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.
