At last we spotted a sign, although it was facing in the opposite direction. Roo drove Rusty past it, and we all craned our necks back to read it.
‘DO NOT ENTER! BLASTING AREA!’ it said.
“Shit! I think we just drove through a blasting area,” Sonja said.
“I think you’re right,” Gill agreed.
This being the case, we gave up on the search for Crocodile Harry and managed to find the way back to the campsite. Later, we confessed our indiscretion to owner Rick.
“Ah, you won’t find Crocodile Harry out there,” he told us.
“Oh? Why not?”
“He’s dead. Died last month. Eighty-two he was.”
“Oh. Bugger.”
“Yeah, it was a bit. Better for you, though. He was getting a bit crotchety in his old age. If you fellas had have rocked up at his shack unannounced, he’d probably have shot yer.”
The trip back to Perth was through some of the driest, emptiest, most monotonous landscape in the country. Even thinking about it bores me half to death, so I won’t bother describing it here.
We did hit the coast at one point, and drove right up to the edge of the sea-cliffs known as The Great Australian Bight. It was deliciously elemental, and amazingly cold – the wind there comes directly from Antarctica, with nothing separating the two continents but a vast expanse of rather chilly ocean.
And so, as we rolled back into Perth a few days later, the first stage of our adventure was over. Roo and Sonja went back home, and Gill and I went back to work for Lindsey. We had platforms to pave, and dollars to earn – because Christmas was right around the corner.
Two weeks away, in fact!
It would be Gill’s first Christmas away from home, and I’d promised myself I’d make it memorable for her; enough so that she might manage to forget how alone we were, and that on the other side of the world, the rest of our family would be enjoying their Christmases without us.
And maybe she could help me forget, too.
Strange Bedfellows
Gill and I were determined to find a hostel where at least some of the residents spoke English. The last place we’d stayed at had been entirely Chinese students, and I didn’t think there’d be much of a Christmas vibe there.
Unfortunately, accommodation anywhere at that time of year is booked up well in advance. After asking almost every hostel in town, we finally managed to score the last two beds, in two different rooms, at a grubby little place called The Planet Inn.
It was a real dump – skanky, mismatched sofas that had blatantly been found on the side of the road, and grubby, mildew-stained walls. I never got to see the room that Gill was sleeping in – mostly because she was so disgusted by it that she slept on the couch – but the room my bed was in… well. It took me about half an hour just to find the bed! Everything was buried under a knee-deep layer of clothes. Hair dryers, curlers and straighteners were strewn around with reckless abandon; a fire-safety officer would have had a heart-attack before he got through the door. Plates of half-finished food perched precariously on bags of shopping, phone chargers writhed like snakes through the miscellanea, and shoes, shoes, shoes were scattered as far as the eye could see.
Which wasn’t very far, because the eight bunk bed room was less than three metres square.
The furthest bunk had a sarong draped like a curtain, hanging from beneath the top bed to provide some privacy for the one below. A neat trick, I thought, particularly now I was in here – all the other occupants of the room were female.
It wasn’t until later on that night that I discovered the need for that curtain; there wasn’t one person staying in that bed, there were two.
And they were fairly vigorous about proving it.
It wasn’t until the second night, when I joined Gill on the sofa, that I made a startling connection. The couple had been shagging every hour for most of the night, popping out for a cigarette in between each bout. I was amazed at their stamina – and a bit jealous, to be quite honest – but Gill was less than sympathetic.
“I’ve got one word for you,” she said; “PAYBACK!”
I guess I had that coming.
“But still,” I said to her, “they must be getting sore by now! I mean, I’m fairly vigorous–”
“I KNOW,” Gill interjected–
“–but really! She could just be laying their and faking it, but he must be swallowing Viagra like they’re M&Ms!”
“Are you sure it’s always the same bloke?” Gill asked.
And that’s when the penny dropped.
The girl in the bed next to me had mentioned she was entering a competition for strippers in a local nightclub, and I’d spent half the day trying to figure out an excuse to sneak off and check it out. Not that she was pretty or anything, but hello? Strippers!
And somehow, it simply hadn’t occurred to me – there were seedier sides to living with a stripper.
Her friend in the next bed was obviously going one better. She was a hooker – and she was using our dorm room as a brothel.
“No wonder they’re all so enthusiastic,” I said. “I guess you would be, if you’d paid for the privilege!”
Gill snuggled down in her sleeping bag, and stretched her legs up onto the arm of the sofa. “Maybe we should find another place to stay?” she suggested.
“What, and leave all this glamour? Shit dude, it’s like living in Vegas.”
“Only without the drugs and guns,” she joked.
And in one of those eerie moments where someone, sometime in the distant future, has just walked over your grave – we both felt a sudden chill.
“We’ll move out tomorrow,” I promised.
After several days of begging for beds, we finally moved into The Underground – a massive, three-storey hostel with a courtyard swimming pool and a cinema room in the basement. It was every backpacker’s dream, right in the heart of Northbridge, Perth’s clubbing district.
With only two days until Christmas, Gill and I could hardly believe our luck.
It was expensive, so we’d booked the cheapest (and only) beds available – in a ten-bed dorm. This proved to be a real stroke of luck, as the room was huge, with one wall entirely made of glass doors which opened onto the pool area.
Ahhhh!
We would do well here.
Not wanting to impinge on Roo’s family Christmas at such a delicate time, Gill and I spent Christmas Day in the Underground hostel – getting horribly drunk on goon. Oh yes – that’s how classy we were! Gill had a whole Christmas dinner planned, but we got as far as making pancakes in the morning, had a glass of wine with them, exchanged presents and drank wine whilst we did so… and from there events just spiralled. By dinnertime Gill was fast asleep in the cinema room, and I’d passed out on the dorm room floor – apparently in exactly the same position as Jesus on the cross, which caused our room-mates to draw felt-pen stigmata on me and dress me in robes made from soggy pool-towels.
And then they put lipstick on me and gave me a guitar, because… well, I wasn’t the only one who was hammered.
Present-wise, we got all sorts of little parcels from England. Most of them contained chocolate, so most of them arrived in a liquid state – Mum not having cottoned on to the twin facts that a) they sell chocolate in Australia, and b) it was forty degrees in the shade. Not to mention, the cost of posting chocolate to Oz has got to be at least ten times the cost of the chocolate bars themselves.
Gill managed to buy me a hilarious t-shirt which I still have, possibly because I get very few chances to wear it; it had a pink dinosaur on it, with the slogan ‘Lickalottapus’.
You know that awkward moment, when you realise your sister knows you just a little too well…?
No?
Just me then.
But my stand-out present for the year (also from Gill), was a cuddly toy; there were a whole series of them to collect, all scaled-up replicas of dangerous microbes – and she’d chosen to buy me The Pox. It was a cute, pink, coi
led up snake-type thing, and it was adorable. It was weeks before the joke wore off – every time anyone asked me what I’d got for Christmas, I told them, “Well, my sister gave me syphilis…”
In return, I gave her a cuddly toy of a space shuttle, which I’d named Uranus.
And I spent the rest of the week saying things like, “Gill, stop playing with Uranus,” and “please move Uranus, I can’t see the TV.”
If anyone has any doubts about the sophistication of my sense of humour, feel free to refer them to this paragraph.
Boxing Day was spent having a second Christmas, visiting Roo and her family to exchange presents with them. It was a merry occasion, and I was careful not to tread on any toes – both metaphorically and literally, what with everyone wearing thongs. It’s hard for the northern hemisphere mind to get used to, it being both Christmas and the hottest summer on record at the same time. Even shorts and t-shirts felt like too many clothes, as the house was scorching inside and out. But at least I got to wear my Christmas hat to the beach.
Before we left to rescue Rusty, I’d been saving up my brick-paving wages to buy Roo the dress of her dreams – a pale purple silk cocktail dress from a boutique called Intangible.
She’d lusted after it for weeks, and I’d made the difficult decision to invest $200 in it, in the hope of making her happy. Luckily, most shops in Oz still do a thing called ‘lay-by’, where they let you pay for things in instalments, so I’d spread the cost over several weeks of working for Lindsey.
When she opened it, her face lit up, and I knew I’d done the right thing. She was surprised and delighted, and when she tried it on for me she looked absolutely stunning.
And as far as I know, that dress has never been worn since.
We don’t get invited to many cocktail parties.
For reasons, see the paragraph on humour, above.
Being back at Roo’s family home allowed me to indulge in another of my favourite activities – no, not what you’re thinking!
From the wide deck attached to the back of the house, all kinds of crazy critters could be observed. It was still a thing of wonder to me, that in place of the small birds we have in England, like robins and starlings, Australia has parrots – and Roo’s garden was full of them. Little animals I had no names for skittered back and forth, taking advantage of the shade under the decking, or frolicking in the half-acre of native forest.
Well, not all of them were frolicking – the bandicoots in particular seemed to be having a tough time. Perhaps because of the soaring summer temperatures, they’d decided to take refuge in the pond – completely disregarding the fact that they can’t swim. No wonder they’re endangered.
Roo had been making a list of her bandicoot sightings to report to the Dept. of Conservation, until sighting #14 was stiff, smelly and floating.
I helped her write an email to them that evening.
‘Dear DoC,
Please find enclosed a report on the bandicoot that was living under our veranda until about 2 o’clock this morning, when he decided to go for a swim. He is now living in a plastic carrier bag in my bin. Not sure what the official number of them left in the wild is, but please deduct one from the total. If you’re looking to wipe out any more of the little critters just send ‘em this way.
Your friends in Conservation,
Tony and Krista’
Three of the poor buggers committed suicide this way, before Roo came up with the idea of leaving bowls of drinking water for them all over the garden.
This led to the creation of our first joint New Year’s Resolution:
1) Drown Fewer Bandicoots
I figured, just because an animal is stupid doesn’t mean it should be allowed to die.
Otherwise I’d be in serious trouble.
Incorporating Fieldwork
Both Gillian and I were in Australia on Working Holidaymaker visas. This is an awesome scheme which the UK also offers – allowing people under the age of 30 to come and work for a year, with relatively few limitations. The biggest issue is that it only lasts a year, and while (I think) a year in England would be enough for anyone, a year in Oz is hardly enough time to scratch the surface.
Luckily, there are options.
One is to marry a local. I wasn’t quite ready for that yet.
One is to have sufficient skill in an industry Australia really needs – like, petro-chemical engineers, or doctors, or – bizarrely – hairdressers (?!). Sadly, ‘shiftless layabout’ is fairly far down the Skills Shortage list. In fact it’s not on it at all.
So we’d have been stuffed, if it wasn’t for this:
The Second Year Working Holiday Visa!
I mean, really? Read that again. How sweet is that?
Designed expressly for people who can’t face the harsh reality of going back to the real world, this scheme couldn’t have been more perfectly timed for us. There was only one major drawback: it required us to do three months of agricultural work.
Three months!
Ouch.
And what’s more, this three months’ work had to be completed, and signed off by an approved person, before the first year’s visa was up.
Now, I don’t know if you remember, but when I originally promised Gill that I’d come to Australia with her, I was sort of… delayed. As in, I didn’t want to leave Thailand, so I stayed there as long as I possibly could, and only came to Australia because I could no longer afford to eat in Thailand (and let me tell you, eating is pretty damn cheap in Thailand). As it happened, I’d kept the poor girl waiting almost exactly three months. Which, although it was utterly forgivable, and not really my fault in the first place, being as how Thailand is awesome – well anyway, it put us in the following position:
It was New Year’s Day.
I was only halfway through my adventures around Australia, because I had six months left on my visa.
But Gill only had three.
DAMN IT, GILL!
So, all of a sudden, instead of relaxing by the pool and dreaming up ridiculous resolutions to break, we had another, rather more pressing agenda.
We had to find jobs.
In ‘agriculture’, whatever the hell that is. I dunno? Tractors and shit.
Like, right freaking NOW.
So. New Year’s Day was spent packing the car, checking out of our beloved Underground hostel, pointing Rusty southwards, and driving through the blistering heat of the day for eight hours straight.
But Gill did the driving, so I tried not to be too hard on her.
After all, starting her working holiday visa three months before mine was an easy mistake to make.
Roo came with us of course, because she’d studied agriculture at school – she’d had her hand up a cow’s arse and everything – so the prospect of farm work held little fear for her. Actually, this seems like a good time to mention an aspect of Roo’s schooling that amused me no end. As part of their agricultural studies, every member of her class had hand-reared a calf, feeding it, training it, and grooming it for a whole year. Then they’d taken their cows to a show, and pranced around the ring with them, being judged for the quality of the animal ‘on the hoof’. The next stage of the competition was called ‘on the hook’ – where all the animals were duly butchered, and judged again on the quality of their meat!
Unsurprisingly, the whole class (of fourteen-year-old girls) were distraught.
It’s hard to imagine them getting away with that in England.
Afterwards Roo’s cow was bought by McDonalds – but I don’t think that cheered her up much.
Anyway. When we arrived in Margaret River, either the circus was in town, or else the place was just full of hippies – strolling along in crazy trousers, carrying juggling clubs, with multi-coloured hair (the people, not the juggling clubs). We even saw one guy dressed as a pirate, in such a convincing outfit that I immediately wanted to emulate him. (But I didn’t tell him that, in case he decided to rape and pillage me.) As it turned out, the circus wa
s in town – but that had absolutely no bearing on the dress code of the local population, which was skewed heavily in favour of New Agers (for no immediately apparent reason), and scruffy backpackers, who had come here for the same reason we had.
All in all, there were surprisingly few suits and ties on the streets of Margaret River. I liked the place immediately.
Gill and Roo, being young, female, traveller-types, absolutely loved it.
Which was good, because Rusty had boiled up several times on the way here. For any of you who are fact-checking out there, Margaret River is actually only three hours, not eight hours, from Perth. The remainder of that time had been spent sitting beside the road, waiting for our van to stop making ‘imminent explosion’ noises. I had a horrible feeling that, unless we made enough cash to replace his… well, everything… we wouldn’t be leaving in a hurry.
Our campsite, named with typical Aussie subtlety, was called ‘Big Valley’. If you can guess why, you win a lollipop. Rather than being within said geographical feature, the camping area itself was on top of the hill looking down on it.
But what a hill! From behind the kitchen we could see for miles in every direction. There were clumps of forest, a man made ‘dam’ (Aussie word for reservoir), and rolling, grassy hillsides that went on forever. It was like the Garden of Eden. Only, in place of a snake it had a stocky bulldog called Muzza, who marked his territory by peeing on every tent in the site. You know what? It probably had snakes too.
The owners, a cheerful, middle-aged couple called Kevin and Shelley, charged us just fifty dollars each for a whole week’s accommodation – so we picked a spot for Rusty and went to do something that would profoundly alter our lives for the better.
We pitched our tents.
See how I used the plural of the word ‘tent’ there?
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 15
