A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next rock formation and the one after that are not mentioned here. Instead, I’m going to write about hot water. But first, the countryside. It started to pick up enormously when we were a couple of hundred miles out of Darwin. All that stunted scrubby stuff began to give way to taller tortured gum trees with a reddish tinge to their trunks. Salmon gums some people called them. The red ant hills which we’d been seeing for a week or more began to elongate; some topping the two metre mark. The spindly, unhealthy looking wild kapok trees, although almost leafless, displayed their bright yellow blooms. Everything was gradually becoming greener, the grasses taller and the cattle were those Quasimodo type humped backed Brahmin things suited to the tropics. There were palm trees too and they’ve always seemed exotic to me.
And now for the hot water. The place is called Douglas Hot Springs. And everyone should go there. I’ve seen quite a few hot springs in different parts of the world but none holds a candle to these. Again, I wonder why it is that there are no features like this in the seven capital cities that are home to the overwhelming bulk of Australia’s population. Why didn’t the Rainbow Serpent position hot springs like this in Parramatta? There must have been some kind of deal between the Rainbow Serpent and the Pope long ago whereupon it was decided that all the good bits would be put in the middle somewhere out of range of the people.
The river at the Douglas Hot Springs which, in the wet season is a fierce and raging torrent that rips big trees from off its banks, subsides to a beautiful clear running stream by the time the dry season arrives. In a separate channel runs a rivulet of clear hot water and at one point it meets the cold river water channel which is everyone’s favourite spot. The hot water really is hot and comes from a big bubbling pool where, according to the national parks information board heated rain water that has soaked into the earth in days gone by breaks the surface. The hot pool is around a quarter the size of a soccer field and is fringed with Pandanus palms. At night or early in the morning you can’t see the other side of it for steam and it comes out of the ground so hot you can’t bear to stand in it.
Two hundred meters downstream from the pool the heated water is just bearable and there are natural pools and shallows where you can sit awhile before walking across to the river that runs alongside to cool down. Another fifty metres downstream the hot and cold waters come together and sitting in the water there is a very pleasant experience. So pleasant was it that for three mornings in a row we went down there and sat in it before breakfast and didn’t get out until the rush hour started an hour and a half later.
All the other hot springs I’ve seen have either been sulphurous and smelly or have been made into swimming pools but here the waters are sweet and crystal clear and you can just sit on the clean sandy bottom looking up through the tropical trees at the blue sky. Colourful kingfishers and bee eaters flit from branch to branch. White and pink cockatoos circulate in the azure sky above the trees and small stripy fish move constantly in and out of the warm water. It’s a small piece of paradise spoiled only by the thought that there are other people out there in their tents and caravans finishing their cups of tea before coming down to join you.
There are parts of the waters where you can adjust your position so as to have warm testicles, cold feet and a hot back. A body’s length away you can slide into another spot where you raise your feet to warm them or lower them for the reverse effect.
There’s a film I saw a few years back called Baraka. The opening sequence was of a warm pool of water in the mountains of Japan somewhere surrounded by snow. It was full of monkeys, some with snow on their heads and icicles on their beards. They were sitting there just keeping warm and checking each others heads out for lice. The scene that greeted us the first day we arrived at Douglas Hot Springs was so close that the human scene seemed a perfect parody of the monkeys; as if it had been set up by a filmmaker. It looked like a re-make of Baraka featuring Dianne Fossey’s Gorillas In The Mist. A ring of fifteen of silver haired, overweight pensioners sat in the steaming water all facing one another and chattering away like so many apes.
I got talking to one big old silverback named Des from Western Australia who, we observed, used to wait until he was sure nobody was looking his way and go off upstream somewhere. He told me that he’d been fishing the rivers of the top end for thirty years and that what he didn’t know about barramundi fishing wasn’t worth knowing. He was probably right. He would only leave the camp ground for fifteen minutes at a time and come back with three or four reasonably sized fish. He obviously had traps set somewhere because he never took any fishing gear with him, just a sack to bring them back. One afternoon Clare and I set out on a walk upriver to try and locate his net or whatever he was using but we didn’t find anything. What we did see though was a crocodile. It was only a harmless freshwater model and only about five feet long but the first we’d seen on our own in the wild. It was quite exciting standing there watching it sunning itself on a tree branch but as soon as we made a noise it slid down into the water and was gone.
Next to where we were camped one afternoon there was a lot of squawking going on. I soon got used to it and took no notice but Clare went to investigate. There was a bower bird’s bower there with a long olive python slowly sliding through it. The squawking was coming from the male bower bird and the ten or so females he was trying to court. The python took no notice of them or of us as we hassled around trying to photograph it.
On the last day we were at this place I’d just got up from the hot pool to walk downstream to the cooler ones and three young girls in bikinis were making their way down the bank. This was very unusual and I checked to see that it wasn’t an apparition but no, none of them had white hair. As they neared me one called out:
“Is this where the hot spring is?”
“Yes” I said. “It’s the fountain of youth. I was ninety two when I got here last Wednesday”
She said “Another couple of weeks then and you might score”
We left Douglas Hot Springs because we ran out of electricity and needed to run the engine to put more charge in the batteries. We had a generator but we were parked in a no generator area and I’d forgotten that it was out of fuel anyway.
According to the travel books the next items on the agenda in the long line of Outback rock formations was to be found in Lichfield National Park. Owing to a shortage of roads occasioned by a shortage of population due to a two hundred year old case of acute national xenophobia, there was nowhere else to go except Darwin so that’s where we headed for. Lichfield was en route.
Right on the edge of the Lichfield National Park there is a lovely green little oasis of a village called Batchelor. It’s most unexpected and it wouldn’t be there but for the fact that there was once a uranium mining venture nearby called Rum Jungle and Batchelor was the company town. Needless to say cappuccino is unavailable even though it’s less that two hours out of the State capital but there’s a supermarket there with a reasonable range of food in it. The supermarket is also the garage and the Post Office and the local Centrelink agent and it sits amidst a whole village full of mowed green grass and palm trees. There were little houses with mowed green lawns and tropical flowers and one street was lined with big frangipani trees. I think I’m getting homesick or civilisation sick just thinking about it. We’ve only been away for a couple of months.
Several kilometres past Batchelor is the park’s first attraction. A collection of small rock formations. However, these rock formations are different. They were made by termites. Termites get hold of granules of dirt and add spittle to them and make these magnificent obelisks called magnetic anthills. They’re called that because they are very thin and wide with the sharp edges facing roughly north south. Some of them are taller than me and wider at the base than I could stretch my arms to. Keep reading and in the last chapter I’ll tell you how tall I am and how far my arms stretch. Until then you’ll just have to look at the picture on page 112. It’s a picture of Adolph Hitler at the Nuremberg rally of 1943. I’m a bit taller and not as wide.
Now, what’s peculiar about these magnetic anthills is that they’re all in one place. They sit in a long paddock looking like those ancient standing stones to be found in the British or French countryside. Either side of the long paddock the anthills are quite different. They’re called Cathedral Anthills and are not magnetic. They’re also very high but they’re fluted all around in maybe fifteen long flutes. They look something like badly formed, elongated lemon squeezers. We spent a few days touring around Lichfield National Park but didn’t come across any more magnetic anthills. Most of Lichfield’s attractions are waterfalls – about eight of them. They were all good to look at and we walked up the sides of and around those that had paths – wonderful rock formations, all of them – and if we’d been geologists they would have been even better.
One attraction in Lichfield really did attract us. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Mother in Law. It’s a swamp in Gippsland that I used to visit from time to time. But up here close to Darwin we visited a much better one. It’s a shame the old dear’s dead really. It was called Tabletop Swamp and it was so attractive to tourists that although the park was full of peregrinating pensioners we were the only ones there. I think most people still regard swamps as dirty smelly places where nasty germs breed and so may be less inclined to go down roads that have swamp written on the signposts. Tabletop swamp was just like one of these places you see on TV or in the pages of National Geographic but never think you’ll come across. Out of the lake grew big paperbark trees that reflected in the still water at their feet and purple water lilies were in bloom on the water’s surface. The lake was surrounded by grass growing well above two metres high and we walked around it ever aware that we couldn’t go right down to the water’s edge in case crocodiles were lurking. Then, suddenly, there was a big rush of water and David Attenborough broke the surface with a water lily root between his teeth……..sorry, I got carried away. It’s not true. But that’s what the mood was like.
After taking in several geological objects d’art we couldn’t find anywhere to free camp so we pulled into the campground at Wangi Falls. The falls and the walk around them were lovely. Two waterfalls dropped into a deep clear pool surrounded by tropical plants. Everything was so perfectly placed that it was almost artificial and Disneylike. The pool was advertised in the brochures as being a safe place to swim and there were handrails and steps down into the water There was also a Beware of Crocodiles and a No Swimming sign there too! With the unusual amount of rain that the Top End had received over the past three weeks some of the creeks were swollen to the point where saltwater crocodiles would have been able to make their way upstream to the pool and the rangers had closed it off. It was a mixed blessing in that although we’d have loved a swim in that clear water the tourist buses, whose operators knew about the crocodiles, were staying away so we had the place more or less to ourselves.
In the campground we parked between two other motorhomes. One was a regular motor home with two elderly ladies in it and it was called “Our ‘Appy One” The other was a thirty seater seater bus with a trailer on the back that housed a large 4WD with a dingy on top. It was white in colour and spotlessly clean. In big black lettering across the top they’d had sign written “Nights in White Satin” under which in smaller lettering it said “Never Reaching the End” At the bottom left of it were the words “Two Lost Souls” On the side in very big black script was painted “Outback Floor Sanding” I tried to imagine but my imagination couldn’t cope with the job. A couple of Ku Klux Klan members each with a sanding machine wandering the Outback searching for their souls but destined never to find them. Fascinated though I was I made up my mind not to introduce myself.
At Wangi falls campground we at last came into close contact with some wildlife. The first was a big monitor lizard, it may have been a goanna or a perentie or something else but it was big and in need of inflating. Clare first heard it rustling around while she was painting outside. Yes, the paintings are for sale folks. She beckoned me to get the camera. The lizard was shy but obviously wanted to hang around the campsite as it was an easy way to get fed. I took about twenty pics of it but couldn’t get near enough so we decided to bait it with chicken in a place where I’d already set the camera up on a tripod. It soon snaffled up the three bits of chicken we put out before I could get a decent shot so Clare showed me a chicken bone. “D’you think he’d eat that?” “Yeah, they eat baby birds and things, it wouldn’t hurt him.” I said airing my advanced herpetological knowledge.
We threw the chicken bone to the spot where I had the camera trained and waited. Cautiously the lizard approached and then, real quick like, he grabbed the bone and kind of shook it down his throat. He kept jogging his head upward and jiggling and shaking like cockatoos sometimes do. Then he turned sideways and we could see that the bone was stuck in his throat. He looked like Frankenlizard. He had this huge bolt-like thing sticking out of both sides of his neck. “Oh Christ” Clare said “d’you think he’ll die?” I didn’t know but I hoped nobody else was watching.
Frankenlizard wasn’t shy anymore, he was desperate. He walked around the upright posts that delineated our camping spot pressing and rubbing the lump in his neck against them in an effort to redirect it. He gave up on that and lay down rubbing his throat on the ground. I was scared to try to help him in case he scratched me but after about five minutes he managed to cough the bone up. Then he grabbed it and made off with it at high speed. I had a good photograph by this time but we deleted it because it looked so grotesque.
Our second encounter with the area’s wildlife was only a few minutes later. I was sitting on the toilet in the toilet block and I happened to look up. There was a great big snake wound around one of the rafters above my head. He didn’t move. But I did. I looked all over for a ranger but couldn’t find one. When I went back in the toilet a few hours later the snake had gone but that was even more of a worry – he could have been somewhere closer than the rafters.
Erasmus, like most motor homes and caravans these days has a shower and a toilet and that’s a great comfort, particularly when it’s raining and you don’t want to go outside. My travels in campervans though, weren’t always this commodious. Back in the late eighties I lived in a van for an extended period of time in Communist Eastern and Central Europe.
One day in what was then Czechoslovakia we were on our way down to the Austrian border and began looking for a toilet or, at least, a decent sized clump of bushes. In a sort of driver’s roadside stop we saw a public toilet sign. Public toilets were a rarity anywhere in Iron Curtain countries and we pulled up. The toilet was like a big wardrobe with two doors and twin old-fashioned wooden toilet seats; the types that have buckets under them. These toilet seats though, hadn’t had buckets under them for a long while but people had still been using them. A swarm of flies greeted me as I opened the doors and the whole scene was absolutely foul. I took some toilet paper and headed for the trees behind the toilets but found that dozens of others had done the same and it was dangerous to tread anywhere in the vicinity.
I crossed the road but all I could see was an embankment going down to a field where people were picking strawberries. I went back to the van and took out our trusty paint bucket and a supermarket bag which I stretched over it like a bin liner and made use of it behind the toilets. I tied a knot in the bag and then, emerging from behind the toilet with a clean paint bucket in one hand and a plastic bag full of poo in the other, I thought about what I should do with the bag. I didn’t want to drive off in the van with it and I didn’t want to throw it in the bushes because the plastic would be around forever. It was then that I saw two garbage bins attached to either side of a light pole and I walked over and placed the bag in one of them. I stepped back into the van to find that Alenka already had the kettle on so I washed my hands and waited for her to make coffee.
I was sitting at the table looking out of the back window when a tramp’s head, unkempt and unshaven, popped up above the embankment on the opposite side of the road. He scrambled to the top and stood at the side of the road waiting for a truck to pass. Then, after looking both ways, he shuffled across to our side of the road. He made a beeline for the rubbish bins and started going though the one I’d just put the bag of poo in. It was a cold morning and as he opened the bag I could see a cloud of steam rise up. He recoiled with a start shouting what I took to be a string of Czech obscenities at our van whilst, at the same time, making a series of internationally recognizable hand gestures. Alenka was yelling at me to drive off but I was paralysed with laughter and stretched out on the floor so the tramp couldn’t see me. Then we both lay on the floor trying to control our laughter while waiting for him to kick the shit out of the van. When I peeped through the curtains a few minutes later there was no sign of him. We quickly poured the coffee down the sink and drove off but as we were pulling out onto the road we found he’d been laying in wait for us. He came running through the trees swinging the bag around his head like David when he slew Goliath with a stone from a slingshot. He let go of it at the wrong moment and it flew up in the air somewhere over the top of the van and we kept on going.
Heading up the Darwin road, after we’d left Wangi falls and Lichfield, we saw the smoke from deliberately lit fires. Not arsonist’s fires (although I was told there’d been a lot of arson about) but controlled fires designed to renew the vegetation as the Aborigines had been doing for tens of thousands of years before the whites came to this continent. We’d seen the results of recent burnings for maybe a hundred kilometres already. On one side of the road the grass would be fairly high and the country looking rather tired but opposing it, across the road, was lush new grass and new shoots on all the eucalyptus trees and fan palms where the area had been recently burnt. It’s taken around two centuries for white Australians to learn that the land was increased by regular firing by the Aborigines. The controlled burning takes place when the grass isn’t too high so there’s no chance of a bushfire. Around the fires corridors are left for the wildlife to escape and it comes back more plentiful than before. It was always called “fire stick farming” and now it’s the accepted way but it’s difficult for the tourists to appreciate as they see fire as a destructive thing. In nearly all the information centres there are leaflets these days explaining the reasons for setting light to the bush.
Half an hour south of Darwin we visited the Territory Wildlife Park, a large chunk of natural bush that included a variety of habitats for animals, reptiles and birds. We’d been in dozens of those places but this one was good. It included a lot of the animals that are destroying large parts of the Australian ecosystem. I knew about camels, water buffalos, goats, cats and pigs but in the park there were Timorese ponies that came originally from Mongolia to Timor centuries ago before being imported into Australia. Balinese cattle and sambar deer were there too. I’d never heard of either but they are just another couple of species that are ruining parts of the Australian eco system.
There was an imposing aquarium too containing a huge saltwater crocodile and it was easy to get to see all of him from the underground tunnel that sided onto his pool. He/she was beautifully patterned and had nice toenails and teeth. I actually got to within the thickness of the glass away from this thing and studied it. It was a little frightening but I still couldn’t tear myself away from it. It was hard to believe that this lethargic looking reptilian could actually erupt with so much speed that it could successfully ambush anything on the whole continent with the exception of road trains. Another thing I saw in the aquarium was a shark that lived in fresh water. It was cruising around with what the Northern Territory restaurants call the fish of the day (barramundi – cod chewsday) and turtles and other fresh water edibles.
I asked the guide about it and she said their park was the only place where these sharks were being exhibited. It was a type of Bull Nosed Shark that had only been discovered & classified within the last year or so. She said that a couple of them had been caught recently and sent overseas to be studied. Overseas must be a hell of a place I always think. She said that it was basically an estuary creature but could live in fresh water quite happily for years and that it grew to three metres in length, could eat humans and go up rivers for many miles. I didn’t know whether to believe it so I asked another guide and got the same answer.
Right next door to the Territory Wildlife Park we saw something amazing. Do you know those archer fish that live up the Amazon and squirt water at insects that fall off branches so they can gobble them up?...........O’h, you don’t. Never mind. I’ll tell you about them. There are these fish that live up the Amazon and they’re called Archer Fish. They don’t have any bows and arrows or anything but some short sighted loony gave them that name. They’re actually squirters or spitters and they eat insects. The way they go about it is to swim up under a fly or mosquito or some other tasty insect and squirt a jet of water at it so it falls into the water and they can eat it.
Well, we’ve got the same thing right here in Australia and they’ve learnt to squirt water at pieces of bread that tourists hold in their fingers. It really blew me away - and I hadn’t been for weeks. There were around fifty of them all about forty centimetres long and they hung around the swimming pool steps at Berry Springs waiting for tourists to turn up with bread. The bread had to be held lightly between forefinger and thumb and half a metre above the water. Then, twenty or so fish would cruise around underneath it and one would squirt the bread out of the hand proffering it. As it hit the water a big scramble would ensue, the winner of which was seldom the fish that had done the squirting. The really cool thing about these archer fish was that if you had bread in your hand and didn’t give it to them because you were too busy saying “fuck me, look at that!!” to those accompanying you, one of these squirty denizens of the shallows would rock on up to the bank and squirt you in the eye as a reminder to get on with it. This behaviour wasn’t coincidence. I tried it on with them a few times.
The archer fish were such a show stopping attraction that they took the eyes away from the place itself and I spent so much time getting squirted and saying “fuck me, look at that!!” that we had to stay the night outside the gates of the place so that we could go back in there for a swim the next morning. As soon as the ranger opened up the park at half past eight we drove into the car park and went down to swim in two of the three warm water pools. The park itself was beautiful with tropical rainforest trees and creepers and expansive grassed areas neatly mown. We had it all to ourselves for an hour before breakfast. No shower or spa bath could ever compare with it. There was even a waterfall that ran warm water. The little river joining the pools was clear and swimmable and we snorkelled among hundreds of fish that hung out under the pandanus roots that grew along the banks. It was one place that I really didn’t want to leave.
We left and drove into Darwin stopping for fuel on the way at one of the very few well run roadhouses we’d experienced since leaving Adelaide. Services at roadhouses is generally abysmal. Whilst it’s true that these places play on their ocker image for tourists there’s still no need for them to be as uninviting as they are. Most of them play on bad taste with inane and smutty notices around the bar in lavatorial humour. Some specialise in an individual bush humour such as walls made from different beer cans or number plates from around the world. Others decorate their bars with baseball caps or international, out of date banknotes. We can all do that, it’s just that we don’t bloody want to. It’s time they took a look at their clientele who have moved on leaving them behind in many cases. By far the most business comes from elderly, retired couples and it’s the sweet old Grannie with permed white hair who’s calling the shots when it comes to where they’ll eat or stop for coffee. She’s not too impressed with these roadhouses that haven’t moved on from the steak and eggs for breakfast era of sweaty truck drivers in blue singlets and thongs (most of whom have also moved on). The old lady wants to see somewhere that’s clean with gingham tablecloths and real tea or coffee from china cups. Time and again we’ve pulled up at roadhouses where there are up to twenty caravans in the parking area with old couples sitting in them who, having bought their petrol, are having their own morning or afternoon tea in their caravans rather than braving the inane atmosphere and the weak Nescafe offered by these establishments.
The service itself and the range of products offered is far from good. We tried in five of them consecutively in an effort to buy distilled water for our batteries only to be told that they were out of stock or simply didn’t stock it. Distilled water has a shelf life of something like forty years so I couldn’t see the problem with stocking it. Petrol, gas and diesel were all these places generally had stock of and even them some of them were out of diesel. None carried a decent range of products like coolants, oils, wiper blades and so forth. Gone are the days when these things had to be transported by camel and ordered months in advance. Now you can email your order to the supplier and get it delivered on the next truck within two days anywhere in Australia. There’s no excuse for running out of stock. Had we not taken spare cans of diesel we could have been marooned until the next delivery in Larimah in the Northern Territory right there on the main Alice Springs/Darwin trunk route. So many times we fuelled up and then went to wash the windscreen only to find that the windscreen washer bucket was empty and there was no tap in sight to fill it. Usually though, there was a few centimetres of muddy water in the bottom that we didn’t want to dirty our windscreen with and the actual rubber windscreen washer tools were invariably broken. I don’t think that there are as many as twenty roadhouses in all of outback Australia that have bothered to asphalt their entrances and forecourts. They’re all red dust that turns to mud when it rains – she’ll be right.
Clare came out of the toilets at a roadhouse on the main Alice Springs/Darwin road and said “let me have the digital camera.” Off she went and returned with a photo of a notice that read “IN THE INTERESTS OF KEEPING THESE TOILETS CLEAN PLEASE REMEMBER TO TURN OFF THE LIGHTS.” I though about it for a long time but could only come up with the thought that if the lights were turned off the toilets would seem cleaner.
Darwin was something of a surprise to us. It was much better looking than either of us had imagined. This northern capital at the very top of the country is a tree lover’s paradise, the very antithesis of the most southerly capital, Hobart. Darwin probably has a thousand civically planted and maintained trees to every one in Hobart. Hobart, in terms of population, is twice the size of Darwin but has only a hundredth of the public space, parks and gardens that one sees in its northern counterpart. Darwin is bright, young and vibrant whereas the southern city is dingy and its buildings ramshackle by comparison. Darwin, of course, is a much more modern city having had the good fortune to have been all but completely demolished in 1974 by Cyclone Tracy. And good fortune it was. In the museum we saw footage of the pre Tracy city. It was a total shit hole built mainly of corrugated iron.
Darwin is very South East Asian in appearance with a profusion of palms and tropical vegetation lining the roads and its many parks. Where it differs from Asian cities, and indeed other Australian cities, is that it has no scruffy and shambolic suburbs. It’s neat, clean and green, colourful and tasteful. It was by far the most attractive city we had visited in Australia.
While we were looking for somewhere to park the van on first entering the little city we saw a small blue signpost saying Fish Feeding. We stopped in the fish feeding car park and paid our entry fee. A lady shoved a ticket into my right hand and six slices of white bread into my left and we walked down the grass to the sea. There was a feeding frenzy going on. Well, there were actually two feeding frenzies going on. Apart from the fish frenzying around in a sea of white sliced bread there were a couple of hundred people frenzying around lobbing bread at them. Every day at high tide for the past forty years this fish feeding ritual has been going on. There must have been a thousand fish there that had turned up for a piece of the old sliced white. They came in all sizes up to well over a metre long and people stood in ankle deep water holding bits of bread and stroking the fish as they took it from their hands.
A rangery looking lady came out of a little office shaped like a boat with an ice cream container full of fish scraps and a pair of tongs. She announced that she was going to feed the meat eaters. We all followed her like she was the Pied Piper. Half way down the boat ramp she stopped and we all stopped behind her. Then, with her tongs she began dispensing the fishy bites throwing them into the sea. Meat eaters came from everywhere and she described them as they came in to take their mid morning fish fingers. When she finished she started her informative and well oiled story about how fish first started coming there to get bread and said that if anyone had any questions they should feel free to interrupt her. I did.
“Do you think bread is a healthy food to feed all these fish on?”
I could see she’d been asked this before as she visibly bristled so I went on.
“It’s just that we’ve been visiting national parks where the signs tell us not to feed the fish bread because it’s not healthy for them”
“We’ve been feeding fish here for more than forty years and they’re still coming back”
“The same ones?”
“How do you mean?”
“Are they the same fish that keep coming back? I mean, do you tag them?”
“No but they’ve been coming back for forty years and I don’t think they’d do that if it wasn’t healthy”
“Yes but how do you know that their parents didn’t die from eating too much bread? I’d live on junk food all the time if someone provided it for me. Even though the cholesterol level in junk food may give me a heart attack I’d keep eating it because it’s easy”
She told me I had a good point and carried on with her talk. A minute or two later she said that fish only had a memory of about twenty seconds. I asked “how come they remember to come back for bread every day then?” I didn’t wait for an answer, I walked away and she didn’t throw anything.
Darwin’s a great place to eat and I can’t resist trying anything I’ve never had before or something I have had before but cooked in a different way. On our first night we went to an establishment called The Barra Shack. It was simple. On an area of public grass right alongside the harbour a guy called Phil had plonked two railway carriages. Either that or they were pre plonked for him by the council. Every night at about six he put out a load of tables and chairs at the water’s edge and created an instant restaurant. There was a small open ended fence as an entrance to the place and sign writing that, with the lights on, reminded me of Luna Park in Melbourne. It was an entirely Asian affair like in Singapore where they set up restaurants in car parks when the sun goes down. It was Asian too, in the way it operated. That is to say the fish was all sold by weight and you picked your piece and they weighed it and quoted you a price for cooking it just as they do in Bangkok.
The cooking was done in the railway carriages and on an outside barbecue burning coconut husks. I had crocodile for the first time. I was sorry to find that it was nothing spectacular, just white meat, a little chewier than chicken with no distinctive flavour. The ambience though, was something very special. Looking out over the harbour we began our meal just on sunset and, as the glow faded, the wharf and jetty lights came on bringing vertical streaks of colour to a body of water calm as a sheet of glass. And all the while the climate was balmily perfect. If an arm bearing an Excalibur had slowly risen from the water and chopped up my crocodile meat I don’t think I would have batted an eyelid. The scent of frangipani filled the air (from a vase on the table) and each table had an oil lamp. The twin aromas of kerosene and frangipani go surprisingly well together with a hint of satay and coconut husk smoke. I didn’t want to leave. And when we did, we didn’t have to go far – about thirty metres in fact. At Phil’s almost insistence we slept in the council car park right outside. “If anyone comes around just tell them you’re my uncle and I’ve asked you to sleep here and keep an eye on the place” he said.
At the end of the harbour jetty, just on twilight every night, thirty or so restaurants open their doors where you can order your meal and sit out next to the water to eat it. Every night hundreds of locals turn up to eat out cheaply in the cool of the evening. It was there that I saw a schnitzel bar advertising schnitzels I’d never seen before. Besides more conventional fare they offered schnitzels made from buffalo, crocodile and camel. There’s a free show there every evening when the patrons throw their fish and chip left overs to the fish in the harbour next to them. I’ve been in a few restaurants in the Mediterranean where people do this but Darwin harbour jetty fish feeding is special because of the size of the living fish that eat the dead fish thrown over the side. They’re huge, silver, flat sided things; big round discs like serving trays with fins on and there are scores of them flashing around in the lights of the jetty. I asked the locals what they were called. I got three answers; bat fish, moon fish and sun fish. Neither was on any of the menus.
On Wednesday nights literally thousands of people turn up at Mindil Beach where there’s a large food and craft market. Here the folks of Darwin buy their meals and walk over to the beach to watch the sun go down. At a stall called The Road Kill Restaurant I tried camel and emu kebabs. The emu was unexpectedly red meaty in taste and the camel must have given himself up under the misapprehension that he would be given a decent burial.
I really couldn’t find much wrong with Darwin. I think the folks there have it made. We went into their parliament house and even that was really cool. It has a great long grassed balcony on the upper floor where members of the public can sit and eat in the open air restaurant with a view through gently swaying coconut palms overlooking the sea. Everything’s on the sea, the museum and art gallery complex has an unfenced beach at the end of their lawn. In Parliament House we looked into the library and on the wall was a framed photograph of “The Northern Territory Mounted Police Force, trackers and others outside the Pine Creek Hotel (c1911).” The photography for its time was excellent. A bunch of about twenty unshaven, drunken assholes in dirty vests and bracers were pictured sitting at and standing around a table with six whisky bottles on it and each man was holding up a glass for the camera.
Of course, Darwin had to have a drawback or God wouldn’t have reserved paradise for Japanese kamikaze pilots and Iraqi suicide bombers. It’s THE WET. I asked six residents if there was anything they didn’t like about Darwin and the first two words that five of them came up were THE WET. The sixth said “Ah shit mate. Geez, it’d ‘ave to be the fuckin’ wet wouldn’t it?” I didn’t ask how long she’d lived there. Darwin has six months of absolutely wonderful weather, guaranteed sunshine every day and the likelihood of rain so minimal that you can virtually discount it. When the wet comes, and I’m told it can come for three to five months, it turns into a different country.
Violent monsoonal thunderstorms are a regular thing and the skies open up and throw rain down at a rate that’s hard for anyone living elsewhere in Australia to visualise. Roads flood, the city gets cut off from civilisation and the people go slightly crazy. Motorists get angry with each other and the fights start in the pubs. The humidity is inescapable and the effects of a cold shower on the body last for less than five minutes. One lady told me it gets so humid that it sometimes takes her four days to get her towels dry under the veranda. THE WET is also the time when the salt water crocodiles move into just about every swollen river and creek and the deadly box jellyfish infest all the seas for hundreds of kilometres around. This is, of course, in summer when the temperatures soar and people would like to be able to gain some relief from the heat by taking a swim. All year swimming in guaranteed safety can only be done in swimming pools.
At every potential swimming point around Darwin there are signs up telling you not to go in the water between May and October because of the crocs and the box jellyfish. The signs are totally non committal about the remainder of the year and they advise you to take vinegar with you whenever you visit the beach just in case. Unfortunately the signs make no mention of what you actually do with the vinegar. The tourists are left wondering whether to smear themselves in it before entering the water, imbibe it or sprinkle it around the area where they intend swimming. It could have something to do with fish and chips, Christ only knows. Swimming at low tides is hazardous anyway because you can suffer from heat stroke during the long trek across the beach to the water in a place that has eight metre tides.
Somehow we lost our grey haired nomad procession in Darwin. They just didn’t put in an appearance save for a handful of caravans and we figured they were all holed up around swimming pools in the caravan parks on the outskirts. We thought we’d come across them again when we reached Kakadu National Park but they were thin on the ground there too. I suppose we could have checked the hospitals or funeral parlours but we didn’t have time – Kakadu beckoned.
I saw two ingenious inventions in Darwin that appealed to me. The first was a custom made, designer lobster pot on the foreshore a little way north of the city. It was made from a supermarket trolley. The basket had been detached from the running gear and the open top had been filled in with the bottom of another trolley. The swinging end you push in to make a kids seat was modified so that it opened to get the crayfish out and at the small end an entry hole had been made with the loose ends folded inside in such a way that the crayfish could enter but not easily exit.
The second invention was a modification to a bicycle so that the wheels went in the opposite direction to the handlebars. A guy at Mindil Beach night market was earning money with it. He had a sign saying “Left is right, Right is left” and a T-shirt to match. He had a carpet on the grass with lines drawn across it and all you had to do was to cycle on his bike from one line to the other. It was only the length of most people’s lounge rooms but nobody could do it. People were queued up to try and paid five dollars each for three attempts. People of all ages would start off, and fall off, immediately. The guy whose bike it was had learnt to ride the thing and every so often he’d sit astride it and cycle up and down to show just how easy it was. It took twenty minutes for five people to loose their money. He was earning seventy five bucks an hour! If he was working two nights a week he’d have been doing pretty well.
It was the dry season and along the road to Kakadu much burning was taking place. They burn one side of the road at a time on a fairly regular basis and using this ancient technique they avoid the bushfires that used to rage in the area for a couple of hundred years after white people first took possession of the land. They haven’t got it quite right yet but I guess they’re learning. The people lighting and managing the fires were called The Mary River Land Management Group. They’d posted a sign at the side of the road - it was on fire. Three kilometres further on was a sign saying Termite Mounds and as we pulled off the road to take a look two men in Texas Ranger type hats and a small fire tender were desperately trying to save the boardwalk around them. They were too late, it was well ablaze.
We had begun to see isolated spots of fire in some places quite far removed from the burning off that was taking place. We stopped at a couple of these places and decided that it had to be the work of arsonists. It was, but not of the human kind. Birds were doing it. Whistling kites (known in Kakadu as fire kites or in Aboriginal circles as burnum burnum) are major beneficiaries of any fires in the area. Fire drives before it small mammals, reptiles, grasshoppers and other kite goodies that they swoop on and eat. They’ve become so accustomed to controlled fires that stop at one side of the road that they pick up burning embers and drop them across the other side in an attempt to get another fire started. It sounds fanciful but it actually happens.
We stopped for the night around six kilometres before the Kakadu National Park itself in a roadside truck stop some twenty minutes from passing the last fire. We had dinner and turned in but I woke up at two o’clock. I could smell smoke and when I went outside I could see that the fire had caught us up. We had to move a few metres to the middle of the service road where there was no grass to catch light. I mentioned it to a Park Ranger the next day who told me that it was more than likely the “bloody kites” that had started the fire off again.
Reversible yoghurt containers. How come nobody makes reversible yoghurt containers? Flavoured yoghurts make easy quick, cool snacks that fit in campervan fridges. What’s more you can buy them in any outback shop that has a fridge. We eat one each almost every day and there’s a bonus. I forget what it is but it’s something to do with Flora in the colon. Dunno why we need margarine in our colons though. There’s never quite enough yoghurt in the container but there would be if you could lick the inside. It’s infuriating trying to get those last slivers of the stuff with the rounded edge of the spoon. When I get back to civilisation I’ve decided to devote my life to producing the first prototype reversible yoghurt container. I’ve been studying rubber gloves and I’m quietly confident that rubber glove technology holds the key. Remember – you heard it first in these pages. Besides Flora there’s that other bread spread that’s called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” Somebody told me there’s a new communion wafer in the USA called “I Can’t Believe It’s not Jesus.”
At one point, on route to Kakadu, we crossed the East Alligator River. There were construction traffic lights on it and as we waited for them to turn green Clare was reading the sign next to them. It said that this construction was a “bridge lengthening project.” Two gigantic crocodiles lay sunning themselves on the far bank and I hoped the bridge was by now lengthened to the point where it reached the other side or we’d be in the shit good and proper.
We stayed our first night in Kakadu in a campground near another part of that same river where it’s tidal and both fresh and saltwater crocs, fish and a variety of watery nasties live. A bit before dusk we walked down to a boat ramp. Across the river was Arnhem Land where entry without a permit is forbidden for everybody except the Aboriginal people who live there. A large family of Aborigines were on the opposite, Arnhem Land, bank. There were probably six adults, the women in gaily coloured skirts and tops, and an equal number of kids some of whom wore little or nothing. Two men made up the party each fishing with a rod. The women fished with lines and they sent some of the kids away who came back later with three quite big dead tree branches. Two of the smallest kids went into the water and splashed around for a few minutes and wandered back out again. It was a relaxed scene and the kids were having a ball chasing each other up and down the sandy river beach. Suddenly one of the women became very animated and everybody else came over to where she was fishing. She’s caught a big sting ray and began hauling it, flapping, out of the water. As soon as it was clear of the water the kids set upon it with the dead tree branches. One of the women stopped them and picking up a stick showed them exactly where to hit it and they started all over again. I don’t think any of them were more than four years old.
I wanted a photograph of the family and I went a few paces along the beach on our side of the bank and stood on the root of a big old tree balancing myself with my back on the trunk. I looked to one side and about ten paces from me was a three meter long crocodile lying on the sand facing down towards the water. I was excited and told Clare who came and looked at it too. We both thought it was of the saltwater, dangerous type. I took a couple of photos of it and looked for someone to tell about it. A white guy and his wife and toddler were standing on the boat ramp fishing and I asked if they knew anything about crocodiles. The wife asked where it was and I showed her. “Yeah, that’s a Salty” she said casually and went back to her fishing.” All three of them were standing only one pace from the water’s edge. The tide was coming in quite fast and we watched the croc for twenty minutes or so as the water rose. It didn’t move a millimetre even as the water covered it. All it did was lift its snout imperceptibly to keep its nostrils clear.
In the morning we took a cruise on the river which was run by the Kakadu park rangers. Two were Aborigines and the third was a white guy who’d lived all his thirty eight years in Kakadu and was raised with Aboriginal kids. The skipper showed us the life jackets which were stowed in a rack above our heads and told us that if the boat tipped over we shouldn’t cling to them but push them ahead of us and swim towards them all the time. The reason for this, he said, was that they were colourful and crocodiles liked colourful objects. He said he’d seen a boat turn over before and the first things the crocodiles went for were the colourful life jackets. I looked around and saw that Clare and I were the most colourfully dressed on the entire boat. He told us that the river contained sharks and sting rays too although he didn’t elaborate on their colour preferences.
It was a very informative hour and a half and we were glad we did it, not least because we stopped briefly on a beach in Arnhem Land and the two Aboriginal guys gave us a talk and made fire from two sticks, blew didgeridoos and demonstrated spear throwing with a woomera. The fire making was doubly impressive because it only took two or three minutes. At the end of it one of them asked if we had any questions and an old lady asked if they rubbed stones together to make fire. The Aboriginal guy said that he’d just demonstrated how they made fire from two sticks. “Yes” she said “but I thought you could rub stones together and make fire” He didn’t now what to say and looked over his shoulder at his Aboriginal colleague who shrugged. He then looked at his white colleague who said “beats me” and shrugged. He turned back to the old lady, cleared his throat and said “up ’ere, we make ‘im with wood. Stones up ‘ere don’t burn too good.” I forgot myself and burst out laughing.
We saw lots of crocodiles on the East Alligator that day and we were told by the rangers that there are an estimated sixty thousand of them in Kakadu alone. As we cruised along the rangers pointed out various plants on the bank and told us what they were used for in Aboriginal society. The fresh water mangrove was best. They crushed up the leaves and threw them into the water in areas where they knew that unreachable fish would be under the banks. It worked like a poison but what it actually did was to deplete the oxygen in the water temporarily sending the fish to sleep. They’d float to the surface where some were harvested and the rest left alone to recover and be there for another day. However, that wasn’t what impressed me most about the fresh water mangrove tree. In times gone by it was also used for the punishment of severe crimes. They would make the culprit eat the stuff and it would make him suffocate by swelling his air passages up. They’d give him a straw which he’d have to ram up his nose to breath through which meant he’d have a fair chance of surviving but not be keen to repeat the offence that led to the punishment.
Later on, and with a little trepidation, we walked along the river bank looking for crocs to take photos of. We knew where we’d seen them from the boat and the rangers said they’d spend hours in the same place so we kept our distance from the water and tip toed along to where we’d seen them. It was quite an adrenaline rush knowing that there was something out there that could, and if hungry would, eat us. I’ve never considered myself as prey before. I had once been chased up a tree by a bison in a Polish forest and had to watch while it trampled my camera. I’d been charged by a wild boar too but in those cases I was on their turf and they wanted to show me who was boss. They didn’t want to eat me. The only other animal scare I’d had was thinking that I was being followed by a rabid dog. That was scary for a while but it just turned out to be curious and had a deformed upper lip that bared its teeth and made it dribble and look vicious.
RABIES DAY
On that occasion I was living in a small village in the north east of Poland up near the Byelorussian border and a rabid wolf had been seen in the forest nearby. Rabid dogs and wolves never seem to go and die in the forest; they always wander into the villages for some reason. Because of this we had an annual Rabies Day when the vet came and inoculated all the village dogs. I remember he first time it happened when I was living there.
Our soltys (village head) visited us at eight o’clock one morning and said we couldn’t go out until the dog had been inoculated. I was just leaving the house to go into the local town for a nine o’clock dental appointment but the soltys said
"Sorry, you can't go out, it's rabies day"
"It's what?"
"Rabies day"
My Polish isn’t bad but I’d never heard the word rabies in Polish and I didn't know what he was talking about.
“Rabies day?" I said, "what the hell's rabies day?"
"You know, that disease the wolves get. Your Misha’s got to be vaccinated against it. It's compulsory. You've got to take her down to the cross roads."
"What if I don't?"
“You'll have to take her into town and have it done or they can fine you. They can even put her down."
"OK I'll be there"
I put the lead on our Misha and hurried off down to the cross roads. I needn't have bothered to hurry because when I arrived there was a queue of 15 people and, I suppose, 25 dogs. It seems we were the last to find out about rabies day and, although I was in a hurry, the operation hadn't even started and the vet was still putting his equipment together.
Rabies day was quite a social event in the village as every single household had at least one dog and quite a few families had two or three. The word social, of course, doesn't necessarily mean sociable and two of the men in the queue weren't on speaking terms. Anton and Marian hadn't spoken for a month because of an incident which had occurred at the start of haymaking.
Not all of the power poles in the village were earthed and when a thunderstorm was immanent folks all pulled the plugs on their televisions in case they blew up. During haymaking Anton was on the way home one evening when he stopped to shake some sand out of his boots and for this purpose he had leaned against a telegraph pole with both hands while he tried to kick one of his boots off.
A tractor came up the lane pulling behind it a cart-load of hay, on top of which were three men including Marian who spotted Anton clutching the telegraph pole shaking one of his legs. Marian was a young, enthusiastic person and sometimes tended to be a little impulsive. On this occasion he summed up the situation in a flash.
He assumed that Anton was being electrocuted by the unearthed power pole and, taking his pitchfork in hand, leapt from the top of the travelling haystack bringing down the pitchfork handle across Anton's wrists in an effort to disengage him from the source of the problem. Anton ended up with a broken wrist and had to be taken to the local hospital on the back of the tractor and then had to rely on help from others to bring his hay in. Now they both stood in the queue three places from one another, each trying to pretend that he hadn't seen the other.
It was the same for the dogs too, some of them hated each other and were anxious to show it. Dogs on Polish farms are invariably small snappy creatures which take up about the same amount of space as a twenty litre water container and they're kept on chains for most of their lives. They're not badly treated, in fact they're usually the subjects of much affection but still, they seldom get to go anywhere unless they break their chains (or sometimes, strings). Now, when you keep a dog on a chain all the time it usually becomes aggressive and that was the case with practically every dog in the village. Rabies day was the day when they could all get together and decide who's going to be the boss for another year.
Dogs who never got to meet, who only barked and howled at each other from afar and who knew each other only from the scent carried on the wind all got to bark, growl, slobber & snap at each other only on this one day. The Villagers didn’t walk their dogs and therefore didn’t have dog leads, so most of the dogs were either carried in their owners arms or on short pieces of old baling twine. Old Polish baling twine, like new Polish baling twine, is not the strongest of materials with which to secure an eager village mongrel and some of them broke loose. Others simply jumped out of their owners arms and it was on for young & old.
There were fights going on all around and under the vet's car, owners bumping into each other as they hurtled back and forth cursing their respective pooches and people saying; "Well, your dog started it, my little Maciek was minding his own business until that ugly wretch of yours went for him"
The vet eventually sorted himself out and sat crosswise in the passenger seat of the car, notebook in hand, as his first client stepped forward. It was Big Jan the plumber. Big Jan was the roughest toughest man in the village and was held in awe by many because he could turn the nettle cutting machine for hours on end without a break. Nettles are good feed for pigs but first they need to be crushed in the machine and this was Jan's forte. I tried the nettle crushing machine once and could barely keep it going with two hands but big Jan could spin it with one hand and feed the nettles in with the other. Yes, he was a man’s man was Big Jan although not from choice. He was a man's man because no woman would have him.
The vet licked his pencil and looked up at the Cyclops towering before him. The little mongrel in Jan's arms seemed to fade seamlessly into his long straggly beard. Big Jan was almost completely bald and now with this little pair of eyes peering out of his beard it looked for all the world as if his head was stuck on upside down.
"Name?"
"Jan Stachlewski"
"Is that the dog’s name or your name?"
"My name"
"I don't want your name; I want the dog’s name"
Big Jan leaned towards the vet's ear & muttered something.
"Speak up, I can't hear you"
"Amour" (The word is used as cupid in Polish)
"So that's Amour Stachlewski is it?"
"Mmmm"
There was sniggering in the ranks which stopped abruptly when Jan, indignant, turned around. The vet did his work, took the money and Big Jan headed for home, his Cupid in his arms. Old Mrs Romanowski was next and when the vet had finished she wanted to talk about her problem cat.
"He's so fussy, he won't eat anything I give him lately and he's loosing weight. I was thinking about that Kit E Kat advertised on TV, do you think he'd eat that?"
"Mrs Romanowski my dear, 20 tins of Kit E Kat would probably come to more than your monthly pension but I'm sure that the cat would love it"
End of discussion.
A few more dogs & owners came and went without incident until Stankiewicz the poacher fronted up. He had 4 dogs tied together with string and had to untie each one as its turn came and tie the remaining three to the vet’s car door handle with another piece of string. One of his dogs, Hubert, was, to say the least, unusual in appearance. It could best be described as a cocker spaniel cross, crossed that is, with an armadillo. It bore all the ancestral hallmarks of the cocker spaniel but in place of fur it had scales everywhere except for its lower legs.
It wasn't a pretty sight and was made all the more unsightly by the addition of a white plastic bucket over its head, placed there, as he told the vet, “to stop Hubert scratching his scabby ears.” The vet wasn't at all impressed with Hubert and donned his plastic gloves before touching him. The queue broke apart and all stood around the car in silence to watch. Stasiek was first to speak
"Whatever that dog's got is most likely infectious, you should have the bloody thing put down"
"Mind your own business Stasiek Kowalski, Hubert will be right as rain in a couple of weeks. Old mother Miankowska's given me some stuff to rub over him"
"Mother Miankowska? what would she know about dogs she's a bloody witch?"
"She's not a witch, she's a herbalist. She cured my feet, Mother Miankowska, the doctors didn't know what was wrong with them but Old Mother Miankowska fixed them up in no time"
Of course what nobody was saying was that Old Mother Miankowska was Stankiewicz's aunt but a timid little voice came out of the crowd.
"My husband would still be alive if it wasn't for Mother Miankowska"
You could have heard a pin drop and the vet, disguising a smirk, stuck the needle into Scabby Hubert's wrinkled red neck. Scabby Hubert let out a hell of a shriek and turned on the vet but was prevented from biting him by the white plastic bucket. We stood there as Stankiewicz tied and untied his three pieces of string and presented the vet with his next offering. It too was a little out of the ordinary. It was 2 dogs long, half a dog high and covered in long hair like a silky terrier. It was as though Stankiewicz had purchased an Old English Sheepdog self assembly kit and hadn't fully understood the instructions. I could imagine the leg extension pieces being scattered around on the floor of his barn somewhere. Or perhaps it was intentional, a custom made dog from a kit?
The scene - The Stankiewicz kitchen in the evening:
"Give me the small screwdriver dear"
"It's there in front of you Stan"
"Not that one, the Philips"
"I hope you're going to clean that lot up after you"
"Mmmm"
"What are those other bits?"
"Leg extensions"
"Aren't you going to put them on then?
"No, it'll be too high - it'll be over the fence as soon as I put the batteries in"
"Well, just don't leave them on the kitchen table, that's all"
"I've already sold them to Adam”
"What does Adam want with them?"
"He's going to put them on his dachshund - stop it getting under his fence"
While all this was going through my head, Kristow the village drunk came staggering down the road with a fairly respectable looking mongrel on a leather lead. The poor thing was having to dance like John Travolta to avoid being trodden on as it kept a wary eye on its owners staggering movements in a vain attempt to anticipate the direction of the next lurch.
Kristow almost pulled up when he reached the car, that is to say he was only moving backwards & forwards by a step or two. He spent a few seconds trying to get Stankiewicz's long haired whatever it was into focus and then:
"Is that a dog? Is that a doggg? 'eh, a dog? haaa. You'd have to give it a piece of sausage before you could kick it up the arse or you'd never know which way round it was. Haaaa. Look, look everybody isssa dog' 'eh? Haaaa"
Kristow was having trouble telling which way round he himself was and, in particular, which way was up and he fell across the bonnet of the vet's car. Two men from the queue laid him down in the back of a cart after assuring him that they'd take care of his dog and he promptly fell asleep. More pooches were punctured during which another argument developed between a farmer and the wife of the shop owner in which she tried to pin the parenthood of her latest litter of pups on his dog and then came Jakub's turn.
"What's her name?"
"Don't know"
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"She hasn't got a name"
I saw one man in the queue nudge another and smirk
"Well, what do you call her when you want her to come?"
"I don't have to call her, she's always on the chain"
"Well, I have to have a name"
"Call her what you like then"
"Alright she's to be known as Kropka. OK?"
"It's OK with me"
"How old is she?"
"Don't know"
"Oh come on, don't you remember when you got her?"
Someone at the back of the queue yelled out that she must have been three because she was from the same litter as his own dog; and the vet filled in the appropriate space on the form.
"Alright, give her to me then"
Something went wrong with the handover and the dog broke free and ran around the other side of the car with Jakub in pursuit. The dog quite obviously thought that it was all a game and darted back and forth around the car as Jakub ran after it in his rubber boots getting redder and redder in the face.
"Whore" he shouted. "Come here whore"
The dog immediately stood to attention and trotted up to Jakub head down, tail between its legs. The secret was out, the whole village now knew the dog's real name and roars of laughter filled the air. Old ladies started whispering to each other behind cupped hands.
"Well I never, did you see that? Whatever's it coming to, fancy giving the poor animal a name like that."
"Yes, I know. I've never liked him you know, he treats his wife terribly. Mrs Siepietowska told me that he locked her out of the house one night and she had to sleep at her sister’s house. Just because she gave him salad. Said he'd been working like a dog all day and he wanted proper food when he came home of an evening."
"Yes, I know, I know. That's what I mean you see - man like that"
Our Misha was last in the queue and when the vet produced the vaccine bottle I asked for a clean needle. Every dog including Scabby Hubert had been vaccinated with the same needle and it hadn't been so much as wiped clean. The vet didn't object. He just reached into the back of the car and grabbed a new needle. A group of dog owners were standing talking within earshot and one of them asked why his dog didn't get a clean needle.
"You didn't ask" replied the vet.
"Well, you should have changed needles anyway. Disease can be transmitted through dirty needles"
"Yes but"
"The department gives you needles and you save them so you can use them yourself in your own practice."
"Now, look here.............."
I left them arguing and set off hot foot for my dentists appointment arriving late with apologies.
"Sorry we're late. It's rabies day in our village" I said.
He gave me a strange look. “Don’t worry” I said. “I'm taking tablets for it."
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next rock formation and the one after that are not mentioned here. Instead, I’m going to write about hot water. But first, the countryside. It started to pick up enormously when we were a couple of hundred miles out of Darwin. All that stunted scrubby stuff began to give way to taller tortured gum trees with a reddish tinge to their trunks. Salmon gums some people called them. The red ant hills which we’d been seeing for a week or more began to elongate; some topping the two metre mark. The spindly, unhealthy looking wild kapok trees, although almost leafless, displayed their bright yellow blooms. Everything was gradually becoming greener, the grasses taller and the cattle were those Quasimodo type humped backed Brahmin things suited to the tropics. There were palm trees too and they’ve always seemed exotic to me.
And now for the hot water. The place is called Douglas Hot Springs. And everyone should go there. I’ve seen quite a few hot springs in different parts of the world but none holds a candle to these. Again, I wonder why it is that there are no features like this in the seven capital cities that are home to the overwhelming bulk of Australia’s population. Why didn’t the Rainbow Serpent position hot springs like this in Parramatta? There must have been some kind of deal between the Rainbow Serpent and the Pope long ago whereupon it was decided that all the good bits would be put in the middle somewhere out of range of the people.
The river at the Douglas Hot Springs which, in the wet season is a fierce and raging torrent that rips big trees from off its banks, subsides to a beautiful clear running stream by the time the dry season arrives. In a separate channel runs a rivulet of clear hot water and at one point it meets the cold river water channel which is everyone’s favourite spot. The hot water really is hot and comes from a big bubbling pool where, according to the national parks information board heated rain water that has soaked into the earth in days gone by breaks the surface. The hot pool is around a quarter the size of a soccer field and is fringed with Pandanus palms. At night or early in the morning you can’t see the other side of it for steam and it comes out of the ground so hot you can’t bear to stand in it.
Two hundred meters downstream from the pool the heated water is just bearable and there are natural pools and shallows where you can sit awhile before walking across to the river that runs alongside to cool down. Another fifty metres downstream the hot and cold waters come together and sitting in the water there is a very pleasant experience. So pleasant was it that for three mornings in a row we went down there and sat in it before breakfast and didn’t get out until the rush hour started an hour and a half later.
All the other hot springs I’ve seen have either been sulphurous and smelly or have been made into swimming pools but here the waters are sweet and crystal clear and you can just sit on the clean sandy bottom looking up through the tropical trees at the blue sky. Colourful kingfishers and bee eaters flit from branch to branch. White and pink cockatoos circulate in the azure sky above the trees and small stripy fish move constantly in and out of the warm water. It’s a small piece of paradise spoiled only by the thought that there are other people out there in their tents and caravans finishing their cups of tea before coming down to join you.
There are parts of the waters where you can adjust your position so as to have warm testicles, cold feet and a hot back. A body’s length away you can slide into another spot where you raise your feet to warm them or lower them for the reverse effect.
There’s a film I saw a few years back called Baraka. The opening sequence was of a warm pool of water in the mountains of Japan somewhere surrounded by snow. It was full of monkeys, some with snow on their heads and icicles on their beards. They were sitting there just keeping warm and checking each others heads out for lice. The scene that greeted us the first day we arrived at Douglas Hot Springs was so close that the human scene seemed a perfect parody of the monkeys; as if it had been set up by a filmmaker. It looked like a re-make of Baraka featuring Dianne Fossey’s Gorillas In The Mist. A ring of fifteen of silver haired, overweight pensioners sat in the steaming water all facing one another and chattering away like so many apes.
I got talking to one big old silverback named Des from Western Australia who, we observed, used to wait until he was sure nobody was looking his way and go off upstream somewhere. He told me that he’d been fishing the rivers of the top end for thirty years and that what he didn’t know about barramundi fishing wasn’t worth knowing. He was probably right. He would only leave the camp ground for fifteen minutes at a time and come back with three or four reasonably sized fish. He obviously had traps set somewhere because he never took any fishing gear with him, just a sack to bring them back. One afternoon Clare and I set out on a walk upriver to try and locate his net or whatever he was using but we didn’t find anything. What we did see though was a crocodile. It was only a harmless freshwater model and only about five feet long but the first we’d seen on our own in the wild. It was quite exciting standing there watching it sunning itself on a tree branch but as soon as we made a noise it slid down into the water and was gone.
Next to where we were camped one afternoon there was a lot of squawking going on. I soon got used to it and took no notice but Clare went to investigate. There was a bower bird’s bower there with a long olive python slowly sliding through it. The squawking was coming from the male bower bird and the ten or so females he was trying to court. The python took no notice of them or of us as we hassled around trying to photograph it.
On the last day we were at this place I’d just got up from the hot pool to walk downstream to the cooler ones and three young girls in bikinis were making their way down the bank. This was very unusual and I checked to see that it wasn’t an apparition but no, none of them had white hair. As they neared me one called out:
“Is this where the hot spring is?”
“Yes” I said. “It’s the fountain of youth. I was ninety two when I got here last Wednesday”
She said “Another couple of weeks then and you might score”
We left Douglas Hot Springs because we ran out of electricity and needed to run the engine to put more charge in the batteries. We had a generator but we were parked in a no generator area and I’d forgotten that it was out of fuel anyway.
According to the travel books the next items on the agenda in the long line of Outback rock formations was to be found in Lichfield National Park. Owing to a shortage of roads occasioned by a shortage of population due to a two hundred year old case of acute national xenophobia, there was nowhere else to go except Darwin so that’s where we headed for. Lichfield was en route.
Right on the edge of the Lichfield National Park there is a lovely green little oasis of a village called Batchelor. It’s most unexpected and it wouldn’t be there but for the fact that there was once a uranium mining venture nearby called Rum Jungle and Batchelor was the company town. Needless to say cappuccino is unavailable even though it’s less that two hours out of the State capital but there’s a supermarket there with a reasonable range of food in it. The supermarket is also the garage and the Post Office and the local Centrelink agent and it sits amidst a whole village full of mowed green grass and palm trees. There were little houses with mowed green lawns and tropical flowers and one street was lined with big frangipani trees. I think I’m getting homesick or civilisation sick just thinking about it. We’ve only been away for a couple of months.
Several kilometres past Batchelor is the park’s first attraction. A collection of small rock formations. However, these rock formations are different. They were made by termites. Termites get hold of granules of dirt and add spittle to them and make these magnificent obelisks called magnetic anthills. They’re called that because they are very thin and wide with the sharp edges facing roughly north south. Some of them are taller than me and wider at the base than I could stretch my arms to. Keep reading and in the last chapter I’ll tell you how tall I am and how far my arms stretch. Until then you’ll just have to look at the picture on page 112. It’s a picture of Adolph Hitler at the Nuremberg rally of 1943. I’m a bit taller and not as wide.
Now, what’s peculiar about these magnetic anthills is that they’re all in one place. They sit in a long paddock looking like those ancient standing stones to be found in the British or French countryside. Either side of the long paddock the anthills are quite different. They’re called Cathedral Anthills and are not magnetic. They’re also very high but they’re fluted all around in maybe fifteen long flutes. They look something like badly formed, elongated lemon squeezers. We spent a few days touring around Lichfield National Park but didn’t come across any more magnetic anthills. Most of Lichfield’s attractions are waterfalls – about eight of them. They were all good to look at and we walked up the sides of and around those that had paths – wonderful rock formations, all of them – and if we’d been geologists they would have been even better.
One attraction in Lichfield really did attract us. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Mother in Law. It’s a swamp in Gippsland that I used to visit from time to time. But up here close to Darwin we visited a much better one. It’s a shame the old dear’s dead really. It was called Tabletop Swamp and it was so attractive to tourists that although the park was full of peregrinating pensioners we were the only ones there. I think most people still regard swamps as dirty smelly places where nasty germs breed and so may be less inclined to go down roads that have swamp written on the signposts. Tabletop swamp was just like one of these places you see on TV or in the pages of National Geographic but never think you’ll come across. Out of the lake grew big paperbark trees that reflected in the still water at their feet and purple water lilies were in bloom on the water’s surface. The lake was surrounded by grass growing well above two metres high and we walked around it ever aware that we couldn’t go right down to the water’s edge in case crocodiles were lurking. Then, suddenly, there was a big rush of water and David Attenborough broke the surface with a water lily root between his teeth……..sorry, I got carried away. It’s not true. But that’s what the mood was like.
After taking in several geological objects d’art we couldn’t find anywhere to free camp so we pulled into the campground at Wangi Falls. The falls and the walk around them were lovely. Two waterfalls dropped into a deep clear pool surrounded by tropical plants. Everything was so perfectly placed that it was almost artificial and Disneylike. The pool was advertised in the brochures as being a safe place to swim and there were handrails and steps down into the water There was also a Beware of Crocodiles and a No Swimming sign there too! With the unusual amount of rain that the Top End had received over the past three weeks some of the creeks were swollen to the point where saltwater crocodiles would have been able to make their way upstream to the pool and the rangers had closed it off. It was a mixed blessing in that although we’d have loved a swim in that clear water the tourist buses, whose operators knew about the crocodiles, were staying away so we had the place more or less to ourselves.
In the campground we parked between two other motorhomes. One was a regular motor home with two elderly ladies in it and it was called “Our ‘Appy One” The other was a thirty seater seater bus with a trailer on the back that housed a large 4WD with a dingy on top. It was white in colour and spotlessly clean. In big black lettering across the top they’d had sign written “Nights in White Satin” under which in smaller lettering it said “Never Reaching the End” At the bottom left of it were the words “Two Lost Souls” On the side in very big black script was painted “Outback Floor Sanding” I tried to imagine but my imagination couldn’t cope with the job. A couple of Ku Klux Klan members each with a sanding machine wandering the Outback searching for their souls but destined never to find them. Fascinated though I was I made up my mind not to introduce myself.
At Wangi falls campground we at last came into close contact with some wildlife. The first was a big monitor lizard, it may have been a goanna or a perentie or something else but it was big and in need of inflating. Clare first heard it rustling around while she was painting outside. Yes, the paintings are for sale folks. She beckoned me to get the camera. The lizard was shy but obviously wanted to hang around the campsite as it was an easy way to get fed. I took about twenty pics of it but couldn’t get near enough so we decided to bait it with chicken in a place where I’d already set the camera up on a tripod. It soon snaffled up the three bits of chicken we put out before I could get a decent shot so Clare showed me a chicken bone. “D’you think he’d eat that?” “Yeah, they eat baby birds and things, it wouldn’t hurt him.” I said airing my advanced herpetological knowledge.
We threw the chicken bone to the spot where I had the camera trained and waited. Cautiously the lizard approached and then, real quick like, he grabbed the bone and kind of shook it down his throat. He kept jogging his head upward and jiggling and shaking like cockatoos sometimes do. Then he turned sideways and we could see that the bone was stuck in his throat. He looked like Frankenlizard. He had this huge bolt-like thing sticking out of both sides of his neck. “Oh Christ” Clare said “d’you think he’ll die?” I didn’t know but I hoped nobody else was watching.
Frankenlizard wasn’t shy anymore, he was desperate. He walked around the upright posts that delineated our camping spot pressing and rubbing the lump in his neck against them in an effort to redirect it. He gave up on that and lay down rubbing his throat on the ground. I was scared to try to help him in case he scratched me but after about five minutes he managed to cough the bone up. Then he grabbed it and made off with it at high speed. I had a good photograph by this time but we deleted it because it looked so grotesque.
Our second encounter with the area’s wildlife was only a few minutes later. I was sitting on the toilet in the toilet block and I happened to look up. There was a great big snake wound around one of the rafters above my head. He didn’t move. But I did. I looked all over for a ranger but couldn’t find one. When I went back in the toilet a few hours later the snake had gone but that was even more of a worry – he could have been somewhere closer than the rafters.
Erasmus, like most motor homes and caravans these days has a shower and a toilet and that’s a great comfort, particularly when it’s raining and you don’t want to go outside. My travels in campervans though, weren’t always this commodious. Back in the late eighties I lived in a van for an extended period of time in Communist Eastern and Central Europe.
One day in what was then Czechoslovakia we were on our way down to the Austrian border and began looking for a toilet or, at least, a decent sized clump of bushes. In a sort of driver’s roadside stop we saw a public toilet sign. Public toilets were a rarity anywhere in Iron Curtain countries and we pulled up. The toilet was like a big wardrobe with two doors and twin old-fashioned wooden toilet seats; the types that have buckets under them. These toilet seats though, hadn’t had buckets under them for a long while but people had still been using them. A swarm of flies greeted me as I opened the doors and the whole scene was absolutely foul. I took some toilet paper and headed for the trees behind the toilets but found that dozens of others had done the same and it was dangerous to tread anywhere in the vicinity.
I crossed the road but all I could see was an embankment going down to a field where people were picking strawberries. I went back to the van and took out our trusty paint bucket and a supermarket bag which I stretched over it like a bin liner and made use of it behind the toilets. I tied a knot in the bag and then, emerging from behind the toilet with a clean paint bucket in one hand and a plastic bag full of poo in the other, I thought about what I should do with the bag. I didn’t want to drive off in the van with it and I didn’t want to throw it in the bushes because the plastic would be around forever. It was then that I saw two garbage bins attached to either side of a light pole and I walked over and placed the bag in one of them. I stepped back into the van to find that Alenka already had the kettle on so I washed my hands and waited for her to make coffee.
I was sitting at the table looking out of the back window when a tramp’s head, unkempt and unshaven, popped up above the embankment on the opposite side of the road. He scrambled to the top and stood at the side of the road waiting for a truck to pass. Then, after looking both ways, he shuffled across to our side of the road. He made a beeline for the rubbish bins and started going though the one I’d just put the bag of poo in. It was a cold morning and as he opened the bag I could see a cloud of steam rise up. He recoiled with a start shouting what I took to be a string of Czech obscenities at our van whilst, at the same time, making a series of internationally recognizable hand gestures. Alenka was yelling at me to drive off but I was paralysed with laughter and stretched out on the floor so the tramp couldn’t see me. Then we both lay on the floor trying to control our laughter while waiting for him to kick the shit out of the van. When I peeped through the curtains a few minutes later there was no sign of him. We quickly poured the coffee down the sink and drove off but as we were pulling out onto the road we found he’d been laying in wait for us. He came running through the trees swinging the bag around his head like David when he slew Goliath with a stone from a slingshot. He let go of it at the wrong moment and it flew up in the air somewhere over the top of the van and we kept on going.
Heading up the Darwin road, after we’d left Wangi falls and Lichfield, we saw the smoke from deliberately lit fires. Not arsonist’s fires (although I was told there’d been a lot of arson about) but controlled fires designed to renew the vegetation as the Aborigines had been doing for tens of thousands of years before the whites came to this continent. We’d seen the results of recent burnings for maybe a hundred kilometres already. On one side of the road the grass would be fairly high and the country looking rather tired but opposing it, across the road, was lush new grass and new shoots on all the eucalyptus trees and fan palms where the area had been recently burnt. It’s taken around two centuries for white Australians to learn that the land was increased by regular firing by the Aborigines. The controlled burning takes place when the grass isn’t too high so there’s no chance of a bushfire. Around the fires corridors are left for the wildlife to escape and it comes back more plentiful than before. It was always called “fire stick farming” and now it’s the accepted way but it’s difficult for the tourists to appreciate as they see fire as a destructive thing. In nearly all the information centres there are leaflets these days explaining the reasons for setting light to the bush.
Half an hour south of Darwin we visited the Territory Wildlife Park, a large chunk of natural bush that included a variety of habitats for animals, reptiles and birds. We’d been in dozens of those places but this one was good. It included a lot of the animals that are destroying large parts of the Australian ecosystem. I knew about camels, water buffalos, goats, cats and pigs but in the park there were Timorese ponies that came originally from Mongolia to Timor centuries ago before being imported into Australia. Balinese cattle and sambar deer were there too. I’d never heard of either but they are just another couple of species that are ruining parts of the Australian eco system.
There was an imposing aquarium too containing a huge saltwater crocodile and it was easy to get to see all of him from the underground tunnel that sided onto his pool. He/she was beautifully patterned and had nice toenails and teeth. I actually got to within the thickness of the glass away from this thing and studied it. It was a little frightening but I still couldn’t tear myself away from it. It was hard to believe that this lethargic looking reptilian could actually erupt with so much speed that it could successfully ambush anything on the whole continent with the exception of road trains. Another thing I saw in the aquarium was a shark that lived in fresh water. It was cruising around with what the Northern Territory restaurants call the fish of the day (barramundi – cod chewsday) and turtles and other fresh water edibles.
I asked the guide about it and she said their park was the only place where these sharks were being exhibited. It was a type of Bull Nosed Shark that had only been discovered & classified within the last year or so. She said that a couple of them had been caught recently and sent overseas to be studied. Overseas must be a hell of a place I always think. She said that it was basically an estuary creature but could live in fresh water quite happily for years and that it grew to three metres in length, could eat humans and go up rivers for many miles. I didn’t know whether to believe it so I asked another guide and got the same answer.
Right next door to the Territory Wildlife Park we saw something amazing. Do you know those archer fish that live up the Amazon and squirt water at insects that fall off branches so they can gobble them up?...........O’h, you don’t. Never mind. I’ll tell you about them. There are these fish that live up the Amazon and they’re called Archer Fish. They don’t have any bows and arrows or anything but some short sighted loony gave them that name. They’re actually squirters or spitters and they eat insects. The way they go about it is to swim up under a fly or mosquito or some other tasty insect and squirt a jet of water at it so it falls into the water and they can eat it.
Well, we’ve got the same thing right here in Australia and they’ve learnt to squirt water at pieces of bread that tourists hold in their fingers. It really blew me away - and I hadn’t been for weeks. There were around fifty of them all about forty centimetres long and they hung around the swimming pool steps at Berry Springs waiting for tourists to turn up with bread. The bread had to be held lightly between forefinger and thumb and half a metre above the water. Then, twenty or so fish would cruise around underneath it and one would squirt the bread out of the hand proffering it. As it hit the water a big scramble would ensue, the winner of which was seldom the fish that had done the squirting. The really cool thing about these archer fish was that if you had bread in your hand and didn’t give it to them because you were too busy saying “fuck me, look at that!!” to those accompanying you, one of these squirty denizens of the shallows would rock on up to the bank and squirt you in the eye as a reminder to get on with it. This behaviour wasn’t coincidence. I tried it on with them a few times.
The archer fish were such a show stopping attraction that they took the eyes away from the place itself and I spent so much time getting squirted and saying “fuck me, look at that!!” that we had to stay the night outside the gates of the place so that we could go back in there for a swim the next morning. As soon as the ranger opened up the park at half past eight we drove into the car park and went down to swim in two of the three warm water pools. The park itself was beautiful with tropical rainforest trees and creepers and expansive grassed areas neatly mown. We had it all to ourselves for an hour before breakfast. No shower or spa bath could ever compare with it. There was even a waterfall that ran warm water. The little river joining the pools was clear and swimmable and we snorkelled among hundreds of fish that hung out under the pandanus roots that grew along the banks. It was one place that I really didn’t want to leave.
We left and drove into Darwin stopping for fuel on the way at one of the very few well run roadhouses we’d experienced since leaving Adelaide. Services at roadhouses is generally abysmal. Whilst it’s true that these places play on their ocker image for tourists there’s still no need for them to be as uninviting as they are. Most of them play on bad taste with inane and smutty notices around the bar in lavatorial humour. Some specialise in an individual bush humour such as walls made from different beer cans or number plates from around the world. Others decorate their bars with baseball caps or international, out of date banknotes. We can all do that, it’s just that we don’t bloody want to. It’s time they took a look at their clientele who have moved on leaving them behind in many cases. By far the most business comes from elderly, retired couples and it’s the sweet old Grannie with permed white hair who’s calling the shots when it comes to where they’ll eat or stop for coffee. She’s not too impressed with these roadhouses that haven’t moved on from the steak and eggs for breakfast era of sweaty truck drivers in blue singlets and thongs (most of whom have also moved on). The old lady wants to see somewhere that’s clean with gingham tablecloths and real tea or coffee from china cups. Time and again we’ve pulled up at roadhouses where there are up to twenty caravans in the parking area with old couples sitting in them who, having bought their petrol, are having their own morning or afternoon tea in their caravans rather than braving the inane atmosphere and the weak Nescafe offered by these establishments.
The service itself and the range of products offered is far from good. We tried in five of them consecutively in an effort to buy distilled water for our batteries only to be told that they were out of stock or simply didn’t stock it. Distilled water has a shelf life of something like forty years so I couldn’t see the problem with stocking it. Petrol, gas and diesel were all these places generally had stock of and even them some of them were out of diesel. None carried a decent range of products like coolants, oils, wiper blades and so forth. Gone are the days when these things had to be transported by camel and ordered months in advance. Now you can email your order to the supplier and get it delivered on the next truck within two days anywhere in Australia. There’s no excuse for running out of stock. Had we not taken spare cans of diesel we could have been marooned until the next delivery in Larimah in the Northern Territory right there on the main Alice Springs/Darwin trunk route. So many times we fuelled up and then went to wash the windscreen only to find that the windscreen washer bucket was empty and there was no tap in sight to fill it. Usually though, there was a few centimetres of muddy water in the bottom that we didn’t want to dirty our windscreen with and the actual rubber windscreen washer tools were invariably broken. I don’t think that there are as many as twenty roadhouses in all of outback Australia that have bothered to asphalt their entrances and forecourts. They’re all red dust that turns to mud when it rains – she’ll be right.
Clare came out of the toilets at a roadhouse on the main Alice Springs/Darwin road and said “let me have the digital camera.” Off she went and returned with a photo of a notice that read “IN THE INTERESTS OF KEEPING THESE TOILETS CLEAN PLEASE REMEMBER TO TURN OFF THE LIGHTS.” I though about it for a long time but could only come up with the thought that if the lights were turned off the toilets would seem cleaner.
Darwin was something of a surprise to us. It was much better looking than either of us had imagined. This northern capital at the very top of the country is a tree lover’s paradise, the very antithesis of the most southerly capital, Hobart. Darwin probably has a thousand civically planted and maintained trees to every one in Hobart. Hobart, in terms of population, is twice the size of Darwin but has only a hundredth of the public space, parks and gardens that one sees in its northern counterpart. Darwin is bright, young and vibrant whereas the southern city is dingy and its buildings ramshackle by comparison. Darwin, of course, is a much more modern city having had the good fortune to have been all but completely demolished in 1974 by Cyclone Tracy. And good fortune it was. In the museum we saw footage of the pre Tracy city. It was a total shit hole built mainly of corrugated iron.
Darwin is very South East Asian in appearance with a profusion of palms and tropical vegetation lining the roads and its many parks. Where it differs from Asian cities, and indeed other Australian cities, is that it has no scruffy and shambolic suburbs. It’s neat, clean and green, colourful and tasteful. It was by far the most attractive city we had visited in Australia.
While we were looking for somewhere to park the van on first entering the little city we saw a small blue signpost saying Fish Feeding. We stopped in the fish feeding car park and paid our entry fee. A lady shoved a ticket into my right hand and six slices of white bread into my left and we walked down the grass to the sea. There was a feeding frenzy going on. Well, there were actually two feeding frenzies going on. Apart from the fish frenzying around in a sea of white sliced bread there were a couple of hundred people frenzying around lobbing bread at them. Every day at high tide for the past forty years this fish feeding ritual has been going on. There must have been a thousand fish there that had turned up for a piece of the old sliced white. They came in all sizes up to well over a metre long and people stood in ankle deep water holding bits of bread and stroking the fish as they took it from their hands.
A rangery looking lady came out of a little office shaped like a boat with an ice cream container full of fish scraps and a pair of tongs. She announced that she was going to feed the meat eaters. We all followed her like she was the Pied Piper. Half way down the boat ramp she stopped and we all stopped behind her. Then, with her tongs she began dispensing the fishy bites throwing them into the sea. Meat eaters came from everywhere and she described them as they came in to take their mid morning fish fingers. When she finished she started her informative and well oiled story about how fish first started coming there to get bread and said that if anyone had any questions they should feel free to interrupt her. I did.
“Do you think bread is a healthy food to feed all these fish on?”
I could see she’d been asked this before as she visibly bristled so I went on.
“It’s just that we’ve been visiting national parks where the signs tell us not to feed the fish bread because it’s not healthy for them”
“We’ve been feeding fish here for more than forty years and they’re still coming back”
“The same ones?”
“How do you mean?”
“Are they the same fish that keep coming back? I mean, do you tag them?”
“No but they’ve been coming back for forty years and I don’t think they’d do that if it wasn’t healthy”
“Yes but how do you know that their parents didn’t die from eating too much bread? I’d live on junk food all the time if someone provided it for me. Even though the cholesterol level in junk food may give me a heart attack I’d keep eating it because it’s easy”
She told me I had a good point and carried on with her talk. A minute or two later she said that fish only had a memory of about twenty seconds. I asked “how come they remember to come back for bread every day then?” I didn’t wait for an answer, I walked away and she didn’t throw anything.
Darwin’s a great place to eat and I can’t resist trying anything I’ve never had before or something I have had before but cooked in a different way. On our first night we went to an establishment called The Barra Shack. It was simple. On an area of public grass right alongside the harbour a guy called Phil had plonked two railway carriages. Either that or they were pre plonked for him by the council. Every night at about six he put out a load of tables and chairs at the water’s edge and created an instant restaurant. There was a small open ended fence as an entrance to the place and sign writing that, with the lights on, reminded me of Luna Park in Melbourne. It was an entirely Asian affair like in Singapore where they set up restaurants in car parks when the sun goes down. It was Asian too, in the way it operated. That is to say the fish was all sold by weight and you picked your piece and they weighed it and quoted you a price for cooking it just as they do in Bangkok.
The cooking was done in the railway carriages and on an outside barbecue burning coconut husks. I had crocodile for the first time. I was sorry to find that it was nothing spectacular, just white meat, a little chewier than chicken with no distinctive flavour. The ambience though, was something very special. Looking out over the harbour we began our meal just on sunset and, as the glow faded, the wharf and jetty lights came on bringing vertical streaks of colour to a body of water calm as a sheet of glass. And all the while the climate was balmily perfect. If an arm bearing an Excalibur had slowly risen from the water and chopped up my crocodile meat I don’t think I would have batted an eyelid. The scent of frangipani filled the air (from a vase on the table) and each table had an oil lamp. The twin aromas of kerosene and frangipani go surprisingly well together with a hint of satay and coconut husk smoke. I didn’t want to leave. And when we did, we didn’t have to go far – about thirty metres in fact. At Phil’s almost insistence we slept in the council car park right outside. “If anyone comes around just tell them you’re my uncle and I’ve asked you to sleep here and keep an eye on the place” he said.
At the end of the harbour jetty, just on twilight every night, thirty or so restaurants open their doors where you can order your meal and sit out next to the water to eat it. Every night hundreds of locals turn up to eat out cheaply in the cool of the evening. It was there that I saw a schnitzel bar advertising schnitzels I’d never seen before. Besides more conventional fare they offered schnitzels made from buffalo, crocodile and camel. There’s a free show there every evening when the patrons throw their fish and chip left overs to the fish in the harbour next to them. I’ve been in a few restaurants in the Mediterranean where people do this but Darwin harbour jetty fish feeding is special because of the size of the living fish that eat the dead fish thrown over the side. They’re huge, silver, flat sided things; big round discs like serving trays with fins on and there are scores of them flashing around in the lights of the jetty. I asked the locals what they were called. I got three answers; bat fish, moon fish and sun fish. Neither was on any of the menus.
On Wednesday nights literally thousands of people turn up at Mindil Beach where there’s a large food and craft market. Here the folks of Darwin buy their meals and walk over to the beach to watch the sun go down. At a stall called The Road Kill Restaurant I tried camel and emu kebabs. The emu was unexpectedly red meaty in taste and the camel must have given himself up under the misapprehension that he would be given a decent burial.
I really couldn’t find much wrong with Darwin. I think the folks there have it made. We went into their parliament house and even that was really cool. It has a great long grassed balcony on the upper floor where members of the public can sit and eat in the open air restaurant with a view through gently swaying coconut palms overlooking the sea. Everything’s on the sea, the museum and art gallery complex has an unfenced beach at the end of their lawn. In Parliament House we looked into the library and on the wall was a framed photograph of “The Northern Territory Mounted Police Force, trackers and others outside the Pine Creek Hotel (c1911).” The photography for its time was excellent. A bunch of about twenty unshaven, drunken assholes in dirty vests and bracers were pictured sitting at and standing around a table with six whisky bottles on it and each man was holding up a glass for the camera.
Of course, Darwin had to have a drawback or God wouldn’t have reserved paradise for Japanese kamikaze pilots and Iraqi suicide bombers. It’s THE WET. I asked six residents if there was anything they didn’t like about Darwin and the first two words that five of them came up were THE WET. The sixth said “Ah shit mate. Geez, it’d ‘ave to be the fuckin’ wet wouldn’t it?” I didn’t ask how long she’d lived there. Darwin has six months of absolutely wonderful weather, guaranteed sunshine every day and the likelihood of rain so minimal that you can virtually discount it. When the wet comes, and I’m told it can come for three to five months, it turns into a different country.
Violent monsoonal thunderstorms are a regular thing and the skies open up and throw rain down at a rate that’s hard for anyone living elsewhere in Australia to visualise. Roads flood, the city gets cut off from civilisation and the people go slightly crazy. Motorists get angry with each other and the fights start in the pubs. The humidity is inescapable and the effects of a cold shower on the body last for less than five minutes. One lady told me it gets so humid that it sometimes takes her four days to get her towels dry under the veranda. THE WET is also the time when the salt water crocodiles move into just about every swollen river and creek and the deadly box jellyfish infest all the seas for hundreds of kilometres around. This is, of course, in summer when the temperatures soar and people would like to be able to gain some relief from the heat by taking a swim. All year swimming in guaranteed safety can only be done in swimming pools.
At every potential swimming point around Darwin there are signs up telling you not to go in the water between May and October because of the crocs and the box jellyfish. The signs are totally non committal about the remainder of the year and they advise you to take vinegar with you whenever you visit the beach just in case. Unfortunately the signs make no mention of what you actually do with the vinegar. The tourists are left wondering whether to smear themselves in it before entering the water, imbibe it or sprinkle it around the area where they intend swimming. It could have something to do with fish and chips, Christ only knows. Swimming at low tides is hazardous anyway because you can suffer from heat stroke during the long trek across the beach to the water in a place that has eight metre tides.
Somehow we lost our grey haired nomad procession in Darwin. They just didn’t put in an appearance save for a handful of caravans and we figured they were all holed up around swimming pools in the caravan parks on the outskirts. We thought we’d come across them again when we reached Kakadu National Park but they were thin on the ground there too. I suppose we could have checked the hospitals or funeral parlours but we didn’t have time – Kakadu beckoned.
I saw two ingenious inventions in Darwin that appealed to me. The first was a custom made, designer lobster pot on the foreshore a little way north of the city. It was made from a supermarket trolley. The basket had been detached from the running gear and the open top had been filled in with the bottom of another trolley. The swinging end you push in to make a kids seat was modified so that it opened to get the crayfish out and at the small end an entry hole had been made with the loose ends folded inside in such a way that the crayfish could enter but not easily exit.
The second invention was a modification to a bicycle so that the wheels went in the opposite direction to the handlebars. A guy at Mindil Beach night market was earning money with it. He had a sign saying “Left is right, Right is left” and a T-shirt to match. He had a carpet on the grass with lines drawn across it and all you had to do was to cycle on his bike from one line to the other. It was only the length of most people’s lounge rooms but nobody could do it. People were queued up to try and paid five dollars each for three attempts. People of all ages would start off, and fall off, immediately. The guy whose bike it was had learnt to ride the thing and every so often he’d sit astride it and cycle up and down to show just how easy it was. It took twenty minutes for five people to loose their money. He was earning seventy five bucks an hour! If he was working two nights a week he’d have been doing pretty well.
It was the dry season and along the road to Kakadu much burning was taking place. They burn one side of the road at a time on a fairly regular basis and using this ancient technique they avoid the bushfires that used to rage in the area for a couple of hundred years after white people first took possession of the land. They haven’t got it quite right yet but I guess they’re learning. The people lighting and managing the fires were called The Mary River Land Management Group. They’d posted a sign at the side of the road - it was on fire. Three kilometres further on was a sign saying Termite Mounds and as we pulled off the road to take a look two men in Texas Ranger type hats and a small fire tender were desperately trying to save the boardwalk around them. They were too late, it was well ablaze.
We had begun to see isolated spots of fire in some places quite far removed from the burning off that was taking place. We stopped at a couple of these places and decided that it had to be the work of arsonists. It was, but not of the human kind. Birds were doing it. Whistling kites (known in Kakadu as fire kites or in Aboriginal circles as burnum burnum) are major beneficiaries of any fires in the area. Fire drives before it small mammals, reptiles, grasshoppers and other kite goodies that they swoop on and eat. They’ve become so accustomed to controlled fires that stop at one side of the road that they pick up burning embers and drop them across the other side in an attempt to get another fire started. It sounds fanciful but it actually happens.
We stopped for the night around six kilometres before the Kakadu National Park itself in a roadside truck stop some twenty minutes from passing the last fire. We had dinner and turned in but I woke up at two o’clock. I could smell smoke and when I went outside I could see that the fire had caught us up. We had to move a few metres to the middle of the service road where there was no grass to catch light. I mentioned it to a Park Ranger the next day who told me that it was more than likely the “bloody kites” that had started the fire off again.
Reversible yoghurt containers. How come nobody makes reversible yoghurt containers? Flavoured yoghurts make easy quick, cool snacks that fit in campervan fridges. What’s more you can buy them in any outback shop that has a fridge. We eat one each almost every day and there’s a bonus. I forget what it is but it’s something to do with Flora in the colon. Dunno why we need margarine in our colons though. There’s never quite enough yoghurt in the container but there would be if you could lick the inside. It’s infuriating trying to get those last slivers of the stuff with the rounded edge of the spoon. When I get back to civilisation I’ve decided to devote my life to producing the first prototype reversible yoghurt container. I’ve been studying rubber gloves and I’m quietly confident that rubber glove technology holds the key. Remember – you heard it first in these pages. Besides Flora there’s that other bread spread that’s called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” Somebody told me there’s a new communion wafer in the USA called “I Can’t Believe It’s not Jesus.”
At one point, on route to Kakadu, we crossed the East Alligator River. There were construction traffic lights on it and as we waited for them to turn green Clare was reading the sign next to them. It said that this construction was a “bridge lengthening project.” Two gigantic crocodiles lay sunning themselves on the far bank and I hoped the bridge was by now lengthened to the point where it reached the other side or we’d be in the shit good and proper.
We stayed our first night in Kakadu in a campground near another part of that same river where it’s tidal and both fresh and saltwater crocs, fish and a variety of watery nasties live. A bit before dusk we walked down to a boat ramp. Across the river was Arnhem Land where entry without a permit is forbidden for everybody except the Aboriginal people who live there. A large family of Aborigines were on the opposite, Arnhem Land, bank. There were probably six adults, the women in gaily coloured skirts and tops, and an equal number of kids some of whom wore little or nothing. Two men made up the party each fishing with a rod. The women fished with lines and they sent some of the kids away who came back later with three quite big dead tree branches. Two of the smallest kids went into the water and splashed around for a few minutes and wandered back out again. It was a relaxed scene and the kids were having a ball chasing each other up and down the sandy river beach. Suddenly one of the women became very animated and everybody else came over to where she was fishing. She’s caught a big sting ray and began hauling it, flapping, out of the water. As soon as it was clear of the water the kids set upon it with the dead tree branches. One of the women stopped them and picking up a stick showed them exactly where to hit it and they started all over again. I don’t think any of them were more than four years old.
I wanted a photograph of the family and I went a few paces along the beach on our side of the bank and stood on the root of a big old tree balancing myself with my back on the trunk. I looked to one side and about ten paces from me was a three meter long crocodile lying on the sand facing down towards the water. I was excited and told Clare who came and looked at it too. We both thought it was of the saltwater, dangerous type. I took a couple of photos of it and looked for someone to tell about it. A white guy and his wife and toddler were standing on the boat ramp fishing and I asked if they knew anything about crocodiles. The wife asked where it was and I showed her. “Yeah, that’s a Salty” she said casually and went back to her fishing.” All three of them were standing only one pace from the water’s edge. The tide was coming in quite fast and we watched the croc for twenty minutes or so as the water rose. It didn’t move a millimetre even as the water covered it. All it did was lift its snout imperceptibly to keep its nostrils clear.
In the morning we took a cruise on the river which was run by the Kakadu park rangers. Two were Aborigines and the third was a white guy who’d lived all his thirty eight years in Kakadu and was raised with Aboriginal kids. The skipper showed us the life jackets which were stowed in a rack above our heads and told us that if the boat tipped over we shouldn’t cling to them but push them ahead of us and swim towards them all the time. The reason for this, he said, was that they were colourful and crocodiles liked colourful objects. He said he’d seen a boat turn over before and the first things the crocodiles went for were the colourful life jackets. I looked around and saw that Clare and I were the most colourfully dressed on the entire boat. He told us that the river contained sharks and sting rays too although he didn’t elaborate on their colour preferences.
It was a very informative hour and a half and we were glad we did it, not least because we stopped briefly on a beach in Arnhem Land and the two Aboriginal guys gave us a talk and made fire from two sticks, blew didgeridoos and demonstrated spear throwing with a woomera. The fire making was doubly impressive because it only took two or three minutes. At the end of it one of them asked if we had any questions and an old lady asked if they rubbed stones together to make fire. The Aboriginal guy said that he’d just demonstrated how they made fire from two sticks. “Yes” she said “but I thought you could rub stones together and make fire” He didn’t now what to say and looked over his shoulder at his Aboriginal colleague who shrugged. He then looked at his white colleague who said “beats me” and shrugged. He turned back to the old lady, cleared his throat and said “up ’ere, we make ‘im with wood. Stones up ‘ere don’t burn too good.” I forgot myself and burst out laughing.
We saw lots of crocodiles on the East Alligator that day and we were told by the rangers that there are an estimated sixty thousand of them in Kakadu alone. As we cruised along the rangers pointed out various plants on the bank and told us what they were used for in Aboriginal society. The fresh water mangrove was best. They crushed up the leaves and threw them into the water in areas where they knew that unreachable fish would be under the banks. It worked like a poison but what it actually did was to deplete the oxygen in the water temporarily sending the fish to sleep. They’d float to the surface where some were harvested and the rest left alone to recover and be there for another day. However, that wasn’t what impressed me most about the fresh water mangrove tree. In times gone by it was also used for the punishment of severe crimes. They would make the culprit eat the stuff and it would make him suffocate by swelling his air passages up. They’d give him a straw which he’d have to ram up his nose to breath through which meant he’d have a fair chance of surviving but not be keen to repeat the offence that led to the punishment.
Later on, and with a little trepidation, we walked along the river bank looking for crocs to take photos of. We knew where we’d seen them from the boat and the rangers said they’d spend hours in the same place so we kept our distance from the water and tip toed along to where we’d seen them. It was quite an adrenaline rush knowing that there was something out there that could, and if hungry would, eat us. I’ve never considered myself as prey before. I had once been chased up a tree by a bison in a Polish forest and had to watch while it trampled my camera. I’d been charged by a wild boar too but in those cases I was on their turf and they wanted to show me who was boss. They didn’t want to eat me. The only other animal scare I’d had was thinking that I was being followed by a rabid dog. That was scary for a while but it just turned out to be curious and had a deformed upper lip that bared its teeth and made it dribble and look vicious.
RABIES DAY
On that occasion I was living in a small village in the north east of Poland up near the Byelorussian border and a rabid wolf had been seen in the forest nearby. Rabid dogs and wolves never seem to go and die in the forest; they always wander into the villages for some reason. Because of this we had an annual Rabies Day when the vet came and inoculated all the village dogs. I remember he first time it happened when I was living there.
Our soltys (village head) visited us at eight o’clock one morning and said we couldn’t go out until the dog had been inoculated. I was just leaving the house to go into the local town for a nine o’clock dental appointment but the soltys said
"Sorry, you can't go out, it's rabies day"
"It's what?"
"Rabies day"
My Polish isn’t bad but I’d never heard the word rabies in Polish and I didn't know what he was talking about.
“Rabies day?" I said, "what the hell's rabies day?"
"You know, that disease the wolves get. Your Misha’s got to be vaccinated against it. It's compulsory. You've got to take her down to the cross roads."
"What if I don't?"
“You'll have to take her into town and have it done or they can fine you. They can even put her down."
"OK I'll be there"
I put the lead on our Misha and hurried off down to the cross roads. I needn't have bothered to hurry because when I arrived there was a queue of 15 people and, I suppose, 25 dogs. It seems we were the last to find out about rabies day and, although I was in a hurry, the operation hadn't even started and the vet was still putting his equipment together.
Rabies day was quite a social event in the village as every single household had at least one dog and quite a few families had two or three. The word social, of course, doesn't necessarily mean sociable and two of the men in the queue weren't on speaking terms. Anton and Marian hadn't spoken for a month because of an incident which had occurred at the start of haymaking.
Not all of the power poles in the village were earthed and when a thunderstorm was immanent folks all pulled the plugs on their televisions in case they blew up. During haymaking Anton was on the way home one evening when he stopped to shake some sand out of his boots and for this purpose he had leaned against a telegraph pole with both hands while he tried to kick one of his boots off.
A tractor came up the lane pulling behind it a cart-load of hay, on top of which were three men including Marian who spotted Anton clutching the telegraph pole shaking one of his legs. Marian was a young, enthusiastic person and sometimes tended to be a little impulsive. On this occasion he summed up the situation in a flash.
He assumed that Anton was being electrocuted by the unearthed power pole and, taking his pitchfork in hand, leapt from the top of the travelling haystack bringing down the pitchfork handle across Anton's wrists in an effort to disengage him from the source of the problem. Anton ended up with a broken wrist and had to be taken to the local hospital on the back of the tractor and then had to rely on help from others to bring his hay in. Now they both stood in the queue three places from one another, each trying to pretend that he hadn't seen the other.
It was the same for the dogs too, some of them hated each other and were anxious to show it. Dogs on Polish farms are invariably small snappy creatures which take up about the same amount of space as a twenty litre water container and they're kept on chains for most of their lives. They're not badly treated, in fact they're usually the subjects of much affection but still, they seldom get to go anywhere unless they break their chains (or sometimes, strings). Now, when you keep a dog on a chain all the time it usually becomes aggressive and that was the case with practically every dog in the village. Rabies day was the day when they could all get together and decide who's going to be the boss for another year.
Dogs who never got to meet, who only barked and howled at each other from afar and who knew each other only from the scent carried on the wind all got to bark, growl, slobber & snap at each other only on this one day. The Villagers didn’t walk their dogs and therefore didn’t have dog leads, so most of the dogs were either carried in their owners arms or on short pieces of old baling twine. Old Polish baling twine, like new Polish baling twine, is not the strongest of materials with which to secure an eager village mongrel and some of them broke loose. Others simply jumped out of their owners arms and it was on for young & old.
There were fights going on all around and under the vet's car, owners bumping into each other as they hurtled back and forth cursing their respective pooches and people saying; "Well, your dog started it, my little Maciek was minding his own business until that ugly wretch of yours went for him"
The vet eventually sorted himself out and sat crosswise in the passenger seat of the car, notebook in hand, as his first client stepped forward. It was Big Jan the plumber. Big Jan was the roughest toughest man in the village and was held in awe by many because he could turn the nettle cutting machine for hours on end without a break. Nettles are good feed for pigs but first they need to be crushed in the machine and this was Jan's forte. I tried the nettle crushing machine once and could barely keep it going with two hands but big Jan could spin it with one hand and feed the nettles in with the other. Yes, he was a man’s man was Big Jan although not from choice. He was a man's man because no woman would have him.
The vet licked his pencil and looked up at the Cyclops towering before him. The little mongrel in Jan's arms seemed to fade seamlessly into his long straggly beard. Big Jan was almost completely bald and now with this little pair of eyes peering out of his beard it looked for all the world as if his head was stuck on upside down.
"Name?"
"Jan Stachlewski"
"Is that the dog’s name or your name?"
"My name"
"I don't want your name; I want the dog’s name"
Big Jan leaned towards the vet's ear & muttered something.
"Speak up, I can't hear you"
"Amour" (The word is used as cupid in Polish)
"So that's Amour Stachlewski is it?"
"Mmmm"
There was sniggering in the ranks which stopped abruptly when Jan, indignant, turned around. The vet did his work, took the money and Big Jan headed for home, his Cupid in his arms. Old Mrs Romanowski was next and when the vet had finished she wanted to talk about her problem cat.
"He's so fussy, he won't eat anything I give him lately and he's loosing weight. I was thinking about that Kit E Kat advertised on TV, do you think he'd eat that?"
"Mrs Romanowski my dear, 20 tins of Kit E Kat would probably come to more than your monthly pension but I'm sure that the cat would love it"
End of discussion.
A few more dogs & owners came and went without incident until Stankiewicz the poacher fronted up. He had 4 dogs tied together with string and had to untie each one as its turn came and tie the remaining three to the vet’s car door handle with another piece of string. One of his dogs, Hubert, was, to say the least, unusual in appearance. It could best be described as a cocker spaniel cross, crossed that is, with an armadillo. It bore all the ancestral hallmarks of the cocker spaniel but in place of fur it had scales everywhere except for its lower legs.
It wasn't a pretty sight and was made all the more unsightly by the addition of a white plastic bucket over its head, placed there, as he told the vet, “to stop Hubert scratching his scabby ears.” The vet wasn't at all impressed with Hubert and donned his plastic gloves before touching him. The queue broke apart and all stood around the car in silence to watch. Stasiek was first to speak
"Whatever that dog's got is most likely infectious, you should have the bloody thing put down"
"Mind your own business Stasiek Kowalski, Hubert will be right as rain in a couple of weeks. Old mother Miankowska's given me some stuff to rub over him"
"Mother Miankowska? what would she know about dogs she's a bloody witch?"
"She's not a witch, she's a herbalist. She cured my feet, Mother Miankowska, the doctors didn't know what was wrong with them but Old Mother Miankowska fixed them up in no time"
Of course what nobody was saying was that Old Mother Miankowska was Stankiewicz's aunt but a timid little voice came out of the crowd.
"My husband would still be alive if it wasn't for Mother Miankowska"
You could have heard a pin drop and the vet, disguising a smirk, stuck the needle into Scabby Hubert's wrinkled red neck. Scabby Hubert let out a hell of a shriek and turned on the vet but was prevented from biting him by the white plastic bucket. We stood there as Stankiewicz tied and untied his three pieces of string and presented the vet with his next offering. It too was a little out of the ordinary. It was 2 dogs long, half a dog high and covered in long hair like a silky terrier. It was as though Stankiewicz had purchased an Old English Sheepdog self assembly kit and hadn't fully understood the instructions. I could imagine the leg extension pieces being scattered around on the floor of his barn somewhere. Or perhaps it was intentional, a custom made dog from a kit?
The scene - The Stankiewicz kitchen in the evening:
"Give me the small screwdriver dear"
"It's there in front of you Stan"
"Not that one, the Philips"
"I hope you're going to clean that lot up after you"
"Mmmm"
"What are those other bits?"
"Leg extensions"
"Aren't you going to put them on then?
"No, it'll be too high - it'll be over the fence as soon as I put the batteries in"
"Well, just don't leave them on the kitchen table, that's all"
"I've already sold them to Adam”
"What does Adam want with them?"
"He's going to put them on his dachshund - stop it getting under his fence"
While all this was going through my head, Kristow the village drunk came staggering down the road with a fairly respectable looking mongrel on a leather lead. The poor thing was having to dance like John Travolta to avoid being trodden on as it kept a wary eye on its owners staggering movements in a vain attempt to anticipate the direction of the next lurch.
Kristow almost pulled up when he reached the car, that is to say he was only moving backwards & forwards by a step or two. He spent a few seconds trying to get Stankiewicz's long haired whatever it was into focus and then:
"Is that a dog? Is that a doggg? 'eh, a dog? haaa. You'd have to give it a piece of sausage before you could kick it up the arse or you'd never know which way round it was. Haaaa. Look, look everybody isssa dog' 'eh? Haaaa"
Kristow was having trouble telling which way round he himself was and, in particular, which way was up and he fell across the bonnet of the vet's car. Two men from the queue laid him down in the back of a cart after assuring him that they'd take care of his dog and he promptly fell asleep. More pooches were punctured during which another argument developed between a farmer and the wife of the shop owner in which she tried to pin the parenthood of her latest litter of pups on his dog and then came Jakub's turn.
"What's her name?"
"Don't know"
"What do you mean you don't know?"
"She hasn't got a name"
I saw one man in the queue nudge another and smirk
"Well, what do you call her when you want her to come?"
"I don't have to call her, she's always on the chain"
"Well, I have to have a name"
"Call her what you like then"
"Alright she's to be known as Kropka. OK?"
"It's OK with me"
"How old is she?"
"Don't know"
"Oh come on, don't you remember when you got her?"
Someone at the back of the queue yelled out that she must have been three because she was from the same litter as his own dog; and the vet filled in the appropriate space on the form.
"Alright, give her to me then"
Something went wrong with the handover and the dog broke free and ran around the other side of the car with Jakub in pursuit. The dog quite obviously thought that it was all a game and darted back and forth around the car as Jakub ran after it in his rubber boots getting redder and redder in the face.
"Whore" he shouted. "Come here whore"
The dog immediately stood to attention and trotted up to Jakub head down, tail between its legs. The secret was out, the whole village now knew the dog's real name and roars of laughter filled the air. Old ladies started whispering to each other behind cupped hands.
"Well I never, did you see that? Whatever's it coming to, fancy giving the poor animal a name like that."
"Yes, I know. I've never liked him you know, he treats his wife terribly. Mrs Siepietowska told me that he locked her out of the house one night and she had to sleep at her sister’s house. Just because she gave him salad. Said he'd been working like a dog all day and he wanted proper food when he came home of an evening."
"Yes, I know, I know. That's what I mean you see - man like that"
Our Misha was last in the queue and when the vet produced the vaccine bottle I asked for a clean needle. Every dog including Scabby Hubert had been vaccinated with the same needle and it hadn't been so much as wiped clean. The vet didn't object. He just reached into the back of the car and grabbed a new needle. A group of dog owners were standing talking within earshot and one of them asked why his dog didn't get a clean needle.
"You didn't ask" replied the vet.
"Well, you should have changed needles anyway. Disease can be transmitted through dirty needles"
"Yes but"
"The department gives you needles and you save them so you can use them yourself in your own practice."
"Now, look here.............."
I left them arguing and set off hot foot for my dentists appointment arriving late with apologies.
"Sorry we're late. It's rabies day in our village" I said.
He gave me a strange look. “Don’t worry” I said. “I'm taking tablets for it."
