A Van Called Erasmus

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2007-12-31T19:21:00.000-08:00

The above photograph concerning the sexual proclivities of Mr. Bob Vines was taken approximately half way across the Nullarbor Plain. If anybody knows the Bob Vines in question perhaps you would be kind enough to let him know what somebody had written about him over a thousand miles from civilisation.

Contact the author at
wapenshaw@hotmail.com

The book “A VAN CALLED ERASMUS” is looking for a publisher

Synopsis
McLaren is a natural humorist particularly with the English language and this book is replete with plays on words. He has had many occupations and a great deal of life experience. This is a man who has dug holes in the road for a living, owned various businesses, managed departments in corporate companies and worked as a photographer and a musician. His formal education includes a BA in history, fine art and Aboriginal studies.

The book A Van Called Erasmus is an irreverent take on Australia and grey nomads written during a recent 17 month trip around Australia in a mobile home with his girlfriend. It is, by turns, side splittingly funny, poignant, controversial and cynical. At times he asks some profound questions concerning Australian society; the rapacious attitude towards the land, he wonders why there are no Aboriginal fellow campervanners and declares Australia to be the world’s most boring continent.

All this is backed up with sound reasoning but at the end of every such discourse there’s something patently loony to finish off with. His considerable amount of experience in other, off beat, parts of the world allows him to draw comparisons with how things are done elsewhere on the planet. There are flashbacks too, often in the form of funny anecdotes and he takes the piss out of Grey nomads unmercifully at times.

His style of writing is highly original. He frequently engages in a one sided dialog with the reader on the most insignificant of subjects and, through conjecture, comes up with hilarious conclusions. Early on in the narrative he describes the trip around Australia as being a procession of grey haired people travelling between rock formations. He then goes on to instruct the reader on how to create these rock formations on their kitchen tables for photographic purposes.

For Uluru he uses red Leicester cheese and Malteesers, Dahlia tubers and red lettuce for the Olgas, roast potatoes for the Devil’s Marbles and Terimasu for the Bungle Bungles. An indication of McLaren’s originality can be gauged from his contact with dead cows. The road from Adelaide to Darwin is littered with hollow, dehydrated dead cows and all the tourists have driven straight past them for decades. McLaren’s different.

To relieve the boredom of driving long distances he stopped and decorated them with garlands, spray painted names on them and took photos. All this in order to produce a future dead cow calendar! Now – how many minds would come up with such an idea?In all, this is a very good read for people with a quirky, pythonesque sense of humour who are themselves well read.

Even so, when it goes over the reader’s head it does so un-noticeably and one can continue through the narrative without being aware of it. As his tutor a university he presented me with some of the most original essays I’ve seen in twenty years of marking. I commend this work to those people who like a giggle and read a chapter a night before turning in.

John Wercouter

Contact Peter McLaren at: wapenshaw@hotmail.com

Chapter 1

2007-12-31T19:20:00.006-08:00

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER ONE

It was in the May of 2004 that Clare and I decided we should travel around Australia in a mobile home. Neither of us had done much in the way of travel in Australia and figured that, as the Aussie dollar was so low overseas and people in headscarves were blowing holes in things, now would be the best time for a vacation on our home soil.

The reason that we’d both, independently, avoided Australia up until that point is that Australia is the World’s most boring continent with the possible exception of Antarctica. If you’re inclined to disagree with this notion simply take a map of the world and trace Australia’s outline on a piece of clear plastic. Then put that clear plastic outline over any land mass on the planet and see what your outline of Australia encompasses. See how many countries, peoples, different cultures, foods, climatic zones, mountain ranges, rivers etc. etc. you come up with.

That’s not to say that Australia isn’t an interesting and fascinating place with lots to see and do within its “Girt by Sea” boundaries. All it means is that those things are further apart with a lot of nothing in between. That’s cool – no worries. The best way to see Australia is undoubtedly by helicopter. We didn’t have one. We decided to do it by campervan.

First we had to find the right van and as we lived in Tasmania, where the choice of anything other than fresh air is limited, we thought we’d have to go to the mainland to find one. That though, proved unnecessary when we first clapped eyes on Erasmus. It was advertised in the Hobart Mercury one Saturday morning and an hour after we’d first seen it we’d decided that this was the van for us. It had a four door, dual cab which we didn’t know if we’d need but thought that the back half would make a good shed if nothing else. The living accommodation was already like a shed, at least in size. It was so big that after we’d had it for a month we found a Japanese soldier wandering around in one of the wardrobes who hadn’t heard that WWII was over. You don’t believe me do you? Well, what follows is an account of our travels and they’re even more unbelievable.

What really impressed me about Erasmus was the guy we bought it from. His name was Baden and he had a wooden leg. At least I think it was wooden but it could have been made from plastic or aluminium or an old drainpipe or whatever. Come to think of it, it was probably a prosthesis but I wasn’t going to type that because I can’t spell it. Still, I thought I’d give it a go and, sure enough, the editor has corrected it for me. Now I just have to hope that prosthesis is the right word and that it doesn’t mean something smelly or religious.

Anyway, Baden wore shorts all the time, even in winter. He was totally un- self conscious about his wood …….uh……. pros ……about being a unidexter with an artificial walking aid; so much so that nobody else noticed he even had one. Well, I noticed it but only fleetingly. Now that I think of it, I guess he only had the one leg to get cold so wearing shorts in winter was only half as cold an experience as it would be for me. Perhaps having only the one leg meant that his heart had less blood to pump around so it would get back inside him, to the thing inside you that warms the blood, quicker than if he’d had two legs. That would mean that his blood would get warmed a bit more than mine as it went through the blood warmer thingy so his other, non wooden leg, would probably have been a good deal warmer than either of my two legs. Isn’t it amazing how nature compensates?

He took us for a drive in the van. The most recent of his two legs he wore on his right side – the accelerator pedal side. The ride was a bit jerky but otherwise nobody would have suspected that he was wearing a prosthetically enhanced walking aid with a shoe on the end to accelerate and brake with. I thought that if he could drive the thing, then I should at least try. Sometimes I can’t stop my brain from thinking things. I can hold what seems to be a perfectly intelligible conversation on one subject while my brain is actually off on a trivia trip. Baden was talking to me and showing me how to let the awning down, how to check the oil, the water, the brake fluid and all those things a really competent mobile home driver should know about. All I could think of was what if he kicked the tyres with his non-blood carrying walking appendage and it flew off.? I mean, imagine if you were mowing the lawn next door and suddenly this pretend leg thing came over the fence and hit you in the head or something?

Baden told me he used to be a log truck driver so his leg could be a hollowed out log I guess. I reckon he could have got plenty of spare one’s in that business too. One man’s log could be another man’s leg – that’s how I look at it. Well…I didn’t really look at it; not while he was looking at me anyway. As I said, I hardly noticed he was wearing one – leg that is. I hope I don’t ever have to have an artificial lower valency. I’d be worried that people were looking at it all the time. I think I’d wear a jackboot on the good leg to draw people’s attention away from the counterfeet one. I’d hate to be pedometrically challenged like that.

We decided to call it Erasmus. No, not Baden’s ersatz ass kicker – the van. But not right then. No, we decided to call it Erasmus when I started to write this book because we didn’t have a name for it. If we get fed up with the name Erasmus this book could be called something else by the time I’ve finished it. Get on with the fucking story I hear you cry. Well, it’s my book and I’ll get on with it when I’m good and ready.

Right, where was I? Oh yes. Well, we took the van out for three weekends in Tasmania so we could gain all the experience we would need for life on the road on the Australian mainland. We didn’t learn much and we made all our major mistakes (like driving off with the electric cable still attached) after we’d left Tasmania on our first trip. That first trip was quite a big drive for us. It took us all the way from Hobart at the bottom of Australia, up through inland Victoria and New South Wales on up through coastal Queensland right up through the Daintree rainforest to Cape Tribulation almost at the very top of Australia.

Of course, life on the road in this huge mobile home wasn’t going to be cheap. Erasmus only did 5.5 kilometres to a litre of fuel and we were looking down the barrel at many thousands of kilometres. We needed a way to earn money on the road. The idea I hit upon was that of selling gum leaves to American budgerigar owners. The idea came to me one night in a friend’s kitchen. We were trying to talk over the chirping and chattering of their incredibly verbose and noisy budgerigar.

“What’s wrong with that bloody budgie tonight” I asked.

“The man at the pet shop told me that if I wanted a happy budgie I should give it gum leaves” Replied Kathryn.

“And that’s what makes it go all vocal like that?”

“Yes, works a treat doesn’t it. She’s never been happier”

“What kind of gum leaves? Where do you get them?”

“Just outside hanging over the pavement.”

It kind of made sense to me that budgies were Australian and so were eucalyptus trees so I researched it. I went to the University of Tasmania library and read up on them. I’d only just finished doing a BA in history there and had been asked to do honours and the semester was due to start in a month’s time. I was soon to attend an honours orientation day at which I should have to announce my chosen subject for my thesis. I was deeply engrossed in books with budgie pictures at one of the reading cubicles when I felt someone behind me. It was my history professor. He’s such a nice, soft voiced and unassuming Englishman in his mid fifties who students tend to think is perhaps a little weak and somewhat eccentric. In fact the man is as sharp as a cactus spine and an innovator who’s prepared to take a risk and go out on a limb with his superiors if he thinks a student’s project has some merit.

“Getting stuck into it already Peter? My God you’re keen. What’s that you’re looking at?” he said as he leaned over the top of my cubicle. “Are they budgerigar illustrations?”

“Yes, I’m thinking about doing the History of the Budgerigar as my history honours thesis.”

“Good, good. That’s what I like to see, something original for a change. See you at the orientation day then”

With that he left me to my budgie research. I thought he’d think I was a loony but he wasn’t phased at all. As it turned out, the history of the budgerigar was a really good story and would have made a great subject for my thesis. A British ornithologist named Gould had taken a few natural, wild budgies to England in 1840. Wild budgies are all green but there, at the other end of the earth in an unfamiliar land; they had been selectively bred into a whole range of colours. They wound up being introduced to over a hundred countries and by the 1950s there were an estimated five million of them in cages all over the world. When this happened the poor old budgie that used to supplement its predominately seed diet with gum leaves never saw this native tucker again. That is, not until I started a website aimed at selling gum leaves to budgie owners. Along with it I advertised perches made from eucalyptus branches and toys made from gum (eucalyptus) nuts.

By the time we left for our first trip the website had begun to perform and the business was coming in. We loaded Erasmus with stocks of toys and perches and everything we needed to run the business. Gum leaves we would pick up along the way every time we received an order. The orders we would collect through the website which we’d access in Internet café’s and libraries.

We said our farewells to friends and Clare’s family, gave them all our email address and off we went on the boat to mainland Australia one cold July night. From disembarking at Port Melbourne in the morning we drove north determined not to stop except for meals and sleep until we reached somewhere warm. We had the address of a Dutch couple, Tonia and Fred, who I’d met briefly in Tasmania the year before. They lived in Maryborough Queensland where they said it would be warm in July. They suggested we call in on them and said they’d give us a few suggestions on where to go in Queensland.

About three hours after leaving the boat we entered the small Victorian country town of Nagambie. It had a nice lake alongside the road and we stopped for coffee. While the kettle was boiling I heard Clare say “hey look at that” “What?” I asked. “There’s a Post Office right next to an Internet café and between them is a gum tree. That’s the perfect set up for you isn’t it?”

I thought the opportunity too good to miss and strode into the Internet café. I paid my two bucks for access to the net and collected two orders for gum leaves. Back out on the sidewalk I broke a few twigs with leaves off the gum tree and went back to Erasmus where I cut them off with the scissors and put them in a plastic bag. I walked back over the road to the post office and mailed them to my two new American customers. The whole operation had taken only fifteen minutes. “Turn the kettle off” I yelled to Clare “We’re having cappuccino and cakes at the cafe.”

Two other memorable things occurred at Nagambie. The first was that when I was sitting on Erasmus’ steps with the scissors cutting gum leaves off twigs and putting them in plastic bags, a grey haired couple strolled by and stopped to watch me. I looked up and the woman said “cutting up the gum leave are ya mate?” I nodded and smiled and they walked on until they came to a campervan which they drove off in. About a month later in a park in Bundaberg Queensland I was again engaged in the same activity when the same couple walked by and stopped to look at me. This time they didn’t say anything to me but just walked off muttering something about “well, it could be anything, you never know with people do you”

The second thing I remember about Nagambie is that when we pulled up at the side of the lake there was a great heap of building rubble on the nature strip stretching back from the road for a few metres. It was all fenced in with wire mesh and it had two enormous doors in amongst it. I remarked that Nagambie was a pretty little place, what with its lake and all, but that great heap of rubble somebody had dumped in the wire mesh compound really took the edge off the place. When the waitress came with our coffee I asked her about it and she said “oh that was our church, it was hit by a bloody great truck a few weeks back.”

I think the people of Nagambie must be some of the biggest sinners on the planet if God chose their town to let this happen to his house. Like MacDonald’s he’s got plenty of branches I guess but what a way to close one down! Nagambie’s shops were still selling postcards with pictures of the church as it was before the destruction. I wondered if the truck driver had been wearing his St. Christopher medal. St. Christopher, for those unfamiliar with the Catholic faith, is the patron saint of travellers. I don’t know if there’s a patron saint for churchgoers who’ve been flattened by Mack Trucks. If not I think Araldite, Goddess of the Sticky Situation, would probably suffice.

On our first day out of the starting blocks the fridge packed up. We were in Shepparton in Victoria when we started to look for an auto electrician. When we found one it was getting late in the day but the guy traced the problem to a little clear plastic box that plugged into our “magic black box” which lived under the wardrobe and did all sorts of things like transforming 240 volts to 12. He told me where to get another little clear plastic box and how to fit it and sent us away without charging. Well, it was charging, that was another thing the magic black box did. It charged the batteries whenever we had 240 volt power on. No, what I meant was that he didn’t charge us any money. We bought a new little clear plastic box at an electrical wholesalers and I plugged it in. The fridge was OK again but by this time it was getting dark and we drove about frantically trying to find a place to stop for the night.

We drove past a service station with a huge gravel car park. There was enough space there to turn even a very large road train around in. We considered ourselves lucky to have found a place to park so close to dark and I fitted the TV aerial up and played with trying to get reception for long enough for Clare to have finished cooking dinner. It had been along day and we watched TV in bed for about an hour before going to sleep at around 9.30 pm. The very large road trains didn’t start to arrive until some time after 11pm but when they did it was frightening. The reason the garage we’d parked alongside had such a huge parking area was so as to allow the very largest of trucks to circle around and line up the diesel pump with the side their filler caps were on. As they turned they came within a few meters of Erasmus and the noise made the whole van vibrate. We left there at about 4 am and drove north.
We crossed the mighty Murray River somewhere unmemorable into New South Wales. We’d been advised to get on the Newel Highway and not stop until the weather became warm and the advice was sound. What could have been a very uninteresting inland journey was made agreeable by the fact that there had been recent rains all the way from Melbourne almost to the Queensland border. There was green grass instead of dry brown stubble everywhere and at almost half hourly intervals there’d be flurries of white or pink as sulphur crested cockatoos or galahs took to the wing.

Although it may not have seemed warm to us there were plenty of insects on the wing and Erasmus, having such a large, flat front, was becoming plastered with them. The really juicy large ones made a real mess of the windscreen and using the washers and wipers only served to smear them across our line of vision. We stopped in a town and bought some insect remover specially formulated, so it claimed, “for cleaning dead insects off of auto paintwork and glass.” I was surprised to find that it really worked. I was intrigued to know what was in it. When I worked in the oil industry I learned that solvents are usually made from a lighter version of the same substance that the stain or whatever is made from. Like, if you want to remove grease, you can use gasoline because it's just a lighter version of the same crude oil product.

Insect remover though, had got me baffled because, following the same logic; I was inclined to think that it was manufactured from something like dragonfly vomit. Clare didn’t agree because she reasoned that the average dragonfly was probably only capable of disgorging something like 100th of a millilitre at a time and, given that the bottle contained 500 mill, they would never be able to produce it for the price. She also pointed out that you couldn’t guarantee that every dragonfly would produce every day. I disagreed. All you'd have to do is get them all together in a big cage and play Kylie Minogue records to them all day and you'd never run out of the stuff.

We went through a barrage of inland towns that sounded like they’d been named by people with speech impediments; Jerilderie, Narrandera, Narrabri, Gilgandra. We drove as fast as we could through places like Gunnedah, which sounded to us like a venereal disease, and Coonabarabran which I had always thought was a cheesy flavoured breakfast cereal. Parkes went by the widow so fast that we forgot it was the town that starred in the film called The Dish that the thoroughly nice Sam Neil managed to reduce to the level of background music.

Dubbo’s Western Plains Zoo was the only place we found worth stopping in. It’s a 300 hectare open range animal park and much better than any I’d seen in Europe. We spent a glorious day there walking around and wished we’d taken the bikes from Erasmus in with us. I couldn’t think of any way in which the place could be improved it was so good. Well, maybe they could put some kind of chastity belts on the male monkeys so they can’t jerk off in front of parties of schoolchildren but that’s all part of the entertainment and, anyway, they’re probably not Christians.

I still remember my father catching me masturbating. He told me what was, I suppose, the standard story in those days, that I’d go blind. I looked across at Tugger Wilson in class the next day. He wore glasses and seemed to be getting on alright. That’ll do me I thought. I’ll just do it a little bit and wear glasses like Tugger Wilson. I was only twenty seven.

The only other improvement that could possibly be made to Dubbo Zoo is to move it to Sydney, or Melbourne, or anywhere. Dubbo’s in the middle of nowhere. I wonder where the name Dubbo came from? It sounds like some kitchen product from the 1940s like OXO or Draino doesn’t it. Clean your plimsolls with new ultra white Dubbo. I can just hear the jingles “Dab a daily dob of Dubbo on your Doberman.” On the third day out I kissed Clare on the Warrumbungles. She’s got lovely Warrumbungles.

Generally the inland route we took to get through New South Wales wasn’t very interesting. There were maybe six or so places to spend half an hour looking at and a lot of driving. One place we stopped at in the north of the State was a cave system that was above ground so didn’t have the usual stalactite/stalagmite cave junk that all looks the same after you’ve seen a few of them. I really tire very quickly of looking at illuminated snot dribbles with names like “the giant’s elbow” or the sleeping beauty” or whatever so it seemed like a refreshing change to go up into a cave system instead of down into one. Although it wasn’t particularly spectacular it was nice and cool on what was a hot day. There was a party of about twenty American teenage schoolkids being taken around by the guide, an Australian teacher, an American teacher and a couple of American parents. The guide said we could wait an hour until the next tour or tag along with the group which we did. We came to a cave with a natural stage in it that the guide said had perfect acoustics and the American schoolkids had learnt to sing that old Australian favourite “Put Me Among The Gum Trees.” Without even asking permission to annoy us they all lined up and sang it as a choir. They expected us to clap but we didn’t and then a girl sang Amazing Grace through braces and a fellow girl student massacred “Bye Bye Miss American Pie. She had a voice like a small furry rodent caught in a trap and we giggled.

When she’d finished the guide said that he was going to demonstrate to us what complete silence and complete darkness were like. He said he was going to turn the light switch off and let us know when two minutes were up. He did and it was like sitting in a dry flotation tank. All my senses were heightened and I shut my eyes because it was pointless keeping them open in the utter, absolute and complete darkness. I could hear myself breathing and hear my heart lub dubbing. Then, after what I judged to be about a minute, I farted a great fart. Clare dug me in the ribs and I could hear suppressed sniggering. When the guide turned the light back on he didn’t mention it but as we left the room/cave the American teacher beckoned to one of the boys to stay behind. As we wandered down to the next level I could hear the boy protesting his innocence. “I swayer on mah life it wasn’t me maaam” he said.

Finding somewhere quiet and out of the way to stop each night while it was still daylight was becoming routine. We’d soon learnt that bumping the top of the van into overhanging trees in the dark was going to become expensive. Reversing it into the bottoms of trees wasn’t quite as bad because the bumpers often saved us but, nevertheless, it had already cost us a hundred and twenty dollars in rear lights. The top of the van though, was going to be difficult for a panel beater to get at.

Charging up the highway somewhere in northern New South Wales, I can no longer remember where, we saw a sign to our right saying Kelly’s Landing. It was a little before dusk and we were looking for a place to stop for the night. I figured that a place with a name like that must be on a river or a lake so we turned off the highway to look for it and park up. We drove for a couple of kilometres without seeing anything and we were having doubts about the dirt road we were on and whether the trees were going to become too low for us to get through. We stopped the van and took to the bikes to see if the road ahead was passable. We rode for another two kilometres or so and didn’t find anywhere to park but the unsealed road was excellent. It was getting dim as we hurried back to Erasmus, threw the bikes inside and drove further on.

We came across forks in the road and after taking half a dozen of these we were worried that we wouldn’t be able to retrace our steps. The roads though, got better and wider but they didn’t seem to go anywhere. After about half an hour of this we had to admit we were hopelessly lost. All these well maintained, wide dirt roads must have been for something but there was no sign of logging or heavy vehicle tyre marks.

By now it was well after dark as we emerged from the forest onto what looked like a causeway. There wasn’t any point in driving around lost any longer so we pulled up at the side of the road and stopped for the night. It was cold and blustery and we couldn’t watch the news because the TV aerial was blowing around so much. We slept well in spite of the wind buffeting Erasmus around. Somewhere about 6am I got up for a pee. I opened the door and stepped down onto the gravel road. As I slammed the door shut a great cloud of white storky looking water birds shrieked and took off. They circled around a couple of times and then settled back down in the marshes.

We’d parked in a real, full on, juice of the fruit wetlands. It was our first wetland experience, the sort of thing we’d seen on David Attenborough TV shows in Africa’s Okavango Delta. Dubbo Zoo eat your heart out – this was the real thing! There were herons, egrets and huge flocks of ducks. Spoonbills spooned and waders waded. And inside Erasmus two breakfasters breakfasted with the windows opened up to one of the best sights we’d ever seen – and it was just for us – no other humans in sight.

We were completely intoxicated. It was as if the whole world had just us two people in it, no buildings or anything to show where the hand of man had ever been. We eventually came around to thinking that the hand of man had, indeed, been in the area along with the bulldozer and grader of man leaving behind mile after mile of roads that didn’t go anywhere. And we had diesel enough left for only about thirty kilometres. It was useless looking at the maps. Kelly’s Landing didn’t appear on any of them and we hadn’t encountered a soul since turning off the main road the previous evening.

We knew that somebody who knew the area would come along sooner or later so Clare got her painting gear out and I started writing. Pretty soon a battered old 1970s Commodore came galumphing along towards us in a cloud of dust and I stood in the road and waved at the driver. His name was Des. He pulled a wedge out of the window and lowered it. He looked at me.

“How the fuck did you get in ere?”

“We came in last night looking for Kelly’s Landing”

“Well, yooze are in it”

“Yeah, but how do we get out?”

“You can spend a week in ’ere an not get out. ‘Op in an’ I’ll show yooze how to get out.”

His car was full of empty beer cans and he leaned forward grabbing handfuls of them throwing them from the front seat into the back where the seats had been removed and replaced with two huge blue eskys. I got in and it was then that I saw that his bare feet and arms up to his elbows were caked with dried mud. As we travelled he explained the reasons for all the well maintained roads.

There was a resort close by and this land was all theirs. A couple of years back the resort was bought by a large Malaysian concern who changed nothing except that they had put in roads, bird hides and observation towers for their guests safari tours. I asked if he lived close by and he said he had a shack built of iron and driftwood that he spent a couple of nights a week in. He went there to catch fish which was how he earned his living. He said his family had always lived close by and he was raised in these marshlands. I asked how the new Malaysian owners felt about his fish poaching activities. He said they never visited and left the land in the hands of a ranger who was a good bloke.

He took me to a few of his favourite fishing spots in the marshes where, at night, he would bait is hooks and tie them with a short line to empty plastic soft drink bottles which he painted white. In the morning just before dusk he rowed around with a powerful torch picking out the white bottles and lifting them and the fish into his dingy. He spent half an hour showing me around these wonderful marshlands which he seemed to have all to himself before taking me to the entrance of the resort where, I suspected, he didn’t want to be seen. At any rate he turned around and took me back to Erasmus where Clare was getting anxious for my safety having seen me leave with such a fierce looking individual. I asked him in for a cup of coffee which he refused but reciprocated by opening up one of the eskys in the back of his car and asking me to help myself to the Malaysian resort owner’s fish.

I was once in Malaysia with time to kill and wandered into a supermarket where I came across a whole wall of fish. The wall was taken up by some twenty or so tanks, all full of brightly coloured tropical fish. It was very soothing to the eye, calming and tranquil and I stood for a while to watch them. My doctor’s surgery back in Melbourne had a big aquarium which, Doctor Andrews told me, made his patients relax while they were waiting to see him. I must admit that I’d always been too impatient to spend time watching Doctor Andrews’ fish but the display in this Kuala Lumpur supermarket was so much bigger and it really did have something of a calming effect. Birds and animals get all stressed and dart about but fish just glide around changing direction with hardly any perceptible movement, all serene like.

Suddenly a hand appeared in one of the tanks and dashed around until it grabbed a large, pretty blue and yellow striped fish and then the fish and the hand disappeared. It all happened so quickly, and I was feeling so relaxed and laid back, that my tiny brain couldn’t quite work out what was going on but I knew that the hand was too big to have been on the end of a kid. The rest of the fishes in the tank didn’t look at all serene now; they were left spinning around like they’d been sucked into a whirlpool. The water was all misty and they were banging against the sides. I was just thinking about telling the guy who was stacking the long white radishy things with blotches on the shelves when, around the edge of the aquarium wall, I saw a "fish butcher" whack the head off of my nice blue and yellow striped fish with an axe. He popped it into a plastic bag and threw it on the scales, slapped a price tag on it and handed it across the counter to a lady who stood in line at the checkout with the unfortunate creature still flapping its last feeble throes.

I got to thinking about how we view fish, or is it fishes? They’re not terribly warm and friendly creatures as far as we humans are concerned but they’re still sentient – they still feel pain. But fish don’t scream when you chop their heads off do they? If you fancied a lump of pork for dinner you wouldn’t just lop the head off a pug would you? Of course you wouldn’t. It was a spelling mistake. It should have read pig. And, anyway, pugs are dogs. Pigs would scream like hell while their heads were being hacked off and we’d feel sorry for them. Pugs too for that matter. But, if you’re a voiceless fish, who gives a toss about you? I’d never thought about it before but I vowed to in future – every time I sprinkled the salt and vinegar on one. But meanwhile, back in real time New South Wales somewhere, we stowed the fish Des gave us away in the freezer, quickly tidied ourselves up and headed straight for the resort.

It was luxurious and palatial, with a golf course, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, the works. We sat around one of the sandy beached outside pools under gently swaying palm trees with a bottle of chilled chardonnay for an hour or so. It was so incongruous, we had woken up lost in the middle of a wetlands surrounded by great flocks of migratory water birds. Then a ride in a mobile wrecker’s yard driven by a mud encrusted crab catcher and now it was only 11am and were hob-knobbing it in a luxury resort.

As we travelled north and on into Queensland the weather gradually became warmer and we were able to change into shorts and T shirts and stay that way for weeks on end. The scenery too, became much more inviting. Hibiscus and frangipanis started to appear along with palm trees and sub tropical monsterias in people’s gardens. By the time we reached Toowoomba enough ingredients had combined to create the holiday mood and we slowed down so as to be able to drink it all in. Toowoomba is at quite an elevation and has over a thousand hectares of parks and gardens. The views from points around this biggest of Queensland’s inland cities are beautiful when mist doesn’t obscure the picture.

Leaving Toowoomba we cruised up and down mountain ranges covered with banana and pineapple plantations, saw macadamia orchards and pawpaw patches. It was glorious and I wondered why it had taken me so many years to get up to this part of Australia. If I’d suspected that it existed I’d have come much sooner.

It was in the early afternoon that we finally drifted into Maryborough to catch up with Fred and Tonia, the Dutch couple I’d met the year before in Hobart.

Chapter 2

2007-12-31T19:20:00.005-08:00

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER TWO

We didn’t know how we’d be received in Maryborough. I had met Tonia and Fred only because they had stayed at the home of a friend of mine in Tasmania and I had taken them out for a day in the car. The friend in question called me and told me that he’d taken them out for a short while and discovered that he was so unfit that he wouldn’t be able to take them to the places he’d promised. He asked if I’d take them out for a day. When we parted they told me that Clare and I would be welcome to stay at their place any time we were up their way. Of course, these things are easy and safe to say when you live thousands of kilometres away and the possibility of people ending up on your doorstep are limited.

We drove up their long and winding drive and parked at the end of the long, ranch style single storey dwelling. Clare wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea of just fronting up to somebody’s house when she didn’t know them and had got me to agree to sleep in Erasmus. She needn’t have worried. Tonia and Fred were so warm and lay back that we hit it off immediately. We stayed with them for four nights. Their spare bed was soft and the water in the shower didn’t have to be limited like the shower in Erasmus. Their garden was full of tropical flowers and plants and numerous parrots visited every day to partake of the goodies Fred put out for them each morning.

Tonia & Fred are of Dutch extraction and have lived in Queensland for over twenty years. Apart from their accents they are entirely acculturated to the Queensland way of life. We sat under their veranda one night enjoying their hospitality after a good Dutch meal prepared by Tonia. The weather was balmy, the stars were so bright they seemed inordinately close to the earth and all seemed right with the world. We were deeply engrossed in conversation about European and Australian cultural differences.

Tonia was expounding on art and in particular the Flemish masters while Fred, all the while, nodded in agreement. We’d been through Vermeer, Rembrandt, van Gogh and Ruebens and were now onto Pieter Breugel.

“Yes” said Fred. “That’s the szort of culture I’m talking about. When you’ve sztood in those galleries in Amsterdam and you’ve taken zat kind of thing in shince you were a young fella it hasz to have an effect on you. Den you got someshing the average Aussie yust can’t have becosz all de money in der vorld juszt can’t buy zat kinda kultyoor if you haff not lived der. It’s yust not in ya grains.”

“Ingrained” said Tonia.

“ya, ingrained, dash vot I meant, ingrained.” Said Fred.

With that, and still in mid conversation, he slowly got up from his chair and casually took three or four paces across the lawn. He reached down and grabbed a cane toad by the hind legs. As he rose he swung around like a lacrosse player launching the cane toad into the air like a bolt from a cross bow dashing its brains out on a nearby concrete water tank. All the while he kept the conversation flowing as if nothing had happened and returned to his chair.

It was a horrific sight, the wilful slaughter of an innocent reptile for doing nothing more offensive than existing. It was also fucking hilarious. We couldn’t stop giggling about it all night. I tried to imagine what would have been the last thing to have gone through the cane toad’s mind as it hit the wall and decided that it would have most probably been its arse.

On another night we were sitting out under the veranda shortly after dusk when the vinyl cover on their gas barbecue began to move. Fred motioned to us to be quite and we waited a good five minutes in silence during which there were a few squeaks coming from under the cover. After a while a goanna, all of a metre and a half long, silently slithered out from under the cover and, almost snakelike, poured itself onto the tiled veranda floor and waddled off into the darkness. Fred removed the barbecue cover to find what was left of a mice nest. There was fat under there from past barbecues that the mice had been feeding on.

The day after Fed had so kindly treated the cane toad to flying lessons we were cleaning Erasmus out when we heard a sizeable mob of wild birds kicking up a great din. An excited Fred emerged from his shed yelling “over here, over here” as he ran, barefooted, towards the fence. There we saw a goanna scurrying across the ground pursued by a bunch of female magpies and noisy mynah birds. The lizard made it to a patch of scrubby cover but not before it had suffered a good few pecks in the tail from the avian women’s morning coffee group.

After we’d seen everything Maryborough had to offer, and armed with Tonia & Fred’s knowledge of Queensland about what to avoid and what was worth a look, we set off on the road north towards Childers. We were in sugar cane country. These lush, tall, sweet and sticky green walls at the side of the road were so much more attractive than all that starve gutted looking scrubby country we’d driven through all the way up through Victoria and New South Wales. In some places we saw little sugar cane trains that ran across the road in front of us. In places that had no sugar trains there were big wire sided trucks carrying the cane to the mills. At Childers I was on the sidewalk trying to take photographs of the strikingly colourful rainbow lorikeets in the trees. A man stopped and told me they were a pest. He said that he worked in the local Isis sugar mill where they break in and eat the sugar which somehow ferments inside them and they become pissed and then shit in the product.

Childers was lovely but we didn’t hang around for long because I wanted to see 1770. I found it on the map where it wasn’t called Seventeen Seventy, in words but simply 1770 in numerals. I’d asked Tonia why it was called 1770 and she’d asked a few friends but nobody knew. I was ensnared. I had to find out. As we drove west through the lush Childers avocado orchards and the ugly pseudo 1940’s garden shed architecture of the industrial outskirts of Bundaberg, I thought about what would one’s address would look like on an envelope if you lived in 1770? What would I do if I was a postal sorter down in Brisbane and got a letter addressed to “Mr & Mrs. Grimsdyke 1770, Main Road 1770? I listened to the weather forecaster on the radio as we drove towards the place to see if they said anything like “Brisbane 25 and 1770, 27.” Wouldn’t it be confusing if you told somebody that your grandfather lived in 1770? When we eventually arrived there we found that in 1770 Captain Cook had visited the place. I wonder what time of day he arrived? I mean, if it was at seven minutes past five in the evening, his log book could have read “arrived in 1770 at 17:07 on 17/7/1770.” I think I’m going nuts – it’s all this driving and getting pissed on cheap Shiraz in the evenings.

Gladstone, the next major coastal town going north was industrial and revolting and, as I only like writing about nice places, I’m not going to mention it. However, we had to drop in there for me to access Internet and while there I was offered a job reviewing websites. It came about completely by accident when I asked the guy in the Internet cafe why there were no slots in his computers to put a diskette in. He told me that he didn’t want people infecting his computers with viruses from diskettes. I replied that, in that case, I wouldn’t need his services because I had website reviews on my diskette that I had to send off to the person who’d commissioned them. “Website reviews?” he said, “do you want a job?”

I didn’t. I’d been writing about websites for about a year and didn’t care if I never wrote about another one so I refused. I’d found writing website reviews very stressful. A year earlier I had been approached by an Internet guru called Dan Garlick who asked me to write a few reviews of the web sites he designed and hosted. I didn't know a lot about it but it seemed easy at first glance. All I had to do was to write 600 words or so describing each of the web sites in question and he'd pay me some money.

What I didn't realise though, when I agreed to become a web site reviewer, was that I'd become one of a little clique of twenty first century wordsmiths who spent an inordinate amount of time competing with each other. The 600 word reviews I had to write weren’t about advertising. The client's web site did that. I had to write a description of the web sites using certain key words in the text. Dan then put all these website reviews into another, separate website for search engines to find and rank. Then, when people happened across these pages of reviews, they could click their mouses and go through to the individual, full size, websites. This is one method of tricking the search engines into putting client's sites ahead of their opposition’s sites.

At first it was all too complex for my tiny brain to absorb but after writing a few reviews I got the hang of it and found it quite interesting. The stress started when one of the site reviews I’d written suddenly started to perform by rocketing up the search engine ranks. It was interesting to think that something I had written was actually having a measurable effect all over the world. Normally I’d write something and never know whether people read it or not after I’d sent it off. This was different. I could actually see how many people a day clicked through from my review to the client’s website. At last I’d written something interesting enough to make people want to read more about the subject. It was flattering.

It was then that I got hooked and became involved in battles with rival wordsmiths in far-off lands whose names I never knew, but for whom I developed a sneaking respect. We knew each other as two men would if tied around their necks by the same piece of rope stretched taut through a hole in the wall between two rooms. When one moved the other shouted “aaargh.”

For a long time I battled with Rommel. Well, that was my name for some far-off desert fox somewhere who was at exactly the same level of wordsmithery as me. Dan’s client's site had been in position ten on page one of the Google search engine for months. Then, one day, another site from way down on page two somewhere knocked “our” site into position eleven which was on the page that he used to be on before he knocked me off. Now, clients with something to sell all strive to position their web sites on the first page of the search engine rankings because the members of the general searching public often don't bother looking any further.

Rommel and I fought this rankings battle over something like nine months before I got the edge on him - or was it her? Rommel would tweak his client's site with a couple of well-placed words, re-submit it to the net and wait to see if it moved up or down a slot. I'd try to get the edge on him by reading his site for changes every day and counter him with words of my own before the search engines re-ranked him. It was around the eighth month of this unuttered war of words that I finally realised that, fascinating as the game was, I was loosing sleep over it. It came to be like some John le Carré spy novel. Sleuth Rommel was stalking me, anticipating my every move. I was slowly but surely being out-generalled.

He was drawing away from me. He was up to position number seven by the time I was back up to position ten again. He was obviously making this battle his mission. I woke up one night and couldn't get back to sleep again. Clare sensed it and asked me what was wrong. I confessed that I was being stalked by Rommel. "Rommel, you call him Rommel? Perhaps it's time you got away from that computer for a spell, Pete. It's a tiny, unreal little world you live in when you're on the Net. You can lose sight of the real world outside the window if you're not careful."

This led to a conversation I didn't want to have at three in the morning. It was all centred on the war in the Western Desert where Rommel was finally out-generalled by Montgomery but not until he'd already seen off two British commanders in the form of General Auchinleck and Field Marshall Wavell. Clare did history at uni and she knew all about it.

"And do you know how Montgomery beat Rommel?" she asked me.
"Um"
"Well I'll tell you. The first thing he did was to get all his troops to exercise."
"Oh ... well then, I'll head off down to the gym at first light"
"You should Pete, you really should. All you do is sit in that study of yours all day and write. It's not healthy. If you exercise your body you'll get some oxygen coursing around your brain and you'll be able to think better. Then have a go at your Rommel."

Now, I don't dislike exercise. Years ago I saw the Jane Fonda aerobics video tape twice and would have watched it a third time if it hadn't been for the one Raquel Welch brought out shortly afterwards. It's just ... well ... .I went for a jog around the block a couple of years back and came back feeling worse than when I left the house.

So there I was in the study writing another web site review. It was a corporate elite health service site where the company goes into offices and gives all the employees a fitness test and then works out some kind of on-site training program for them. I quickly read through the site to get the gist of what this client’s product was about until my eyes fell upon the bit about healthy bodies supplying oxygen to unhealthy brains and making people "think more efficiently." Yes, I thought, I'll bear that in mind - no need to mention it over dinner though.

Not long afterwards I was reviewing another site, this time about a thing called a Zen Chi Relaxerciser. If anybody had asked me the meaning of Zen Chi before that I would have said it was either about kick-boxing or meditating or both, but this thing was a machine for moving people's legs around.
As I was writing my little 600 word review I had to keep referring to the web site and gradually I could see that what I was writing about was the very thing that would solve all my problems vis-a-vis lack of exercise. It said I could exercise lying down.

" ... Zen Chi is a unique non-impact exercise movement that stimulates venous and lymphatic return, as well as the digestive tract, all whilst lying down ...."

That's what it said. And I was impressed. I didn't know what "venous and lymphatic return" was but I thought that I wouldn't have minded some. I was even more impressed with a whole load more words I didn't understand. And it didn't stop there. It could cure menstrual pains and promote the flow of blood to capillary banks in all the extremities of my body. It could cure things I'd never heard of; maladies with names reminiscent of well-known typing errors.

I read on “the relieving of nervous tension - stimulus to the digestive tract - the boosting of sluggish metabolisms - enhancement of digestion - increased circulation of oxygenated blood through the muscles.”
And all this could be achieved while lying on the floor of my choice. Wow! This was my kind of exerciser. I wondered if it could make the coffee or tell me what time the tide came in, in the Bay of Naples on St. Valentine's Day. I read on until I came to the bit about insomnia.

"Hello Dan?"
"Yes Pete?"
"You know that Zen Chi vibrating ankle thing I'm writing about?"
"Oh good, glad you rang. I need that article ASAP."
"Ah, yes ... I was actually wondering if you could prevail upon the Zen Chi people to let me have one for a few days. It's a bit difficult to review a thing like that when you haven't actually used one."
"Sorry Pete, too late for that. You can borrow mine if you like."
"What, have you got one?"
"Yep."
"Can I try it?"
"Yep. Bring around the article and you can pick it up at the same time."

I cursed myself for calling him. It had had the reverse effect. I had wanted to borrow this ankle shaking machine thing that was going to relax me and stimulate my lymphatic returns and now I'd succeeded in bringing forward a deadline on an article. More stress. That evening I came home with the Zen Chi. My mate Tony was drinking tea with Clare in the kitchen. I plugged in the machine and got him to try it first. He reckoned it was like putting your feet up on a giant blancmange during an earthquake. Clare said it made her feel like a Mermaid. I said it made me feel like a dolphin. Tony said "me too, can we have French fries with it?" You know the way that Dolphins swim? The way they always look as though they've actually got two legs duct taped together inside a bin liner? That's how it made me feel and the dog, who's not used to seeing me lay on the floor, added a touch of realism to the whole watery experience.

When I was writing web site reviews I spent a lot of non-productive time sitting around waiting for sites to download but the next day I plugged in the machine and used it whenever there was a break in the traffic. These things are time-guzzlers. They can take fifteen minutes and make them seem like five. I don't know how they do it, they just do. But most of all, the machine worked on my brain, on my memory. While I was there lying on the study floor with my eyes shut, going through my new dolphin meets mermaid fantasy, l found I could think.

Perhaps it's just that I've never lain on the floor in between web sites before, I don't know, but it straightened out my thought processes and gave me another angle on the article I was writing. . I'm sure it was this device that helped me finally overcome Rommel. With my new-clear weapon of a brain churning out carefully crafted volleys of adjectives I Montgomery'd him off to page two. Thunk him right down I did but even after this triumph no amount of money could induce me to write any reviews for the man in Gladstone.
Rockhampton
Well hidden from the road in a small forest north of Gladstone that night our TV packed up right in the middle of some program I can’t remember. I wished it hadn’t. It was an unusual TV because it had a VCR built into it and it worked both on mains electricity and from the van batteries. The chances getting it repaired or getting hold of parts for it I thought slim as it was over ten years old. Up the road from Gladstone was Rockhampton and we called in there looking for a TV repair man fully expecting that we’d have to order a new TV from down in Brisbane. Behind the counter of the first TV shop I went into was a brown skinned, wrinkled little man in his sixties with thick glasses and what looked like a terminal case of galloping dandruff. He looked like a jockey ten years past his use-by-date.

He came out to the van to take a look at the TV. The door was open and I motioned him inside ahead of me. As he stepped inside he tripped over the second step falling forward and banging his head on the handle of the drawer Clare kept her underwear in. Clare had been standing at the sink and hadn’t heard us coming across the street towards the van. The first she knew of our arrival was a bang and a scream as a dandruffy, sexagenarian TV repair man midget came flying through the door smashing his glasses on the handle of her underwear drawer.

I helped him to his feet. He was one of these people who go bald and then grow the hair long on one side of their head so as to comb it over to the other side and plaster it down with hair spray to keep it in place. When he got up his hair was standing almost bolt upright and his smashed glasses were askew on his face. All he said was “phew” and then looking up said “is that the television up there then is it?” “No”, I said, “that’s the..um..microwave actually.” I handed him my glasses saying he might be able to see something through them. He put them on and asked “what strength are these?” “I’m not sure” I said “but I seem to remember they’re one and a half in the left eye and two in the right.” “These are just the job,” he said. “Much better than mine.” It was then that I looked in the wardrobe mirror and saw Clare sitting on a seat on the pavement, head in hands, eyes wet with laughter.

When, in due course, he located the TV he switched it on and declared that he’d have it fixed in an hour. “Doesn’t it need any parts?” I said. “Yes it does, maybe a couple of parts. But I’ve got two of these TVs in the shop I can cannibalise, had them for years.” I unbolted the TV and left it, and my glasses, with him. We went for a cruise around Rockhampton. It was ghastly but the coffee was good and we turned up back at the TV repair shop where the guy had our TV working perfectly and only charged us thirty dollars. There was, though, a catch in it. He’d already been to the optician up the road and asked him if he could duplicate my glasses. We had to wait a further half an hour until the optician’s assistant returned them.

A thousand kilometres up the map from Rockhampton is Mackay. It’s a hundred miles more upmarket than Rockhampton, the nearest big town to its immediate south. Another sugar town it produces a third of Australia’s entire harvest. All of these sugar towns have mile after mile of green cane fields which we thought most attractive but which, I suppose, must look vastly different after it’s all cut. One thing that cane did for Mackay was to make it one of Australia’s most cosmopolitan towns. After Australia stopped importing indentured, sometimes forced, Kanaka labour from the South Seas shortly after the turn of last century, the Europeans arrived in town. They came from all over, Italy, Malta, Greece, Sweden, Spain; they all came to cut cane around MacKay. One legacy they’ve left is food. There’s some of the best European food in the country in MacKay. It was a small town and had nothing to hold our interest other than to walk around it. There are only so many excellent meals you can have in a day so after looking at their new port development we kept going.

A month or so before we left on our first trip we read that the tourism authorities in Queensland had introduced new laws and with heavy penalties which were to be applied to people like us who camped freely without spending money in their caravan parks. We didn’t need to use caravan parks as we were self-contained. That was one of the reasons for deciding to buy Erasmus in the first place. The fines in Queensland though, were exorbitant and we found the whole State to be covered in no camping signs especially wherever there was a glimpse of the sea. The maximum fine was $1,500 for camping in a no camping spot.

We knew about this as we entered the town of Bowen and we stopped at the information centre on the way in. Clare asked the guy there where we could park without going to a caravan park or the sports oval which, in most Queensland towns, is the only place anybody can park freely. He was a nice helpful guy who told us that the new laws were going to lose Queensland a lot of tourist dollars if they began to enforce them. I agreed with him and commented that if they fined anyone $1500 just for parking illegally overnight it would soon be all over the caravanning magazines and Queensland would get lots of unwanted negative publicity.

He told us not to say that he gave us the information but that Bowen had a disused quarry near a nice beach where the parking man seldom went to check for illegal campers. It seemed too good to miss out on so we followed his directions and headed straight for the spot. It wasn’t a bad beach although the quarry left a bit to be desired. The good thing about it was that it was level. We unhitched the bikes from the front of Erasmus and cycled along the beach into town and returned just after dark. It was my turn to cook and I was just pulling the skin off of a chicken breast when there was a knock at the door.

A nice, neat, grey haired man in a blue shirt and belted shorts with creases stood in the glimmer of the van lights. His newly shaven face was shiny and as he looked up at me I could see the texture of the skin on his neck which had survived many summers. I looked at the chicken skin on the draining board and then back at his neck. The only difference was that the chicken wasn’t sunburnt.

“Good evening sir.” He said

“Good evening.” Says me

“I’m afraid I’ll have to move you along sir”

“I don’t really think we want to move from here thank you”

“You can go down to the sports oval. It’s free and there’s water there and toilets”

“Can you see the sea from there?”

“No sir, you can’t see the sea I’m afraid but if you stay here I’ll have to fine you”

“Oh alright, but can you hurry up because I‘m in the middle of cooking dinner?”

“What, you want me to fine you?”

No, but I’ve decided to stay here and if you have to fine me then there’s not much I can do about it really is there?”

“Well…………”

“How much is the fine? Fifteen hundred dollars isn’t it?”

“No, it’s a hundred and fifty a night for parking here though”

“Well, it’s a beautiful view isn’t it? To get a motel room for two in Bowen with a view like this would cost a lot more than that. I’ll take the hundred and fifty thanks”

“Ah, very well sir. Would you care to come over to the car and I’ll write the fine out?”

We got to his car and he sat inside while I stooped down at the window.

“This is the first one of these I’ve written out actually. You’ll have to bear with me. Sorry it’s holding your dinner up?”

“That’s OK”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go to the sports oval?”

“Absolutely”

He finished writing the fine out and handed me a copy of it.

“Now Mr. McLaren, payment details are on the back and you have thirty days to pay. I wonder, would you care to answer a few questions? We’re doing a questionnaire that will hopefully help Queensland serve its tourists better. You don’t have to of course, we just like to get feedback – see what people think.”

“Not at all, dinner’s stuffed. Go ahead”

He had list of about twenty questions – age bracket, how long would we spend in Queensland, how much per week we spent on fuel, caravan parks, meals etc. etc. He was half way down the list when he came to the question about occupation and he had to tick one of the boxes that had things like professional, skilled or unskilled, retired and so forth printed alongside them.

I said “I’m a journalist with Caravan & Camping Magazine.”

His jaw dropped and he said “Personally I think these new laws are ridiculous.”

Months later, when we returned to Hobart there was no mail on the subject and I never heard any more about it.

Further up the coast from Bowen is Townsville which for me is one of the best places along that whole stretch of coast and it has a world class aquarium that you can spend half a day in. It has a linear park called The Strand that runs for several kilometres along the waterside and we biked it a couple of times just on dusk. It was warm and balmy and exotic and we loved it. There were palm trees and colourful tropical flowers and people strolling and lying about on the grass - and they weren’t even pissed like the people who lay on the grass in Adelaide! Needless to say, we couldn’t find a place to free-park yet again. We cycled around the town looking for somewhere to live for a few days. In the car park that services the Magnetic Island ferries we came across a strange looking campervan. It was basically a tray truck with what I imagine used to be a refrigerated cool room on the back. It had a home made, wood framed flyscreen door which was open and a set of home made wooden steps positioned in front of it. There were only two narrow slots of windows in it and the exterior covering looked like white painted car port roof decking.

We cycled up to the door to see if there was anyone at home who might know if the area was patrolled. As we got within a couple of meters of it a small dog flew out of the door at us. It was a strange, slightly dachshundy, looking creature about two dogs long and half a dog high with one leg at each corner. Its name was Fred and in its urgent determination to defend its territory it forgot that it was tied by a piece of string to one of the door hinges. It flew through the air toward me at eye level and abruptly came to the end of the string. It hovered in mid air for a nanosecond and then swung quickly downward over the edge of the truck’s tray where it spun around by the neck making gurgling, sneezing noises.

The owner, a guy in his early seventies, hauled Fred back on board by the string and offered us a cup of tea. Well, I suppose he was really offering two cups of tea but we didn’t find out because we declined. I asked if he’s been there overnight and he said he had and that he hadn’t been bothered by anyone. That was good enough for us and we were on the verge of setting up house right there when Clare looked across the road and saw a huge gravel car park right next to the water facing the marina. There was hardly anybody in it and, although there were no toilets there, the ones where Fred and his owner were staying were only about fifty metres away. There was tons of room and we cruised about in it finally selecting a spot under a big light for security at night.

We were there for four nights and would have stayed longer but we were kicked out by a waiter from the Jupiter Hotel who owned the place. We’d probably have been alright for a much longer stay but our presence had attracted another van on the fourth night and the hotel thought they should nip this budding caravan park in the bud. When we came home on the third night Fred brought his owner across to see us. He told us the police had given him his marching orders. The owner, that is, Fred didn’t say a word. I said that he hadn’t had a bad run having stayed there from the night before us. ‘No” he said. I’ve been there for 6 weeks!

He was a fascinating person, an Englishman who’d lost all his money in a stock market crash ten years ago and had been living in a van ever since. He’d been just about everywhere and gave us a number of addresses of places to camp free of charge and un-hassled all around the country. He said his longest stay had been in a park in Sydney where he’d been for three months.

Right across the water from us was a classy looking restaurant on piles built out over the water. It was lit up at night and looking out the van window at it was just like a postcard. I was so inspired I took a photo of it on time exposure on the tripod. On our last night we went in there for a meal and were shown to a window seat. The view from their windows wasn’t as good as the view from ours. The water was all dark and at the other side of it the only thing that was illuminated was a bloody great mobile home called Erasmus.

On the last day, after we’d been kicked out of the Jupiter Hotel car park, we drove across the road to the Magnetic Island Ferry car park where we locked up Erasmus and caught the ferry out to the island for the day. We liked it. The weather was hot but the swimming was cool and the bus service went all around the back streets taking five kilometres to travel one. The good thing about it was that we got a free tour of the place and got to see over the fences of people’s back yards. They all lived among the kind of tropical vegetation I love. Big leaved monsteria type plants, bougainvilleas, palm trees, stunning hibiscus blossoms and perfumed frangipanis – lucky bastards.

We bought breakfast. It was the most romantic setting I think I’ve ever had for a breakfast. We sat outside next to a limpid pool in which big white and orange spotted Japanese koi carp emerged silently from under water lily flowers. Overhead exotic tropical orchid blossoms and palm fronds dappled the light. We had bacon and eggs and some tropical shite hawk of a bird shat on our toast. The owner gave us more toast and free coffee to make up for it.

At the end of the day when we were waiting for the ferry to take us back to the mainland we sauntered languorously into the backpackers hostel come pub and there, in a cyclone wire mesh enclosure, was a huge salt water crocodile. The manager of the place told me that he read in the newspaper that the croc was going to be put down for behaving like a crocodile so he asked if he could provide a home for it. I felt sorry for it. What quality of life was it for a salt water crocodile to have to listen to Kylie Minogue music and Pommy back packers throwing up every night?

One thing I hadn’t taken into account when I decided to become an itinerant fresh eucalyptus leaf vendor was that eucalyptus leaves aren’t available everywhere in Australia. I didn’t give it enough thought – didn’t do the research – I just assumed that gum trees grew everywhere. As we travelled further north into the sub tropics the vegetation grew ever more….ugh….um….sub tropical. There were lovely trees and rain forests and cane fields and hibiscuses – or is it hibisci? I’m not much good on plurals actually. I remember that shortly after leaving school I had a friend called Kenny Weeks and he told me about his neighbour who had a small menagerie in his back yard. This neighbour read about an animal in India that would actually attack and kill poisonous snakes. It was called a mongoose.

He found a pet shop in Newcastle that sold them and he rang about the cost of one of these animals and agreed to send the pet shop owner a cheque and he’d send the mongoose on the train down to Southampton. Then he read a bit more about the mongoose and he thought he’d better get it a mate because the book said they hunted in pairs. He sent a letter that started with Dear Sir, please send me two mongooses. It didn’t sound right so he crossed it out and wrote two mongi. That didn’t sound right either so he wrote two mongeese. He was getting confused so he looked up the word mongoose in the dictionary to find the plural but it wasn’t there. In the end he wrote out a cheque for twice the amount that he’d been quoted for a single mongoose and wrote an accompanying letter which went: Dear Mr. Mitchell, Please send me the mongoose as agreed. P.S. Please send me another one. The enclosed cheque is for a breeding pair.

From Bowen we carried on up the map through Ingham. Ingham is famous for having one of its pubs drunk dry by American sailors after the battle of the Coral Sea at a time when America could be justifiably proud of its military achievements. This event is said to have given rise to Slim Dusty’s song A Pub With No Beer although any reference to American sailors in the song must be, to say the least, veiled.

The cemetery was the most interesting place in town. It had mini mausoleums in it containing the remains of Italian and Spanish Basque cane cutters, their relatives and their descendents, many of whom probably ended up there from the after effects of the worst pizzas in Australia. We had one there that was so bad we couldn’t eat it.

It was around Ingham that the scenery began to change to what I now call my kind of scenery. Until then I didn’t know it was my kind of scenery because I was unaware of its existence. Close to Ingham began the waterfall country and I found I really like waterfalls with tropical vegetation. North of Ingham we came to the small tropical township of Tully which I thought was located in the most glorious spot I’d seen for a long time anywhere in the world.

Tully is situated in one of the highest rainfall areas in Australia but the rain that falls upon Tully is warm and with the tropical heat and humidity the surrounding area supports the growing of tea, bananas and, of course, the omnipresent sugar cane. All this green leafy agriculture is very South East Asian in appearance. It’s the kind of place where you drop a seed and run. Up behind Tully is a twisty turny road that runs alongside the Tully River up to a small hydro electric power station. Once a day the power station releases a big lump of water that rocks on down the gorge in a wave full of whitewater rafters.

The beauty of the Tully Gorge will forever remain as one of the highlights of my life. In some places we walked down it and stood on a wide, sweeping bank of the clean and cool fast slowing river. Sheer cliffs covered in tropical ferns, trees and vines rose vertically out of the water and swallows or some such birds cruised around catching the insects before disappearing into holes in the cliff walls. In some places trailing orchids hung down the cliff faces while, all the while, colourful butterflies cruised languorously about. It was perfect. I’d love to have stayed there for a long time but, alas, there was no accommodation and nowhere to park Erasmus.

Sixteen hundred kilometres north of Brisbane we arrived in Mission beach late one afternoon where we found all the caravan parks were full. Although we didn’t want to use a caravan park there was nowhere else. The little seaside town was perfectly positioned with white, sandy beaches backed by rainforest and banana and sugar cane plantations dotted around in the hinterland. However, it was littered with signs telling would be campers that they’d be fined for camping. Everywhere there was a glimpse of the sea there was a threatening sign. We went into the visitors centre to tell them that we’d have liked to spend some money in their town but they were making it too difficult for us. The lady behind the counter was sympathetic but could offer no suggestions beyond offering her own driveway for us to park in overnight.

We thanked her but declined her offer. Instead we bought fuel and prepared to leave the place without looking to see what it had to offer. About a kilometre north of the town we found an unsealed road down to the beach where, at the expense of our radio ariel, which we broke on an overhanging branch, we managed to hide behind the trees. According to the map the place was called Garners Beach. It was close to perfect with tropical fig trees spreading their shady cover out over a pristine ribbon of yellow sand like an organic Frank Lloyd Wright library building. We swam in the warm water and then rode back into own for a meal where we soon realised that we were staying in the best spot for miles around.

That night Clare woke me up. She’d heard three very distinct taps on the side of the van and told me that somebody was out there. Only a week before we’d seen a program on TV about the murder, in the Northern Territory, of Peter Falconio who, with his girlfriend Joanne Lees, had been travelling in a campervan. We’d discussed the possibility of being attacked by some machine gun wielding idiot before we left home. The subject had come up when we were telling another couple that we intended to go around Australia in a van without using caravan parks. The husband had said that he wouldn’t have embarked on such a trip unless he had a van that he could walk through from the bed to the driver’s seat so that he could drive away if danger threatened. Erasmus, however, had a separate homette. If anyone broke into the cab and started the engine, they could have driven us away and attacked us in the killing field of their choice. I’d argued that I’d spent two years living in a van in Russia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East without incident and that Australia was child’s play in comparison. Now though, I wasn’t as confident as I had been back in our friends Hobart kitchen.

I quietly clambered down from the bed and looked out of all the windows. The windows though, were tinted and I couldn’t see anything. After a while I climbed back into bed but not until I’d fumbled around and located the torch which I now kept beside me. Needless to say, we couldn’t sleep. Fifteen minutes later we heard someone walking around outside and I climbed back down the ladder torch in hand. This time I set the alarm off and, at the same time, ran around shining the torch out of all the windows. Whoever was out there seemed to have been scared off and in time we fell asleep.

In the morning while the kettle was heating I looked out of the windows for footprints among the leaf litter under the trees but couldn’t see anything much. We’d just sat down to breakfast when there was tapping again on the outside of the van. This time I could feel that the taps were coming from somewhere close to where I was sitting. It was near the window behind Clare. “That’s it” said Clare. “That’s the noise I heard last night.” I rose from the table and due to the proximity of the overhead cupboards; I leant forward towards the window that Clare had her back to. Just as my face came within a foot of the window up popped another face on the other side. It took me aback and more – it scared the living shit out of me. It was a cassowary. These huge birds are as tall as me and much, much nastier albeit somewhat uglier; but that’s just a personal opinion. They have a great blue flattened horn on their heads and huge feet fitted with what the national park information sheet called a “disemboweling toe.” I knew these Edna Everidges of the emu world lived in the highlands of New Guinea, where they’re highly prized by the Sepiks as a measure of one’s wealth, but I didn’t expect to have one doing its Morse Code on the side of our campervan during Sunday breakfast at Mission Beach. It sure made a mess of breakfast as well. There was more coffee flying around than my toast had the capacity to absorb. It made a mess of Clare’s nerves for a while too. As I leant forwards toward her, I suddenly screamed “Aaaargh Fuuuck” in her direction. This is a turn of phrase which, I found long ago, is my standard reaction to fear.

I recall shouting the very same words in an almost identical situation some twelve years before. I was in a third class caravan park (exclusively set aside for Russians and Eastern Europeans) on the Black Sea somewhere a little north of Varna in Bulgaria where the water was so foul we couldn’t drink a Coca Cola because the glass it was served in had been washed in it. I was alone in a campervan sitting at the table typing a travel article for an English language newspaper in Warsaw. I only had four hours to my deadline on account of an encounter with a man named Krim whose wife distilled plum brandy in a village up in the hills near Rila. Bulgaria, unlike Poland and Hungary, still hadn’t kicked communism at that time and the Russian puppet dictator Tudor Zhikov still ruled the roost. What this meant to my chances of getting paid for the article was that I’d be lucky to get a phone line out of Bulgaria in time unless I could find someone bribable. But there, in the caravan park, where I couldn’t buy fruit juice because the melons had been delivered, I was typing like fury.

I’d heard a scrapy gypsy violin playing somewhere close by and would have liked to have gone outside and watched but there wasn’t time. It was a slightly medieval sound, an eastern dirge involving a series of riffs an Irish pub fiddle player could maybe get his fingers around. Searching for the right word, I looked up for an instant. At the very second I did, a huge bear’s face looked in the window at me. “Aaaargh Fuuuck” I shouted as my head hit the underside of the cupboards. The bear was on a string and belonged to the gypsy. They were a double act that went around caravan parks and wandered the streets, him playing and the bear dancing on its hind legs. It was cruel but I couldn’t take my eyes off the spectacle.

Oh yes, the melons. The shops in Bulgaria at that time had nothing in them and great queues outside them if the queuers thought there was a chance of anything being delivered in the near future. I had gone in the camp shop and looked around and found the only thing in stock were bottles of gritty pear juice. The good news was that there was plenty of it. As I was due to leave the country in a couple of days and knew the Bulgarian leva I had in my pocket would be useless anywhere outside Bulgaria, I’d made up my mind to spend all of it on a couple of hundred bottles of fruit juice that I’d be able to sell in Romania.

The next morning I was on my way down to the shop when I saw the shop assistant walking in the same direction. “I’m going to clean you out of fruit juice today” I told her. “I’m sorry”, she said “but you can’t have any until we’ve sold the water melons.” I thought I hadn’t understood her but carried on walking to the shop alongside her. The blinds were down when we got there and she gingerly opened he door. Half a dozen water melons rolled out, then a pause, and about fifty of them followed in an avalanche.

Communism was like that. You received next to nothing for weeks and then, out of the blue, your monthly quota of something was delivered all at once. In this case a truck load of water melons had turned up and they stacked them all in the shop (the only place where they’d be under lock and key) with the result that the shop assistant couldn’t even get in there.

Mission beach though wasn’t like that. Their water melons were all cut in quarters and encased in cling wrap and their cassowaries couldn’t dance.

Anyway, the vegetation in central eastern Queensland was lush and lovely alright but there were no gum trees. We had fifteen orders for packets of gum leaves and customers in the USA waiting for them. We drove all over Innisfail until we spied the only gum tree we could find in town. The trouble was that it was only young, a bit past the sapling stage, and it was slap in the middle of a playground in a kindergarten. I thought about going in there and asking if I could have some of its leaves to send to five budgerigar owners in America but reasoned that they’d think I was a nutcase.

On the other hand they could have said “no” and then what would I have done? There was only one course left open to us. I jumped the fence after dark and stole them. We carried with us a tree lopper called Cindy and I extended the telescopic handle and cut almost a third of the leaves off the tree. In the next town I stuffed them into plastic bags and mailed them from the post office in the morning. I wondered what the playground attendant would have made of it the next day at the crèche. Who in their right mind would have stolen the leaves off a gum tree? OK, I know what you’re thinking – and perhaps you’re right.

It was in Innisfail that we visited our first crocodile farm. Crocodiles are arguably the most relaxed creatures in the universe with the possible exception of hibernating sloths or grey nomads in comas. Farming them seemed like a pretty relaxed occupation too. It seems all you have to do is throw them a chicken now and again and separate them when they fight with each other. The only reason for the latter is that crocodile skins with bite marks fetch less when you go to sell them than those that are unmarked. They don’t graze, don’t break through the fences, aren’t shearable and don’t need milking. And, according to our guide who candidly confided in me, “they’re thick as arseholes ‘cause they only got brains the size of peas.”

We wandered around behind a crocodilophobe in a ranger’s outfit listening to more statistics than I heard when I visited Auswitz. He told us how many tons they weighed, how much they ate, how many thousands of pounds pressure their jaws exerted, how fast they were over a twenty metre sprint when a dead chicken is thrown at them and all sorts of crocodiley crap nobody could possibly remember.

The crocodiles weren’t listening either. They just lay there bored to death with the guy. They’d heard it all so many times before that it was all like a sort of droning background anaesthetic to them; a soporific crocodile elevator music. A fellow tourist, who’d also paid ten bucks to get in, actually asked me if I thought the big croc we were looking at might be real!

But - and this is big - when the guide threw the dead chickens into the crocodile pens the crocs erupted into a violent and explosive action that lasted for all of thirty seconds. My advice to anybody contemplating a visit to a crocodile farm is don’t bother. They’re so inactive that watching a photograph of a crocodile for an hour, or even three, will give you just as much excitement.

Inland and up a bit from Innisfail is Atherton which is, as would be expected, in the Atherton Tablelands. I’d heard of the Tablelands many times and really paid no attention to what might be there. If anything I guess I imagined some sort of flat, parched plateau. But the tablelands are nothing whatsoever like that. They’re lush and green, little rivers everywhere and waterfalls aplenty. The area is as big as Tasmania and it’s easily the prettiest place in the whole continent. Large exotic flowers may have something to do with it but there are also coloured bids and gigantic coloured butterflies moving around. Some parts of it look like the south downs of England, others a little like parts of Switzerland in summer but minus the snow capped peaks and flaxen haired virgins carrying milk buckets.

It was the only area where we saw good quality green pastures that weren’t overstocked with grazing cows, in fact there seemed to be a cow shortage in the Tableland meadows. Some fields were divided by hedges and we drove down high banked tree lined country lanes; some of which could have been straight out of Europe. The Tablelands are at an elevation that makes for an equable climate in which to grow crops that won’t grow down on the coast because it’s too hot. Down in Cairns, which is only a couple of hours drive away, lettuce, beetroot, carrots and the like can’t be raised because of the climate but the Tablelands are replete with fields growing these colder climate crops. The area was without doubt the most varied in vegetation that we saw on the whole of our trip around Australia.

Everything in the tablelands seemed pure and clean. The rampant new growth of the tropical rainforests regularly washed clean by the abundant rainfall made it all look as though it had only just been created – by Enri Rousseau. Clare saw her first platypus…….and then another one and another one after that in the Tablelands rivers. He word platypus is a bit like mongoose when it comes to plurals isn’t it?

Baden, the guy we bought Erasmus from, had told us that we must visit Kuranda railway station but we couldn’t recall why. It certainly wasn’t the sort of thing I’d normally do though. I don’t particularly like railway stations. But, as we moved through the rainforests from Atherton towards Cairns Clare happened to see Kuranda on the map. So, as neither of us had any appointments to keep in the twenty first century, we went there. Actually, as I write, I’ve remembered why railway stations are not my thing. I haven’t thought about if before but now, as I psycho analyse myself, I can clearly see that I’ve had bad experiences in them.

The memory of one bad experience is always triggered by that Simon and Garfunkle song “Homeward Bound” that starts off with “Sitting in a railway station waiting for my destination.” It was on platform one of Southampton railway station in 1964 that Dianne Collier told me that she’d dumped me for Clifford Hendry. He was an arsehole who stole cars and sold uppers and downers. He was uglier than me too. Anyway, Dianne Collier walked off and I never went out with her again but on the way home the radio was playing that mournful Simon and Garfunkle song and it’s got sod all to do with Kuranda railway station. Nobody’s ever written a song about Kuranda station. Mind you, somebody should.

An ex wife and I had a terrible argument at Waterloo Station in London too. She walked off as well. It was all over her mispronunciation. She was Polish and when I misunderstood what she said she thought I was taking the piss out of her. We were standing on the platform waiting for a train north when, looking up, she said

“We need a poo”
“I don’t”
“Don’t what?”
“I already had one before we came out”
“Had what?”
“Had a poo”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look, you said we need a poo. Right?”
“No I didn’t”
“Yes you did”
“No” – I said “Winnie the Pooh”
“Why?”
“Are you blind?”
“No, why?”

With that she pointed up to a huge advertising sign with a picture of Winnie the Pooh on it. I looked at it, then back at her. “Do you always have to make a joke out of every fucking thing?” she said as she walked away.

So it was with much trepidation that I descended the steps onto Kuranda railway station platform ten steps behind Clare keeping an eye on the exit in case she made a run for it. I could see why Baden had told us to go there. It’s one of the world’s the prettiest railway stations. It’s covered with tropical plants. They’re in pots all over the two platforms and hanging in cascades from baskets overhead. It really is most beautiful and Kuranda town itself is like no other in Australia. It’s positioned on a hill in the middle of rampant rainforest with walks into it starting right at the back of the main street. The town exists for tourists, and there appeared to be no other industry there, but it’s the most tasteful tourist town we were to happen upon in all of our Australian travels.

There were souvenir shops all over the place but they were original rather than cheap and kitsch with local artists work very much to the fore. There were great craft markets as well and a couple of tropical bird aviaries and a bat recuperation refuge where people could have their picture taken with a fruit bat. Best of all were the two train rides in and out of the place. The train that ran from the plant covered railway station is famous in Queensland and zig zags down the mountain for well over an hour. It goes through fifteen hand cut tunnels, over bridges and across ravines, across the actual face of the Stoney Creek Falls and it stops at the Baron Falls for people to get out and take photographs. There can’t be many short railway rides in the world as scenic. It went

The other way to go to and from Cairns is by the worlds longest sky rail which is over seven kilometres long and has a couple of treetop stations along the way. We went on it early one morning and it was stunningly stunning and then a bit more. We sat in a gondola as it travelled over and through the tree canopy of a world heritage rainforest with views of the Coral Sea beaches, cane fields and luxuriantly green mountains. While we were up there we could see that there was a circus right in the middle of Cairns. That’s where we were going next.

Apart from caravan parks there’s absolutely nowhere to park a big mobile home in or within twenty kilometres of Cairns and the police enforce the law rigidly. We made a bee line for the circus which was setting up in a large square park only a three minute bike ride from the city centre. The circus people had at least ten huge mobile homes there on the grass and we drove right up and parked just a little to one side of them. We spent three nights there without being bothered at all. The only problem we had was my stepping in a sizeable faecal sample of what I perceived to be pacoderm excrement in the dark on the way to the toilets one night. It came up over my sandals.

Cairns was a good city too with broad streets and good shade trees, good food and art galleries. I’d never seen any of that hot climate, British Raj grand colonial architecture before except for a few buildings in Singapore. Cairns had a lot of it all painted white and I could imagine moustachioed plantation owners with baggy khaki shorts and pith helmets standing on the balconies. The esplanade was extra cool. It had a big swimming pool overlooking the sea with grassed areas to sunbake on and its own sandy beaches.

We were now over seventeen hundred kilometres north of Brisbane. Port Douglas was only another sixty kilometres up the map and after that we’d finally get to see the Daintree.

In Port Douglas the lady at the tourist information office was more honest than anywhere else we’d been. She told me that they didn’t want anybody in campervans or motor homes staying anywhere near the town other than in caravan parks. She told me why too. It was because we all defecate in the bushes and leave our rubbish lying around. She told me this in earshot of all the other tourists in the building. I told her in a loud voice that camping and caravanning had probably moved on a bit since she last tried it. “We have shithouses on board these days madam. There’s no need to shit in the bushes like you used to do when you last went camping.”

The town itself was a nice place to take a break and blow a lot of money. The tropical vegetation had a lot to do with the holiday atmosphere but at the rate at which building was going on I found it hard to imagine that it will be a nice place for too much longer. Port Douglas is for the beautiful people. It’s trendy and it’s tasteful with a plethora of good restaurants and art gallery kind of shops all with prices designed to keep out the riff raff. It was busy with tourists but not hurried and everything seemed to go down with a minimum of fuss. For a while this was Brett Whitley’s town and looking at some of his more colourful abstractions I wouldn’t surprise anyone to hear that he drew inspiration from the place.

We stayed illegally for four days half an hour from the action at a place called Pretty Beach where we hid in among the trees right at the waters edge. Port Douglas had the most expensive internet café we came across during the entire trip around the country but it was the only show in town so we had to use the place. After one very expensive hour long session I asked the guy at he counter where I could find a hairdresser. The cheeky bastard looked at my hair style and said “hairdresser or barber sir?” I did, nevertheless, take the point and went to the hairdresser. It was billed as a Unisex Salon and I still had my uni student card but it was a con – there was no sex, uni or otherwise, in there. Even so, an overweight girl up from Footscray gave me a number seven and I can’t say I was displeased. Picking up on my English provincial accent she told me with much rising inflection that her boyfriend “is English?…but he was born in Germany?… so I call him a Nazi?…and he doesn’t like it?” “I’m not really surprised” I said. “Na” she said “I’m always hangin’ shit on him and stuff. It’s cool?”

The Daintree rainforest, the oldest continually surviving rainforest in the world, was something we were looking forward too. We didn’t even know exactly where it was but remembered catching glimpses of it on the TV news years ago when the Greenies were battling to save it. What I hadn’t realised was that Daintree was actually a place, a small village in fact, located on a bend in the Daintree River in which saltwater crocodiles go about their daily grind. It was in a most luscious and luxuriant setting surrounded by tropical rain forest with little else there in the way of civilisation but for a pub, petrol station and a couple of shops. I told the lady in a souvenir shop that I thought she was very fortunate to live in such lovely tropical surroundings. “Nah”, she said, “it looks good at this time of year but everything goes mildew up here in five minutes.” I’d been there for ten and must confess I was feeling a bit musty.

We drove north as far as we could go with a two wheel drive leviathan, the sealed road finally coming to an end at Cape Tribulation. The drive up there through the Daintree rainforest was, for me, memorable. The road twisted and turned around rocky outcrops covered in outdoor pot plants of the type that dwellers of the southern states have to keep indoors. Great palms with creeping vines climbing up them greeted us at every bend and orchids hung from the treetops. Brightly coloured birds and butterflies flitted and flattened and every now and again we’d catch glimpses of the Coral Sea which we were never far away from. Squawky parroty birds flitted and butterflies the size of sparrows flattened - on the windscreen.

It was at Cape Tribulation that we stayed in our first Caravan Park. There was simply nowhere else because the sides of the road almost the whole way were nothing but high green walls of jungle. I just love all that decaying of the jungle and new things growing up from the black smelly stuff it leaves behind although I’ve never fully understood how it all works, how it gets bigger all the time. You see, what I don’t get is how come people’s lawns get higher? If you plant a lawn level with your driveway it only takes a couple of years and it’s higher than the drive and then you have to buy one of those lawn edger things.

How come archaeological sites are underground? I used to get my cigarettes every day on the way into the city from a Greek guy called Con in a small take-away shop in the Melbourne suburb of Camberwell. Con had a rubber plant - not dissimilar to some of the fig trees in the Daintree - in a bucket sized pot behind the door. Over the years it wound itself around the small shop almost twice and began to obscure the filthy, grease splattered, midge encrusted take-away menu. One Monday morning I went in there and the floor was covered in newspapers half an inch deep. The place was much lighter too. Con and his missus had chopped up the rubber plant and taken it to the tip. I asked him about it and he said that it wouldn’t stop weeping its sticky, milky white sap on the floor which they’d found impossible to remove despite the application of every solvent they could lay their hands on.

Con said he’d had to make two trips to the tip with a borrowed trailer because there was just too much rubber plant to go in one load. Then he asked a question I thought very profound. “Where all dis shit come from den? All diss rubb plant leaves branches? De fuckin pot was still full of de stuff de missus put him in when she buy im? We just give im water, das all. Maybe sometime she give im seaweed fertilizer, das all.” I told him that if a bloke called Fred Hoyle ever came into the shop he should ask him.

Now, as we drove through the Daintree I thought about Con’s rubber plant. In the years that I used to get my cigarettes in Cons shop I probably saw the rubber plant put on a couple of metres but where did it all come from? If Con had have dried all the leaves and branches until all the moisture had gone he still couldn’t have fitted it all back in the bucket it grew in. Furthermore, the original soil still occupied the bucket. It made me think of the rest of Australia; most of Australia, all that parched dry country. If we composted our poo along with pig poo as they do in China and grow vegetables on the compost, would the people doing it be able to grow more than they eat? After all, isn’t that what manuring is all about? It’s just that we don’t have any native manure producing animals and it’s too dry for the cattle manure to break down in the places where we run them. There’s plenty of artesian water around when used sensibly with trickle irrigation so it seems to me that with a different approach to agriculture we could make use of what is beyond doubt the most unused and disused country on earth. Con’s rubber plant was still growing in the same bucket of soil and we’re so short of soil in the Outback. I concluded that if only the Minister of Agriculture would send Greek fish and chip shop owners to the Outback with buckets and rubber plants a lot of our problems would be over: and the standard of fish and chips would go up too.

By now we’d travelled as far north as we could get in Erasmus and we turned its head for home. Since entering Queensland we’d seen an abundance of verdant and luxuriously exotic vegetation, in places so dense that the sun never reached the ground. We’d visited banana and pineapple and ginger plantations and walked through tropical rainforests until we were happily greened out. Now it was time to head a little inland, over the mountains where the rain didn’t venture.

I had been so impressed with Cairns that I couldn’t leave Queensland without seeing it once more so we headed back the way we came and, after a couple of days in that glorious town, we took the road back through the Atherton Tablelands and down the Kennedy Highway. We crossed the Great Dividing Range somewhere near the town of Ravenshoe and almost immediately the scenery changed for the worst. Clare, who can see more in any vista than me, thought it made a welcome change. For me though, it was my first experience of the The Great Queensland Outback Nothingness and I became bored by it after no more than a couple of hours. The further we went the worse the roads became too until they decayed into a trickle of tarmac too narrow for two cars to pass each other on. Dangerous they were too for road trains charged along them. I soon learned that one does not challenge a road train. If you do stand your ground as one of these things approaches you your windscreen is showered in the stones his tyres pick up from the soft shoulder. As soon as we saw a road train coming our way we pulled into the shoulder as far as possible and stopped. A constant eye had to be kept on the rear vision mirror too. If a road train sneaks up behind you and catches you unaware the driver will sound his million decibel horn that makes your vehicle vibrate it’s so loud. The roads were, in short, an utter disgrace.

Just off the Kennedy Highway about two hundred and sixty kilometres south east of Cairns we happened upon perhaps the most unusual sight Clare and I saw on this, our first real trip. It was called the Undara Lava Tubes. We had no idea they were there but we were so fed up with the monotonous landscape that when we saw a sign pointing to them we turned off the highway.

We had to drive over a shockingly corrugated road to get to the place and it was so isolated that you couldn’t really do it on a day trip. Consequently most tourists have to stay in the on-site accommodation which is in old railway carriages. They’re most likely lovingly restored; we didn’t ask because we had Erasmus which we parked in a quarry down the road a bit. It didn’t occur to us to ask where all these railway carriages came from but when we looked at the place on the map a few days later there wasn’t a railway line anywhere remotely near the place. It was as though God had just thrown them down from the sky. With the Moses & Co in the Sinai desert it was manna but there in the Queensland Outback it was railway carriages.

The Undara Lava tubes are 190,000 years old and are a geological phenomenon which is difficult to spell. We were told that all that time ago a volcano erupted but rather than a violent eruption that blew lumpy stuff up in the air, it just oozed giant dribbles all across the flat landscape and down dry river beds for a hundred and sixty kilometres! I would imagine it was like when you make one of those self-saucing sponge puddings in the oven with too much water in it and turn it up too high. Or, to put it closer to the time, perhaps it was more like a Brontosaurus having a wet dream. Anyway, these rivulets of red hot volcano ejaculate spread out and ran in random directions all over the plains. The outsides of these molten rock runnels solidified as soon as they hit the air. The insides, however, kept on running spewing out the end of the tubes and forming more tube as it went. The end result was empty lava walled tubes.

These things aren’t the size of drainpipes; they’re huge, enormous, voluminous, capacious, colossal, immense, gigantic. I’ve run out of adjectives. They’re….fuckin’ big. We only took the shortest guided tour on offer but, even so, we went in one tube where the roof was higher than a single storey house even though the bottom of it was half full of silt. Across the breadth of it you could have parked a dozen or more full sized buses.

And there’s more! When this volcano threw up 190,000 years ago the area was sub tropical and covered with rainforest. Now it’s just dry savannah country with the odd sizeable tree in it. Some of the roofs of the tubes collapsed soon after they were formed and rainforest trees and vegetation began to grow in the bottom of them. As the climate changed over time, and the vegetation with it, giant sub tropical fig trees kept growing with their roots down in the tubes.

Now, as you drive along through the scrub, you can come across what looks likes a huge tropical fig bush at ground level and a totally different colour to the rest of the eucalypts that surround it. When you actually get up close you realise that its buttress roots and trunk are way down in the bottom of one of the tubes. The trees aren’t all that remains of the old rain forest. Sub tropical rain forest birds and lizards also remain marooned in these little islands far from the present day rain forests far to the north and east.

While we were parked in the quarry up the road from the lava tubes we came across a really weird tree. It had little black rock hard cannon balls hanging from it. They were the size of a plum and smooth and there were a few on the ground that had split open. They didn’t open up much but when they did they looked like Muppets mouths. I asked the lava tube guide what they were the next day and he knew all about them. He told me the tree was called Grevillea glauca but that the common name was the bushman’s clothes peg tree. I didn’t have to ask why, they’re perfect for use as clothes pegs and we’ve been using them ever since. So impressed was I that I stripped the tree bare of them and incorporated them into parrot toys which I promptly put on my budgie web site.

Between The Undara Lava Tubes and Charters Towers we drove through so much waterless sun scorched country that my mind became numbed with the endlessness of it. Clambering into the cab in the morning at Undara and looking at the road to Charters Towers on the map did nothing to excite me. I new I’d just have to sit there bumping up and down for eight hours in this most wretched of landscapes. Lunch and dinner would be the highlights to look forward to.

When, eventually we rumbled into town we were pleasantly surprised by it and sorry for it at the same time. What was a grand old lady of a town like this doing in such a shit hole of a place? It deserved better. Between 1870 and 1916 Charters Towers had a population of thirty thousand souls but these days it has less than a third that number. Like so many places in Australia it had been a mining town and the mines had run out. In this case it was the gold that came to an end after a brilliantly successful run that saw a hundred gold mines thereabouts. The town even had its own stock exchange which was open around the clock around the year. It was very big deal. The gold paid for some great public buildings, in fact it has more national trust properties than any other town in Queensland. These days some of the old mine dumps are being reworked with modern extraction methods but this brings little money into the town compared with beef and agriculture. I liked the place but to have spent a month in it would have driven me mad. It was one of those kind of places that has cake stalls on the pavement run by crocheted patchwork quilt clubs and the displays in the shop windows are faded. The sort of place where the older generation can still be seen wearing walk socks and trilby hats and they talk about horse racing a lot.

Clermont, the next town to the south was, for us, another day’s drive away and equally as exciting as the road into Charters Towers from the north. I couldn’t see any discernable difference. Again, it was a town kicked off by gold that ran out. Then there was copper in a close by town they named Copperfield but that ran out too. Nobody, it seems, was interested in developing anything sustainable. Nobody thought about making anything with the copper. It was dug up and sold wholesale like anything else to be found in the ground in Australia. It was sold cheaply to smart people overseas who made electrical cables from it and made more money from it than we did. These days the town services the nearby Blair Athol coalfields which contain the world’s largest deposits of steaming coal. That should last a while but after it’s gone the town will probably revert to nothing. There’s a cattle and sheep industry outside the town which is busy ensuring the land will soon be rendered non productive too as the top soil all blows away.

I was fast becoming bored silly with this kind of countryside, the endless dryness punctuated by the odd splash of bugger all, and when we reached Emerald I rang Tonia and Fred the Dutch couple from Maryborough who we’d stayed with on the way up.

“This is driving me silly Fred” I said.

“Vell, ishn’t that vot I told yah? Didn’t I tell yah to shtick to the east side off the mountains? Vie don’t yah come on over here to Maryborough and ve’ll go and do shum vale vatchink.”

“What kind of vale vatchink Fred?”

“You know, the humpy backed vuns.”

“Right, you’re on”

A couple of days of intensive driving through towns not worth mentioning saw us back in Maryborough again. It was like a homecoming. We slept in a proper bed again that didn’t rock when the wind blew and the bathroom was so big you could turn around in it. And then there was the evening meal outside under the eaves again watching the rosellas feeding from the bird tables in Fred’s tropical flower garden.

The vale vatchink was in Hervey Bay and Tonia had already arranged it with a tour operator who gave a money back guarantee that we’d see humpbacked whales at close quarters. It was amazing, the boat was directed to the whales by a spotter plane and we went straight to them. On the way out to sea there were several occasions when the skipper pointed out whales in twos and threes but didn’t stop or head towards them. We looked at them through binoculars and they didn’t do anything special. They merely surfaced and blew threw their blow holes and went down out of sight again.

When we arrived at the pair of whales we were aiming for though, it was a different matter. From just cruising around doing the odd blow job they went into a routine. As we drew alongside them they began leaping out of the water and spinning around like Michael Jackson. Come to think of it they were that same black and white colour too. They swam under the boat and came up on the other side and, as soon as we all rushed across to the other side, they went back again. They did this on several occasions.

I was leaning over the side wondering where they’d gone at one point when one of them surfaced right in front of me and exhausted through its blow hole. It wasn’t all air though. It drenched both me and my camera but I’d actually smelled whale breath and I’d never met anyone else who had. It wasn’t fishy. It smelt warm like cows breath. I told everybody on the boat about it but nobody seemed to think it was anything special. I felt like the whale had actually communicated with me. The two girls who made lunch and generally looked after us were used to communicating with them. They went down onto the platform at the back of the boat and two whales came up and turned over to have their bellies scratched. I left the boat feeling thoroughly satisfied that I’d experienced something special.

Our first big trip had taken much longer than we’d anticipated because there were so many more interesting things to see and do in Queensland than we’d anticipated. What we’d seen of inland Victoria and New South Wales at this stage didn’t offer much at all in comparison. But right now we had to get back to Tasmania where Clare wanted to be for the birth of her first grandchild. We’d gone past the time we’d allotted for our trip by a fortnight and had no hope of driving down to the Spirit of Tasmania ferry at Port Melbourne in time. Tonia and Fred had the answer. They offered to look after Erasmus for us while we flew back to Hobart for a couple of months. We found cheap flights back to Hobart: Clare with Qantas and I with Virgin. We travelled down to Brisbane on the Tilt Train and that evening spoke to each other by phone in Hobart.

Chapter 3

2007-12-31T19:20:00.003-08:00

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER THREE

I saw a sign in Hobart that read “OCCASIONAL CHILD CARE.” I didn’t now what it meant. It certainly didn’t sound too reliable. I imagine you turn up with your kids on the way to work and say “so, are you going to have them today or what?” How would one go about booking one’s kids into an occasional child care centre? “When do you think you could have the children then?” “Oh, now and again I suppose. Give me a ring Tuesday and I’ll see how I feel.”

In furniture shop in Hobart there was a small wooden thing labelled as an occasional table. What was the bloody thing for the rest of the week then, an air conditioner or what? Then, in a sandwich bar in North Hobart there was a sandwich on their menu board that said in the description of a focaccia that it came with “with a hint of basil.” I asked what a hint of basil actually meant. The guy said

“It’s just what it says, a hint of it.”

“So does it have any basil in it or not then?”

“You can just detect the taste I suppose is a better way of putting it” he said.

“OK. I’m allergic to basil. It makes my airways swell up and I choke. So now has it got any bloody basil in it or not?”

“Yes, it has.”

“Good, then I’ll have one.

There’s a bakery in Elizabeth Street called Banjos where, if you ask for a loaf of bread, the girl behind the counter says “would you like it sliced at all?” If you say to her “yes, completely” she can handle it. But if you say “just a little thanks” she doesn’t know what to do.

At the Post Office further down Elizabeth Street there’s a guy with a bow tie behind the counter and when he’s finished with the customer in front of you he looks up at the queue and says “yes thanks.” The first time I heard him say it I was thrown for an instant. I’m used to hearing yes please or no thanks but I couldn’t quite get my head around yes thanks. It was like saying no please. What he’s actually doing is ultra polite. He’s thanking you in anticipation, before he’s even served you. Isn’t that kind of nice? I guess it can be likened to the phrase “good on you” which is nice too. It’s a little piece of praise for doing bugger all. There’s a guy called Tim Cox on Hobart’s ABC radio and one day I heard somebody call him on a talk back show. “Where are you calling from?” asked Tim Cox. “Queenstown” said the caller. “Good on you” said Tim Cox. I wondered why Tim Cox had showered good on the guy just for living in Queenstown. But that was before I saw Queenstown – it’s ghastly.

There’s a furniture restorer in North Hobart in an alleyway next to the Mexican restaurant. He does a bit of upholstery and repair work for other people but mainly he repairs furniture for himself to sell in his shop. I used to live behind his workshop through a hole in the fence which was a short cut to the shops and which I used every day. The furniture restorer had a clipboard with little sheets of paper and a pencil affixed to his door so that people could leave messages for him. Three or four times a week - whenever he was out – I took a sheet of paper and wrote GZORNDENPLAD on it and put it back under the clipboard. I did this for three years and one day, as I walked past, I saw him showing one of my pieces of paper to the Mexican restaurant chef who was out the back having a smoke. The chef was shaking his head and saying “never heard of it mate.”

The day before Clare and I left Hobart on our trip I was walking past his shop and decided I’d have a look inside. I’d never actually met the furniture restorer but he came up to me and asked if he could help. I asked if he ever got any really big old sideboards with mirrors in the shop. “No” he said. “But if I come across one I can let you know if you have a phone number.” “How about an email address” I said. “that’ll do” he said. He gave me a card to write on and I wrote GZORNDENPLAD@Hotmail.com, which was entirely fictitious, and left the shop. As I walked away towards the main street he called me back. “What does this word mean?” he said as he pointed to the word GZORNDENPLAD on the back of the card. “I didn’t think anyone would ever ask me that, it’s Mongolian actually” I said, adding “it’s a swearword.” “Oh really? would you mind telling me exactly what swearword?” “Yes”, I said. “It means asshole.” He thanked me and I carried on walking towards the shops.

When I lived in North Hobart my friend Tony used to come down from Sydney one weekend a month and stay at my place while he visited his kids who lived nearby. He sent me an email one Wednesday asking if I could pick him up from the airport and informing me that he had changed his phone number. I rang him back twice but there was a guy’s voice on the answering machine saying “hi, we’re out so could you please leave a message after the beep.” When Tony arrived on Friday evening I asked him who the guy on his new answering machine was. Tony said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He didn’t have an answering machine. We checked and found that he’d made a typing error in his email to me and I’d rung somebody else and left a message for Tony on their answering machine. Tony rang the incorrect number to listen to the message and when the beep came on he said “Hi, this is Tony, are there any messages for me?” The guy, who was at home and had been listening to the answering machine, picked up the phone and old Tony he was “a friggin’ parasite” using other people’s phones to receive messages like that. Tony countered with “Parisite? I’ve never even been to France.” Later that evening we went out to a restaurant and when the waiter came up to our table we couldn’t order for laughing about it.

Tasmania is a strange place populated by less than half a million people, a large percentage of who are also strange. It’s a place were they’ve conducted the most complete genocide in recorded human history and don’t think there’s anything particularly unusual about it. Whenever I’ve broached the subject of the missing Aborigines with Tasmanians they say things like “well, there were only about seven or eight thousand of them to start with.” This seems to imply that had there been twice as many Tasmanian Aborigines they wouldn’t have killed them all. The fact is that they killed, or caused to die, one hundred percent of the native population – every one they came across. The few Tasmanian Aborigines from which the present day population of that race emerged from were not on the main island of Tasmania at the time their brothers and sisters were exterminated.

As one moves around Tasmania there is no record of Aborigines ever having lived there. If you walk around Hobart for a day imagining yourself to be a Tasmanian Aboriginal descendent, it is highly unlikely that you would be able to find any record of your ancestors ever having existed. There are no statues to the Aboriginal dead that fought for their country when it was invaded. However, in almost every country town, you come across memorials to white people who unquestioningly went off to fight Turks on behalf of Britain without even knowing where Turkey was or why they were doing it.

There is, nevertheless, a record of Tasmanian Aborigines to be found in gardens around Tasmania in Cygnet, Sheffield, Queenstown and other small towns and villages. These take the form of Aboriginal garden gnomes. I wonder at the mentality of a people who, having exterminated a whole race of people, would further denigrate their memory by making garden gnomes of them. To my mind it is a gross exercise in tasteless ignorance and exhibits a great lack of feeling and compassion. Imagine, if you will, what we would say of Germans if they made stereotypical Jewish garden gnomes and placed them on their lawns! In Germany it wouldn’t be safe for you to do such a thing but in Tasmania you can do this safe in the knowledge that the rest of the village isn’t going to object.

Tasmanians seem to put little value on living things or on their interrelationships. They seem to despise trees. They’ve exterminated the Tasmanian Tiger just as they did the human population of the island. It now seems certain that another long term Tasmanian resident, the world’s largest freshwater crayfish, will soon be extinct. It’s a huge creature that takes fourteen years to reach maturity. So too the Huon Pine; a once prolific tree that lives predominately in the south west of the island and takes five hundred years to achieve its full height. These days it’s a protected rarity but even in the late 1970’s the Tasmanians were chopping down two thousand year old trees. But it’s the roadkill that’s the most evident to visitors. Nowhere in the world has such a high roadkill rate. Each year the number of native animals killed on Tasmania’s roads equals or exceeds three times the number of humans living on the island.

The treeless wastes of Hobart and its northern suburbs seem to go un-noticed by those that live there. As you stand in the centre of Hobart and look up and down the street in any direction your vision won’t be obstructed by pestilential trees. Not for Hobart the avenues and boulevards of other Australian cities and country towns. Their destruction of old growth forests has been well documented and continues to be in the media in various parts of the world.
It was to Tasmania, in the early years of the nineteenth century, that the mighty British Empire, obsessed at the time with a notion of the existence of a criminal class, transported the people who formed the bulk of Tasmania’s population. The men and women that were thought to make up this “criminal class” were considered to be beyond redemption. Their sad & sorry state was not thought to have been a result of their environmental programming but, rather, something like a genetic defect. It was reasoned that Britain could rid itself of this class of people by exporting them thus rendering the country a land more fit for honest people to live in.

After the American Revolution in which Britain was roundly defeated by its own colonists, the newly emerging United States refused to take any more of Britain’s criminals. The Cape Colony in South Africa was considered for a while and then abandoned in favour of Australia as the dumping ground for Britain’s criminals.

Of course, not every convict transported to Australia could be termed a criminal. There were educated Irish political prisoners and there were people who fell foul of the law for no reason other than that they did, indeed, steal a loaf of bread. Others were unjustly accused after upsetting the local Lord of the manor and so forth.

Nevertheless, genuine criminals formed the overwhelming majority of those convicts transported to Australia. The notion that Britain somehow trawled the nation looking for bread and handkerchief stealers to send to Australia is historically without credence. Now, the average criminal is usually somebody who’s not terribly smart and most of them get caught. Sure, you get the odd mastermind, the odd genius, but criminals are usually so unintelligent that they get caught through not covering their tracks in some way. Every town has an area where these people seem to gravitate to. They’re down-market areas with pubs where people fight, spit, do shady deals, have mullet haircuts and swear a lot. It was ever thus (apart from the mullet haircuts) and was so back in eighteenth century Britain.

Those criminals who ended up in Tasmania were the very worst of a bad and none too bright bunch and they formed almost forty percent of the total human flotsam and jetsam cargo transported to Australia. A large percentage of these criminals had already been filtered through New South Wales. These were the habitual recidivists, the repeat offenders so thick or intransigent as to be incapable of learning. Among them were a certain percentage of mentally deficient people too. These were not wanted in Sydney and so were sent down to Tasmania which, at the end of the line, had no option but to take them. Sydney kept the “best” most useful and skilled criminals for itself.

When we think of the convicts that were transported to Australia we usually think of them as being male, and the majority were, but in Tasmania’s case it had a disproportionately high percentage of women criminals and mental deficients too. Not a brilliant start to filling the gene pool of the fledgling colony one would have thought? Because of the reputation of Tasmania (Van Diemen’s Land as it was earlier known) as being some sort of punitive hell hole, free women were reluctant to go there. A few schemes were tried by the various governors to attract women but, although a few did go of their own free will, these schemes were a disaster. The women simply didn’t want to go there.

When a free man arrived in Tasmania to start his enterprise he needed the services of a woman to run the house while he was out all day supervising the convicts that were assigned to him to work his land. Similarly those convicts that, having kept their noses clean for seven years and obtained their tickets of leave, were granted a piece of land and set up house. They too faced a life of celibacy if they thought they’d be able to attract a woman to this “devil’s isle.”

So what did they do? There was only one choice – a convict woman. These convict women, despite what the now discredited crop of feminist historians wrote about them in the 70’s, were a particularly bad lot. For a woman to be transported to Australia she had to be a hopeless case, usually a prostitute, thief or a mentally sub standard person who habitually re-offended. She was someone the system had completely given up on.

Female convicts were “available” for assignment to work on people’s farms and in their businesses. There was a small charge levied by the State Government of the day for this legalised slavery and the women, before being assigned, were kept in either of two female prisons called female factories. When a man, rich or poor, wanted a woman to keep house and share his bed the female factories were his only source of supply. Of course some free women did come to Tasmania and, indeed, one of them even succeeded in having her convict husband assigned to work on her farm. Nevertheless, by far the larger percentage of women comprised pickpockets, liars, arsonists, drunkards and prostitutes who were habitual re-offenders.

When a man in search of a woman called at the female factories he invariably chose the youngest, strongest woman on offer. An old feeble woman wouldn’t have been much use to him around the farm or as desirable to him in his bed. And in his bed children were conceived. It was usually in the advanced stages of pregnancy that “honest women” were made of these convict lasses when they found themselves saying “I do” to the preacher in order to prevent the farmer’s sons being born as bastards. There were also two added incentives that encouraged the farmer to marry his convict assignee. Firstly a legitimate son would have an easier time with the legal system when it came to inheritance than would one born out of wedlock. The second incentive was the avoidance of the social stigma that was attached in those times to fathering a bastard.

Marrying a younger woman, however, could have repercussions further down the track – she more often than not outlived him and ended up owning the farm. This of course made her a more attractive potential wife than she had been the first time around and many a Tasmanian farmer’s son found himself swindled out of his inheritance by his step father.

But in 1840 an event that would drain Tasmania of a large number of its able minded males occurred. Gold was discovered in Victoria. Everybody with any get up and go simply got up and went! This one event in Tasmania’s short [white] history did more to drain the State’s gene pool of healthy DNA than anything that happened before or since. Tasmania already had a much higher proportion of mentally deficient people in its population than the rest of the British Empire and now it became further distilled.

Mental featherweights, both male and female, found themselves in possession of vast tracts of land purchased for little more than the cost of the previous owner’s ticket to Melbourne. At the time of the gold rush Governor Arthur was sending off letter after letter to his superiors in England requesting more “men of good quality and standing” because the cream of Tasmania’s human crop, such as it was, was fast disappearing to the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo. At this time anybody in the British Isles who had been intending migration to Tasmania went to the goldfields instead and so poor Governor Arthur had to promote convicts to public offices throughout the State – there was simply a shortage of non-convict people. Tasmania now had idiots in high places, ex convicts that were able to swindle other idiots out of their land and little by little Tasmania’s landed gentry became infiltrated with, and watered down by, sub standard genetic material.

The church and State have never completely separated in Tasmania. They have a long and intertwined history together. As in many other towns in the colonial British Empire the Glebe system operated. Under this scheme government gave Aboriginal land to the church so that it could earn a part of its keep from it (this is one of the present day reasons that pubs and shops aren’t to be found in Glebes). The church would title the land and distribute or lease it and the tenants or buyers would go forth and shoot the Aborigines off it. As you travel through Tasmania you’ll see chapels in places where there are no populations. In many cases there never were any people settled near those chapels. When the church wanted land it would apply to the government who would tell it to go and build a chapel on it and the land would be granted. Corrupt Government officials who wanted land for themselves would turn this situation to their advantage. They would approach the church and do a deal. First the church would build a chapel, the land would then be granted, and a part of it would be signed over to the corrupt official who’d granted it. With ex convicts in positions of authority the wheels of corruption were kept well oiled.

These days Tasmania plays on it’s convict history although only on a superficial level – don’t scratch the surface too hard or you’ll find yourself ostracised. The tourist industry now promotes the islands time as a penal colony and would be floundering without it. It wasn’t always so. Tasmanians at one stage in their short history changed the name of Port Arthur, their infamous convict prison settlement, to Carnarvon such was their shame at being labelled the British Empire’s number one hell hole.

Tales of brutality and the macabre, it was realised, bring in the tourist dollar and nowadays Port Arthur is promoted as being some sort of antipodean Auschwitz which of course it most definitely was not. Not a single person was ever executed there, nobody starved to death, was worked to death or had operative medical experiments conducted on them without an anaesthetic. The inmates of Auschwitz were there for a vastly different offence – that of existing – and could only leave the place by surrendering their lives.

Port Arthur by contrast must be the most perfect landscape that ever played host to a jail; backed as it is by the most luxuriously abundant green forests and fronted by the most beautiful of tranquil waters imaginable. What the tourist brochures omit to tell the reader was that this was the most successful prison, in terms or rehabilitation, the world had ever known. This was the only prison anywhere where the rules were posted on the walls together with a list of rewards available for inmates who kept their noses clean. For good behaviour in Port Arthur inmates were actually granted a piece of land at the completion of their sentences and many rose to become not only upstanding and moral citizens but government officials! Hardened criminals brutalised by the system and existing in rat infested hulks in the Thames with no hope in life whatever could, if transported to Van Diemens Land, make a life for themselves far better than the average law abiding Briton could ever hope for.

It comes as no surprises then that people in Britain actually began committing crimes with the sole intention of being transported to this “Devils Isle.” Again, in the Sate archives we see letters from the British Home Office urging Governor Arthur to increase the punishment regime so that people would stop committing crimes in England so as to get sent to Tasmania. Governor Arthur wrote back protesting that he’d been sent to the island with a charter under the heading of Penal Reform – he was achieving it with a stupendous success rate - and asked how his results stacked up against those of the Mother Country. Many criminals, It must be said, didn’t take advantage of the rewards offered and continued to re-offend. A large percentage of them couldn’t help themselves and ended up in Tasmania precisely for that reason. Others were there because they had been helping themselves and couldn’t stop it. Tasmania’s present day population is in decline, it has been for decades. Maybe it’s time for an injection of DNA from elsewhere.

Of course, everywhere has something good and in Tasmania’s case it’s scenery. Tasmania is the lumpiest place in Australia and from the slopes of the lumps one gets to see the splendour of the hollows down below. A large percentage of Tasmania’s population have views from their lounge room windows that people in other States would die for. Sea views in other States are usually just that – sea views – but in Tasmania many of the sea views incorporate stunning views of islands, inlets and channels. Bus drivers in Hobart live in houses with better views than millionaires in France.

Some time ago Clare and I visited the Arthur River on the west coast and took a trip on a boat through forests that had never been logged. It was the real, primordial and pristine environment that only people on TV seem to get to see but it was easily accessible in a family car. The forest that pushed against the river banks may have been changed over the millennia by fire and flood due to natural causes but not by the hand of man. To see such a thing in other parts of the world you have to spend heaps of cash, travel great distances, brave dangerous animals and risked being ripped off or killed by the locals. After the river trip we wandered on down to the beach only to be greeted with one of the weirdest sights I’ve seen anywhere in the world. The beach for mile after mile was littered with giant trees strewn in all directions as if by some angry, childlike God in a tantrum. It would have been easy to imagine a forested island offshore somewhere that had been hit by a tidal wave and the forest thrown up on Tasmania’s west coast.

We asked the ferry’s skipper about it. He told us that at the mouth of the river was a huge sandbar and that now and again the forests up river get hit by titanic and torrential storms. These storms knock down the forest giants which float in the river for months unable to get out. Then, once a year or so after a downpour, the river is in such heavy flood that the sandbar at the river mouth can no longer contain it. When this occurs the floating trees are pushed out into the ocean only to be thrown back on the beach by the wild seas of the Roaring Forties. The aftermath which we’d seen on the beach was breathtaking. Trees much larger than most Australians will never encounter in their lifetimes (because all the big ones will soon be logged) had been smashed in two by the violent waves as if they were no more than match sticks and then heaped upon each other. The sheer amount of useable timber to be seen was staggering but all but impossible to salvage due to the terrain and its remoteness.

Unfortunately the trees on farming land in the State have not fared so well. The sight that greets the traveller on the drive from Launceston to Hobart along the Midland Highway is, in some places bordering on the surreal. Almost all the trees on farms are either dead or dying. It’s a ghostly sight like something from a Tarkovsky art house movie. Dead Eucalypts both great and small stand out stark white on the horizon. They litter the fields; their whitened limbs lying on the ground beneath them like the bleached bones of the long dead original human inhabitants of this island.

Tasmania’s old growth forests are eminently accessible. They can be seen on the back of log trucks going through Hobart at night. On one night in November 2003, it was reported in the Hobart Mercury, eighty of them were clocked going through town. They go to the Triabunna wood chipping mill where they’re exported to Japan so that Japanese workers can enjoy full employment manufacturing building products to sell to the world including Australia. One would have thought that, even if the State Government is so short sighted that it chops down old growth forests it can’t re-create, it would at least see to it that we export the manufactured chipboard and craftwood to Japan. Exporting jobs along with the base product is not, of course, unique to Tasmania. That’s what Australia does for a living.

The area where much of this wood comes from is the hauntingly beautiful Huon Valley in the south of the State where orchards line the roadways and the Huon River slowly moves its waters out to the sea. The scene is one of pastoral innocence. Mountains, rivers, apple blossoms and little wooden houses in sylvan clearings with wispy chimney smoke lazily ascending skywards greet visitor and resident alike. Then a fucking great log truck roars past you and the idyllic prospect shatters. Behind the concealing mountains and hills, away from the eyes of the tourists the utter devastation is sickening, the more so because the industry down there is expanding. My advice to any prospective visitor to Tasmania is, get down there and see it quickly because it’s not going to last long and it won’t be recreated.

It was during the last week of October that Clare’s daughter gave birth to Clare’s first granddaughter and we were free to leave Tasmania again and resume our travels in Erasmus. However, we now had a time limit on the next leg of our trip as the next grandchild was due on Christmas day. Grandchildren were falling thick and fast – the third one was due less than a month after the second. I felt a bit sorry for Clare. Being told you’re about to become a grandmother is shock enough to the system when you thought you weren’t old enough for the title. In Clare’s case she’d been told within a fortnight that she was going to be a grandmother by each of three of her kids. We had to plan our wanderings to fit in with the new arrivals but to get out of Tasmania again before the baby sitting started. In the first week of November we flew up to Brisbane and caught the train on up to Maryborough in order to get on with our peregrinations - it’s a posh word that means travels.

Fred “vosh dare” at the railway station to meet us and soon enough we were, for the third time, in the now familiar surroundings of their house and garden. Fred had looked after Erasmus as if it was his own. He’d washed the bird shit off of it and started the engine up once a week. All we had to do was to throw out the dead flies and it was all ready to go.
TAMBORINE
A day or two later saw us on the road again and heading south for Mt. Tamborine a little to the west of Brisbane. There we would stay for a couple of weeks in a house in return for the owners staying at my apartment in North Hobart a month down the track. After picking up the keys from Barbara and Harry in Brisbane it was getting close to dusk. By the time we had reached the foothills it was around ten at night. We drove ever onward and upward zig-zagging all the while and playing tunes on Erasmus’s gearbox to get to our destination atop the mountain. The road was narrow and difficult to drive even in daytime. At night it was murder and if it hadn’t been for the fact that much of the road was flanked on both sides by unbroken forest we would have given up and spent the night in the van. As it was there was nowhere to park so we just had to press on.

The cottage, when we eventually arrived, was better than we’d hope for but we were dog tired and went to bed straight away. In the morning after we’d had breakfast we set out to find the shops. Outside the newsagents was a billboard advertising the Gold Coast Bulletin on which was written in bold black letters “Special Flood report – 4,000 Homes at risk” on the same sheet of paper underneath it in red were the words “Free Fishing Book.” I thought it wouldn’t have gone down too well with some of the 4,000 home owners but perhaps it was just a matter of the Gold Coast Bulletin trying to be practical. Just imagine being trapped by the rising flood waters on top of the roof of your house when the paper delivery boy rocks up in a dingy and offers you a free fishing book. I’d rip the bricks from the chimney one by one and sink the sick little bastard.

At the fruit and vegetable market a few minutes later the guy who served us had four studs at the base of his neck and when we saw him the next day he had the same 4 studs but lower down his back. I couldn’t see what was on the other end of the studs to hold them there. He didn’t have four opposing stud holders in his throat and I could only think that the holes in his neck were so deep that the studs just stayed in there. With all his studs removed he must have looked like a walking cribbage board.

It reminded me that at university I used to sit next to a girl in one of the weekly lectures who had a stud in her nose. Before the lecture started one day she told me that she had a shocking cold accompanied by catarrh. I noticed that she didn’t have her nose stud in as usual and that the stud hole was on my side. Every time she held a tissue up to her nostrils and sneezed I ducked just in case.

Again at the shops later in the week Clare came looking for me in the supermarket to tell me that there was an old car that she thought I’d like to look at. I used to be very interested in old cars because my first job was as an apprentice in the workshops of a motor museum where we restored all sorts of antique transport. This car turned out to be something of a rarity. It was a Railton built probably in the mid 1920s. They were very fast sports cars and we had one at the museum that, driven by John Cobb, had once held the world land speed record. This one, however, looked as if it had been in continuous use since new with very few dents in what had once been its polished aluminium bodywork. It was parked in the shopping centre car park with the passenger, an old cocker spaniel, taking care of the supermarket shopping alongside him.

I managed to attract the attention of the owner, a grey haired, slack trousered individual in his mid fifties, who had until then been heavily engaged in conversation with what appeared to be a Yeti impersonating a park ranger. It had hair down to its waistline and the face of a clumsy beekeeper. It looked as if it had learned to walk upright some time earlier in the week - a quality that these days is most likely an essential qualification for the job of park ranger in Queensland - and it sported a Queensland park rangers shirt. The Railton owner told me that he’d brought the car with him when he’d emigrated from the UK many years ago and that he bought it from a journalist friend in Ethiopia who had fallen foul of Heilie Selassie. Highly Unlikey was what I thought but, then again, so was an open topped Railton cruising around a mountain top in Queensland with a dog in the passenger’s seat and no seat belts or roll bars.

The Railton we had in the museum when I was a lad was called the Napier Railton because it was powered by a Napier aircraft engine. In the days immediately after John Rhodes Cob had broken the world land speed record in the car it had disappeared and it was rumoured to have been taken to bits. This was believable because it wasn’t unusual for this fate to befall record breaking automobiles. The reason this used to happen was in case the car fell into the hands of a rival. Then, and with perhaps something like the possibility of a higher octane fuel being available a year down the track, the same basic car could be used again to set a new record for the new owner.

One day when I was about 19 years old and working at the museum we were visited by a man in his 40s who said he’d seen the old Napier Railton record breaker. It was, he said, doing service as a test bed for a parachute manufacturing company. We didn’t believe him at first but he was right and it came to stay a while at our museum workshops a few weeks later. The parachute company, I was told, had used the car because it was so heavy that when the parachute opened at speeds of 100mph plus, it didn’t pull the back end out of it. We, however, were horrified to see that they’d welded a huge sub frame to the back of this historic piece of high speed airplane engine on wheels.

Some four years prior to this, when I was new to this, my first job, I was asked if I would like to learn to ride an “Ordinary.” I’d never heard of an ordinary but thought that whatever an ordinary was it didn’t sound like anything special. I was taken over to the bicycle section of the museum by Bob Warne, the workshop foreman, and introduced to the Ordinary. It was a huge pre-historic looking bicycle. I’d seen penny farthing bikes in pictures and there was one standing alongside it but the Ordinary was, well, it was…. colossal…that’s what it was.

It was so high that it had two steps up the cross bar to get to the seat. Bob told me that there was to be a procession, a sort of cavalcade of transport, across the bridge that went out to Hayling Island in a fortnight’s time and the museum would be taking a few cars and motor cycles to it. As I was the only person in the workshop without a driving licence it made sense to have me in the procession riding the ordinary. The occasion was the lifting of the toll on the bridge which had been a toll bridge for over 60 years.

For the next two weeks Bob and I went across to the bike section of the museum every lunch time for me to practice riding. Bob would hold onto the cross bar as I climbed up it and then he’d run alongside pushing me up to take-off speed until I was away on my own. As time went on I learned to dismount by cycling up to a telegraph pole and clinging onto it. I’d then slide down the pole and push the bike back to the museum. On the last day before the Hayling Island Bridge procession I rode the thing home to my village. It was a distance of some five miles which was covered in next-to-no time because the ordinary was very fast on the flat once you got it up to speed. There was no chain or any other mechanism. The pedals were connected directly to the huge front wheel and one turn of these little pedals turned the big diameter front wheel all the way around.

On the approach to my village I put on an extra spurt to show off and came down the main street at the speed of a chemical reaction. All heads turned to watch the daring young man speeding down Beaulieu Road with his arse ten feet off the ground and coat tails flying out behind him. Tubby Wilson’s brindle terrier that always ran alongside cyclists didn’t know what to make of it and gave up the chase after about fifty yards. I was feeling pretty bloody cool until, as I approached our house, I realised that in our village they’d put the power lines underground the previous summer. What this meant to my current situation was that there were no telegraph poles to rock on up to and dismount.

All eyes were upon me as I cruised straight on through the village and kept going. I cycled around the highways and byways of three adjacent villages until dusk unable to get off the fucking thing. Eventually I came up behind a friend called Tugger Smith and I yelled out to him to run alongside me and hold onto the cross bar so that I could get off. The first time around he wasn’t quick enough but I went around the block and he caught me the second time.

I’d told my dad that the Hayling Island procession was to be on the local TV news and, proud father that he was, he went out and bought me a new tweed jacket and grey flannels for the occasion. He also told everybody in the neighbourhood that his son was going to be on TV and at 6pm he and about ten other people were sitting in our lounge room in rapt anticipation. What they saw though, wasn’t quite what they were expecting.

The Ordinary wasn’t easy to control at low speeds and so when the procession started we let all the cars and motor cycles go on ahead so that I could start off and maintain a reasonable speed at which the thing would be stable. A suitable telegraph pole was lined up for my dismount upon return and they told me there was a big roundabout at the other end of the bridge so I could keep going until I got back to base. With the help of a couple of locals I set off in my new tweed jacket and grey flannels with my highly polished brown brogues glinting in the sunlight with every turn of the pedals.

Everything went well for the first half mile or so until I was about half way across the bridge and had caught up with the cars that had gone ahead of me. As I crossed the hump of the bridge and looked down the other side the Lord Mayor was standing in the middle of the traffic with his hand raised and saying something like “oh here ye, oh here ye, all who pass this way must now pay the last toll.”

As the traffic began to slow I looked around desperately for a telegraph pole or anything else that I could cycle towards and cling to. Nothing! Shit! I was caught between the kerb on my left and a line of vintage cars on my right. As I looked to my left past the kerb all I could see was the sea below and the traffic was slowing. Then some idiot in a leather flying helmet sitting on some two wheeled scrap heap threaded through the line of cars and came to a halt in front of me.

I teetered towards the sea for an instant and, reminding myself that I couldn’t swim, chose to fall off the machine to my right. To my right was a 1920’s Vauxhall touring car with a black canvas full length hood. I couldn’t see what was under the hood but I heard it as I plunged head first into it. An unsuspecting middle aged lady dressed in period costume screamed her head off as the canvas roof under which she was sitting was suddenly rent in two by a fifteen year old spotty youth clad in a tweed jacket and grey flannels sent, as if from heaven, to bury his head in her nether regions. Needless to say, by the time I arrived home that evening I was already a laughing stock in the village

Meanwhile, jumping onwards a few decades, we stayed for a fortnight on Mt. Tamborine and took it easy. Clare painted pictures which I played with on the computer putting borders around them and publishing them on my website to see if we could sell them. Seven small parks make up the Tamborine National Parks and each one is spectacular in some way. Some have waterfalls and rock pools while others have unusual birds or strangler vines or maybe something like stag horn or bird’s nest ferns festooning the trees. A lot of the mountain is covered in rain forest and avocado orchards with a smattering of wineries and a bakery that does the best cheese and bacon pull aparts in the universe. It all adds up to a very agreeable way to spend a dirty weekend if you live in Brisbane which is only an hour away.

Anyway, all good things come to an end and one day we went up to the bakery and they were out of cheese & bacon pull aparts. We left the next day.

First we went to Lamington National Park which was a lot about babbling brooks and moss and mist shrouded valleys full of strangler vines. It was big – twenty thousand hectares worth. There were tropical orchids and weird coloured fungi and ferns all over the place. Walking around it felt very much like I would imagine an ant would feel if dropped into a terrarium. We saw lots of those little sugar glider things gliding between trees looking like somebody’s toupee had blown off. There were carpet pythons there as well and we saw what we thought was one. I thought it was an Axminster but Clare said it was a Berber.

We both wanted to catch a glimpse of the wonderfully rare and beautiful birds we’d seen on a David Attenborough TV show about the area. Wonderful and beautiful they turned out to be but on Mt. Lamington all around the famous O’Reilly’s Guest House they weren’t rare at all. We don’t know a lot about birds but some of the Australian parrots and bower birds are outstanding. We pulled up in the car park and straight away Clare recognised a rare satin bower bird patrolling the rubbish bins. Then, as we walked around behind the restaurant there were literally dozens of king parrots, crimson rosellas and regent bower birds being fed by the tourists. In the restaurant there was a signed picture of David Attenborough with regent bower birds on his arm. I wanted one of those photos but with me in it instead of him and we weren’t going to get it with all these tourists hanging around. Now, the regent bower bird is one of God’s most wonderful creations second only to Jennifer Lopez. It’s black and gold in equal proportions with very striking markings second only to Jennifer Lopez in a black and gold G string which God wouldn’t have created because he’s not into that sort of thing.

We wandered off for a couple of hundred metres and took the bread out of the bag we were carrying. In no time flat we were surrounded by regent bower birds, satin bower birds and a whole bunch of other birds we didn’t know the names of and didn’t like much because they weren’t as pretty as the bower birds. At first we gave them too much bread and they flew away to eat in the trees where we couldn’t get a photo of them but pretty soon we leant how to handle them. I got a small piece in my hand between thumb and index finger (I knew that the old opposing thumb would come in handy one day) and didn’t let them take it. They stood on my hand trying to prize the bread out from between my fingers. After we’d done this a couple of times I found that if I waited for the bird to really dig its beak down between my thumb and forefinger and then closed the gap, it couldn’t get away. They just let go with their feet and tried to fly backwards. It was then that I noticed a bus load of Japanese tourists taking videos of me. I smiled a Steve Irwin kind of smile and held on to a bower bird’s beak as it fluttered flat out in reverse gear and they all snapped away. When I let go it somersaulted backwards twice and fell into the bush behind it in a flurry of dust and feathers. I would thoroughly recommend Lamington National park to anyone wishing to study Japanese tourists and their affinity with digital video cameras.

From Mt. Lamington we travelled to the Gold Coast to stay with friends of Clare’s that I’d never met. They were very welcoming and lived on an up-market Queensland klong in a palatial house. They took us up flying in their ultra light and we saw the Gold Coast from the air. It was streets ahead of the Gold Coast from the ground as we looked out over South Stradbroke Island and the prawn farms below. Flying in an ultra light makes you realise just how close you are to death. I didn’t dwell on it but as I sat in the thinly upholstered seat I could feel that my arse was less than the length of a magpie’s beak away from the outside of the plane.

We borrowed our hosts’ car for a couple of days and one day we wound up in a shopping centre where I asked a girl for a hot chocolate and a cappuccino. She said “would you like the cappuccino in a cup?” I said “no, that’s OK, I’ve brought a paper bag with me” She said “sorry but we’re only allowed to use our own cups and mugs.” My abiding memory of the Gold Coast is that almost everybody that lives there is from somewhere else and their favourite topic of conversation is the price of real estate. We couldn’t hold a conversation with anybody in a moving car without hearing that everywhere we passed had been bought or sold by somebody for a fortune. The Gold Coast is on the move and everybody wants a slice of the action so they’re constantly talking about it. It’s a strangely insular little world that blatantly apes parts of the USA even down to copying district and street names like Monterey, Santa Clara Boulevard, Florida Sands and so on. There’s very little Australian about it including the designs of the houses and apartment blocks. I found myself wondering why we still can’t develop an identity or, if we have, why we can’t bring ourselves to trust it.

On top of the million overseas visitors the Gold Costs gets every year several million Australian tourists turn up on its doorstep. With figures like that it must have a lot of what people on vacation are looking for. For me though, I thought it ghastly. Its growth rate is four times the national average too. All it had that I liked was good weather and this it has in abundance – 300 sunny days a year! The area is a maze of canals and windy corridors between high rise buildings and it’s full of “Worlds.” Movie World, Sea World, Dream World, Tropical Fruit World, Cable Ski World. It’s in desperate need of a Get Real World. People who like shopping must think the Gold Coast is a cool place. It has swag of the biggest air conditioned shopping centres in the country

After three days in Klongsville we headed south into New South Wales and decided to call in on Nimbin which I remembered from the 70s TV news when it had been declared the hippy capital of Australia. The way there took us through delicious lush green hills and river valleys and I could quite see why the area would appeal to earth friendly pot smoking, Centrelink assisted, self sufficient idealists. Nimbin itself was roughly what we expected but more entertaining. Erasmus, being a long rig, needed more parking space than the main drag afforded us so we drove on through to the town centre and parked opposite the cop shop.

The hippies didn’t seem to me to have changed at all until it occurred to me that these hippies were not the same people that founded the hippy colony back in the early 70s. They looked like the hippies of the 1970s but this crop was aged mostly between twenty and thirty five. We had no way of telling whether they were the children of the originals or whether hippies were still emerging from macrobiotic compost heaps all over Australia and gravitating towards Nimbin.

The ideals on which the “colony” was originally founded were painted on walls in a couple of places in the main street. It was a kind of hippy manifesto with points such as make love not war, don’t be greedy, take from the earth only what you need etc. etc. Most of those ideals no longer seemed extant. The place was full of souvenir shops with psychedelically painted facades, each with a token incense stick burning on the pavement outside. There was a hippy museum in an old house with psychedelically painted VW Kombi vans in it and a generous helping of general Australiana which we took a look at. It was boring and, fed up with looking at it; I stood at a window overlooking an alleyway. There were people doing deals all over the place. The business was being done right there with little pretence of covering it up. I watched as a girl of about nineteen handed a plastic bag over to a tourist and took $50 off him. When he’d gone she took a wad of notes out of her hemp bag and started counting. She had at least $5,000 in there.

Around three months prior to us going to Nimbin we’d met another couple who were travelling and we compared notes. They said that in Nimbin they saw a Kombi van on the street and somebody selling marijuana out of the hole where headlight should be. Now, as we came out of the Nimbin Hippy Museum the Volkswagen we’d been told about was right there, it was part of the museum that stuck out onto the pavement. The headlight hole was there too and the bottom of it was covered in marijuana dust and clippings. We watched as a guy stuck his hand under the bumper and pulled out a brown paper bag which he stuffed into the headlight hole. Another guy was sitting on a bench opposite with an ordinary shoe box doing deals keeping both his stock and money it. It would have been impossible for the cops just a little way down the street not to know what was going down. They were either in on it or turning a blind eye.

In a supermarket there we bought a tray of twenty scrumptious, ripe mangoes for five dollars and they were the best mangoes either of us had eaten. Just down the street from the shop was a sign outside the public toilet that said “Sniffer Dogs Prohibited.” There was a great painting of the crucifixion in a coffee shop we went into – the Christ was female and had a fair pair of knockers to boot! Anyway, all in all, I thought the whole, original hippy thing, the hippy raison d'être, had died a sort of hashish to hashish dust to dust death long ago.

We only spent half a day in Nimbin before heading out of the gorgeous gorges and the verdant valleys and east towards the coast. There we turned right and went south down along the New South Wales beaches. Byron Bay looked great but we didn’t stop. It was the Schoolies Week, a time when school leavers spew out of their native habitats like sperms from a ruptured condom and head for Surfers Paradise. The overflow, because Surfers Paradise can only accommodate 30,000 of them, ends up in places like Byron Bay. We didn’t know about Schoolies Week and thought Byron Bay was hosting the annual convention for the pimple cream models union. The beach we thought was spectacular but as we travelled south we came across so many spectacular beaches that a week later we would have rated it as rather ordinary.

All the way down the Pacific Highway from Byron Bay to Coffs Harbour the road barely glimpses the sea and I couldn’t see why it was called the Pacific Highway. What a disappointment it must be to overseas tourists. I don’t know the reason why it couldn’t have been constructed closer to the ocean but most likely it was because it’s cheaper to build roads inland. Australia doesn’t have enough people paying taxes to supply the money for anything but a bare minimum of roads. Well over ninety percent of Australian roads are second class or worse compared with Western Europe, Japan or the USA. The Pacific Highway is one of them, it’s a national disgrace. The road surface in places isn’t bad but it’s full of humps and hollows and the continual up and down motion for kilometre after kilometre distracts the driver from some of the prettiest stretches of agricultural scenery. Banana and pineapple plantations and lush green sugar cane all grow here in withering profusion.

Along this part of the highway we didn’t take so many side roads down to the ocean because the distances were so far and there was scant information available about what was likely to be there when we arrived. One exception was a little place called Minnie Water south of Grafton. Grafton, incidentally, is the jacaranda capital of Australia and most probably the world. It’s good that it has that going for it when the jacarandas are in bloom because it had sod all else going for it at the time we visited it. The mighty, muddy mangrove lined Clarence River was no different to the Maryborough River or a score of others we’d already seen and the bridge over it was purely industrially functional and unattractive. Like an overblown Meccano set put together by some communist futurist architect, it belonged in Silesia or the shipyards of Gdansk. The town itself, like most Australian riverside towns, shunned the river. It wanted nothing to do with it and was built to exclude it from view.

I never could quite figure out why it is that Australians hate rivers so much when Europeans makes so much of them. Australian towns are built to hide them as if they’re sewers that should be apologised for. All over Europe one finds rivers as the central attraction in towns and villages. They build promenades along their banks. Coffee houses and restaurants proliferate and for centuries past the wealthy have built their grand houses to incorporate river views. In Australia they seem only to have served as purely functional arteries to move goods to and fro and to discharge effluent into. With so many Australian towns the river is only encountered on the way in or out. Typically the traveller crosses the bridge and then carries on up the main street which is built at right angles to the river. In most other countries I’ve visited the town is built along the banks of the river. Nor do I buy the argument that Australian rivers are prone to more flooding than those of the old world. They aren’t.

In Tasmania the Hobart Rivulet, the year round stream that fed the early town, has been piped underground like a sewer. The Rivulet is the very reason that Hobart is positioned where it is. The first settlement was founded further up the Derwent at Risdon Cove but had to be shifted to the town’s present location because it ran out of water. For many a decade it’s been hidden underground in pipes emerging only for a short length away from the main thoroughfare in a concrete channel where people won’t have to see it. I’ve seen smaller streams in Turkey and Syria dammed up into cascading pools with ducks and overhanging trees, outdoor tables and restaurants. But Hobart doesn’t deserve its Rivulet.

Minnie Water nestles timidly up against the ocean beach about 25 kilometres off the highway south of Grafton. It’s a merely a cluster of holiday houses on a beautiful beach with clean toilets and a shop. It’s surrounded by trees full of parrots and cockatoos and there’s a lake called Lake Hiawatha. It’s just a lovely, beautiful, peaceful and well cared for place to be. There’s a national park there with camping grounds for tents and caravans but we stayed for a couple of nights right next to the no parking sign in the small gravelled beach car park. The lady at the shop opposite was incredibly helpful and knowledgeable about the area and told us not to worry about the no-parking sign. Nobody had bothered anybody for parking there in years she told us. We walked the walking tracks for hours and cycled all around and ended up thinking it would be a nice place for old farts to retire to.

The name Minnie water had apparently been coined after that of Lake Hiawatha which I thought was kind of cute. Australian place names, of which I will make mention later, are predictably boring and uninventive being, for the most part, second hand English names. Even so Aboriginal place names aren’t much more exciting. They seem to suffer from an overdose of tautology. “I tracked him from Mount Baw Baw to Wagga Wagga your honour. And I hit him with a nulla nulla and threw him in the Mulla Mulla during a Willy Willy.” What sort of talk is that?

When we reached Coffs Harbour, a coastal town said in the guide books to have what most Australians consider the perfect climate, it was too hot. We cooled off in an air conditioned shopping mall and then went to the botanic gardens. They were big and straggly and not terribly interesting but the car park looked level and shady and we thought we’d stay the night there after all the cars had gone and the gates were closed. We unloaded the bikes from Erasmus and went off on a long cycle ride along a boardwalk in a mangrove swamp which was, well.....uh…..swampy I guess is the word that best describes it. There were mangroves and there was a lot of mud, which was nice, and I thought it may have looked different if the tide had have been in. Despite that I can say without fear of contraception that it was the best mangrove swamp I’ve ever cycled through.

When we got back to the van it was dark but we’d already eaten out so we went straight to bed. I woke up at some early hour of the morning for a pee. It was still warm and humid as I struggled out of the door in the dark, around to the other side of Erasmus and took a few paces forward. I came across a step and, stepping up, found myself standing a large plinth. It was nice and cool and smooth on my feet and I peed off the edge of it. As I did so I heard my pee splashing. This was unusual, it usually goes fairly silently straight into ants nests or sand or leaf litter or something. As my eyes became accustomed to the lack of light I saw that I was peeing on a large, flat shiny construction like the one I was standing on. I lifted my gaze and saw that I was standing on a long line of flat shiny rectangles aligned with military precision. They were graves.

The Coffs Harbour botanical gardens shares a car park with the Coffs Harbour cemetery and it’s a really cool cemetery to be buried in – the only qualification being that you have to be metabolically disadvantaged to get in. But the graves are something special. A large percentage of them are tiled with 1970s and 80s kitchen and bathroom wall tiles! The most undignified one I saw was done in tiles I recognised the next day covering the floor of a public toilet near the beach.

I guess they were practical but as kitsch and tasteless as it’s possible to get. There were some double graves where the occupants had died twenty five years apart. I wondered if they’d bought a double lot of tiles when the husband died and stored them under the house or whether they had the whole thing re-tiled when the wife went to that big grouter in the sky. Anybody who was around in the early 1960s can walk through the Coffs Harbour cemetery and tell roughly when each tiled grave was made by recalling their friends’ kitchens and bathrooms of the time. My will now specifies that if I should die in Coffs Harbour I want blue grout. One gravestone said that someone called Ernest Farley was buried beneath it. I couldn’t help thinking that the worms down there were living in dead Ernest.

As we travelled south from Coffs Harbour my thoughts returned to the reasons for the origins of the mundane place names I’d first thought about back in Minnie Water.

How terribly blinkered the early immigrant Brits were when it came to naming places. No doubt the White Australia Policy was partly responsible for this lack of originality too. Towns and villages were occasionally named after something Aboriginal but more often that not after places in Britain. However, when it came to the names of rivers, beaches and so forth the same old names crop up wherever you go in Australia. I lost count of how many Deep Creeks and Seven Mile Beaches we came across.

How dreadfully unoriginal can these English explorers have been when they trekked across Australia all those years ago and named everything they came across after the bleedin’ obvious? Mind you, the anthropologists were just as boring. Just think how exciting it would have been to have been married to a man who gave the snakes he discovered names like Black Snake or Brown Snake.

“Good evening dearest wife, what’s for dinner tonight?”

“Well, dear husband, tonight I’ve cooked you roast lamb with roast potatoes and traditional English gravy with a tiny touch of rosemary.”

“ Rosemary, why do we need rosemary? I’ve been eating roast lamb and roast spuds for twenty seven years without rosemary. Why do we need it now?”

“Sorry dear husband. I’ll away to the kitchen and make the gravy you’re used to”

“Good. I found a new snake today. Totally new and unknown to science, never been classified”

“My word. A new snake, how exciting. What colour is it?”

“Brown”

“What will you call it? They have such lovely sounding names for snakes don’t they? Let’s see, there’s anaconda, boa constrictor, taipan, python, cobra. There’s so many of them. And then there’s that American water moccasin snake isn’t there? Have you thought of a name for your new snake yet dear husband?”

“Yes”

“What is it pray tell? Don’t keep me in suspense any longer dearest husband”

“Brown snake”

“Brown snake?”

“Yes, brown snake”

“Oh……..brown snake…..mmm……..Well, I suppose cobra could mean brown in the Sanskrit language couldn’t it?” Did I mention to you that the Governor’s wife told me that everyone up at parliament house is doing it doggy fashion these days?”

“Yes, dozens of times”

“Oh…..well, if you ever….you know……?”

“No thank you dear wife. We’ve been doing it missionary position for twenty seven years now. I see no reason to change.”

“Twenty one dear. We stopped doing it altogether in 1837”

When you travel the United States you come across names that are not only from all over Europe but from all over the world. I guess the difference is that the USA had been accepting immigrants from all points of the globe for almost two hundred years before the Whitlam Government kicked out the White Australia Policy in 1972. This cultural starvation is evident not only in the place names but in the architecture too. There’s a boring sameness to the styles of houses throughout Australia compared with the USA where one can see different dwelling styles in areas originally settled by the Russians, or the or Spanish, the Germans or the French.

I’ve been tossing up in my mind just how I would design the typical Australian country town and what it would have in it. On the outskirts there would be a couple of big green artillery pieces from WWI. Then there’d be a Deep Creek and a Five Mile Creek to be crossed as you come in from the north. There’d be an Elizabeth Street, a Collins and a Flinders Street. I guess a McQuarrie Street should be thrown in too and a Joseph Banks memorial park. Down by the shore there’d be a Beauty Point overlooking a Seal Rock with Pelican Point in the distance overlooking seven mile beach. There would, of course, be a monument to those who fell in the numerous wars in which we have, uninvited, involved ourselves. It would need to be of modular design and easily expandable to encompass the wars we’ve been in and the wars we will, no doubt, be involved in as time goes by.

Down the coast we dawdled south through Nambucca Heads and Kempsey. Sometimes, on a whim, we took roads to our left that led to down to some of the most wonderfully clean and near deserted beaches where I took lots of photographs of the exquisite yellow tailed black cockatoos that feed on the local coastal banksias. Occasionally we’d put a CD on and just lay outside on the grass by the sea with a bottle of wine or two until we felt like moving on or decided we were too pissed to drive.

In one of those seaside towns, I can’t remember which; we stopped for lunch in a supermarket car park. Afterwards I went off to an Internet café while Clare went into the supermarket to do the shopping. I came back with a heap of orders for gum leaves so we drove around town until we found a car park with suitable trees. It was a pretty place on the edge of the water. We wished we’d had lunch there instead. I took Cindy the tree lopper and wandered around the place taking the choicest twigfulls of leaves from the uppermost branches. I took them back to Clare at the van and she sat inside on the step with the scissors. By now Clare was a dab hand at recognising the best quality leaves on the twig and clipping them straight off into the bag so they landed right way up. She has a great eye for the length of leaf too. If they’re too long the ziplock bag won’t seal and if they’re too short they form a bump in the middle of the bag which ends up too thick to be classed as a letter at the post office.

The climate was in the mid twenties with a gentle sea breeze and I thought what a really cool occupation this was, just going around Australia raiding gum trees and sending the leaves off to American budgerigars to remind them of something they’d never had in the first place. My theory is that as the budgerigar evolved with the gum tree there’s some kind of affinity between them. Just as a woman isn’t complete until she’s experienced widowhood, so the budgie isn’t complete until it’s reunited with the smell of eucalyptus oil.

I’d gather a few twiglets (sounds better than twigs don’t you think?) and hand them into the door of the van to Clare then I’d put my arm through the window onto the draining board to pick up the twiglets she’d discarded. I’d then walk over to the rubbish bin and drop off the used twiglets. We’d been doing this for around half an hour and all the time I’d been conscious that a family picnicking in a mini van on the other side of the car park were watching me.

When they finally finished their picnic and packed everything away in their van the father hoisted his youngest child onto his shoulders and the whole family strolled on over to the van. I quickly clipped off a twig and scurried over there too to tell Clare they were coming. She stood up and moved further inside just as they arrived at our van door. I don’t know what nationality they were but the Grandmother wore a headscarf.

“G’gay folksh. Can ve shee?” The father said to me

“See what?”

“ Shee ‘im, ‘er, woddever id ish”

“This is my partner Clare” I said

“No…da koala. That’s wot you got in der ishinitt?”

I laughed and told him we didn’t have one.

“Come on” he said “I know you nod shupposed to ave wun. Das OK. I jush wan da liddle wuns to shee ‘im.

I smiled at all of them and told him we were just putting the leaves in bags.

“Wot for you doin’ dis?”

“I’m going to sell them in the USA”

“Ooze gonna buy em den?”

“Budgerigar owners”

“Oo?”

“People who own budgies….you know budgies?”

“No”

“They’re little birds”

“You bullshit me”

“No, really”

I showed him a couple of packets.

“You doin sumfin not legal. Drugs or sumfin. I dunno. Come on we go ome”

With that they left. They stared daggers at us as they left the car park and we waved back.

Heading in a downwardly direction Port Macquarie was next and a trip to the supermarket to stock up again. It began life as a penal settlement and if you think that’s something that just happens to old men, you’re wrong. Actually, I must confess I don’t like being in supermarket queues at all. I hate it when somebody’s behind me and getting impatient because something I bought didn’t have a price sticker on it or the bar code on it was stuffed. It’s at these times I get that piece of wood with “Next Customer” written on it that divides their stuff from mine on the conveyor belt. I show them the bit that says Next Customer on it and say “see that? that’s you.” Then I say “and I want you to stand….over there” and I throw it right up the other end of the toilet paper aisle. Sorry, I lied about that, but I’ve always wanted to do it. It’s just the rebel in me I guess. I once bought a return bus ticket and walked home just to cheat the bus company. It’s just the kind of guy I am.

We re-stocked Erasmus and carried on south all the while taking in some of the most beautiful coastal scenery of its type we’d so far seen. This coast had better swimming beaches than Queensland and didn’t have the dreaded jellyfish problem they get farther north.

A lot of the places on the coast road south of Port Macquarie aren’t particularly attractive. The exception is Nelson Bay on the south eastern shore of Port Stevens. It’s a trendy little place with far too many tourists in it but it copes well with them. The beaches were exceptional and while standing on one we saw a pod of at least fifty dolphins that cruised up and down for so long that we’d had enough and moved on. The water was clear and blue like tinted Absolut Vodka.

Newcastle was marginally more attractive than the city in England for which it was named but that was mostly due to the better weather. It certainly didn’t pretend to be anything other than the industrial city that it is. It’s not for tourists but it’s a good place to go and live if you’re ever reincarnated as a fly or a cockroach. Nevertheless I enjoyed walking around Newcastle. I hadn’t been in one of those cities for a while. People there seemed to me to be doing it tough though and there seemed to be an inordinate number of shops selling second hand clothes which is always an indicator that people don’t have the money to buy new ones.

It was the only town in which we’d seen racist graffiti on our trip; some of which was aimed at both Jews and Muslims. I saw a couple of Orthodox Jewish men and several headscarved Muslim women in the street and, of course, they do stand out and attract a certain amount of attention. The clothing identifies and defines them as immigrants in the minds of many Australians unlike, say, New Zealanders who form such a large proportion of our “alien” population and look exactly the same as “mainstream” Aussies.

I lived in Istanbul for some time where the girls dress well in up-to-the-minute fashions that don't lag behind Europe at all. But there was also a small percentage of traditional Muslim women who, in Turkey’s secular capital, wore headscarves all the time and for some reason unknown to me, wore gaberdine raincoats no matter how hot it was. You could see them all over the place queuing for the bus, walking around the shops, everywhere, while their husbands wore normal comfortable clothing. Their husbands were sometimes very fashionable but these poor women must have been perspiring terribly underneath all that weight of clothes during the summer.
I could never understand male Orthodox Jewish dress code either. I used to live in a Jewish suburb in Melbourne and practically all the Orthodox men wore 1930's business clothing. They all had trilby hats and wore dark blue pin striped suits with waistcoats and ties all year round. Melbourne absolutely swelters too on some summer days. But in their case the women all dressed quite normally. There was a synagogue at the end of our street and on religious days we would see them all pile out of their cars, the women dressed up to the nines and the men all looking like Al Capone clones but with beards and glasses

I could never understand why God wanted all these people to be so bloody uncomfortable, and how come it's the Jewish women but the Muslim men that are allowed to get away with it? There must have been a misprint somewhere along the line mustn't there? Perhaps Moses wasn’t that hot at shorthand when he took down all that stuff about coveting they neighbour’s wife’s ass etc. onto the stone tablets. I could maybe go part of the way to understanding the whole subject if these styles of dress were a couple of thousand years old but gaberdine raincoats and pin striped suits - I ask you. At what point did the Lord actually indicate that he wanted his flock to wear this garb? I put it at around 1933.

And The Lord Spake Unto Them Saying

"I have cast down upon the earth the material that shall be called gaberdine and the technology to make more thereof.

Makest though not sexy undergarments out of this material nor shalt thou make of it thy socks or the socks of thy husbands or thy husbands sisters husbands.

Maketh only that which is called the Full Length Gaberdine Raincoat and wearest thou this garment in the sight of the Lord.

For I the Lord thy God findeth the Full Length Gaberdine Raincoat to be a real turn on.

And unto the Jews, my chosen people, I give to you the blue, pin stripe, pure wool suit material and an abundance thereof that you may make that which is called the double breasted business suit.

And for the trilby hats which covereth thy heads in the sight of the Lord - Felt, I give to you and an abundance thereof.

And seekest though not to get felt in any other place".

We left Newcastle at three thirty on a weekday morning after spending the night in a supermarket car park where we weren’t threatened by anyone but the police. The police told us that if we stayed in the car park we’d almost certainly be threatened by people more threatening than them. They advised us to go and stay in a caravan park and threatened to fine us if we didn’t.

It was around about this time that we thought about booking our passage from Melbourne to Devonport so as to arrive in Tasmania in time for Christmas day when Clare’s second grandchild was scheduled to be introduced to the world outside. We had no idea what sex it was going to be Nicole hadn’t wanted to have an ultrasound and the baby didn’t have a womb with a view. A cursory study of the map and some basic arithmetic showed us that we’d spent far too long ambling down the coast. We still had a long way to go before Melbourne and there were things to see and do there that we didn’t want to miss out on before boarding the boat. We decided to sacrifice a few towns and places of interest and go hell for leather down the map. We vowed though, that on leaving Tasmania after the grandkids were all up and running we’d stay away until we’d seen the lot.

Gosford with all its agricultural and pastoral greenness went past the window in a flash. The outskirts of Sydney went by in a cloud of carbon monoxide and salvo of tyre, brake, clutch and exhaust workshops. Wollongong, which looked good, went by in the clear sunshine but nearby Port Kembla looked like something from 1950’s communist China. It was all about steel production and its associated industries at the expense of the environment. It was dirty and smoggy and had a road signposted as a tourist route. We took it. It was disgusting. The only redeeming feature was the sea which hadn’t been scattered with ugly iron warehouses conveyor belts and sheds. Batemans Bay, Narooma and Merimbula all looked inviting but we hadn’t the time to stop for anything other than meals and fuel until we got to Eden where we visited their whaling museum.

I wasn’t terribly interested in the whaling boats and bits of maritime junk that all those places have but there was a great whaling story there. A party of whalers in a whaling boat rowed out to attack a few whales one day in the 1800s and one guy fell overboard straight into the mouth of a whale. The next day they caught a whale and noticed something moving around its stomach. They cut it open and found that it was one of the lost man’s gumboots. Inside his gumboot was his foot and the rest of him was still attached to it. He had survived for eighteen hours inside the whale but he was now blind and his hair and skin were bleached white. He lived for some years after the event. Accompanying the story was a scientific explanation about how there had been enough oxygen in the whale’s stomach for him to have been able to survive for so long. I didn’t understand it but I was very impressed.

I was impressed too by another story about how a pack of killer whales, led by a whale I shall call Nobby, used to herd other whales into the bay at Eden and then alert the human whale catchers. Nobby would lead the human whale catchers straight to the whales they’d herded and the men would kill them and then leave them for the killer whales to eat their tongues which are, apparently, a killer wale delicacy. The story said that Nobby would actually grasp the rope on the front of the whaler’s boat and tow it to the scene. I was inclined to think the whole story was a bit far fetched until I saw Nobby’s skeleton and the two teeth that were worn away from dragging on the rope for many years. I dunno about whales really. I mean...... they’re supposed to have these enormous great brains, God knows how may times the size of a human brain, but what do they actually do with them? Just show me one piece of whale poetry for instance.
MORNINGTON PENINSULA
We carried on south across the New South Wales border into Victoria and drove straight across towards Melbourne. It was very unpleasant countryside to me, all dried up and supporting only scraggy looking vegetation. The much vaunted town of Lakes Entrance was scruffy compared with most of the towns we’d seen all the way down from Northern Queensland. We were heading for the Mornington Peninsula where I used to live and of which I still had fond memories. We weren’t disappointed; it was still beautiful and the beaches were the best swimming beaches all the way from Cape Tribulation on down. Our idea of a great swimming beach is one without big waves where the depth remains roughly at chest height for a long way out. The Mornington Peninsula has these in abundance on its Port Phillip Bay side while the opposite (Westernport Bay) side has surf beaches with big rollers.

It’s a spectacular part of Australia and the ridge down the spine of the peninsula is home to a couple of dozen wineries where one can get legless on weekend wine tastings for free. Of course, it’s best if you have an Erasmus like us that you can park up somewhere and sleep off the effects of the alcohol at any point in the day. We were in no fit state to drive anywhere after about ten tastings. Sorrento, almost at the tip of the peninsula was a fantastic little town with good coffee and cakes and a good Ferry to Queenscliff across Port Phillip Bay. Portsea is at the end of the peninsula and the national park there was, until recently, out of bounds. It was there at Cheviot beach that Harold Holt, an Australian Prime Minister back in the 60s, went missing presumed drowned whilst swimming. We took a look at the beach and decided the guy was a bloody idiot to go swimming in such a treacherous place with such a strong undertow. As a Prime Minister how responsible was that?

In one of the Melbourne suburbs there’s a swimming pool called “The Harold Holt Memorial Pool” which I though was enormously funny but upon enquiry found that it was called that before he drowned. It seemed a contradiction in terms like The Genghis Khan Child Minding Centre or the John Denver School of Flying.

But what a way for a head of State to go! Turkey’s Ataturk died of sclerosis of the liver through too much alcohol. Mussolini was strung up, Hitler took poison and Ceausescu was shot; Louis XVI was guillotined and Ghandi assassinated. In 1327 Edward the III of England died from a central heating complaint when he was held down and a red hot poker rammed up his arse. But our Aussie Prime Minister was out there swimming somewhere dangerous on his day off when he disappeared.

From Portsea we drove north to the Dandenong Ranges and along the way stopped at Lake Aura Vale where I went into the men’s urinals. They were very nice urinals and spotlessly clean but with one feature that distinguished them from all other urinals I have seen in Australia or abroad. Slap bang in front of me when I was peeing was a stainless steel handrail. I took a photo of it and showed my friends (both of them) but they hadn’t seen a urinal with a handrail either. I couldn’t get it off my brain – things like this intrigue me. I could only see the use for a handrail in a men’s urinal either on a rolling ship or during an earthquake. Or perhaps it was to chain slack wobbly idiots to who may be in danger of toppling over. Do some people pee with such force that it thrusts them backwards? Is it for when you’re too pissed to stand up? It’s just one of life’s mysteries to me like why lemmings don’t buy life insurance or whether or not Mormons all have the same pressure in their bicycle tyres.

What makes the Dandenongs so special is, perhaps unfortunately, the European trees which compliment the tall native eucalypts and the European flowers in people’s gardens. Many Europeans live in those lovely ranges and here and there they’ve built grand houses modelled along the lines of Swiss chalets and houses with those steeply pitched roofs to be found in many European mountain areas. They’ve also long ago planted the trees that would accompany them if they were in those countries. Mount Tamborine in Queensland has tried to achieve this type of atmosphere but there the climate is too hot for the right trees to grow. The Dandenongs get so cold that they sometimes have snowfalls in winter and this climate suits European vegetation. It all fits very well there. The Dandenongs were impressive with imposing views and would have benefited from the closing down of all the Agatha Christie type tea shops, the Laura Ashley soap, petal & pot pourri shops and any place that sold fucking Teddy Bears.

Healesville wildlife sanctuary wasn’t as good as I remembered it but it was still among the top ten in Australia. We got to see either one platypus several times or vice versa. No, it definitely wasn’t one of them. It could have been a Habeas Corpus though I suppose. When you see a platypus close up in an aquarium or in this case, a platypussery, you get to see what a weird thing it really is. It’s one of God’s little cock ups. I reckon he put the thing together from bits he had left over from making other things. But where he really fell down was in the eyes. The platypus gets its food from creek and river beds and a lot of it is hiding under stones which it has to turn over to get at. But, and here’s where God was really cruel, it has to close its eyes when it goes under water. Imagine that! The poor little things have to feel around with their beaks to find their food. It’s like blindfolding your kids out on the lawn at dinner time and telling them “dinner’s in the oven kids – go find it.”

One thing we saw at Healesville that was extra special was an albino kookaburra. It was completely bleached from beak to claw. I once bleached twenty nine goldfish when I lived in the Dandenongs. At the back of our house was a cliff with a terrace on which I put an above ground swimming pool which, after a year or more, began to sink at one edge as the ground settled under the weight of it.

At the bottom of the cliff was a pond with the goldfish in it which used to catch the rainwater when it ran down the cliff. One Saturday morning in summer I decided to empty the pool and reposition it on the terrace. First I had to drain out the water which I did by syphoning it out with a couple of garden hoses down the cliff. It was taking a long time for the water to go down so I took the kids out for the day. When we returned I walked around to the back of the house and found that the pool water which contained chlorine had totally bleached all the pond plants together with the water snails and the twenty nine goldfish.

The water in the pond was clearer than it had ever been and the snail shells were all white. The goldfish though were surreal looking and had Salvador Dali seen them the old phoney would have turned the idea into money. They were transparent. They were cruising very slowly up and down the pond with what seemed like invisible fins and tails and the larger part of their bodies were see through. Some of them displayed almost all of their skeletons and the thing I found the strangest about the whole experience was that all their eyes were still black.

It wasn’t the first calamity I’d had with goldfish. Both the kids had a goldfish each in a bowl in their bedrooms when they were young. One day I was showing three year old Clare how we change the goldfish bowl water. We went out to the pond so we could get rainwater because the chlorine in the tap could have poisoned her fish. After this we left the new water overnight in the same room as the goldfish bowl so that it would be the same temperature.

The next day we gently poured the old water out of the bowl tipping the fish into a jug of his familiar old water and we cleaned the bowl out using the pond water taking care not to use a pot scourer that might have dishwashing liquid on it. Clare was standing on a chair up at the sink as I lifted the jug with the goldfish in it and began to pour it, and him, into the clean bowl. It was a double drainer sink and my wife walked up and switched on the waste disposal unit just at the instant that I missed the bowl with the water from the jug. The water overshot the bowl and the goldfish, Lawrence, flew straight down the waste disposal opening. There was a short buzz that lasted only for a millisecond and Lawrence had gone to meet his maker. Clare cried and we told her that he’d be back in the morning and that this was a perfectly normal part of the fish bowl cleaning process. That night we went out to the pond and trawled it until we found Lawrence’s first cousin and dropped him in the bowl. I told my Jewish work colleague about it at the office on Monday and he just shrugged, parted his hands, turned them skyward and said “gefilterfish.”

The house was in Upper Fern Tree Gully and while we lived there we had a series of disasters with, not only fish, but animals too. We lived on a large sloping block on the side of a rocky mountain that had next to no topsoil. To keep the grass and brambles down we bought a goat. We called it Xenophon and the kids loved it but one day my wife rang me at work to tell me that it had died. We knew the kids would be upset and, as the first thing they did when they got home from school every day was to go up and feed it, she asked me to come home and bury it. I dragged the late Xenophon from the top of the block down to one of the terraces and tried to put a spade into the ground but it was too rocky to dig a hole. Time was running out and the kids would soon be home from school so I desperately ran all over the block with a pick axe trying to find a place where I could dig a hole deep enough to accommodate a dead goat. When I at last scraped the soil away from in between two rocks and rolled the goat in, the only way he’d fit in the hole was on his back. The problem was that riga mortis had set in and his legs refused to fold down below ground level. I ran across to my neighbour George and asked if I could borrow his hacksaw. George followed me back up the block and sawed one leg off for me and then, eyeing up the remaining three said “they’d make bloody good cricket stumps but.”

One day we saw a marsupial mouse in the garden and we thought it was rather special but we were worried that if it hung around our place the cat next door would surely kill it. We talked about what to do and decided that the best thing would be to capture it somehow and release it further up the mountain where there were no houses. I found an eccentric humane animal trap manufacturer in the village of Upwey called Kevin Elliot. He had just the trap I was looking for and his wife, a zoologist, suggested I bait it with peanut butter. This we did and one morning we went out into the garden to see the trap was sprung and we’d caught the mouse. It was half an hour before I was due to go to work so I bundled the kids and the mouse in the car and drove up the mountain to where there was a pull in. We parked the car and opened the trap but the mouse didn’t want to come out. I picked up the trap and shook it. The mouse came out in a hurry, took one look at the forest, found it daunting and ran straight out into the middle of the road where it stopped. A car was on its way down the mountain and the three of us stood at the side of the road shouting at the mouse to move but it wouldn’t listen and the car ran over it.

Out the back of the Dandenong’s, starting at Lilydale, we slowed our pace due to the wine tasting opportunities presented by the Yarra Valley wine growing region. This area is so suited to the production of sparkling wines that both Moet et Chandon and Devaux have set up shop there! Gently sloping hills sporting lines of grape vines always look good to me but in the Yarra Valley the surrounding area was green too; unlike the Barossa valley which is dry and not so striking between vineyards.

Further on past Healesville we crossed the Black Spur, an amazing drive over the Dividing Range through a forest of tall mountain ash trees and towering tree ferns that grew right down to the road.

We went through the forest as far as the small town of Marysville which surely must be the quaintest town in Victoria with its deciduous tree lined streets contrasting with the darker tree covered mountains that surround it. Close by we visited two waterfalls and returned to town to sample the cakes and coffee which were superb. I couldn’t fault anything about the place. The cute little wooden houses wouldn’t have looked out of place in Switzerland and it was all as neat and clean as German window box.

From Marysville we drove down closer to Melbourne where our friends Loretta & Steven lived at McLeod. As they hadn’t seen me for a while, and they new I used to be into the vodka when I lived in Poland, they had a bottle on hand just for me. Steve played old Beatles songs on his guitar while I played the harmonica. I became most horribly pissed after having a thoroughly good time and we slept in a real bed for a change in their spare room. In Melbourne I wanted to buy a Middle Eastern style men’s, full length robe and we went into Victoria Market to look for one. When I lived in Turkey I always wore a robe in the hot weather and they were so much more comfortable than trousers, light and airy with no constrictions around the waist. Victoria Market though didn’t have one so we headed for Brunswick St. Fitzroy which is a lot of fun.

Brunswick St. Fitzroy these days is a lot like I think New York was back in the 1920s. In Australia we’ve only allowed immigrants here from all over the world since 1972 but America started out by accepting anyone from anywhere. Melbourne has now come of age in that regard and in Fitzroy you can get your hair cut by a Turk, the shoemaker is Armenian, your fish & chips are cooked by a Greek and you get your cappuccinos from an Italian all in the space of fifty metres. It’s a great shame that our founding fathers were so paranoid and xenophobic with regard to immigration. If we’d had a War of Independence and kicked the British out as did the Americans we could have been enjoying the fruits of multiculturalism for a couple of hundred years longer than we have.

In Brunswick St. I saw a sign in a fish shop window. It read “Sorry customer Angelo Fish man Today Closed Not Fil Well.” I hoped the “customer” wasn’t inconvenienced. I found my robe in one of those Lebanese shops that sells trinkets and stuffed vine leaves, gaudy pictures of the seaside and tea sets with gold rimmed saucers. The lady had shelves full of them and I chose a business robe with a pocket to put my scientific calculator and glasses in. She was pleased I’d bought it so I thought it would be a good time to ask what some of the delicious delicacies were in the glass case. It worked and she gave us a couple of pistachio nut cakey somethings I couldn’t pronounce; all sticky and sweet. We found another robe in the Salvation Army Op Shop in the same street for four dollars. It was a green and white striped one with gold braiding at the neck. Clare liked it so I bought it and it made me look like Osama bin Laden doing an impression of a halal butcher.

On the way back down town we passed a place that used to be a downmarket Egyptian restaurant years ago. I recalled how I went in there late one night with my friend Jay who looked into their refrigerated glass cabinet and, seeing nothing with which he was remotely familiar, looked up at the weary proprietor and said “I’d like you to do something typically Egyptian for me”. In an upper class English accent the proprietor replied “very well sir, perhaps you’d like me to block up the Suez Canal for you?”

By now it was the third week in December and Christmas was sneaking up on us fast. We had to be across the Bass Strait in Tasmania before then or face the wrath of Clare’s kids for not being home for the first time on Christmas day. Reluctantly – at least for me – we drove Erasmus onto the ferry and settled down for the trip back to reality.

This had been our first trip albeit broken in two. I wouldn’t have missed the experience for anything but a much bigger trip was to begin a couple of months down the track. This time I’d be prepared properly. I’d shelve my camera equipment and get into the twenty first century with a digital and I’d begin making proper notes like a real author does. That meant getting myself a laptop computer too with a word processing program to save me time and frustration.

In all the distance we travelled and all the towns we’d visited I still hadn’t found anything that really defined Australia and Australians for me. I’d found nothing in the culture that I could recognise as being Australian had I been elsewhere else in the world. In other parts of the world I could recognise something as being, for example, French, in Canada’s Quebec or America’s New Orleans. In Tokyo or Manilla there’s so much that is recognisably American such as MacDonald’s or baseball. In South America there’s so much that is instantly recognisable as Spanish and so forth.

Throughout Australia I found a lot that was typically English like some towns in Tasmania or the cricket or roast beef. I found even more that was typically American, the whole culture smacked of it from MacDonalds to theme parks. Too, I found places that were identifiably Italian like Carlton or Vietnamese like Richmond. Souvlakis, rollmops, pizza, satay, chow mien, Yorkshire pudding. I knew where all these things came from too. The Australian two food items that readily sprang to mind were the Lamington and the ubiquitous Pavlova but nobody overseas has ever heard of them.

All the time we were away I’d been quietly looking for something I could put my finger on as being quintessentially Australian. Something that, if I was overseas somewhere, I could say “coo, look at that, it’s very Australian isn’t it?” The only thing I could think of was sport, we’re good at sport. Rugby, soccer, tennis, swimming, basketball, lacrosse, skiing? All those things came from somewhere else and Australian Rules football is just that. It’s only played in Australia. Perhaps there was something out there that could be seen as typically Australian when travelling through Russia or China or even Britain and America. Vegemite, that’s all our own and so are Speedos but they don’t quite stack up against brand names like Electrolux or Hoover.

Perhaps there’s an invention like the telephone or the……automobile……or the….. I know, if I see a stump jump plough being used somewhere I’d know it was invented right here. Problem is, I can’t tell a plough from a combine harvester. If there was something Australian out there I thought I stood a good chance of finding it between Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin and Perth.

Chapter 4

2007-12-31T19:20:00.001-08:00

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What rope?”

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

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

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

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

“Your usual number”

“No fucking wonder”

“Why”

“Does your house phone display text messages?”

“Ah, shit”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said “I’m Anthony’s friend Peter.”

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

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

“Gunoot” I said

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was thinking about Ajax sir”

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

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

“That a fact Bill?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes sir?”

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

“Yes sir, thank you sir.”

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

Chapter 5

2007-12-31T19:19:00.004-08:00

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER FIVE

Before leaving Adelaide we paid a visit to the Gaganis Brothers warehouse. Gaganis Bros is a Greek Australian company that imports food from all over Europe and there we stocked up on copious quantities of canned, bottled and dried goodies we knew we wouldn’t be seeing for a long time. Gaganis supply restaurants and retail shops all over Australia but at their warehouse you can buy all the things they sell very cheaply without having to buy in multiples. There you can get a tin of Croatian pork liver pate for a dollar and at the other end of the scale, a wine press for twelve hundred dollars. You can also pick up the odd cockroach if you’re not careful.

We emerged from that superb Greek wholesalers with a couple of supermarket trolleys piled high with Hungarian fruit juices, Polish, Turkish and Iranian jams, Greek vacuum packed smoked mackerel and canned calamari, Italian and German cheeses, Greek peas and string beans baked in oil. Stuffed vine leaves from Croatia, Turkish stuffed eggplants and flame roasted red peppers, Lithuanian canned smoked sprats and a whole lot more. All this we dextrously stuffed into crevices in Erasmus along with Turkish and Lebanese dried apricots and dates. We were looking forward to dining in the desert. Gaganis is interesting from the point of view of the customers you get to see in there. We saw an old lady with a concentration camp tattoo. I know that’s what it was because I’d previously seen a few of them when I lived in Poland and I knew somebody who had two of them. There were lots of old Greek women dressed in their black mourning colours and at least thirty elderly Slavs of different nationalities. Two of the short broad shouldered Slavic men in, I guess, their early seventies who were shopping with their wives had fingers missing, which I thought strange. A disproportionate number of these men had obviously made the wrong choice of pets too as they had scars on their faces and bits out of their ears.

But, for the moment, back to the cockroaches. We found one in Erasmus a couple of weeks later up near Alice Springs and I reckon it came from Gaganis Bros warehouse. Clare didn’t agree. She said it was a local cockroach that had just sneaked in at a truck stop. Either way, its life was taken from it by a size nine Nike in a brutal and untimely fashion and its now probably building brain cells in a magpie or something. That’s what I like about Buddhism. There’s no God and what goes around comes around. There’s this sort of universal pool of soul where all living things die, break down and go back to. Then they get recycled so bits of the Gaganis Brothers cockroach could now be a part of John Howard’s scrotum. Well, that’s a bit far fetched really. John Howard hasn’t got any balls and he was already around when I killed the cockroach but that’s roughly how Buddhism works. I’m not a Buddhist though, I’m irreligious.

But the cockroach got me thinking about existentialism. What the fuck is it? Anyway, if this cockroach was really from Adelaide and we took it all the way to Alice Springs, what about flies. Flies travel with us for hundreds of kilometres every day. They drive us nuts. They appear on the windscreen and we keep on swatting at them and they lay low for a bit and then come back and annoy us all over again. When we stop for lunch I usually open the doors and shoo them out but sometimes there are more flies outside waiting to get in. Well, I got to thinking about how an Adelaide fly would get on in, say, Broken Hill if we transported it there. It would be too far to fly home wouldn’t it? And, anyway, it probably wouldn’t know the way.

How would our fly get on with other local flies? What if it landed on a piece of kangaroo shit and a load of other flies came along and shouted “FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF, FUCK OFF” Like that?

“Sorry, my names Buzz, as in Aldrin. I’m from Adelaide”

“Yeah, well you ain’t getting none of our kangaroo shit ‘cause you ain’t a member of the Great Fly Barrier Industrial Council marsupial shit infection work collective”

“Oh really, might I be allowed to join the Great Fly Barrier…., thingy?”

“No, it’s a closed shop. You gotta be hatched here to join. Fuck off”

“Bzzzzzzz”

“Well done brother, that told the smarmy little prick.”

“OK lads, back to work. We’re on wallaby this afternoon, that means time and a half”

We left Adelaide on a bright, sunny, mid May morning. But hang on – wait for a minute. Sorry, I could be wrong. Clare says it was raining and unbright. Overcast, that’s the word. I’ll have to learn to keep better notes.

We left Adelaide on a - what the hell; you don’t want to know what the weather was like do you? No. We went north through the Clare Valley all autumnal grape vines and European colours. On we went like a rat up a drainpipe and out the other side into a large flat area of expansive fields of boring old stubble. It went on for far too long but there was nothing we could do about it. And then it went on for a whole lot more. About four or five hours later the bloody stuff was still there as if somebody had painted a mural of it on the windscreen. It was all the same.

We went through many an unmemorable town until we came to one we liked. It was called Melrose but by then it was growing dim. We looked for somewhere to park for the night and found the football oval. There was a sign saying camping was permitted which was unusual; we don’t usually park in places where we’re permitted. There were toilets too and water to fill our tanks with. A football game was in full swing. Well, it might have been in half swing for all I know about football. It’s a male sexual thing, a fertility right, the football, isn’t it? I watched a part of a Grand Final a few years ago and all these men broke through this sort of symbolic hymen with the names of the teams written on it. It all took place on an egg shaped patch of grass and like a horde of flagella they proceeded to kick this egg shaped ball into a symbolic womb.

We cruised around the Melrose football oval looking for the most level place to park and then saw a ridge which we just had enough ground clearance to struggle over. We found ourselves on a flat plateau overlooking the football oval right at the foot of a big, tree covered conical thing called Mt. Remarkable. When I awoke in the morning I looked out of the window at Mt. Remarkable. It had a touch of the mist in it as if God had found magnetic candy floss lurking around in the trees there and he was up there with a bloody great magnet pulling the stuff up to heaven. A truly celestial sight it was and I could just imagine an ark being stuck up there somewhere.

I climbed down from the bed and put the kettle on and opened the curtains. As I did so a huge flock of galahs rose from the ground screeching and wheeling away from me in a great pink flapping cloud. I thought I’d scared them with the noise of the curtain track being pulled. Then I heard a voice. It said “Oh shit, not again. When are they goin’ to put a friggin’ fence up.” I peeked out from behind the curtains on the other side of the van. It was then that I realised we were between the sixth and seventh tees of the Melrose golf course. We had a fit of the giggles and didn’t open up Erasmus until the golfers had gone.

After breakfast we went down into the little township. It was neat and tidy and we liked it a lot. Being at the foot of Mount remarkable gives the place a setting that money can’t buy any of the other towns that compete for the tourist dollar along that stretch of road. And if they ever do find an ark up there it will do wonders for the price of real estate.

Now there’s a funny thing, that Noah and the ark. I don’t believe it. In the Adelaide Museum I saw a colossal skeleton of a dinosaur and the description said that even that huge thing wasn’t the biggest type of dinosaur that ever existed. Now, I don’t doubt at all that dinosaurs existed and anyone who doesn’t must be a thicko because there are so many dinosaur skeletons standing around in museums all over the world. This Noah and his missus and the in-laws were supposed to have put a mating pair of everything inside their boat. I don’t know how many days sailing Noah provisioned for but if he’d only stocked it for a week’s supply for the dinosaurs alone there would have to have been a hell of a load of forage. Then there’s the question of poo. There were only four, or was it six of them of them on the boat? Can you imagine how much poo a stegosaurus puts out at a time? One wet fart from a Tyrannosaurus Rex would have filled the scuppers before they could have shovelled it away.

From Melrose we carried on north through more monotonous countryside and a smattering of small towns not worthy of mention. It was dry, parched country with only the odd olive grove to relieve the boredom save for a couple of dry creek beds where fresh looking eucalyptus trees grew. One small town called Wilminton, had an IGA supermarket into which we ventured briefly and wished we hadn’t. The fresh produce counter had only two soup packs of three or four cling wrapped vegetables and there was a solitary parsnip. I picked up the parsnip. It no longer had the strength to stand upright and I sensed that I wasn’t the first customer to have tested it. The next time I saw parsnips was at Ayers Rock. They were fresh and individually wrapped and for sale at $2.45 each.

We were heading for the Flinders ranges and Wilpena Pound. We next alighted from Erasmus in a small town not far from Wilpena called Quorn. The reason we’d stopped is that Clare wanted to see if she could get a prescription order from the chemist. The chemist didn’t have a pharmacist but rang through the order to a chemist in Port Augusta and said that the items would be delivered in two working days. Considering the remoteness of the place I thought the service excellent. We wandered around Quorn to stretch our legs and went into a café where the walls were decorated with movie posters from days gone by. I didn’t take much notice of them until Clare pointed out that all these movies had been made in and around Quorn. They were all Wild West movies and that gave us an idea of the kind of country we would be going into.

There’s a national parks resort at Wilpena with a couple of rather ordinary restaurants, a shop with and gas station and that’s about all apart from the resort’s caravan park. Signs at various intervals along the road had told us that we weren’t allowed to camp anywhere but in the resort caravan park and we were determined not to so we drove around looking for places to stop where the ranger wouldn’t be able to spot us. We found a good place behind a Telstra transformer/relay station in among trees and parked up behind it just on dusk.

We walked into Wilpena pound the next morning and after a coupe of hours trekking Clare realised it was my birthday. That afternoon I sent postcard to my kids telling them that I’d spent my sixtieth birthday in the pound. Wilpena Pound is something special. It’s a massive ring of mountain walls with a big conical hollow inside where the walls slope down to a treed plain of some five kilometres by eleven. It looks like a meteorite crater but was, in fact, formed by a geological process I can neither spell, pronounce or remember. Back around the late 1800s a man found it and realised that there was only one way in or out of it. He fenced off the opening and grazed cattle in it. I can’t imagine a bigger or more secure cattle coral in the world.

We climbed up to the rim of it and saw the sheer immensity of the place. It looks totally impregnable and the walls undulate like the decorative icing around a wedding cake. I suppose the earth, given sufficient millennia, is malleable and geological forces had folded it up like the icing that’s squeezed from one of those cake icing piping bags. Each fold had a little point on it too where that big cake decorator in the sky had put the final glob of icing on. There, that was better that a whole load of geological descriptive crap wasn’t it?

The following day, as a birthday present, Clare booked a half hour plane ride over the place and I was extremely taken with it. The pilot took us all the way around it and to have seen all the peaks at shoulder height is an experience I’ll never forget. What really stood out was that there was absolutely nothing around it as far as we could see from our lofty perch. My insignificance hardly counted for anything.

Back on the ground, we met up with a couple of large feral goat herds. All the members of the herd looked far too healthy for words. They obviously thrive on destroying the local ecology. At one small, muddy pool we saw a confrontation between two goats and a large kangaroo. The kangaroo was already drinking when the two goats rocked up. The kangaroo stood its ground until one of the goats stood up threateningly on its hind legs. That was enough for Skippy, he withdrew. We could see that what had been a pristine watering hole was trampled into a muddy mess by hundreds of goat’s hooves.

We saw or first wild emus at Wilpena and got quite excited taking a swag of out of focus photographs. As emus run away from you the great bustle of feathers on their rear ends rolls from side to side. They looked like early Victorian ladies in crinoline dresses doing the hundred metres in stiletto heels. By the third day at Wilpena we’d seen so many emus that we no longer took any notice of them - we’d become emunised. One day as we returned to the Wilpena resort car park we saw a new Subaru with the personalised number plate “OLD BOY.” I can’t stand personalised number plates and I often wonder why people have to make those silly statements about themselves. Mind you, we did see a car in Adelaide with the number plates SHAGU 2 which I thought showed originality. But there in the Wilpena resort car park I just couldn’t help myself. I grabbed an envelope and wrote FART on it with a black marker. Then I stuck it to the guy’s number plate so it read OLD FART and Clare took before and after photographs of it. It just made me feel good.

Another first for both of us was seeing Aboriginal rock paintings. We saw three within twenty minutes driving distance of Wilpena. Two of them at Yourumbulla were located in rock overhangs in stony country almost identical to the terrain of the Aegean coast of Turkey. Both Clare and I have visited that area independently and were both struck with the similarities. We understood nothing about the symbolism of the rock paintings; it was just a good thing to have experienced.

I managed to find a telephone line to connect my laptop to in Wilpena and I found that Neil had been getting quite a few emails from budgerigar owners and our customers looking for advice. One lady in Wisconsin wrote that her budgie was picking feathers out of his rump and that it was looking inflamed. She said that she’d put the budgie’s rear end in luke warm water and some sort of moisturising oil hoping it would cure the problem. However, it created another problem which was that the budgie now had this moisturising oil all over its bum and she wanted to know how to get rid of it. I replied to Neil saying “with a blowlamp” and Neil, being a bit stressed out and tired at the time, made the mistake of sending my reply direct to the customer. At Wilpena I downloaded the email she’d sent us.

“You horrible horrible people. It’s obvious that you don’t really care about our little feathered friends at all. You are nothing better than monsters. I will write to the all budgie clubs and tell them what you’ve done and ask them to boycott your company. I sensed from the start that you didn’t really care.

Sigrid Milington

P.S. My husband says FUCK YOU.

After leaving the Finders ranges we stocked up on food at Port Augusta and after stealing water from a public toilet we slept the night there in the Naval Cadets Club car park and headed off again the next morning still going north. Having made mention of stealing water I suppose I should say a little about the different methods we sometimes used to obtain it. As we didn’t use caravan parks we had to carry a fair amount of water with us for showering and washing up and in some places it wasn’t available. We bought two long hoses, which we could join together if need be along with every type and size of hose fitting available in Australia. Thus equipped we could get water from just about anywhere. It’s easy enough connecting to taps at the back of factories or supermarkets and they don’t mind people taking water but there are some organisations that guard their water. Some, such as sports ovals, bowling clubs and schools have taps with no handles. After striking this situation a couple of times I went into a plumbing shop and asked the guy behind the counter how they opened them. ”With one of these” he said and slapped a tap handle on the counter. “Right” says I. “I’ll have one.” “Or it could be one of these.” He said, slapping a different one on the counter. “How many different types are there?” Says I. “Four” says he. “Right.” Says I. “I’ll have one of each.” “That’ll be eleven bucks even” Says he.

The eleven dollars worth of tap handles was worth its weight in showers and cups of tea a thousand times over but sometimes we came across public toilets with no outside taps. For this we bought flexible rubber universal squeezable uppable things from a hardware store that went around any tap spout, even the rectangular ones. The public toilet taps were often on springs to stop people running too much water at a time but they were easily held open with a stick between the tap and the wall. Another problem sometimes encountered was that of dirty water at roadside stops in arid areas after rain. It runs into the tanks from the gutters of those shade house carport things they erect so that people can get out of the sun when they’re having hot cups of tea. However, the sediment always hangs around at the bottom of the tank near the tap while the water at the top of the tank is clear. When faced with this we drove Erasmus right up to the tank and stood on the bumper from where we could get the hose in the top and siphon the clear water out. You, the reader, will probably never need to know about any of this but I need something to fill this book out so I thought I’d tell you about it.

Absolutely nothing happened the day we left Port Augusta and besides stopping and starting for coffee and lunch the country was so flat I only changed gear twice. At about five in the afternoon. Is five pm afternoon or evening? At about 1700 hours we stopped for the night in a big roadside car park at a place called Hart Lake. It was a salt lake with a couple of centimetres of water in it and the remains of a disused railway track running out to the middle that was once used by salt getters. There was a pair of railway wheels on an axle out in the shallow water that had the setting sun projecting its golden glow upon. The reflection of the wheels in the still water was stunning and I wanted a photograph of them. The sun was going down fast and we grabbed the camera and ran out there as quickly as we could. We got in about ten shots while the light was good and then slowly strolled back to the shore past a large sign which we hadn’t read. A couple on the banks were shouting and hollering at us and Clare could just make out something about “read the sign.”

We turned around and read it. It was a warning by the Department of Defence and read: DANGER. DO NOT VENTURE ONTO THE LAKE SURFACE. LAKE IS A LIVE BOMBING AND AMMUNITION TARGET AREA. UNLOCATED LIVE ORDINANCE IN A CONDITION DANGEROUS TO PERSONNEL MAY BE ON OR JUST UNDER THE LAKE SURFACE. AREA ADMINISTRATOR. WOOMERA.

We slept well and in the morning moved back out onto the asphalt for another day exactly the same as the last. How does one describe absolutely bugger all to the reader? A couple of times I swear I could see the actual curvature of the earth. We didn’t see a solitary native animal in live mode and the highlight of the day was when we saw a fox and a number of eagles tearing lumps off of some poor cow’s defunct thinking apparatus. An hour before dusk Coober Pedy hove into view. Not a lot of Coober Pedy, it must be said, actually hoves because about 95% of it is under the ground where little hoving goes on.

We made our way slowly down the main street. It was a mess. We came to a roundabout and parked on the dust to the left of it and clambered down from Erasmus. A score of Aborigines were sitting around taking in the last rays of the setting sun and a variety of other substances from bottles and cans. There was a lot of bickering going on and one woman was being verbally abused by a man who was probably her partner. She was eating a pie and he made as if to hit her. She took a step back and as he came forward she thrust the pie toward his face. He turned away and it went all down the left hand side of his head. “He must be one of these pie-on-ears I keep hearing about” I said to Clare. She wasn’t amused and kept walking looking straight ahead.

Above ground Coober Pedy is, well, um, ………. a shit hole. Of course, when everybody lives under the ground I guess they don’t care too much for what’s above it. We cruised about looking for somewhere to stop for the night and found ourselves in one of the suburbs. Coober Pedy almost certainly has some of the most original looking suburbs in the world. They consist of white limestone roads flanked by bloody great piles of white, limestone tailings. Apart from a smattering of disused mining machinery that’s about all there is! We parked, possibly in someone’s garden, between two piles of the said white limestone tailings and were scared to venture out after dark for a pee in case we fell down a mineshaft. It was one of the quietest nights we’d spent and the reflection of the moon on the tailings was ghostly.

When, in daylight, we gingerly explored our surroundings we found dwellings everywhere. They weren’t underground in the sense that you had to walk or climb down a slope to get to them. They were set in the sides of cut away hillocks with windows, doors and carports all facing the same way. The odd one had a view (of bloody great heaps of white, limestone tailings) but most looked out onto white cliff faces. It seemed all higgledy piggledy but they must all have known where each others burrows were located.

In the town centre and immediate suburbs some people had managed to grow trees where none had existed before as attested to by the surrounding plains which supported only poor, low lying scrub. Coober Pedy’s first tree was on display as a tourist attraction. It was fabricated in (I think) the 1960s from the metal left over from a truck that had been in a road accident.

Much of the film Mad Max Three was made in Coober Pedy but although it was mentioned in most of the guide books there was no reference to it anywhere that we could find in the town. In the car park of an underground opal sales emporium stood a fantastic sort of truck come aircraft that was used in the movie and tourists were taking photographs of it but there was no notice anywhere to say what it was. Above ground Coober Pedy is only an advert for what’s underground and most of that is about opal sales. Some of the shops are very elegant and boast a constant temperature year round. There are also many places billed as opal museums and displays with free admission that are nothing more than opal shops.

There are five or six underground churches in the town and one we visited was the Serbian Orthodox place of worship. As far as we were concerned it was the best place in town. In the stained glass windows various old Christian religious standards were represented but one scene was of a woman lying on a funeral bier with a bunch of halo wearing apostles around her. One guy was kneeling at the bedside with his hands cut off at the wrists. His bloody hands were both lying on the sheets of the woman’s bed. Standing in the foreground was the culprit, a long haired female Roman centurion with a bloody sword and wings.

When we came up out of the church I saw the Serbian Orthodox priest changing the wheel on his 4wD and I asked him what the scene was all about. He said that in their tradition there had been an impious Jew at Mary Magdalene’s death and he’d reached out to push Mary off the bier. The winged
centurioness was actually an angel who popped down from heaven real quick like and saved the day by chopping the poor bugger’s hands off.

When walking around some parts of above ground Coober Pedy you thread your way through a forest of knee high ventilation pipes. Some take the form of forty four gallon drums but most are just six inch diameter pipes with conical hats on top to prevent the rain from entering. Every underground shop or dwelling has to have ventilation pipes but I was surprised that they were so low to the ground. I was almost overcome by a desire to pee down one or bellow in a deep voice “I am the Lord thy God and I want you to take off all your clothes and stand in the window.” Better still would be to paint a picture of Jesus or the Virgin Mary on a circular piece of glass and position it in a ventilator with a light behind it at night and make biblical noises.

Water in this little opal mining town probably comes from underground. I don’t know. There is, however, a waterworks and it was to there that we had to go to fill Erasmus’s tanks. The filling apparatus was attached to the fence outside the waterworks premises and there was a sign telling the waterless that they had to put twenty cents in the slot for thirty litres of the stuff and the water would be available when a green light came on. It also said that campervan owners should attach their own hoses to the waterworks nozzle because the water came out at high pressure and it could burst water tanks. We put twenty cents in the slot and waited but we couldn’t see the green light because the sun was on it. We put another twenty cents in and clicked the nozzle open. It was a nozzle like those found on petrol pumps but, unlike petrol pumps which deliver more the harder you squeeze the trigger, this one was either on or off. We had no way of telling when the green light would have come on if it had been visible but when the water came it delivered the thirty litres in a matter of ten seconds or so and it was a terrifying experience. It so shocked me as it blew back at me from out of Erasmus’s tank that I dropped the nozzle and its flexible pipe on the ground where, in this parched piece of paradise, there was a muddy bog where other people had done the same as me. By the time I regained my composure and washed the mud off the nozzle the invisible green light had gone out and cut off the supply. We put another twenty cents in the slot and this time I waited with the trigger open and the nozzle facing up the road. The jet of water, when it came, reached for more than nine meters which is the length of Erasmus. I’m glad we weren’t just trying to fill the kettle.

When we left Coober Pedy and drove north we could see the extent of the opal mining. It’s no longer guys with picks and shovels doing their own small time thing. It’s a sizeable industry with machinery scattered all over the land as far as the eye can see. Great heaps of white tailings went on for forty kilometres and went back more than a kilometre from the road in some places. It was a disorganised, slapdash looking blot on the landscape and I wondered at a country that has so much land and such a minute population that it allows people to do this without a thought for coming generations who may find a use for it. How can we deserve it if we can’t respect it?

It was in Coober Pedy that I came into the closest contact I had yet had with Aboriginals and I’ve been confused by the thought of them fitting into white society, or otherwise, ever since. I recently completed two years of Aboriginal studies at university and, although I knew that what I did there was all theory I thought I understood more about them than I did. In Coober Pedy I first saw their close affinity with the land in the sense of them wanting to actually sit on it. I was to see this in Alice Springs later where I talked to a group of three middle aged Aborigines (middle age for an Australian Aborigine is ten years younger than that of a white Australian) and they preferred to sit on the earth than on the brand new seats in the park. I think that sitting on the earth is actually part of their attachment to the land.

We embarked on yet another day full of sod all, slowly sneaking inexorably towards Ayres Rock. The highlight of the day was probably crossing the half dozen or so dry creek beds that went under the road. In the creek beds a few good looking trees grow which makes a nice change from the relentless drabness of the scrub. To be fair, the scrub did vary in height from about knee high to something in the order of three metres but I didn’t need a whole day’s worth of it – again. The next day things picked up. The scrub got higher and greener, much greener, due to the rain which fell for most of the day and had been falling for a week before we got there.

But there was something else. Cows. Yes, cows. Not the hollow sounding moohy type cows you see in dairy farmer’s paddocks. No, these were the hollow bodied cows you see at the side of the road after an encounter with a road train. When road trains hit cows they go up in the air and land in all sorts of peculiar attitudes just like you see animals doing in kids cartoons on TV. Sometimes they land with their legs splayed out in four different directions. The last thing that goes through a cows mind before a road rain hits it is often its arse. It’s a most undignified way for a cow to go but no less so than to hear all its buddies in the abattoir being slaughtered as it awaits its own turn. In such a dry climate the cows dry out and are hollow inside. The only native things I’ve seen trying to eat them are the eagles but their beaks are no match for the cows’ hides. Some cows land like the horse in Picasso’s Guernica and I got to thinking about his bulls. Picasso was Spanish by birth and, although he lived in France for most his life, he never could get the bullfight out of his psyche. Bulls crop up again and again in all his periods. I thought that if it was good enough for Picasso to think bulls for extended periods of time it might be good enough for me too and take the boredom out of driving for a while.

I began stopping and taking photographs of them from different angles and wondering how Picasso would have held his digital if it were him. I studied them at night and thought I just might be able to start the next arty photography book craze – empty cows. Yeah…….I’ll call it Holy Cow and go looking for a non vegetarian publisher. Look for it in a book shop near you next year some time.

The next day I went looking for cans of spray paint so that I could sign all these hollow cows with famous artist’s names or write names like daisy or Clarabell on them. Of course it was futile. There were only two roadhouses the next day and neither of them sold spray paint. Still, I wasn’t going to be put off and determined to try in Alice Springs where, I was told, half the population was sniffing cans of the stuff.

I had always imagined that Ayres Rock was just out of Alice Springs by a few kilometres but it’s not. It’s some three hundred kilometres west down the Lasseter Highway and the turn off from the main road is a couple of hundred kilometres before “The Alice.” I was disappointed as it meant a day’s extra tedious driving to get in there and another to get out. Nevertheless, having come this far we couldn’t go past it so we turned left and kept going until we found a roadside stop for the night. For dinner we had kangaroo meat cooked in the pressure cooker for twenty minutes with a little dried rosemary and oregano. It was simply delicious and fell to pieces it was so tender.

I pondered on how unusual it was for any people to be tucking into their national emblems for dinner. Americans don’t eat eagles for dinner do they? Kiwi Kiev doesn’t sound right and try finding a recipe for Unicorn.

A right turn of the Lasseter Highway before Ayres rock brought us to Kings Canyon which we’d never heard of but which the guide books said shouldn’t be missed. We arrived there at about seven thirty in the morning all prepared for a three hour walk preceded by what the Lonely Planet guide book said was a difficult climb up to the canyon rim.

The sight that greeted our eyes was palpably pulchritudinous. Pert pointed pinnacles pugnaciously punched their way through the morning mist that hung in plumes over the primitively pedantic canyon walls.

In the car park a pandemic of puerile pensioners posed for pictures and pointedly poo-poohed the peregrinators pacing the path towards the foot of the hill where the walk began while the punters who partook, purposefully pulled on Paddy Palin ponchos and plodded painfully past the starting post.

Standing resolute, the ramparts of rusty red rocks ran rapturously like raging runnels, receding rapidly into regions unknown. And as far as the eye could see marvellous mesas mellifluously melded magnificent mountains into beautiful buttes. This bloody word processing program gets stuck on words beginning with P sometimes. Anyway, Kings Canyon – shit it was good. Magnificent mountains, gorgeous gorges.

The walk around the rim was stunning and the vertiginous chasms, all in the popular red rock that abounds in those parts, were so deep you could spit and never see where it landed. Isn’t it funny how people like to spit from railway bridges and hotel balconies?

The climb up to the canyon rim was as difficult as the guide books said it would be and most people paused to get their breath back several times during the ascent. The rock wasn’t bouldery or jagged but sort of flakey as though Zeus or the Rainbow Serpent had cast a heap of stone tablets down. Stone tablets, mountains? My mind was off again. I was ahead of Clare as I struggled up over the rim on hands and knees. An elderly couple stood in front of me leaning on sticks. I picked myself up and dusted myself off and looking at the husband said

“Excuse me; you haven’t see God up here have you?”

They stared at me

“You know, he’s a big guy with a beard and long hair”

They didn’t move a muscle

“Only, I have an appointment you see. I’ve got to write out these commandments. Got plenty of stone tablets.”

“No, we haven’t seen……. Anybody unusual.. at all really….have we?” He said looking to her for backup. She nodded and, thinking the action may be misconstrued, shook her head vigorously.

Clare’s head had just emerged over the canyon rim and I yelled to her “I think we’ve got the wrong mountain again” and walked of muttering “I could have sworn this was Sinai.”

We saw the couple three more times as we wandered around up there but each time they made sure to look the other way. In the afternoon we went for another walk but this time on the floor of the canyon following the creek which was flowing with more gusto than its usual trickle owing to the unseasonable rains that had been falling over the previous week or so. The Northern Territory, while we’d been there, had experienced record low temperatures and had had the most rain since 1968. Immediately before the start of our canyon floor walk Clare read one of those notice boards that tells you what kind of shoes to wear and what not to do. Next to it was a blurb about a toad that lives in Central Australia and I read it. When there’s going to be an extended drought this disgusting little sod blows a load of mucus bubbles out of its mouth cocooning itself in a heavy slime and buries itself down deep in the sand. There it goes into a sort of trance-like hibernation where it can stay for years until there’s a big rain. Then it comes up and lays its eggs and another toad fertilises them and the toadpoles hatch and they grow into more little toads and some of them fall prey to snakes and those that don’t, go on to participate in the miracle of life that’s kept these toads doing this for millions of years. On the twenty fourth of May 2005 one of these toads finally emerged above ground to take part in the miracle of life after being buried underground for probably twenty years – and I stood on it! I didn’t mean to. I just stepped back from the notice board and heard it make a small “eek” sound. I looked down and saw it breathing its last under my boot. I didn’t want the people who’d been reading the blurb at the same time as me to see it so I stood there until after they’d gone. Then I took a good look at it and it and positively identified the corpse from the illustrations on the board.

If you’re in a recreational vehicle of any sort in Outback South Australia or the Northern Territory all the other drivers of recreational vehicles wave to you. And there are hundreds of them every day. The further north you get the less enthusiastic the waves but they, or their front passengers, still manage to raise a couple of fingers from the wheel. Sometimes it’s the husbands who do the driving and the wives who do the waving but I just got fed up with doing it. After the first couple of hundred I couldn’t be bothered but you have to keep it up in case you’re on your way out of an attraction like Ayres Rock and you break down after not acknowledging someone who was on their way in. You worry that they may go straight past you without stopping to help you on their way out.

I’ve been working on a clever device for a couple of weeks now that takes all the hard work out of waving and, at the same time, provides entertainment for all the family thus relieving the boredom during long drives. The prototype has four surgical rubber gloves stiffened with varnish in different attitudes. There’s an outthrust palm, a V sign, the finger and a thumbs up sign. These are all aligned along the top of the dashboard and they have 12 volt globes in them. They’re all connected by cable to the cigarette lighter and there’s a four way switch that serves to light up the appropriate hand gesture to suit the occasion. The cable is long enough to be passed to anybody in the car so that all the family can have a go with it.

“Can I give him the finger Dad?”

“No, he’s a road train driver, they’re big blokes son”

“What about this one Dad, shall I give ‘im the wave?”

“No. son, he’s Asian. We give them the finger”

You see, it’s educational as well.

After another mind numbing day’s drive we finally got to Ayres Rock or Uluru as it’s now known. Nothing could have adequately prepared us for it. We walked around the base of it and both agreed that it was one of the best things we’d ever done at home or abroad. Before we walked around it though, we drove around it and quickly saw that ninety percent of all the postcards on sale only show one aspect of it in which it appears as one amorphous blob showing up in different colours.

In actual fact The Rock is a much more interesting lump than these commercial views show it to be. The reason that the popular pictures of it are all taken from one or two aspects is that the sun sets or rises on those two sides of it. The changes of colour are best seen from those angles but Uluru has many different faces and facets that are far more interesting. We didn’t know it had so many large trees at the base of it. These don’t show in commercial photographs because they’re taken at a great distance so as to get the whole of the Rock in the view finder. As we walked around the base of this stupendous red lump it was easy to see why it so impressed the Aborigines that all sorts of creation legends became associated with it. It’s hundreds of kilometres away from anywhere and to get to it they had to walk over country that’s flatter than Kylie Minogue so it absolutely dominates the landscape. The Rainbow Serpent is said by the Aborigines to live in one of the permanent pools at the base of the Rock. I don’t believe it but it makes just as much sense to me as virgin births and blokes feeding five thousand people on five loaves and two small fishes. That reminds me; all of the paintings I’ve seen of the Feeding of the Five Thousand don’t show frying pans or people scraping the scales off fishes. The Japanese eat raw fish but God hadn’t invented the Japanese at that stage. In the paintings of the event you never see a bunch of Jewish chefs at the back slogging away at making Gefilte Fish or anything like that. I reckon four thousand nine hundred and ninety eight of the Jews in the audience would just passed up on the raw fish. “Ta very mooch like but, eh, ahm not really ‘ungry I’ll joost ‘ave a crumb thanks – providin’ it’s kosher like.”

Buses disgorged tourists at an astonishing rate and quite a few of their passengers were climbing up the Rock despite all the notices saying that it was a sacred place and the Aboriginal owners would prefer that they didn’t. I thought it most culturally ignorant to do such a thing. How would they like Aborigines abseiling down the spire of Canterbury Cathedral? I’m an atheist but I wouldn’t dream of climbing up Uluru or abseiling down the spires of cathedrals. The Rock gets back at the tourists though. According to the notice board I read thirty six people have died by either falling from it or having heart attacks whilst attempting to ascend or descend it. It could be they were asphyxiated by Rainbow Serpent breath which, I should imagine, is similar to dragons.

Everything I ever heard or read about the Rock changing colours at the drop of a hat is true. My hat blew off and by the time I’d caught the bloody thing and put it back on my head a cloud had blown away from the sun and it had turned a whiter shade of pale. Well, puce actually. When we first approached it, it looked like an enormous decaying box jellyfish. It had a kind of semi translucent appearance with ill defined dark stripes running down it and a load of black spots where the rot was setting in. Early the next morning though, it looked like a giant red fly agaric toadstool just breaking the ground with the stalk yet to emerge.

When we walked around its base some parts of it looked like a Swiss cheese made from Red Leicester. It’s impossible to take a photograph of Uluru that can be considered typical.

For those of you who wish to re-create an Uluru in the privacy of your own kitchens for photographic purposes – here’s what you do.

1. Take half a kilo of Red Leicester and with warm wet hands smooth it into a mushroom shape.

2. Take a pencil and poke six or seven holes in it with the blunt end.

3. Take a hair brush and give it about four downward strokes from top to bottom.

4. With the back of a carving knife make a couple of downward slashes and paint them with strawberry jam.

5. Take two Malteesers, cut them in half and press them randomly, round end first, into the Red Leicester.

6. Mount on a piece of yellowy brown Masonite (rough side up) sparingly sprinkled with dry lawn clippings and with a macro lens click away.

Filters are the best way to create the changes in colour but if you can’t afford them hang different coloured pieces of cellophane around the kitchen light globe.

One thing struck me about all the geological information on display in large illustrations on notice boards about how Uluru, the Olgas, Kings Canyon etc. were formed. I wondered how it affected what the Aboriginals believed about their creation stories, legends and myths. Their religious beliefs are largely based in the land and its features and how things like Uluru were created. I wondered how their beliefs are standing up to all this scientific, factual information right there in their faces on their own land. Of course, Christians, Muslims and Jews, for example, can choose whether to believe all that stuff about the world being created by God in six days or decide that it’s bunk and believe in evolution. But what of the Aborigines? All this scientific and geological knowledge evolved slowly in the old world but here it has been suddenly thrust upon the Aborigines whose religion and culture are so interwoven that they can’t be separated. Thus, an attack on their religion represents a tandem attack on their culture. Uluru and all the other public attractions in the landscape of the Northern Territory, display information on notice boards blatantly contradicting what the Aboriginal inhabitants have believed for millennia. I wonder what this information does to the social fabric of Aboriginal society when a kid tells his elders that what they believe is a load of crap.

The first night we spent at Uluru we set up at the roadside in a little industrial suburb where the concrete is mixed and the busses repaired. It wasn’t much of a place to be for any length of time but it served our purposes which were to sleep and have breakfast before going out to the Olgas the following day. At one thirty in the morning a security guard came and told us to either go to the Caravan Park or head out of town by a minimum of ten kilometres. I said that he was welcome to fine me but he said that either he would escort me to the caravan park or I would be charged with trespassing first thing in the morning. The whole area of Uluru, he said, was private property owned by the Aboriginals but managed by a company and they were very particular about not having campers and caravanners littering the place. We drove twenty five kilometres out of town before we came to the first roadside stop where we could pull in for the night and we went back there for the next three nights. Under normal circumstances there are thousands of hectares of available camping space at the roadsides but we were visiting the area at a time when high rainfall records were being broken right across the Territory and the edges of the roads were too soft to cross.

One welcome thing about visiting Uluru was being able to catch up on a little civilisation for a brief period. The resort had a decent supermarket, newsagency, post office, bank and all those things that we didn’t know we’d been missing. I’d been missing cappuccinos and seeing younger people.

The Olgas are some fifty kilometres from Uluru on a sealed road and, like Uluru, they dominate their surroundings. As you approach them they seem to stay distant for a long time and then suddenly swell up in front of you in the middle of the road. They’re equally as impressive as the Rock, perhaps more so. They’re unquestionably more interesting in shape and a lot lumpier. There’s a big difference in their make up however. The Rock is a homogeneous thing made from the one substance whereas the Olgas are conglomerate. No, I don’t know what homogeneous means either I was just trying to impress. The Olgas are big and smooth looking but when you get close to them you can see that they’re composed of a load of big stones held together with a red mud that has hardened into rock by a process I don’t understand and, if I could, I’m sure wouldn’t be able to annunciate.

We’d come to the Olgy Poos for the three hour walk which seems to be something of a standard time for advertised walks in the Northern Territory. In the car park a remuda of rambunctious, red necked Rambos rabidly readied themselves for the three hour walk. Oh shit! This word processor’s stuck on Rs now. Maybe the Olgas present a better all round experience than the Rock. They’re different and we were unable to choose between them. The walk around the Rock was flat but with the Olgas walk you get to walk between them, through great chasms of rounded rock and across little streams. Once inside the visitor comes across flowering shrubs and plants in the valleys growing in their own little micro climates. What most impresses one is, again, the sheer immensity of these huge rounded red snot bubbles oozing up from the flatness of the plains. We took over eighty digital photographs on our Olga walk.

For those not fortunate enough to be able to experience the real feel of the Olgas any time soon but still wanting to partake of the same photographic experience we had; here’s what to do:

1. Take five kilos of sweet potatoes and cook with the skins on.

2. Randomly rub away about five percent of the skin and arrange them like a bunch of dahlia tubers on your kitchen table.

3. Finely chop two leaves of red lettuce and poke it into the clefts between the sweet potatoes.

4. Take seven or eight sprigs of fresh dill about a centimetre in length and jam them also into the clefts in the sweet potato tubers.

5. Mount on a piece of yellowy brown Masonite (rough side up) sparingly sprinkled with dry lawn clippings. Use ¼ second at f8 with a paper tissue over the flash to diffuse the light.

For the time being I’d had enough of rocks. It may well have been a geologist’s paradise but there’s a limit to how many phenomenal rock formations I can take in, in any one week. I said to Clare “if I have to put up with one more incredibly riveting rocky experience I’m gonna throw up.”

We girded up our loins and split for Alice Springs.

Chapter 6

2007-12-31T19:19:00.003-08:00

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER SIX

From Uluru to Alice Springs was another dayful of bugger all. Calling upon all my descriptive powers I could never make this tedious, repetitive scenery into anything readable although I’m sure many authors are capable of doing just that. With the exceptional amount of rain the countryside had soaked up over the past two weeks things were greening. Perhaps the red earth would soon be more lookable if the emerging green tinge would carry on emerging. The James ranges which we drove through would have maybe seemed worth looking at if we hadn’t already seen so much in a similar vein. It had been a full fortnight since we’d seen a native animal from the cab although Clare had seen two camels. People told us that when there was plenty of feed following the rains the animals didn’t venture near the road. They weren’t missing anything.

The bush (there are actually several of them) was undergoing a regenerative phase. I had spoken to a ranger back at the Olgas who told me that the native shrubs and trees have big lignotubers under the ground. I was impressed. I thought they were woodwind instruments. According to Mr Ranger Sir what you see above ground with these plants is only two thirds of the whole planty scheme of things. They’re designed by David Bellamy (or was it the Rainbow Serpent?) so that the top can burn and the real heart of the thing, which is underground, just carries on as though nothing has happened. These ligno what’sits are big. Mr. Ranger Sir said they can be “about as big as …oooh let me see…half a small car I suppose?” When we stopped for a pee and tea break in a place utterly indistinguishable from anywhere we’d seen in the past eight hours of driving, we could see the old lignos at work. We’d come past hundreds of kilometres of dead shrubs varying in height between a metre and three times that. Now, as we looked at the bases of these shrubs almost every one was sprouting anew from under the ground. I think that if we’d made our trip perhaps a fortnight after Lignotuber Revival Week we’d have seen a vastly different panorama.

Through the swish of the windscreen wipers Alice Springs came into view slowly. It wasn’t like the Olgas that suddenly sprang out at us from behind the nothingness. The Alice is not a small place. It has a permanent population of twenty five thousand souls, the overwhelming majority of which are attached to bodies.

We drove around town looking for a Laundromat. The weather had been so wet that we hadn’t been able to do any washing for a long time and I’d taken to marking my underpants with Textas on all the sides I’d used – right way round, back to front, inside out front and back. The town seldom sees rain and suffers from temperatures in excess of forty degrees Celsius for weeks on end. Drying the washing in this climate doesn’t normally present a problem but on this day all the people who didn’t have dryers were in the Laundromat. Some were from cattle stations and came with ten bin liners full of washing. There was segregation in the laundrette too. Grey nomad travellers occupied one corner patiently waiting to use the dryers. At the opposing end were the aboriginal women hypnotically watching their washing spin around. The middle ground was held by the white cattle station wives with kids that found it necessary to kick and punch each other. Their mums, used to the wide open spaces where sound doesn’t echo, shouted at them at the tops of their voices and smacked the backs of their legs. It took us three hours to get our meagre odds and ends washed and back in place but it was worth it just to be able to go to sleep with the smell of washing detergent again.

Alice Springs is a surprisingly sophisticated place and I’d like to take the population of Coober Pedy there so they could see what could be done with the shit hole they inhabit. If Coober Pedy is about opals then Alice Springs is about Aboriginal art. The town is covered in it. Some of it good, some excellent but most “mediochre.” We could probably have stayed there for a couple of weeks going out on day trips and have filled every day. It has a good pedestrian mall with upmarket shops and restaurants where you can sit outside and enjoy a coffee with a little people watching thrown in. We didn’t actually see any little people though. The tourists come from all points of the globe and wander up and down the mall threading themselves in and out between the local Aboriginal populations.

Some of the art shops - and there are many - are stylish. They sell three thousand dollar paintings, expensive didgeridoos and necklaces and so forth and the goods are top class. To authenticate some of the more expensive items they have the artist visit the shop and have their photograph taken with the piece they’ve created; often pictured actually signing the back of the painting. As you go through the paintings the artist’s picture is attached to each one. I was struck by three things. The first being that the Aborigines, who have created all these paintings and object d’art, aren’t the one’s selling them. There’s a lot of money changing hands in the art shops of Alice Springs but it’s all done by white people and not necessarily by Australians. I heard a variety of accents among the art shop proprietors there.

I don’t get it. I don’t see why Aborigines aren’t in the shops selling their own wares in upmarket, sophisticated surroundings. Perhaps they don’t want to but if that’s not the case what if they all went on strike? If they cut off supply a lot of Alice Springs would have to go into immediate hibernation. The whole town sells itself on its Aboriginality. Hoardings everywhere invite the visitor to buy Aboriginal, to take trips to places with names like ‘Corroboree Rock” etc. etc. Book shops sell books about Aboriginal art, customs and bush tucker ad infinitum but it’s all being done by whites.

The second thing that struck me was the subservient attitude of the Aboriginal artists when they entered the shops to sell their paintings and the patronising attitude that was returned to them by the shop owners. I heard shop owners speaking to their colleagues and customers about the artists as though the person standing in front of them wasn’t there and using expressions such as “bless her.” The third thing in relation to the art scene in Alice Springs was the number of female artists photographs I saw attached to paintings depicting the artist with a split lip or a black eye.

In the shopping centre we had to pay fifty cents each to use the toilet. The purpose behind the high price was to put this rather pedestrian pee-hole out of the range of the Aboriginals. I used the internet service at the library while we were in town and was charged six dollars per hour for it. South Australian libraries offer the service free! We also visited the Alice Springs Desert Park. It’s crap – don’t go there. The small trees, shrubs and plants in the place looked identical to the stuff we’d been driving through and, in my case, peeing into for days. I couldn’t tell the difference.

This town that Neville Shute wrote so lovingly of sits in the middle of the east and west McDonnell ranges which are just another long line of craggy hills for geologists to get excited about and for people like me to drive past. The McDonnells are thin, two dimensional mountains rather like the backs of stegosaurs. From some angles, and at some times of day, they look like a nose to tail procession of marine iguanas with the fins on their backs erect. Those of you wishing to replicate the McDonnells at home should:

1 Take a fresh Swiss Roll and squash it between your hands, making a pointed ridge at the top.

2 With your fingers splayed, push down a little on the ridge so that you end up with a series of fairly uniform humps and hollows.

3 Airbrush the bottom half of the Swiss Roll with a little Indian Red.

4 Mount your Swiss Roll in the middle of a flattened, rusty forty four gallon drum sprinkled with dried grass clippings

You’ll find the strata thus created by the jam in the Swiss Roll is nigh on an exact replica of the McDonnell Ranges. The difference in size between the Swiss roll and the flattened forty four gallon drum will give you an idea of the size ratio of the ranges to the plains they reluctantly inhabit.

Alice Springs was for us a stop where we could load up at the supermarket and get a few things done that hadn’t been possible for a few weeks due to the lack of goods and services in the fairly remote places we’d been passing though. I went to the hairdressers and got myself a number seven. I can’t keep up with things like numbers for haircuts. It wasn’t that long ago when, if you’d walked into a hairdresser’s and said you wanted a number two, they’d have told you to bugger off or shown you to the toilet. I suppose the numbers start at zero and anything below that would mean having skin taken off your scalp? I have no idea where the numbers end. What number would a Rastafarian haircut be? Probably about ninety I reckon. I know I’m not allowed to ask for a sixty nine but I’ve still got a lot to learn. I seem to remember a thirty seven from years ago though; for some reason I associate it with lychees and ice cream. Now there’s an idea. Chinese restaurants could get together with hairdressers and offer mystery nights where you can buy tickets with numbers from one to ten. You’d buy a number seven ticket which you’d present at each establishment and compare the experience with your mates down at the hospital afterwards.

By now the weather was raining so consistently that we decided we’d have to use The Alice as a base for a while and go out on two day sojourns coming back in when if the weather really got bad and roads became impassable due to creeks in flood. We stocked up with food at Woolworths and headed for the East MacDonnells. The fairly regular dips in the ridges of this long line of mountains has, in a few places, been broken by rivers forming the famous gorges that became sacred site for the Aboriginals and, later still, tourists attractions for everyone else.

There are probably about a dozen of them all told and I guess we went to half of them. Each had an entirely different ambience and none were a disappointment. They’re mostly in national parks with names like Simpsons Gap or Glen Helen Gorge but the odd one is on private property and they charge an entrance fee. One such was called Standley Chasm where I asked the woman behind the counter “how much would you charge an old man to look at your chasm?” She looked at me stony faced and said “We don’t ‘ave no concessions ‘ere.”

I shouldn’t gloss over the gorges with frivolity. They’re all spectacular and they all have different types of rock formations. Their sandy bottoms have taken millions of years to create by slowly wearing down the rocks in the ranges. This, all the more mind boggling when one considers that some of the rivers that wore the rocks down only flow for a few days a year. That makes them much older than God and … just as wrinkled.

Hermannsburg Mission is out that way. An incongruous dispersal of whitewashed, German stone buildings; they looked as if they’d just fallen from the sky onto the wrong continent. It was a Lutheran mission that set out to civilise the Central Australian Aborigines back in the 1870s. A small procession of German pastors had worked themselves ragged in their misguided callings for decades to no real, lasting avail. Pastor Albrecht, who came in the early 1920s was, I think, the last. Albrecht was born, educated and raised to a debatable maturity in Russian occupied Poland and so would have been familiar, no doubt, with what the job west of Alice Springs entailed.

He was lame and his peer group didn’t seem to want to have much to do with him. He was a social misfit who did badly at school and was crazy about God. Seven other pastors had refused the Hermannsburg position before Albrecht applied for it. They were glad to get him – or anyone. He was a thoroughly nice man who believed implicitly that he was engaged in his God’s calling. He never once stopped to consider that he could have got it wrong; he didn’t need to, he knew he had it right - God told him. He was guilty of blinkered vision and universally, across space and time, should be roundly condemned for his failure to use the brain his God so thoughtlessly furnished him with. He was guilty of not bothering to think about or question what he was doing. His religion was, in his mind, right and the religions of the Aboriginals wrong. The conceited prick.

These days the Mission is a tourist attraction. It’s very attractive and the whitewashed Germanic church and outbuildings set among gum trees and date palms provides some rare photo opportunities. In the early 1980s the Mission and the land were handed back to the rightful owners who now employ white staff to manage it and earn them money from it. It’s fenced off and the windows are all barred to stop the owners getting into it and, presumably, despoiling it. I can’t see why the Aborigines can’t run it themselves. There’s a little village full of Aborigines at Hermannsburg where their parents and grandparents were born and I’m sure that tourists would like to be shown around by people whose forefathers had built the place and tended its gardens and sung the German version of All things Bright and Beautiful. There are reasons why the Aborigines at Hermannsburg don’t run their own show just as there are reasons why we didn’t see Aborigines employed on the land they own at Uluru in anything but menial positions. I just don’t know what they are. Is it that the system has failed to give them the right sort of education? Is it that the present crop of parents isn’t very good at parenting because they were stolen from their parents? Is it because they just don’t want to? Why is it that in the USA so many black people occupy such high positions in government or as film stars, entertainers, mayors of cities, presidential candidates etc. and Australian Aborigines here in their own country don’t.

Something in the back of my mind has been nagging me on this subject for a long time. Just why it is that American Negroes, the descendants of slaves, have done so well in comparison to our Aborigines? Perhaps we’ve killed our Aborigines with kindness? By this I mean welfare kindness. The white Americans gave their black Negro population little in the way of welfare compared with white Australians. American blacks had to fight for what they got and through fighting retained, and indeed further developed, a sense of pride through gaining in adversity. The majority of Australian Aborigines, by contrast, received at least their subsistence for doing nothing. Where was the incentive to get up off their butts and grow?

This is all my own home baked theory with a little bit of education on the subject thrown in. It’s a political hot potato and I’ll be pulled to bits for saying what I’ve said. It’s unthinkable to many that anyone should say that the invading marauding whites have killed the Aboriginals with kindness. Nevertheless I think it may be true. There are far more questions on the subject than answers out there. I hope by the end of our trip that Clare and I will have found some answers to these questions.

A few weeks back a fellow traveller told me that there was something basically wrong and deficient in a people who had lived on a continent for forty thousand years and didn’t have a single pyramid [or something of a similar ilk] to show for it. He was as guilty of not thinking as was pastor Albrecht. Had the Aborigines built a pyramid, what would they have done with it? They could have sat around it and starved to death but that’s all. The fact is that all civilisations that build fixed settlements are unable to do so until they can grow more than they can eat. When that can be done the surplus allows for a sedentary way of life where people can build things they couldn’t have carried with them when they were nomads.

What could the Aborigines have grown? So far the white invader settlers have failed to locate a single Australian staple crop. Nothing on the Australian continent is cultivatable to the point where a settled population can exist on what it grows let alone put a surplus in store for harvest failures. So far the Macadamia nut is the only Australian crop commercially cultivated by white people but that was first achieved by the Americans who took it to Hawaii to develop it.

Now, let us for a minute imagine that there had been a cultivatable, staple crop here in Australia – what would the Aborigines have used to pull the plough? Since 1788 when the white invader settlers first came here to till the land they haven’t domesticated a single Australian animal. Sure, they’ve tamed a few but where are the herds?

Few white Australians have ever stopped to consider that what they will eat over the course of their whole lives will have originated in other continents. Without the animals and plants they brought with them they couldn’t have developed any further than the Aborigines who managed to exploit everything exploitable on the continent.

In Alice Springs we came across a really excellent bookshop that specialises in books about Central and Aboriginal Australia. There were books there that I’d never seen elsewhere and on the subject of Australian Aborigines it had more information on its shelves than the University of Tasmania’s School of Aboriginal Studies. The elderly lady proprietor of the shop also stocks paints for the local Aboriginal artists and she watches them like a hawk as they wander through her premises. Nobody can put one over on this lady and she has eyes in the back of her head. It’s plain to see that she loves her Aboriginal customers and when they talk to her they lift their eyes up rather than staring at the floor as most of them do when they talk to whites outside on the sidewalk. There we bought Bruce Chatwyn’s Songlines, a book largely about the singing up of the country by Aboriginals as they pass through it. That night when Clare opened it she read that Chatwyn had also been in that bookshop when he was researching his book on Aboriginals. He described both the lady and her shop. The following day we were going into town and Clare called in and asked the lady if she was, indeed, the person mentioned in Songlines. “Yes”, she said, and motioning to a chair by the window said “he used to sit over there.” And pointing quite casually to another chair said “Salman Rushdie sits over there when he comes.”

Her daughter was there when we visited her the second time; a lady probably in her mid sixties who, uninvited, sang us If You Ever Go Across The Sea To Ireland and The Rose of Tralee. The second of which she sang to the tune of The Streets of Laredo. While she was wailing away like a tremulous screech owl her mother was perceptibly wincing. She told us that she and her mother were trying to sell the shop and they intended to buy a house in Adelaide with the proceeds. She said “when I’m there I’ll sing for free for those that don’t have anything. There are so many in the world that have so much and then there are those who have nothing. I’ll sing for those poor souls who have nothing.” She didn’t elaborate and I wondered if she intended to actually sing at the poor people or to sing at some poor unfortunate rich people and give the foreign coins, broken eggs and rotten tomatoes thus collected to the poor.

Something we found very strange during our stay in The Alice was the fact that ABC radio didn’t do weather forecasts. They told us what the temperature was or had been in a few places but never once did they hazard a guess as to what tomorrow’s weather might be like. The rain never really gave up during the time we were in and around the place so we left and hurried north. Three experienced travelling couples had told us that once across the Tropic of Capricorn we could put our shorts on and keep them on no matter whether or not it was raining. Everything in Erasmus was feeling cold and damp by this time. Warm rain sounded like a better proposition to us.

Tenant Creek would be the next town where it might be possible to buy a cappuccino and in between were only roadhouses where the instant coffee, made with bore water, tasted like gorilla piss. I was slowly developing a love/hate relationship with the Australian landscape or, at least, this particular part of the Australian landscape. The love was for the two percent of the time spent looking at and walking around truly spectacular natural rock formations, gorges, canyons and such. The hate was for the ninety eight percent of the flat, unending sameness of the plains in between those attractions. The drive from The Alice north towards Tenant Creek though, was different. What made the difference was the rain I’d been complaining about. Much of this stretch of road had wide gutters at each side so that it looked as though the bitumen was on a causeway. The gutters had collected the rain water which was now gone but in its place the grass had greened. We travelled for mile after mile on a black strip flanked by two green strips like a microbe running along the back of a frog.

There was colour too! Some of the dull boring old scrubby things had yellow mimosa-like flowers on them and these contrasted with the rusty red earth – magic. So, there was a black strip flanked by green strips flanked by yellow strips under which was red earth. The whole experience was like getting lost in a box of liquorice allsorts. There were wildflowers as well but at this stage we didn’t know they were there until we stopped Erasmus and walked away from the road. There weren’t enough of them to carpet the land. They were tiny delicate things you had to get close to before you noticed them. I first came across them when we stopped to decorate our first dead cow.

We’ve founded an organisation called “Belated Bovine Makeovers inc.” and its raison detre is to give dead cows a more dignified send off rather than ending up as a standard flattened leather envelope at the side of the road. Our first makeover was DOT who I think was a Hereford. She had been brown and white. Well, she still was but she used to be an altogether more rounded animal. We located her leg bones and put them roughly in place and sprayed them white as we did with the horns. Then we sprayed her name in white along the bit where the spare ribs used to be. We finished her off with gold spray around the edges and teeth. We took before and after photographs and I’m hoping the idea will catch on when this book is published. The photographic essay will appear in book form as soon as I can convince a publisher that it’s a really good idea and that lots of sane people will be queuing up to buy a copy. The book may be called Dead Cows & Dead Cars of the Australian Outback. The reason for this is that we’ve also been taking pictures of the many dead cars we see along the sides of the roads. Were convinced they’re stolen because they’re always behind bushes about thirty metres from the hard shoulder where most car drivers won’t notice the thieves stripping them of their engines and other parts. If we’d been in a normal family car we wouldn’t have seen so many of them but Erasmus is basically a truck and the seats are high off the ground.

One of the roadhouses along the way was at a place called Aileron which I thought was a strange name for a roadhouse. When we got out of the van there was a big, good looking eagle looking at us from the other side of a cyclone wire fence. Its plumage was perfect and it had lovely feet, all clean and wrinkled. He was surrounded by the remains of past meals of kangaroo legs and he had a really soft high pitched chirp which we thought was most un-eaglelike. The guy who served us told me that his name was Bozo and that he was bionic. Bozo the Bionic Eagle sounded great, just like the name of a comic strip. He said that Bozo had seven pins in his right wing, four pins in his left wing and a synthetic chest. I didn’t know what to say in reply to this information. I just said “better not let him get near a magnet then.”

Besides Bozo the Bionic Eagle there was only one attraction worth speaking of between Alice Springs and Tenant Creek. Another unusual and spectacular fucking rock formation. I mean, like, if you’re not into rock formations don’t take a vacation in Outback Australia.

These particular rocks were called The Devils Marbles. Funny how the Devil gets blamed for things like that isn’t it? I think I’ve seen about a score of Devils mountains in various parts of the world. I feel sorry for the old devil sometimes. I think the poor old bugger’s had a very bad press. Everybody who wants to see the Dev’s Marbs tries to get there for sunset and everybody did. The car park was a sea of caravans and grey hair. They all stayed the night sharing their wine casks around their fires and their noisy generators.

The Devils Marbles are made of something geologically unusual or incongruous - you can bet your arse. I didn’t bother reading the information boards but that’s what they would have said for sure. And then there would have been a load more information about how some Rainbow Serpent or Bunyip or some such mythical creature in the Dreamtime dropped all these rounded rocks from the sky when they were infertile because he was being chased by some nasty bastard called Manalargenagooblybum or Wooragglyfingerburnum or whatever. I find myself saying “for Christ’s sake grow up. Don’t you know everything was created in six days out of bugger all by God who had a day off when it was finished? Anyone can see that this is where God used to pick his nose. They’re not the Devils Marbles, they’re God’s Bogies. And as for rainbow Serpents – it’s patently ridiculous.

Now, where was I? Oh yes. Sorry about that. I’ve a feeling I’m becoming obsessed. The marbles, yes, the….marbles. The marbles are a whole bagful of, I suppose, a thousand or more either spherical or rounded lumps of rock that have, through some freak of nature, become precariously balanced one atop the other, over a large chunk of landscape. They could be spread over a square mile or so but I’m not very good at judging these things. They’re very nice to look at especially when you’ve had fuck all else to look at for six hours. Having said that, you’d probably give them the once over if they were on your way to work. And whilst on that subject, how come none of these bloody great Australian rock formations are on the way to work for 99% of Australia’s population? How come there’s nothing like the Olgas or Uluru or the Devils Marbles in the suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne where they could take your mind off the fact that the missus always looks the bleedin’ same when you’re on your way to work in the morning? Perhaps the Devil really did make these things just to inconvenience people. I think it’s pretty Devilish to make people drive all that way to see them.

The Devils Marbles probably just got piled on top of each other by glacier or an iceberg that drifted in when the place was under water and then melted afterwards. I don’t now. It was an iceberg that sank the Titanic though wasn’t it? Bloody Jews – Iceberg, Goldberg, Greenberg what’s the difference? I’ve often wondered whether or not there were any Chinese Jews and I found out last year when Clare and I went to China on vacation. I asked our guide when we were having a smorgasbord breakfast in a hotel we stayed at in Shanghai. “Tell me. Are there any Chinese Jews?” I said. “I don’t fink so no.” He said. “They got up there only the orange jews and pineapple jews.”

Now, the Devils Marbles. Marvellous really, especially at sunset. They’re big and you can walk around them and between them and some have sizeable trees growing in crevices between them. They’re a bit like Uluru and the Olgas of course in that they aren’t jagged at all but rounded and feminine. They’re a bit like Henry More sculptures but without the holes. I suppose they’re more like the exaggerated cannon ball buttocks of some of the Picasso beach paintings. Yes, sort of Earth Mother buttocks, breasts and bellies but not of the ilk of those lollopy, potato fed, Russian women that bask in their nineteen fifties underwear on the banks of the Volga. These are sort of firm and Mediterranean and sun tanned and the bushes that grow in the crevices are like pubes.

For those of you who wish to create the Devils Marbles in the privacy of your own back yards for photographic purposes, here’s what to do.

Take twenty seven kilos of new potatoes washed but not peeled or scraped.

Roast them in cheap Dick Smith canola oil for thirty five minutes at 220 degrees Celsius.

When cooled take six boxes of cheap Dick Smith Dick Head matches and push them half way into half the potatoes.

Take the other half of the potatoes and join them in random bunches to the first half utilising the half matches that are protruding.

Push the joined potatoes together in twenty seven random heaps

Take a few sprigs of parsley and press these into the cleavages between the roast spuds.

Place the whole installation on seventeen rusty flattened forty four gallon drums sprinkled with lawn clippings.

We stayed the night at the Devils Marbles and managed to get away before the rush for the iron lung started. We continued in an upwardly direction towards the elusive Darwin stopping at Tenant Creek which was only a couple of hours up the road. On the way into town we saw a sign inviting us to real coffee and culture so we stopped. The place was called the Nyinkka Nyunyu………No, me neither, but that’s got sod all to do with it.

After the flat whites in the very appealing little bistro set in a desert garden, we tried the cultural bit. That was at eleven in the morning and we didn’t get out of the place until four thirty in the afternoon. Their museum and art gallery was superb. And before you go thinking that I should have said were superb; the museum and art gallery was all in the one room. That’s the way it were.

It was run by the Waramunga people. They’re Aborigines. Waramunga means something if you’re born Waramunga but not to me. There were a couple of continually running videos in which the Waramungas? Waramungese? Waramungwegians? Waramungooses? Warra warra…fuck it, these Aborigines, explained their culture. They did it by going out into the bush and actually doing things like dancing, cutting up and cooking kangaroos, finding underground water, collecting food and honey, using sign language and all sorts of really cool stuff. The videos together with the displays and written information were all first class and it was so good that we lost track of time. The Aborigines were doing a great job in Tenant Creek and, by comparison, their counterparts in Alice Springs were a sad looking bunch. The Tenant Creek guys had dignity and stood upright, wore clean clothes and looked you in the eye. They still sat in the dirt. They needed to. It felt right.

The next two days were, to use Americas Cup parlance, Lay Days. We were fed up with so much driving and found the Tenant Creek water reservoir and stopped there and read books. It was a beautiful green oasis with toilets and showers. Clare painted a little and I wrote there words I’m writing at the moment. Yes folks, these words are fresh. I don’t think I ever read a totally fresh word in a book before have you? I’m right here sitting in the back of Erasmus in my shorts with my half drunk cup of coffee and a saucer full of prune pits and I’m going to give you a fresh word. Priapism – hows that? Like it? Want another? OK, Wapenshaw. Good eh?

I was sitting outside typing one day last week when a grey haired guy with an overdose of hair cream and a small dog on a lead came up to me and said “excuse me, can I have a quick word?” I said “sure I’ll type you one right away. How about velocity? ” He looked at me a little vacantly. “OK” I said “speed, that’s a quick word.” I smiled. He didn’t and he asked me if I knew any free camping spots in Darwin. I didn’t. He left.

I walked around the Tenant Creek reservoir. Judging by the lack of tracks I don’t think many people have been silly enough to do it before me. What started out as a pleasant little stroll became decidedly unpleasant the further I walked. The little inlets were enchanting and I surprised flocks of wild ducks and solitary white egrets that took to the wing in front of me as I stumbled through the spiky Spinifex. I had to stumble through the spiky Spinifex that grew back from the water’s edge because down near the water were thousands of the fattest bodied spiders I’d ever encountered. The long gossamer strands that anchored their webs to the ground or the low scrub stretched up to around three meters in length and were very tough. The problem with them was that they formed colonies of fifty or so spiders and spun their webs overlapping each other. Despite keeping a keen eye out for them a couple of times I walked into these horrid bundles and it frightened me. I stopped at one point and threw heavy twigs into one of these communal webs and came to the conclusion that they would easily trap a small bird the size of a sparrow. Somebody told me later that they were called St. Andrews spiders because the way they hang in the webs is in the shape of a St. Andrews cross.

It was about five hours out of Tenant Creek at a place called Renners Springs that we pulled out of a roadhouse after refuelling and a road train ran us off the road. It was quite deliberate and from what I’ve heard road train drivers really do regard all other traffic as lesser life forms – they’re the kings. This came a day after our hearing on the news that somebody had been killed in an accident with a road train near Katherine some four hundred kilometres north of where we struck our little problem. We pulled out of the refuelling stop about a kilometre ahead of a huge Volvo road train pulling three or four (in panic we couldn’t count them) trailers. A car was coming towards us about two kilometres away and the road train driver pulled out to overtake us. He could see that the car coming towards us was going at a fast pace but he wasn’t going to slow down and hang in behind us. I watched in the rear view mirror as he pulled out and before his cab was even alongside us he put his left hand indicator on to let me know he was coming in on us. This he did as soon as his cab was past us. He just swung in forcing us off the road with his trailers. We managed to pull up but it was a scary experience and if there’d been a hole in the hard shoulder or it had been soft from all the rain we’d had recently we’d have gone over.

Needless to say, we couldn’t catch him to take a photo of his number plate and he wasn’t stopping. I was somewhat incensed and wanted to report the incident to the police but found them virtually non existent. We called into three police stations along the way and they were all unmanned with telephone numbers to call in emergencies. Stacked up against the murder of Peter Falconio and the like we figured we didn’t rate as an emergency and so it wasn’t until we got to Katherine, a few hundred kilometres further on that I found a manned police station that was able to register our complaint. Services in the bush, it seems to me, don’t need to be that primitive in this day and age. I’d hate to be a lone policeman up here facing some nutter outside the station with a complaint and a gun. It would be hours before you could get help.

When we arrived in Daly Waters, a small settlement on the road north with a famous pub, we began to realise that travelling around Australia was becoming something of a procession. It was at two thirty in the afternoon and most people had already set up camp for the night. The Daly Waters pub was large. The bar itself was quite spacious and decorated with the usual memorabilia in these parts which included Overland Telegraph leftover junk and bits left over from the American military visits of WWII. Above the bar hung various items of female underwear discoloured by cigarette smoke and fly shit. Around the bar were a few open air courtyards where people sat at trestle tables sipping beer. It was a much better pub than most that we’d struck and outside sat a man burning people’s names into ready made slices of wood to hang on their bedroom and toilet doors. It was very popular with the caravanners who marvelled at his skills with the hot bent wire.

To one side of the pub was a caravan park of sorts with a couple of hundred caravans, tents and campervans already set up for the night. When we pulled into it we straight away decided that we’d go look for somewhere else for the night but we stopped the engine and walked over to the pub through the regimented lines of campervans. As in most caravan parks we’d seen the caravans were parked within three metres of each other where the occupants could easily hear one another break wind in the night. As we threaded our way between them six or seven people we’d seen before in roadside stops along the way waved at us. We waved back not sure whether they were just waving flies way or trying to be friendly.

Once in the pub we recognised a few more couples we’d seen before too. When we thought about it we realised that we were all in a grand procession from one beauty spot, or place of interest, to the next. Without a four wheel drive vehicle there are so few places to visit in Outback Australia that everybody is heading where you’re heading and you know you’ll see them again soon. The large capacity water tanks, the generator and the big batteries in Erasmus allowed us to stay away from civilisation for up to five days and sometimes, when we came back into the fold, we’d join the next procession. Wave after wave of white haired pensioners like plagues of rats are out there moving doggedly through the landscape all the time.

This gregarious camaraderie is what people with white hair seek. There’s a security in knowing a bunch of other white haired travellers; kindred spirits on what could possibly be life’s last, or perhaps first, big trip. I reflected on what a wonderful way it was to spend one’s retirement compared with the life of elderly people in most other parts of the world where to retire is to sit around waiting for death whilst being supported by one’s family.

It was also a very different experience to travelling in Europe and the Middle East where, in a past life, I lived in a campervan for a couple of years. There we hardly ever saw anyone at a campsite or place of interest that we’d come across before. There was so much to do and so many interesting places to visit that, although there were many more people travelling around, they went in many more different directions; crossed borders into other countries and so on. The Australian experience, by contrast, involves people travelling much greater distances and visiting far fewer places – natural attractions as opposed to cathedrals, bridges, ancient cities. The camaraderie this Australian way of travelling generates is a bonding thing. People meet other people and become life long friends through it and visit each other in their respective States afterwards.

North from Daly Waters we called in at Mataranka, the next place in the line. A few stragglers from the last procession were pulling out of the car park as we pulled in and I gave them the salutary wave. Mataranka is a special place – and here comes the word. Wait for it. Ready? “Geomorphologically.” I bet you’re impressed. But enough of that shit for the time being. Adjacent to it is a replica of the log cabin that was built to feature in the film We Of The Never Never. I’d heard of it but I always thought it was about hire purchase debt collectors. The film was, however, based on a book by Jeannie Gunn who signed herself Mrs. Aeneas Gunn. Had I been her I would have stuck to the Jeannie. Aeneas Gunn sounds like some surface to air heat seeking suppository device to me. Anyway, starting in 1902 Mrs. Gunn lived for a whole year at Elsey Station which then incorporated what is now known as Mataranka. Her book, We of the Never Never, in which she related her experiences in the Territory, became famous and sold millions of copies. After the year at Elsey Station her husband died and she returned to Melbourne and died there nearly sixty years later. She was a lousy writer but her subject matter was unique at the time and her book became required reading for a generation of Australian schoolchildren. In it she makes mention of the “nigger hunts” her husband. “a kindly man” used to go on.

At the replica of her homestead I read the historical facts on the walls.

“1905-1909 The Arafura company organized hunting parties to kill Aboriginals occupying country wanted for cattle. First missionaries at Roper river (1908) report on whites shooting Aboriginals ”just for fun.”…”

I reference to Aboriginal women it said “Sometimes relations with white men were forced upon them, but there were also enduring and compassionate unions between white men and black women. Children born to these relationships were almost always taken to compulsory Government institutions, to be brought up without family contact.”

“Compassionate” seems not to have extended to the kids of these white men who, by all accounts, didn’t object to the government taking them. Not a grave or memorial exists to any of those “slain for the fun of it” but we did visit the We of the Never Never graveyard. There we saw the graves of most of the characters in Mrs. Gunn’s book as well as a splendid memorial to the lady herself. Some of the white people from the book had been exhumed and re-interred in the graveyard in the interests, I presume, of creating a more fulfilling experience for the tourists; most of whom are of the generation that had the book as a compulsory part of their education and know full well that we Australians don’t need to see niggers graves on our holidays.

Mataranka is a big drawcard in the Northern Territory but Elsey Station is only a part of it. There’s a resort there and it also has a geomorphological wonder going for it. There in the middle of what I think was nowhere there’s an underground spring that pushes up five million gallons of crystal clear hot water every day – even on Sundays. And, it hits the air at thirty four degrees Celsius! I loved it because here was a major attraction that wasn’t a rock formation. We walked down the palm covered walkway. Hundreds of tall, shady Livingstonia palms blocked out the harsh rays of the midday sun. They were absolutely jam packed with hanging fruit bats numbering in their thousands and we hadn’t walked fifty metres into this little forest before Clare had bat shit on her arms. She ran for shelter but I was intrigued at how these big bats hanging upside down could shit on somebody below them without getting it all over themselves. I looked through the zoom lens of the camera at them. I wanted to see if their eyelids were covered in poo or whether they turned right way up, poohed, and then went back to the hanging position again. I didn’t find out before I had to move on too. The Kodak CX6330 digital camera is a fine piece of equipment but once you get a dose of bat excrement on the retractable lens it takes hours to get rid of.

After a short walk we stood beside the thermal pool. My sunglasses misted up immediately and as I squinted through them I thought the resort was doing its washing in there. When I took them off I realised that it was full of people the colour of sheets and badly in need of ironing. We walked on through the forest following the hot stream and came to a landing on a river for swimmers. To get to it you had to go through a little gate on which was a notice from The Parks and Wildlife, Northern Territory. It read: CAUTION, FRESH WATER CROCODILES INHABIT THIS AREA. THEY CAN BECOME AGGRESSIVE AND CAUSE INJURY IF DISTURBED. PLEASE DO NOT APPROACH OR INTERFERE WITH THESE ANIMALS.

I hate signs telling me what to do but I was prepared to go along with it. I hate being told what not to do even more. When I receive those Government forms that say “please do not write in this space” I smear butter on them. If I can’t write on them I’ll make sure no other bugger does.

On the return walk we had to run the gauntlet through batsville again and his time I wanted a picture of one of these big fruit bats in flight because I knew the wings were transparent against the sun and they’d look like rats with wings. We stood around for a couple of minutes waiting for one to take to the air but without luck. Impatiently I picked up a big dead tree branch and asked Clare to hold onto the camera while I beat the trunk of a tree that was full of bats. I hit the trunk once and was about to hit it a second time when all hell broke loose.

Screeching rent the air (not a bad expression that?) and the bats from all the trees took off together. The heavens opened as the runny bat shit rained from the skies like a biblical plague. Pensioners ran shrieking in all directions and we ran, and ran, and ran until we got to the van and took off. It was fully a month later that we pulled into a national park and as we drove towards a gaggle of pensioners and I saw a woman point to us and explain that we were the people who had cause it to rain bat shit. She was pointing up and then at us and then wiping her arms and they all turned to look at us.

We hired a canoe at Mataranka in the late that afternoon and paddled down the Roper River. We left at the same time as a pleasure boat that stopped at various points while the guide explained things that we too were interested in and we hung around his boat like a bad smell getting all the free information. The passengers thought it highly amusing that every time they stopped we’d drift in behind them after a couple of minutes and listen. The guide though, was highly pissed off. After about an hour the pleasure boat turned around and went at a fast lick downstream away from us and put about a kilometre between us. They then disembarked and had their evening refreshments on the river bank. Just as they were getting back into their boat we rocked up and they all began to grin. We paddled up alongside and I hailed the guide. “Excuse me” I said, “do you happen to have a pair of water skis we can borrow? Now that I’m loosened up the missus would like to have a bit of a ski on the way back.” They all laughed so much that the guide had to pretend that he thought it was funny too. The Roper River was lovely, quite exciting. It was lined with pandanus palms and it felt very exotic like going down some great African river hippopotamically challenged though it was. Crocodillically challenged, though, it was not. As we rounded one bend in the river we came upon a big long cage thing. It was very sturdy looking and we paddled up to it to get a better look. At the back of it was hanging a big leg of some animal like, say, a cow. It was a crocodile trap and we were a little concerned that we’d end up vertically challenged if we met up with a crocodile.

When we got back to the kiosk where we’d hired the canoe I asked the ranger about the crocodile trap. He said that in the dry season (winter in these parts) there are only the “timid, harmless” freshwater crocodiles around but when they get to about six feet long they worry the tourists and so they catch them and move them somewhere else. He said that after each wet season they patrolled the river catching any of the dangerous, human eating, crocodiles and removed them to a human-less environment.

Katherine is the next stop in the south to north procession and everybody (there are no exceptions save for locals and truck drivers) goes there to see the Katherine Gorge which is a rock formation with water running through it. On the way there we stopped at the much advertised Cutta Cutta Caves. The brochures made it sound good. These caves are home to thousands of little red flying foxes which have a name like Orange Horseshoe Bats or something similar. We’d just arrived and were reading the information board when a ranger type woman came out of the office and told us that a cave tour had started and that she’d radio the guide who was just outside the cave entrance and get him to hold the tour if we wanted to join them.

We said we did and paid our sixteen dollars each. Once in the cave it turned out to be the worst hole in the ground either of us had ever been in – and in Turkey I once helped a friend to dig a grave! It was just plain boring with hardly any stalag thingies that point up and down and who gives a toss which is which anyway? Something it did have though was common brown tree snakes. We only saw one but the guide assured us that the ceiling and upper walls were thick with them. I couldn’t see why because there were no common brown trees in the cave for a start. About half way through the cave he stopped and said “see those roots hanging from the ceiling, can anybody guess what they are?” “Yes”, I said. “I think they’re the common brown tree roots from up above us.” He then went into a lengthy explanation for my benefit as to why the snake was called what it was.

Now, your common brown tree snake is a wily little devil. A few hundred thousand years ago, when Liberal Party politicians first began wallowing in the primeval slime from which they were never to emerge, brown tree snakes ventured into the Cutta Cutta Caves. There they acquired a taste for the little red flying foxes that cruise through the cave system twice a day at thirty kilometres an hour on their way to and from work. Today, the common brown tree snakes that live in these caves never venture out. They hang off the walls and ceiling with their mouths open catching bats for their meals. It’s a limited diet but one that seems to suffice. Now, can you imagine what it’s like being hit in the mouth with a dinner that’s travelling at thirty kilometres an hour every day? Make your neck ache wouldn’t it? You’d be absolutely starving but still shitting yourself at the thought of having to lean out and grab your next evening meal. To get an idea of what the procurement of the day’s sustenance is like for a common brown tree snake in Cuta Cutta Caves a Japanese restaurant is the place to go - one with a sushi train. There you should get the proprietor to tie your hands behind your back (in the ritual beheading position), turn the sushi train up to maximum speed and suspend your head two centimetres above the belt. Then have the cook place a thirty five kilo lump of hump backed whale meat on a plate and send it in your direction.

The Cutta Cutta Caves tour we went on was a rip off and they can try sueing me for saying so in print. Not only was it a lousy guided tour in the lousiest cave imaginable led by an inane driveller of a guide and there were no bats. I don’t know where or when the bats appear but the lady who conned us into impulse buying the tickets didn’t mention that we wouldn’t be seeing them. Compared with all other attractions we’d so far visited this was the worst value for money rock formation around.

Having wasted our time in the Cutta Cutta Caves we arrived in Katherine a little later than planned and knew we wouldn’t have time to find a free camping spot in the bushes before sundown so we stopped just long enough to steal a tankful of water from the historic railway station. There was a certain type of Aborigine occupying pavement space in Katherine, a particularly attractive type. He’s the fifty or sixty year old long slim, slightly bow legged guy with cowboy boots, a cowboy hat and a neatly trimmed white beard. They’re probably ex stockmen. These guys look so cool I envy them. Like they’d wandered into town to shoot up the Sheriff and were just sitting on the pavement waiting for him to step out of the saloon. When these guys walk they saunter. Anybody who’s seen Lee Marvin in his role as the gunslinger in Cat Ballou can easily bring to mind this kind of guy. Six or seven of them, each to himself, sat easily on the Katherine pavements, the odd one had a piece of grass between his teeth …..reaaaal coool like.

Katherine Gorge was a pleasant surprise for us. We’d pictured it as a big chasm with water in it where you could swim and maybe walk around it. Something we thought would be maybe half a kilometre long. When we finally got there we found it comprised thirteen interconnected gorges that went on for almost twenty kilometres. We took a look at the options before us for the next day and decided it was impossible to choose between two hour, four hour and eight hour cruises plus a number of walks, some going on for days. There were canoes for hire too and some of the canoe trails lasted for three or four days. There was nowhere to park Erasmus but for the national park campground but we managed to get a site away from the madding crowd and turned in early.

As dusk approached we saw flights of fruit bats going past in battalions or batteries or whatever the collective name for bats is. They were going off hunting for the night and we wished them well as the mosquitoes were biting. At precisely four thirty in the morning they returned to their roost. It was in the trees around the toilet block. There they screeched as such a volume that we couldn’t sleep. I looked through the window and saw that everybody else had their lights on too. They’d woken the whole camp. They smelled awfully and they kept up their screeching all day only quieting down just before going out again the next evening. Up to that point it was easily the noisiest camp site we’d been in and we would think twice before going back there. In fact we have thought twice and we’re not. The flying foxes were ruining the trees around the campground but the rangers said they were protected and so would just go on ruining the area to the detriment of campers and, I think eventually, the national park’s income.

We took a four hour cruise which started at eleven am and were glad we hadn’t hired a canoe. There was a very strong head wind whistling up the gorge that would have made hard work of paddling and the guide said that it started at the same time every day. The cruise took us through three of the gorges making it necessary to disembark from our boat and embark on another at two points where the water was low. Richie the guide was an Aboriginal in his early thirties and although he wasn’t of the Jarwon tribe that owned the gorge he’d learned the stories associated with it and kept us entertained. He told us the legends, showed us Aboriginal rock paintings, stopped occasionally and took a leaf from a tree and told us what it was that Aboriginals used it for. He was fun too. He stopped at a number of places and told us the Aboriginal legends of how they were created. He sounded utterly convinced and convincing as he related these stories and then he’d give us the scientific version of events. They weren’t half as romantic. His knowledge of plants was impressive. He knew all the Latin names for them and the chemical substances they contained.

He related to us how, when he was a kid, he and his playmates were on top of a cliff overlooking the Katherine River wishing they could swim in it but knowing their parents had forbidden them to. A couple of horses came down to the bank to drink and suddenly a huge saltwater crocodile lunged out of the water and with a couple of shakes tore one of the horses heads off. Katherine Gorge was a great rock formation, well worth stopping off at. It was basically a vast twisting and turning gash in the landscape about seventy metres across; a towering canyon with a slow moving river running through it. Long spindly Livingstone palms grew in clefts in the canyon walls and here and there were beaches that the canoers stopped at to rest and swim. Richie said that the water was extremely cold and that people jumping into it to cool off sometimes developed cramps and drowned. What was hard to envision was that this great gash actually filled up sometimes during the wet season. I couldn’t have designed a better drain. When the wet approaches the waters rise and the gorge becomes continuous. Then the park rangers are able to get all the boats back to base across the rocky obstructions that divide it into thirteen gorges and moor them safely on land.

We left the gorge after two nights and went into Katherine town to catch up with our emails, buy camera batteries, draw money from the ATM and all those things that you wish you didn’t have to do in order to keep going. We met an Aboriginal girl sitting on a park bench with her two week old baby. He was very cute and I asked his name because I don’t know many Aboriginal names. “He’s Brian” said his mum.

Next stop, Edith falls on the Edith River. It was another rock formation with water. The toilets were good though. Right now I wouldn’t mind seeing a cathedral or something. Australia is empty. We’re not using it. I don’t want to describe another rock formation. I’ll look for something else.

At Edith Falls I decided to charge up the camera batteries but there were no powered sites. The only power point I could find was in the toilet and I plugged in the charger there. I’m red/green colour blind and the charger light glows red until the batteries are fully charged when it switches to green. Sometimes it takes hours to charge all four batteries up and this was one such occasion. I plugged it in before dinner during daylight but visited it a few times and didn’t think the light had changed to green. Clare wasn’t too keen on visiting the men’s toilets with me so I went down there on my own again at about half past nine which was way after dark. I still couldn’t make out what colour the light was and I was walking out of the loo when I spotted a guy walking between caravans.

“Excuse me” I said “Would you do me a favour?”
“I’ll try” he said
“I wonder could you come in here for a minute and see if my charger’s still red.”

He had a London accent and he replied “don’t worry; you’ll go blind before that happens.”

Chapter 7

2007-12-31T19:19:00.001-08:00

A Van Called Erasmus.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The next rock formation and the one after that are not mentioned here. Instead, I’m going to write about hot water. But first, the countryside. It started to pick up enormously when we were a couple of hundred miles out of Darwin. All that stunted scrubby stuff began to give way to taller tortured gum trees with a reddish tinge to their trunks. Salmon gums some people called them. The red ant hills which we’d been seeing for a week or more began to elongate; some topping the two metre mark. The spindly, unhealthy looking wild kapok trees, although almost leafless, displayed their bright yellow blooms. Everything was gradually becoming greener, the grasses taller and the cattle were those Quasimodo type humped backed Brahmin things suited to the tropics. There were palm trees too and they’ve always seemed exotic to me.

And now for the hot water. The place is called Douglas Hot Springs. And everyone should go there. I’ve seen quite a few hot springs in different parts of the world but none holds a candle to these. Again, I wonder why it is that there are no features like this in the seven capital cities that are home to the overwhelming bulk of Australia’s population. Why didn’t the Rainbow Serpent position hot springs like this in Parramatta? There must have been some kind of deal between the Rainbow Serpent and the Pope long ago whereupon it was decided that all the good bits would be put in the middle somewhere out of range of the people.

The river at the Douglas Hot Springs which, in the wet season is a fierce and raging torrent that rips big trees from off its banks, subsides to a beautiful clear running stream by the time the dry season arrives. In a separate channel runs a rivulet of clear hot water and at one point it meets the cold river water channel which is everyone’s favourite spot. The hot water really is hot and comes from a big bubbling pool where, according to the national parks information board heated rain water that has soaked into the earth in days gone by breaks the surface. The hot pool is around a quarter the size of a soccer field and is fringed with Pandanus palms. At night or early in the morning you can’t see the other side of it for steam and it comes out of the ground so hot you can’t bear to stand in it.

Two hundred meters downstream from the pool the heated water is just bearable and there are natural pools and shallows where you can sit awhile before walking across to the river that runs alongside to cool down. Another fifty metres downstream the hot and cold waters come together and sitting in the water there is a very pleasant experience. So pleasant was it that for three mornings in a row we went down there and sat in it before breakfast and didn’t get out until the rush hour started an hour and a half later.

All the other hot springs I’ve seen have either been sulphurous and smelly or have been made into swimming pools but here the waters are sweet and crystal clear and you can just sit on the clean sandy bottom looking up through the tropical trees at the blue sky. Colourful kingfishers and bee eaters flit from branch to branch. White and pink cockatoos circulate in the azure sky above the trees and small stripy fish move constantly in and out of the warm water. It’s a small piece of paradise spoiled only by the thought that there are other people out there in their tents and caravans finishing their cups of tea before coming down to join you.

There are parts of the waters where you can adjust your position so as to have warm testicles, cold feet and a hot back. A body’s length away you can slide into another spot where you raise your feet to warm them or lower them for the reverse effect.

There’s a film I saw a few years back called Baraka. The opening sequence was of a warm pool of water in the mountains of Japan somewhere surrounded by snow. It was full of monkeys, some with snow on their heads and icicles on their beards. They were sitting there just keeping warm and checking each others heads out for lice. The scene that greeted us the first day we arrived at Douglas Hot Springs was so close that the human scene seemed a perfect parody of the monkeys; as if it had been set up by a filmmaker. It looked like a re-make of Baraka featuring Dianne Fossey’s Gorillas In The Mist. A ring of fifteen of silver haired, overweight pensioners sat in the steaming water all facing one another and chattering away like so many apes.

I got talking to one big old silverback named Des from Western Australia who, we observed, used to wait until he was sure nobody was looking his way and go off upstream somewhere. He told me that he’d been fishing the rivers of the top end for thirty years and that what he didn’t know about barramundi fishing wasn’t worth knowing. He was probably right. He would only leave the camp ground for fifteen minutes at a time and come back with three or four reasonably sized fish. He obviously had traps set somewhere because he never took any fishing gear with him, just a sack to bring them back. One afternoon Clare and I set out on a walk upriver to try and locate his net or whatever he was using but we didn’t find anything. What we did see though was a crocodile. It was only a harmless freshwater model and only about five feet long but the first we’d seen on our own in the wild. It was quite exciting standing there watching it sunning itself on a tree branch but as soon as we made a noise it slid down into the water and was gone.

Next to where we were camped one afternoon there was a lot of squawking going on. I soon got used to it and took no notice but Clare went to investigate. There was a bower bird’s bower there with a long olive python slowly sliding through it. The squawking was coming from the male bower bird and the ten or so females he was trying to court. The python took no notice of them or of us as we hassled around trying to photograph it.

On the last day we were at this place I’d just got up from the hot pool to walk downstream to the cooler ones and three young girls in bikinis were making their way down the bank. This was very unusual and I checked to see that it wasn’t an apparition but no, none of them had white hair. As they neared me one called out:

“Is this where the hot spring is?”

“Yes” I said. “It’s the fountain of youth. I was ninety two when I got here last Wednesday”

She said “Another couple of weeks then and you might score”

We left Douglas Hot Springs because we ran out of electricity and needed to run the engine to put more charge in the batteries. We had a generator but we were parked in a no generator area and I’d forgotten that it was out of fuel anyway.

According to the travel books the next items on the agenda in the long line of Outback rock formations was to be found in Lichfield National Park. Owing to a shortage of roads occasioned by a shortage of population due to a two hundred year old case of acute national xenophobia, there was nowhere else to go except Darwin so that’s where we headed for. Lichfield was en route.

Right on the edge of the Lichfield National Park there is a lovely green little oasis of a village called Batchelor. It’s most unexpected and it wouldn’t be there but for the fact that there was once a uranium mining venture nearby called Rum Jungle and Batchelor was the company town. Needless to say cappuccino is unavailable even though it’s less that two hours out of the State capital but there’s a supermarket there with a reasonable range of food in it. The supermarket is also the garage and the Post Office and the local Centrelink agent and it sits amidst a whole village full of mowed green grass and palm trees. There were little houses with mowed green lawns and tropical flowers and one street was lined with big frangipani trees. I think I’m getting homesick or civilisation sick just thinking about it. We’ve only been away for a couple of months.

Several kilometres past Batchelor is the park’s first attraction. A collection of small rock formations. However, these rock formations are different. They were made by termites. Termites get hold of granules of dirt and add spittle to them and make these magnificent obelisks called magnetic anthills. They’re called that because they are very thin and wide with the sharp edges facing roughly north south. Some of them are taller than me and wider at the base than I could stretch my arms to. Keep reading and in the last chapter I’ll tell you how tall I am and how far my arms stretch. Until then you’ll just have to look at the picture on page 112. It’s a picture of Adolph Hitler at the Nuremberg rally of 1943. I’m a bit taller and not as wide.

Now, what’s peculiar about these magnetic anthills is that they’re all in one place. They sit in a long paddock looking like those ancient standing stones to be found in the British or French countryside. Either side of the long paddock the anthills are quite different. They’re called Cathedral Anthills and are not magnetic. They’re also very high but they’re fluted all around in maybe fifteen long flutes. They look something like badly formed, elongated lemon squeezers. We spent a few days touring around Lichfield National Park but didn’t come across any more magnetic anthills. Most of Lichfield’s attractions are waterfalls – about eight of them. They were all good to look at and we walked up the sides of and around those that had paths – wonderful rock formations, all of them – and if we’d been geologists they would have been even better.

One attraction in Lichfield really did attract us. I’ve always had a soft spot for my Mother in Law. It’s a swamp in Gippsland that I used to visit from time to time. But up here close to Darwin we visited a much better one. It’s a shame the old dear’s dead really. It was called Tabletop Swamp and it was so attractive to tourists that although the park was full of peregrinating pensioners we were the only ones there. I think most people still regard swamps as dirty smelly places where nasty germs breed and so may be less inclined to go down roads that have swamp written on the signposts. Tabletop swamp was just like one of these places you see on TV or in the pages of National Geographic but never think you’ll come across. Out of the lake grew big paperbark trees that reflected in the still water at their feet and purple water lilies were in bloom on the water’s surface. The lake was surrounded by grass growing well above two metres high and we walked around it ever aware that we couldn’t go right down to the water’s edge in case crocodiles were lurking. Then, suddenly, there was a big rush of water and David Attenborough broke the surface with a water lily root between his teeth……..sorry, I got carried away. It’s not true. But that’s what the mood was like.

After taking in several geological objects d’art we couldn’t find anywhere to free camp so we pulled into the campground at Wangi Falls. The falls and the walk around them were lovely. Two waterfalls dropped into a deep clear pool surrounded by tropical plants. Everything was so perfectly placed that it was almost artificial and Disneylike. The pool was advertised in the brochures as being a safe place to swim and there were handrails and steps down into the water There was also a Beware of Crocodiles and a No Swimming sign there too! With the unusual amount of rain that the Top End had received over the past three weeks some of the creeks were swollen to the point where saltwater crocodiles would have been able to make their way upstream to the pool and the rangers had closed it off. It was a mixed blessing in that although we’d have loved a swim in that clear water the tourist buses, whose operators knew about the crocodiles, were staying away so we had the place more or less to ourselves.

In the campground we parked between two other motorhomes. One was a regular motor home with two elderly ladies in it and it was called “Our ‘Appy One” The other was a thirty seater seater bus with a trailer on the back that housed a large 4WD with a dingy on top. It was white in colour and spotlessly clean. In big black lettering across the top they’d had sign written “Nights in White Satin” under which in smaller lettering it said “Never Reaching the End” At the bottom left of it were the words “Two Lost Souls” On the side in very big black script was painted “Outback Floor Sanding” I tried to imagine but my imagination couldn’t cope with the job. A couple of Ku Klux Klan members each with a sanding machine wandering the Outback searching for their souls but destined never to find them. Fascinated though I was I made up my mind not to introduce myself.

At Wangi falls campground we at last came into close contact with some wildlife. The first was a big monitor lizard, it may have been a goanna or a perentie or something else but it was big and in need of inflating. Clare first heard it rustling around while she was painting outside. Yes, the paintings are for sale folks. She beckoned me to get the camera. The lizard was shy but obviously wanted to hang around the campsite as it was an easy way to get fed. I took about twenty pics of it but couldn’t get near enough so we decided to bait it with chicken in a place where I’d already set the camera up on a tripod. It soon snaffled up the three bits of chicken we put out before I could get a decent shot so Clare showed me a chicken bone. “D’you think he’d eat that?” “Yeah, they eat baby birds and things, it wouldn’t hurt him.” I said airing my advanced herpetological knowledge.

We threw the chicken bone to the spot where I had the camera trained and waited. Cautiously the lizard approached and then, real quick like, he grabbed the bone and kind of shook it down his throat. He kept jogging his head upward and jiggling and shaking like cockatoos sometimes do. Then he turned sideways and we could see that the bone was stuck in his throat. He looked like Frankenlizard. He had this huge bolt-like thing sticking out of both sides of his neck. “Oh Christ” Clare said “d’you think he’ll die?” I didn’t know but I hoped nobody else was watching.

Frankenlizard wasn’t shy anymore, he was desperate. He walked around the upright posts that delineated our camping spot pressing and rubbing the lump in his neck against them in an effort to redirect it. He gave up on that and lay down rubbing his throat on the ground. I was scared to try to help him in case he scratched me but after about five minutes he managed to cough the bone up. Then he grabbed it and made off with it at high speed. I had a good photograph by this time but we deleted it because it looked so grotesque.

Our second encounter with the area’s wildlife was only a few minutes later. I was sitting on the toilet in the toilet block and I happened to look up. There was a great big snake wound around one of the rafters above my head. He didn’t move. But I did. I looked all over for a ranger but couldn’t find one. When I went back in the toilet a few hours later the snake had gone but that was even more of a worry – he could have been somewhere closer than the rafters.

Erasmus, like most motor homes and caravans these days has a shower and a toilet and that’s a great comfort, particularly when it’s raining and you don’t want to go outside. My travels in campervans though, weren’t always this commodious. Back in the late eighties I lived in a van for an extended period of time in Communist Eastern and Central Europe.

One day in what was then Czechoslovakia we were on our way down to the Austrian border and began looking for a toilet or, at least, a decent sized clump of bushes. In a sort of driver’s roadside stop we saw a public toilet sign. Public toilets were a rarity anywhere in Iron Curtain countries and we pulled up. The toilet was like a big wardrobe with two doors and twin old-fashioned wooden toilet seats; the types that have buckets under them. These toilet seats though, hadn’t had buckets under them for a long while but people had still been using them. A swarm of flies greeted me as I opened the doors and the whole scene was absolutely foul. I took some toilet paper and headed for the trees behind the toilets but found that dozens of others had done the same and it was dangerous to tread anywhere in the vicinity.

I crossed the road but all I could see was an embankment going down to a field where people were picking strawberries. I went back to the van and took out our trusty paint bucket and a supermarket bag which I stretched over it like a bin liner and made use of it behind the toilets. I tied a knot in the bag and then, emerging from behind the toilet with a clean paint bucket in one hand and a plastic bag full of poo in the other, I thought about what I should do with the bag. I didn’t want to drive off in the van with it and I didn’t want to throw it in the bushes because the plastic would be around forever. It was then that I saw two garbage bins attached to either side of a light pole and I walked over and placed the bag in one of them. I stepped back into the van to find that Alenka already had the kettle on so I washed my hands and waited for her to make coffee.

I was sitting at the table looking out of the back window when a tramp’s head, unkempt and unshaven, popped up above the embankment on the opposite side of the road. He scrambled to the top and stood at the side of the road waiting for a truck to pass. Then, after looking both ways, he shuffled across to our side of the road. He made a beeline for the rubbish bins and started going though the one I’d just put the bag of poo in. It was a cold morning and as he opened the bag I could see a cloud of steam rise up. He recoiled with a start shouting what I took to be a string of Czech obscenities at our van whilst, at the same time, making a series of internationally recognizable hand gestures. Alenka was yelling at me to drive off but I was paralysed with laughter and stretched out on the floor so the tramp couldn’t see me. Then we both lay on the floor trying to control our laughter while waiting for him to kick the shit out of the van. When I peeped through the curtains a few minutes later there was no sign of him. We quickly poured the coffee down the sink and drove off but as we were pulling out onto the road we found he’d been laying in wait for us. He came running through the trees swinging the bag around his head like David when he slew Goliath with a stone from a slingshot. He let go of it at the wrong moment and it flew up in the air somewhere over the top of the van and we kept on going.

Heading up the Darwin road, after we’d left Wangi falls and Lichfield, we saw the smoke from deliberately lit fires. Not arsonist’s fires (although I was told there’d been a lot of arson about) but controlled fires designed to renew the vegetation as the Aborigines had been doing for tens of thousands of years before the whites came to this continent. We’d seen the results of recent burnings for maybe a hundred kilometres already. On one side of the road the grass would be fairly high and the country looking rather tired but opposing it, across the road, was lush new grass and new shoots on all the eucalyptus trees and fan palms where the area had been recently burnt. It’s taken around two centuries for white Australians to learn that the land was increased by regular firing by the Aborigines. The controlled burning takes place when the grass isn’t too high so there’s no chance of a bushfire. Around the fires corridors are left for the wildlife to escape and it comes back more plentiful than before. It was always called “fire stick farming” and now it’s the accepted way but it’s difficult for the tourists to appreciate as they see fire as a destructive thing. In nearly all the information centres there are leaflets these days explaining the reasons for setting light to the bush.

Half an hour south of Darwin we visited the Territory Wildlife Park, a large chunk of natural bush that included a variety of habitats for animals, reptiles and birds. We’d been in dozens of those places but this one was good. It included a lot of the animals that are destroying large parts of the Australian ecosystem. I knew about camels, water buffalos, goats, cats and pigs but in the park there were Timorese ponies that came originally from Mongolia to Timor centuries ago before being imported into Australia. Balinese cattle and sambar deer were there too. I’d never heard of either but they are just another couple of species that are ruining parts of the Australian eco system.

There was an imposing aquarium too containing a huge saltwater crocodile and it was easy to get to see all of him from the underground tunnel that sided onto his pool. He/she was beautifully patterned and had nice toenails and teeth. I actually got to within the thickness of the glass away from this thing and studied it. It was a little frightening but I still couldn’t tear myself away from it. It was hard to believe that this lethargic looking reptilian could actually erupt with so much speed that it could successfully ambush anything on the whole continent with the exception of road trains. Another thing I saw in the aquarium was a shark that lived in fresh water. It was cruising around with what the Northern Territory restaurants call the fish of the day (barramundi – cod chewsday) and turtles and other fresh water edibles.

I asked the guide about it and she said their park was the only place where these sharks were being exhibited. It was a type of Bull Nosed Shark that had only been discovered & classified within the last year or so. She said that a couple of them had been caught recently and sent overseas to be studied. Overseas must be a hell of a place I always think. She said that it was basically an estuary creature but could live in fresh water quite happily for years and that it grew to three metres in length, could eat humans and go up rivers for many miles. I didn’t know whether to believe it so I asked another guide and got the same answer.

Right next door to the Territory Wildlife Park we saw something amazing. Do you know those archer fish that live up the Amazon and squirt water at insects that fall off branches so they can gobble them up?...........O’h, you don’t. Never mind. I’ll tell you about them. There are these fish that live up the Amazon and they’re called Archer Fish. They don’t have any bows and arrows or anything but some short sighted loony gave them that name. They’re actually squirters or spitters and they eat insects. The way they go about it is to swim up under a fly or mosquito or some other tasty insect and squirt a jet of water at it so it falls into the water and they can eat it.

Well, we’ve got the same thing right here in Australia and they’ve learnt to squirt water at pieces of bread that tourists hold in their fingers. It really blew me away - and I hadn’t been for weeks. There were around fifty of them all about forty centimetres long and they hung around the swimming pool steps at Berry Springs waiting for tourists to turn up with bread. The bread had to be held lightly between forefinger and thumb and half a metre above the water. Then, twenty or so fish would cruise around underneath it and one would squirt the bread out of the hand proffering it. As it hit the water a big scramble would ensue, the winner of which was seldom the fish that had done the squirting. The really cool thing about these archer fish was that if you had bread in your hand and didn’t give it to them because you were too busy saying “fuck me, look at that!!” to those accompanying you, one of these squirty denizens of the shallows would rock on up to the bank and squirt you in the eye as a reminder to get on with it. This behaviour wasn’t coincidence. I tried it on with them a few times.

The archer fish were such a show stopping attraction that they took the eyes away from the place itself and I spent so much time getting squirted and saying “fuck me, look at that!!” that we had to stay the night outside the gates of the place so that we could go back in there for a swim the next morning. As soon as the ranger opened up the park at half past eight we drove into the car park and went down to swim in two of the three warm water pools. The park itself was beautiful with tropical rainforest trees and creepers and expansive grassed areas neatly mown. We had it all to ourselves for an hour before breakfast. No shower or spa bath could ever compare with it. There was even a waterfall that ran warm water. The little river joining the pools was clear and swimmable and we snorkelled among hundreds of fish that hung out under the pandanus roots that grew along the banks. It was one place that I really didn’t want to leave.

We left and drove into Darwin stopping for fuel on the way at one of the very few well run roadhouses we’d experienced since leaving Adelaide. Services at roadhouses is generally abysmal. Whilst it’s true that these places play on their ocker image for tourists there’s still no need for them to be as uninviting as they are. Most of them play on bad taste with inane and smutty notices around the bar in lavatorial humour. Some specialise in an individual bush humour such as walls made from different beer cans or number plates from around the world. Others decorate their bars with baseball caps or international, out of date banknotes. We can all do that, it’s just that we don’t bloody want to. It’s time they took a look at their clientele who have moved on leaving them behind in many cases. By far the most business comes from elderly, retired couples and it’s the sweet old Grannie with permed white hair who’s calling the shots when it comes to where they’ll eat or stop for coffee. She’s not too impressed with these roadhouses that haven’t moved on from the steak and eggs for breakfast era of sweaty truck drivers in blue singlets and thongs (most of whom have also moved on). The old lady wants to see somewhere that’s clean with gingham tablecloths and real tea or coffee from china cups. Time and again we’ve pulled up at roadhouses where there are up to twenty caravans in the parking area with old couples sitting in them who, having bought their petrol, are having their own morning or afternoon tea in their caravans rather than braving the inane atmosphere and the weak Nescafe offered by these establishments.

The service itself and the range of products offered is far from good. We tried in five of them consecutively in an effort to buy distilled water for our batteries only to be told that they were out of stock or simply didn’t stock it. Distilled water has a shelf life of something like forty years so I couldn’t see the problem with stocking it. Petrol, gas and diesel were all these places generally had stock of and even them some of them were out of diesel. None carried a decent range of products like coolants, oils, wiper blades and so forth. Gone are the days when these things had to be transported by camel and ordered months in advance. Now you can email your order to the supplier and get it delivered on the next truck within two days anywhere in Australia. There’s no excuse for running out of stock. Had we not taken spare cans of diesel we could have been marooned until the next delivery in Larimah in the Northern Territory right there on the main Alice Springs/Darwin trunk route. So many times we fuelled up and then went to wash the windscreen only to find that the windscreen washer bucket was empty and there was no tap in sight to fill it. Usually though, there was a few centimetres of muddy water in the bottom that we didn’t want to dirty our windscreen with and the actual rubber windscreen washer tools were invariably broken. I don’t think that there are as many as twenty roadhouses in all of outback Australia that have bothered to asphalt their entrances and forecourts. They’re all red dust that turns to mud when it rains – she’ll be right.

Clare came out of the toilets at a roadhouse on the main Alice Springs/Darwin road and said “let me have the digital camera.” Off she went and returned with a photo of a notice that read “IN THE INTERESTS OF KEEPING THESE TOILETS CLEAN PLEASE REMEMBER TO TURN OFF THE LIGHTS.” I though about it for a long time but could only come up with the thought that if the lights were turned off the toilets would seem cleaner.

Darwin was something of a surprise to us. It was much better looking than either of us had imagined. This northern capital at the very top of the country is a tree lover’s paradise, the very antithesis of the most southerly capital, Hobart. Darwin probably has a thousand civically planted and maintained trees to every one in Hobart. Hobart, in terms of population, is twice the size of Darwin but has only a hundredth of the public space, parks and gardens that one sees in its northern counterpart. Darwin is bright, young and vibrant whereas the southern city is dingy and its buildings ramshackle by comparison. Darwin, of course, is a much more modern city having had the good fortune to have been all but completely demolished in 1974 by Cyclone Tracy. And good fortune it was. In the museum we saw footage of the pre Tracy city. It was a total shit hole built mainly of corrugated iron.

Darwin is very South East Asian in appearance with a profusion of palms and tropical vegetation lining the roads and its many parks. Where it differs from Asian cities, and indeed other Australian cities, is that it has no scruffy and shambolic suburbs. It’s neat, clean and green, colourful and tasteful. It was by far the most attractive city we had visited in Australia.

While we were looking for somewhere to park the van on first entering the little city we saw a small blue signpost saying Fish Feeding. We stopped in the fish feeding car park and paid our entry fee. A lady shoved a ticket into my right hand and six slices of white bread into my left and we walked down the grass to the sea. There was a feeding frenzy going on. Well, there were actually two feeding frenzies going on. Apart from the fish frenzying around in a sea of white sliced bread there were a couple of hundred people frenzying around lobbing bread at them. Every day at high tide for the past forty years this fish feeding ritual has been going on. There must have been a thousand fish there that had turned up for a piece of the old sliced white. They came in all sizes up to well over a metre long and people stood in ankle deep water holding bits of bread and stroking the fish as they took it from their hands.

A rangery looking lady came out of a little office shaped like a boat with an ice cream container full of fish scraps and a pair of tongs. She announced that she was going to feed the meat eaters. We all followed her like she was the Pied Piper. Half way down the boat ramp she stopped and we all stopped behind her. Then, with her tongs she began dispensing the fishy bites throwing them into the sea. Meat eaters came from everywhere and she described them as they came in to take their mid morning fish fingers. When she finished she started her informative and well oiled story about how fish first started coming there to get bread and said that if anyone had any questions they should feel free to interrupt her. I did.

“Do you think bread is a healthy food to feed all these fish on?”

I could see she’d been asked this before as she visibly bristled so I went on.

“It’s just that we’ve been visiting national parks where the signs tell us not to feed the fish bread because it’s not healthy for them”

“We’ve been feeding fish here for more than forty years and they’re still coming back”

“The same ones?”

“How do you mean?”

“Are they the same fish that keep coming back? I mean, do you tag them?”

“No but they’ve been coming back for forty years and I don’t think they’d do that if it wasn’t healthy”

“Yes but how do you know that their parents didn’t die from eating too much bread? I’d live on junk food all the time if someone provided it for me. Even though the cholesterol level in junk food may give me a heart attack I’d keep eating it because it’s easy”

She told me I had a good point and carried on with her talk. A minute or two later she said that fish only had a memory of about twenty seconds. I asked “how come they remember to come back for bread every day then?” I didn’t wait for an answer, I walked away and she didn’t throw anything.

Darwin’s a great place to eat and I can’t resist trying anything I’ve never had before or something I have had before but cooked in a different way. On our first night we went to an establishment called The Barra Shack. It was simple. On an area of public grass right alongside the harbour a guy called Phil had plonked two railway carriages. Either that or they were pre plonked for him by the council. Every night at about six he put out a load of tables and chairs at the water’s edge and created an instant restaurant. There was a small open ended fence as an entrance to the place and sign writing that, with the lights on, reminded me of Luna Park in Melbourne. It was an entirely Asian affair like in Singapore where they set up restaurants in car parks when the sun goes down. It was Asian too, in the way it operated. That is to say the fish was all sold by weight and you picked your piece and they weighed it and quoted you a price for cooking it just as they do in Bangkok.

The cooking was done in the railway carriages and on an outside barbecue burning coconut husks. I had crocodile for the first time. I was sorry to find that it was nothing spectacular, just white meat, a little chewier than chicken with no distinctive flavour. The ambience though, was something very special. Looking out over the harbour we began our meal just on sunset and, as the glow faded, the wharf and jetty lights came on bringing vertical streaks of colour to a body of water calm as a sheet of glass. And all the while the climate was balmily perfect. If an arm bearing an Excalibur had slowly risen from the water and chopped up my crocodile meat I don’t think I would have batted an eyelid. The scent of frangipani filled the air (from a vase on the table) and each table had an oil lamp. The twin aromas of kerosene and frangipani go surprisingly well together with a hint of satay and coconut husk smoke. I didn’t want to leave. And when we did, we didn’t have to go far – about thirty metres in fact. At Phil’s almost insistence we slept in the council car park right outside. “If anyone comes around just tell them you’re my uncle and I’ve asked you to sleep here and keep an eye on the place” he said.

At the end of the harbour jetty, just on twilight every night, thirty or so restaurants open their doors where you can order your meal and sit out next to the water to eat it. Every night hundreds of locals turn up to eat out cheaply in the cool of the evening. It was there that I saw a schnitzel bar advertising schnitzels I’d never seen before. Besides more conventional fare they offered schnitzels made from buffalo, crocodile and camel. There’s a free show there every evening when the patrons throw their fish and chip left overs to the fish in the harbour next to them. I’ve been in a few restaurants in the Mediterranean where people do this but Darwin harbour jetty fish feeding is special because of the size of the living fish that eat the dead fish thrown over the side. They’re huge, silver, flat sided things; big round discs like serving trays with fins on and there are scores of them flashing around in the lights of the jetty. I asked the locals what they were called. I got three answers; bat fish, moon fish and sun fish. Neither was on any of the menus.

On Wednesday nights literally thousands of people turn up at Mindil Beach where there’s a large food and craft market. Here the folks of Darwin buy their meals and walk over to the beach to watch the sun go down. At a stall called The Road Kill Restaurant I tried camel and emu kebabs. The emu was unexpectedly red meaty in taste and the camel must have given himself up under the misapprehension that he would be given a decent burial.

I really couldn’t find much wrong with Darwin. I think the folks there have it made. We went into their parliament house and even that was really cool. It has a great long grassed balcony on the upper floor where members of the public can sit and eat in the open air restaurant with a view through gently swaying coconut palms overlooking the sea. Everything’s on the sea, the museum and art gallery complex has an unfenced beach at the end of their lawn. In Parliament House we looked into the library and on the wall was a framed photograph of “The Northern Territory Mounted Police Force, trackers and others outside the Pine Creek Hotel (c1911).” The photography for its time was excellent. A bunch of about twenty unshaven, drunken assholes in dirty vests and bracers were pictured sitting at and standing around a table with six whisky bottles on it and each man was holding up a glass for the camera.

Of course, Darwin had to have a drawback or God wouldn’t have reserved paradise for Japanese kamikaze pilots and Iraqi suicide bombers. It’s THE WET. I asked six residents if there was anything they didn’t like about Darwin and the first two words that five of them came up were THE WET. The sixth said “Ah shit mate. Geez, it’d ‘ave to be the fuckin’ wet wouldn’t it?” I didn’t ask how long she’d lived there. Darwin has six months of absolutely wonderful weather, guaranteed sunshine every day and the likelihood of rain so minimal that you can virtually discount it. When the wet comes, and I’m told it can come for three to five months, it turns into a different country.

Violent monsoonal thunderstorms are a regular thing and the skies open up and throw rain down at a rate that’s hard for anyone living elsewhere in Australia to visualise. Roads flood, the city gets cut off from civilisation and the people go slightly crazy. Motorists get angry with each other and the fights start in the pubs. The humidity is inescapable and the effects of a cold shower on the body last for less than five minutes. One lady told me it gets so humid that it sometimes takes her four days to get her towels dry under the veranda. THE WET is also the time when the salt water crocodiles move into just about every swollen river and creek and the deadly box jellyfish infest all the seas for hundreds of kilometres around. This is, of course, in summer when the temperatures soar and people would like to be able to gain some relief from the heat by taking a swim. All year swimming in guaranteed safety can only be done in swimming pools.

At every potential swimming point around Darwin there are signs up telling you not to go in the water between May and October because of the crocs and the box jellyfish. The signs are totally non committal about the remainder of the year and they advise you to take vinegar with you whenever you visit the beach just in case. Unfortunately the signs make no mention of what you actually do with the vinegar. The tourists are left wondering whether to smear themselves in it before entering the water, imbibe it or sprinkle it around the area where they intend swimming. It could have something to do with fish and chips, Christ only knows. Swimming at low tides is hazardous anyway because you can suffer from heat stroke during the long trek across the beach to the water in a place that has eight metre tides.

Somehow we lost our grey haired nomad procession in Darwin. They just didn’t put in an appearance save for a handful of caravans and we figured they were all holed up around swimming pools in the caravan parks on the outskirts. We thought we’d come across them again when we reached Kakadu National Park but they were thin on the ground there too. I suppose we could have checked the hospitals or funeral parlours but we didn’t have time – Kakadu beckoned.

I saw two ingenious inventions in Darwin that appealed to me. The first was a custom made, designer lobster pot on the foreshore a little way north of the city. It was made from a supermarket trolley. The basket had been detached from the running gear and the open top had been filled in with the bottom of another trolley. The swinging end you push in to make a kids seat was modified so that it opened to get the crayfish out and at the small end an entry hole had been made with the loose ends folded inside in such a way that the crayfish could enter but not easily exit.

The second invention was a modification to a bicycle so that the wheels went in the opposite direction to the handlebars. A guy at Mindil Beach night market was earning money with it. He had a sign saying “Left is right, Right is left” and a T-shirt to match. He had a carpet on the grass with lines drawn across it and all you had to do was to cycle on his bike from one line to the other. It was only the length of most people’s lounge rooms but nobody could do it. People were queued up to try and paid five dollars each for three attempts. People of all ages would start off, and fall off, immediately. The guy whose bike it was had learnt to ride the thing and every so often he’d sit astride it and cycle up and down to show just how easy it was. It took twenty minutes for five people to loose their money. He was earning seventy five bucks an hour! If he was working two nights a week he’d have been doing pretty well.

It was the dry season and along the road to Kakadu much burning was taking place. They burn one side of the road at a time on a fairly regular basis and using this ancient technique they avoid the bushfires that used to rage in the area for a couple of hundred years after white people first took possession of the land. They haven’t got it quite right yet but I guess they’re learning. The people lighting and managing the fires were called The Mary River Land Management Group. They’d posted a sign at the side of the road - it was on fire. Three kilometres further on was a sign saying Termite Mounds and as we pulled off the road to take a look two men in Texas Ranger type hats and a small fire tender were desperately trying to save the boardwalk around them. They were too late, it was well ablaze.

We had begun to see isolated spots of fire in some places quite far removed from the burning off that was taking place. We stopped at a couple of these places and decided that it had to be the work of arsonists. It was, but not of the human kind. Birds were doing it. Whistling kites (known in Kakadu as fire kites or in Aboriginal circles as burnum burnum) are major beneficiaries of any fires in the area. Fire drives before it small mammals, reptiles, grasshoppers and other kite goodies that they swoop on and eat. They’ve become so accustomed to controlled fires that stop at one side of the road that they pick up burning embers and drop them across the other side in an attempt to get another fire started. It sounds fanciful but it actually happens.

We stopped for the night around six kilometres before the Kakadu National Park itself in a roadside truck stop some twenty minutes from passing the last fire. We had dinner and turned in but I woke up at two o’clock. I could smell smoke and when I went outside I could see that the fire had caught us up. We had to move a few metres to the middle of the service road where there was no grass to catch light. I mentioned it to a Park Ranger the next day who told me that it was more than likely the “bloody kites” that had started the fire off again.

Reversible yoghurt containers. How come nobody makes reversible yoghurt containers? Flavoured yoghurts make easy quick, cool snacks that fit in campervan fridges. What’s more you can buy them in any outback shop that has a fridge. We eat one each almost every day and there’s a bonus. I forget what it is but it’s something to do with Flora in the colon. Dunno why we need margarine in our colons though. There’s never quite enough yoghurt in the container but there would be if you could lick the inside. It’s infuriating trying to get those last slivers of the stuff with the rounded edge of the spoon. When I get back to civilisation I’ve decided to devote my life to producing the first prototype reversible yoghurt container. I’ve been studying rubber gloves and I’m quietly confident that rubber glove technology holds the key. Remember – you heard it first in these pages. Besides Flora there’s that other bread spread that’s called “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter.” Somebody told me there’s a new communion wafer in the USA called “I Can’t Believe It’s not Jesus.”

At one point, on route to Kakadu, we crossed the East Alligator River. There were construction traffic lights on it and as we waited for them to turn green Clare was reading the sign next to them. It said that this construction was a “bridge lengthening project.” Two gigantic crocodiles lay sunning themselves on the far bank and I hoped the bridge was by now lengthened to the point where it reached the other side or we’d be in the shit good and proper.

We stayed our first night in Kakadu in a campground near another part of that same river where it’s tidal and both fresh and saltwater crocs, fish and a variety of watery nasties live. A bit before dusk we walked down to a boat ramp. Across the river was Arnhem Land where entry without a permit is forbidden for everybody except the Aboriginal people who live there. A large family of Aborigines were on the opposite, Arnhem Land, bank. There were probably six adults, the women in gaily coloured skirts and tops, and an equal number of kids some of whom wore little or nothing. Two men made up the party each fishing with a rod. The women fished with lines and they sent some of the kids away who came back later with three quite big dead tree branches. Two of the smallest kids went into the water and splashed around for a few minutes and wandered back out again. It was a relaxed scene and the kids were having a ball chasing each other up and down the sandy river beach. Suddenly one of the women became very animated and everybody else came over to where she was fishing. She’s caught a big sting ray and began hauling it, flapping, out of the water. As soon as it was clear of the water the kids set upon it with the dead tree branches. One of the women stopped them and picking up a stick showed them exactly where to hit it and they started all over again. I don’t think any of them were more than four years old.

I wanted a photograph of the family and I went a few paces along the beach on our side of the bank and stood on the root of a big old tree balancing myself with my back on the trunk. I looked to one side and about ten paces from me was a three meter long crocodile lying on the sand facing down towards the water. I was excited and told Clare who came and looked at it too. We both thought it was of the saltwater, dangerous type. I took a couple of photos of it and looked for someone to tell about it. A white guy and his wife and toddler were standing on the boat ramp fishing and I asked if they knew anything about crocodiles. The wife asked where it was and I showed her. “Yeah, that’s a Salty” she said casually and went back to her fishing.” All three of them were standing only one pace from the water’s edge. The tide was coming in quite fast and we watched the croc for twenty minutes or so as the water rose. It didn’t move a millimetre even as the water covered it. All it did was lift its snout imperceptibly to keep its nostrils clear.

In the morning we took a cruise on the river which was run by the Kakadu park rangers. Two were Aborigines and the third was a white guy who’d lived all his thirty eight years in Kakadu and was raised with Aboriginal kids. The skipper showed us the life jackets which were stowed in a rack above our heads and told us that if the boat tipped over we shouldn’t cling to them but push them ahead of us and swim towards them all the time. The reason for this, he said, was that they were colourful and crocodiles liked colourful objects. He said he’d seen a boat turn over before and the first things the crocodiles went for were the colourful life jackets. I looked around and saw that Clare and I were the most colourfully dressed on the entire boat. He told us that the river contained sharks and sting rays too although he didn’t elaborate on their colour preferences.

It was a very informative hour and a half and we were glad we did it, not least because we stopped briefly on a beach in Arnhem Land and the two Aboriginal guys gave us a talk and made fire from two sticks, blew didgeridoos and demonstrated spear throwing with a woomera. The fire making was doubly impressive because it only took two or three minutes. At the end of it one of them asked if we had any questions and an old lady asked if they rubbed stones together to make fire. The Aboriginal guy said that he’d just demonstrated how they made fire from two sticks. “Yes” she said “but I thought you could rub stones together and make fire” He didn’t now what to say and looked over his shoulder at his Aboriginal colleague who shrugged. He then looked at his white colleague who said “beats me” and shrugged. He turned back to the old lady, cleared his throat and said “up ’ere, we make ‘im with wood. Stones up ‘ere don’t burn too good.” I forgot myself and burst out laughing.

We saw lots of crocodiles on the East Alligator that day and we were told by the rangers that there are an estimated sixty thousand of them in Kakadu alone. As we cruised along the rangers pointed out various plants on the bank and told us what they were used for in Aboriginal society. The fresh water mangrove was best. They crushed up the leaves and threw them into the water in areas where they knew that unreachable fish would be under the banks. It worked like a poison but what it actually did was to deplete the oxygen in the water temporarily sending the fish to sleep. They’d float to the surface where some were harvested and the rest left alone to recover and be there for another day. However, that wasn’t what impressed me most about the fresh water mangrove tree. In times gone by it was also used for the punishment of severe crimes. They would make the culprit eat the stuff and it would make him suffocate by swelling his air passages up. They’d give him a straw which he’d have to ram up his nose to breath through which meant he’d have a fair chance of surviving but not be keen to repeat the offence that led to the punishment.

Later on, and with a little trepidation, we walked along the river bank looking for crocs to take photos of. We knew where we’d seen them from the boat and the rangers said they’d spend hours in the same place so we kept our distance from the water and tip toed along to where we’d seen them. It was quite an adrenaline rush knowing that there was something out there that could, and if hungry would, eat us. I’ve never considered myself as prey before. I had once been chased up a tree by a bison in a Polish forest and had to watch while it trampled my camera. I’d been charged by a wild boar too but in those cases I was on their turf and they wanted to show me who was boss. They didn’t want to eat me. The only other animal scare I’d had was thinking that I was being followed by a rabid dog. That was scary for a while but it just turned out to be curious and had a deformed upper lip that bared its teeth and made it dribble and look vicious.
RABIES DAY
On that occasion I was living in a small village in the north east of Poland up near the Byelorussian border and a rabid wolf had been seen in the forest nearby. Rabid dogs and wolves never seem to go and die in the forest; they always wander into the villages for some reason. Because of this we had an annual Rabies Day when the vet came and inoculated all the village dogs. I remember he first time it happened when I was living there.

Our soltys (village head) visited us at eight o’clock one morning and said we couldn’t go out until the dog had been inoculated. I was just leaving the house to go into the local town for a nine o’clock dental appointment but the soltys said

"Sorry, you can't go out, it's rabies day"

"It's what?"

"Rabies day"

My Polish isn’t bad but I’d never heard the word rabies in Polish and I didn't know what he was talking about.

“Rabies day?" I said, "what the hell's rabies day?"

"You know, that disease the wolves get. Your Misha’s got to be vaccinated against it. It's compulsory. You've got to take her down to the cross roads."

"What if I don't?"

“You'll have to take her into town and have it done or they can fine you. They can even put her down."

"OK I'll be there"

I put the lead on our Misha and hurried off down to the cross roads. I needn't have bothered to hurry because when I arrived there was a queue of 15 people and, I suppose, 25 dogs. It seems we were the last to find out about rabies day and, although I was in a hurry, the operation hadn't even started and the vet was still putting his equipment together.

Rabies day was quite a social event in the village as every single household had at least one dog and quite a few families had two or three. The word social, of course, doesn't necessarily mean sociable and two of the men in the queue weren't on speaking terms. Anton and Marian hadn't spoken for a month because of an incident which had occurred at the start of haymaking.

Not all of the power poles in the village were earthed and when a thunderstorm was immanent folks all pulled the plugs on their televisions in case they blew up. During haymaking Anton was on the way home one evening when he stopped to shake some sand out of his boots and for this purpose he had leaned against a telegraph pole with both hands while he tried to kick one of his boots off.

A tractor came up the lane pulling behind it a cart-load of hay, on top of which were three men including Marian who spotted Anton clutching the telegraph pole shaking one of his legs. Marian was a young, enthusiastic person and sometimes tended to be a little impulsive. On this occasion he summed up the situation in a flash.

He assumed that Anton was being electrocuted by the unearthed power pole and, taking his pitchfork in hand, leapt from the top of the travelling haystack bringing down the pitchfork handle across Anton's wrists in an effort to disengage him from the source of the problem. Anton ended up with a broken wrist and had to be taken to the local hospital on the back of the tractor and then had to rely on help from others to bring his hay in. Now they both stood in the queue three places from one another, each trying to pretend that he hadn't seen the other.

It was the same for the dogs too, some of them hated each other and were anxious to show it. Dogs on Polish farms are invariably small snappy creatures which take up about the same amount of space as a twenty litre water container and they're kept on chains for most of their lives. They're not badly treated, in fact they're usually the subjects of much affection but still, they seldom get to go anywhere unless they break their chains (or sometimes, strings). Now, when you keep a dog on a chain all the time it usually becomes aggressive and that was the case with practically every dog in the village. Rabies day was the day when they could all get together and decide who's going to be the boss for another year.

Dogs who never got to meet, who only barked and howled at each other from afar and who knew each other only from the scent carried on the wind all got to bark, growl, slobber & snap at each other only on this one day. The Villagers didn’t walk their dogs and therefore didn’t have dog leads, so most of the dogs were either carried in their owners arms or on short pieces of old baling twine. Old Polish baling twine, like new Polish baling twine, is not the strongest of materials with which to secure an eager village mongrel and some of them broke loose. Others simply jumped out of their owners arms and it was on for young & old.

There were fights going on all around and under the vet's car, owners bumping into each other as they hurtled back and forth cursing their respective pooches and people saying; "Well, your dog started it, my little Maciek was minding his own business until that ugly wretch of yours went for him"

The vet eventually sorted himself out and sat crosswise in the passenger seat of the car, notebook in hand, as his first client stepped forward. It was Big Jan the plumber. Big Jan was the roughest toughest man in the village and was held in awe by many because he could turn the nettle cutting machine for hours on end without a break. Nettles are good feed for pigs but first they need to be crushed in the machine and this was Jan's forte. I tried the nettle crushing machine once and could barely keep it going with two hands but big Jan could spin it with one hand and feed the nettles in with the other. Yes, he was a man’s man was Big Jan although not from choice. He was a man's man because no woman would have him.

The vet licked his pencil and looked up at the Cyclops towering before him. The little mongrel in Jan's arms seemed to fade seamlessly into his long straggly beard. Big Jan was almost completely bald and now with this little pair of eyes peering out of his beard it looked for all the world as if his head was stuck on upside down.

"Name?"

"Jan Stachlewski"

"Is that the dog’s name or your name?"

"My name"

"I don't want your name; I want the dog’s name"

Big Jan leaned towards the vet's ear & muttered something.

"Speak up, I can't hear you"

"Amour" (The word is used as cupid in Polish)

"So that's Amour Stachlewski is it?"

"Mmmm"

There was sniggering in the ranks which stopped abruptly when Jan, indignant, turned around. The vet did his work, took the money and Big Jan headed for home, his Cupid in his arms. Old Mrs Romanowski was next and when the vet had finished she wanted to talk about her problem cat.

"He's so fussy, he won't eat anything I give him lately and he's loosing weight. I was thinking about that Kit E Kat advertised on TV, do you think he'd eat that?"

"Mrs Romanowski my dear, 20 tins of Kit E Kat would probably come to more than your monthly pension but I'm sure that the cat would love it"

End of discussion.

A few more dogs & owners came and went without incident until Stankiewicz the poacher fronted up. He had 4 dogs tied together with string and had to untie each one as its turn came and tie the remaining three to the vet’s car door handle with another piece of string. One of his dogs, Hubert, was, to say the least, unusual in appearance. It could best be described as a cocker spaniel cross, crossed that is, with an armadillo. It bore all the ancestral hallmarks of the cocker spaniel but in place of fur it had scales everywhere except for its lower legs.

It wasn't a pretty sight and was made all the more unsightly by the addition of a white plastic bucket over its head, placed there, as he told the vet, “to stop Hubert scratching his scabby ears.” The vet wasn't at all impressed with Hubert and donned his plastic gloves before touching him. The queue broke apart and all stood around the car in silence to watch. Stasiek was first to speak

"Whatever that dog's got is most likely infectious, you should have the bloody thing put down"

"Mind your own business Stasiek Kowalski, Hubert will be right as rain in a couple of weeks. Old mother Miankowska's given me some stuff to rub over him"

"Mother Miankowska? what would she know about dogs she's a bloody witch?"

"She's not a witch, she's a herbalist. She cured my feet, Mother Miankowska, the doctors didn't know what was wrong with them but Old Mother Miankowska fixed them up in no time"

Of course what nobody was saying was that Old Mother Miankowska was Stankiewicz's aunt but a timid little voice came out of the crowd.

"My husband would still be alive if it wasn't for Mother Miankowska"

You could have heard a pin drop and the vet, disguising a smirk, stuck the needle into Scabby Hubert's wrinkled red neck. Scabby Hubert let out a hell of a shriek and turned on the vet but was prevented from biting him by the white plastic bucket. We stood there as Stankiewicz tied and untied his three pieces of string and presented the vet with his next offering. It too was a little out of the ordinary. It was 2 dogs long, half a dog high and covered in long hair like a silky terrier. It was as though Stankiewicz had purchased an Old English Sheepdog self assembly kit and hadn't fully understood the instructions. I could imagine the leg extension pieces being scattered around on the floor of his barn somewhere. Or perhaps it was intentional, a custom made dog from a kit?

The scene - The Stankiewicz kitchen in the evening:

"Give me the small screwdriver dear"

"It's there in front of you Stan"

"Not that one, the Philips"

"I hope you're going to clean that lot up after you"

"Mmmm"

"What are those other bits?"

"Leg extensions"

"Aren't you going to put them on then?

"No, it'll be too high - it'll be over the fence as soon as I put the batteries in"

"Well, just don't leave them on the kitchen table, that's all"

"I've already sold them to Adam”

"What does Adam want with them?"

"He's going to put them on his dachshund - stop it getting under his fence"

While all this was going through my head, Kristow the village drunk came staggering down the road with a fairly respectable looking mongrel on a leather lead. The poor thing was having to dance like John Travolta to avoid being trodden on as it kept a wary eye on its owners staggering movements in a vain attempt to anticipate the direction of the next lurch.

Kristow almost pulled up when he reached the car, that is to say he was only moving backwards & forwards by a step or two. He spent a few seconds trying to get Stankiewicz's long haired whatever it was into focus and then:

"Is that a dog? Is that a doggg? 'eh, a dog? haaa. You'd have to give it a piece of sausage before you could kick it up the arse or you'd never know which way round it was. Haaaa. Look, look everybody isssa dog' 'eh? Haaaa"

Kristow was having trouble telling which way round he himself was and, in particular, which way was up and he fell across the bonnet of the vet's car. Two men from the queue laid him down in the back of a cart after assuring him that they'd take care of his dog and he promptly fell asleep. More pooches were punctured during which another argument developed between a farmer and the wife of the shop owner in which she tried to pin the parenthood of her latest litter of pups on his dog and then came Jakub's turn.

"What's her name?"

"Don't know"

"What do you mean you don't know?"

"She hasn't got a name"

I saw one man in the queue nudge another and smirk

"Well, what do you call her when you want her to come?"

"I don't have to call her, she's always on the chain"

"Well, I have to have a name"

"Call her what you like then"

"Alright she's to be known as Kropka. OK?"

"It's OK with me"

"How old is she?"

"Don't know"

"Oh come on, don't you remember when you got her?"

Someone at the back of the queue yelled out that she must have been three because she was from the same litter as his own dog; and the vet filled in the appropriate space on the form.

"Alright, give her to me then"

Something went wrong with the handover and the dog broke free and ran around the other side of the car with Jakub in pursuit. The dog quite obviously thought that it was all a game and darted back and forth around the car as Jakub ran after it in his rubber boots getting redder and redder in the face.

"Whore" he shouted. "Come here whore"

The dog immediately stood to attention and trotted up to Jakub head down, tail between its legs. The secret was out, the whole village now knew the dog's real name and roars of laughter filled the air. Old ladies started whispering to each other behind cupped hands.

"Well I never, did you see that? Whatever's it coming to, fancy giving the poor animal a name like that."

"Yes, I know. I've never liked him you know, he treats his wife terribly. Mrs Siepietowska told me that he locked her out of the house one night and she had to sleep at her sister’s house. Just because she gave him salad. Said he'd been working like a dog all day and he wanted proper food when he came home of an evening."

"Yes, I know, I know. That's what I mean you see - man like that"

Our Misha was last in the queue and when the vet produced the vaccine bottle I asked for a clean needle. Every dog including Scabby Hubert had been vaccinated with the same needle and it hadn't been so much as wiped clean. The vet didn't object. He just reached into the back of the car and grabbed a new needle. A group of dog owners were standing talking within earshot and one of them asked why his dog didn't get a clean needle.

"You didn't ask" replied the vet.

"Well, you should have changed needles anyway. Disease can be transmitted through dirty needles"

"Yes but"

"The department gives you needles and you save them so you can use them yourself in your own practice."

"Now, look here.............."

I left them arguing and set off hot foot for my dentists appointment arriving late with apologies.

"Sorry we're late. It's rabies day in our village" I said.

He gave me a strange look. “Don’t worry” I said. “I'm taking tablets for it."