by Tony Horwitz
24 … She’ll Be Right
At sunrise there is another ceremony to attend. Twenty middle-aged men have gathered at a park by the water, waiting for the first rays of dawn. One carries a bugle, another has a flag under his arm, and a third is setting up a record player in the back of his station wagon. The others mill around in the still-cool dark, smoking cigarettes and talking quietly among themselves.
The sun filters through the trees and a scratchy, martial tune begins playing on the record player. The men right-wheel and left-wheel across the grass to the sound of Bridge on the River Kwai. Slowly, a crowd gathers and a troop of Brownies joins the march. Then four soldiers plant their bayonets in the dirt, and the bugler blows out a breathy Last Post.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning we will remember.
A gun goes off, wreaths are laid, and the Anzac Day parade disperses before the sun has lifted itself ten degrees off the tropical horizon.
“You can’t dawdle in this heat,” explains Les Davis, a World War II infantryman. Behind him, the Brownies hike up their dresses to let cool water from a tap run across their ankles. “Broome by mid-morning can be as grueling as Tobruk,” Davis adds, referring to the 1941 battle in the Libyan desert.
It is not my ceremony—not my country, even—but somehow the brief remembrance feels more genuine than Memorial Day in the U.S. There is nothing in American history to match the unredeemed slaughter at Gallipoli. And for many Americans, mourning of the war dead is mixed with the celebration of continued military might.
In Australia there is only the mourning. “The whole war thing is bullshit,” Les Davis tells me as the marchers drift from the park to the Catholic church, where Father Mack will conduct a brief memorial service. “I’m here to remember me mates, not all the throats I cut. The army, the saluting, the whole lot of it makes me bloody bitter.”
Not many American veterans of World War II talk that way—particularly not veterans like Davis, whose chest is covered with stars and crosses from Egypt and France and Southeast Asia.
Anzac Day has an added poignancy in Broome, where so many of the citizens are of Japanese descent. When the internment order came through at the beginning of the war, a local pearlmaster declared: “It’s hard to hate a particular fellow who’s been a good shipmate, even if he is Japanese.” In the jingoistic fever of wartime, such a statement was tantamount to treason.
Now the races are united again and peppered across the pews listening to Father Mack.
“I was visited by a Jewish traveler yesterday,” he tells them soon after I wander in and take a seat. “It was Passover, the day when Jewish slavery is remembered, and he wanted to find a Jewish family to remember with. It made me think about our own ceremony, here, today. Of how we gather together, to remember. That’s what collective memory, what Anzac Day, is all about.”
I am happy to repay Father Mack for his help, and pleased to hear myself listed as an exotic new ingredient in the ethnic curry of Broome.
Anzac Day resembles Passover in another way: the remembrance is quickly softened by drink. Until a few years ago, the veterans of Broome marched straight from the park to the nearby Continental Hotel for a few rounds on the house. But a new owner at the pub discontinued the early opening, fearing that the whole thirsty town of Broome would crowd in for a freebie at dawn. So now, after the service at the Catholic church, the men retire to a liquid breakfast at an army barracks instead.
“AttenSHUN!” shouts the local Returned Services League president, raising his tinnie for a 7 A.M. toast.
“To the Queen!”
“Hear! Hear!” (All drink.)
“To those we left behind, at Gallipoli, at Tobruk, in New Guinea!” (All drink.)
To me ’Nam mate, Michael, who got killed in a car prang last week.” (All drink.)
A stooped Digger fills a large glass of beer and places it in the corner as a sort of Elijah’s cup for all the ones that didn’t make it home. “To absent friends,” he croaks. All drink again. And then another Digger, an ex-submariner, starts the singing.
This is my story
This is my song
I’ve been in the Navy too bloody long.
And so it goes, all drinking, all singing, into the heat of the day. The party moves from the barracks to a tin-and-wood RSL building back in town. By midday the men have descended into stuporous mateship, slinging arms over one another’s shoulders and slurring out toasts to everyone they have ever heard of.
“To George Franklin’s birthday!”
“Hear! Hear!”
“Who the bloody hell is George Franklin?”
“Me next-door neighbor.”
“Hear! Hear!”
I slump on the floor beside a middle-aged woman named Marian Choice. She is chaperoning her uncle, a World War II veteran named Tassie, the only male in her family to return from the front lines in one piece. More or less.
“He’s got radiation burns from being in a prisoner of war camp in Japan,” she says. “But otherwise he’s fine.”
Marian’s father fought at Gallipoli and returned with shrapnel in his forehead (“didn’t bother him much”). Her father’s brother was killed in a trench somewhere in France, and Marian’s own brother died in New Guinea nine days before World War II ended. He was a few weeks short of his twenty-first birthday.
“All three of my sons went to Vietnam,” she says. “They came out okay, physically, that is. It shook ’em up mentally.” She goes quiet for a moment. “It doesn’t seem fair that the old men start the wars and the boys got to fight them.”
Man and boy, veteran and private, are fighting a losing battle now to keep from falling on the floor. They are saved by an Aboriginal veteran who steps outside, rolls a tarpaulin over a patch of dusty ground, and bangs two empty tinnies together to get everyone’s attention.
“Mates, it’s two-up time.” And the building empties out into the yard.
“Five dollars on the heads!”
“I’ll take it.” A few crumpled bills exchange hands.
“Ten to make guts! Ten to match the spinner!”
“Guts made!”
“Come in, spinner!”
I have read about two-up, which supposedly originated in the trenches of France. But I’ve never seen the living, breathing game. And what strikes me is the simplicity of it all—a game of chance so crude as to be absolutely captivating. Two old-style pennies, with a Queen on one side and a kangaroo on the other, are balanced on a wooden “kip” of wood. Then they’re flipped into the air, with two Queens a victory for the heads, two kangaroos a win for the tails, and one of each a throw that doesn’t count at all.
“Tail ’em up! Tail ’em up!” shout the tails bidders.
“Head ’em, ya bastard, head ’em!” yell the heads bidders.
And then the “Come in, spinner!” beckoning each man in turn to take his place in the circle to flip the coins.
“Foul toss!” the men yell, as my turn as spinner sends the coins rolling into the dust. “Send the Yank home!”
The jest is light-hearted, though. I get another chance, and then another, as I hit a run of heads.
“Tails, ya bastard! You’ve tailed out, mate!” The five-dollar bills at my feet disappear and someone else takes the kip. My second turn at spinning is a tails on the first toss. And in between, I lose twenty dollars making side bets on other people’s spins.
If I had a line of credit handy, I’d borrow money and gamble on. But I know no one, except for Father Mack, who watches the illegal game with a bemused smile from the shade of a nearby tree. A policeman, meanwhile, joins in, “just to keep the game clean,” he says.
So I climb on my bike again and pedal off, wondering that the Axis didn’t win the war while the Aussie spinners came on in.
I awake in a park some hours later, sweaty and hung over, to the realization that I have been too long in Broome. It’s not that I’ve overstayed my welcome—far from it. Ever since that first friendly
wink from the librarian, two long days ago, Broome has been nothing if not welcoming. The Wronskis invited me to visit again, as did Father Mack and several of my two-up companions. And Mark and Gavin are still wandering about, ready to shout me another beer—or a joint. If I wanted to, I could bludge my way through a year or two in Broome.
It’s my own itinerary that’s the problem. There’s a plane leaving Darwin for Sydney on Tuesday morning, three days from now. I negotiated a month away from Sydney with the promise that I’d be on that plane—and back at the office the following day. My employer’s goodwill was stretched to the limit allowing me that much leave, and I don’t like to consider my chances of stretching it any further.
The only problem is, I don’t like my chances of making it either. It’s Friday evening and I’m still a twelve-hundred-mile drive from Darwin. Much of the road is unpaved, and most of the rest is unpopulated. If I’d left Broome yesterday morning, as originally planned, there wouldn’t have been any problem. But now I’ll need some luck and a lot of stamina to make it through in three days.
Nor am I the only person who wants to linger in Broome. Just before sunset, I return the bicycle and catch a ride to a gas station at the main highway, twelve miles south of town. My plan is to find a truckie or long-distance driver to travel with through the night. But the only traffic at the station is a squadron of sandflies and mosquitoes.
The handiwork of other stranded hitchhikers isn’t very encouraging, either.
“Is five hours here too long?” says the top scratch on the back of a road sign.
“No.”
“Pat stuck 3 days. Christmas 85.”
“Wayne, the same. Get into Jim Beam.”
Then, at the bottom, a half-quoted lyric from the rock band Talking Heads.
You may find yourself…
Nice song. Nice thought. I scratch out a stanza to pass the time.
You may find yourself
In another part of the world.
You may find yourself
Behind the wheel of a large automobile.
You may find yourself … a short way into the scrub. In a not-very-large sleeping bag. Wondering, well, how did I get here?
Saturday morning finds me still in search of a large automobile. The sun is high and hot in the sky before a car finally pulls over to pick me up. It’s about twenty minutes after that when the same car, driven by an Aboriginal couple, pulls off the road with a flat. The driver takes a pair of pliers out of the glove box, uses them to roll down his window, and opens the door from the outside. Then he passes the pliers over his shoulder so I can do the same. Outside, we struggle with a broken old jack until it collapses under the weight of the station wagon. Not that it matters. The spare tire doesn’t fit.
I’ve hitched half a dozen rides with Aborigines since leaving Sydney and all but one has ended something like this.
I catch a ride to the next roadhouse, give the mechanic five dollars to drive back and rescue the couple, then seek out a swifter steed to carry me on. A brawny man in a sleeveless jean jacket is pumping gas, and when I ask him for a ride, he waves me into his station wagon. Strangely, the other passengers—a teenaged woman and two babies—are in the backseat, so I climb into the front for the 210-mile trip to Fitzroy Crossing.
The mangrove swamps that hug the shore give way almost immediately to a flat and barren plain, much like the flat and barren plain I’ve been crossing since Perth. After half an hour, lush and sultry Broome seems unreal: sealed off from the world, like a pearl, by the hard red crust of outback Australia.
“Whole bloody town was crawling with ’gins, wogs, and slit-eyes,” Bruce says when I tell him I’ve just come from Broome. Unlike me, he couldn’t get out of the place fast enough. In fact, he cut short his three days of company-paid R and R, spent the rest of his stipend on a few cases of beer, and loaded his family into the station wagon for an early drive home.
“I couldn’t leave the motel without bumping into some kind of weirdo,” he tells me, draining a beer and reaching a hand over his shoulder so his wife, Tish, can give him a fresh tinnie. “At least they aren’t taking any white jobs. As far as I could see, no one in that bloody town works.”
Bruce’s own work is laying down bitumen on the rough stretch of highway between Fitzroy Crossing and Hall’s Creek. He hates it, but he doesn’t have any choice. Last year he was laid off from a job cutting cane stalks in his native town of Bundaberg, Queensland. Tish was pregnant with their second child, and they’d just moved into a new house.
“The dole wouldn’t have made a scratch in the bills I had to pay,” he says. So he hitchhiked west until he found road work, then saved enough to send for Tish and the kids. Ever since, their home has been Nowhere, Western Australia—a caravan beside whatever patch of highway the road crew is paving over.
I ask Tish what there is to do while Bruce is at work.
“Nothing,” she says. “Except looking after the kids and turning the air-conditioner from high cool to low cool.”
She hands me a beer and passes another over Bruce’s shoulder. He plops it into the Styrofoam stubbie cooler with a loud thunk. He opens it, drains it, then reaches over his shoulder for another.
“You know something?” he says. “I missed being junior fishing champion of Victoria by three months.” Then he launches into a long and rambling story of how he traveled to Victoria with some Bundaberg mates, hit a big patch of salmon, and came in first at the contest’s weigh-in. But he was disqualified because the age limit for the junior division was six months younger than in Queensland; the award went to someone else. “I gave fishing away after that,” he says.
I’m not sure if he tells me the story out of pride, or to illustrate the basic unfairness of a life that finds him now, at the age of twenty-three, driving a dozer in the Western Australian desert to support a wife and two children.
The conversation lags after that, but the beer-drinking continues at a fierce pace. If the alcohol is affecting Bruce’s driving, I don’t want to know about it; after a few beers, I’m too tired and apathetic to muster my usual passenger-seat panic. So I pull a T-shirt over my head and doze through the afternoon, listening to one mortar after another being loaded into the stubbie cooler, then opened and drained. Thunk. Pffft. Swerp. Reload. Thunk. Pfffft. Swerp…. When Bruce nudges me awake at Fitzroy Crossing, tinnies lie scattered around the car like spent shells.
The battlefield outside is even more impressive. A dense carpet of tinnies surrounds the Fitzroy pub, shimmering in the late afternoon light. It looks like an aluminum reproduction of the salt lakes I saw in South Australia.
“Welcome to the Fitzroy snowfields,” Bruce says humorlessly. “Watch out for the ’gins.” With that he roars off to the caravan that is his home in the desert.
Ian Wronski told me a little of Fitzroy Crossing’s history. The town was no more than a roadhouse until about twenty years ago. Then the government ruled in favor of equal wages for all workers, white or black. The law was liberal-minded in intent but disastrous in practice, at least for poorly paid blacks on cattle stations in the Nor’west. Rather than pay the government wage, most property owners simply let their Aboriginal workers go. So hundreds of black families were left to drift into towns like Fitzroy Crossing, to collect their government assistance, and to live in fibro government homes. They have been there ever since.
Each Aboriginal community I’ve encountered has been locked in some form of battle with alcohol. At Mutitjulu, near Ayers Rock, opposition to alcohol is so intense that booze is barred from the community altogether. In other places, such as the Beagle Bay Mission north of Broome, a truce has been worked out. Alcohol is permitted in designated quantities at designated times. Someone might drive into Broome and pick up a few cases of beer for a Friday-night celebration, but anything more than that is verboten.
Fitzroy Crossing appears to have fought the same battle and retreated in abject surrender. Even the elderly women I pass in the street are red-e
yed and wobbly. And the area around the petrol station, where I stand watch for another ride, resembles a downtown street at 2 A.M. on Saturday. Dozens of drinkers mill around with no apparent activity or destination, on the verge of collapse.
Standing alone by the road, I become a natural target for their stumbling, imperfect English.
“Hey, mate. Hey. Where you going, mate?”
“Hey, mate, got a smoke, mate?”
“Mate, got me a dollar, mate?”
I empty my pockets of change then pull the insides out, to show that I have nothing left. But conversation is difficult. The men aren’t unfriendly or aggressive, just out of it. One man urinates in full view of a busload of kids at the gas station. Another lies down for a snooze a few yards from where I stand. And as the heat and glare drain from the sky, the abandoned tinnies go from white to orange to red in the fading sun.
I am about to look for a camping spot when a truckie pulls in at the gas station and offers me a ride to Hall’s Creek, 185 miles to the east. “You’re lucky,” he says, driving off quickly. “Most people avoid stopping at Fitzroy altogether, unless they run out of petrol. It gives them the creeps.”
An hour out of Fitzroy, the bitumen turns to gravel and the driving becomes slow and silent, so slow that it is after midnight when I climb out at a camping ground on the edge of Hall’s Creek. It’s drizzling, so I crawl under my tarp for what promises to be another brief and uncomfortable sleep. Shining my torch at the map, I calculate how far I’ve come: 450 miles since Broome, about 7,000 since Sydney. Only 750 or so to go. I make a sign to the next town—“Kununurra Pls!”—and return to the same lullaby I hummed last night.
You may find yourself
In a beautiful house.
With a beautiful wife.
You may ask yourself,
Well, how did I get here?
Sunday morning I don’t even make it out to the road. I am seated on my pack at dawn, trying to muster the energy to roll my swag, when a voice beckons from the morning mist.
