A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER NINE
The town of Kununurra was built to service the Ord River project and I’m glad it was. We had Erasmus serviced there. It was the greenest place we’d seen for weeks. With nineteen Sydney Harboursful of Lake Argyle water just up the road there’s enough left over to sprinkle a bit around and mow the grass that comes up. It brought up little fairy mushroom rings of Aborigines too. They obviously liked having somewhere nice to sit and talk. There is a celebrity Tree Park in the town. We wandered around it. There were little concrete pillars with brass plaques on them next to trees. The name of the tree was printed on each plaque along with the name of the celebrity that planted it. Each person had a classification. Rolf Harris, for example, was classified as a singer and TV personality. I wonder if Rolf Harris remembers that he planted a Cathormion Umbellatum in Kununurra on 16th February 1986 and does he know that dogs are pissing on it. Just about everyone, no matter how remotely famous they may have been, that has ever visited Kununurra has been roped into planting a tree there. Some, I’m sure, wouldn’t like it if they knew how badly looked after and close to death their trees are now. If Osama bin Laden rocked up in Kununurra they’d have him out there with a silver spade planting a kalashnikovus vulgaris tree before his feet hit the ground.
Like all popular places where tourists can find enough to do to stay for a couple of nights Kununurra had caravan holiday gulags. We went around them all to see if there was a place we’d like to stay because I needed to charge the camera and laptop batteries up. They were all too crowded and, instead, we went out of town by five kilometres and down a dirt road where we saw a couple of Aboriginal guys riding horses. We asked them where there was a good place to stay and they showed us an absolutely unspoiled and exquisite spot under a big old shade tree on the riverbank next to the rowing club which they said was only ever visited by its members on the odd Saturday morning. We went back there each night of the four nights we were in the area and it was so good that I didn’t want to leave. We didn’t see a soul all the time we were there and had the river to ourselves. We drove around the irrigated farming areas which were green but far less than spectacular and we noted that many of the tropical fruit farms were for sale. There was certainly a good variety of crops with sugar cane, bananas, mangoes and the like all under cultivation but it was nowhere near as special as the tourist propaganda would have had us believe. One “must see” stop on the tourist route was a melon farm where they sold a variety of tropical fruits in their farm shop. There were mandarins for sale there for seven dollars forty one a kilo. The exact same mandarins with the same stickers were in the supermarket in town for a little over four bucks a kilo. There was though, one product that caught my eye and I just had to try – boab tubers. They looked like dahlia tubers, had the consistency of crispy cucumbers and tasted like armadillo piss.
On the outskirts of town is another dam called the Diversion Dam which, I suppose, diverts water to the agricultural areas. We stood at the bottom of it one afternoon and saw a guy catch two huge fish. Apart from the fish we saw the Aboriginal family catch in the East Alligator River these were the only fish we’d anybody catch. We’d walked along at least thirty jetties and the banks of a score of rivers where people had been fishing but nobody in those places had caught a single fish. Everywhere we went in Australia where there was a river, lake or access to the sea there were shops in the local town selling fishing gear. One in every five touring vehicles we passed on the road had a boat on the roof or following behind on a trailer. Recreational fishing is a huge industry in Australia. Catching fish though, seems to be something of an exercise in futility. I’m sure that if you add up the costs of all the fishing gear sold in a year and divide it by the number of edible fish caught it would be a bloody sight cheaper to take the missus out to a really good fish restaurant once a month than catch a single fish. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the fact that when you go fishing you can get away from the missus for the day. Nevertheless, if you take her out to a really good fish restaurant once a month you’ll probably find that she’s much better company than you thought she was and you could have stayed at home with her.
A sleep or two out of Kununurra and we arrived in the Roadside Stopship of Turkey Creek. That’s all there was. A little further down the road was the Aboriginal community of Warmun that actually owned the roadhouse but we weren’t allowed in there unless we rang and said we were coming. We didn’t.
There was nowhere to stop but in the cramped dustbowl of a caravan park and Clare went into the roadhouse to book us in. She told the guy that Erasmus was quite big so he came out to take a look at how long it was so as to know what part of the park to put us in. I was sitting in the driver’s seat when he arrived at the open window. He put his head inside and said “that’s a big rig you’ve got here” I said “no, it’s just the way my trousers hang.” He said “smart arse” and I said “thanks for the compliment – it goes well with my big rig don’t you think?” He didn’t answer.
We’d stopped at Turkey Creek to take a look at the Bungle Bungles. These painful lumps had been growing on my arse for weeks and…….. No, I was just joking. The Bungle Bungles are – wait for it – rock formations. Yes, rock formations. A couple of thousand kilometres ago I swore I‘d never look at another rock formation as long as I lived but here I was doing it all over again.
We booked a four wheel drive day tour of the Bunglypoos for which we had to be up and awake and on the bus at five fifteen in the morning. It was going to be a long day. Now your Bungle Bungles were first brought to the attention of most Australians back in 1983 when a TV documentary was shown about them. At that time there wasn’t even a road out to them and the Channel Nine TV crew, who were in the area to film something else, went in there by chance in a helicopter. Pretty soon people were asking how to get to see them and, as the land was poor and no good for agriculture, the cattle were kicked off it and a National Park declared. National Parks, I have now realised, are seldom in any place that’s commercially valuable. So many people started to visit the Bungle Bungles (30,000 last year) that the national parks people put a four wheel drive track into them. Then, a year or so ago, the Bungle Bungles were declared on the World Heritage list. That’s big that is. That’s something reeeal special. And, from now on I’m going to call them the BBs.
The four wheel drive track was fifty three kilometres long and it was bloody murder. It took nearly three hours to drive it one way. It also took half an hour on a sealed road to get to the track. Out of our day six hours were spent on the four wheel drive track and another hour on the bitumen and that didn’t leave much time to look at the BBs because lunch took an hour and the two tea breaks took twenty minutes each. What we actually saw of the BBs was breathtaking for anyone into geology and very impressive for people like me. These BBs were formed by some geological action that can be duplicated fairly precisely by the factories that make the tiramisu that you can buy in yoghurt containers in Coles supermarkets. They are described as beehives in the tourist brochures but not many Australians have ever seen beehives that looked anything like that. I once did. They were in a village up on the Danube bend near Aggtelek in Hungary and nearly every house had some of those kind of beehives in the garden. They were made from a kind of rope twisted out of straw and wound around in circles to make a conical shaped hive. Well, I guess the BBs do look a bit like those hives but they’re layered rather than being wound around. The guide told us that the layers were laid down by a phenomenon that I am unable to remember or able to look up in a motor home. Anyhow, what they actually look like is what happens in a tiramisu factory when the conveyor belt that supplies the plastic containers breaks and the tiramisus that were supposed to go into the containers all become squashed up together before anybody had the time to press the emergency stop button.
At one stage we had to clamber through a narrow gorge to get into a small canyon and this involved a small amount of climbing up a few rocks. One woman who I suppose was in her late fifties became stuck and couldn’t get her leg up high enough to place her foot on the next step. The guide, who had waited to see us all get over this small hump, made as if to push her butt and then realised what he was about to do and backed off. She said “is Jim there?” Jim, the husband, came forward and pushed her up the step and we all continued. Doris, had a job negotiating all the little rocks and climbing bits and I felt sorry for her as she simply wasn’t the type and wasn’t ambulant enough for this trip. After we’d seen the BBs and were on the track home we stopped for a tea break and, as we’d done at the morning tea break, the guys all went off to pee in the direction in which we were heading and the ladies in the direction from which we’d come.
The guys and most of the ladies had returned and were well into their cups of tea when we heard a scream. It was Doris and she was screaming for Jim. Jim didn’t want to go and look for her because there were ladies peeing down there somewhere. He waited for a while as Doris’s screams became ever more insistent and in the end he set off. One of the ladies was returning and she stopped and talked to Jim for a minute and he trotted off in the direction of the screams.
The lady came back to the group and asked if anybody had a pair of tweezers and luckily somebody had a pair. There’s a very prickly Spinifex that grow all over the top end. It looks like round clumps of soft, lush green moss from a distance but the spines are as hard as porcupine quills. Doris had fallen over sideways in a clump of this stuff and now had a butt and thigh full of prickles. We felt sorry for her because most of us knew just how nasty this plant was. You only had to scuff past it to end up with nasty scratches on your ankles. Jim spent around half an hour with the tweezers while we all stood around trying not to comment on the situation. The guide was becoming impatient because he wanted to be back on the sealed road before dark but he couldn’t very well complain and stood to one side of the group kicking the dirt. When, at last, Jim and Doris emerged nobody said anything but Doris asked us if we’d mind swapping seats with her and Jim. We’d been sitting in the back and Doris wanted to be behind the group. The driver took off and then looked in the mirror and saw that Doris was standing. He told her he knew that sitting down would be uncomfortable for her but she couldn’t possibly stand up on such a bumpy track. We all disembarked again and the guide radioed for bigger bus to come out from somewhere so that she’d be able to lay out on her stomach across the back seats. This only took some forty minutes and we were on our excruciatingly bumpy way again. It could have been worse for Doris. What if she’d been bitten on the Bungle Bungles?
What little we saw of the BBs was very special. They truly are rock formations extraordinaire but we wouldn’t do the same trip again no matter how much we were paid. It was an object lesson in discomfort. Considering that they are not only in a national park but one of such significance as to be on the World Heritage list the road into it was truly horrific; as bad as you’d find in practically any third world country.
After six hours of being thrown about in the back of a four wheel drive vehicle we felt quite sick. Our heads throbbed and Clare had a headache that lasted for two days afterwards. Clare’s real tough too. A week or so later we heard an Aboriginal radio station giving out the conditions of roads in the district and the announcer, referring to the track we’d been on into the BBs, said it was the worst track in the area.
Anybody wishing to create a replica of the BBs in the setting sun at home for photographic purposes should do as follows:
1 Remove your bathroom door and place it over your kitchen table.
2 Take thirty five sheets of the sanded paper they sell in pet shops for the bottom of budgie cages and join them all up on the reverse side with duct tape. Then scrunch them up a little and lay them out on your bathroom door.
3 Sprinkle the sanded budgie paper with a supermarket bagful of dried grass clippings.
4 Buy 120 small Bonta Divina brand tiramisus at a Coles or Woolworths supermarket and stack them three high in twelve equal size clumps.
5 Cover the bottom of your kitchen light fitting with orange cellophane and switch it on.
6 Move around on your knees with the camera on macro and click away for the next ten minutes.
The trick is to catch the tiramisus just as the top ones are sliding down over the layer beneath. For an aerial shot stand on your kitchen chair.
Our Bungle Bungle guide told us that the National Park wherein the BBs are situated used to be home to over a million donkeys and that they have all but been eradicated. Statistics like that always make me feel insignificant. The Bungle Bungles made me feel insignificant come to that. They were so big. I hadn’t felt so insignificant since Delia Jenkinson called me Dracula in front of my mates at secondary school. Val Grice was there too and I fancied her nearly as much as Delia Jenkinson. Delia Jenkinson was real good looking and she arrived at our school from somewhere else when I was about fifteen. I fancied her because she had bigger boobs that the local girls and being from somewhere else she was exotic. All the boys fancied her but none had plucked up the courage to ask her out for fear of rejection. I was desperate to be the first.
During recess I was walking down the corridor with three of my mates when Deliah Jenkinson and two other girls were coming in the opposite direction. She was in the front of her group and I was in the front of mine and, as we neared each other, I smiled cockily and said “what’s cookin’ good lookin” and she said “nothing spectacular Dracula” and carried on walking without even looking at me. Just like that. It was effortless. She didn’t even have to think about it. Everybody fell about laughing and the whole school heard about how I was ridiculed. Years later I saw her in town at a bus stop and gave her a lift home in the car. She invited me in and I met her husband and had coffee. I recalled the incident at school but she didn’t even remember it. Women can be so cruel sometimes – she’d made me feel insignificant twice.
After Turkey Creek and the Bungles another dayful of bugger all (or was it two?) brought us to Fitzroy crossing. We stood on the bridge over the Fitzroy River and tried to imagine the amount of water it must carry in the wet season. The answer was, of course, available at the visitors centre. It can put out one Sydney Harbourful in twenty one hours. I wondered why, with this abundance of fresh water that Australia has, we couldn’t find the wherewithal to pipe it to the areas that could use it. The wet lasts for well over three months. With a Sydney Harbourful of good agricultural water going out to sea every twenty one hours for ninety days I would have thought that we could have started to use the continent. I can’t imagine for one minute that a guaranteed ninety Sydney Harboursful of good quality water annually would be allowed to go to out to sea in the USA or China. Australia even has a place it could store all this fresh water too and use it for agriculture and to drought proof its tiny little cities. It’s called the Great Artesian Basin. It’s sitting there depleted over many generations and just waiting to be replenished. We have a big country full of small thinkers it seems.
There were interesting things to do around Fitzroy Crossing but all of them involved going on four wheel drive trips and we were still shagged out from the last one to the Bungle Bungles. Instead, we decided to drive around and look for somewhere to park up for the day so that I could write and Clare could paint. We found a lush and sylvan spot right next to a quiet road alongside a small river. A grassy slope led gently down to the water and an egret took off as we approached. Two brightly hued rainbow bee eaters flitted in and out of the trees and, in the river, barramundi suspended themselves lazily wagging their tails above the yellowy gravel of the river bed. We got the chairs and table out and then took a walk along the river banks for an hour.
When we returned a family of Aborigines were sitting on the grass next to the river on the opposite side of the road. I really wanted to strike up communication with them but I knew from doing Aboriginal Studies at uni that the polite way to do it was not to approach them. Rather, you sit patiently within hearing distance and look the other way. I tried that for a couple of hours and it didn’t work so I gave up on the idea and completely ignored them. After another couple of hours one of them came across to me. He was a big man in is mid forties with very dark shiny skin and a big smile. He looked very similar to the broad nosed New Guinean people I’d seen on TV arguing over the price of cassowaries. His name was Billy Uhrl and in his arms he carried a one year old girl called Jezreel who was wearing a disposable nappy. At his feet were Zacharias and Elias, two boys of about five or six years old. The boys were black with identical green streaks.
They all shook hands with me and Billy asked me if we had any toilet paper. Clare gave him a spare roll. The toilet roll introduction however, was only an icebreaker. He just wanted a chat. He asked where we came from and when we told him that we weren’t Australian he became very friendly. Billy was in his mid forties and had never worked at anything that gained him an income. He told us a bit about the area, where to catch fish, what birds were around, what they ate and where there were other places we could park up if we intended to spend any more nights in the area. We spent half an hour talking and every so often he pointed to his ‘missus” across the road sitting on the grass with the rest of the family and a small pack of mangy dogs. She waved and smiled enthusiastically but didn’t seem inclined to cross the road to where we were. He asked if we’d send him a photograph of us and I told him I’d take one there and then with the digital camera and he could have a look at it before I sent him a print from the next photo shop. I said, rather casually, that I could take one of Jezreel and the boys too if he wanted. The idea seemed to appeal to him but he wanted to consult his missus first. He went back across the road to talk with her and returned saying that they’d only like a photo of Jezreel and could they have one of her smiling. I was looking for a chance to take a photo of Aborigines but hadn’t had the courage to ask one except for a guy I spoke to in Alice Springs who told me he wanted ten dollars per photo. I took two photos, one was of him and Jezreel with Clare. Clare is small of stature and when I put the picture on the laptop she looked like Billy’s lunch. Billy went back across the road after giving me his address and as the hours went by more and more people began to turn up and the party, to which we were unfortunately not invited, went on until about ten at night.
In the morning we didn’t know if they had all gone or whether some of them were still asleep in the grass until we heard a vehicle arrive. We were having breakfast inside Erasmus and I pulled the curtain back and saw a council pick up truck and a woman taking bin liners out of the back. I walked across the road to see what she was doing and was taken aback. This lovely little green sward alongside the river that had so attracted us the previous day was now covered in litter. It wasn’t littered in the city park sense of the word but strewn with disposable nappies, cigarette packets, eighty odd beer cans, two empty bottles of Southern Comfort an assortment of take-away containers and cold chips in their wrappers from the fish and chip shop. It wasn’t all on the grass either; there were beer cans in the river too. I approached the council worker who was picking up the litter.
“Be careful where you tread, you’ll get shit all over your shoes.”
“Christ!”
“Oh they’re pigs, absolute bloody pigs. They treat us like servants. They know the whites will pick it up. They’re taking the piss out of us.”
I looked down and she was right; there was shit all over the place – dog shit and human shit
“Is this a daily thing?”
“No, yesterday was Centrelink payday. It’ll be like this for another day and then they won’t have the money for anymore grog”
“Oh”
“Then there’ll be the women’s payday and it’ll start again”
“What about their work”
“You’re joking. There’s not an Abbo within miles of here that’s ever worked a day in his life. If you get up early in Kununurra you’ll see six council workers every day picking up their rubbish before the tourists get to see it. ”
I somehow didn’t like hearing her talk about Aborigines in this way. I’d already heard so many whites saying similar things but at last I reluctantly had to admit to myself that it was true. Everywhere we’d been where there were Aborigines there was litter and mess. I started to become confused between what I’d learnt at university and what I was seeing and hearing in practice. This confusion would come back to haunt me time and again as we travelled further through Western Australia. I began to wonder whether cleaning up their litter and keeping them on unemployment benefits and pensions wasn’t a bad exchange for invading, occupying and raping their country, earning a fortune from its minerals and so forth. I began to wonder how important litter was anyway. It’s unsightly to me and a lot of other whites but maybe it isn’t to Aborigines.
Converting the Aborigines to welfare junkies was government policy in this country. It was presumed by us white invaders that the Aborigines were a dying race that had failed to evolve. Government policy instituted, sometimes with the best of intentions, was to “sooth the dying pillow” on which they were expected to slowly fade away. Our problems increased when they didn’t. Now, in the first decade of the twenty first century, they have replaced the twenty thousand of their number that died in the initial confrontations and the Aboriginal population is back up to pre white contact times.
Living on welfare nevertheless, does nobody any good. When a person no longer has to expend any energy or thought in the procurement of his daily sustenance he can only degenerate. When this happens to a whole race of people I can’t think how it would be possible to point them upward again. Certainly, most of what Clare and I had seen of Aborigines so far wasn’t a pretty sight. As we met more whites in the north and listened to their stories and attitudes it became apparent that there’s a gulf between the two races that isn’t going to narrow anytime soon.
When we’d seen all we wanted to see of Fitzroy crossing we drove on along the top of Australia to the left on the map. We were heading for Derby. There was another kind of nothing all the way there and I’d fall asleep at the keyboard if I attempted to describe it. At about half past two in the afternoon we saw a cloud. It was the first one we’d seen for at least six weeks and we pulled over and got out of Erasmus to look at it. As we got back in I had an inkling that perhaps I was slowly going nuts. It was the first time I realised how boring boredom can really be. I guess it was a kind of agoraphobic thing although it wasn’t so much a fear of the wide open spaces as it was the fear of being stuck in the entirety of this nothingness for an extended period. It was time to go to the movies or a restaurant or get pissed or meet someone funny and laugh at their jokes. There were often days when we went without meeting anyone and were very happy with our own company but was it healthy? Perhaps I was getting cabin fever from being inside the van (the only place to go) and agoraphobia when I went outside. I though about it for a bit, asked Clare if she thought I was going nuts. She didn’t think so but how would she have known? She could have been going nuts with me.
The local cows were different in these parts although they were pretty thin on the ground. They were humpy backed Brahmins and Zebus both of which were light in colour. When we came across a dead one, (dead ones are extremely thin on the ground – fifteen centimetres on average) my white paint didn’t show up on it. I made a note to hunt down a spray can of black when we got to Derby. We’d also been reviewing the photographs of dead cows that we’d taken and some of them were a trifle uninspiring so we made a note to get hold of a few props too. A garland and a couple of hats maybe.
When we arrived in Derby we made a bee line for the jetty because we’d read in our guide book that it had “the second highest tidal range in the world at eleven metres.” Well, not the jetty – the water under it. The jetty didn’t move all the time we were there. Derby jetty is a long drive-in-drive-out affair, a semi circle that allows you to keep on driving in the same direction until you’re back on the land again. We didn’t drive along it, we walked. For some reason I am unable to understand Derby gets four tides per day and one was going out as we walked along the jetty. The eleven metre tides don’t come and go over a short, steep, cliff-like beach but over many miles of gently sloping mud flats. Consequently the water travels very quickly. It was a horrid looking mud coloured thin slurry like the world’s biggest caramel flavoured milk shake and it was travelling so fast that it pushed up a full half metre against the jetty’s piers. It was going out to sea at a rate I couldn’t imagine the average recreational fisherman’s outboard dinghy being able to hold its own against. It said in the Derby tourist promotional brochure “anglers will not be able to resist casting a line from the jetty.” I wouldn’t eat anything that came out of that awful looking sludge and if I’m ever called upon to walk on water it’s from Derby that I’ll be doing it.
Because the tides come and go four times a day and because the water drops eleven metres large ships can’t tie up to the wharf. They’d be high and dry and fall over while they were being loaded. Instead, the conveyor belt that carried the precious bauxite Derby exports loaded it into flat bottomed barges which took it downriver some twenty kilometres where it was transferred to the ships in deep water. The barges then returned on the next tide. Derby isn’t a place I’d choose to visit again or tell anyone they shouldn’t miss. It’s surrounded on three sides my mudflats when the tide’s out and by cacky looking slurry when it’s in. It’s a clean and tidy little place with a sprinkling of greenery and a good Woolworths supermarket.
Derby had the usual mushroom fairy rings of Aboriginals sitting on the grass drinking grog that all the towns up there have. In addition, it has the usual placards with historical information about how the Aborigines were killed, enslaved and otherwise badly treated by whites. This information now seems to be cropping up all over the place. Now that so many whites have said sorry there’s no need to hide it anymore – perhaps we’re growing up. Derby has a boab tree sporting a monstrously wide trunk with a slit in it big enough for a man to climb through and be kept in. It’s called The Prison Tree and was used as such. The tree itself is enclosed by a fence now and the information boards leading up to it describe and display some particularly gruesome stories and pictures of Aboriginals chained together like so many animals.
So much for the humour. The best bit of Derby for us was the cemetery. The caravan park wasn’t a place we liked the look of so we spent the night in the cemetery car park. It knocked spots off Coffs Harbour cemetery which was the last one we’d stayed at. The place was on the outskirts of town and quiet at night aside from the odd ghost. Some of the graves were a bit odd too. As part of the headstone furniture one grave had two Emu Export brand beer cans, a two litre orange juice container and a fold up chair. At the foot were three plastic milk crates which looked as though they were used as chairs. Across from it was a grave decorated with second hand plumbing fixtures; a two foot long piece of water pipe with a tap screwed to it and a ballcock being the most outstanding features and in the middle was a kerosene lamp. Another grave had a shade house built over it with two bench seats inside. Some graves were flat and simply decorated with shells from the beach although I don’t know where from. No self respecting shellfish would be found near Derby’s slurry washed mud flats. Several looked downright sinister in the waning light as I stepped outside for a pee. To keep their bunches of plastic flowers in place people had draped whole graves with black plastic shade cloth. The lumps of the flower bunches beneath the shade cloth made it look as if the corpses were lying on top of the ground. I didn’t tell Clare.
Almost adjoining the cemetery was another, older one which, a small notice said, was being restored. On a rusty metal cross there, were the words “RIP Jack Marshal 1807 – 1969. At one hundred and sixty two years of age he must surely have been the planets oldest resident! A nearby headstone above the grave of William Richardson had the words “Killed by the Blacks at Lillmaloura Station 31st October 1894 while in the execution of his duty.” William had been a policeman whose devoted Aboriginal tracker, who’d helped him catch scores of Aboriginals, balked at having to hunt his own tribesmen and killed him. The headstone was erected by the West Kimberly Police. I was glad to leave Derby. I thought it was the pits until I saw Port Hedland. Little did I know that within two years I’d be working there as the art co-ordinator of an Aboriginal ladies silk screen printing workshop. First though, came Broome.
As we neared Broome the amount of traffic going in and coming out told us that it was going to be difficult to find anywhere to park at night. We visited a very big holiday gulag a couple of kilometres before the town. It had some three hundred sites all in very close proximity to each other and didn’t have any vacancies. We walked around it anyhow. It looked really depressing. We carried on looking. Judging by the number of no camping signs all over the place the whole town seemed fanatically anti people like us who prefer to stay in places other than designated caravan parks. We looked at the other gulag and it was full up too so we went to the Visitor Information Centre where we were advised to try Broome’s two overflow sites. The first one was called the Youth and Citizens Club. It was a wire mesh compound covered in red dust without a blade of grass. It looked so much like a dog pound that we would never have recognised it had it not been for the red dust covered caravans tightly packed into it. We ended up at the second overflow caravan park. It was at the Pistol Club and as we pulled in there we could hear the members target shooting. It was a much better looking place than anywhere else in town and the parking spaces were amongst trees. We were shown a powered site and we paid for two nights. I couldn’t find a power point so I went up to the office to ask where the power board was. The manager showed me where to plug in. It was simply a plug on a lead tied to a tree and the lead was tied taught to another one a few metres away. I thought to myself that if the wind blew it would break the cable and if it rained there’d be sparks.
We spent four nights in Broome and they were enjoyable although the place was busier than anywhere we’d been on our trip. It had decent restaurants and coffee houses and a good beach. It had a good movie house too. The screen was outside but the moviegoers sat inside under a roof so they were protected from the rain and seagull shit. On our first night I was going through the local paper, Broome Happenings, and read a restaurant review by a journalist called Simone Knox. Her review was on an Italian restaurant called the Café Carlotta. She wrote “Glasses and cutlery were clean and shining and the dim lighting added an extra sparkle to the restaurant.” Since when did dim lighting add extra sparkle I wondered? We didn’t go to the Café Carlotta but to a topless restaurant down near Cable Beach. There was no roof at all. We had to order our meals at the counter and the guy serving us handed us one of those things that buzzes and vibrates when they press the button to let you now your order’s ready. I said “is this one of those things that vibrates?” He said “yes.” “Good” I said and stuffed it down the front of my shorts. I watched them. When our meal was ready they were fighting over who was going to press the button.
Broome prides itself on being the first real multicultural town in Australia and pays tribute to the Japanese pearl divers and technicians without whom the town would never have got off first base. The Japanese know about it too. They paid to have the town’s Japanese cemetery restored. There are around nine hundred Japanese buried there and it’s the most tasteful place in Broome. If it had a decent car park we would have camped in it. In the main drag in Chinatown there are three bronze statues standing next to each other, two Japanese and a European all of whom paid an important part in Broome’s pearling industry. I put my underpants over the head of one of them and took a photo.
Much of Broome is still about the pearling industry and there are a number of up-market shops there selling pearls and jewellery made from them. I don’t like them at all. To me they go with aspidistras and Agatha Christie novels and the smell of Shepherd’s Pie and frumpy old women in twin sets and blouses. Here were black pearls too and they had ridges around them like soft shelled eggs like the pearl had squeezed it out through an orifice in its nether regions in stages that brought water to its eyes. Chinatown, which I thought was a suburb of Broome, actually is Broome. It’s basically a street of cream corrugated iron shops all in roughly the same style and looking as though they were built at the same time under the watchful eye of a sensible town planner. There’s lots of palm trees and tropical vegetation in town and it has a distinct and deliberate Asian flavour. There were boobs there too! Lots of cleavage sans wrinkles for a change. The grey nomads only made up half of the vacationing population which was extremely unusual.
When we returned to the Pistol Club caravan overflow park on the second night all hell broke loose as we drove in. An electricity cable caught under the skylight on the top of Erasmus and it came down. The guy whose caravan was using the cable was living on site and had two big freezers full of food and now didn’t have any electricity. I went and told the manager what had happened and he rigged up a temporary supply. I asked him afterwards if everything was alright and he wasn’t the least concerned that we may have been electrocuted by his low lying cables. He was concerned though, that the new cables would cost him two hundred dollars. His name was Clive and he was a pig. Before we left the next day Clare went down to see him but he made it obvious that he was still angry about it. Before we left the place I took photographs of all the cables draped this way and that across trees and roads and took them to the council offices. The health services manager there was horrified and told me he’d get somebody to go over to the Pistol Club urgently saying “that’s all the town needs, an electrocuted holiday maker.”
Before leaving town we found a cheap and nasty shop where we managed to find a single plastic flower to decorate our dead cows with. We wandered around the shop for quite a while picking up various gaudy looking bright shiny objects but could only find a plastic flower attached to the top of a kids pencil. We’d been so long looking around that the young shop assistant came to the end of the shop where we were to ask if she could help us.
“Are you right there, need any help?”
“Do you have any more decorations? Maybe a boa or garlands or something?”
“No, not really. That’s about it?
“Do you know if there’s anywhere else in town that sells that sort of thing?”
“No, not really. What’s it for, a children’s party? Fancy dress?”
“To decorate cows with”
“Cows?”
“Yes”
“What sort of cows..real cows?”
“Dead cows”
“Dead cows?”
“Yes, the one’s you find along the roadside”
“Holy shit”
“That’s an idea – a halo”
“Oh, jeez, that’s, that’s friggin sick”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
She looked up at me with hands on hips
“Are you a farmer or something?”
“No, I’m a Hindu”
“And that’s what they do us it, decorate dead cows?”
“Some of us yes, it’s not compulsory though”
“Don’t you have any respect for the poor friggin things?”
“Yes, that’s why we don’t eat them. In fact cows are sacred to us”
“Well that flower’s all we got”
“OK, I’ll take it then.”
I paid my dollar fifty and we left the shop and stepped up into the back of Erasmus. Through the tinted windows we giggled as we watched her go to the newsagents next door and tell them all about Hindu bovine funerary rights while pointing in our direction.
Between Broome and Port Hedland there’s nothing. The truck drivers who travel that road regularly or folks that live thereabouts may well think there’s something. They may even be able to see the odd distinguishing feature but for me there’s sod all. I have no past experience, no frame of reference gained elsewhere with which to compare Australia’s nothings. There are basically about six types of nothing in the landscape of this country and I’m at a loss to describe any of them satisfactorily. If I did manage to and then it rained, the description would no longer apply. The nothing between Broome and Port Hedland had a red earth background. It was a parched nothing with bleached grass, uninteresting low clinging Spinifex, flat and gearchangeless. There was the odd olive coloured and stunted eucalyptus tree wishing it had been borne elsewhere and resigned to the fact that it was never going to reach its full potential. The cows were good though. We found Dead Ned and May and we tarted them up splendidly. Dead Ned resplendent and resembling Malcolm Frazer in a Forestry Tasmania Akubra hat courtesy of my friend John Goedraad of 44 Quarry Road, Bellerive, Tasmania who wishes to remain anonymous.
Port Hedland was without doubt the biggest dump I’ve seen in Australia. I’ve been in a number of third world countries but have seldom seen anything to compare with this above ground hole. To be fair, it was conceived as a dump, an iron ore dump, and was never meant to be anything else. It was post WWII Communist Russian in appearance. Everything was utilitarian and it’s a word I really should look up in the dictionary one day. Apart from a recently added small park at the water front, from which tourists gather to watch ships come and go, there had never been any attempt at beautification. It was a purely functional place built, one could be forgiven for thinking, during the soviet constructivism “artistic” period. The only thing missing was the elephantine statuary of miners wielding pick axes in cramped tunnels that always went with the architecture places like Port Hedland displayed to the world. Outside the visitors centre in the main street (Port Hedland claims the smallest main street in Australia) we even found one such statue. It was a crudely hewn copper statue of a grim faced man pushing a wheelbarrow with two flashlights attached to it. I think it was supposed to portray was a miner in a tunnel back in the days before mining machinery when men were men and canaries were nervous. Instead he just looked like a pauper from the Ruhr Valley going on holiday. I stole a pair of Clare’s white panties and stretched them over his head for a photo but it didn’t look very arty and I didn’t want to spend much more time adjusting them because a small crowd was gathering and probably thinking I’d stole the panties from a clothes line or something. When I handed them back to Clare they were covered in red dust.
The main street was filthier than…well…I dunno really? Maybe like the Maggi packet soup factory had exploded all over it while it was on a cream of tomato production run. There wasn’t any litter just a decade’s worth of red dust. The Post Office was covered in it and all the advertising boards for the shops. The telephone boxes were caked in the stuff – nobody cared. We stayed the night in the Spoil Banks which doesn’t sound terribly attractive but was actually the cleanest place in town. It was a small peninsula made from the sand being constantly dredged to keep the shipping channel clear. At night we counted fifteen big iron ore ships laying offshore waiting to load. Their lights made a pretty sight and it was possible to forget what a dreadful place Port Hedland was.
When morning came it was Sunday. This wouldn’t normally have been worthy of mention but for the fact that we thought it was Friday. I wanted to see if I had any emails and found that the only place in town to do this was at a coin-in-the-slot machine in the Laundromat. A gaunt, walking skeleton of a guy in a red dust encrusted white singlet, shorts and thongs was already using it. He was toothless. I asked him how long he’d be. I said I’d come back later, I just didn’t want to find myself in a queue after he’d finished. He said that he’d only put a couple of dollars in the machine and I could use it first, adding that once he got on it he’d probably be there for a fifty dollar session. We talked about the internet which he said he used only for viewing porn sites. I asked if this didn’t offend other customers in the Laundromat. He said that he’d been doing it for six months and nobody had complained so far. I said that I thought it was a very expensive way to access the internet and asked why he didn’t buy a computer. He said he lived in a company provided flat and had many times had the money to buy a computer but he wanted to go to Karratha to buy one. Every time he’d saved up the money he’d blown it gambling in the pub before he could get to Karratha. He smiled a resigned, gummy grin and opened is palms as if to say that’s the way life was and he was powerless to do anything about it. What an attitude! Daft as a diesel driven doughnut in my opinion. But then I’m not gambling addict. There was a good cheap and nasty shop in South Hedland (where the posh people live) and there we managed to buy a heap of props for our dead cows. We bought a purple halo, a yellow feather boa, a pack of five different coloured garlands, a Ronald MacDonald wig and a pair of angel’s wings all the way from China and made from swans feathers. I wonder what they do with the rest of the swans? Swan chow mien? Swan with cashew nuts? Swan Sechwan? Who knows?
CHAPTER NINE
The town of Kununurra was built to service the Ord River project and I’m glad it was. We had Erasmus serviced there. It was the greenest place we’d seen for weeks. With nineteen Sydney Harboursful of Lake Argyle water just up the road there’s enough left over to sprinkle a bit around and mow the grass that comes up. It brought up little fairy mushroom rings of Aborigines too. They obviously liked having somewhere nice to sit and talk. There is a celebrity Tree Park in the town. We wandered around it. There were little concrete pillars with brass plaques on them next to trees. The name of the tree was printed on each plaque along with the name of the celebrity that planted it. Each person had a classification. Rolf Harris, for example, was classified as a singer and TV personality. I wonder if Rolf Harris remembers that he planted a Cathormion Umbellatum in Kununurra on 16th February 1986 and does he know that dogs are pissing on it. Just about everyone, no matter how remotely famous they may have been, that has ever visited Kununurra has been roped into planting a tree there. Some, I’m sure, wouldn’t like it if they knew how badly looked after and close to death their trees are now. If Osama bin Laden rocked up in Kununurra they’d have him out there with a silver spade planting a kalashnikovus vulgaris tree before his feet hit the ground.
Like all popular places where tourists can find enough to do to stay for a couple of nights Kununurra had caravan holiday gulags. We went around them all to see if there was a place we’d like to stay because I needed to charge the camera and laptop batteries up. They were all too crowded and, instead, we went out of town by five kilometres and down a dirt road where we saw a couple of Aboriginal guys riding horses. We asked them where there was a good place to stay and they showed us an absolutely unspoiled and exquisite spot under a big old shade tree on the riverbank next to the rowing club which they said was only ever visited by its members on the odd Saturday morning. We went back there each night of the four nights we were in the area and it was so good that I didn’t want to leave. We didn’t see a soul all the time we were there and had the river to ourselves. We drove around the irrigated farming areas which were green but far less than spectacular and we noted that many of the tropical fruit farms were for sale. There was certainly a good variety of crops with sugar cane, bananas, mangoes and the like all under cultivation but it was nowhere near as special as the tourist propaganda would have had us believe. One “must see” stop on the tourist route was a melon farm where they sold a variety of tropical fruits in their farm shop. There were mandarins for sale there for seven dollars forty one a kilo. The exact same mandarins with the same stickers were in the supermarket in town for a little over four bucks a kilo. There was though, one product that caught my eye and I just had to try – boab tubers. They looked like dahlia tubers, had the consistency of crispy cucumbers and tasted like armadillo piss.
On the outskirts of town is another dam called the Diversion Dam which, I suppose, diverts water to the agricultural areas. We stood at the bottom of it one afternoon and saw a guy catch two huge fish. Apart from the fish we saw the Aboriginal family catch in the East Alligator River these were the only fish we’d anybody catch. We’d walked along at least thirty jetties and the banks of a score of rivers where people had been fishing but nobody in those places had caught a single fish. Everywhere we went in Australia where there was a river, lake or access to the sea there were shops in the local town selling fishing gear. One in every five touring vehicles we passed on the road had a boat on the roof or following behind on a trailer. Recreational fishing is a huge industry in Australia. Catching fish though, seems to be something of an exercise in futility. I’m sure that if you add up the costs of all the fishing gear sold in a year and divide it by the number of edible fish caught it would be a bloody sight cheaper to take the missus out to a really good fish restaurant once a month than catch a single fish. Of course, this doesn’t take into account the fact that when you go fishing you can get away from the missus for the day. Nevertheless, if you take her out to a really good fish restaurant once a month you’ll probably find that she’s much better company than you thought she was and you could have stayed at home with her.
A sleep or two out of Kununurra and we arrived in the Roadside Stopship of Turkey Creek. That’s all there was. A little further down the road was the Aboriginal community of Warmun that actually owned the roadhouse but we weren’t allowed in there unless we rang and said we were coming. We didn’t.
There was nowhere to stop but in the cramped dustbowl of a caravan park and Clare went into the roadhouse to book us in. She told the guy that Erasmus was quite big so he came out to take a look at how long it was so as to know what part of the park to put us in. I was sitting in the driver’s seat when he arrived at the open window. He put his head inside and said “that’s a big rig you’ve got here” I said “no, it’s just the way my trousers hang.” He said “smart arse” and I said “thanks for the compliment – it goes well with my big rig don’t you think?” He didn’t answer.
We’d stopped at Turkey Creek to take a look at the Bungle Bungles. These painful lumps had been growing on my arse for weeks and…….. No, I was just joking. The Bungle Bungles are – wait for it – rock formations. Yes, rock formations. A couple of thousand kilometres ago I swore I‘d never look at another rock formation as long as I lived but here I was doing it all over again.
We booked a four wheel drive day tour of the Bunglypoos for which we had to be up and awake and on the bus at five fifteen in the morning. It was going to be a long day. Now your Bungle Bungles were first brought to the attention of most Australians back in 1983 when a TV documentary was shown about them. At that time there wasn’t even a road out to them and the Channel Nine TV crew, who were in the area to film something else, went in there by chance in a helicopter. Pretty soon people were asking how to get to see them and, as the land was poor and no good for agriculture, the cattle were kicked off it and a National Park declared. National Parks, I have now realised, are seldom in any place that’s commercially valuable. So many people started to visit the Bungle Bungles (30,000 last year) that the national parks people put a four wheel drive track into them. Then, a year or so ago, the Bungle Bungles were declared on the World Heritage list. That’s big that is. That’s something reeeal special. And, from now on I’m going to call them the BBs.
The four wheel drive track was fifty three kilometres long and it was bloody murder. It took nearly three hours to drive it one way. It also took half an hour on a sealed road to get to the track. Out of our day six hours were spent on the four wheel drive track and another hour on the bitumen and that didn’t leave much time to look at the BBs because lunch took an hour and the two tea breaks took twenty minutes each. What we actually saw of the BBs was breathtaking for anyone into geology and very impressive for people like me. These BBs were formed by some geological action that can be duplicated fairly precisely by the factories that make the tiramisu that you can buy in yoghurt containers in Coles supermarkets. They are described as beehives in the tourist brochures but not many Australians have ever seen beehives that looked anything like that. I once did. They were in a village up on the Danube bend near Aggtelek in Hungary and nearly every house had some of those kind of beehives in the garden. They were made from a kind of rope twisted out of straw and wound around in circles to make a conical shaped hive. Well, I guess the BBs do look a bit like those hives but they’re layered rather than being wound around. The guide told us that the layers were laid down by a phenomenon that I am unable to remember or able to look up in a motor home. Anyhow, what they actually look like is what happens in a tiramisu factory when the conveyor belt that supplies the plastic containers breaks and the tiramisus that were supposed to go into the containers all become squashed up together before anybody had the time to press the emergency stop button.
At one stage we had to clamber through a narrow gorge to get into a small canyon and this involved a small amount of climbing up a few rocks. One woman who I suppose was in her late fifties became stuck and couldn’t get her leg up high enough to place her foot on the next step. The guide, who had waited to see us all get over this small hump, made as if to push her butt and then realised what he was about to do and backed off. She said “is Jim there?” Jim, the husband, came forward and pushed her up the step and we all continued. Doris, had a job negotiating all the little rocks and climbing bits and I felt sorry for her as she simply wasn’t the type and wasn’t ambulant enough for this trip. After we’d seen the BBs and were on the track home we stopped for a tea break and, as we’d done at the morning tea break, the guys all went off to pee in the direction in which we were heading and the ladies in the direction from which we’d come.
The guys and most of the ladies had returned and were well into their cups of tea when we heard a scream. It was Doris and she was screaming for Jim. Jim didn’t want to go and look for her because there were ladies peeing down there somewhere. He waited for a while as Doris’s screams became ever more insistent and in the end he set off. One of the ladies was returning and she stopped and talked to Jim for a minute and he trotted off in the direction of the screams.
The lady came back to the group and asked if anybody had a pair of tweezers and luckily somebody had a pair. There’s a very prickly Spinifex that grow all over the top end. It looks like round clumps of soft, lush green moss from a distance but the spines are as hard as porcupine quills. Doris had fallen over sideways in a clump of this stuff and now had a butt and thigh full of prickles. We felt sorry for her because most of us knew just how nasty this plant was. You only had to scuff past it to end up with nasty scratches on your ankles. Jim spent around half an hour with the tweezers while we all stood around trying not to comment on the situation. The guide was becoming impatient because he wanted to be back on the sealed road before dark but he couldn’t very well complain and stood to one side of the group kicking the dirt. When, at last, Jim and Doris emerged nobody said anything but Doris asked us if we’d mind swapping seats with her and Jim. We’d been sitting in the back and Doris wanted to be behind the group. The driver took off and then looked in the mirror and saw that Doris was standing. He told her he knew that sitting down would be uncomfortable for her but she couldn’t possibly stand up on such a bumpy track. We all disembarked again and the guide radioed for bigger bus to come out from somewhere so that she’d be able to lay out on her stomach across the back seats. This only took some forty minutes and we were on our excruciatingly bumpy way again. It could have been worse for Doris. What if she’d been bitten on the Bungle Bungles?
What little we saw of the BBs was very special. They truly are rock formations extraordinaire but we wouldn’t do the same trip again no matter how much we were paid. It was an object lesson in discomfort. Considering that they are not only in a national park but one of such significance as to be on the World Heritage list the road into it was truly horrific; as bad as you’d find in practically any third world country.
After six hours of being thrown about in the back of a four wheel drive vehicle we felt quite sick. Our heads throbbed and Clare had a headache that lasted for two days afterwards. Clare’s real tough too. A week or so later we heard an Aboriginal radio station giving out the conditions of roads in the district and the announcer, referring to the track we’d been on into the BBs, said it was the worst track in the area.
Anybody wishing to create a replica of the BBs in the setting sun at home for photographic purposes should do as follows:
1 Remove your bathroom door and place it over your kitchen table.
2 Take thirty five sheets of the sanded paper they sell in pet shops for the bottom of budgie cages and join them all up on the reverse side with duct tape. Then scrunch them up a little and lay them out on your bathroom door.
3 Sprinkle the sanded budgie paper with a supermarket bagful of dried grass clippings.
4 Buy 120 small Bonta Divina brand tiramisus at a Coles or Woolworths supermarket and stack them three high in twelve equal size clumps.
5 Cover the bottom of your kitchen light fitting with orange cellophane and switch it on.
6 Move around on your knees with the camera on macro and click away for the next ten minutes.
The trick is to catch the tiramisus just as the top ones are sliding down over the layer beneath. For an aerial shot stand on your kitchen chair.
Our Bungle Bungle guide told us that the National Park wherein the BBs are situated used to be home to over a million donkeys and that they have all but been eradicated. Statistics like that always make me feel insignificant. The Bungle Bungles made me feel insignificant come to that. They were so big. I hadn’t felt so insignificant since Delia Jenkinson called me Dracula in front of my mates at secondary school. Val Grice was there too and I fancied her nearly as much as Delia Jenkinson. Delia Jenkinson was real good looking and she arrived at our school from somewhere else when I was about fifteen. I fancied her because she had bigger boobs that the local girls and being from somewhere else she was exotic. All the boys fancied her but none had plucked up the courage to ask her out for fear of rejection. I was desperate to be the first.
During recess I was walking down the corridor with three of my mates when Deliah Jenkinson and two other girls were coming in the opposite direction. She was in the front of her group and I was in the front of mine and, as we neared each other, I smiled cockily and said “what’s cookin’ good lookin” and she said “nothing spectacular Dracula” and carried on walking without even looking at me. Just like that. It was effortless. She didn’t even have to think about it. Everybody fell about laughing and the whole school heard about how I was ridiculed. Years later I saw her in town at a bus stop and gave her a lift home in the car. She invited me in and I met her husband and had coffee. I recalled the incident at school but she didn’t even remember it. Women can be so cruel sometimes – she’d made me feel insignificant twice.
After Turkey Creek and the Bungles another dayful of bugger all (or was it two?) brought us to Fitzroy crossing. We stood on the bridge over the Fitzroy River and tried to imagine the amount of water it must carry in the wet season. The answer was, of course, available at the visitors centre. It can put out one Sydney Harbourful in twenty one hours. I wondered why, with this abundance of fresh water that Australia has, we couldn’t find the wherewithal to pipe it to the areas that could use it. The wet lasts for well over three months. With a Sydney Harbourful of good agricultural water going out to sea every twenty one hours for ninety days I would have thought that we could have started to use the continent. I can’t imagine for one minute that a guaranteed ninety Sydney Harboursful of good quality water annually would be allowed to go to out to sea in the USA or China. Australia even has a place it could store all this fresh water too and use it for agriculture and to drought proof its tiny little cities. It’s called the Great Artesian Basin. It’s sitting there depleted over many generations and just waiting to be replenished. We have a big country full of small thinkers it seems.
There were interesting things to do around Fitzroy Crossing but all of them involved going on four wheel drive trips and we were still shagged out from the last one to the Bungle Bungles. Instead, we decided to drive around and look for somewhere to park up for the day so that I could write and Clare could paint. We found a lush and sylvan spot right next to a quiet road alongside a small river. A grassy slope led gently down to the water and an egret took off as we approached. Two brightly hued rainbow bee eaters flitted in and out of the trees and, in the river, barramundi suspended themselves lazily wagging their tails above the yellowy gravel of the river bed. We got the chairs and table out and then took a walk along the river banks for an hour.
When we returned a family of Aborigines were sitting on the grass next to the river on the opposite side of the road. I really wanted to strike up communication with them but I knew from doing Aboriginal Studies at uni that the polite way to do it was not to approach them. Rather, you sit patiently within hearing distance and look the other way. I tried that for a couple of hours and it didn’t work so I gave up on the idea and completely ignored them. After another couple of hours one of them came across to me. He was a big man in is mid forties with very dark shiny skin and a big smile. He looked very similar to the broad nosed New Guinean people I’d seen on TV arguing over the price of cassowaries. His name was Billy Uhrl and in his arms he carried a one year old girl called Jezreel who was wearing a disposable nappy. At his feet were Zacharias and Elias, two boys of about five or six years old. The boys were black with identical green streaks.
They all shook hands with me and Billy asked me if we had any toilet paper. Clare gave him a spare roll. The toilet roll introduction however, was only an icebreaker. He just wanted a chat. He asked where we came from and when we told him that we weren’t Australian he became very friendly. Billy was in his mid forties and had never worked at anything that gained him an income. He told us a bit about the area, where to catch fish, what birds were around, what they ate and where there were other places we could park up if we intended to spend any more nights in the area. We spent half an hour talking and every so often he pointed to his ‘missus” across the road sitting on the grass with the rest of the family and a small pack of mangy dogs. She waved and smiled enthusiastically but didn’t seem inclined to cross the road to where we were. He asked if we’d send him a photograph of us and I told him I’d take one there and then with the digital camera and he could have a look at it before I sent him a print from the next photo shop. I said, rather casually, that I could take one of Jezreel and the boys too if he wanted. The idea seemed to appeal to him but he wanted to consult his missus first. He went back across the road to talk with her and returned saying that they’d only like a photo of Jezreel and could they have one of her smiling. I was looking for a chance to take a photo of Aborigines but hadn’t had the courage to ask one except for a guy I spoke to in Alice Springs who told me he wanted ten dollars per photo. I took two photos, one was of him and Jezreel with Clare. Clare is small of stature and when I put the picture on the laptop she looked like Billy’s lunch. Billy went back across the road after giving me his address and as the hours went by more and more people began to turn up and the party, to which we were unfortunately not invited, went on until about ten at night.
In the morning we didn’t know if they had all gone or whether some of them were still asleep in the grass until we heard a vehicle arrive. We were having breakfast inside Erasmus and I pulled the curtain back and saw a council pick up truck and a woman taking bin liners out of the back. I walked across the road to see what she was doing and was taken aback. This lovely little green sward alongside the river that had so attracted us the previous day was now covered in litter. It wasn’t littered in the city park sense of the word but strewn with disposable nappies, cigarette packets, eighty odd beer cans, two empty bottles of Southern Comfort an assortment of take-away containers and cold chips in their wrappers from the fish and chip shop. It wasn’t all on the grass either; there were beer cans in the river too. I approached the council worker who was picking up the litter.
“Be careful where you tread, you’ll get shit all over your shoes.”
“Christ!”
“Oh they’re pigs, absolute bloody pigs. They treat us like servants. They know the whites will pick it up. They’re taking the piss out of us.”
I looked down and she was right; there was shit all over the place – dog shit and human shit
“Is this a daily thing?”
“No, yesterday was Centrelink payday. It’ll be like this for another day and then they won’t have the money for anymore grog”
“Oh”
“Then there’ll be the women’s payday and it’ll start again”
“What about their work”
“You’re joking. There’s not an Abbo within miles of here that’s ever worked a day in his life. If you get up early in Kununurra you’ll see six council workers every day picking up their rubbish before the tourists get to see it. ”
I somehow didn’t like hearing her talk about Aborigines in this way. I’d already heard so many whites saying similar things but at last I reluctantly had to admit to myself that it was true. Everywhere we’d been where there were Aborigines there was litter and mess. I started to become confused between what I’d learnt at university and what I was seeing and hearing in practice. This confusion would come back to haunt me time and again as we travelled further through Western Australia. I began to wonder whether cleaning up their litter and keeping them on unemployment benefits and pensions wasn’t a bad exchange for invading, occupying and raping their country, earning a fortune from its minerals and so forth. I began to wonder how important litter was anyway. It’s unsightly to me and a lot of other whites but maybe it isn’t to Aborigines.
Converting the Aborigines to welfare junkies was government policy in this country. It was presumed by us white invaders that the Aborigines were a dying race that had failed to evolve. Government policy instituted, sometimes with the best of intentions, was to “sooth the dying pillow” on which they were expected to slowly fade away. Our problems increased when they didn’t. Now, in the first decade of the twenty first century, they have replaced the twenty thousand of their number that died in the initial confrontations and the Aboriginal population is back up to pre white contact times.
Living on welfare nevertheless, does nobody any good. When a person no longer has to expend any energy or thought in the procurement of his daily sustenance he can only degenerate. When this happens to a whole race of people I can’t think how it would be possible to point them upward again. Certainly, most of what Clare and I had seen of Aborigines so far wasn’t a pretty sight. As we met more whites in the north and listened to their stories and attitudes it became apparent that there’s a gulf between the two races that isn’t going to narrow anytime soon.
When we’d seen all we wanted to see of Fitzroy crossing we drove on along the top of Australia to the left on the map. We were heading for Derby. There was another kind of nothing all the way there and I’d fall asleep at the keyboard if I attempted to describe it. At about half past two in the afternoon we saw a cloud. It was the first one we’d seen for at least six weeks and we pulled over and got out of Erasmus to look at it. As we got back in I had an inkling that perhaps I was slowly going nuts. It was the first time I realised how boring boredom can really be. I guess it was a kind of agoraphobic thing although it wasn’t so much a fear of the wide open spaces as it was the fear of being stuck in the entirety of this nothingness for an extended period. It was time to go to the movies or a restaurant or get pissed or meet someone funny and laugh at their jokes. There were often days when we went without meeting anyone and were very happy with our own company but was it healthy? Perhaps I was getting cabin fever from being inside the van (the only place to go) and agoraphobia when I went outside. I though about it for a bit, asked Clare if she thought I was going nuts. She didn’t think so but how would she have known? She could have been going nuts with me.
The local cows were different in these parts although they were pretty thin on the ground. They were humpy backed Brahmins and Zebus both of which were light in colour. When we came across a dead one, (dead ones are extremely thin on the ground – fifteen centimetres on average) my white paint didn’t show up on it. I made a note to hunt down a spray can of black when we got to Derby. We’d also been reviewing the photographs of dead cows that we’d taken and some of them were a trifle uninspiring so we made a note to get hold of a few props too. A garland and a couple of hats maybe.
When we arrived in Derby we made a bee line for the jetty because we’d read in our guide book that it had “the second highest tidal range in the world at eleven metres.” Well, not the jetty – the water under it. The jetty didn’t move all the time we were there. Derby jetty is a long drive-in-drive-out affair, a semi circle that allows you to keep on driving in the same direction until you’re back on the land again. We didn’t drive along it, we walked. For some reason I am unable to understand Derby gets four tides per day and one was going out as we walked along the jetty. The eleven metre tides don’t come and go over a short, steep, cliff-like beach but over many miles of gently sloping mud flats. Consequently the water travels very quickly. It was a horrid looking mud coloured thin slurry like the world’s biggest caramel flavoured milk shake and it was travelling so fast that it pushed up a full half metre against the jetty’s piers. It was going out to sea at a rate I couldn’t imagine the average recreational fisherman’s outboard dinghy being able to hold its own against. It said in the Derby tourist promotional brochure “anglers will not be able to resist casting a line from the jetty.” I wouldn’t eat anything that came out of that awful looking sludge and if I’m ever called upon to walk on water it’s from Derby that I’ll be doing it.
Because the tides come and go four times a day and because the water drops eleven metres large ships can’t tie up to the wharf. They’d be high and dry and fall over while they were being loaded. Instead, the conveyor belt that carried the precious bauxite Derby exports loaded it into flat bottomed barges which took it downriver some twenty kilometres where it was transferred to the ships in deep water. The barges then returned on the next tide. Derby isn’t a place I’d choose to visit again or tell anyone they shouldn’t miss. It’s surrounded on three sides my mudflats when the tide’s out and by cacky looking slurry when it’s in. It’s a clean and tidy little place with a sprinkling of greenery and a good Woolworths supermarket.
Derby had the usual mushroom fairy rings of Aboriginals sitting on the grass drinking grog that all the towns up there have. In addition, it has the usual placards with historical information about how the Aborigines were killed, enslaved and otherwise badly treated by whites. This information now seems to be cropping up all over the place. Now that so many whites have said sorry there’s no need to hide it anymore – perhaps we’re growing up. Derby has a boab tree sporting a monstrously wide trunk with a slit in it big enough for a man to climb through and be kept in. It’s called The Prison Tree and was used as such. The tree itself is enclosed by a fence now and the information boards leading up to it describe and display some particularly gruesome stories and pictures of Aboriginals chained together like so many animals.
So much for the humour. The best bit of Derby for us was the cemetery. The caravan park wasn’t a place we liked the look of so we spent the night in the cemetery car park. It knocked spots off Coffs Harbour cemetery which was the last one we’d stayed at. The place was on the outskirts of town and quiet at night aside from the odd ghost. Some of the graves were a bit odd too. As part of the headstone furniture one grave had two Emu Export brand beer cans, a two litre orange juice container and a fold up chair. At the foot were three plastic milk crates which looked as though they were used as chairs. Across from it was a grave decorated with second hand plumbing fixtures; a two foot long piece of water pipe with a tap screwed to it and a ballcock being the most outstanding features and in the middle was a kerosene lamp. Another grave had a shade house built over it with two bench seats inside. Some graves were flat and simply decorated with shells from the beach although I don’t know where from. No self respecting shellfish would be found near Derby’s slurry washed mud flats. Several looked downright sinister in the waning light as I stepped outside for a pee. To keep their bunches of plastic flowers in place people had draped whole graves with black plastic shade cloth. The lumps of the flower bunches beneath the shade cloth made it look as if the corpses were lying on top of the ground. I didn’t tell Clare.
Almost adjoining the cemetery was another, older one which, a small notice said, was being restored. On a rusty metal cross there, were the words “RIP Jack Marshal 1807 – 1969. At one hundred and sixty two years of age he must surely have been the planets oldest resident! A nearby headstone above the grave of William Richardson had the words “Killed by the Blacks at Lillmaloura Station 31st October 1894 while in the execution of his duty.” William had been a policeman whose devoted Aboriginal tracker, who’d helped him catch scores of Aboriginals, balked at having to hunt his own tribesmen and killed him. The headstone was erected by the West Kimberly Police. I was glad to leave Derby. I thought it was the pits until I saw Port Hedland. Little did I know that within two years I’d be working there as the art co-ordinator of an Aboriginal ladies silk screen printing workshop. First though, came Broome.
As we neared Broome the amount of traffic going in and coming out told us that it was going to be difficult to find anywhere to park at night. We visited a very big holiday gulag a couple of kilometres before the town. It had some three hundred sites all in very close proximity to each other and didn’t have any vacancies. We walked around it anyhow. It looked really depressing. We carried on looking. Judging by the number of no camping signs all over the place the whole town seemed fanatically anti people like us who prefer to stay in places other than designated caravan parks. We looked at the other gulag and it was full up too so we went to the Visitor Information Centre where we were advised to try Broome’s two overflow sites. The first one was called the Youth and Citizens Club. It was a wire mesh compound covered in red dust without a blade of grass. It looked so much like a dog pound that we would never have recognised it had it not been for the red dust covered caravans tightly packed into it. We ended up at the second overflow caravan park. It was at the Pistol Club and as we pulled in there we could hear the members target shooting. It was a much better looking place than anywhere else in town and the parking spaces were amongst trees. We were shown a powered site and we paid for two nights. I couldn’t find a power point so I went up to the office to ask where the power board was. The manager showed me where to plug in. It was simply a plug on a lead tied to a tree and the lead was tied taught to another one a few metres away. I thought to myself that if the wind blew it would break the cable and if it rained there’d be sparks.
We spent four nights in Broome and they were enjoyable although the place was busier than anywhere we’d been on our trip. It had decent restaurants and coffee houses and a good beach. It had a good movie house too. The screen was outside but the moviegoers sat inside under a roof so they were protected from the rain and seagull shit. On our first night I was going through the local paper, Broome Happenings, and read a restaurant review by a journalist called Simone Knox. Her review was on an Italian restaurant called the Café Carlotta. She wrote “Glasses and cutlery were clean and shining and the dim lighting added an extra sparkle to the restaurant.” Since when did dim lighting add extra sparkle I wondered? We didn’t go to the Café Carlotta but to a topless restaurant down near Cable Beach. There was no roof at all. We had to order our meals at the counter and the guy serving us handed us one of those things that buzzes and vibrates when they press the button to let you now your order’s ready. I said “is this one of those things that vibrates?” He said “yes.” “Good” I said and stuffed it down the front of my shorts. I watched them. When our meal was ready they were fighting over who was going to press the button.
Broome prides itself on being the first real multicultural town in Australia and pays tribute to the Japanese pearl divers and technicians without whom the town would never have got off first base. The Japanese know about it too. They paid to have the town’s Japanese cemetery restored. There are around nine hundred Japanese buried there and it’s the most tasteful place in Broome. If it had a decent car park we would have camped in it. In the main drag in Chinatown there are three bronze statues standing next to each other, two Japanese and a European all of whom paid an important part in Broome’s pearling industry. I put my underpants over the head of one of them and took a photo.
Much of Broome is still about the pearling industry and there are a number of up-market shops there selling pearls and jewellery made from them. I don’t like them at all. To me they go with aspidistras and Agatha Christie novels and the smell of Shepherd’s Pie and frumpy old women in twin sets and blouses. Here were black pearls too and they had ridges around them like soft shelled eggs like the pearl had squeezed it out through an orifice in its nether regions in stages that brought water to its eyes. Chinatown, which I thought was a suburb of Broome, actually is Broome. It’s basically a street of cream corrugated iron shops all in roughly the same style and looking as though they were built at the same time under the watchful eye of a sensible town planner. There’s lots of palm trees and tropical vegetation in town and it has a distinct and deliberate Asian flavour. There were boobs there too! Lots of cleavage sans wrinkles for a change. The grey nomads only made up half of the vacationing population which was extremely unusual.
When we returned to the Pistol Club caravan overflow park on the second night all hell broke loose as we drove in. An electricity cable caught under the skylight on the top of Erasmus and it came down. The guy whose caravan was using the cable was living on site and had two big freezers full of food and now didn’t have any electricity. I went and told the manager what had happened and he rigged up a temporary supply. I asked him afterwards if everything was alright and he wasn’t the least concerned that we may have been electrocuted by his low lying cables. He was concerned though, that the new cables would cost him two hundred dollars. His name was Clive and he was a pig. Before we left the next day Clare went down to see him but he made it obvious that he was still angry about it. Before we left the place I took photographs of all the cables draped this way and that across trees and roads and took them to the council offices. The health services manager there was horrified and told me he’d get somebody to go over to the Pistol Club urgently saying “that’s all the town needs, an electrocuted holiday maker.”
Before leaving town we found a cheap and nasty shop where we managed to find a single plastic flower to decorate our dead cows with. We wandered around the shop for quite a while picking up various gaudy looking bright shiny objects but could only find a plastic flower attached to the top of a kids pencil. We’d been so long looking around that the young shop assistant came to the end of the shop where we were to ask if she could help us.
“Are you right there, need any help?”
“Do you have any more decorations? Maybe a boa or garlands or something?”
“No, not really. That’s about it?
“Do you know if there’s anywhere else in town that sells that sort of thing?”
“No, not really. What’s it for, a children’s party? Fancy dress?”
“To decorate cows with”
“Cows?”
“Yes”
“What sort of cows..real cows?”
“Dead cows”
“Dead cows?”
“Yes, the one’s you find along the roadside”
“Holy shit”
“That’s an idea – a halo”
“Oh, jeez, that’s, that’s friggin sick”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
She looked up at me with hands on hips
“Are you a farmer or something?”
“No, I’m a Hindu”
“And that’s what they do us it, decorate dead cows?”
“Some of us yes, it’s not compulsory though”
“Don’t you have any respect for the poor friggin things?”
“Yes, that’s why we don’t eat them. In fact cows are sacred to us”
“Well that flower’s all we got”
“OK, I’ll take it then.”
I paid my dollar fifty and we left the shop and stepped up into the back of Erasmus. Through the tinted windows we giggled as we watched her go to the newsagents next door and tell them all about Hindu bovine funerary rights while pointing in our direction.
Between Broome and Port Hedland there’s nothing. The truck drivers who travel that road regularly or folks that live thereabouts may well think there’s something. They may even be able to see the odd distinguishing feature but for me there’s sod all. I have no past experience, no frame of reference gained elsewhere with which to compare Australia’s nothings. There are basically about six types of nothing in the landscape of this country and I’m at a loss to describe any of them satisfactorily. If I did manage to and then it rained, the description would no longer apply. The nothing between Broome and Port Hedland had a red earth background. It was a parched nothing with bleached grass, uninteresting low clinging Spinifex, flat and gearchangeless. There was the odd olive coloured and stunted eucalyptus tree wishing it had been borne elsewhere and resigned to the fact that it was never going to reach its full potential. The cows were good though. We found Dead Ned and May and we tarted them up splendidly. Dead Ned resplendent and resembling Malcolm Frazer in a Forestry Tasmania Akubra hat courtesy of my friend John Goedraad of 44 Quarry Road, Bellerive, Tasmania who wishes to remain anonymous.
Port Hedland was without doubt the biggest dump I’ve seen in Australia. I’ve been in a number of third world countries but have seldom seen anything to compare with this above ground hole. To be fair, it was conceived as a dump, an iron ore dump, and was never meant to be anything else. It was post WWII Communist Russian in appearance. Everything was utilitarian and it’s a word I really should look up in the dictionary one day. Apart from a recently added small park at the water front, from which tourists gather to watch ships come and go, there had never been any attempt at beautification. It was a purely functional place built, one could be forgiven for thinking, during the soviet constructivism “artistic” period. The only thing missing was the elephantine statuary of miners wielding pick axes in cramped tunnels that always went with the architecture places like Port Hedland displayed to the world. Outside the visitors centre in the main street (Port Hedland claims the smallest main street in Australia) we even found one such statue. It was a crudely hewn copper statue of a grim faced man pushing a wheelbarrow with two flashlights attached to it. I think it was supposed to portray was a miner in a tunnel back in the days before mining machinery when men were men and canaries were nervous. Instead he just looked like a pauper from the Ruhr Valley going on holiday. I stole a pair of Clare’s white panties and stretched them over his head for a photo but it didn’t look very arty and I didn’t want to spend much more time adjusting them because a small crowd was gathering and probably thinking I’d stole the panties from a clothes line or something. When I handed them back to Clare they were covered in red dust.
The main street was filthier than…well…I dunno really? Maybe like the Maggi packet soup factory had exploded all over it while it was on a cream of tomato production run. There wasn’t any litter just a decade’s worth of red dust. The Post Office was covered in it and all the advertising boards for the shops. The telephone boxes were caked in the stuff – nobody cared. We stayed the night in the Spoil Banks which doesn’t sound terribly attractive but was actually the cleanest place in town. It was a small peninsula made from the sand being constantly dredged to keep the shipping channel clear. At night we counted fifteen big iron ore ships laying offshore waiting to load. Their lights made a pretty sight and it was possible to forget what a dreadful place Port Hedland was.
When morning came it was Sunday. This wouldn’t normally have been worthy of mention but for the fact that we thought it was Friday. I wanted to see if I had any emails and found that the only place in town to do this was at a coin-in-the-slot machine in the Laundromat. A gaunt, walking skeleton of a guy in a red dust encrusted white singlet, shorts and thongs was already using it. He was toothless. I asked him how long he’d be. I said I’d come back later, I just didn’t want to find myself in a queue after he’d finished. He said that he’d only put a couple of dollars in the machine and I could use it first, adding that once he got on it he’d probably be there for a fifty dollar session. We talked about the internet which he said he used only for viewing porn sites. I asked if this didn’t offend other customers in the Laundromat. He said that he’d been doing it for six months and nobody had complained so far. I said that I thought it was a very expensive way to access the internet and asked why he didn’t buy a computer. He said he lived in a company provided flat and had many times had the money to buy a computer but he wanted to go to Karratha to buy one. Every time he’d saved up the money he’d blown it gambling in the pub before he could get to Karratha. He smiled a resigned, gummy grin and opened is palms as if to say that’s the way life was and he was powerless to do anything about it. What an attitude! Daft as a diesel driven doughnut in my opinion. But then I’m not gambling addict. There was a good cheap and nasty shop in South Hedland (where the posh people live) and there we managed to buy a heap of props for our dead cows. We bought a purple halo, a yellow feather boa, a pack of five different coloured garlands, a Ronald MacDonald wig and a pair of angel’s wings all the way from China and made from swans feathers. I wonder what they do with the rest of the swans? Swan chow mien? Swan with cashew nuts? Swan Sechwan? Who knows?
