by Tony Horwitz
It is the same creeping sense of unreality I felt in the cockies’ truck yesterday: part of me here, in this beat-up bus in the Nullarbor, and part of me in Sydney with Geraldine. The farther I travel from home, the more I feel as if I could just drift off altogether, like a boat breaking loose from its moorings and easing out with the tide.
16 … A Certain Sire and a Certain Dame
On any other morning I would have ducked into the bushes as soon as I saw the car approach. And had the driver seen me scrambling out of sight, he would have happily sped on past. But not here, on the edge of the Nullarbor, with the rain spitting down. So when the Tasmanians see me, and I see them, there is really no choice but to climb aboard again.
Edna picks up where she left off the night before. As we pass a flock of crows, breakfasting on dead kangaroo by the highway, she rolls down the window to cheerlead: “Good on ya, mates! Good on ya!” Then it’s back to bloody unions, bloody greenies, bloody dole bludgers.
Two bags of Cherry Ripes later, we reach Norseman, the first real town in Western Australia. I decide to duck out and have a poke around before choosing whether to go north through the goldfields or to take a coastal road to Perth.
“I’ll stop in when I pass through Kalgoorlie,” I lie.
“Love to have you,” Edna lies back. She doesn’t bother to offer an address.
It is 11 A.M. Monday when I disembark in Norseman. The gold miners are halfway through the day shift, their wives are shopping in town, the children are all at school. And I am shuffling down the main street with a rucksack: no appointments, no deadlines, no errands. Beats the hell out of Monday morning at the newspaper office.
But my waifdom is not so complete that I can walk by the first news agency I’ve spotted since leaving Alice. “The Norseman Today is a paper without character,” declares the editorial in a three-day-old copy of the local rag. “It never has any controversial articles printed in its pages…. All it does is report school news, Lions news, and various other sports club news.”
I open to the inside pages and sure enough: school news, Lions news, various other sports club news. I return to the curious editorial. “Have you noticed that Norseman Today never writes about accidents, deaths, or anything remotely unpleasant? Well, that probably will not change.” And that seems to be the point of the editorial—to assure readers that they’ll continue to be fed a steady diet of school news, Lions news, and various other sports club news.
After all, there’s enough unpleasantness in Norseman without the local paper rubbing it in. The town seems to have been in a slow state of decay since 1894, when a horse named Norseman stumbled over a gold nugget and the mining fever began. Jerry-built houses huddle beneath a huge slag heap left by the mines. All commerce seems to have fled with the gold, leaving a row of Victorian shop fronts with “for sale” or “for lease” signs in the windows, and iron rooftops sagging almost onto the footpath.
One of the few businesses actually open at noon on Monday is Amelia Jones’s rock and empty-bottle shop. She spies me peeking through the window at her granite and glass, and comes out for a chat.
“Business is kind of slow,” she confesses, stopping to rearrange a few chunks of amethyst in the front window. “And I guess this isn’t the best kind of business for a town where people are always moving in and moving out. They don’t want to load themselves down.”
I decide to go with the flow and move out as quickly as I can. But the same rule applies here as in Cloncurry and Coober Pedy; the more blighted the locale, the harder it is to escape. Norseman has the added disadvantage of being a gateway to Western Australia, and hence a point of entry for fugitives, criminals, and drifters from the eastern states. If the Norseman Today hadn’t been so busy reporting Lions news and various other sports club news, it might have told me what Amelia Jones reports: namely, that three days prior to my arrival, a pair of hitchhikers bashed and robbed a driver who had been so unlucky as to offer them a ride out of town. No wonder, then, that the only person to pull up beside me all afternoon is a policeman who wants to check my identification.
Until Elsa. There’s a bit of fable that passes among male hitchhikers the world over. Whatever the version, it is a story that brings together two essential threads in Hitchhike Dreaming: the attractive woman and the comfortable car. Jackson Browne popularized the fantasy with his song about standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona: “It’s a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowing down to have a look at me.” The song ends with Jackson wailing, “Open up, I’m climbing in.” But that only happens to rock stars. Unaccompanied women are understandably afraid of letting strange men into their car. Some will even stop to tell you that as they unpick you up. “Sorry, if I weren’t alone I’d give you a ride,” or a similarly apologetic phrase.
The fact that drivers of luxury cars stop as rarely as lone women is more complex. Perhaps they’re simply worried that a scruffy wanderer with a rucksack will scratch a polished leather seat. But having hitchhiked now on three different continents, I suspect there’s more to it than that—some universal law stating that the higher one climbs on the economic ladder, the lower becomes one’s quota of generosity toward strangers. The converse is also true. If anyone ever put together a group profile of hitchhikers’ most frequent patrons, it would come out looking like the lobby of a welfare office: Mexican fruit pickers in America, Turkish laborers in secondhand Volkswagens on the Autobahn, Aborigines and hard-luck cockies in the bush. It is the disadvantaged who are also most likely to offer you a seat at their dinner table or a bed for the night. Meanwhile, those who can afford to share their petrol and tucker very rarely do.
Enough for social theory; all I’m thinking of in Norseman is a ride, any ride. For my humility I’m rewarded with a young doctor popping past in a zippy roadster, then turning around to offer me a lift.
“Hop in,” she says with a wide, welcoming flash of perfect orthodontia. “I’m just headed down to have a look around the coast. Plenty of extra room.”
Elsa is a GP from Perth, putting in a few months at a clinic in Kalgoorlie. She’s also the first kindred soul I’ve encountered in several thousand miles. Kindred in that she’s an outsider who has left the city in a self-conscious effort to see some bush. Kindred too in that she’s a little burned out and anxious to chat about city things for a while. After a steady conversational diet of fertilizer, farting, drinking, and killing kangaroos, I’m only too happy to oblige.
So we speed south of Norseman, through Salmon Gums, through Grass Patch, through Gibson, talking about plays and movies, English literature, politics, differences between city and country life. And it is all as smooth and satisfying as a long lunch over chardonnay by Sydney Harbor.
But my movable feast with Elsa causes a strange sort of indigestion. While I was traveling through the scrub with opal miners and cockies, or across the Nullarbor with a family of Tasmanian geeks, there was little to remind me of home—and hence little to make me homesick. But chatting with this amiable and attractive young doctor, I begin to miss Geraldine with a palpable sense of longing.
There’s a related discomfort, less acute but more perplexing. Elsa breaks the spell of my adventure, in the same way that the Tasmanians’ air-conditioned car removed me from the rawness of desert travel. The scenery conspires with the chat to shrink all sense of away-ness. I am suddenly out of the scrub, rushing toward the sea through rolling, verdant heath. Grass. Trees. Orchards. I haven’t seen so much green since my first day hitching out of Sydney. Approaching the coast from the sunparched interior, it is easy to see why Australians crowd the shoreline despite all the open, untamed spaces farther in.
The seasons have also changed. In the outback the only seasonal gradations are hot, very hot, and unbearably hot. But when I leave the warmth of Elsa’s car in Esperance, I step into the chill and wet of a late autumn evening. Still clad in a singlet and shorts, I feel like an Australian bumpkin climbing off a plane in wintry London. I decide to hibernate at th
e nearest pub and console myself with a hot meal and a warm, early bed.
I would have done better to camp in the rain. The pub meal is Rabelaisian in quantity and grotesque in quality, even by comparison to the chicken rolls and pasties I’ve been living on for the past several days. For entrees I devour a basket of stale white bread and a thin gruel with grease bubbles floating on the top, called “soupe du jour.” The main course appears to be an entire haunch of lamb, swimming through a swamp of brown gravy, with a massive collection of vegetables dipping their toes in the ooze: three greens, two baked potatoes, a pile of canned carrots and canned peas. There’s also a side salad of egg, more potato, beetroot, and sweet canned fruit sailing through the muck on a wilted leaf of lettuce.
I eat it all but the meal is so poor that I feel unsatisfied. So I order dessert and get a lemon meringue that a mining engineer couldn’t drill his way into. Washed down with coffee that looks suspiciously like the soupe du jour.
Of course, it could have been worse. Ernest Giles’s first meal after surviving the Gibson desert was a small sick wallaby, which he ate “living, raw, dying—fur, skin, bones, skull and all. The delicious taste of that creature I shall never forget.” Nothing like a few words from the wretched explorers to put your own misery in perspective.
In the morning I restore my spirits—and my resemblance to the rest of the species—with a long shower and a trip to the Laundromat. Between the wash and the rinse cycle I meet three Englishmen named Paul, Nick, and Nick, touring Western Australia in search of the elusive Halley’s Comet. They offer me a lift to their next viewing spot, a few hours inland from Esperance.
The company makes me feel as well-seasoned and Australian as a nineteenth-century bushman. In England, Paul, Nick, and Nick work as pharmacist, physicist, and computer programmer. In Australia they merge into a three-headed parody of the Pommie nerd. Paul the pharmacist drives like a half-blind pensioner, with Nick the computer whiz in the navigator’s seat, yelling in panic whenever a scenic lookout or roadhouse doesn’t appear with the precision of a software program. At one point he even orders Paul to turn around and retreat twelve miles to Esperance. The gas tank is half empty; better to go back and refuel rather than to venture into thirty miles of wilderness.
Meanwhile, Nick the physicist shifts uncomfortably in his proper leather shoes and stretch slacks, complaining of the “heat bumps” covering his pale white body. While the deep space he’s gazed at through the telescope has been underwhelming, the Australian space outside the car has him reeling.
“I get agoraphobic out here,” he confesses, gazing at a landscape of sheep and farmhouses that is downright cluttered by Australian standards. “In England there’d be three villages out there. Here, nothing.”
I think of the hardbitten men I traveled with in the center, and of explorers like John Eyre, who walked much of the way from Adelaide to Esperance in 1841, and muse at how quickly Homo Australis has evolved from the English weed that first took root in the Antipodes.
Hitchhiking with tourists has a singular advantage: namely, that they are doing the same thing as you—sightseeing. Riding with a truckie, or with a local driver through the flow of their daily work, you can’t very well blurt, “Pull off here so I can snap a picture,” or “The travel guide says the best view of the coast is just ten kilometers south.” Tourists do it for you.
So three Poms and a Yank amble through the countryside, stopping to gawk at Pink Lake (an algae-ridden pond that is as pink and artificial-looking as cotton candy) and to photograph each other standing atop a dune overlooking the Great Australian Bight. We even go in search of the famed Western Australian “rabbit fence,” erected by graziers and farmers some years ago to keep bunnies from migrating west. It didn’t work. There’s no sign of the fence anymore, just rabbits hopping all over the highway.
Hitchhiking with tourists has the singular disadvantage that they, like you, are strangers to the territory. Only the surface of the landscape is touched and understood. So at a town called Ravensthorpe, where the Englishmen stop to set up camp for the night, I decide to head on without them. Nine head of cattle stare out from between the wooden slats of a truck parked at the gas station. I wait for the driver to fill his tank and flash my most plaintive “I-need-a-ride” smile. He smiles back and waves me into the passenger seat.
It is a fortunate selection. Andrew Cabassi is as rare and fine a breed as the bulls he is carrying to a “Beef Week” auction in Albany: a successful man of the land, as contented with his lot as the Kimba cockies were discontented with theirs.
“If you want to grizzle, you can grizzle, and most cockies do,” he tells me. “But at the moment I can’t think of anything to grizzle about.” When I ask him what he specializes in, he hands me a finely printed business card with “Advanced Cattle Production Consultant” written beneath his name. “Just for show,” he says, fingering the card with a curious mix of pride and embarrassment. “Anyway, it only tells half the story.”
The card should read: “Andrew Cabassi, cattle consultant, stud breeder, sperm exporter, vegetable farmer, and lucky son of indigent Italian immigrants.” A generation ago, his family was still scratching two acres of stony hillside in Tuscany, as it had for the previous few centuries. Then his father fled to Western Australia and started scratching a few unstony acres of soil near Perth. Andrew left school at eleven (“Still can’t do anything but sign the checks”), married with two hundred pounds sterling to his name, borrowed, increased, and eventually bought his own farm. He has been growing fat off the land ever since.
“Fat as a sow,” he says. The good fortune includes a few thousand head of cattle grazing across three thousand acres of land. Also, the highest price ever paid in Western Australia—twenty-two thousand dollars—for the last bull he sold at the Albany market. It broke his own record set a few months before that. “And I’ve had some bloody fun, all the way to the bank,” he says.
Success has gone to Andrew’s pocket but remarkably little of it has gone to his head. He could easily afford to hire someone else to drive his bulls to market. But he prefers to do it himself. And when he gets to Albany, well before dawn so his bulls will be first off the auction block, he’ll sleep in the back of his truck rather than check into a hotel.
“My blood is contadino—peasant blood—and as soon as I forget where I came from, I will be a peasant again,” he says. “Just because I have money doesn’t make me better than the next bloke. Just happier.” He laughs again. “As happy as a bull in a paddock full of dames.”
Andrew points through the slats of his truck to illustrate a point about breeding. “See that one in the corner? Good muscle, nice and wide across the top. But not real masculine. Sort of sloppy. You want more muscle through the rest of the body for red meat.”
He lectures me about sperm rights, about “teaser” cows that lure the bulls into the pen, and about the rubber bags—soft and water-filled to duplicate a vagina—used to collect the specimen. “Doesn’t take ’em long, let me tell you,” he says with a chortle.
In the middle of his dissertation—“Am I boring you?” “No, not at all.” And he isn’t—he pauses to ponder the magic that unfolds every time chromosome X meets chromosome Y. “Use a certain sire with a certain dame and it comes up trumps,” he says, concluding the lecture. “Works almost every time. Isn’t that something?” Still as wondrous to him as his own success at engineering it.
Part of the appeal of newspaper reporting is that it gives you daily glimpses into the lives of people you’d otherwise never encounter. Hitchhiking magnifies the same experience. Instead of calling ahead and arranging an appointment, you are thrust into the full stream of their working day. No time for them to fix the makeup or alter the normal pattern of events. Just raw and unedited life; as raw as a truck full of bulls, rumbling toward a “Beef Week” auction in Albany.
We drive slowly through the twilight, with Andrew pointing out the farm of one customer, then another; the road is as fami
liar as a milk run to him. And as dusk gives way to dark, we share the sandwiches his wife prepared—“home-grown veggies, not a chemical on the lot of them”—and talk about the future.
Driving at night seems to unlimber the soul. Eye contact ends and the cab becomes a confession box, with nothing but murmuring voices in the dark. The small distractions of the workday are shoved aside.
Andrew tells me about his marriage of thirty years and I ask him how to keep it strong for all that time (“Stay patient and keep your fingers crossed,” he says. “Let her window shop if she’s restless, so long as she doesn’t buy”). He tells me about his sons at university—“one in med sci, one in ag sci”—and asks for advice about keeping them away from drugs (I tell him that I experimented and came through all right—I think). I ask him about success and he tells me, “Trust your instincts and don’t listen to the next guy.”
And finally we talk about death, or our fears of it. Pushing fifty, Andrew looks as strong and well fed as his cattle. But still he worries. “When you’re young, you feel like Superman, like nothing can touch you,” he says. “Then some bloke you know, strong as an ox, keels over in the paddock one morning. So you slow down a bit, spend more time with the missus, try to enjoy things a little more.”
Andrew has one parting piece of advice. As I climb down from the truck to wander into town, he gives me a stock tip—not of the Hereford kind either. He tells me the names of several small companies that he’s “got a hunch will be worth a bloody fortune some day.” I want to ask how I can invest in him instead. As it is, he will be remembered in a private collection of all the memorable faces I’ve met on the road. Andrew Cabassi, the Happy Farmer in the Lucky Country. We shake hands and go our separate ways in the night.
