what happened to the old one.

“It was unstable” I said. “It rocked about all over the place.”

“Did you tie it up with the rope?” He asked.

“What rope?”

“There was a rope that came out through the centre of the spare wheel cover to tie the bike rack up tight with. I had the spare wheel cover specially made with a hole in it” he said.

I remembered the rope. We thought it looked scruffy and I’d cut it off. I felt stupid.

I knew that I was going to need a new mobile phone for the big trip, one with a greater range. I waited until my daughter Sarah was visiting me from Melbourne before I bought it so I could get her to set it up for me. My brain doesn’t cope too well with learning such things and she was known to be able to get VCRs to record during leap years; I thought she’d be just the person for the job. Weeks later when I first came to use it I dialled in my pin number and a message came up. It said “managed to turn it on did ya – dumb fuck!” She was probably right. The first text message I sent was to a friend in Melbourne. I rang the next day to see if he got it.

“No, what number did you send it too?”

“Your usual number”

“No fucking wonder”

“Why”

“Does your house phone display text messages?”

“Ah, shit”

Budgie World, the little business I had started up on the internet selling gum leaves to American budgerigar owners had begun to grow to the point where it couldn’t be easily handled from Erasmus any more. I also wanted to add new products and there wasn’t enough room to carry stocks of every item with us as we charged about all over the countryside. I took in Neil, an old friend and neighbour, as a business partner on the basis that he would handle all the orders and I’d handle the website alterations and additions until such time as I stopped travelling. I could do any alterations on my laptop inside Erasmus and upload them to the website whenever I was near a telephone line.

We finally left for Melbourne on the night boat from Devonport Tasmania and arrived in Port Melbourne on the morning of 25th February. Before we went to bed in our cabin Clare set the alarm for 6.15 am and got me to check it in case she’d made a mistake. I did, and we went to sleep. There was nothing wrong with the alarm clock but we’d set it for 7.15pm and were sound asleep when the intercom told us that it was time we were up. We didn’t have time to shower or shave or do all those things that one should before letting people look at you in the mornings. We were due to have breakfast fifteen minutes after leaving the boat with our friends David and Dianne who lived in Beaumaris on the way down to Neil’s place. We arrived there feeling decidedly scruffy and unattractive and were therefore delighted to find David looking worse than either of us.

He’d twisted his neck and was wearing one of those white high collar things that keep people’s necks stretched. He had a beard and as he sat opposite me at the table and he looked like Father Christmas just emerging from a snow covered chimney somewhere in Lapland. Dianne was between jobs at that time which meant that she had time to make us a great breakfast with fruit salad and fresh croissants and home made damson jam. I’m not sure whose home it was actually made in but I suspect it was her sister Sandra’s. When time came for us to leave she presented us with a big fruit cake that lasted for over a week – no matter what we did with it. We used it as a wheel chock for three days.

We were feeling good as we said goodbye and headed down to the Mornington Peninsula to where Neil & Ally lived arriving just on lunch time for the next great feed. It was all good but I’ll remember the flourless sponge cake with the cream in the middle for a long time to come.

At Neil’s we unloaded all my Budgie World equipment and stocks of the toys, swings and perches that were selling on the web site. Then we went off in search of eucalyptus leaves so that I could show Neil how to make Budgie Butter. The invention of Budgie Butter is my biggest achievement in life and I entertain hopes that vintage jars of it will be selling on Ebay long after I’ve shuffled off my mortal coil. It’s basically ground up eucalyptus leaves & twiglets mixed with a special oil of my own invention. It keeps for a year and gives budgies a real charge if spread on their food once a day. The secret is in the type of trees the leaves come from. It took me a very long time to identify exactly which trees budgies went for in the wild and then it took even longer to find the same trees where I lived in Hobart Tasmania.

Luckily Neil is something of a botanist having once owned a native Australian plant nursery. He managed to locate the right trees within a few hours. I instructed him in the noble art of filling plastic bags with gum leaves and he was a natural at it. During the vacuum packing operation, in which the air is dextrously sucked out of the plastic bag utilizing one of those hard white drinking straws that come with Yakult liquid yoghurt, I told him about the dangers of Eucalyptus maculata; the Sydney Spotted Gum.

A year or so back I was in Melbourne staying with Steve and Loretta. Whilst there I received an email from a lady in Connecticut telling me that her budgie, Casper, wouldn’t eat the gum leaves I’d sent her. I went down to the local park and found a good looking gum tree and sent her a packet of its leaves. A fortnight later, when I was back home in Hobart, I received another email from the lady telling me that the new leaves were a big hit with Casper. I was pleased. I’d supplied a first class product.

I sent an email to Steve asking him if he’d go to the park, locate the gum tree and get it identified. This he kindly did and at the Melbourne botanical gardens the resident botanist pronounced it to be Eucalyptus maculata. I then contacted the Hobart Council’s tree nursery and found out where the species was growing locally. I thought I’d discovered something really special and sent maculata leaves out exclusively for a couple of weeks. Shortly thereafter I received an order from a zoo in Canada for forty bags of gum eaves for their Australian bird aviary. Forty bags of leaves meant a whole lot of sucking on the Yakult straw but I did it early one morning in a Hobart park. Lots of people on their way to work looked at me strangely but compared with some of the sucking activities that go on in Hobart’s parks it should be viewed as a relatively benign idiosyncrasy.

On the way home I called into an electrical shop and got myself a new Sunbeam electric kettle and fell out with the guy behind the counter. It set the mood for the day. I was pissed off and angry the whole time and I was so nasty to a man from the electricity supply company over the pone that I had to call him back and apologise. I didn’t feel better until I woke up the next morning.

I wandered out of the bedroom and switched on the new kettle. It had a whistle which I didn’t bother putting on the spout and after my early morning pee I switched on the computer. Just as the emails began to appear the kettle whistled to indicate that it was boiling so I went back to the kitchen. The whistle had gone off but it was sitting on the kitchen worktop about half a metre from the kettle. I didn’t think much about it at the time, just made my coffee and returned to the computer. There was another email from Casper’s mum asking if the leaves I’d sent her could possibly have made Casper aggressive. “It may be coincidence” she wrote “but Casper’s bitten me twice now and he never did that thing ever before in his entire life.” Silly American person I thought to myself. I wrote back and told her that Casper must have been going through a stressful period or something. That afternoon I received another email from a guy in Pittsburgh also asking if these leaves could make budgies bite people. “This is bloody strange” I thought. I fired up the Internet and looked for Eucalyptus maculata in Google’s search engine - and it was bloody strange. It said “honey bees feeding on the flowers of these trees become aggressive”. Shit, I thought (I often think that when I’m lost for thoughts) these bloody leaves are making me AAAARGH - FUCKING VIOLENT!!

I made a few more cups of tea with the new kettle over the next week or so and a couple of times I was sure I didn’t put the whistle on the kettle when it had whistled. I resolved to get to the bottom of it by deduction. I picked up the whistle and blew in it. There was no sound. I looked all over the kettle but there was nothing. I took off the handle to see if the whistle was in there. It wasn’t. Over the next few weeks I showed it to every visitor that came around to the house but they were all baffled. Then, one day, I spilt something on it and it sort of glued itself to its base. I picked it up to clean it. Underneath the base was a switch. It had three positions and four words. They were whistle, high, low, off. I felt stupid.

I related all this to Neil as he was sucking away at the Yakult straw. He couldn’t suck for laughing at my idiocy. We left him and Ally up to their ears in gum nuts and Budgie Butter - to say nothing of the new improved Parrot Pesto which could turn out to be something really big – and officially started our trip by heading down the Mornington Peninsula for the second time that year. We thoroughly enjoyed staying on the beach at Rye that first night and we were half way through enjoying the wineries around and about the Red Hill area again when I suddenly noticed our two bikes disappear before my very eyes.

“Did you see that?”
“What?”
“The bikes”
“Where?”
“Exactly”
“Exactly what?”
“Exactly where are the bikes?”
“Christ – where are they?”

We screeched to a halt and if I could have thought of a better phrase I would have used it there.

The new bike rack was mounted on the front of Erasmus and to stop the bikes moving about and distracting me when driving; I had tied it securely to the bumper with a rope. When we walked around to the front of the van we saw that the bike rack had snapped in half right at the weld where we’d had it shortened. All that was holding it to the van was my piece of rope. I cursed King Trailer Industries of 5-9 Florence St. Moonah Tasmania 7009 who’d done the job and I advise everybody not to go there.

We found an agricultural machine shop in Red Hill where we had the bike rack welded again and I watched the welder do it. He did a great job and it only cost us twenty dollars. That night we spent at Gunamatta on the ocean side of the peninsula in a car park. We were the only ones there and the beach was spectacular. It wasn’t a swimming beach, although a dedicated six or seven surfers were paddling about looking for waves. No, this was a really fierce place with huge waves and their undertow literally ripped tons of sand off the beach every time the waves withdrew. The toilets were good too and open all night.

In a Rosebud wine cellar we found a wine from the Mornington Peninsula called “Ten Minutes by Tractor.” The people in the shop didn’t know why it was called that so I looked them up on their website. There are three small family wineries ten minutes equidistant from each other by tractor and they make their wine together. Their wine was great but, in our opinion, over priced. We spent another two days loafing around on the peninsula and it was all good including an international sand castle competition which I thought would bore the pants off me but it was fantastic.

When we’d had our fill we put Erasmus on the ferry to Queenscliff. It was only a short trip across the narrow entrance to Port Phillip Bay and it cut out having to go through Melbourne on our way down The Great Ocean Road towards Adelaide. Choosing to go this way, instead of driving around through Geelong, had one drawback for me. It meant that I would miss out on getting a photograph of the road sign at the entrance to the town of Indented Head. What a name! I was there twenty years or more ago and I asked a man in a newsagency how the town got its name. He didn’t know but he told me that back in the 70s Channel Nine used to have a beach girl competition in many of the towns along that strip of coastline. The girls that won the competition in their town were then known by the peculiar epithet of “Miss Indented Head.”

Queenscliff is an elegant old own with elegant old hotels, elegant coffee shops and, at weekends, elegant people. All week it’s occupied by the scruffy locals going about their dailies but on the weekends the fresh cakes come out in readiness for the trendies from across the bay.

To the left of Queenscliff is point Lonsdale and The Rip. The Rip is a piece of extremely confused water that lives in the Entrance to Port Philip Bay. We slept in the car park there and looked at it through the coin-in-the-slot telescope. Seen close up it’s frightening – not the car park you understand – The Rip. The water boils and thrashes around so violently that I couldn’t see how a ship could possibly pass through it. I knew that many ships had gone down in the vicinity because of it and we watched as a big container ship approached it. I was disappointed. It steamed straight through it. In the car park four other campervans came and went and we observed the magpies that hang around there waiting to pick up a free meal. The clever thing about them is that they can tell the difference between a door and a window no matter what the model of campervan. As soon as a van rocked up they walked or flew straight to the doors and waited.

We meandered down towards the Great Ocean Road which begins proper at Torquay which is a small village almost entirely given over to surfing. Nearby is Bells Beach where the Bells Easter Classic international is held every Christmas – not really. The coast thereabouts is a Mecca for the surfing community and there are still more VW Kombi vans in that area in summer than anywhere else in Australia save for Nimbin where they’re kept in a museum.

The main attraction on that road is the views from the road itself rather than the towns and villages along it. Unlike the Pacific Highway where you seldom get to see a glimpse of the water The Great Ocean Road hugs it and shows off some breathtaking coastline. Even so, I would hate to have been stuck behind us. There was nowhere to overtake for miles on end in some places. It’s only a two lane highway and is, from that point of view, grossly inadequate.

The best views started at Lorne and Lorne itself was lovely too. The town is on a large, sweeping bay at the foothills of the Otway Ranges. It’s largely unspoilt with classy little owner operated shops and eating houses all on the high side of the street overlooking a sea that glints and sparkles in the late afternoon sun. We walked up a fern tree lined moss covered valley to the Erskine Falls and imagined what it would have been like had there been any water coming over them. Clare imagined it would have been “quite nice” and I imagined a great thunderous mist and Jesuits sitting in the back of canoes paddled by short muscly brown people with those straight cut Matto Grosso haircuts and macaws digging kaolin laden mud out of the clay river banks and a fleet of piranhas getting stuck into one of those bloody great guinea pig capybara things and then the Jesuits canoe came rocking over the cliff and the piranhas gave up on the capybara and swam towards the Jesuits going straight past the short brown muscly people with the Matto Grosso haircuts and then Indiana Jones with a knife clenched in his teeth came swinging through the air or was it Mark Spitz playing the part of Johnny Weissmuller and just as he was about to save the Jesuits he scratched himself on a big pineappley jungle plant thing and his blood dripped into the water and the piranhas all looked upwards and it was all happening inside Molly Blum’s dream in James Joyce’s’ Ulysses and……..and then Clare said it was time we walked back to the car park.

But you know those guinea pigs that live naturally in South America? My daughter Sarah went into a church in an out of the way village in Bolivia a few years back and took a great photo. It was a large colourful mural; a rough copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper but in middle of the table was a big serving plate with an upturned, roasted guinea pig on it. Christianity predates so well because it’s adaptable.

In the Otway National Park we visited the Cape Otway Light station. It was my first lighthouse experience. Standing tall like a great white, monument of erectile tissue it defied the winds as it looked out over the Southern Ocean or the Great Australian Bight or whatever it was. The Great Australian Bight, of course, is not to be confused with, or mistaken for, the Great Australian Bite which is “g’day mate, can you lend me two bucks.” Anyway, I thought it was a very nice lighthouse but there was no lounge room or kitchen or anything in it. It was just a working room at the top end of a spiral staircase. Apparently the first lighthouse keeper, Frederick (self tapper) Titmouse, died when he ran up the spiral staircase so fast he screwed his head into the roof.

We spent the rest of the day cruising around the Otway ranges which are lush and beautiful with big mountain ash trees (E. regnans); a species said to be the tallest flowering hardwoods in the world. I rarely take any notice of such claims as I’ve been in a lot of places in a lot of countries over the years and they all have the biggest, longest, highest somethings. Much as the trees were tall and impressive, they’re lousy looking trees. Some of them are eighty metres high with huge girths and the first limbs don’t start until sixty metres up the trunk. On top there’s invariably a scraggy old assortment of broken branches and sparse leaves. Mind you, not everything has to be beautiful does it? Or does it? These trees look like giant toilet brushes.

The Otways with their waterfalls, fern gullies and big trees covering some of the lumpier parts of Victoria are but remnants of a vast temperate rainforest system that once covered huge tracts of land in the south of the State. As such they’re little different to the forests you can find elsewhere on the tops of Victorian mountains like the Dandenong’s or the Black spur. They were all once joined up. Tasmania, which was joined to Victoria for millions of years, until some twelve to eighteen thousand years ago, has, to my eyes, identical rainforests including mostly the same species of trees and ferns.

If you can forget that the existing forest is only a remnant of what used to be, you’ll still think that what’s left is vast. There are a lot of protected trees alongside and backing the Great Ocean Road. The Angahook-Lorne State Park, the Otway State Forest and the Otway National Park all seem to merge into each other and provide a lot of camouflage for stick insects. Then, very abruptly, it runs into the Port Campbell National Park where trees and stick insects find themselves unable to cope in the scrubby, heathery wilderness and don’t bother coming. The Port Campbell National Park is all about the sea and the coast.

It’s near Port Campbell that the biggest single attraction along the Great Ocean road lives. It’s the stretch that includes the Twelve Apostles and London Bridge, a huge arch of sandstone attached to the sandstone cliffs. We got to see the apostles but we missed London Bridge by about twelve years. After millions of years of doing nothing it collapsed in 1990 leaving a couple of holiday makers standing on the seaward portion of it. They had to be rescued by helicopter. How lucky was that? It reminded me of that Gulf War video Norman Schwarzkopf showed of a car crossing a bridge just before it was blown up by a missile.

We rolled into the Twelve Apostles car park at around 5 pm. It contained a very large and impressive building designed, a helicopter pilot told us, to resemble a cuttlefish. It didn’t. It resembled a cockroach. What games of mental masturbation these architects can indulge themselves in. We were anxious to see what we could before it was too dark so hurried across the road and walked as much cliff top as we could before the light faded. We’d eat in the restaurant when we got back. Across the road was very, very impressive. Huge circumcised phalluses of weathered sandstone capped with wispy toppings of pubic-like heather scrub rose erect from the sea bed and the clouds above them were as ejaculate. It was as though we were standing on the very scrotum of the earth. Waves crashed on the beach just like those in 1960s Doris Day movies in the bits where the audience was supposed to deduce that she’s just had it off with Rock Hudson or somebody. I think it was probably the best chunk of coastal scenery I’ve seen anywhere in the world.

It was cold and windy as, in the failing light, we headed back to the car park and the giant cockroach. It wasn’t even six o’clock and the place was all shut up. Still, the toilets were open and there was hot water, a luxury not found in many places when you don’t stay in caravan parks. We hunkered down for the night in the blustery car park and in the morning we decided to go to the restaurant for breakfast. The door was open but inside there was nothing but a big void covered with hoardings carrying information on the apostles and how they were formed. There was a cleaner working away at one end of it and I asked him where the restaurant coffee shop and souvenir shops were.

“There’s not, there’s nothing ‘ere. This is just a glorified shitouse mate” he said. I quizzed him and he told me that the giant cockroach had been built with all these things in mind but when it came to it the bourgeoisie of the local town, Port Campbell, had complained. They reasoned that if shops and restaurants opened right there at the apostles, then Port Campbell would no longer have a reason for being. The local MP looked like loosing is seat over it so he’d joined in and lobbied against it. Now, when you visit the apostles, you need to take your own thermos flask because it can be very cold and windy there and it’s a place to spend a few hours walking along the cliff tops. I thought it remarkably stupid. The town was ten or fifteen minutes drive from the attraction and all the facilities were there; ready to go, on site. I vowed not to give the stick-in-the-mud, non progressive folks of Port Campbell any of our business later in the morning when we were due for our constitutional cappuccino.

We went back to the beach after talking to the glorified shitouse cleaner. The morning light was whiter and clearer than on the previous evening and the whole vista had changed. It was more clinical, more primal. Stepping onto the sand at the foot of the only set of steps we saw two tiny little penguins less than a foot high standing, face to the cliff, shivering. The waves were huge and angry and walking along the beach we came across two more penguins that had gone to meet that big penguin in the sky. We thought the two live ones back at the steps had been thrown up onto the beach by the waves and an hour later they hadn’t moved an inch. We felt sorry for them, all shivery and vulnerable.

We took a fifteen minute helicopter ride at the Twelve Apostles and wish we’d taken a longer one so that I’d have had time to drop something smelly and offensive on Port Campbell. From the air we could see large caves under the cliffs and inlets not visible from the cliff tops. The cockroach looked better from up there too and when we landed we went straight into Port Campbell for our constitutional cappuccino. I’d taken so many pictures with my digital camera that the battery needed charging so we plugged the charger into the café’s power while we drank the cappuccinos I’d vowed not to buy. From Port Campbell on east towards Adelaide the road swung away from the coast and became less interesting – well – dreary. Sorry, it didn’t become less dreary. It became dreary as we got out of the out of non dreariness that we’d been in before it became dreary. I’m not very good at this. It’s my first book you see.

We only came across one place that, to us, was worth stopping in on the Victorian side of the border. Port Fairy used to be a large whaling station. It’s on the Moyne River where it enters the sea. The fishing fleet was tied up to the wharf alongside the river at the time we were there, and there was a great green sward of grass in the tiny park opposite the boats. It made for pretty postcard photographs. Fifty of Port Fairy’s buildings have been classified by the National Trust and many of them were built back in the nineteenth century. They’d all been impeccably restored.

It was pretty and the cherry cheesecake was excellent. We’d go back there for a fortnight sometime if only it didn’t entail driving through so much boring country to get to it. Somewhere along the Victorian coastline we’d filled up our tanks with water that had an unpleasant taste to it and the tanks had become tainted. We couldn’t shift the taste no matter what we did so we bought a ten litre container just to hold tea and cooking water. In Port Fairy I filled it up and drove off without it. We didn’t find out until we stopped that night and only had fruit juice to drink.

I’d done a similar thing more than ten years before in what used to be Yugoslavia. It was in the town of Negotin close to the Bulgarian border. It was a Wild West style town but with slight Mafia overtones. Negotin sits four square in one of the worlds most extensive rubbish heaps; full of shifty, suspicious looking individuals with swarthy skins who haven't shaved for a week - and the men were just as bad. I'd never seen such hairy women and I came across the first woman I'd seen with a full beard since I saw a bearded lady in a fairground when I was a kid. She was only around forty years of age and what made her appearance all the more startling was that she wore brilliant red lipstick and a mini skirt.

Couples promenaded down the main street in the cool, dust laden evening air, many of the men wearing identical 1970s style white, bell bottomed safari suits and trilby hats cocked at an angle. Their hirsute companions dressed in Carnaby Street fashions of the Beatles era. The dusty shop windows displayed sun bleached yellowed toothpaste adverts which hadn't been changed for years.

We drove up a narrow street with overhanging trees which scraped at the van roof looking for somewhere safe to park for the night. Finding it to be a dead end we turned around to see, coming up the street towards us, a guy of about 30 on a bicycle, puffing and panting and waving two plastic water containers at us. He was pointing to our roof rack and as far as we could make out, he was telling us that the water containers would be just the thing to sit up there warming in the sun. We told him that we didn't want to buy them but he was quite insistent and after much heated and animated discussion, which failed to dissuade him, I told him to fuck off.

No matter what country one visits, no matter what language the natives speak, they all understand these two English words and the water container salesman was clearly disturbed by them. He stood there astride his bike, water containers in his left hand and was just about to open his mouth again when I jumped in – “fuck off, go on fuck off will you.” With that I put the van in gear and we drove away. It wasn't until later that evening when we parked for the night and I went up on the roof rack to get our shower water that I found that the containers the pedaller was peddling were our water containers. They'd fallen off of the roof rack and this poor sod had been pedalling his guts out to try and give them back to us.

Across the South Australian border Mt. Gambier was the first town of any significance and although the town was just another place to stock up and maybe grab a meal, it has some interesting things going for it. The limestone ground thereabouts is riddled with sink holes and extinct volcanoes. One extinct volcano, now called the Blue Lake, was a deep cobalt blue when we visited but we read that at some times of the year it’s grey. We saw a big, deep sink hole in town too; in a park. It was one of the most attractive holes I’ve seen and I say that with all due respect to Kingston which we later went through at speed - it was dreadful. Years ago I remember going down into one of Mt. Gambier’s many cave systems. It was dark and dank and looked for all the world as though the ceiling had been plastered with pizza cheese that was slowly melting.

Kingston, the hole previously referred to, has a restaurant on the main drag. Outside is a huge kitsch looking lobster called Larry that’s badly in need of renovation. Further down the main drag is an old tractor on a stick about ten meters high. I don’t know what possesses people to put tractors on sticks but we saw a few of them in the coming weeks.

We arrived in Victor Harbour late in the afternoon after a long, hot and not particularly interesting day. Victor Harbour hadn’t been on any particular agenda of ours. We’d intended to stay in the Coorong which was billed as South Australia’s biggest wetlands. The travel brochures waxed eloquent on the place and the rare species of water birds to be seen. Clouds of pelicans and egrets were supposed to take clattering flight before us as we rumbled along. Spoonbills and ducks, black swans and sand pipers, auk, hawks and skuas were all supposed to be feeding or breeding. The Cooorong was utter crap. There’d been a drought and I don’t recall seeing a single bird all the way through it. It was as dry as a Phillip Ruddock joke book and Clare took photos of me standing in salt pans because they were the most picturesque sights we saw. Other people have told me that at the wrong time of year the place stinks like an Amanda Vanstone Asylum seeker program too. So this is why we ended the day in Victor Harbour.

We cruised around the place looking for somewhere near the beach to park up but everywhere any good was covered in no parking signs. The temperature was in the mid thirties and after the whole day travelling in it we needed to get into the water and cool off. At the very far end of the beach, some three kilometres from town, we espied a boat ramp in a big dusty car park. At one end of it, away from the actual ramp, there was a beautiful green grassed strip about twice as long as Erasmus and only ten paces from the water and we wanted it. I parked in the middle of it so that nobody else could park at either end of us and we went for a swim. Later we ate our evening meal followed by a leisurely stroll until six o’clock in the evening when I thought the parking attendants would have all knocked off for the day.

We read and watched TV for a while and then climbed up to our bed which is over the top of the cab and turned in for the night. We left the windows open and the flyscreens in place as it was still unpleasantly hot. At around two in the morning I was awoken by something, I didn’t know what. Clare was already awake and she said there’d been a short hailstorm. About 10 minutes later there was another little hailstorm that lasted for a couple of minutes or thereabouts and we went back to sleep thinking to ourselves that the weather should be a bit cooler tomorrow if there was hail around.

I don’t know how much later it was but I got up to pee and there was another mini hailstorm going on. This time, as I climbed down the ladder, my legs were suddenly wetted and when I stood on the floor of the van I found myself in a puddle. We’d parked side on to six powerful pop up sprinklers which raked the van as they all went past and then turned back again. Everything was sodden, all the cushions and the lower mattresses were wet through as the bottom line of windows was perfectly lined up with the sprinklers.

I grabbed the ignition keys and opened the door only to be blasted with a wall of water and quickly shut it again. We kept a number of food items like vegetables at ground level and they were all sodden as were our little cardboard tubs of spices, the OMO washing powder and the paper towels. When the sprinklers moved off the van for a while we threw them all out of the door resolving to clean it all up in the morning. Then we shut all the windows and pushed what water we could down the steps and under the door and clambered back up the ladder to bed which was now the only dry place in the van.

We didn’t sleep very well at all and I got up a little after daylight to make a cup of tea but the sprinklers were still going and I couldn’t get out the door to turn the gas bottle on. I lifted one of the mattresses aside at the back of the van and moved my dry pillow into the spot where it had been so I’d have somewhere dry to sit. I pulled back the curtain next to the table to let the light in. Four early morning joggers were standing there cracking jokes about us. One pointed to the front of the van where I couldn’t see and made some comment. They left and along came an elderly couple with a dog on a lead and they looked towards the front of the van and smiled too. I pulled a pair of shorts on and ran the gauntlet of water around to the front where the drips off the awning had been falling on the OMO carton and a small river of bubbles ran down into the sea. A guy of about thirty came out of a house across the road with his digital camera and took a couple of pictures. I asked him if he could email me one of them in case my own camera was wet. It was and he did. His name is David Alston from Frankston in Victoria. He was on holiday and I’m glad he was there to record my cock up because nobody would have believed it otherwise. The other person I think I should thank in these pages is the tractor driver who pulled us out. I can’t remember his name but after getting bogged trying to extricate ourselves, I don’t know what we’d have done without him.

We had planned our trip to be in Adelaide for WOMADELAIDE which is a big Global Music festival. We’d been there the year before and vowed there and then to keep coming back every year. It’s held in Adelaide’s Botanic Park which is a splendid tree museum next to the Botanic gardens. There they put up five stages where musicians and singers from all over the world strut their stuff. The WOMAD organisation holds festivals in a dozen or more countries. They go on for three days and it’s all about the left, green, slightly hippie, pot smoking and off beat music scene. Some of the acts are truly spectacular. One Pakistani group had five percussionists. Another group played Celtic music on bagpipes from a village in Spain. Yet another group, from Senegal, played olive oil tins strung with fishing wire and wore odd coloured gum boots as they danced. Our favourite though, was an Algerian rock group that we’d seen the year before. Parts of the park give off the aromatic amalgam of a raft of foreign food stalls. A hint of marijuana smoke infuses the air and one hears parts of snatched conversations like “amazin, have you really stripped all the kitchen floorboards yourself? You’re like soooh resourceful.”

We stayed at my daughter Clair’s house some forty minutes by train from the venue and when we came back on the third night we saw that Erasmus had been broken into. Our bikes were stolen from off the rack despite them being locked and various things were nicked but our laptop and camera we’d thankfully left at Claire’s. They’d left Clare’s clothes alone but taken a lot of mine. I was extremely flattered as the police said it was almost certainly the work of teenagers. I’d never been made to feel so cool and trendy, thinking that teenagers would want the gear I wear, but Clare bought me back down to earth with “they probably took them for their granddad.”

In daughter Claire’s house unfortunately live my three grandchildren I say unfortunately because I’m not yet ready to have grandchildren even though Claire seems to be more than ready to breed them. They’re boys and I’m glad I had two girls. They’re incredibly boisterous, noisy and destructive with enough energy between them to drive a small power station if only it could be harnessed somehow.

One of them, Luke, is bald. He’s only five years old but looks very much like a cretinous version of Michael Klim the Olympic swimmer. It’s just like if one of those Amazonian head hunters that shrink heads had got their hands on Michael Klim and done the business on him. The medical profession isn’t exactly sure why Luke’s gone bald but they seem confident that his hair will grow back sometime. Meanwhile his mum has to avoid taking him to bowling alleys. Last time they went Luke was sitting down doing his shoelaces up when a big guy came up behind him, stuck two fingers up his nose and hurtled him down one of the aisles. He’s a great kid, very active and will almost certainly take up professional bungee jumping or trampolining when he finally hits the workforce. Alternatively, if there are any positions available entailing pulling the legs off grasshoppers, poking small mammals with pointed sticks or pulling the spines out of echidnas no employer could afford to go past him.

His twin brother, a professional arsehole already at the age of five, will probably be a nuclear physicist or a brain surgeon. Nathanial (his dad actually got the spelling of the name Nathaniel wrong on the birth certificate) is nothing whatsoever like Luke. He’s a budding genius who’s obsessed with learning anything. This kid absorbs and retains anything he’s told and he bites people if he can’t get his point across. He’s got a memory like main frame computer and if you tell him you’ll do something like playing scrabble with him he’ll hold you to it forever. His mum describes him as “socially inept” which he is when he’s anywhere except school where he’s a model student.

My third grandson, a year and a bit younger than the twins, is just a delightful and well balanced all round individual who’s as stubborn as it’s possible for a human to be. He’s told his mum that he’s going to eat fruit and vegetables when he turns four and he will. Meanwhile he ain’t going to and he’s dug his heels in so deep that he’ll starve rather than touch the stuff. His mum’s tried calling his bluff but she’s no match for the kid. He says “no, I’m not eating that ‘till I’m four” and he once went for thirty six hours without eating before his mum gave in and gave him a helping of the junk food he knows and loves.

In my opinion Adelaide is a great little city. It has some of Australia’s most striking architecture, a very good produce market and good restaurants. The other thing it has going for it is entertainment. The Arts centre attracts the best of Australian and visiting artists and performers. The hills around the city are spectacular in the spring and autumn and the Barossa and Clare valleys shouldn’t be missed by anyone who’s kicking around South Australia on vacation. The suburbs, especially those south of the city have some of the worst undulating roads in Australia. South Australian’s can’t build good roads it seems and they can’t finish them off. The sides of their suburban roads are the scruffiest in the country.

They also have the world’s ugliest telegraph poles. They’re called Stovie Poles and are named after some guy called Stovie or Stovy who invented them. I think Stovie Esq. should have had his naughty bits squeezed in a vice for designing such tasteless and hideously unattractive, industrial looking things. Along with the equally unsightly iron fences that enclose South Australia’s gardens they visually pollute otherwise attractive suburbs. Mr. Stovie’s poles are made from two rusty iron girders held apart by rust stained concrete and bolted together with rusty nuts and bolts. They’re set about two feet apart at the bottom and rise to a point and are so solid that to hit one at any speed would almost certainly kill you. I was in the South of England some five years ago where I saw green plastic telegraph poles designed so that if a car hit one, and snapped it off, the poles at either side would hold it safe. They weren’t conductory like Old Stovie’s efforts either.

We went to an Iranian gourmet food night in Morphett Street in the city while we were there. We had walked into an Iranian grocery shop looking for real, Middle Eastern fig jam and coffee. We found what we were looking for and the girl who served us asked if we’d like to be invited to their first Persian gourmet night. They sent us the fixed menu by email and we jumped at it without asking the price.

It said “The night is a fun filled evening of gourmet Persian Cousin” I was impressed and read on. The next line said “We waken your senses with a platter of traditional dips served with crisp bread.” This was sounding pretty good as they went on with “Followed by traditionally prepared soup of herbs, beans and special noodles. Garnished with an Authentic Persian yoghurt sauce, fried onions and garlic....”

I was excited when they said “Then we invite your taste buds to experience one of the world most delicate flavors. A bed of saffron rice filled with pieces of specially marinated chicken garnished with the little emeralds we call Barberries. These delicately flavored berries are the true jewel of Persian cuisine.”

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I read “Before the Maine course we serve an authentic cucumber drink to rinse your senses and introduce you to a whole new world of flavours” but it didn’t matter, I was hooked. But then it got better still with “For main course we invite you to experience two of the most favored "khoresht" in Persian Cuisine. Fesenjoon a delicate chicken dish with a Pomegranate and walnut sauce served on a bed of polou or Ghormeh Sabzie a lamb and herb dish slowly cooked to perfection again served on a bed of polou (specially prepared rice).

And for desert a pistachio flavored ice-cream traditionally prepared garnished with saffron Pashmak (cotton candy).”

To complete the experience we have invited Adelaide's best Persian Dance performer to introduce you to one of the world most ancient cultures, and what better way to experience it all then with food music and danse.”

It was a fucking disaster. The dancer had a nice arse but that was about all. I thought the cucumber drink was particularly revolting but that was before I tried the pomegranate and walnut sauce on the chicken. It was as dry as battery acid. We were served first with the stuff and after taking a soupcon of it I waited to see the other diners reactions. One by one their mouths adopted the sphincter-like pulsations of sea anemones and they reached for the cucumber drinks they’d been trying to avoid until that moment.

The meal was served by three different girls with cooking stains on their T shirts who didn’t have a clue about waiting tables. The whole Iranian experience was performed to the sound of Strauss waltzes by some born again Richard Klaydermann impersonator.

While in Adelaide I had been asked to look up the mother of a friend of mine and deliver a parcel to her. I thought to myself that if she was short I’d ask her to stand on the table. My friend didn’t tell me his mum’s name but I knew that she was from Scotland. She answered the door.

I said “I’m Anthony’s friend Peter.”

She said “Pleased tee meechuh. I’m Gunnoot. I Kanna speek tyuh reet noo. Can yuh cum back?”

I thought Gunnoot was an unusual name and I sort of raised my eyebrows as I held out my hand.

“Gunoot” I said

“Aye, I’m gunnoot ayve gottee doctors appointment the noo.” She said.

One thing Adelaide and South Australia has that no other State can boast are those magnificent, stone built, civic buildings. Not only the town halls and museums but churches, Masonic halls, banks and warehouses are all so permanent looking compared with everywhere else we’ve been. We knew Adelaide is called the city of churches but after a week in the city and immediate suburbs one gets the opinion that the place was started off by a boatload of religious nutters. In fact one church we walked around in Woodville had a foundation stone laid by a bloke called Arthur Nutter. At some points in the suburbs you can stand on a street corner and see six churches.

Before we left Adelaide for points north we decided to take a weekend trip to somewhere we wouldn’t be seeing along the way. We looked at the map and chose a place called Wallaroo which is on the sea at the head of the Yorke Peninsula. It’s crap. Don’t go there. Wallaroo and the drive up to it from Adelaide have a beauty all their own. This they guard steadfastly refusing to reveal any of it to the casual observer.

That area is called the Copper Coast because that’s where they used to mine copper. Wallaroo was in the thick of the loading-copper-onto-boats business years ago and it can’t quite get it out of its system. These days it loads grain onto boats and is home to hundreds of thousands of pigeons and a smattering of humans. We went into a fruit and vegetable shop and hanging on the wall was a newspaper article with a picture of the proprietor. I read some of the accompanying article in which the said proprietor was bemoaning the fact that people were stealing grapes to the tune of ten dollars worth a week.

There were signs all over the place saying that the ground on which you stood was an alcohol free area. Towns that do this have a problem with drunks and it always puts me off somewhat although I’ve found that most of the drunks are harmless enough. There is an Anzac memorial in Wallaroo in the shape of two pillars that form the entrance to a civic building of some sort. The one on the right has a plaque saying “This Memorial Arch Was Erected Through The Efforts of the Ladies of The Wallaroo Cheer Up Society and Local Branch.” At the base of the left hand pillar there’s a scraggy old rosemary bush and a little white sign next to it saying that the rosemary was grown from a cutting taken from Gallipoli. In the Post Office there was a brochure welcoming tourists and wishing them a good stay in Wallaroo.

Wallaroo was one of those places where what they were digging out of the ground ran out. In this case it was copper. Australia’s full of places that died when the seam ran out. There never seems to have been any plans for the continuation of civilisation when this would inevitably happen. A country that just digs holes in the ground and exports its resources never fully develops a real economy. It’s a little like selling some item of furniture from your lounge room when the electricity bill comes in. One day there’ll be nothing left to sell!

It seems we’ve got something terribly wrong. The folks at Wallaroo should never have been selling their copper ore for somebody else to be making copper cables from. They should have been making copper cables and selling them. This wholesaler’s attitude to business in Australia probably came from our origins as a colony that supplied raw materials to a mother country but we can’t seem to shake it. With this huge continent the size of the USA, and the resources we have in the ground, we should enjoy the best standard of living in the world. After all, our population is only that of a Chinese city. Whoever heard of an Australian product overseas? Sweden, with a population of around fourteen million and a tiny land area has business giants like Volvo and Ericson. Finland, a tiny country with a population of something like five million boasts Nokia.

We parked on a cliff top and spent a cold, blustery night – it could have been the beans. In the morning I was cleaning the inside of Erasmus’ windscreen when I noticed for the first time the name of the product I was using. It was Ajax window cleaner. I never thought of it before but why would some big chemical cleaning product company name its wares after a hero from Greek Mythology?

Ajax was the guy who fought Hector at the Siege of Troy. He was boastful, arrogant and quarrelsome and he violated King Priam's daughter Cassandra.
So what’s that got to do with window cleaner? Who knows? I can just see the meeting of the marketing guys at Colgate Palmolive who make Ajax though.

“So what are we going to call this new window cleaner then, any suggestions?”

“I was thinking about Ajax sir”

“Ajax, why Ajax Bill? Don’t tell me…uh……All juicy ……..added juice…..uh available xtra…..uh. OK I give up Bill lay it on us old buddy”

Well sir, as you’ve probably heard, so many housewives these days are into Greek Mythology.”

“That a fact Bill?”

“Oh yes sir, really into it and Ajax was really strong just like our window cleaner sir”

“And so Ajax was a guy in the Greek Mythology was he then Bill?”

“Oh yes sir. He was at the Siege of Troy”

“Did much window cleaning go on at the siege of Troy then Bill? Did they all live in a glass palace or something did they Bill?”

“Not exactly sir but I’m sure that most of today’s housewives would identify with a mythological Greek hero”

“Is that a fact Bill? OK, anyone else got any suggestions? No? OK we’ll run with Ajax. And Bill……..”

“Yes sir?”

“If this shit doesn’t sell we’re gonna drown you in the Goddamm fuckin’ stuff, you got that Bill?”

“Yes sir, thank you sir.”

On the way back to Adelaide from Wallaroo we were passed by a huge Linfox Transport rig. On the back of it was written “You Are Passing Another Fox.” I racked my brains but I’m stuffed if I could remember eating one.