A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Some of the Northern Territory’s national parks campgrounds have free talks and slide shows put on by the rangers. The first one we went to was about rock art and was given by an Aboriginal guy who was incredibly knowledgeable. He showed us paintings done twenty thousand years ago, some of the oldest art in the world, which he compared with the seventeen thousand year old cave paintings at Altimira in Spain. There was a busload of Americans in his audience and I sensed that he was taking the piss out of them and us in a tongue in cheek sort of way. When he asked if there were any questions I had one for him. “Is it true that before white people came to Australia your people couldn’t tell a late from a flat white?”
Without breaking into a smile he said “yes, ‘I’ve heard that too. In fact my grandfather told me that he knew people years ago who even used to sprinkle the chocolate on top of long blacks.” The Americans didn’t see the humour in it. I couldn’t imagine anybody listening to that short conversation who didn’t think there was something strange about it but they didn’t react in any way at all. The art though – Wow. I don’t know much about art but I know a mess when I see it. I had no frame of reference through which to view it and the ranger said that it would take years to understand what it was about. When it came to actually painting any of it the artist himself had to be initiated before he could pick up a painting stick and it took him years to get to that stage. I could only judge it by whether or not I’d put it on the wall in my flat. I would. Alongside the oldest art in the world were paintings done in the 1960s by a guy called Barramundi Charlie. As far as I could tell he was just as good as anybody who’d gone before him and I liked the name Barramundi Charlie too. I wondered if there were any other names around like that – dick grouper maybe? The thing we non-Aboriginals generally fail to grasp is that this art is dynamic, not static.
Our Renaissance art in the form of old frescoes in Florence, for example, is static. It won’t change, it won’t progress and we view and study it retrospectively. We can even roughly date paintings by what style of art was in vogue at the time they were created. We look into what beliefs were around at the time that Michael Angelo, or whoever, painted them and we look at them and perhaps excuse them from that standpoint.
The Aboriginal rock art we saw in Kakadu was dynamic. That is to say it was still valid. The representations in it involve parts of the landscape. There are mythical beings depicted on the rocks that had turned into parts of the landscape like rivers, valleys or mountains. The art therefore, although being sacred, has been painted over many times and can still be used to instruct young people in their lore. A figure painted on a rock could be pointed to and then the student could be told that “that rock over there is what he turned into and that’s why that place is sacred.” A sort of living Jerusalem may be a way for Christians to get a handle on it I guess. This art has been re-done continually for tens of thousands of years and it’s still used. It’s not like old renaissance art gallery stuff that we no longer believe in, nor is it like a sacrosanct stained glass cathedral window to be marvelled at. There are no famous old masters in Aboriginal art. The artist was unimportant, he could have been be an Aboriginal Rolf Harris but he had to know what he was painting and for that he had to be initiated.
To the Aborigines this art is still real. They’re still using the same beliefs as they were back all those thousands of years ago. In part this is why Kakadu is classed as one of the twenty or so places in the world that has a world heritage listing on two counts. One being the environment and the other being the culture. This is by far the oldest continuous, living culture on the face of the earth and Clare’s just asked me whether to open a can of Turkish stuffed vine leaves for dinner or the Greek stuffed eggplant. I chose the eggplant. Anyway, the thing is that the stories told by the depictions painted on the pyramid walls five thousand years ago have been relegated to history as being incorrect – nobody believes those things anymore. This art in Kakadu still has an extant belief system attached to it unaltered.
Another thing we went to in a Kakadu campground one evening was a slide show called Buffalo Days. Good God. Look at that! There’s a woman getting undressed in a tent with the light on. Not a pretty sight actually. I did hear a couple of weeks ago that a peeping Tom in one of those grey nomad caravan parks in Darwin ran ten kilometres to the police station and gave himself up. Now, where was I? That’s completely thrown me, buggered up the old creative urge it has.
Ah yes, buffalos. A few of these animals were imported into a small settlement for use as meat back in the late 1800s and then turned loose when the settlement failed. Pretty soon they had increased until they numbered in the hundreds of thousands and then an industry was established to hunt them and export the hides to Turkey where they were carefully split into three layers and used for all manner of things, among them, industrial belts to drive machinery. The rest of the buffalo was of no interest to the industry. What wasn’t eaten by the Aborigines employed in the industry was left on the ground. The industry was dwindling by the late 1950s but not for lack of buffalos, they were still on the increase. Then big game hunting became popular and people would fly out from Darwin for a weekend’s shooting. We saw a slide of the tariffs for these trips. You could hire an experienced white buffalo hunter for five pounds per day or an experienced black buffalo hunter for thirty shillings. That meant that for the same price as a white hunter you could get three black ones and still have ten bob left for beer at the end of the day.
Of course, what all this did was to destroy many thousands of hectares of land. Soils that had never seen hoofed animals (Australia doesn’t naturally have any) couldn’t withstand the impact of the buffalo. Marshes where the roots of the vegetation absorbed the rainwater from The Wet and released it into the rivers all year round were trampled until they could no longer hold water at all. When The Wet came the soil no longer had anything to bind it and it washed away. Aquatic life then suffocated in other parts as it became smothered by this water born soil. The biggest tragedy for the area was that this destruction allowed the sea into what had been predominately freshwater swampland altering stable habitats that had remained intact for well over two thousand years.
Then America did Australia a favour for which we should be eternally grateful. At sometime in the 1970s they told us that they wouldn’t buy our beef unless we cleaned up our act. We had to prove to the USA that we were a clean supplier of meat and to do that we had to cull hundreds of thousands of wild buffalos that could carry the deadly brucellosis disease. The area occupied by our much lauded world heritage national park at Kakadu, of which we are so proud, would have been totally destroyed but for those nice Americans. The Australian government couldn’t have given a damn about Kakadu’s environment but they did care about the almighty dollar. As it is there is still an enormous problem in the top end with feral pigs but nothing really serious is being done to eradicate them. A ranger told us that for five hours last year they shot pigs from helicopters with SLR rifles at the rate of one per minute but it made no impression whatsoever on the pig population.
Northern Territory National Park campgrounds were generally very good. They weren’t too much like caravan parks which we long ago found we didn’t like at all. The problem with National Parks though is that you’re not allowed to camp anywhere other than their own campgrounds and if you miss out on a place you have to keep moving along and miss the attraction you’d come to see. We pulled into one of these campgrounds in Kakadu early one afternoon where the toilets were blocked. We knew there would be no visit from the ranger until the evening when he came to take the money so we reluctantly had to leave as the stench was unbearable.
I’m no stranger to problem toilets as I once lived in Turkey for three years, where plumbing is still in its formative stages, and I used to own one. There we had an Australian restaurant which we opened in a little town called Eceabat which is the closest town to the Gallipoli battlefields. The ANZACs didn’t go anywhere near the town of Gallipoli itself but did their misguided thing on the Gallipoli Peninsula, from whence cometh the most famous foreign name in Australia’s short white history. Our restaurant was on the ground floor of an hotel that overlooked the Dardanelles. We’d opened it to coincide with the seventy fifth anniversary of ANZAC day which was a big event attracting thousands of tourists and a smaller number of battleships and foreign prime ministers.
ANZAC day and the week leading up to it were incredibly busy and we turned the place into a hamburger bar come pub and opened it up around the clock in an effort to make as much money as possible in a short space of time. The little town of Eceabat had never been so busy in its entire history. There had never been so many tourists putting so much pressure on the infrastructure of the place. Indeed an hotel offering accommodation to tourists had been built especially for the event. The day after ANZAC day was busy too and at precisely ten past seven in the evening a truck with a tank on the back pulled up outside and connected up to the sewerage system of the hotel above us to pump out the septic tank, something that hadn’t been done for years.
We shared a common drainage system with the hotel and this truck had arrived to pump out the septic tank underneath the ground. The truck was already half full of effluent from some place else when the driver connected the suction hose to the delivery end of the pump so that instead of sucking it blew. He started the pump and walked across the road to talk to his buddies at the tea house. It took three or for minutes for anything to happen and then it blew half a bowser load of shit, tampons, condoms and other assorted nasties out of our toilets with such a force that it hit the ceiling and it blew columns of sewerage water out of our three kitchen sinks.
The restaurant was full at the time. I was heading towards the kitchen with a load of cups and saucers I’d just cleaned up from the tables when a middle aged lady burst out of the toilets and ran screaming past me like a stuck pig knocking everything I was holding onto the floor. As my eyes followed her through the door I could see that she had a large brown streak all the way up her back and she was dripping. She’d been sitting on the toilet at the time. I didn’t fully comprehend what was happening. After all, what restaurant proprietor would ever envision that one day his toilets would erupt and blow his lady customers off their seats.
As I turned around I saw Mehemet our kitchen hand looking at me. He didn’t look at all like Mehmet usually looked but more like some dirty little organ grinders monkey who’d just been fished out of a septic tank. He’d been washing lettuce when all of a sudden something hit him. It was a fucking great wall of poo water heading for the kitchen ceiling and, having been hit under the chin with it; it then started raining down upon him.
There was a mass exodus but the doorway proved inadequate to cope with this volume of traffic and so some people with shit all over their shoes ran back into the place and leapt up onto the chairs and tables. People cope with stress in different ways I suppose but I just burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter. I hurt my throat and stomach I laughed so much. Mehmet thought I’d lost it and stroked my head with one of his poohey hands saying “don’t worry Mister Peter it will be Mehmet’s pleasure to make things shape like ship.” That made things worse; he was acting and speaking like Manuel from Fawlty Towers. I struggled out to the kitchen where I fell to my knees and began crying like a bloody maniac.
By the time I’d recovered Mehmet and Bayram the chef had rounded up a couple of their friends from somewhere and with mops and tea towels on sticks they started to push all the crap out of the door amidst both cheers and screams from the mostly Australian audience. They all thought it was a great laugh. They had their video cameras running and there were flashes going off as they took photographs.
I joined the lads in the cleanup and as I was pushing a load of assorted sewerage out of the door and over the step into the drain a guy in a suit came up to me. He had another guy with a camera with him and he said "Oh Peter I'm from the Australian embassy and this is Fred Smith (I forget the name) from the Melbourne Age newspaper who'd like to do an article on your business". "Sorry Fred" I said "I'm in the shit at the moment, can you come back a bit later?" He said he would but we didn’t see him again.
Throughout this whole episode there were three Aussie soldiers sitting calmly discussing football in one corner. Everyone else had fled in panic leaving behind their cameras, handbags and cigarette lighters but these guys just sat there with shit floating around their boots as if it happened to them every day. I sloshed over to them with a round of free beers and said "sorry about all this boys." One of them looked up and quietly said "no worries, we like a good night out on the piss now and again."
But back to Kakadu. It was all good but the highlight for us was an early morning six thirty am. cruise on a billabong called Yellow Water. We boarded in the dark and cruised around the waterways for a couple of hours during which we saw all sorts of water birds and, of course, crocodiles. Everything looked so perfect, so pristine that it was hard to imagine that the Ranger Uranium Mine in the park had had spills from their settling ponds making it necessary for safety limits to be placed upon some of the traditional foods the Aborigines take from Kakadu. On the boat we sat in among a party of Germans who, as the sun came up, all held their hands up against the light in Seig Heil salutes.
When we’d finished in Kakadu we headed once again for Darwin as I had a computer problem. I’d taken too many photographs and didn’t have a way of backing them up onto a CD. Digital photography these days is so easy that any idiot can take fifty photographs and be sure of getting a good publishable quality one. I‘m one such idiot and I already had a couple of dozen that we considered would look good in a book. It was Friday evening and the computer repair shops wouldn’t be open until Monday so we decided to take it easy for a couple of days. Clare wanted to catch up on some painting and I wanted to write the words that I’m writing right now. Accordingly we went into the small hamlet of Adelaide River a hundred or so kilometres south of Darwin. We found the place in one of those inaccurate and out of date camping books that are on sale in most reputable book shops.
Since the book was written though, the Adelaide River showgrounds had turned into a little virtual caravan park. They’d put in a little pool, and bought a couple of washing machines and constructed a few of those shade cloth carport things for caravans to go under. This was the second caravan park we’d so far stayed in. We spent three nights there and it gave us a chance to observe our fellow grey nomads at closer quarters. We’d been wondering where they all were for they’d disappeared as soon as we got to Darwin and we saw very few in Kakadu. At the Adelaide River showgrounds we met people who’d been holed up there for six weeks! The curious thing was that there was sod all there. It’s one of those settlements that starts with a whimper and then slowly peters out. The whole place and its environs can be viewed more than adequately in two days. There’s no view from the showgrounds, only the racetrack and the toilet block, but there were people there whose thresholds of boredom were so high that they could happily just stay there sitting in chairs all day.
One couple were in an old bus and the wife made mango chutney and advertised it in the laundry. Their bus was called Happy Days and their names were on the door – Wally and Sandra. Happy Daze would have been more appropriate. They were parked next to a van called “Gypsy Rovers” and three vans further up was “Done Dreamin’.”
Opposite where we parked was a couple in their late sixties. The husband dressed in a shirt, jeans and elastic sided agricultural boots every day. He first nestled into his deck chair at eight in the morning and stayed there until five at night. He went to the toilet maybe a couple of times but the rest of the time he just sat there staring at nothing and his meals were brought to him by his wife. His only movement was with his wrist which operated a fly swat now and again. On the third day he moved his car out, turned it around and put it back in the same spot.
They weren’t alone; almost everybody spent the whole day sitting in deck chairs staring at the race track. Four couples had dogs which they took for a walk three times a day. They kept them on leads and carried thin supermarket fruit and vegetable bags which they turned inside out and picked the dog poo up with. One couple had refined the system. They had a dog lead with little clips on it that they attached ten or more plastic bags to.
Clare talked to a Queensland lady who’d been coming to the Adelaide River showgrounds with her husband for five years and had already been there for six weeks by the time we arrived there. Clare said that they must by now be very familiar with Kakadu. “No” she said. “My husband won’t go there. We went as far as the entrance a few years ago but my husband said he wouldn’t pay to get into a National Park so we turned around and came back. Anyway, there’s bities there and I don’t like the bities.” The bities she was referring to were mosquitoes.
We went over to the little pool to cool off three times because I couldn’t believe the conversations people were having.
“There are too many bloody bats in some places we’ve been and they’re not allowed to get rid of them. It’s the Greenies. Greenies haven’t got a bloody clue about anything”
“I know. In one place we stopped a bloke was shouting don’t do it, don’t let them do it. I asked him what it was that they shouldn’t do and he said he didn’t know. Someone had offered him twenty bucks and a free lunch if he’d protest but they didn’t tell him what it was about.”
“Yeah, that’d be bloody right. That’s the Greenies for yah”
We found that couples talked a lot about where they were booked into and their programs. One couple said they missed their friends at a caravan park the year before because they’d read their program wrong and turned up a week too late. In the pool bookings were discussed in great detail. “We’ve booked Kununurra” or “we couldn’t get the park we wanted in Townsville so we had to settle for Bowen.” It seemed that little time was left for adventure. They had to be in places they’d booked by definite dates and if they found somewhere or something interesting they couldn’t stay an extra day or two and enjoy it. One problem some of them faced was locating kennels to put their dogs in. They couldn’t bear to leave these family members at home so took them along but sometimes had to find kennels to put them in. National Parks, for example, don’t allow dogs and neither do the better caravan parks. One couple we met at the Adelaide river showgrounds had spent eight days there just trying to organise a decent kennel for their two dogs so they could go into Kakadu. Another couple we met back in Alice Springs had two dogs that they muzzled every time they went outside the caravan because they’d already lost a dog to 1080 poisoning on the trip.
I listened to fifteen minute conversation one afternoon between seven people about where you could get the best T Bone steaks in Australia. And I’m not bloody going to anywhere they mentioned. Something else we noticed was that they seemed intimidated by open space. There was plenty of space to park their caravans in but as people arrived they squeezed in between other vans wherever possible until they could have heard each other whisper. All, without exception, were overweight and many of the guys in the pool bore the scars of open heart surgery. These were marks they bore with some pride as though they’d been gained fighting Turks at Gallipoli or Iraqis in Iraq; Vietnamese in Vietnam perhaps? or some other people whose homelands they would have had difficulty locating on a map of the world but where Australian soldiers had gone to beat up the locals (who’d done bugger all to offend us) at the behest of “our great and powerful allies.” There were too, all those snippets about what the doctor had said to them. Things like “if I’d have left it another week the doc said I would’a bin dead. Isn’t that right Shirl?” And, “I died twice on the operating table but they brought me round.”
Clare paid for two nights at the Adelaide River and when we decided we’d stay for another night I found the caretaker and asked if I could pay him. He got his book out and asked what name we were under. I told him it was probably McMillan (Clare’s name) or it could be McLaren. He looked up from his book and said “you two not …um?” I said “married?” He nodded and I said “yes we are. But not to each other.” A week later after we’d been to Darwin and were on our way south again we found ourselves back in Adelaide River at 5pm so decided to stay the night there again. As we drove in we could see all the same faces in the same line of deckchairs. I spotted the caretaker standing in the middle of the line talking. As I pulled up alongside him I wound down the window and said “we just couldn’t keep away from the place Trev.” Somebody yelled out “how was Darwin?” and somebody else shouted “did yewze go up there to get married did yah.” To which everybody broke out in peels of stifled sniggering.
As we were leaving the next day the little population of Adelaide River together with all the campers turned out to watch the new Adelaide to Darwin train go past. The traffic was stopped way before the train came through so I wandered up to the head of the queue to take a look too. I spoke to a woman there who told me that she turned out twice a week to see the train come through and that she was sixty four years old and never thought she’d live to see a train. I said “in Adelaide River you mean?” “No”, she said “any train. I’d only seen them on the telly before this. I think it’s a real good idea, I do. I’m gonna go on it too next year.”
Since the coming of the railway just a few weeks before I met her she’d become an incurable railway addict and regaled me with stories about the great railways of the world. As we waited for the train we talked about the great engineering feat involved in the successful completion of the coast to coast, east/west, railway in the USA. It was finished, she said, in 1869 a hundred and thirty five years before the Adelaide Darwin and crossed some appallingly inhospitable terrain. “This railway ‘ere is bugger all compared with that American one.” She said. “They had to go right through the middle of bloody great mountains over there and build really high bridges over the valleys. Then they went through deserts where the Red Indians derailed the trains and killed some of the blokes layin’ the lines and all. This railway ‘ere is more than an ‘undred years bloody late and they had just about all flat land to cross. If they’d done it an ‘undred years ago we’d have had big towns all down through the middle of Australia by now like America has instead of bloody scrub. And you know what? They should have laid the water pipe alongside it when they done it. It wouldn’t have cost much more if they’d done it at the same time. That way they could’ve had water in the centre where there’s no diseases and grown all sorts of things, grapes and olives and figs and that.” I asked where the water would have come from. “It wouldn’t matter as long as you had the bloody pipe it could have been filled from anywhere in twenty years time, fifty years time. Doesn’t have to be now. You could be connected to the Ord River. They got water to spare. Goin’ to waste it is it up there.”
I would like to have listened to her for longer but the train came and went and we had to get moving. I knew that if she’d read that much about the east/west American railway she must have also read that it wouldn’t have been possible to have built it at the time without Chinese labour. In both the USA and Canada Chinese labour was used on the building of the railways and it was Chinese gangs that set the never to be broken records in both countries for miles of track laid in a single day. Chinese labour, of course, couldn’t be used in Australia at the time. We were doing everything possible to keep them from entering our country, taking our jobs, raping our women and polluting our bloodlines.
Our journey now took a turn to the west. However, due to another acute shortage of roads we’d had to retrace our steps from Darwin all the way to Katherine before we could head in that westerly direction. Even so, the sealed road that we took – a main arterial highway called the Victoria River Road – was, by international standards, a disgrace. Australia either doesn’t know how to build quality roads or is unable to afford them. They’re done on the cheap. In numerous places the road was simply worn out and where the holes appeared we could see that the asphalt was only a stone’s thickness. In a few places road trains had pushed the asphalt up in ridges at the side of the road and the earth underneath was showing through. At bridges where we stopped we could see the road flex as the trucks went past. Lack of proper foundations too, meant that many of the roads we had been on ever since leaving Alice Springs are prone to being washed away.
The Victoria River Road took us two or three hundred kilometres west through Victoria River Crossing (a bridge and a roadhouse) and then on to Timber Creek. The scenery was un-scenic being mainly open savannah woodland and low ranges but as we neared Timber Creek more boab trees began appearing. These bottle shaped giants are perhaps my favourite trees apart from custard apple trees which I’ve never seen. And perhaps apricots. Then there’s lychees I suppose and maybe mandarins. Anyway, they’re really cool and the bottle part of them can grow to be….I don’t know? I guess it would take four people holding hands to join up around the trunks of some of them. Oh, I forgot nectarine trees, they’re good too. I don’t know what they look like either but nectarine trees are very, very good.
What I liked about the boab trees was that they were unpredictable; unruly. They just branch out wherever they want, don’t follow any rules. The branches look like roots so the effect you get is that of a bottle with a bunch of roots stuck in the top like an Amanda Vanstone flower arrangement would be – totally without any artistic merit. Come to think of it the big ones look like Amanda Vanstone with a number 25 haircut.
Sometimes you can see three of the huge bottle trunks branching out from a single root and if a boab falls over, it just sprouts branches upwards from the side of its trunk. When we reached Timber Creek we stayed in a campground that had about thirty big boabs in it which took on a frightening appearance at night. They looked like those pictures in kids books of trees with faces in their trunks and branches for arms. What’s more, boab trees hold a secret. Nobody knows how old they are because they’re hollow inside and don’t have rings you can count. They’re a dendrochronologist’s nightmare and I bet you don’t know what that means. You do? Nerdy little bookworm aren’t you?
At Timber Creek we took a cruise down the Victoria River. The Victoria River I’d never heard of but it’s the biggest river in the Northern Territory. It has a tide eight metres high and in the wet can’t be located as it, and the entire surrounding district, can be up to seventy feet under water. The craft we went in was a sort of flat bottomed speedboat with two 150 hp outboard engines hanging from the back of it. Thirty of us clambered aboard it at half past four in the evening in very uncomfortable sticky weather. Clare and I had been waiting around in the shadeless campground for five hours in debilitating temperatures and we were all in. The skipper, a great big army sergeant kind of guy, gave us a little talk for five minutes. What he told us about life jackets was roughly what the skipper on the last boat trip had told us. “Does, everybody know how to put these things on?” he yelled, pointing to a big net full of life jackets above our heads. Most of us said “yes.” “Well, don’t” he said. “All the studies show that crocs love life jackets. So, if we start to sink we throw all the life jackets out of one side and then we walk on water towards the other bank.”
This woke us up a bit. Then he started his Honda outboard engines and reversed quietly out to mid stream. Suddenly he opened up the 300 hp of combined engine power available to him and tore off down the river with us all pushed back into our seats. Flies and mosquitoes ricocheted off our sunglasses and everybody’s hair was flapping around their faces. We weren’t hot anymore. After about five minutes of this he cut the engines and we stopped even quicker than we had taken off. “Two big crocodiles fighting up ahead on the right” he barked. We all stood up just in time to see the two biggest crocs we’d seen so far swimming away from a dead cow. “We lose thirty cows to crocodiles every year on this river and countless wallabies.” He waited for us to take photos and then tore off at maximum speed again. In this fashion we lurched down the river and back up again for four hours.
It was a good trip though and our skipper had eyes like a hawk. At one point he shouted “a salt water crocodile eating a freshwater crocodile up ahead on the right.” It was horrible. This five meter long crocodile was shaking another two metre long crocodile which it had bitten nearly in half and bits of intestines were falling into the river. It made me feel quite sick. We rounded a bend at speed and he cut the engines near a sandbank absolutely covered in white cockatoo-like birds. “These birds are called little corellas” he shouted. We clicked away for a few minutes and then a woman asked him “could a crocodile catch a Carmello?” The skipper ignored her mispronunciation of the word Corella and said “no.” We giggled.
At the next stop he took the lid off a saucepan and took out a piece of meat about the size of a five cent piece and pressed it into the middle of a slice of white bread. It was a target for twenty or more kites. They all knew the bread wasn’t worth having and swooped down grabbing the tiny piece of meat in the bull’s eye. They did this time and again until a whole white sliced was thrown over the side and we all tried to catch the kites on camera. While this was going on he told us that there was a pair of White Sea Eagles living nearby and it was them he was trying to attract rather than the kites. He asked us to let him know if we saw them. A minute later the Carmello woman saw one of the sea eagles and yelled “over there, over there, the sea goose.” The guy in front of me said “bloody idiot” to his wife. The skipper said “yes that’s a sea eagle, see the white breast.” The Carmello woman said “yes, that’s what I said.” She must have had some kind of hearing dyslexia.
When we reached the end of our downstream journey we heaved to, or something equally as nautical. We waited for the sun to set behind an escarpment while we ate the supplied cheese and cocktail onions. Below the escarpment was a cattle station that was once owned by a man called Captain Bradshaw and according to the skipper it was the largest station in the world and was the size of Belgium which he said was five million acres. I don’t know if it’s true but there are quite a few stations in the Kimberly at a million or more acres. There was a houseboat anchored close to us and somebody asked how come it was there in such a remote location. The skipper said it was his and he hired it out to fishermen. Then he told us that he once unintentionally surfed five kilometres up the river in it, all the time thinking it was going to turn over and dump him in with the crocodiles. The Victoria River has a bore as it comes in from the Beagle Gulf and his houseboat was caught by it. He told us of another local man who had lost three boats to the bore. As we neared the jetty again at the end of the trip we saw the man’s present boat. It was called Last Hope.
Moving west across the top end we dropped into Lake Argyle, the largest crocodile holding pen in the southern hemisphere. According to the tourist brochures, which keep repeating that just about everywhere has something that’s the biggest in the southern hemisphere, there are twenty five thousand fresh water crocs in the lake!
We didn’t actually drop into Lake Argyle of course; we came across it so to speak. I had a friend once who came into money – he used to play with himself over a cash register draw. It’s not easy writing books I’ll have you know. A lot of thinking goes into them and that’s why you’ll probably never get to read this. What publisher would print this crap? Maybe I’ll look for a brail publisher. That reminds me. Years ago I did a speed reading course and went blind in one finger.
Lake Argyle was formed by damming up the Ord River which, in the wet season, gets more water than they use in all the baths in Belgium on St. Valentines day. I think that was what the notice board said. I could be wrong. The Lake Argyle dam wall is a tiny little thing but in such a strategic place that it’s created a lake one hundred and ten kilometres long! All projects involving dams in Australia use Sydney Harbour as a yardstick. Depending on which notice board you read, Lake Argyle contains eighteen or twenty times the amount of water in Sydney Harbour. Even the difference is kinda big though innit? I mean. Two Sydney Harboursful is quite a lot of water. Just think what you could do with that amount of water. I thought about that woman I talked to about trains in Adelaide River. With two Sydney Harboursful she could grow quite a lot of grapes and olives and primroses and Lilly of the Valleys. Or is it Lillies of the Valley? God, writing this book really gives me the shits sometimes. Lillies of the Valleys? It’s like erections and Governors Generals. Is the plural of hard on, hards on like Governors General? Should I say I had two hards on last night or I had two hard ons last night? Actually it was three but that’s got nothing to do with it. Hard ons and Governors general mmmm? Maybe I should ask that Peter Hollingworth prick?
I think it’s probably time I started a new chapter even though I’m still going to write about the Ord River. I just have this feeling that maybe this chapter is running its course and getting bogged down somehow. Meanwhile, I’d like you to think about something. How come there are no Aboriginal cricket players? There are Aboriginal football players in many teams. Remember Lionel Rose the Aboriginal world champion boxer? Yvonne Goolagong was a world beating tennis player, Cathy Freeman was the world’s best 400 metre runner. Anthony Mundine’s a world beater too. But how come no cricket players? And what happened to the Elephant Man? I’ve often wondered what happened to him. Just that one cracker of a movie and nothing since. Alright, alright – I’ll go. See you next chapter.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Some of the Northern Territory’s national parks campgrounds have free talks and slide shows put on by the rangers. The first one we went to was about rock art and was given by an Aboriginal guy who was incredibly knowledgeable. He showed us paintings done twenty thousand years ago, some of the oldest art in the world, which he compared with the seventeen thousand year old cave paintings at Altimira in Spain. There was a busload of Americans in his audience and I sensed that he was taking the piss out of them and us in a tongue in cheek sort of way. When he asked if there were any questions I had one for him. “Is it true that before white people came to Australia your people couldn’t tell a late from a flat white?”
Without breaking into a smile he said “yes, ‘I’ve heard that too. In fact my grandfather told me that he knew people years ago who even used to sprinkle the chocolate on top of long blacks.” The Americans didn’t see the humour in it. I couldn’t imagine anybody listening to that short conversation who didn’t think there was something strange about it but they didn’t react in any way at all. The art though – Wow. I don’t know much about art but I know a mess when I see it. I had no frame of reference through which to view it and the ranger said that it would take years to understand what it was about. When it came to actually painting any of it the artist himself had to be initiated before he could pick up a painting stick and it took him years to get to that stage. I could only judge it by whether or not I’d put it on the wall in my flat. I would. Alongside the oldest art in the world were paintings done in the 1960s by a guy called Barramundi Charlie. As far as I could tell he was just as good as anybody who’d gone before him and I liked the name Barramundi Charlie too. I wondered if there were any other names around like that – dick grouper maybe? The thing we non-Aboriginals generally fail to grasp is that this art is dynamic, not static.
Our Renaissance art in the form of old frescoes in Florence, for example, is static. It won’t change, it won’t progress and we view and study it retrospectively. We can even roughly date paintings by what style of art was in vogue at the time they were created. We look into what beliefs were around at the time that Michael Angelo, or whoever, painted them and we look at them and perhaps excuse them from that standpoint.
The Aboriginal rock art we saw in Kakadu was dynamic. That is to say it was still valid. The representations in it involve parts of the landscape. There are mythical beings depicted on the rocks that had turned into parts of the landscape like rivers, valleys or mountains. The art therefore, although being sacred, has been painted over many times and can still be used to instruct young people in their lore. A figure painted on a rock could be pointed to and then the student could be told that “that rock over there is what he turned into and that’s why that place is sacred.” A sort of living Jerusalem may be a way for Christians to get a handle on it I guess. This art has been re-done continually for tens of thousands of years and it’s still used. It’s not like old renaissance art gallery stuff that we no longer believe in, nor is it like a sacrosanct stained glass cathedral window to be marvelled at. There are no famous old masters in Aboriginal art. The artist was unimportant, he could have been be an Aboriginal Rolf Harris but he had to know what he was painting and for that he had to be initiated.
To the Aborigines this art is still real. They’re still using the same beliefs as they were back all those thousands of years ago. In part this is why Kakadu is classed as one of the twenty or so places in the world that has a world heritage listing on two counts. One being the environment and the other being the culture. This is by far the oldest continuous, living culture on the face of the earth and Clare’s just asked me whether to open a can of Turkish stuffed vine leaves for dinner or the Greek stuffed eggplant. I chose the eggplant. Anyway, the thing is that the stories told by the depictions painted on the pyramid walls five thousand years ago have been relegated to history as being incorrect – nobody believes those things anymore. This art in Kakadu still has an extant belief system attached to it unaltered.
Another thing we went to in a Kakadu campground one evening was a slide show called Buffalo Days. Good God. Look at that! There’s a woman getting undressed in a tent with the light on. Not a pretty sight actually. I did hear a couple of weeks ago that a peeping Tom in one of those grey nomad caravan parks in Darwin ran ten kilometres to the police station and gave himself up. Now, where was I? That’s completely thrown me, buggered up the old creative urge it has.
Ah yes, buffalos. A few of these animals were imported into a small settlement for use as meat back in the late 1800s and then turned loose when the settlement failed. Pretty soon they had increased until they numbered in the hundreds of thousands and then an industry was established to hunt them and export the hides to Turkey where they were carefully split into three layers and used for all manner of things, among them, industrial belts to drive machinery. The rest of the buffalo was of no interest to the industry. What wasn’t eaten by the Aborigines employed in the industry was left on the ground. The industry was dwindling by the late 1950s but not for lack of buffalos, they were still on the increase. Then big game hunting became popular and people would fly out from Darwin for a weekend’s shooting. We saw a slide of the tariffs for these trips. You could hire an experienced white buffalo hunter for five pounds per day or an experienced black buffalo hunter for thirty shillings. That meant that for the same price as a white hunter you could get three black ones and still have ten bob left for beer at the end of the day.
Of course, what all this did was to destroy many thousands of hectares of land. Soils that had never seen hoofed animals (Australia doesn’t naturally have any) couldn’t withstand the impact of the buffalo. Marshes where the roots of the vegetation absorbed the rainwater from The Wet and released it into the rivers all year round were trampled until they could no longer hold water at all. When The Wet came the soil no longer had anything to bind it and it washed away. Aquatic life then suffocated in other parts as it became smothered by this water born soil. The biggest tragedy for the area was that this destruction allowed the sea into what had been predominately freshwater swampland altering stable habitats that had remained intact for well over two thousand years.
Then America did Australia a favour for which we should be eternally grateful. At sometime in the 1970s they told us that they wouldn’t buy our beef unless we cleaned up our act. We had to prove to the USA that we were a clean supplier of meat and to do that we had to cull hundreds of thousands of wild buffalos that could carry the deadly brucellosis disease. The area occupied by our much lauded world heritage national park at Kakadu, of which we are so proud, would have been totally destroyed but for those nice Americans. The Australian government couldn’t have given a damn about Kakadu’s environment but they did care about the almighty dollar. As it is there is still an enormous problem in the top end with feral pigs but nothing really serious is being done to eradicate them. A ranger told us that for five hours last year they shot pigs from helicopters with SLR rifles at the rate of one per minute but it made no impression whatsoever on the pig population.
Northern Territory National Park campgrounds were generally very good. They weren’t too much like caravan parks which we long ago found we didn’t like at all. The problem with National Parks though is that you’re not allowed to camp anywhere other than their own campgrounds and if you miss out on a place you have to keep moving along and miss the attraction you’d come to see. We pulled into one of these campgrounds in Kakadu early one afternoon where the toilets were blocked. We knew there would be no visit from the ranger until the evening when he came to take the money so we reluctantly had to leave as the stench was unbearable.
I’m no stranger to problem toilets as I once lived in Turkey for three years, where plumbing is still in its formative stages, and I used to own one. There we had an Australian restaurant which we opened in a little town called Eceabat which is the closest town to the Gallipoli battlefields. The ANZACs didn’t go anywhere near the town of Gallipoli itself but did their misguided thing on the Gallipoli Peninsula, from whence cometh the most famous foreign name in Australia’s short white history. Our restaurant was on the ground floor of an hotel that overlooked the Dardanelles. We’d opened it to coincide with the seventy fifth anniversary of ANZAC day which was a big event attracting thousands of tourists and a smaller number of battleships and foreign prime ministers.
ANZAC day and the week leading up to it were incredibly busy and we turned the place into a hamburger bar come pub and opened it up around the clock in an effort to make as much money as possible in a short space of time. The little town of Eceabat had never been so busy in its entire history. There had never been so many tourists putting so much pressure on the infrastructure of the place. Indeed an hotel offering accommodation to tourists had been built especially for the event. The day after ANZAC day was busy too and at precisely ten past seven in the evening a truck with a tank on the back pulled up outside and connected up to the sewerage system of the hotel above us to pump out the septic tank, something that hadn’t been done for years.
We shared a common drainage system with the hotel and this truck had arrived to pump out the septic tank underneath the ground. The truck was already half full of effluent from some place else when the driver connected the suction hose to the delivery end of the pump so that instead of sucking it blew. He started the pump and walked across the road to talk to his buddies at the tea house. It took three or for minutes for anything to happen and then it blew half a bowser load of shit, tampons, condoms and other assorted nasties out of our toilets with such a force that it hit the ceiling and it blew columns of sewerage water out of our three kitchen sinks.
The restaurant was full at the time. I was heading towards the kitchen with a load of cups and saucers I’d just cleaned up from the tables when a middle aged lady burst out of the toilets and ran screaming past me like a stuck pig knocking everything I was holding onto the floor. As my eyes followed her through the door I could see that she had a large brown streak all the way up her back and she was dripping. She’d been sitting on the toilet at the time. I didn’t fully comprehend what was happening. After all, what restaurant proprietor would ever envision that one day his toilets would erupt and blow his lady customers off their seats.
As I turned around I saw Mehemet our kitchen hand looking at me. He didn’t look at all like Mehmet usually looked but more like some dirty little organ grinders monkey who’d just been fished out of a septic tank. He’d been washing lettuce when all of a sudden something hit him. It was a fucking great wall of poo water heading for the kitchen ceiling and, having been hit under the chin with it; it then started raining down upon him.
There was a mass exodus but the doorway proved inadequate to cope with this volume of traffic and so some people with shit all over their shoes ran back into the place and leapt up onto the chairs and tables. People cope with stress in different ways I suppose but I just burst into fits of uncontrollable laughter. I hurt my throat and stomach I laughed so much. Mehmet thought I’d lost it and stroked my head with one of his poohey hands saying “don’t worry Mister Peter it will be Mehmet’s pleasure to make things shape like ship.” That made things worse; he was acting and speaking like Manuel from Fawlty Towers. I struggled out to the kitchen where I fell to my knees and began crying like a bloody maniac.
By the time I’d recovered Mehmet and Bayram the chef had rounded up a couple of their friends from somewhere and with mops and tea towels on sticks they started to push all the crap out of the door amidst both cheers and screams from the mostly Australian audience. They all thought it was a great laugh. They had their video cameras running and there were flashes going off as they took photographs.
I joined the lads in the cleanup and as I was pushing a load of assorted sewerage out of the door and over the step into the drain a guy in a suit came up to me. He had another guy with a camera with him and he said "Oh Peter I'm from the Australian embassy and this is Fred Smith (I forget the name) from the Melbourne Age newspaper who'd like to do an article on your business". "Sorry Fred" I said "I'm in the shit at the moment, can you come back a bit later?" He said he would but we didn’t see him again.
Throughout this whole episode there were three Aussie soldiers sitting calmly discussing football in one corner. Everyone else had fled in panic leaving behind their cameras, handbags and cigarette lighters but these guys just sat there with shit floating around their boots as if it happened to them every day. I sloshed over to them with a round of free beers and said "sorry about all this boys." One of them looked up and quietly said "no worries, we like a good night out on the piss now and again."
But back to Kakadu. It was all good but the highlight for us was an early morning six thirty am. cruise on a billabong called Yellow Water. We boarded in the dark and cruised around the waterways for a couple of hours during which we saw all sorts of water birds and, of course, crocodiles. Everything looked so perfect, so pristine that it was hard to imagine that the Ranger Uranium Mine in the park had had spills from their settling ponds making it necessary for safety limits to be placed upon some of the traditional foods the Aborigines take from Kakadu. On the boat we sat in among a party of Germans who, as the sun came up, all held their hands up against the light in Seig Heil salutes.
When we’d finished in Kakadu we headed once again for Darwin as I had a computer problem. I’d taken too many photographs and didn’t have a way of backing them up onto a CD. Digital photography these days is so easy that any idiot can take fifty photographs and be sure of getting a good publishable quality one. I‘m one such idiot and I already had a couple of dozen that we considered would look good in a book. It was Friday evening and the computer repair shops wouldn’t be open until Monday so we decided to take it easy for a couple of days. Clare wanted to catch up on some painting and I wanted to write the words that I’m writing right now. Accordingly we went into the small hamlet of Adelaide River a hundred or so kilometres south of Darwin. We found the place in one of those inaccurate and out of date camping books that are on sale in most reputable book shops.
Since the book was written though, the Adelaide River showgrounds had turned into a little virtual caravan park. They’d put in a little pool, and bought a couple of washing machines and constructed a few of those shade cloth carport things for caravans to go under. This was the second caravan park we’d so far stayed in. We spent three nights there and it gave us a chance to observe our fellow grey nomads at closer quarters. We’d been wondering where they all were for they’d disappeared as soon as we got to Darwin and we saw very few in Kakadu. At the Adelaide River showgrounds we met people who’d been holed up there for six weeks! The curious thing was that there was sod all there. It’s one of those settlements that starts with a whimper and then slowly peters out. The whole place and its environs can be viewed more than adequately in two days. There’s no view from the showgrounds, only the racetrack and the toilet block, but there were people there whose thresholds of boredom were so high that they could happily just stay there sitting in chairs all day.
One couple were in an old bus and the wife made mango chutney and advertised it in the laundry. Their bus was called Happy Days and their names were on the door – Wally and Sandra. Happy Daze would have been more appropriate. They were parked next to a van called “Gypsy Rovers” and three vans further up was “Done Dreamin’.”
Opposite where we parked was a couple in their late sixties. The husband dressed in a shirt, jeans and elastic sided agricultural boots every day. He first nestled into his deck chair at eight in the morning and stayed there until five at night. He went to the toilet maybe a couple of times but the rest of the time he just sat there staring at nothing and his meals were brought to him by his wife. His only movement was with his wrist which operated a fly swat now and again. On the third day he moved his car out, turned it around and put it back in the same spot.
They weren’t alone; almost everybody spent the whole day sitting in deck chairs staring at the race track. Four couples had dogs which they took for a walk three times a day. They kept them on leads and carried thin supermarket fruit and vegetable bags which they turned inside out and picked the dog poo up with. One couple had refined the system. They had a dog lead with little clips on it that they attached ten or more plastic bags to.
Clare talked to a Queensland lady who’d been coming to the Adelaide River showgrounds with her husband for five years and had already been there for six weeks by the time we arrived there. Clare said that they must by now be very familiar with Kakadu. “No” she said. “My husband won’t go there. We went as far as the entrance a few years ago but my husband said he wouldn’t pay to get into a National Park so we turned around and came back. Anyway, there’s bities there and I don’t like the bities.” The bities she was referring to were mosquitoes.
We went over to the little pool to cool off three times because I couldn’t believe the conversations people were having.
“There are too many bloody bats in some places we’ve been and they’re not allowed to get rid of them. It’s the Greenies. Greenies haven’t got a bloody clue about anything”
“I know. In one place we stopped a bloke was shouting don’t do it, don’t let them do it. I asked him what it was that they shouldn’t do and he said he didn’t know. Someone had offered him twenty bucks and a free lunch if he’d protest but they didn’t tell him what it was about.”
“Yeah, that’d be bloody right. That’s the Greenies for yah”
We found that couples talked a lot about where they were booked into and their programs. One couple said they missed their friends at a caravan park the year before because they’d read their program wrong and turned up a week too late. In the pool bookings were discussed in great detail. “We’ve booked Kununurra” or “we couldn’t get the park we wanted in Townsville so we had to settle for Bowen.” It seemed that little time was left for adventure. They had to be in places they’d booked by definite dates and if they found somewhere or something interesting they couldn’t stay an extra day or two and enjoy it. One problem some of them faced was locating kennels to put their dogs in. They couldn’t bear to leave these family members at home so took them along but sometimes had to find kennels to put them in. National Parks, for example, don’t allow dogs and neither do the better caravan parks. One couple we met at the Adelaide river showgrounds had spent eight days there just trying to organise a decent kennel for their two dogs so they could go into Kakadu. Another couple we met back in Alice Springs had two dogs that they muzzled every time they went outside the caravan because they’d already lost a dog to 1080 poisoning on the trip.
I listened to fifteen minute conversation one afternoon between seven people about where you could get the best T Bone steaks in Australia. And I’m not bloody going to anywhere they mentioned. Something else we noticed was that they seemed intimidated by open space. There was plenty of space to park their caravans in but as people arrived they squeezed in between other vans wherever possible until they could have heard each other whisper. All, without exception, were overweight and many of the guys in the pool bore the scars of open heart surgery. These were marks they bore with some pride as though they’d been gained fighting Turks at Gallipoli or Iraqis in Iraq; Vietnamese in Vietnam perhaps? or some other people whose homelands they would have had difficulty locating on a map of the world but where Australian soldiers had gone to beat up the locals (who’d done bugger all to offend us) at the behest of “our great and powerful allies.” There were too, all those snippets about what the doctor had said to them. Things like “if I’d have left it another week the doc said I would’a bin dead. Isn’t that right Shirl?” And, “I died twice on the operating table but they brought me round.”
Clare paid for two nights at the Adelaide River and when we decided we’d stay for another night I found the caretaker and asked if I could pay him. He got his book out and asked what name we were under. I told him it was probably McMillan (Clare’s name) or it could be McLaren. He looked up from his book and said “you two not …um?” I said “married?” He nodded and I said “yes we are. But not to each other.” A week later after we’d been to Darwin and were on our way south again we found ourselves back in Adelaide River at 5pm so decided to stay the night there again. As we drove in we could see all the same faces in the same line of deckchairs. I spotted the caretaker standing in the middle of the line talking. As I pulled up alongside him I wound down the window and said “we just couldn’t keep away from the place Trev.” Somebody yelled out “how was Darwin?” and somebody else shouted “did yewze go up there to get married did yah.” To which everybody broke out in peels of stifled sniggering.
As we were leaving the next day the little population of Adelaide River together with all the campers turned out to watch the new Adelaide to Darwin train go past. The traffic was stopped way before the train came through so I wandered up to the head of the queue to take a look too. I spoke to a woman there who told me that she turned out twice a week to see the train come through and that she was sixty four years old and never thought she’d live to see a train. I said “in Adelaide River you mean?” “No”, she said “any train. I’d only seen them on the telly before this. I think it’s a real good idea, I do. I’m gonna go on it too next year.”
Since the coming of the railway just a few weeks before I met her she’d become an incurable railway addict and regaled me with stories about the great railways of the world. As we waited for the train we talked about the great engineering feat involved in the successful completion of the coast to coast, east/west, railway in the USA. It was finished, she said, in 1869 a hundred and thirty five years before the Adelaide Darwin and crossed some appallingly inhospitable terrain. “This railway ‘ere is bugger all compared with that American one.” She said. “They had to go right through the middle of bloody great mountains over there and build really high bridges over the valleys. Then they went through deserts where the Red Indians derailed the trains and killed some of the blokes layin’ the lines and all. This railway ‘ere is more than an ‘undred years bloody late and they had just about all flat land to cross. If they’d done it an ‘undred years ago we’d have had big towns all down through the middle of Australia by now like America has instead of bloody scrub. And you know what? They should have laid the water pipe alongside it when they done it. It wouldn’t have cost much more if they’d done it at the same time. That way they could’ve had water in the centre where there’s no diseases and grown all sorts of things, grapes and olives and figs and that.” I asked where the water would have come from. “It wouldn’t matter as long as you had the bloody pipe it could have been filled from anywhere in twenty years time, fifty years time. Doesn’t have to be now. You could be connected to the Ord River. They got water to spare. Goin’ to waste it is it up there.”
I would like to have listened to her for longer but the train came and went and we had to get moving. I knew that if she’d read that much about the east/west American railway she must have also read that it wouldn’t have been possible to have built it at the time without Chinese labour. In both the USA and Canada Chinese labour was used on the building of the railways and it was Chinese gangs that set the never to be broken records in both countries for miles of track laid in a single day. Chinese labour, of course, couldn’t be used in Australia at the time. We were doing everything possible to keep them from entering our country, taking our jobs, raping our women and polluting our bloodlines.
Our journey now took a turn to the west. However, due to another acute shortage of roads we’d had to retrace our steps from Darwin all the way to Katherine before we could head in that westerly direction. Even so, the sealed road that we took – a main arterial highway called the Victoria River Road – was, by international standards, a disgrace. Australia either doesn’t know how to build quality roads or is unable to afford them. They’re done on the cheap. In numerous places the road was simply worn out and where the holes appeared we could see that the asphalt was only a stone’s thickness. In a few places road trains had pushed the asphalt up in ridges at the side of the road and the earth underneath was showing through. At bridges where we stopped we could see the road flex as the trucks went past. Lack of proper foundations too, meant that many of the roads we had been on ever since leaving Alice Springs are prone to being washed away.
The Victoria River Road took us two or three hundred kilometres west through Victoria River Crossing (a bridge and a roadhouse) and then on to Timber Creek. The scenery was un-scenic being mainly open savannah woodland and low ranges but as we neared Timber Creek more boab trees began appearing. These bottle shaped giants are perhaps my favourite trees apart from custard apple trees which I’ve never seen. And perhaps apricots. Then there’s lychees I suppose and maybe mandarins. Anyway, they’re really cool and the bottle part of them can grow to be….I don’t know? I guess it would take four people holding hands to join up around the trunks of some of them. Oh, I forgot nectarine trees, they’re good too. I don’t know what they look like either but nectarine trees are very, very good.
What I liked about the boab trees was that they were unpredictable; unruly. They just branch out wherever they want, don’t follow any rules. The branches look like roots so the effect you get is that of a bottle with a bunch of roots stuck in the top like an Amanda Vanstone flower arrangement would be – totally without any artistic merit. Come to think of it the big ones look like Amanda Vanstone with a number 25 haircut.
Sometimes you can see three of the huge bottle trunks branching out from a single root and if a boab falls over, it just sprouts branches upwards from the side of its trunk. When we reached Timber Creek we stayed in a campground that had about thirty big boabs in it which took on a frightening appearance at night. They looked like those pictures in kids books of trees with faces in their trunks and branches for arms. What’s more, boab trees hold a secret. Nobody knows how old they are because they’re hollow inside and don’t have rings you can count. They’re a dendrochronologist’s nightmare and I bet you don’t know what that means. You do? Nerdy little bookworm aren’t you?
At Timber Creek we took a cruise down the Victoria River. The Victoria River I’d never heard of but it’s the biggest river in the Northern Territory. It has a tide eight metres high and in the wet can’t be located as it, and the entire surrounding district, can be up to seventy feet under water. The craft we went in was a sort of flat bottomed speedboat with two 150 hp outboard engines hanging from the back of it. Thirty of us clambered aboard it at half past four in the evening in very uncomfortable sticky weather. Clare and I had been waiting around in the shadeless campground for five hours in debilitating temperatures and we were all in. The skipper, a great big army sergeant kind of guy, gave us a little talk for five minutes. What he told us about life jackets was roughly what the skipper on the last boat trip had told us. “Does, everybody know how to put these things on?” he yelled, pointing to a big net full of life jackets above our heads. Most of us said “yes.” “Well, don’t” he said. “All the studies show that crocs love life jackets. So, if we start to sink we throw all the life jackets out of one side and then we walk on water towards the other bank.”
This woke us up a bit. Then he started his Honda outboard engines and reversed quietly out to mid stream. Suddenly he opened up the 300 hp of combined engine power available to him and tore off down the river with us all pushed back into our seats. Flies and mosquitoes ricocheted off our sunglasses and everybody’s hair was flapping around their faces. We weren’t hot anymore. After about five minutes of this he cut the engines and we stopped even quicker than we had taken off. “Two big crocodiles fighting up ahead on the right” he barked. We all stood up just in time to see the two biggest crocs we’d seen so far swimming away from a dead cow. “We lose thirty cows to crocodiles every year on this river and countless wallabies.” He waited for us to take photos and then tore off at maximum speed again. In this fashion we lurched down the river and back up again for four hours.
It was a good trip though and our skipper had eyes like a hawk. At one point he shouted “a salt water crocodile eating a freshwater crocodile up ahead on the right.” It was horrible. This five meter long crocodile was shaking another two metre long crocodile which it had bitten nearly in half and bits of intestines were falling into the river. It made me feel quite sick. We rounded a bend at speed and he cut the engines near a sandbank absolutely covered in white cockatoo-like birds. “These birds are called little corellas” he shouted. We clicked away for a few minutes and then a woman asked him “could a crocodile catch a Carmello?” The skipper ignored her mispronunciation of the word Corella and said “no.” We giggled.
At the next stop he took the lid off a saucepan and took out a piece of meat about the size of a five cent piece and pressed it into the middle of a slice of white bread. It was a target for twenty or more kites. They all knew the bread wasn’t worth having and swooped down grabbing the tiny piece of meat in the bull’s eye. They did this time and again until a whole white sliced was thrown over the side and we all tried to catch the kites on camera. While this was going on he told us that there was a pair of White Sea Eagles living nearby and it was them he was trying to attract rather than the kites. He asked us to let him know if we saw them. A minute later the Carmello woman saw one of the sea eagles and yelled “over there, over there, the sea goose.” The guy in front of me said “bloody idiot” to his wife. The skipper said “yes that’s a sea eagle, see the white breast.” The Carmello woman said “yes, that’s what I said.” She must have had some kind of hearing dyslexia.
When we reached the end of our downstream journey we heaved to, or something equally as nautical. We waited for the sun to set behind an escarpment while we ate the supplied cheese and cocktail onions. Below the escarpment was a cattle station that was once owned by a man called Captain Bradshaw and according to the skipper it was the largest station in the world and was the size of Belgium which he said was five million acres. I don’t know if it’s true but there are quite a few stations in the Kimberly at a million or more acres. There was a houseboat anchored close to us and somebody asked how come it was there in such a remote location. The skipper said it was his and he hired it out to fishermen. Then he told us that he once unintentionally surfed five kilometres up the river in it, all the time thinking it was going to turn over and dump him in with the crocodiles. The Victoria River has a bore as it comes in from the Beagle Gulf and his houseboat was caught by it. He told us of another local man who had lost three boats to the bore. As we neared the jetty again at the end of the trip we saw the man’s present boat. It was called Last Hope.
Moving west across the top end we dropped into Lake Argyle, the largest crocodile holding pen in the southern hemisphere. According to the tourist brochures, which keep repeating that just about everywhere has something that’s the biggest in the southern hemisphere, there are twenty five thousand fresh water crocs in the lake!
We didn’t actually drop into Lake Argyle of course; we came across it so to speak. I had a friend once who came into money – he used to play with himself over a cash register draw. It’s not easy writing books I’ll have you know. A lot of thinking goes into them and that’s why you’ll probably never get to read this. What publisher would print this crap? Maybe I’ll look for a brail publisher. That reminds me. Years ago I did a speed reading course and went blind in one finger.
Lake Argyle was formed by damming up the Ord River which, in the wet season, gets more water than they use in all the baths in Belgium on St. Valentines day. I think that was what the notice board said. I could be wrong. The Lake Argyle dam wall is a tiny little thing but in such a strategic place that it’s created a lake one hundred and ten kilometres long! All projects involving dams in Australia use Sydney Harbour as a yardstick. Depending on which notice board you read, Lake Argyle contains eighteen or twenty times the amount of water in Sydney Harbour. Even the difference is kinda big though innit? I mean. Two Sydney Harboursful is quite a lot of water. Just think what you could do with that amount of water. I thought about that woman I talked to about trains in Adelaide River. With two Sydney Harboursful she could grow quite a lot of grapes and olives and primroses and Lilly of the Valleys. Or is it Lillies of the Valley? God, writing this book really gives me the shits sometimes. Lillies of the Valleys? It’s like erections and Governors Generals. Is the plural of hard on, hards on like Governors General? Should I say I had two hards on last night or I had two hard ons last night? Actually it was three but that’s got nothing to do with it. Hard ons and Governors general mmmm? Maybe I should ask that Peter Hollingworth prick?
I think it’s probably time I started a new chapter even though I’m still going to write about the Ord River. I just have this feeling that maybe this chapter is running its course and getting bogged down somehow. Meanwhile, I’d like you to think about something. How come there are no Aboriginal cricket players? There are Aboriginal football players in many teams. Remember Lionel Rose the Aboriginal world champion boxer? Yvonne Goolagong was a world beating tennis player, Cathy Freeman was the world’s best 400 metre runner. Anthony Mundine’s a world beater too. But how come no cricket players? And what happened to the Elephant Man? I’ve often wondered what happened to him. Just that one cracker of a movie and nothing since. Alright, alright – I’ll go. See you next chapter.
