by Rick Stein
My diary starts then. I come over as cautious, irritable, critical, sometimes sorry for myself, occasionally funny, but at least it’s the real me at 20. I begin by asking the question: what is the point of a diary?
The main reason is surely to record my actions for the purpose of pondering over my youthful incompleteness at a later date. I would think that a record of my actions at this most interesting time in my life will be of great interest to me later. Writing a diary is a mental exercise providing it is regularly kept up at a time when mental exercises are pretty inactive. This might prove invaluable and of course a diary should perhaps clarify mental problems, so to conclude a diary must contain a factual account plus emotion plus problems.
So, ponderous too! I had been reading Voss by Patrick White, a beautifully written and very literary account of a doomed Victorian expedition into the outback. My English companions pushed off, while Steve and I continued on.
I must say it is rather depressing to see them go. Jake made me extremely homesick for Cornwall. Ah well one has to be firm of intention and I must stick to my plans but I would certainly like to go with them.
Surfers Paradise, south of Brisbane, was then absolutely the place to go to if you were young and liked beach life. The fact that you could pay to be sprayed with coconut oil to improve your tan was enormously indicative to a young man keen to meet blonde Aussie girls that here it would all happen. I haven’t been back since but, from the air, Surfers looks like Rio with high-rise hotel and apartment blocks lining the beach. In 1967 it was empty. Pubs were called hotels, and life revolved around the pubs. There was live music and lots of noise. I note that the Surfers Paradise Hotel is now called The Surfers Paradise Tavern. Taverns in Australia don’t rock my boat.
On my first night in Surfers I wrote,
Steve and I went to the Chevron Hotel looking for women and grog. We got the grog but the women angle was bad. It must have been my lack of technique in chatting up. Last night I was asking too many important questions, many of which probably passed right over the dear ladies’ heads. I was asking about jobs and their opinions of tourists. I don’t think even I was too interested in the answers any more than they were about the questions. Still how does one chat up rather clueless girls. If I knew I would be a champion rooter. I will try flattery next time and a lack of questions.
My eventual success was down to Steve. Four girls were renting the caravan next to the one we booked for $15 a week, on a road going into Surfers from the south. They turned out to be anything but clueless. We suggested going into the town together and it was, I’m sure, the fact that one of them, Helen, took a shine to Steve that another one, Karen, started talking to me. That’s always how it happens – they start talking to you. Karen was a lovely-looking girl, not so much pretty as statuesque; she had long, very curly, light brown hair and brown eyes. Her friends all called her Affie because of her hair but also because she had a big nose which did indeed make her look a bit like an Afghan hound. Whenever I hear of women having plastic surgery to decrease the size of their noses, I think of Karen: beauty is definitely not about trying to make yourself look the same as everyone else. She had long legs and, as I discovered, small breasts and long arms. She wore a dark blue skirt of some light man-made material which clung to her brown stomach and bottom and drove me wild.
Back in Cornwall, my last girlfriend had been a slim blonde called Gill Richards, who was the darling of the Australian surfers but who was not keen to have sex with anyone at that time. She was very attractive and I found I could revel in a chaste relationship and concentrate on treating a graceful female with correct respect. From Australia, I wrote dutifully to Gill – long letters full of manly adventures. I left out all the adventures with women. One particularly hung-over Sunday in Surfers I went into the camp shop and bought a tin of ice-cold Golden Circle pineapple juice. I remember marvelling at the civilisation of a hot country which had such life-saving drinks for sale, chilled, in somewhere as humble as a small shop on a campsite. My time with Karen was similarly charmed: trips to see the dolphins jump (plain boring) and the sharks (fascinating, really evil-looking, sleek and beautifully dangerous when viewed from above), a floor show in a place called the Cha-Cha and lots of swimming in the sea. One diary entry is suggestive, ‘Another great night but the bed collapsed’.
Steve and I left Surfers to travel north because our new girlfriends were going back to work in Brisbane. We drove 400 miles to Gladstone with a feeling of adventure. I suppose we expected to find another Surfers Paradise and we chose Gladstone because we could get a ferry to Heron Island which is at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef. We thought it would be where the action was. Gladstone was where the reality of most of rural Australia began to dawn on me. There wasn’t much going on. We arrived in the evening, tired from the long journey. We went into a couple of pubs and discovered the town was full of construction workers building an aluminium smelting plant. There was nowhere to stay. We slept in the car and woke at 6.30 feeling dusty and demoralised. We couldn’t get a ferry to Heron Island so we took one to Curtis Island. It seemed to be inhabited by about 30 people. I was made even gloomier by the ramshackle nature of the houses and the sight of a couple of trucks dating back to the 1940s parked on the beach. In another life everything there would have seemed quaint and charming but then it made me feel like I was suffocating with depression. In the diary I recorded a lot of drinking sessions so I was probably hung over and Steve was no help. He was bright and cheerful, but I found myself getting irritated by his laugh, his always clean and pressed shirts and shorts, the neatness of his little car. The more he irritated me, the more pissed off I was with myself for being such a bastard. I wanted to be drinking XXXX beer with the construction workers in the Gladstone Hotel, not travelling around with a nice guy like Steve.
He and I parted company at Maryborough. He was going home to Newcastle, New South Wales, and I was carrying on to Cairns. I was not looking forward to loneliness in the outback and, as I grew more experienced, I realised the handicaps of travelling solo. I was constantly reduced by lack of companionship. No wonder I read so much and wrote so frequently to my mother. Every time I arrived in a new town I would head straight for the post office Poste Restante, to see if there was mail from her. Once I even planned my route based on a Poste Restante which I would get to in ten days’ time.
I gradually got better at getting what I wanted on the road. I soon learned that starting to hitch-hike in a town was waste of time. Better to walk to the outskirts, also to choose an open stretch of road with somewhere where a car could pull in. I figured that I should always look as clean and tidy as possible and smile as much as I could. Part of the deal was that I should talk as much as the person who picked me up wanted to, and soon I began to enjoy it. I travelled with a professional boxer who told me about Sydney’s underworld and Long Bay prison, with the Italian owner of a sawmill who was also the president of soccer for Queensland, with a guy in a singlet smelling of sweat who drove an ‘artic’ (articulated lorry) loaded with railway sleepers. I made it to Cairns only to hit the rainy season. Depression started to set in, and I alleviated it by reading On the Beach by Nevil Shute and going to see Ship of Fools with Vivien Leigh, Simone Signoret and Lee Marvin in a cinema where all the seating was deckchairs. I returned from the cinema to find my 65p a night room was full of cockroaches. That was when I decided to go back to Karen.
By then, I was getting really quite sharp at hitch-hiking: south of Cairns the car I was in joined a queue to wait for a creek which had flooded the road to subside so I thanked the driver, got out with my stuff, and walked down the queue of cars asking politely at each window where they were going, till I found a driver who was heading for Brisbane. When I got there, I phoned Karen. She put me up but things didn’t go too well, and soon I was on my way again.
I was running out of money so I went to the employment exchange in Toowoomba. They found me a job in an abattoir in Roma, about 200 miles fur
ther west. I must say I was apprehensive about working in a slaughterhouse – which they referred to as a meat works – but I was still imbued with the Hemingway-esque idea of proving myself as a man by doing tough things. It took me five lifts to get there and I was tempted to take a job offered by a very pleasant farmer on his farm near the turn-off to Condamine. When I got to Roma I checked in to the Hotel Grande, and recorded that in the next room was ‘an attractive chaste looking barmaid. The prospects are promising’. Only later did I realise that she was a prostitute in town for the slaughtering season. So naive was I, and so lustful, that I lay in bed the first night thinking of going to her room and asking to sleep with her but deciding not to as she seemed to be rather restless, constantly opening and closing her door and walking around the room and getting in and out of bed.
I’ve never been in a war zone and only occasionally have been in serious danger, so I can’t claim to have seen it all … but that slaughterhouse really shocked me. Even the night I arrived I could smell it and hear the disturbing bellowing from the cattle in the field into which a brown effluent was pouring from a large pipe. I was distinctly uneasy as I arrived for work at 6.45 a.m. I can remember exactly what I was wearing: jeans and a dark blue work shirt. I was given the job of sweeping up blood and guts in the killing section. In my diary I wrote,
When I first looked round I thought that I would faint. I panicked with a feeling that I couldn’t stand it but I didn’t and felt it was going to be alright, maybe just a slight twinge when I first saw the beheaded cows swinging along on hooks attached to rollers. The smell was rather odd I think it must be the smell of warm blood.
Each cow was forced up a ramp from the stockyard on to a weighing platform. Just beside the platform stood the big death man, with a contraption that looked like a sawn-off rifle. This had a rod about one foot long which shot out of the barrel when fired into the head. The cow fell down a chute, legs still twitching, and was hoisted up by its back legs. First the throat was cut and bleeding induced by a man in black oilskins and sou’wester who stuck a rod up an artery. The blood ran into a trough. The cow was beheaded and then let down on to a ramp where it was cut open and the guts and hide removed. Then it was hoisted back on to the rails and taken to be sawn in two and chilled for boning.
My day of sweeping blood down drains was long, and I sweated a great deal. I also discovered that the pay wasn’t great, so I moved into what I called a no-hopers home which cost £2 per week. On my second day at the abattoir a bullock broke loose after having been shot. It slipped in the blood trough, got up and started galloping round the factory knocking over buckets and bins. Men were scrambling up ladders to get out of the way. Finally they got the fear-crazed animal cornered, and the slaughterman took another shot and the bullock took off for another lap of the abattoir. Finally everybody grabbed it and it was shot at the blood trough. The whole killing department roared with laughter. I found it distinctly unfunny. I was hoping in earnest that the animal would do some real damage, perhaps knock the place down so that we could all go home.
I hate it. I start in the morning indifferent. By first smoko I’m wishing the death man would kill faster so that the 165 quota can be over quicker. By breakfast I’m thirsty and covered in blood and hair. By lunchtime I’m bored stiff and fed up. By the last smoko of the day I’m so depressed and wish so much to get out of that smelly blood hole that I’m half mad.
Nowadays, I can see myself as I was then and quote my hero Dylan:
Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
Next thing I’m going to the pub with half the residents of the flophouse. My diary records a drinking session that lasts from midday till two the following morning, during which I had an argument with Pedro who is a boner in the meat works. By about 4 p.m. we were all pissed and he flatly refused to buy a round of drinks, which the Aussies call a shout. There was no way I was going to buy them. We were about the same size, and the conversation went something like this:
‘Do you want a fight?’
‘Do you want a fight?’
‘No, I’m saying do you want to step outside?’
‘Look, mate, I asked you first. Do you want a fight?’
‘I don’t care. Do you want a fight?’
He got up and bought the drinks.
One final note is from the margins of the diary after a weekend drinking session in the pub. I crashed what is called a B&S or Bachelor and Spinster Ball. I chatted to two girls and was beginning to think how intelligent they were, and how nice, when one of them said, ‘You’re far too pissed. You’d better go home.’ I wrote, ‘Spent night in bush outside Winton, many mosquitoes and much dust’.
I had become used to sleeping in my sleeping bag under the stars. I had my radio and my camera, an Emi K which I’d bought in Aden on my way over. I had a couple of T-shirts, two shirts, two pairs of shorts, underpants, my flip-flops, boots, razor, toothbrush. My books become a problem, as I was loath to leave them behind, The Grapes of Wrath, Voss, Lord Jim, South by Java Head, My Uncle Silas, The Carpetbaggers. All of them had a serious physical presence for me and eventually I hit on the idea of sending them all back to Sydney by post. Apart from the diary and biro, I had my Avia watch and a Dunhill cigarette lighter which my brother-in-law Shaun had given me as going-away present, and that was it.
The hotels I stayed in were pubs with rooms, rough but atmospheric. The rooms often had a wide communal veranda and swinging from a hook in the roof there’d be a canvas water bag which delivered quite cool water by a process of evaporation. One of my enduring memories was a hotel in a tiny place called Augathella, between Charleville and Longreach: a few beers in the evening with the locals, sleeping with the fly-screen door shut on to the veranda, getting up early in the morning for breakfast of lamb chops in thick gravy and strong tea and the smell of wood smoke in the air from the breakfast stove as I shouldered my backpack and set off down the road in my R. M. Williams riding boots that I’d bought in Brisbane.
Looking back, the abattoir had been another rite of passage. It had toughened me up and made me happy with my lot. I began to love the dry, fiercely hot country I was passing through and the sparseness of the towns.
IV
In the fettlers’ camp at Deepwell they called Alice Springs ‘Callous Springs’. The reason, they said, was that when you were working in one of the camps and you had time off, you went to Alice to get pissed and ‘pick up gins’. Not many of the locals wanted you around and they made it clear. I was told that gins – old aboriginal women, – were mostly alcoholics and you’d go off to the dry bed of the Todd River with a gin and flagon of red wine and fuck her, then leave her with the wine.
Arriving at Alice Springs in the rain in a caravan towed by road grader and driven by a Yugoslavian called Bruno, I had been rather disoriented because in the mist and drizzle it felt a bit like Cornwall. I hung around for a couple of days, staying at the Country Women’s Association for 10 shillings [50p] a night, then got a job as a railway track maintenance workman also known as a fettler.
It took about 12 hours to go the 50 miles from Alice to Deepwell on the train because much of the track had been weakened by having the ground washed away from under it. The last part of the journey was made by a motorised section car and at times we were going over track with nothing under it.
The morning after I arrived I was at work by 7 a.m., assisting a bulldozer to push the desert sand under the tracks and levelling the track by what was called lifting and packing. There was no ballast (crushed granite stones), under the tracks, just sand, which was why the track was always being washed away and why the steam passenger train, which ran from Alice Springs to Port Augusta, travelled on its narrow-gauge 3-foot 6-inch rails at speeds so low a boy could run faster. Lifting and packing simply meant jacking up the track with a hand jack till level, then packing sand under the sleepers, ramming it home with the handle of a shovel. We a
lso replaced the wooden sleepers by digging out the old jarra timber ones, sliding the new ones under and securing the track by belting in a thick steel nail called a dog with a sledgehammer. Being able to hit the dog fair and square every time was what counted and took some learning. If you were off course you’d break off bits of steel which would fly everywhere. I’ve still got the scar on my chest where a white-hot piece of steel hit me.
When we worked the work was hard, but we spent a lot of time not working – lounging under gum trees in the heat of the day with a tin mug of billy tea or lying around the camp reading. We’d work from 7 till 9 a.m. and then have smoko, which was tea and a cigarette. Building fires was easy as there was always plenty of dry firewood. The billy was a two-pint can with a wire handle. You’d fill it from the canvas water bag hanging on the section car. The tea would be imbued with smoke from the fire. That smoky tea with a roll-up was heaven. Tobacco used to come in on the Ghan (the train) once a week at about nine in the evening, when it was deathly quiet with an intense canopy of stars. You’d hear the Ghan 20 minutes before it arrived. A distant hum, then you’d see a hue of light in the distance. A crackling in the rails and it would appear, in its giant red and silver magnificence, its light briefly illuminating the water tower. It rarely stopped, unless a rail boss was coming to see us – Mr Donlan in his sinister leather coat. The train simply slowed down and someone passed out the mail and the tobacco and any other parcels. Then it would be off through the black hills and the rumble would fade to silence. Out there in the bush, there was no sound. I used to think about the explosiveness of silence. My mother sent me a quote from George Eliot: ‘If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.’
