Chapter13

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the year 1845 a small group of men set off from Perth on foot. They walked all the way to a green and pleasant shallow river valley in the Victoria plains north of Perth by some one hundred and thirty kilometres. It must have been a hell of a walk and one that I, for one, wouldn’t attempt under any circumstances. But then again I, a mere mortal, a mere pimple on life’s bum, could never be as driven as was this small group of men. They, just like the Blues Brothers who came after them, were on a mission from God.

They were from the Spanish branch of the Catholic Church and they made the journey in order to make contact with and then to “civilise” the Aborigines thereabouts. This was the same organisation that gave us the Spanish Inquisition and the fanatical Christian fundamentalists that acted without a shred of their professed Christianity when they attempted to “civilise” the indigenous Indians during the rapacious Spanish conquest of South America.

The rape of South America and the Spanish Inquisition took place in the dim distant past but here they were again, in the mid nineteenth century, still believing that they, who had demonstrated their lack of civilisation so palpably, had within them the wherewithal to civilise other people. They still didn’t get it. Still hadn’t figured out that they were the problem, not the solution. They still don’t get it – they think they’re good people doing good!

But back in 1846 a hundred and thirty kilometres north of Perth on a new and practically unsullied continent they started to build something permanent. It’s a fucking great, cathedral-like, religious complex on the most grandiose scale that wouldn’t appear at all out of place in Spain. It’s beautiful. They named it New Norcia and it’s without doubt the most incongruous looking cluster of buildings in the whole of Australia. New Norcia is a small company town that was set up not to mine the earth, but to mine someone else’s culture. I’m sure God would have hated them for behaving in such an un-Christian way.

We took a tour of the complex with a guide. Her name was Lindsay, an English woman of around thirty who had been living and working in New Norcia for a bit over a year. She made the history of the place sound idyllic and stressed that all the Aboriginal children who lived there were willingly sent there by their parents to be educated. She stressed that the monks only accepted Aboriginal children if the parents had signed a consent form.

I knew this to be bullshit of the first order, lies in fact. I had read about New Norcia and seen a documentary on TV – The Habits of New Norcia - that I still had on videotape at home. In it a dozen or so fifty to sixty year old Aborigines were taken back there to recount their childhoods spent in this prison. And prison it was. They were stolen generation kids whose parents were illiterate and couldn’t even read the consent forms they were coerced into signing. They told tales of cruelty, of slave labour and of a kid being beaten unmercifully by a monk when he was caught and returned there after escaping.

The monastery at New Norcia used to take in washing to earn money just as Roman Catholic convents did in Ireland and was so well portrayed in the film The Magdalena Sisters. The former Aboriginal inmates said in the video documentary that life in the laundry was so hard that they used to catch bees and get them to sting the ends of their fingers so as to make them swell up so they’d be excused work in that dreadful place.

During the tour I pulled our guide aside and asked if she’d seen the “Habits of New Norcia” documentary. She said she hadn’t even head of it. I told her about it and could see she didn’t believe a word I was saying. Later in the day Clare and I went for a coffee in the hotel cafe and Lindsay, the guide, was sitting there at a bar stool. She asked if I’d mind telling her a bit more about the documentary because she’d asked her supervisor who denied all knowledge of it and of the horrors I’d been telling her about. Her supervisor too, had asked the monks about it.

One of the monks still at New Norcia is in his eighties and another in his nineties. It’s impossible for them not to know what went on there and for them to say that they don’t know of the documentary’s existence stretches the bounds of credibility. I asked Lindsay who she thought planted, tended and harvested the olive groves that New Norcia’s famous olive oil originally came from and who she thought was resting in all the unmarked graves in the cemetery. She was a nice, caring person who had never thought about these things and who was distraught at the thought of it all.

New Norcia functioned as a boarding school for white children too for a period in its history. In various rooms in the complex were photographs of happy smiling white kids in groups or individually. By contrast, the small aboriginal museum had photographs of groups of Aboriginal children. Without exception they all looked miserable, downcast and, in some cases cowed.

We stayed two nights at New Norcia. The countryside was green and beautiful and formed a great backdrop to take some of the most unusual architectural photographs in Australia. We went for walks in the lush meadows and watched the parrots and the Catholic sheep. Clare painted. I watched. She should really have used a bit of Polyfilla on the cathedral before applying the purple acrylic though. Various monks went to and fro from building to building. We didn’t know what they were actually doing but they looked so incongruous dressed in religious garb; the style of which predated white Australia by centuries. Their clothes were spotless but I knew they had dirty habits in their closets. And those that worked in the kitchens. Were they friars or chipmunks?

After all that religious stuff and the disturbing thoughts about the mistreatment of native Australian children at the hands of the Spanish, Roman Catholic nasties we needed something lighter. We turned North West and headed out to the Willy Farm. The Willy Farm is officially known as the Pinnacles. It’s in the Pinnacles Desert, in the middle of Nambung National Park and it’s unique. Literally thousands of huge, dick-like limestone pillars rise out of a harsh landscape of yellow sand. Some of them are well over three metres tall. The guide book said “Some are jagged, sharp-edged columns, rising to a point; while others resemble tombstones.” That’s because they don’t want to print what they actually look like. Nobody, but nobody could possibly look at these things without thinking PENIS, PENIS, PENIS.

I remembered seeing a TV program in which Billy Connolly took off his clothes and danced naked around a bunch of these very pinnacles. I thought to myself that he understood exactly what they resembled. Nor could the potent imagery of this “shape of things to cum” national attraction have been lost on the Aboriginals that counted this area within their territory. They absolutely must have had some sexual legend to explain why 20 hectares worth of petrified erectile tissue all ended up in the same place. It was as if all the male members of the male members of the Christine Aguilera fan club had been snap frozen during one of her video clips and buried right there in the West Australian desert.

We hid Erasmus from the Ranger when he closed up the car park for the night and evaded his eye when he opened up the next morning. It made a nice change to park somewhere with clean toilets and water for the night. In the morning before sun up I left Clare asleep and with the digital camera I took off on the bike weaving my way between pinnacles looking for new angles from which to photographs them. As the sun rose over the horizon a pinkish glow began to glance across the tops of this extraordinary collection of standing stones. It was such an enthralling sight that I was lost for words and even thoughts. I was completely mesmerised at the way they were changing colour by the minute. Ten minutes passed before I remembered why I’d dragged myself out of bed so early. I’d now missed all the best photo opportunities and the colours were fast disappearing.

I jumped back on the bike and pedalled pugnaciously past precariously protruding pinnacles at slightly sub-sonic speed bathing my blinkers in the bright blue …….fuckit, this keyboard’s stuck again.

I stopped the bike atop a small rise and looked back. I’d ridden where no grey nomad had baldly gone before, at least since the last dust storm. Mine were the only tracks, not another foot or tyre print spoiled the hard sandy desert floor. I looked up and saw a handful of my fellow insomniacs who were cruising the two-kilometre circuit in four wheel drives stopping occasionally for their wives to click their cameras while they stood in the lee of their Landcruisers scratching their scrotums.

I charged off down the slope weaving between obelisks when I suddenly came upon a German guy standing at the foot of one of the bigger pinnacles watching two galahs. The galahs were standing on top of a solitary pinnacle and kept cocking their heads from side to side. The pinnacle was creaking as it heated up in the sun. The German guy smiled. I inclined my head towards the birds and said

“We call them galahs”

“So”, he said. “I think we call them Rosy Breasted Cockatoos. They won’t move from that pinnacle even if you wave your hands”

“It’s creaking as it heats up”

“Vat is creeeging?”

“It’s the noise the pinnacle is making at the moment”

“It’s a word just for pinnacle heating or can I use it for other things?”

“No, the word creaking can be applied to anything that makes that kind of noise. A door that makes a noise as you open it – that’s creaking too”

“Oh, I thought that vas skweeging?”

“Yes, I suppose you could call that kind of noise squeaking or creaking”

“So………and the pinnacle is creeeging then?”

“Yes, that’s why the galahs are so interested in it. That’s probably why they won’t move from it. That faint creaking noise sounds just like another galah”

He walked back to his van and I stayed taking photographs of the two galahs. After taking several blurry shots I came up with a brilliant one and seeing the German guy didn’t have a camera with him I thought it would be kind of nice if I showed him it and offered to e-mail it to him. I cycled over to where he was standing and showed him the picture in the viewfinder. As he was looking at it his wife/partner suddenly appeared from behind another set of pinnacles.

“Can I see?” she said

Yes, of course”

“Oh, that’s very, very good. I have also this bird. Would you like to see them?”

“Yes”

She switched on her camera and showed me a shot of the two galahs sitting on top of the pinnacle in question. Her shot had more in it than mine. It had a baby Galah’s head sticking out of the top. The guy was looking over my shoulder. “Ya”, he said to his wife. “Ve herd zem creeging – and the pinnacle vas creeging too too.”

When I returned to the van Clare was still in bed. I woke her with a hot cup of tea. She squirmed. She hates hot tea being thrown over her. She’s never complained about the hard cups though.

“Have you already finished taking pictures?”

“Yes”

“That was quick”

“Ya, it vos a Blitzcreak”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later”

While Clare made breakfast I searched the laptop for a photo I’d taken months before at Uluru. It was of a vagina-like fissure in the rock. I found it and opened up Photoshop where I put it in a montage next to the most dick-like of the pinnacle photos I’d just taken. It didn’t work though. I showed it to Clare and she still carried on making breakfast. Still, I’d found a new hobby. I’m now the inventor and main protagonist of the Australian Eco Porno Picture Club. I’ve been making disgusting pictures and calling them art ever since.

Owing to the ongoing infrastructure shortage in the form of roads there wasn’t anywhere else to go now but to head south for Perth. And we did. It had been five months since Clare had left Tasmania and her kids were missing her so we decided she should go back to see them for a fortnight. We booked into a caravan park in Midland north east of the city where I would stay for the duration. It was absolute luxury to be in a place where there were showers and hot water on tap all the time and electricity to plug into. And there was TV. Although we had a TV in Erasmus we were often out of range of a transmitter and we’d sometimes go for a week or more without watching it. Now I watched it every night in bed. Nothing much had happened. Still the same old wars going on and the ABC were still showing old, second hand BBC programs.

In the fortnight Clare was away I went everywhere it was possible to get to on the train out of Perth. Perth lies 19 km up the Swan River and pretty much lines its banks all the way downstream to Fremantle at the estuary. It’s a truly lovely city and anyone who hasn’t been there should go. Kings Park took a whole day to tramp around and the vistas it affords across the Swan River are stunning. The whole city is young and vibrant. It’s also brash but tasteful which, unfortunately can’t be said for the majority of its male population.

While there and on my own I took the opportunity to look up Adriana and Katherine, a couple of old female friends. I don’t mean “look up” in the Biblical sense of course. Heavens no! I’m no contortionist. I had a friend called Ray once who, at parties when asked his occupation by female party goers, used to say “I’m an amateur gynaecologist. I don’t know much about it but I’ll look into it for you.”

I hadn’t seen either of these ladies for almost 30 years when they used to live in Melbourne and weren’t ladies but girls. They took me out for lunch in East Perth and we discussed sex and why they’d never enjoyed it. Adriana had been married to a premature ejaculator who, at one time, had been my best friend. They told me they’d both been sexually assaulted by family members when in adolescence. I said I didn’t know where Adolescence was but it seemed funny that they’d both ended up getting fingered in the same town. Katherine said “can’t you be fucking serious for one second?” and Adriana said “no, he can’t. Don’t you remember?”

Katherine was terribly bitter about her split up with her ex (another guy who at one time was my best friend) but Adriana had forgiven and moved on. The bitterness had aged Katherine but Adriana was radiant and more alive and vivacious than I remembered her. When Clare returned we all went to dinner one night at a restaurant on the far side of the river from the CBD. It was a magical place to eat after dark with the shimmering waters of the Swan River backed by the lights of the city high rises.

The next day Clare and I went on a day trip to Rottenest Island. We caught a boat from the quay in the city and cruised the 19 km down river to Fremantle and then about the same distance again before landing on the island. On the way down river we were treated to the view of the houses of the rich and famous. The captain gave us a more or less running commentary on who owned the flash looking dwellings and how much they cost. The passengers oohd and aaahd at the names of the local and overseas rich and famous who’d bought houses on the Swan. Among the grey nomads I noticed that the tighter the perm the bigger the ooh. Clare said those with blouses had the biggest aaahs but I thought it was the ones wearing twin sets.

Rottenest Island is a tourist island but it had the usual, and by this time repetitive, dark history of bad treatment of Aboriginals by the colonisers. Beginning in the 1830's it became an Aboriginal men’s prison which lasted for some 70 years. Over 3,400 Aboriginal men were imprisoned on the island and over 350 had died there whilst incarcerated. Rottenest was also used during World War I as an internment camp for men of German and Austrian descent who didn’t even have to be black to qualify for the free board & lodging.
How it came by its name I thought a little unusual. It was named by a Dutch sea captain, Willem de Vlamingh, and it actually meant rats nest. Dutch Willy mistook the islands main inhabitants – quokkas – for rats. It’s not surprising, so did we. Quokkas (Barry Quokka excepted) are little wallaby-like things that live in profusion on the island and they do really good rat impersonations. So good that we saw a teenage kid throwing stones at one with the full blessing of his vacationing mother. There was a hop on/off bus service around the island which we took and hopped in both directions several times.
What was good about the place was it was that it didn’t have any cars. It did have fab beaches and big Moreton Bay fig trees and a lighthouse I took dozens of photos of. I just fell in love with its great smooth phallic form and wondered how I could make an eco porno pic from it. It qualified as porno but not eco. I thought about it all the way back on the boat. I thought about quokkas too. Australian animals are unique but to the lay observer (me) they’re a bit boring once you’ve seen three or four different ones.
Quokkas for me represent a big bunch of similar, ratty, pouched animals like bettongs, kangaroo rats etc. Then a bit further up in size there are kangaroos and wallabies. Once you’ve seen a kangaroo who needs to see a wallaby? Well….another wallaby maybe but not me. Snakes are all the same basic Aboriginal artifact shape too just with different patterns and colours. Lizards? For a kick off they’re all hard to see and they’re all the same, one leg at each corner, small head & long tail shape. Sure there are specialists who can tell the difference at 40 paces but at 40 paces you can’t even see most of the lizards.
The koala’s great but what did God do for an encore? Next to the three toed sloth the koala’s the laziest animal on the planet. The bloody things hardly ever move and you can get more fun out of the Taiwanese ones they sell in the tourist shops! Oh yes, the platypus. Well, the trouble with platypusses…..platypi…..platy……..platy….those slimy little duckbilled water critters is that they’re boring because you never see one out of the window of a four wheel drive. Hardly anyone’s ever seen one in the wild.
I like different shaped animals like they have in Africa. Like, if you were doing the washing up and a giraffe stuck its head over the back fence you wouldn’t spend time wondering what particular part of the giraffe species it was from. You’d shout “oh intercourse” in your native tongue and hope it didn’t suck all the clothes pegs off the line like it did last week. And look at all the other different shaped animals those lucky Africans have, to say nothing of the different flavours they might all be.
Nothing else looks like a hippo or a rhino or an elephant or a zebra. With kangaroos and wallabies you don’t know if the animal you just saw was a small kangaroo or a big wallaby. And chimpanzees just blow me away. In fact the male ones often blow themselves away, in public too!

Having explored the lower reaches of the Swan River, we next looked for some kind of craft to take us upstream. We found it in the form of a wine tasting cruise with lunch. We boarded the boat at the same city quay where we’d boarded the boat for Rottenest the day before. A well dressed young man in suit trousers and waistcoat cast us off and we set off upstream. The day was perfect and the scenery splendid as we glided effortlessly along the sylvan verdancy of the Swan valley. Glided? Doesn’t sound right really does it? Perhaps we glid. Yeah, I reckon we glid.

The captain gave us a soft continuous commentary subliminally educating us, plying us with a little history here, a little viticulture there. Most pleasant. The young man who cast us off – now with sleeves rolled down and sporting a neck tie – brought us morning coffee. A little later he collected the cups and again returned with cheese and biscuits. He was a cheese expert, this young man.

Some ten minutes after the delivery of said cheesy comestibles, and concurrent with the consumption thereof, he returned. This time he sported the suit jacket too. He was suave and good looking and I couldn’t have imagined him casting the boat off and stowing the ropes as he’d done but an hour earlier. This time he had reinvented himself as a wine waiter and he was perfect. He had with him an assortment of Western Australian wines of the month. He was a wine expert this young man. He knew almost everything there was to know about the wines he was pouring us. He knew their acid content, tannin content, the soils the grapes grew in, how much sunshine they received – everything.

The tour took in two substantial wineries and when we stopped at a jetty the young man tied the boat up and metamorphosed into a high class stevedore as he unloaded us. He transferred us to a coach and seamlessly slid into the role of coach captain regaling us with stories that made the landscape light up. At the wineries he glided, or glid, among us making sure everyone was happy, that we all had a chance to try all the wines on offer.
After the second winery visit he took us to a restaurant where the meal was sumptuous; a showcase of what Western Australia had to offer in the way of fresh produce cooked to perfection. While we were waiting for our meal the young man bent at the knees and glid sideways, and effortlessly, onto a piano stool. He played the tune ‘Softly as in a morning sunrise” and I couldn’t fault it. Then he played a whole range of jazz standards with arrangements I hadn’t heard before.

On the back of a coaster I started to write the job description his employer would have to put in the newspaper if he left his employ. Piano playing wine and cheese expert required. Must be able to tie up boats, serve coffee, entertain, act as coach captain etc. etc. I ran out of coaster. This lucky bastard was perfect and so talented. I would have given my right arm to play the piano like that. Then I would have been really famous. Anyone who can play a piano like that with only the left had would be much in demand for talk shows and the opening of big sports events.

The wines at the restaurant were different to those we’d had coming upstream on the boat but no less impressive. The wines we were plied with on the return journey were different again. By the time we’d all tasted a couple more of these Western Australian, cheeky little numbers people were humming - and singing – and pole dancing-and taking articles of clothing off – and throwing up. It was a ball baby!! It was the first, hopefully the last, time I’d seen a pole dancing aged pensioner. When we disembarked (a word few of us could, by now, pronounce) people staggered off to their cars and argued about who was going to drive home.

It was time l to leave Perth. I’d seen a lot of it while Clare was away for that fortnight in Tasmania and was eager to get rolling in Erasmus again. As we drove out of the caravan park and down the road, going up through the gears, it just felt right somehow. We didn’t realise how habituated we’d become to life on the road. Moving again was somehow comforting and the anticipation was back. There was always the thought that we were going to see something new, experience something we hadn’t expected.

As we moved on down the map south of Perth towards the famous Margaret River area the countryside began to change. There were more trees, it became greener and from the type of trees that lined the roads we could see we were entering a more temperate climatic zone. We’d seen plenty of these kinds of eucalypts in Victoria and Tasmania.

We hugged the coast all the way down to Bunbury but couldn’t actually see much of it. It was certainly no Great Ocean Road so at Bunbury we went inland to a small town called Donnybrook. The town is surrounded by stunning old growth forests, winding rivers, rolling hills, vineyards and cold climate fruit orchards. Donnybrook is a lovely little country town with an eye for tourism, a neat and clean little place. It had a good coffee shop too and I had a slice of hummingbird cake there. I complimented the proprietor on his cake and asked if he’d ever thought about starlings. He said that starling cake didn’t have the right sort of ring to it. “Alright then, how about bell birds?” “Now you’re talking” he said. I asked how we should get out of town and he said “with a sense of humour like that you won’t have to bother looking for signs – you’ll be run out.”

We left. And on the outskirts we stopped to take photos of an apple orchard. It reminded us of Tasmania, in fact had we seen photographs of the area we would have identified it as somewhere in Tasmania’s Huon Valley. As I struggled across the ditch at the side of the road an electric vehicle akin to a golf buggy came out of the packing sheds a couple of hundred metres away. The driver saw us and probably thought we were doing something we shouldn’t. He drove down his drive and down the road to see what we were doing. He was the owner of the orchard and emblazoned across the front of the golf buggy was the word INTAFRY which I thought sounded like a Chinese international airline. I don’t know why I think these things and sometimes wish I didn’t but ever since visiting China with Clare a couple of years back I can’t help looking at words and wondering how the Chinese would pronounce them. The word flog, for example, strikes me as being a descriptive word for a Chinese adult tadpole.

The first night we were in China we visited a restaurant in Beijing with our small party of travelling companions. Our Australian guide suggested it. He took all his groups there on the first night because it was the best icebreaker it was possible to find. His name was Bob Withers and he insisted that we let him take care of the ordering after which we could look at the menus. He said that if we looked at the menus first we’d never get past the ordering stage before closing time. He was right!

The menu had been translated into English and contained such delicacies as “deep fried sliminess.” Several dishes came with “bunge.” We never did figure out what it was but the item that had us laughing most was a dish that was accompanied by “eggs, corporal punishment.” They’d obviously looked up the word beaten in a Chinese/English dictionary and come up with that wonderful turn of phrase!

But back to INTAFRY. The man, whose name I didn’t ask, saw the Tasmanian registration plates on Erasmus and quizzed us at length on Tasmanian orcharding and such but we were sadly deficient in facts and figures. Then, out of the blue, he said “if you’re from Tasmania you’d be familiar with Pink Ladies?” I told him that I wasn’t but it sounded like a good idea. Most of the ladies with whom I’ve had the good fortune to be familiar have, indeed, been pink or pinkish depending on the time of year and the particular portion of the lady I was viewing at the time. The Pink Ladies he was talking about though, it transpired, were a type of apple and he was packing them that very day.

In Tasmania they sell potatoes called Pink Eyes. When I first went there to live I put some in a plastic bag in the Purity supermarket at Newtown. When I got to the checkout the girl obviously hadn’t been on the fruit and vegetable identification course. She held up the beetroot and asked me “do you know what these things are called.” She didn’t know what a custard apple was and she thought the swede was a turnip. Then she held up my spuds, looked at me and said “pink eyes?” I looked at her and said “big nose.” She didn’t laugh and when it came time to pay her she turned away from me towards the till and I saw she had an enormous hooter. I was embarrassed.

But back to INTAFRY. The man asked us if we’d seen apples being packed before. We hadn’t and he invited us up to the shed where half a dozen pink ladies were washing and waxing the other pink ladies. They were last year’s pink ladies – not the half dozen, they were much older. No, the apple kind of pink ladies were last year’s. They’d been in cold storage waiting for the market to rise and now were being submerged, one fork lift palette at a time, in water and floated down a long canal where they got washed. Then they were blow dried and waxed and dried again and went off on a conveyor belt where, depending on their size, they fell down different sized holes. They ran down a shute and onto a table where humans (mostly pink men but I think one was an Indonesian) packed them into boxes. As we wandered around the packing facility we saw a forklift back into the Indonesian guy but he wasn’t hurt. I told the owner that we’d just passed a place advertising crustaceans and if the Indonesian guy ever did get flattened by the forklift he should take him down there. He didn’t get it.

That night we became hopelessly lost and a short while after dusk we gave up trying to find where we were. We drove up a dirt track for a couple of kilometres and found somewhere we could pull of the road in among trees and stopped for the night. When we went outside in the morning we found we were surrounded by wildflowers. They weren’t of the type that carpeted hectares of ground but individual and dotted about within a few paces of each other. It was like some sort of fairy wonderland full of gaily coloured paper cut outs in different shapes set up on tiny lollipop sticks. It put me in mind of the sides of the Yellow Brick Road in the Wizard of Oz. We wandered about for half the day discovering flowers we hadn’t seen before and I took dozens of photographs of them. There was the odd sheep and rabbit skull on the ground too. These white, sun bleached little pockets of death, juxtaposed with the spring wildflowers said something about eternity, about the continuation of the planet, about the cycle of life, spring’s renaissance. I don’t actually know what it said but I’m sure it said something.

Eventually we retraced our steps out to the bitumen road we left the night before and travelled in the general direction we thought we should take but ended up back in Donnybrook which we’d left the previous afternoon. We went back in the same coffee shop and the guy behind the counter said “I thought I’d told you how to get out of town yesterday. What is it this time Finch Fingers?” “No, mouseatouille.” “Alright, lay it on me.” “It’s like ratatouille but the portions are smaller.”

A few kilometres out of Donnybrook Clare said she could see a lama in a field. “Pauline Hansen was right” I said. “We really are being swamped by Asians.”

I stopped and jumped down from the cab with my camera. The animal was a chocolate brown colour and of unknown religious persuasion. In the same field was a white Shetland pony. As I approached the fence the lama walked right up to meet me but as I raised the camera it went berserk. It leapt up in the air and started darting around the field like its arse was on fire. Then it came back to the fence and stopped. I raised the camera again and it spat at me. It was the first time a camera had done that to me and I vowed to buy a more expensive model next time. I immediately went into fits of laughter and the lama began jumping about like one of those wind-up bucking horse toys.

The owner, who had been sweeping up leaves on his lawn, downed tools and came over to me. He told me that the lama was in fact an alpaca. After checking with him that it was in no way related to Kerry Paca I asked him why it was so highly-strung and entertaining. It was a sad tale. This was a male alpaca and until a couple of weeks beforehand he had a mate and she was pregnant and they were looking forward to starting an alpaca family there in the lush green meadows south of Donnybrook. Then some rotten dogs had killed her one night and he’d had some sort of nervous breakdown over it.

He slept every night over her grave and was extremely morose for a few days and then became aggressive. The owner had borrowed the Shetland pony just so as to give the alpaca some company. He told us that the poor animal had quietened down a lot since meeting the pony but had taken to this highly-strung leaping about behaviour.

I kept thinking about this poor, bereft alpaca for days afterwards. He’d not just lost a mate. As far as he knew he’d lost the only other member of his species in the world! Just imagine thinking that you were the only other human left on the planet watching cars go past the fence driven by aardvarks and beavers every day and craning your neck to see if there was a human in the back seat. Of course, you wouldn’t be the only human though. Somewhere on the planet Cher would still be around and looking the same as she did ninety years ago.

I heard on the radio news a couple of days later that a woman had been taken by a shark in South Africa. The incident had occurred at Fish Hook Beach, which to my mind was ironic. If the fishes were planning to strike back I couldn’t think of a better sounding place to start off their campaign. I heard on a radio program shortly before the incident that about ten humans a year are killed by sharks while humans kill around thirty million sharks every year. It seems sharks have a long way to go to even up the score.

When in Perth we had met up with one of Clare’s buddies from her university days and she offered us a place to park at Margaret River. Judy and her husband had a holiday house in the area and, although it was tenanted, it was on an acreage with plenty of room for us to park Erasmus. It turned out to be a very convenient place to stay and explore the area each day. The township of Margaret River itself was a good place to be and I wouldn’t have minded living there permanently. It was surrounded by several other small towns which, like Margaret River itself, were arty and sophisticated with elegant restaurants and a holiday atmosphere.

There were numerous wineries to visit in among the rolling green hills and thick forests. Small dairy enterprises and olive oil groves were dotted around the district as were numerous little art galleries. Access to the beaches was easy and from there on down south for the next few hundred kilometres we saw the best coastal scenery we’d come across anywhere in Australia.

That south west tip of Western Australia is famous for its caves. There are actually over three hundred of them and about a dozen are open to the public. The area is riddled with holes in the limestone and we were told by several people that there’s a cave further east that gets the sea breeze from the coast. It’s thirty-seven kilometres inland!

We descended into three of the tourist caves. They were bigger and more impressive than anything we’d seen anywhere before and had formations we didn’t know existed. They had the usual old stalagmites and stalactites but there were new things too. Stalactites must, of course, not be confused with Stalagtights; the latter word referring to those items of apparel worn by ballet dancers and other cross dressers in WWII German concentration camps.

There were acres of stone drapery in folds like those in the clothes of Roman and Greek statues and there were shawls. The shawls were strikingly similar to Jewish prayer shawls. They were formed by drips that didn’t drip straight downwards but ran along an angled piece of rock for a while before dropping.

Over millions of years there had been times when the water that formed them was of a differing colour E.g. dinosaur piss. When this happened for a million years or two the shawl would develop a different colour border or frieze. The shawls are quite rare but where they occurred they had been illuminated from behind and the six or seven we saw were delicately exquisite.

One cave had a self-guided tour, which was easily the best way to go cave watching. We were issued with a player that probably had a small hard disk in it, which we hung around our necks. It had numbers on it from one to ten and every so often in the cave there’d be an illuminated number. All we had to do was punch the number into the thing around our necks and we’d get the commentary about that specific bit of cave in our earpieces. It was much better than having to listen to a guide while being jostled by a bus-load of Japanese tourists.

When we reached the lowest part of one of the caves there was a guy sitting in a chair reading a book under a light. He was an information dispenser and we recognised him. He’d been our guide on a tour of a lighthouse the previous day. He was an interesting person and we talked for a while. He said he was only allowed to stay down in the cave for two hours at a time because the air quality could possibly be a health hazard over prolonged periods; there being no ventilation, the air was pretty well stagnant. I thought about it. Although it was a big cave a lot of tourists would go through it over the course of a year and a number of them would have farted. I wondered if pockets of bird flu could hang around in there too.

The small village of Nannup hove into view while we were out one Sunday. It came as something of a surprise as we had expected it to be another village. Clare did map reading or map making or something during her university days too! We stopped next to a little park and I jumped down from the cab. In front of me was a wooden statue carved out of a tree stump, a familiar statue of an animal I couldn’t quite place for a minute. What attracted me to it was that its tail had once been a part of the stump but it had split away. I like to take photographs of cockups, things that haven’t quite worked so I raised the camera. “That’s a bloody Tasmanian Tiger.” It was Clare behind me. “It can’t be” I said. “It bloody well is” she said. It was too.

There was a bumper sticker around town with an illustration of The Nannup Tiger on it. On a tourist information sign in the main street we read that “Nannup is famous for its (unconfirmed) Tasmanian Tiger sightings.” Nannup was a nice little place, all green with a river and well kept gardens and spelling mistakes on the bowling club “sponsers” board and a fish and chip shop called “Baldies Fish Supply”. The council offices were pretty too with a garden full of perfectly pruned cream tea roses. I took a photo of the spelling mistakes and one of Baldy who was reading the newspaper under his veranda. But Tasmanian Tigers? What wankers. Even so Tasmania doesn’t have bumper stickers of Tasmanian tigers so what does that say about the entrepreneurial spirit down there.

We cruised on and into a small town called Bridgetown just south of Nannup to find the main street blocked off. I asked the yellow vested traffic director person what was going on. He said it was the famous Bridgetown Blues festival. That was good enough for us. We found a place to park under the Bridgetown Bridge and moseyed on into town. I was glad we were moseying ‘cause it fit reeeel well with the other moseyers; some of which sauntered while others swaggered. One of the predominant men’s fashions at this bluesy event was the long, red split-beard and hillbilly hat combo with cowboy boots. There were so many of them that I wondered if they all lived in the area, which is kinda countryish. We didn’t see them anywhere else. The split red beards looked like hairy forked carrots.

It was at the Bridgetown Blues festival that I saw my first professional spoon player. Sure, I’d seen plenty of half pissed, raggedy arsed, cutlery bashers leaping around public bars when I lived in London last century but this one was special. This one played two numbers backed by an eight-piece band! She was a local Bridgetown schoolteacher who must have been fifty if she was a day, which she wasn’t. She came on stage wearing beige pants and a pink blouse and I knew she wasn’t going to be your average spoon player when she pulled on her special, rubber fingered, professional spoon player’s gloves. Next she strapped on a professional spoon player’s thigh pad and adjusted it real casual like; as though she’d been doing it for decades.

The band started on one of those songs where the tempo gradually speeds up and carried on to the point where the singer couldn’t sing fast enough to keep up with them. At this point, and with a generous, gentlemanly flourish, the singer launched the spoon player. Like a space shuttle from the back of one of those big fuel tanky things, she took flight.

Christ, did she take off! Like a pair of incontinent machine guns the spoons instantly became a blur. It would have required a strobe light to adequately view the performance. She banged them on her kneepad, hips, elbows and even her head producing a clatter like Mister Beau Jangles being chased down the pavement by a Pit Bull.

There were lots of Pit Bulls or, at least, Pit Bull look-alikes around Bridgetown. Most were in the back of Utes. It’s an Australian thing, the Ute with a dog in the back. I wonder how long it will be before Holden dealers get wise and start offering dog and Ute packages? I’m sure the Holden dealership/kennels is only just around the corner, especially with genetic engineering being so immanent and cloning being so rampant. Holden dealers will soon be able to offer standard Holden dogs. The Holden Heeler for him and the Holden Customline Poodle for her.

In the South of Western Australia the nights and early mornings were cold. Back In Tasmania we had bought a heater which screwed on top of the same gas bottle that we usually used with a gas ring on it whenever we cooked with the wok. The heater though, was a bit self-defeating. It was a radiant heater. It relied on enough gas pressure being present to heat up the metal mesh element, which would glow hot and radiate. Whenever the temperature was low the vapour pressure in the gas bottle was correspondingly low and the heater didn’t work.

One really cold night we couldn’t get warm and Clare mentioned that the heater was a stupid invention because it needed a hot day to make it work. I know, I thought. I’ll make the heater think it’s a hot day. I put the kettle on and then put the gas bottle, with the heater attached, in the sink. When the water was boiling I poured it slowly over the gas bottle to warm the gas and increase its pressure. When I lit the heater it burst into life with a roar like a WWII fighter plane. This was followed closely by the popping sound of a WWII fighter plane running out of fuel followed closely by a fairly accurate impersonation of a WWII flamethrower.

It spat out a flame easily a metre long which, when you’re sitting in the close confines of a motor home, covers a good deal of living space and can be quite alarming. To put this on a scale most people could easily relate to; it was like some commando had burst into your lounge room while you were watching TV (which Clare was) and squirted a bloody great flame from behind the sofa, right across the coffee table and singed the pot plant behind the television. Substitute the pot plant for the tablecloth that hung on a hook next to the sink in Erasmus and you have a fair idea of what it looked like and why Clare screamed so loudly.
I immediately grabbed the singed tablecloth, which I used as an oven glove to grab the heater, and throw it out of the door.

We were in a national Parks campground at the time. It was dark but outside there were a number of Grey Nomads sitting around a campfire. There were more screams as this thing came spinning through the air like some disgruntled dragon, landing with a thud and setting light to the tablecloth. “Good evening” I said as I strolled nonchalantly across to pick it up. “We’ve perfected the warhead – just need a little more work on the delivery system.” I went back inside with it and nobody uttered a word. Well………Clare uttered a few but I’m sure she didn’t mean most of them. Not the bit about me going forth and multiplying anyway.

We stayed at Margaret River on Judy’s block for almost a month. It gave us plenty of time to explore and enjoy the area. It would be hard for anyone to find fault with such a beautiful area. On balance I couldn’t decide which was the best place to live in Australia, it was a toss up between the Atherton Tablelands and the Margaret River area.

When we finally left we went south east towards Walpole which we intended to go through en route to Albany. The route went through some densely forested country. It was mainly karri forest which grows south from Nannup to Manjimup to the Frankland River, then east to Denmark and Torbay, near Albany. These are seriously big trees and most live in a series of four national parks which dotted our route. We took a tourist drive called the Karri Forest Explorer which took us through and around all four and I’m desperately trying to think of a superlative adjective I haven’t already used to describe it all without swearing. To say these forests weren’t big and impressive and full of nice woody smells and great to sleep in out of sight of the ranger would all be terminological inexactitudes. How’s that? and a couple of exclamation marks just to ram home the point….!! Take that dear reader. Intercoursing awesome they were.

The Karri Forest Explorer drive is 86-kilometres long and as well as having plenty of trailside information there’s an information radio station you can tune in to as you go. There are tourist radio stops along the way too where you can hear all about what you’re going to see before you get out of the car and look in the wrong direction. We stopped at one of these points and a grey nomad called Les asked my why it was that the retiring age for women was 60 while the age for men was 65. He said that men die earlier so it’s unfair. He’s right, of course, but I’m stuffed if I know why it was that he chose to ask me. I began to worry that people might think I looked like a politician or a philosopher.
The south west of Western Australia has its tourism act together better than anywhere else in the country. During the 86 kilometre drive there were good national park campgrounds to stay at right in the heart of the forests. There were rivers and dams, small towns with places to stop for coffee, gourmet meals and wine tastings too. It was so good it took us a week to get through it.
In the Gloucester National Park we wanted to see the famous Gloucester tree named after the Duke of Gloucester who visited the area in the 1940s. The Gloucester tree is climbable by maniacs and is 60 metres high. The way up is by spiral staircase made from round steel bars which are backed with chicken wire to form a sort of spiral cage. Thousands of people go up the thing every year. We were too scared. It used to be a fire lookout and I read the story of the guy who went up it to clear all the branches off. His name was George Reynolds and he worked his way up the tree banging in the steel bar pegs and sawing the branches off.
During the operation, a branch he had cut through twisted as it fell and snapped off some of the pegs he’d already knocked into the trunk. There was now no way he could get down. He had to wait for hours up the tree while another man re-pegged the damaged section from below. Real ANZAC material those guys were.
As we trundled on south towards Walpole we came across signs to the Valley of the Giants and the Ancient Empire. We went there. The Valley of the Giants main attraction is a tree top walk something like a suspension bridge but it’s a walkway that goes on for almost half a kilometer. At places it’s 40 metres above ground high up in the canopy of the Tingle forest. Yeah, tingle! Tingles are tall eucalypt trees. I asked the woman at the ticket office if we’d be able to actually touch one of these tingle trees. “Yes, of course” she said. “Good” says I. “Me and the missus ‘aven’t felt a big tingle for years. Sounds like we’ve come to the right place then?” The ticket lady didn’t comment.
I read assiduously, the fact sheets about the design and construction of this giant walkway and saw that the graphic design company’s name was Stumpfel Shaw. We were surrounded by trees and there was this guy with the surname stumpfel. Oh, well, stuff you then. I thought it was funny. Anyway you try reading assiduously. Assiduously. There, it wasn’t easy was it? Some of the animals that live there have funny names too. There was the motorbike frog, and the Brush-tailed phascogale, the chuditch and the crested shrike-tit. When I was about 12 a new boy came to our class at school called Michael Sherwood. He was from a city and he was much more mature than us country bumpkins. One day during Mr. Gregory’s art class we were supposed to be painting a beach scene and after we’d been at it for 10 minutes or so Sherwood looked down at his painting and said in a loud and rather posh voice “tits like coconuts.” The boys either side of him craned their necks to see his painting and Mr. Gregory said “That’s quite enough from you Sherwood. Any more of that and I’ll send you up to Mr. King’s office.” “It’s true sir” protested Sherwood…..”and sparrows like bread crumbs.”
When you’re 12 years old and getting your laughs from setting light to farts in the science lab something like that is extremely sophisticated. I learned a lot from Michael Sherwood, especially the misuse of the English language. He was brilliant at it. In Miss Pickup’s English class (yeah, Pickup) we had to construct a sentence with the words delight, deposer and defender. He wrote “de light was out, I couldn’t find de po sir, so I did it in de fender.” A po, for those readers not fortunate to have been born in the 1940s, is a chamber pot.
Oh yes, the Valley of the Giants. Some of the trees there are only 30 metres high and you can look straight into the tops and see what goes on in there. I was real disappointed. It was just like looking into a small, eye level, tree but on a bigger scale. What’s so profound about that? Well, I always wondered what it would be like to look into the top of a huge tree and it was a bit of an anti climax. There was absolutely bugger all going on. No caterpillars munching, no tits bonking, nothing except a few ants. They did have some giants there though. They were 75 metre high tingle trees! We could only look into the trunks half way up those. There was bugger all going on in their either – except a few ants. Of course, there could have been a gaggle of camouflaged chuditches staring me right in the eye I suppose.
The Ancient Empire turned out to be a boardwalk underneath the walkway. It too was impressive not least because the giant tingle trees have the largest girths of all the eucalypts. They’ve been known to grow up to 24 metres around. Some of the buttressed bases had been burned out by bushfires long ago but the trees were still standing albeit with holes in them big enough to fit a garden shed in. Buttressed bases, burnt, bushfires? Oh, not again. The bloody thing’s stuck on Bs now!
We spent the night hiding from rangers again in the forest and the next day we had a day off. That spot in the tingle forest was just so lovely, so perfect we didn’t want to move. Clare painted and I took photographs and we drank wine on and off all day and had a sleep in the afternoon after lunch. I get bored easily though and looked around for things to do. I checked the oil in Erasmus, coiled up our water hoses and kicked the tyres. “I know”, I thought. “I’ll try some of that tree hugging that I read the Kaiser used to do to keep healthy.”
For centuries before Greenies began to hug trees to stop them being felled by the nasty, rapacious capitalists, people with primal religions used to hug trees (in some parts of Eastern Europe & Russia they still do) as a therapeutic thing. They believed that a little of the tree’s life force would somehow be transferred to them. Here I was in tingle tree city. It seemed like a good place to try it out.
It wasn’t a big tingle I chose. I wanted one I could get my arms three parts around. I didn’t notice the ants nest I was standing in until well after I decided that the gluey sappy stuff from the trunk was going to ruin my T shirt. But as I pulled away I could feel a resistance. The hair of one side of my head had been in contact with this gluey sap too. Yuk! It was about then, really, that the expeditionary force of light infantry scout ants decided to launch a suicide mission. It was one of those rare days when I hadn’t been wearing shorts and they waited until they got to just above calf height to initiate contact.
High speed Flamenco dancing is what Clare called it. I kept falling over too when I dropped my trousers to get at my attackers. Their stings hurt for fifteen minutes of so and then itched for an hour afterwards. I relegated the T shirt to the dipstick wiping bag where, by now, we had enough ruined clothes to wipe the dipsticks of a battalion of grey nomads. My hair was the problem. We didn’t have anything in the van that would act as a solvent for tingle sap and Clare had to cut a big congealed lump of my hair off with blunt kitchen scissors. She offered to try to even it up by hacking a lump off the other side but I told her not to bother.
When we reached Walpole the next day I went into the hairdressers for a cut. He picked up his scissors and looked at by bald patch, cocked his head and looked at me in the mirror. “Dunno” I shrugged. “Woke up like it this morning – probably rats?” “Big toothed ones” he replied. I thought about telling him I’d been cuddling a big tingle in the forest but didn’t.
Walpole’s crap. Don’t go there except to refuel. Coffee’s crap too. We pressed on to Denmark. It’s awesome – you should go there. We arrived on the outskirts at around 5pm…….actually, Denmark doesn’t really have any inskirts. Anyway, we found a place to park in one of those sort of bits cut out of a hillock at the side of the road where they’d been digging gravel out to make the road itself. We’d stayed in a lot of them because they are usually level. Levelness is important in a van because you don’t want all the blood rushing to your head when you’re sleeping and you want as much water as possible to go down the plug hole when you’ve finished the washing up. You probably thought I was going to tell you a story about where we stayed for the night. Well, I’m not.
Denmark is surrounded by hills and karri forests. It’s spread out along the western bank of the lower Denmark River and is near a goodly number of beaches. It’s one of those places where latter day hippies with rasta hair uncuts meet for folk festivals and sell bongs and do piercing. I forget exactly where but somewhere we’d been we saw a sign outside a shop that advertised body piercing and it said “ear piercing while you wait.” I wondered just how many people would have left their ears there and come back for them later anyway.
Denmark has the best beaches of their type in the whole of Australia and there are twelve of them. Some, like Greens Pool, were big sheltered natural swimming pools of the clearest emerald water with enormous rounded boulders dotted around in them. Another, Waterfall Beach, has a freshwater stream that gushes from the dunes, tumbling over rocks on its way to the sea. There was another called Madfish Bay, a name I couldn’t resist investigating. It’s at a small stretch of coast where two ocean currents meet head on. You can actually watch two sets of breakers pounding into each other and, apparently, the fish are highly confused by this and leap out of the water behaving like mad things.
There’s a showroom near Denmark for a company called Mount Romanace. They sell emu oil and sandalwood oil and sandalwood infused wines. They sell cappuccinos too so we went in. On the shelves I found a product called Erotic Oil. Mount Romance Erotic Oil? Couldn’t get my mind unboggled. I approached the sales girl with a bottle.
“Does this stiff work?”
“Pardon?”
Sorry, Freudian slip. Stuff, does this stuff work?
”I’ve never used it myself sir”
“How much of it do I have to drink?”
“It’s not to be taken internally”
“Do I have to rub it in then?”
“Yes, massage it in I suppose”
“Where?”
“Where!!?”
“Would Adelaide be alright?”
“Yes, I should think so”
“Does it come in 44 gallon drums?”
“No just as you see it there sir”
I gave it to my daughter Clare for Christmas but still haven’t had any feedback.
The next dot on the map was the town of Albany which wasn’t more than half a day’s drive away but we took three days to get there because there was so much to see along the way. At one point we drove through a karri forest. I was always confused between karris and kauris but read somewhere in the forest that the karri is a eucalyptus while the kauri is a pine and native to New Zealand. The karri’s are very tall and majestic and perhaps the biggest trees we’d seen outside of Tasmania where the mountain ashes grow so big. However, in Tasmania you can’t get to see those big trees on masse because of the Tasmanian mania for chopping down old growth forests. Here in the southwest corner of W.A. though it was fantastic to drive through a whole forest of big trees. I think they were even bigger than the tingles we’d seen a few days beforehand.
The night before the morning that we slunk into Albany we stayed at a deserted campground at a place called Cosy Corner. It was right up against the beach from which we were protected by a sand dune. We were the only humans there on this most spondoolious of beaches and we walked and explored and would have made love in the sand dunes if we’d been teenagers. A school friend of mine called Colin Hill, who was the funniest person I ever met, once told me he took Lyn Lovejoy to the beach one hot summer evening and suggested they bonk in the dunes. Lynn Lovejoy said “what’s in it for me” and Colin Hill said “sand.”
I just noticed while I was italicizing the word sand on the computer that it also italicized the full stop. I increased the size of it to 72 points and it looked really good, like it was a big rubber ball that was going real fast and then tried to pull up in a hurry.
In the late afternoon at Cosy Corner a thick sea mist began to draw in covering the hills on the other side of the bay right down to sea level. The slight breeze that we’d been enjoying gradually stopped and everything went still, even the birds stopped singing. It wasn’t threatening or brooding or anything but just a bit strange. Then, as we looked up, all we could see across the bay was a row of wind turbines from the Albany wind farm sticking up above the mist. It was an eerie experience I won’t forget, especially as I’ve now written it down. Yeah, Lynn Lovejoy. The first pair of live breasts I ever saw were Lynn Lovejoy’s. A whole gang of us, early teenage girls and boys, were in the Hythe picture house and Lynn Lovejoy suddenly said “it’s fuckin’ ‘ot in ‘ere innit?” And took her jumper off! She wasn’t wearing a bra and I became very excited. Tits in magazines just weren’t the same after that. She didn’t give a shit, Lynn Lovejoy, and she went to Australia with Douggie Dearden, the son of the man who ran the Hythe bicycle shop. Dunno what happened to her after that. If she’s still here she’ll probably sue me when this lot appears in print……Please excuse me for a paragraph or so, dear reader, but I think I should just cover my ass with a message to the aforementioned Ms Lovejoy in an attempt to nip any litigious ideas she may have towards me in the bud.
If you try to sue me Lynn Lovejoy I’ll tell everybody about the time you tied little Jeff Philips to a tree down on the foreshore and tossed him off against his will. Davey Rivers will back me up on that too - if he’s still alive – cause we was hiding behind the sewerage outlet and we seen yah. Just remember that old saying Lynn – you play ball with me and I’ll scratch yours.
I wonder if dandruff’s got DNA in it? Anyway, that’s got bugger all to do with it really. Albany was just a nice little seaside town but the area around it was just orgasmagorical. All this coastline along the bottom half of Western Australia is among the best in the world but there’s always a drawback. Here it’s the weather – it’s almost Tasmanian and the summer season’s too short.
There’s a national park on the Torndirrup Peninsula just out of town with some of the most beautifully dramatic coastal scenery we’d seen anywhere on our worldly travels. At Torndirrup the Southern Ocean has sculpted a gigantic natural bridge in the granites rocks where the waves rush in and out with unbridled ferocity. The blowholes there are impressive and scary too. One thing that sets these gargantuan (bloody good word that, must look it up) rocks and cliffs the apart from the more uniform and boring rocks is that big areas of them are striped. They are called Gneisses and I didn’t make it up. They were formed by layers of different coloured minerals and the bends and folds of the stripes were caused by pressures and temperatures so high that they made the rocks behave like plasticine. Plasticine from the Pleistocene? I really wish my mind wouldn’t do these things sometimes.
If you can imagine a zebra the size of a large hemorrhoid – or is it asteroid?- travelling through the universe at twice the speed of sound and splatting itself on the side of a mountain, you’ll probably get a good mental picture of what these rocks ended up looking like. No, it was definitely asteroid. It’s the ass in asteroid that makes me confuse them with hemorrhoids.
In Albany I saw a poster in a shop window. It was for a music festival. One of the featured bands was called “Slap My Thigh and Call Me Barbara.” I’ve been thinking about music for a long time. I’m wondering how long it will be before we’ve used all the notes in our (western pentatonic) scale in all the combinations possible. That really will be the day the music dies. We could adopt the heptatonic scale from India then I guess but our Western music will have died. I wish I didn’t wonder about this subject. There’s a lot more good, more potentially productive, wondering I could be engaged in I’m almost sure.
Albany used to be a great whaling town and in 1978 when whaling finally stopped there everybody thought the town was going to die. Whaling was its reason for being and the Cheynes Beach Whaling Station kept the town’s economy alive. Then someone had a bright idea, they’d turn this hell hole for spermy leviathans into a tourist attraction. After they’d discharged all the seamen they spent a couple of million dollars on the place and now it’s right up there on the list of things to see and do in Western Australia. It brings in tourists in droves and educates them, and they like it.

The Albany Whaleworld is the only whale museum created from an actual whaling station and they’ve restored an old whaling ship, Cheynes IV, as the centrepiece and symbol of Albany’s past. It’s a really good day out for families and kept us intrigued for hours. The old whale oil tanks have been cleaned and painted and converted to movie theatres that show films about whaling and marine bits and pieces.

They haven’t tried to cover up their awful past but presented it as a part of their history that’s over. One thing that had us baffled though was that four Japanese couples who walked around ahead of us were falling about giggling for most of the day. I don’t know if it was at the primitivism of Australian whale processing that amused them or, perhaps, that Australians were wimps for not killing whales. I don’t know but we thought it a little insensitive given the difference in attitudes that exist between the two nations on the subject of whaling.

As we stood on the flensing deck (look it up, I had to) we were told that as many as 200 sharks used to hang about there waiting for an easy meal. As the whales were towed into the complex a couple of hundred sharks could strip a whale of a lot of saleable meat. To counter this they would have snipers on station that would shoot sharks for other sharks to eat. One shark was weighed at the whaleweigh station that set a world record at 1470kg. All in all I thought that Albany had done something great with its old whaling station. It’s a pity that Hobart, which at one time was a huge international whaling town, couldn’t have come up with something similar.

If dandruff really has got DNA in it perhaps I should turn the keyboard upside down and shake it into a plastic bag and put it in a vial and then encapsulate it in that plastic stuff they make paperweights out of. Then if my grandkids get their DNA damaged by long term exposure to Nintendo’s or something the genetic engineering people could put back the damaged gene from my dandruff. It’s worth thinking about though isn’t it? If all those people at the World Trade Centre and Tsunamis and other natural disasters had put their dandruff in one of those things the authorities could have identified them all. That’s assuming they were stored in the local government’s encapsulated dandruff bank of course.

When we’d had enough of Albany and surrounds we slid north a bit to Mt. Barker. Mount Barker is a small hick town north of Albany and just made for taking the piss out of. It’s hideous and its shops have the most God awful window displays; some of which haven’t been dusted for months. We stumbled all around it laughing and then drove out of town and parked up for the night in what used to be a bend in the road that had been cut off like a billabong when the road changed direction. It was a good place to stay because it was asphalted and shaded by trees.

In the morning Erasmus failed to start. It was the first time in well over a year’s worth of starts that it didn’t spring into life first time. “How terribly inconvenient” I muttered. It seemed to me that the battery was flat so I got the generator out of the trunk and connected it to the battery. After twenty minutes of charging I tried again to start the engine but the battery still wouldn’t turn the engine over. We had always had, in the back of our minds, the thought that it would be possible to become stranded somewhere a long way from civilisation. Unlike a four-wheel drive trip where we could get properly lost and die of thirst though, Erasmus could only be driven in places that family cars could reach. At almost all times we carried enough food and water to last a fortnight or so – a month if we really were in dire straits. Our only worry in this regard was breaking down in a place like the Nullarbor where it could cost thousands of dollars to get towed to a repair shop. Now that we were broken down only a short distance from Mt. Barker we weren’t worried. We had a cup of coffee, listened to the radio news and tried again to start the engine now that the generator had had extra time to put some more punch into the battery. No luck.

Clare read through the literature we’d picked up at the Mt. Barker tourist information service and found an advert for a place that sold tyres and batteries. I phoned them on the mobile hoping that, as this was a Saturday morning, they’d be open. “Hello, Tim’s tyres, how can I help you?” I told him I was broken down and I thought the battery was the problem but I wasn’t sure. “Well, why don’t I come out right now with a starter battery and we’ll see if we can’t get you started and back into town. Then we can figure out what your problem is sir?” I told him that I thought that was a splendid idea and that I’d be very grateful. “Right then sir – where are you.” I didn’t know. I asked Clare. She didn’t know. I told the guy from Tim’s tyres that I didn’t know where I was. “OK sir, that’s alright, how long do you think you drove for out of Mt. Barker before you stopped for the night?” I told him that I thought it would have been for around twenty minutes. “And can you describe you’re whereabouts? Are you in fields or forest for example? Are you on a dirt road or on the bitumen? It clicked. I remembered we were on a stretch of old disused road. “Is there a level crossing nearby, by any chance?” I remembered that we’d been woken in the night by a train blowing its horn so I told him he was looking good. “OK sir, excellent. The boss is out on a call at the moment and he has the company ute so I’ll come out in my own car. Just hang tight until I get there.”

No more than ten minutes elapsed and the guy was there with his battery pack. I showed him the battery with the generator leads still attached. He didn’t say anything but walked around to the other side of the van and attached his battery pack to the other batteries. “Try starting her now sir.” I did and it did. I’d been charging up the battery that served the fridge and lights in the back of Erasmus. It was a totally separate electrical system isolated completely from the engine.

We followed him back to his place of work where he tested the batteries with a piece of sophisticated equipment I couldn’t make head or tail of. Then he explained in terms an idiot could understand exactly the state of our battery. It was stuffed. He fitted a new one and wished us a happy bon voyage and off we went. Since first calling him less than an hour had gone by. We took back all the nasty things we’d said about Mt. Barker. It was a great place albeit somewhat rustic and we had a couple of flat whites and a passable piece of hummingbird cake in the hotel before we left town. That was the second piece of hummingbird cake I’d had in Western Australia. It was time to try something else.

I remember that when I was about 18 and Colin Hill and I were on the way back from Brands Hatch in England where we’d been to see a car race. We came across two other guys at the side of the road with a broken down old Ford and we stopped to help them. The driver said he’d only had the car for a couple of days. After fiddling about under the bonnet for a while Colin said “I’ve found the problem – it’s pregnant.” “Pregnant?” said the guy, “the car’s pregnant?” “Yes,” said Colin “it was fucked before you bought it.”

Four kilometres out of town was a banksia farm that advertised it had all the known - 77 species - of banksia there on display. They weren’t all out in flower but some of them were huge. One specimen with creamy coloured flowers a foot long and as thick as two Swiss rolls hung upside down, which doesn’t make sense. The bush/shrub was the right way up but the flowers were upside down. Well…….as far as the flowers were concerned they probably thought they were the right way up but……. From the human point of view the flowers on this particular banksia bush were……….fuckit, I’ll write about something else.

I’ve never been a great banksia fan but that’s because I’d never seen the astounding assortment of shapes, sizes and colours these things come in. What I found unusual about them was that they look as though they’ve been engineered. They’re so accurate I’m convinced that God’s an anally retentive German.

After leaving Mt. Barker we drove around the back (north side) of the Stirling Ranges. They are located in wheat-belt country and as the evening drew close I managed to capture some stunning images of Blue folding mountains with the bright yellow fields in the foregrounds. I was so taken with the sights that in a bit over an hour I took over one hundred and twenty photos and we spent hours at night culling out the not so brilliant ones from the absolutely excellent ones. We parked for the night in a farmer’s gateway on the opposite side of the road to the national park and just marvelled at the changes in the colours of the mountain range until sundown.

The following day we were driving north and on a bend in the road came across a big painted sign saying “CAUTION NUDIST’S CROSSING.” (see picture) There was no explanation and not a nudist to be seen despite combing the mountain slopes with the binoculars for ages. Less than ten minutes later a big Dutch style windmill hove into the passenger’s side window. Just like that. It looked just like the real thing. In fact it was. It was built buy a Dutch couple too, Hennie and Pleun Hitzert. I never found out which was which but they did a great lunch in a reconstructed railway station next to the windmill.
The Lily Windmill is an authentic 16th Century design windmill. It’s five stories high and the cap on the top of it weights 22 tons. It’s most likely the largest traditional windmill ever built in Australia and they grind flour with it and sell it at a number of stores in Western Australia. To get the design for it one of the Hitzerts returned to Holland and spent a lot of time researching windmills. When we set out that morning we had no idea that we’d run into a Dutch windmill next to a reconstructed railway station in a paddock. What a strange place this Australia is – you can get a cappuccino almost everywhere.
Close by the Stirling ranges is another range called the Porongurups. A lot of place names south of Perth seemed to end in UP and I guess they were Aboriginal names but didn’t see any information about the subject anywhere.

The Porongurups, like the Stirlings, were equally spectacular although better watered and they were dotted with wineries and eucalyptus plantations. We stayed in a caravan park in the tiny hamlet of Porongurup so as to be easily found by some local people we’d planned to meet there.

Only one other van was in the park and the owner, a grey nomad of about 60 long years, came across to talk to me. He said they’d been to a modern day monastery nearby where the monks made wine and sold it. Half jokingly, I ventured the opinion that any occupation that kept them away from paedophilia was a good thing in my book. He wasn’t amused and left. A few minutes later his wife came across to tell me off for saying such terrible things about such devout Christian people.
“I don’t know why people like you harp on that subject so much. They’re no worse than any other sector of the community. You should be ashamed.”

I asked her a question:

“If somebody told you they’d give you a million bucks and 24 hours if you could locate a paedophile where would you start? You wouldn’t go to the local branch of the Builder’s Labourers Federation would you? No, you’d head off to a Christian religious establishment – Anglican or Catholic.”

“Well, these monks are neither” she said “They’re from a modified Benedictine Order.”

“And have Benedictines been immunised against paedophilia or what?” I said “Who put the dick in Benedictine, that’s what I’d like to know.”

She left in a huff and I didn’t feel good about what I’d said. It was probably a Pope who did it anyway. I hadn’t seen a huff for a while though.

Later, I read about these monks. Their stated aim was to restore the world through personal transformation. Their advertising leaflet didn’t say exactly what stage they wanted to restore the world to - the Black Death of 1348 for example or the Crusades that were kicked off by Pope Urban in 1095? It would have been pre Charles Darwin though for sure – maybe even back to the primeval slime times? It didn’t say how many persons would have to personally transform in order to make it happen either. There was probably a couple of dozen of them there working away at it though.

Porongurup had the most inventive petrol pump I’ve ever seen. There was only one pump. It stood outside the general store come post office that also saw duty as the tea-rooms and, as far as we could see, was all run by one woman. The petrol pump was painted black and had a slotted Ned Kelly helmet on top. Two eyes made from golf balls hung on springs from somewhere inside the helmet and the two petrol guns stuck in the sides looked as though the thing was waiting for someone on the opposite side of the road to draw. (see picture)

It was the last day of November when we left Porongurup and we had less than a month to get back to Adelaide by Christmas. I’d half promised my Grandkids I’d be there for the event but it was already looking as though we were going to be late.

About five kilometres out of the small settlement of Ravensthorpe we were flagged down and asked to pull into the side of the road by a guy in a pilot car. Behind him were two enormous grain silos being towed by a tractor and a normal four wheel drive car. The pilot car didn’t have a wide load warning on it and the silos were only balanced on two wheel trailers. It was a very hot and windy day and the silos were catching the wind and swaying all over the place. I thought it very dangerous especially after seeing, only minutes before, a campervan that had been blown off the road and being hoisted onto the back of a tray truck.

I pulled over and stopped to take a photograph but when I got back in the van it wouldn’t start. The batteries we’d bought only a couple of days before at Mt. Barker were flat and so were the other set of batteries that powered the fridge, water pump and lights in the living accommodation. I suspected the alternator wasn’t charging the batteries but there was nothing we could do about the situation except to stand at the roadside and wait for a lift into Ravensthorpe.

It was around five in the afternoon and we had to wait for a good half-hour before a four-wheel drive Toyota rolled up. The driver was a guy in his seventies called Lloyd Archer who owned a farm somewhere in the area. He towed us to start the engine and the stayed close ahead of us until we got to the Ravensthorpe garage. The proprietor was about to shut up shop for the day but let us park outside his premises. He was too busy to do any repairs for us but said that in the morning he could charge our batteries and that would give us enough range to get into Esperance where there were three or four auto electrical shops.

We locked up Erasmus and adjourned to the local pub, the Palace Motor Hotel, for dinner. The barmaid was a Swedish sounding girl in her early twenties. I don’t know why. We asked for a couple of glasses of white wine and the bar went quiet while the clientele, all craned their necks to see what poofters had ordered it. There’s appears to be a belief abroad in some country pubs that to drink wine a tie must be worn which inhibits swallowing.

Thirty or so men stood around drinking. Twenty of them had the same steel toe capped safety boots on. There had either been a pretty slick steel toecap shoe salesman in town or they all had something in common. Perhaps it was there yellow and orange waistcoats. Looking through to the dining room I could see that it too was full of steel toe capped, yellow and orange waistcoated men mostly sitting alone eating steak and chips. We’d seen this scenario all over the north of West Australia. It spoke of a mining town but we’d never heard mention of mining in the south of the state. Curiosity got the better of me and I asked one of the farmers what all these guys were doing. He told me that a 1.6 billion-dollar copper mine was soon to be opened in the district.

The copper would go to Esperance – two hundred kilometres away – and from there to Towoomba in Queensland. “Come back in five years time and take a look at this place mate. It’s on the fuckin’ move. We’re gunner ‘ave the fuckin lot ‘ere soon. New pubs n picture ‘ouses, the fuckin’ works mate. She’s gonna be fuckin’ jumpin’ alright.” I wondered if there’d be an elocution school too.

He was rightthough, the place is going to be jumping. All of West Australia is already jumping. China’s got them jumping with its insatiable appetite for what we have in the ground. Every week since we’d been in West Australia there had been another big mining or gas deal done with China. And China can’t wait for us to get our act together. It’s investing heavily in West Australia and because we can’t afford to develop our own resources China’s having to put up the cash. We’re just a Chinese quarry now.

Tasmania, I couldn’t help thinking, would give its eyeteeth for just one such venture but, alas, it seems to have nothing under the ground down there except for dead Aborigines and there’s no percentage in them. I think the only way to get Tasmania moving is to make it a duty free holiday island. The Government sure changed the status of islands in the north at lightning speed as soon as a few asylum seekers started to arrive so I don’t see why it can’t make Tasmania a duty free state.


The town where the Nullarbor starts proper like, is called Norseman. I knew there was something a bit odd about it when we approached the roundabout. It was full of life sized galvanised iron camels. Behind them was the Tin Camel Café and Deli, a foul smelling establishment that stank of last weeks cooking oil and stocked trashy souvenirs and posters of Red Indians heads in clouds looking down at the prairies and, below them, a few well thumbed post cards. We went into the Supa Valu supermarket which we envisioned would stock everything we’d need for the crossing. It didn’t.

We cruised the shelves looking for something to eat and we must have been a long time doing it because we were approached by the manager, a slight, friendly man of crumpled appearance and two black eyes. They were unusual black eyes in that they were only black at the bottom. I had the impression that either he was a person who healed from the top down or his assailant had punched his sunglasses downwards if the fracas.

“Can I help you find something?

“Yes, thanks, we’re looking for felafel mix”

“ Ow’s that again?”

“Felafel mix. It’s like ground up chick peas that you mix with water and make them up into little balls and fry them”

“What…..and you eat ‘em?”

“Yes, they’re good for long trips in the desert because they can’t go off”

He went away and came back with chapattis.

“Bit like this maybe?”

“No, not really”

“Don’t think we can help you then”

We thanked him and kept perusing the shelves. We were looking for croutons and a young guy came up and asked if we could help us. When we’d finished explaining to him what croutons were he walked up the aisle and asked the black-eyed manager about them. They both looked at us and the manager walked over to us again

“These things are chunks of fried bread are they?”

“Yes”

“That’s all……….fried bread?”

“Yes, just little cubes”

“Can’t you make ‘em yourself?”

“Yes, no problem. We just thought you might have them that’s all”

“How do you eat them?”

“We put them in soup and in Caesar salads, that sort of thing”

He smirked ever so slightly. “Soup you say?”

“Yes”

“Sorry, looks like we can’t help you with that either”

Across from us at the checkout was a fat young woman in even fatter tracksuit pants and top. She had her right arm in a sling and was dragging a kicking, screaming kid along the floor with her left hand. At the checkout she had to let go of the kid to dig in her pocket for her money. The kid fell against the pile of shopping baskets and raised the volume slightly. On the other side of the checkout was an Aboriginal couple. The fat woman waved her bandaged arm at them like a trophy and yelled “yeah, I got kicked out.”

As we walked outside black-eyes was on the pavement discussing fried bread with a woman. “Sure, why not?” she said. “I’ve had them in soup in Alabany.” We went into the café next door and sat down to admire the view across the road. The fat woman came dragging the kid along the pavement by one arm and swung him under an outside table. She flopped down in one of the chairs and tried to open a coke bottle with one hand and her teeth but it didn’t work. The Aboriginal couple came along and the woman stopped and opened it for her. The fat woman then felt obliged to share the coke with them. By the time they’d moved on all the coke was gone. The kid came out from under the table, picked up the empty coke bottle and started banging it on the table and screaming. “Fuck” said the fat woman and came inside the café to buy another bottle of coke.

Norseman looks as though it’s dying. We visited the Visitors Centre. It was a place where you could book a ticket to Alaska. I saw the brochure. There were brochures too, on every tourist destination in Western Australia but nothing at all about the drive across the Nullarbor that we were about to undertake. We walked out into the blazing sun and over to the Visitors Centre toilets. There was a sign on the door saying we had to get the toilet keys from the office.

“Can I have the toilet door keys please?”

“Do you have a deposit?”

“Yes, and as soon as you give me the keys I’m going to leave it in your toilet.”

Leaving Norseman we headed east for a standard eight hour drive until we pulled off the road to park for the night in a clump of low scrubby trees. On the left as we pulled in was a one-man tent. As we crept past it I saw a hand at the entrance wave to us. It wasn’t until we’d boiled the kettle and made tea that we realised how strange it was to see someone alone in a tent on the Nullarbor Plain without a car. It was still light and I walked over toward the tent to see if there were car or bicycle prints in the sand but there was nothing save for a few footprints. We discussed it and looked at the map which showed that we were about five kilometres from a turn off that went down to the beach at a place called Fowlers Bay.

In the morning at breakfast we saw through the trees a man standing at the side of the road trying to get a lift from the road trains but nobody was stopping. Since the murder of Peter Falconio, we reasoned, it would be tough for hitchhikers in the outback. Half an hour later as we drove out of the trees I stopped across the road from the man who was looking for a lift in the opposite direction. He was in his early sixties, clean shaven with a pony tail blowing around underneath his bush hat. He said somebody had given him a lift all the way from Adelaide but they’d turned off down the Fowlers Bay road leaving him on the highway. I asked when.

“Two days ago” he replied in a European accent.

“Where you from?”

“Amsterdam”

“You going to be OK – need water or anything?”

“No thanks, been the last 5 years walking around Australia. I was 3 days in a roadhouse trying to get a ride last year.”

“You’ve heard about Peter Falconio then?”

“Yeah, the drivers all think I’m gonna murder them”

“You wouldn’t though would you?”

“No, haven’t murdered anyone in weeks”

With that we said goodbye and as we drove off I watched him in the mirror sitting there in the middle of nowhere on his backpack.

At around about this point of our trip I became overwhelmed with sheer boredom. It wasn’t just the Nullarbor Plain, it was the never ending nothingness that is the greater part of Australia. The interminable, featureless flatness, the dull brown yellowy hues. I asked Clare how she felt about it. She’d had enough too and we wished we could just have got a helicopter to lift us out of it to anywhere. That’s the way to see Australia, by helicopter. From then on we just drove as fast as Erasmus would carry us to Adelaide where we sold it on Ebay to a couple in Queensland.

We’d done the big trip and we had no regrets but I’d seriously advise any non helicopter owners to seriously consider doing any such similar trip on another continent. The stay at home Australians will hate me for saying such things about their country but not the ex patriots. Young Aussies these days are leaving our shores in droves for countries more interesting and exciting. At this point I can hear Aussies saying “why doesn’t the Pommy bastard leave Australia if that’s how he thinks about it.” Not me mate – I headed back up to the Kimberleys where I took up a job running an Aboriginal silk screen printing factory. That’s where I found my real Australia, the beautiful Australia. Until you’ve looked at it through Aboriginal eyes you ain’t seen nuthin of this place.

It all ended a bit abruptly didn’t it? Well…………….to tell you the truth I just got fed up with typing so that’s all you get. If I can find a publisher though I’ll continue on from where this book left off. Thanks for reading this little walk around my troubled mind.