There was no one around and the bathroom was clean with plenty of hot water. Les didn’t bother about a shave, but had a good long shower then went back to his room and changed into his black cargoes and a white 99.9 FM T-shirt he bought in Victor Harbor. Now, what’s the day doing? he asked himself, once he’d laced on his trainers. Les unbolted the door and stepped out onto the verandah.
Plenty of fat white clouds were drifting around in the breeze. But the sun was shining brightly and there was no sign of rain. Cars were coming and going and people were walking around and Nimbin appeared to have come to life as the morning headed towards noon. Les strolled down to the far end of the verandah and noticed you didn’t have to drive far before the town ended in a rolling maze of mountains and valleys. Walking back, he stared over at a building near the pizza shop. Written a little unevenly above the awning was THINK GLOBALLY ACT LOCALLY TO SAVE THE ENDANGERED SPECIES NIMBIN INDEPENDENT POWER ACTION A COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP EXHIBITING SOLUTIONS TO CLIMATE CHANGE. Fair enough, smiled Les. We all must do our bit to save the planet. Les walked down to the other end of the verandah and gazed across the laneway at the Nimbin Hemp Embassy. The awning was painted bright red and printed below the Nimbin Hemp Embassy sign was WE ARE NOT CRIMINALS.
From the hotel verandah, Les had an excellent and inconspicuous view of the street below where he could hear everything that was going on. The pungent odour of someone smoking pot drifted up through the floorboards and made Les poke his head over the railing. The Aborigine in the dark blue tracksuit who had offered Les dope the evening before was standing outside the hotel with his mates drinking cans of UDL and one of the group was smoking a joint. A pimply-faced white kid in a pair of baggy check shorts and a black T-shirt came across the road with an expectant look on his face. One of the group wearing a grey tracksuit top picked up on the kid’s expression and immediately approached him.
‘Want some weed, bro?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ the kid replied vaguely.
‘Well, just come down here away from the cameras.’
Les watched them disappear down the laneway and stepped back from the railing. Well there you go, he smiled. Nice to see a group of indigenous small businessmen making a well-earned dollar. I wonder if the cans of UDL and the hot one attract a fringe benefits tax? His stomach rumbling with hunger, Les went back to his room. The Spectrum Café across the road looked as good as anywhere. Les got his money and credit cards and walked down to the front entrance. After stopping for the morning paper, he strolled along to the café. The folding wooden door at the front was wide open so Les stepped straight through.
Inside, the old eatery was big and gloomy with a blackboard menu behind a long counter on the right that faced a row of bench tables and chairs set against the opposite wall. Beneath the counter was a glass cabinet stacked with cakes, and a refrigerated drink container stood beneath the blackboard. At the back of the restaurant an open door led to a grassy area edged with trees. Several chairs and tables sat in the middle and seated around them, rolling or smoking joints, were a few sour-faced old hippies with beards and long straggly hair, dressed like relics left over from the age of Aquarius. One in particular, with drooping eyes and a long grey beard, reminded Les of Rip Van Winkle—the man in the fairy tale who fell asleep for a hundred years.
Les left the relics to it and stepped across to the counter. After a quick look at the blackboard menu, he ordered scrambled eggs and bacon, plus a flat white, from a beefy, pleasant-faced man in black with his hair pulled back in a ponytail, who assured him it wouldn’t take long. There was only one other person in the café, a skinny brunette in a long red dress drinking coffee. Les chose a table one back from the doorway so he could read his paper and check out the punters walking past at the same time. He spread his paper out as the cutlery and paper napkins arrived, then thought of something. Les left his paper on the table and walked back to the counter for a bottle of sparkling mineral water. When he got back to his table his paper had gone.
‘What the fuck!’
Les scowled around the café. The woman drinking coffee didn’t have it and there was no one else around except the hippies out the back. And even if one of them did take his paper, it would be pointless going out and putting the heavies on them in their condition. All Norton could do was storm up to the newsagent and get another one. Jesus! They’re not bad around here, gritted Les as he left the café. He returned with another paper just as his coffee arrived.
The coffee was quite good. The food arrived promptly and it wasn’t too bad either with plenty of crisp buttered toast and tiny packets of jam. Les was chomping away, half reading the paper and half watching the people walking past, when a man seated on one of the bench tables in front of the café, reading a magazine and wearing jeans and a white T-shirt with NIMBIN UNIVERSITY on the front caught his eye. He had thinning dark hair going grey, a full face with a pronounced dimple in his chin, and Les found himself trying to think of someone in Bondi the man reminded him of. Les was mulling this over as he chewed on a slice of toast when a woman came past on the right wearing a white chef’s jacket and carrying a plastic bag full of carrots.
‘Morning, Gazza,’ she said.
The man glanced up from his magazine. ‘Hey, Nina,’ he smiled. ‘How’s things?’
‘Ohh, can’t complain.’
‘Good on you.’
The woman continued on her way and the man called Gazza returned to his magazine while Les absently studied him over his coffee. Next thing an Aboriginal man appeared on the left wearing a pair of cream trousers and a yellow check shirt. He had scrubby brown hair and didn’t look much like an Aborigine. But Les figured him to be a blackfellah because he was carrying two placards. One read: SORRY IS A HOLLOW WORD. A BILL OF RIGHTS MAKES IT SOLID. The other read: WE ARE NOT FAUNA. GIVE US A BILL OF RIGHTS. The man with the signs stopped at Gazza’s table.
‘G’day, Gazza,’ he said directly.
Gazza glanced up impassively from his magazine. ‘Morning, Jimmy,’ he replied. Then he noticed the two placards. ‘Hello. What the fuck’s all this about?’
‘I’m protesting.’
‘You’re protesting? Christ! What about this time?’ Gazza read the two placards out loud then shook his head. ‘Fuckin hell! You’re not fair dinkum, are you?’
‘Why wouldn’t I be?’ replied Jimmy, placing the placards on the table.
Either Gazza was in a bad mood or Jimmy had touched a nerve. But Gazza threw his magazine on the table and stared in open disbelief. ‘Jesus Christ, Jimmy,’ he said. ‘You’ve been whingeing about Sorry for I don’t know how many fuckin years. Now you got it. And it’s still not good enough.’
Jimmy ignored Gazza. ‘I want a treaty. And I want social justice,’ he said.
‘A treaty and social justice,’ echoed Gazza. ‘Fair dinkum, Jimmy. What don’t you fuckin want? You want social justice. Reconciliation. Assimilation. Dialogue. Land rights. Mineral rights. Native Title. Native council. An indigenous bill of rights. A United Nations Declaration of Rights. Mabo. Wik. Land councils. Then there’s the Stolen Generation. Black deaths in custody. Customary law. Indigenous law. Racial discrimination.’ Gazza nodded to the placards. ‘Now this. Fuck me, mate. Does it ever end?’
‘And I want compensation for past grievances,’ continued Jimmy.
‘Compensation for past grievances. Yeah,’ nodded Gazza. ‘In other words, money. Well, if you wanted money, why didn’t you get some of the billions of dollars your mates in ATSIC pissed up against the wall in a flood of nepotism?’ Gazza looked directly at Jimmy. ‘You do know what nepotism is, don’t you, Jimmy?’
‘Of course I know what nepotism is,’ replied Jimmy. ‘I’m a blackfellah. I’ve had to suffer it all my life.’
‘No. That’s racism, you fuckin goose,’ said Gazza. ‘It means looking after your mates.’
‘Because of whitefellah law, all me mates are in gaol.’
‘Well, if they didn’t sell dope and rob and bash peo
ple, they probably wouldn’t be in gaol. You fuckin moron.’
Les watched in astonishment as Gazza abused and berated the inoffensive Aboriginal man for doing no more than make a legitimate protest. In the meantime a small crowd had started to gather in front of the café.
‘You stole me country,’ said Jimmy.
‘Stole your country?’ howled Gazza. ‘Ohh, get fucked, Jimmy. If your silly fuckin Abo mates back in 1788 had brains enough to invent a bow and arrow, the First Fleet wouldn’t have landed. All they had to take on was a bunch of half-starved Royal Marines armed with old muskets. A couple of dozen Apache Indians would have sorted them out in ten minutes. And you’re lucky it was the Poms and not the Spanish who sailed in through the Heads, you ungrateful prick of a thing. They’d have given you native fuckin title. Just like they gave the Indians in South America. You’d’ve all been worked to death by now.’
‘I also want,’ continued Jimmy, ‘open admission of disenfranchisement and white guilt. And constitutional recognition of my Aboriginal identity.’
‘Aboriginal identity.’ Gazza threw his hands in the air. ‘Fair dinkum! Have you had a look in the mirror lately, Jimmy? You’ve got about as much blackfellah in you as Miss Iceland. You cunt.’
Jimmy ignored Gazza. ‘And I ain’t finished there,’ he stated. ‘I’m also demanding…’
Les turned to his left as the man with the ponytail appeared from behind the counter and pushed the shutter door across. ‘I’ll close the door a bit,’ he said. ‘Things are getting a little heated out there.’
‘Fair enough,’ smiled Les.
‘Good thing they’re both sober.’
With the front door almost closed, the café was virtually left in darkness. Les quietly finished his coffee in the dim glow of a few small sunken lights in the ceiling then, taking his paper with him this time, walked across to the counter and ordered another flat white. Returning to his table, Les found his last piece of toast and packet of strawberry jam was gone. The woman in the long dress had left and the hippies were all down the back getting stoned.
‘Strike me hooray,’ said Les, looking under his table. ‘What have they fuckin got in here? Elves?’
The man brought Norton’s coffee over then tentatively opened the front door. Jimmy and Gazza were gone and the small crowd had dispersed. ‘Thank God for that,’ the man said.
Les finished his coffee and paper, paid the bill and stepped out onto the footpath. Well, he thought, glancing at his watch, I might take a quick look around, then ring my mate Lonnie. He’s probably wondering where I am. Les dumped his paper in a bin, turned left and followed the shops to where they finished at a corner past the war memorial, then worked his way back.
Apart from an old supermarket, the newsagency and a few others, it was mostly small souvenir shops selling T-shirts and whatever all with a marijuana theme and everything on the T-shirts from BEWARE THE NIMBIN BISCUIT to THE NIMBIN HEMP OLYMPICS. Alongside the Spectrum Café was the Nimbin Museum. Les dropped a donation in an old milk can and stepped inside an old dusty wooden building.
Cut away kombi wagons full of junk were stacked against the walls along with newspaper photos and articles about hippies smoking pot or getting busted for doing it. A sign in one room read NO DEALING OR SMOKING DRUGS IN THE MUSEUM. In the next room a fat, good-natured Aboriginal woman and two younger ones had a bong going, and Les got three offers to buy dope. Norton left the museum then stopped in front of another souvenir shop to read what was written across the front window:
BUSINESS HOURS: OPEN MOST DAYS ABOUT 11–12, OCCASIONALLY AS EARLY AS 9 BUT SOME DAYS AS LATE AS 2 OR 3. WE CLOSE AT 5.30 OR 6—OCCASIONALLY AT 4 OR 5 BUT SOMETIMES AS LATE AS 10 OR 11—SOME DAYS WE ARE NOT HERE AT ALL. BUT… LATELY I’VE BEEN HERE JUST ABOUT ALL THE TIME…EXCEPT WHEN I’M SOMEPLACE ELSE BUT I SHOULD BE HERE THEN TOO
…
Very good, opined Les. Obviously penned by a free spirit, not confined by the shackles of corporate orthodoxy.
Les drifted around till he finished up in the Nimbin Hemp Embassy. It was another big old wooden building with a glass counter in the middle, surrounded by marijuana paraphernalia, hemp clothing and T-shirts. In one corner a video showed some bearded man seated at a table, tossing around several kilograms of heads like big green corn cobs. A door on the right led to another room where several backpackers were seated along a wooden counter avidly mulling up.
Norton’s attitude to dope was fairly ambiguous. Of all the drugs going around, pot, grown out in the open, was the most innocuous. And arresting citizens in their own homes for just having a smoke and listening to music, while junkies were robbing houses and bashing old ladies, and kids were frying their brains on methamphetamine and ice, didn’t make much sense. Also, hemp, the non-smoking type, was a plant that had been around for thousands of years and could easily stop the destruction of rainforests for paper, while producing oil, clothing and myriad other products at the same time. But seeing marijuana paraphernalia everywhere and having it shoved in your face by shifty-looking dope dealers, got to be a turn-off. Nevertheless, Norton bought three souvenir T-shirts. A black one for Warren, with 007 JAMES BONG LICENSED TO CHILL on the front. A brown one with NIMBIN UNIVERSITY on it for Warren’s girlfriend Beatrice. And a grey one for himself with RAINBOW LANE: MY FAVOURITE ADDRESS IN NIMBIN on the front.
With his T-shirts in a brown paper bag, Les stepped out of the Hemp Embassy to cross over to the hotel and fell in alongside a barrel-chested old bloke in a pair of white shorts and a baggy green T-shirt videoing the shops and the hotel. He had a mop of snow-white hair and a pair of steel-rimmed glasses perched beneath a domed forehead. Next to him was his grey-haired wife, wearing a white tracksuit and huge wraparound sunglasses that covered her spectacles. They looked European and Les overheard them talking to each other in English with a foreign accent.
The old bloke was happily videoing away when he strolled past the Aborigine in the blue tracksuit who had offered Les dope, who was standing at the edge of the footpath outside the hotel with his two mates. Blue tracksuit was obviously the leader of the gang and as soon as he spotted the old bloke with the video camera, his face reddened.
‘Hey,’ he shouted angrily. ‘Is that fuckin thing on?’
The old bloke stopped, turned to his wife then turned back to Blue Tracksuit. ‘I am sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I do not understand.’
‘I said, is that fuckin thing on?’ Blue Tracksuit shouted again.
The old woman nervously took hold of her husband’s arm while they stood facing Blue Tracksuit and his mates. ‘What is wrong?’ she asked her husband.
‘I don’t want my privacy filmed all round the fuckin world,’ yelled Blue Tracksuit. ‘Fuck off. You nosy old cunt.’
His video camera still absently rolling, the old bloke turned to his wife. ‘Is all right,’ he assured her. ‘Do not be frightened.’
‘I’ll tell you what,’ snarled Blue Tracksuit, ‘you want something to video? Go and get your granddaughter and you can film me fucking her. How about that?’
The wife paled while the old man’s body stiffened. His face turrned to stone and a glint of pure loathing suddenly burned in his eyes towards the man in the blue tracksuit. Les strolled past the old bloke and his wife, before stopping at the bottom of the stairs.
‘Ahh, don’t take any notice of the old cunt, Ray,’ said one of Blue Tracksuit’s mates. ‘He’s only a mug.’
‘Fuck him,’ spat Blue Tracksuit. ‘Who’s he think he fuckin is?’
The old bloke continued to stare at Blue Tracksuit before stepping off the footpath and guiding his wife across the road.
‘Ohh, what are you looking at, you fuckin old goose?’ said Blue Tracksuit. ‘Go on. Fuck off.’
The old bloke took his wife across to a white Winnebago with a red, white and blue flag in the corner of the rear window, parked alongside the war memorial. After opening the far door to let his wife in, the old bloke came round to the driver’s side. He stared at
Blue Tracksuit for a moment as one of the hood’s mates left to do a deal, then got behind the wheel and drove off. Les watched the van disappear before climbing the stairs and opening the side door.
Fair enough, mused Les, when he reached the corridor. You can’t go videoing the lovable local indigenous persons like that. You might steal their spirituality. Of course videoing that foul-mouthed prick and his mates dealing dope in the main street wouldn’t help their spirits much either. Les shook his head as he stepped inside his room. So much for peace, love and lentil burgers. From what I’ve seen so far, this place is fucked. Les tossed his souvenir T-shirts on the top bunk and put the distasteful incident outside the hotel behind him. He took out his mobile phone, clicked it on then found Lonnie Lonreghan’s number and dialled.
‘Hello. Lonnie speaking.’
‘G’day, Lonnie. It’s Les Norton.’
‘Les. Hey. How are you, mate?’
‘Not bad.’
‘Shit. I’m glad you called,’ said Lonnie. ‘I was starting to get a bit worried.’
‘Yeah. Well I’ve been settling in,’ replied Les. ‘Finding my way around the city.’
‘How’s the hotel?’
‘Oh, it’s good,’ said Les, kicking one of the bunks. ‘Room service is a bit slow. But the entertainment’s been unreal.’
Lonnie chuckled quietly into the phone. ‘So where are you now? At the hotel?’
‘Yes. Relaxing in my suite.’
‘Well, I’m at the bar. Why don’t you come down and we’ll go over a few things about tonight? You know where it is?’
‘Yeah. Give me about fifteen minutes.’
‘Righto, Les. See you then.’
Les hung up and looked at his mobile. Was there anyone else he wanted to ring? Not particularly. He switched it off and placed it in his overnight bag. After tidying one or two things up in his room, Norton left the hotel and headed for the bar.
High Noon in Nimbin Page 10
