by Paul Carter
I could hardly believe it was 1 August 2009, but the time had finally come. Dan was ready to film us leaving. He would then fly back to Sydney and six days later come to Adelaide with 200 pounds of filming gear, ready to spend the next three months on the road with me, poor bastard. I had a good feeling about Dan: he could go the distance, and most importantly he had a great sense of humour.
Now he quietly went about assembling his huge pile of kit while we ran around trying not to forget things. One of the last-minute jobs was properly tethering Lola’s baby seat to the back seat of the truck. There was a portable DVD player mounted behind the driver’s headrest so she could watch her movies and hopefully not scream the cab down all the way to Adelaide. By mid-morning we finally had everything squared away. The truck was clean and organised, with everything in its place, everything accounted for and working. I would never see it like that again.
This was it: departure time. I wasn’t going to see my home again until I rode Betty through Perth on the way back to Adelaide. Our neighbours came out to see us off. Nick and and Gorga are great people, we’re lucky to have such a cool couple living next door. They would keep an eye on our place while we were away, empty the letterbox, mow the lawn—the usual stuff. Nick and I had sat in his backyard the night before, drinking whisky and talking till late. He’s a good laugh, always the optimist. ‘Don’t worry about the house, mate, we’re going to turn it into a roller disco next week, I’m gonna flog your bikes and have sweet rave parties in your garage.’
Right, had I thought of everything? I went through my list, mentally ticking things off in my head. Standing on my driveway, the sun beating down on me, I knew that everything that could be done, had been done. Lola was in her seat already plugged into The Wiggles, Clare was hugging Gorga, and Dan was standing on our front lawn patiently holding his camera. I was ready, the truck was full of fuel, spare tyres, food, water, the sat phone, CB radio, sat nav, and enough spare parts and tools to give MacGyver a boner.
Finally, the first part of this journey was beginning. As we pulled out into our quiet street, I felt my sense of adventure flare up; my pilot light was back on.
Perth’s suburbs drained away fast. Clare and I talked and talked, our conversation going all over the place. Before long we had trundled past Southern Cross. We both stopped talking simultaneously at the crest of a hill. The straight road rolled under the truck’s cab in silence. Ahead, blacktop line into infinity. The heat haze washed it with mercury silver sheen. Even though it was bumpy and we were doing 110 kilometres an hour it felt like we were standing still. ‘Shit babe, it’s a long way to Adelaide,’ Clare said, turning to check on our daughter. The Wiggles had put Lola out cold in the back.
I know about riding a bike in the heat, but driving an air-conditioned truck at the speed limit is an entirely different experience. Betty was going to be the slowest thing on the road and that would be frustrating and dull. Plus riders like corners and hills, and the Great Eastern Highway is short on both.
We rolled into Norseman that evening off the Coolgardie–Esperance Highway, checked into a motel, and all three of us fell into a vast still sleep; the 700 k’s had zapped our energy. In the morning Clare got the coffee going while Lola climbed onto my chest and prised open an eyelid. ‘Cheeky Daddy,’ she said. I had to get up and start the day. After a daybreak roadhouse breakfast, a refuel, and a quick check of oil, water, tyre pressure, we hit the road again.
If I’d thought the previous day was a dull prospect for a motorcyclist, well, the second day was worse. The Eyre Highway was the road equivalent of a doctor’s waiting room without the two-year-old copies of Woman’s Day.
We stopped to refuel in Balladonia; Lola made friends with a puddle of diesel—clearly she’s my daughter—and then we spent half an hour cleaning her up. We ate petrol station sandwiches that had an interesting diesel aftertaste, and climbed aboard for more of the same. This particular stretch of the Eyre Highway, around 150 k’s, is Australia’s longest straight road. I was so happy to have my girls there with me; doing this journey by myself would have been painful otherwise. There were some drawbacks though. Lola by now had watched Finding Nemo close to six times and she was nowhere near bored with it. As a consequence, Clare and I can recite that entire movie verbatim—that, and we know every song in The Wiggles’ repertoire.
Somewhere between the end of the long straight bit and our destination for the night at Madura Pass, Lola had a massive freakout. She went from fast asleep to ballistic in a nanosecond. I would ordinarily just put this down to what we had heard other parents describe as the ‘terrible twos’—those times when your sweet little toddler is smiling and chatting one minute, and seconds later is possessed and biting, arms thrashing wildly. Our little girl is no exception: I was starting to consider shaving her head to look for the three sixes. But this time I could sympathise with her.
We pulled over and discovered her slumber had been disturbed by a cockroach. It had probably crawled into our open cooler bag last night in the motel. While Lola was passed out in front of Finding Nemo, the insect had made an attempt at circumnavigating the top of her head. Now, Lola’s usually unfazed by insects, and picking them up for a closer inspection is normal. This often progresses into a simple hand crush to see what they look like on the inside, or she goes full Bear Grylls mode and just flat-out eats them, with all Bear’s facial expressions. (We love watching Bear Grylls’ TV show Man vs Wild; Lola in particular loves it, especially when Mr Edward Grylls eats insects.) However, this was her first contact with a cockroach. She had woken up, managed to grab the beasty, and then gone bananas.
It appeared that along with a love of diesel and axle bolts, Lola could have inherited my fear of cockroaches. We all have a thing, don’t we? You might be freaked by snakes or rats or sharks, but my freakout is the humble roach, closely followed by spiders. I can deal with everything else, and over the last twenty years I’ve woken up in various Third World jungles to find all manner of beasties biting, burrowing or feeding on me, both externally and internally. But it was a cockroach that caused my record freakout.
After my wife had dealt with the roach, we climbed back into the cab and pushed on. Clare was laughing, clearly reminiscing about a horrible moment in my past. ‘I’ll never forget that night . . .’ She smiled at me sympathetically.
‘Hmm.’ I shifted uncomfortably behind the wheel and started brushing off imaginary roaches.
Four years earlier I was working a rotation in Japan, on a land rig in Hokkaido. I had just flown back into Australia for my days off, ready to have some fun. We had accepted an invitation to spend a night at a friend’s parents’ holiday home an hour out of Sydney. Simon and Sally are always a great laugh, so Clare and I were really looking forward to a good catch up, no doubt an excellent meal, and some very fine wine. Our evening unfolded as expected. Simon cooked, Sally had me laughing so much I got hiccups, we all hammered the wine and ate too much, and ended up around a huge fireplace with Simon’s 25-year-old single malt before wandering off to bed at midnight, happily pissed.
The house was massive, and our room was on the ground floor, near the kitchen. I was still pissed but woke suddenly in fright, kicking the covers off the bed. I can’t remember much about it, but Clare said I was on all fours and completely rigid, my eyes wide in panic.
‘There’s something in my head,’ I apparently screamed.
Right, so you get the picture. She’s thinking, ‘Oh perfect, now I find out he’s actually completely mental.’ I’m still blurry on this part, but somehow she ascertained that I wasn’t having a psychotic episode.
I was by now rolling about on the floor, both hands cupped over my head, demanding something I could poke into my left ear. My frantic wife took off down the hall, doing the Tom Cruise sock slide into Simon’s parents’ holiday home kitchen where she started madly riffling through drawers. I was by now completely sober and in
ridiculous amounts of pain. The horrible realisation that something had crawled right into my ear, and was now attempting to burrow through my eardrum and into my brain, was making me crazy.
Clare burst into the bedroom with a meat skewer in her hand. ‘WHAT THE FUCK BABE, I’M NOT JAMMING THAT FUCKING THING INTO MY EAR,’ I screamed. I was convulsing and slapping my hand against the left side of my head. The insect or whatever it was seemed intent on moving forward. It was, in a word, terrifying.
‘CALM DOWN, I NEED TO WAKE UP SALLY,’ Clare shouted at me. I must have looked out of my mind, because she took off again. She reappeared next to me with a fistful of uncooked spaghetti, and was off up the stairs to wake our hosts.
I shoved the end of a stick of the spaghetti into my ear. This made whatever was in there only more determined. I could feel lots of sharp legs madly scrambling, and every few seconds something hit my eardrum. You know when you’re fiddling about in your ear with a Q-Tip and you push it in just a bit too far, and it bloody hurts? Right, well imagine hitting the end of that with a hammer, and that’s what it felt like. I was beside myself with fear, pain and spaghetti. Simon and Sal came running in, wearing what looked like each other’s underwear. ‘Jump in the car mate,’ Simon said, trying to sound sober.
I ran out to the dark winter driveway, twitching wildly. Sally rang ahead to tell the local emergency room there was a disturbed bald man in his underwear about to arrive with something digging a hole through his head.
The drive was only a few miles, but it might as well have been to the moon as far as I was concerned. Panic started to shoot waves of adrenalin through my body as we pulled into the small hospital, the two main doors and big red emergency sign flooding the car park in fluorescent light. Simon leaped from the car and ran inside. Clare opened the car door for me and I sprang into the cold like a wild man. The doctor on duty that night was waiting just inside the entrance; he simply gestured me towards an open doorway. Clare sat down in the waiting room with Simon, who looked drunk but appropriately concerned.
I stood in the little examination room staring at the eye chart on the opposite wall and nervously hopping from toe to toe while the doctor sauntered in and casually closed the door, regarding me with a whimsical look. ‘Right, you’ve got an insect in your ear then.’
I twitched, my eyes big and crazy. I closed the gap between us, put both hands on his shoulders. ‘Get it out, for fuck’s sake.’
He straightened up instantly, all humour gone. ‘Don’t worry, Mr Carter. Over to the bed and sit down, please.’
I leaped onto the bed. ‘Call me Paul. Just get it out, Doc.’
He produced one of those black trumpet-shaped scope things with the little light, pulled down on my lobe and poked in the scope. As his head drew close to the lens he jerked back. ‘Whoa,’ was all I heard.
‘What the fuck is it?’ I asked.
He put down the scope. ‘Well, there’s a big cockroach in there, but don’t worry, first we’re going to drown him with oil, then we can remove him.’
‘Whaddya mean drown him? It doesn’t need to look like an accident—why don’t you send in a hit man? Drown him in oil, what do you mean in oil? I work in oil. What kind of oil? Why fuck about with a drowning? Just use a gun—even better, there’s a meat skewer back at the house . . .’ I was raving, but he was already gone. I sat there for what seemed like forever. My new friend, sensing he was in real trouble, began scratching around even harder. The doc came back with a giant turkey baster full of warm vegetable oil. He had to sit on my head to keep me still while a nurse squirted the oil into my ear.
The roach went into his death throes while he slowly suffocated. The doc held on while I screamed and bucked wildly. The nurse held the examination bed down while the doc enjoyed his first human-head rodeo; he rode for the full eight seconds before dismounting and straightening out his hair. I lay there twitching in unison with my newly drowned friend.
His oil-covered cadaver came out in two pieces. Rejoined, he was an inch long. I took him back to the house in a bio-hazard container to show everyone.
Just before I went back to the rig, Clare and I were getting ready for bed and I wandered into the bedroom and stretched out on top of the bed. Just as she came in and turned off the light a Bondi roach flew through the open window like a bronzed hockey puck with wings, and landed on my chest. I lost him behind the wardrobe twenty minutes and several failed attempts to kill him later. Sleep came eventually after stuffing my ears full of toilet paper.
Back on the road to Adelaide, we made regular stops to stretch our legs and point at nothing. The odd dingo mooched about looking for a handout. There was a roadhouse every 200 kilometres or so. Clare fell asleep; Lola was still fixated on Finding Nemo and I let my mind wander. There was going to be a lot of this to come, I thought. It’s a hard barren place out there. I don’t know what triggered it, but having my girls in that truck with me sparked my instinct to protect them. The sky turned to stone as dusk approached, then from nowhere it started pouring with rain.
We ascended through the Madura Pass at nightfall, with rain still falling hard, and pulled up at the motel there. ‘Try the quiche, it’s really good,’ said the motel manager as I checked us in. I glanced over to the driveway; Clare was waking up in the cab outside.
The manager was a big man with a shaved head, a goatee and a lazy eye. On a night like this one, my first impression was that he had probably just finished digging three shallow graves out in the bush in anticipation of our arrival. It didn’t help that the motel was a big spread-out complex at the base of the pass. Other than us and the manager, it appeared to be totally empty. Our room was at the end of a wing that stretched into darkness.
‘This place is creepy,’ said Clare, looking through the rain as lightning lit up the wet landscape.
We unloaded our bags and ran back to the main building for something to eat. The motel manager was there. ‘Try the quiche,’ he grinned. ‘It’s really good.’
We sat there in the restaurant alone, not another soul in there. ‘This place is like an Aussie Bates Motel,’ I whispered.
Clare looked worried and put on Lola’s bib. ‘He’s scary,’ she said.
‘Are you going to have the quiche? Apparently it’s really good.’
She pulled a face. The manager returned a moment later with a pad.
‘I’ll have the quiche,’ I said, smiling at Clare. Clare had a salad and Lola demolished a big piece of fish.
The quiche was horrible, our night was long, the door had a flimsy lock on it, and Clare was convinced the motel manager was going to burst through the door and hack us up with a fire axe. She was ready to pile up the furniture against the door, but in the end the night was uneventful. The manager was in fact a perfect gentleman with a dry sense of humour and bad taste in quiche.
We crossed the border into South Australia the next day. I watched an electrical storm brewing over the Bunda Cliffs on the northern side of the road, rain cascading down in liquid sheets across the highway and out to the southern ocean.
The rest of our journey played out in much the same way, with two more days of driving. Crossing the Nullarbor Plain is, well . . . plain, especially the part called the Treeless Plain—that’s really plain. But eventually the plain gave way to grassy rolling hills and the outskirts of Adelaide.
I hadn’t really slept the night before, but day one, stage one, had me out of the hotel at 6 a.m. and over to the uni’s workshop. Howard, the support driver, was due to arrive in an hour, and then we had to get the truck over to the MoGas holding yard and fill up the tanks with 800 litres of bio-fuel that had been waiting there for me for weeks. Then all we’d have to do was wait for the lord mayor and the media to arrive before we could take off. At 6.30 a.m. I stood there in the workshop with a mug of coffee, the huge roller door opened to a big, almost empty car park surrounded on three
sides by the university’s buildings. The truck was parked next to Betty, and everything was packed, ready to go. Only a few people were around; it was the calm before the storm. I had the time and the quiet to reflect on the last four months.
What was I really trying to do, I wondered, other than ride a bike around Australia (which had been done many times before?). Well, it was the fuel and the bike that made this ride different, and that was the bit that excited me. The uni had built Betty as a prototype, but Colin and his students hoped that once this ride was over, she could be used as an example, perhaps in a first tentative step towards the production of an Australian-made motorcycle for the farming community to use on their properties, powered by the same diesel fuel used in tractors, pumps and all manner of motorised farming machines. As with any other ag bike which would only be used on a farm, it wouldn’t have to be registered to run on the road. More ambitiously, though, this first-generation agricultural motorcycle could run just as effectively on bio-fuel. Every rural community has a roadhouse or a pub that each week discards around 20 litres of used cooking oil. One roadhouse could provide enough fuel to run one bike for over 500 kilometres of travel a week. I had discovered in the course of my research that the farming community in Australia is more than willing to embrace the concept of a bio-fuel ag bike, as for many farmers the cost of running a standard fossil-fuel-burning quad bike, in terms of fuel and maintenance, is on par with running a car. Fuel is one of their biggest costs.
And then there was its potential application in the city. Could you imagine all those people who ride cheap scooters to work every day instead riding a version of Betty to the office, no longer paying for their fuel at the service station in the city? Though the loss in fuel tax revenue alone would have the bike taxed in some other way before it even left the factory. Bio-fuel could also have applications in public transport or industry.
