by David Mason
The clean water and bale of hay were thanks to Gibbo, the Aronui manager. Introductions had been through friends of my brother’s wife’s parents, my having tried for months to find a location for the camels to stay while I walked from the coast to meet them. I met Gibbo in his house just behind the feedlot offices and just far enough away from the cattle that the low noise of the mob was little more than a murmur. Greg, Mary-Ann and their children Meg and Drew sat around the dinner table and invited me to sit down. Gibbo offered to put up the camels for a couple of weeks and said, ‘Mate, don’t worry about it at all. Meg and Drew have been looking forward to this for weeks.’ Mary-Ann gently poked her elbow into Gibbo’s generous blue-signeted belly, smiled at me and said, ‘So has he.’
Amber became more distant and withdrawn as I became more obsessed with what I felt I had to do. I told her again what I planned; leave the camels at Aronui while I walked from the coast to the camels and the gear, then west along the Warrego Stock Route.
We stayed in Dalby that night and left the following day to drive to Ipswich and the coast. I needed to know what the alternatives were for me to walk from Byron Bay to Dalby. The drive confirmed what the map had told me months before; the route between Toowoomba and the Queensland coast was multilane tar, oil and cars. Not a place for camels. Certainly not a place for camels and cars, so I was glad I had decided not to walk with the camels from the coast, leaving them instead at Aronui where the Warrego Stock Route began.
Amber and I spent the following night in Murwillumbah, on the Tweed River, New South Wales’ most northerly river. We woke to the green shark fin of Mount Warning, known in the local Bundjalung language as ‘cloud catcher’, in the hotel window and lungs full of sweet syrup sub-tropical air. After breakfast we found the Information Centre in the middle of town. I wanted to know if there were hotels on the possible routes from Byron Bay. A soft, damp-handed tour guide with a name tag on his chest that said Barry, set between two golden circles of smiling faces, ignored my questions on the route west through Lismore and north to Kyogle. I watched Barry’s pink wet lips work the patter of the tour guide. There was no information here, just a salesman selling theme parks. I felt an instant dislike for his rainbow waistcoat, bow tie and moist, smooth brown skin; an all too common face of tourism.
Having received nothing from Barry but a road map and a sense of alienation we drove to Kyogle. At the Shell petrol station a young mechanic emerged from the dark interior of the workshop wiping grease from his hands with a dirty rag. There was a blob of grease in his red hair and his cherubic face turned to a frown as he said, ‘No mate, not much at all on that road to Woodenbong up north. No pubs. In fact not much at all, just forest and scrub.’
It was decided. My walking route would take me north from Byron Bay to Beenleigh and west to Toowoomba and Dalby where I would pick up the camels. Until I got to Dalby there would be days when I would have to walk more than 40 kilometres to make it to a pub and a bed. I thought this was better than carrying a large pack. I would need to walk fast and not take too many rest days. As the crow flew, the distance across the continent was just over 4000 kilometres. I knew that I would have to walk many, many more and calculated my Walk Across Australia added up to more than 5500 kilometres, including the first solo east–west walk across the Simpson Desert. I wanted to avoid moving across the country in summer, when temperatures got up to 50ºC. Even so, I knew this journey was to be an extreme challenge. It would test the limits of my endurance.
I was ready.
2 The Journey Begins
– 23 March 1998
A tolerable high point of land bore NWBW distant 3 miles. This point I named Cape Byron … It may be known by a remarkable sharp peaked Mountain lying NWBW from it.
Captain James Cook, 15 May 1770
Early on Monday 23 March 1998 I lay in bed, watching a mote kissing Amber’s cheek. Her mouth was open, lips moist with the touch of her tongue. Maybe, as she dreamed, she searched the air for her hopes and sureness in her future with me. The mote looked permanent, but was it like our love, a fiction illuminated by the golden glows of a sunrise? My eyes were grainy; stare-eyed apprehension had meant the moisture evaporated from my eyes.
The day before I lay in the Pacific Ocean, knees to my chest, suspended in the wet warmth, the foam washing and fizzing over my body. I thought back on the years of planning, the setbacks and disappointment that had to be fought and overcome. I had hit a cow and written off a vehicle. I had worked as a lawyer in sterile comfort watching the seasons turn, dreaming of the green, blue, red and gold of Australia’s outdoors. I even wondered whether I was wasting my time, but not often and never for long
Later in the morning I drove with Amber to the Cape Byron lighthouse, the 18 metre high, round-topped chess piece opened in 1901 that reportedly had the brightest light in Australia. It was time to go and with a gulp of the sea salt air I began. Lifting my head I closed my eyes for a moment and tried to picture myself at the end of the expedition at Steep Point thousands of kilometres away. Doing the sums in my head again I knew I had to walk around 30 kilometres every day until mid November, when I planned to finish. One part of me said I was mad, possessed of an arrogant hubris that denied the possibility of hurt, injury or accident. How else could it be done? After all it was the equivalent of walking more than a half marathon every day for eight months. For every day I missed I would have to make up with more kilometres the next day, or the next. Another part of me marvelled at the possibility that it could be done no matter my fear, no matter what the numbers said. It was this part of me that won and drove me forward.
I missed a turn on the way out of Byron Bay. I prefer to think I was distracted by the people rather than a lack of navigation skills. Along with the beach, Byron Bay’s biggest asset is its people. I had never seen so many people wearing so little but tattoos and rings on and in various parts of their flesh. I walked on past the Returned Services Club before I realised I was off the track, then spun on my heel and retraced my steps.
Later than morning I wrote up my diary, which I kept to capture and keep my thoughts, fears and frustrations. I sat down to eat a meat pie at Uncle Tom’s Special Pie Shop, a food and petrol stop on the turnoff to Mullumbimby, the home of Australia’s counterculture in the 1970s and 80s. During the next few days I carried nothing for lunch, preferring to fill up on hotel breakfasts and just carry water in my little pack. According to the sign above the shop, approximately 550,000 pies would be baked at Uncle Tom’s in the course of the year. I ate two of them and as I sat chewing through the pastry I looked up to the opposite side of the road and a large traffic sign of towns and distances.
That sign reminded me there was a long way to go. It also made me think of kilometres as time. From now on time was on a different, a bigger, scale … certainly not of meetings or emails. There was no need to think of minutes or hours, but days and months. This was because time equalled distance and the only measure of success was distance. I suddenly felt very different from the people who rushed past me in their cars, perhaps late for some engagement. If they looked at me at all they probably wondered what the hell some fool was doing walking on the side of the road in a humid 36 degrees.
I was also different from the two young guys I woke up that morning on Cape Byron. They had spent the night 90 metres above the sea, and expected to wake with the sun. Instead it was me who woke them with ‘Hey guys, are you okay?’ Grey faces and red cobwebbed eyes peered from coloured sleeping-bag cocoons. They asked me if I had the ‘vibe’ and I asked them what they meant. One shook his head and the other said ‘Oh, wow man.’
I supposed they were looking for something. They were some of the many in Byron Bay who expressed their search in tattoos, piercings and the language of self-actualisation. I was looking for something too; in my own way, actively seeking, doing and testing. So I left them to pack up their sleeping-bags and moved over to the sign that declared ‘Australia’s most easterly point’. I looked to the east and the diamond poin
ts of the sea, picked up a loose rock and threw it, as far as I could, to where the sun rose out of the Pacific Ocean.
I took a breath for a moment then turned to the sign. Just as I moved to put my foot up on the sign I stood squarely on some droppings left by one of the many goats on the cape. I looked at my foot and then at Amber, who was preparing to photograph the beginning of the great endeavour. Her smirk was accompanied by the bleat of a goat. Having taken the photo Amber promised to meet me later and drove away.
From Tom’s Pies I headed to Amber and Brunswick Heads, my stop for the night. Just short of town I walked through Pilgrim’s Park. It had a barbeque, mown lawns and headstones, some vertical, others flat on the ground. It seemed to me that here were people, or at least their memories, and our paths crossed. On one tombstone was written a too brief story:
In loving memory of Minnie Beloved daughter of James and Mary Anne Mills Died 30th April 1886 Aged 3 years and 11 months ‘Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven’
I wondered what brought James and Mary Anne there. Was he a cedar cutter and did he work in the hinterland, or did he work at the port? Were they searching for a better life for Minnie? Was this a land they loved, or did they fear it? I was certainly looking for something; something in me, something in the land of which I was a part. Once I had begun the walk, and had time to think, I was starting realise that what had originally been something necessary to sustain me was now much more. I grasped the freedom I had to search for a part of myself in the land that was my home.
That night Amber and I stayed at the incongruously named Chalet Motel, not far from the beach. At the art deco Brunswick Hotel we had our final dinner together, outside on bricks laid like cobblestones. Though there were few people eating under the stars, we sat close like conspirators, whispered to one another and held hands so long they became hot and damp. I reminded Amber that we would be apart for eight months. She leaned forward so that her hair fell across her face. She held my hands in hers. With wet diamonds in her eyes she promised me she would help me no matter what happened or how long I took. I was more thankful and grateful than I could say, even more so because her statement was so unexpected. I was tired from the long day and felt very vulnerable and exposed. It was what I sought and the implications were close to me now. The expedition was on and the sense of vulnerability, exposure and fear of failure hung heavy on me, weighing down my usual optimism.
At the Chalet Motel I attended to practical matters, including my feet. I had a quick shower and later, as Amber watched, I punctured a blister. Five years in the Foreign Legion taught me a few very useful things. It taught me that the sometimes favoured method of puncturing the blister and then cutting off the troublesome piece of skin was just about the worst thing to do. Instead, I used a needle heated with the flame of a lighter, punctured the offending spot and put a plaster over it. This at least kept the skin and took the pressure and pain away. The fact was that running five or even 10 kilometres every day did not replicate walking 20, 30 or 40 kilometres a day. I hoped my feet would toughen up fast and I knew that before they did I would suffer the pain of the road. Following the minor surgery we fell into bed. We held each other closely, wondering what the future would bring. Then we slept and the darkness swept our doubts away.
Next morning I walked from the motel out onto the road. Amber stood next to the car, her face shiny and bright in the early morning sunshine. She had her work in a law firm and had to be back the following day. With what I thought was a brave wave, I walked away along the road to the north, my head down and tears now rolling down my cheeks. I did not feel guilty at leaving her; just a selfish sense of loss and sadness at leaving her warm smile and her warm embrace.
A car went by. It was Amber. She pulled off the road some 50 metres in front of me. Stepping from the car she waited till I caught up. ‘I’m not going to cry any more. I want you to know that I love you and I want you to finish this. I want you to come home to me.’ She swallowed a sob and put her arms around my neck. I could feel her warm tears on my wet cheek and then she let go. Was there ever a right way to say goodbye?
Without wiping her wet eyelids or the tears that coursed down her cheeks, she kissed me on the mouth, got into the car and drove off. I stood still with my little green day pack on my back. Through the back window of the car I saw her draw the back of her hand across her eyes. I felt at once utterly foolish, selfish and alone. My little green pack had never been heavier. The idea of walking across Australia had, suddenly, never seemed so self-indulgent or full of risk.
I steeled myself, took a deep breath and lifted my face to the sound of early morning birds and the sunrise over the ocean to the east. I walked toward the coast through Brunswick Heads past the fishing cooperative, and then turned right into Ocean Shores, a suburban estate with watered lawns, neat flowerbeds, fences, kerbed roads and shopping centre. The curtained windows winked at me as I walked by, the occupants probably nervous at a person purposefully striding through their piece of bliss with a little pack on his back. I marched across the Orana Bridge, a wooden footbridge, which brought me to the beach, the muscles in my legs at last stretching out after the work of the previous day. Apart from a few rocky headlands, my map told me the beach extended past the Gold Coast to the north.
I turned left and headed north along the golden ribbon of sand. When I looked behind me the Cape Byron lighthouse seemed suspended above the blue promontory in the distance. Appearing now and again over the dunes was Mount Warning, and at my right shoulder blue green mercury licked at the golden sand. I felt moisture trickle down my neck to my back where it was stopped by the pressure of the pack against my skin. The moisture spread as the air was too dense to allow for evaporation and there was no breeze to provide a cool caress to my cheek.
Over the next few hours there were times when I could see an Impressionist smudge of people, in front or behind me, but too far away to make out clearly, to wave at, or to shout to. For most of the morning my only companion was a sea eagle, patrolling her stretch of beach with bright, shining, dark glass eyes. I felt sure she was keeping a benevolent eye on me. I loved her ability to move on the dense air and the thought that we were sharing the same place, that ambivalent place, on the sand between the land, sea and the sky.
I watched her for a while and reached into my little pack for my diary, ‘We share more than you know. Your passing is marked by a little turbulence in the air, mine by the movement of a few grains of sand, soon smoothed into sameness by the action of the sea. If someone were to follow you or me, they would never know we were here.’ For those who leave no marks on the land the only evidence of their passing are stories. I felt no need to create something substantial, to build a tangible legacy. Instead, I wanted to show myself and others that stories really mattered. They mattered because stories are who we really are.
A few kilometres from Byron Bay and across the road from Tom’s Pies.
An hour or so later I met a far away smudge that hardened into Bill. He was fishing from the beach in baggy blue shorts with a rod longer than a station wagon. His feet were buried in the wet sand of the shore break and a cigarette lolled between his lips. As the muscles of his calves bulged he told me about the fish. ‘There are mullet out there, mate, but the bloody commercial fishermen take too much. Greedy bastards they are. They take roe for the overseas market and dump most of the fish back into the ocean. Bloody criminal it is. Whaddya reckon?’ I said that it did not seem to make much sense to me.
At Hastings Point further north, surfers knifed a right-hand break, and I made it to the Kingscliff Hotel as the sun began to paint orange and red the border between land and sky. I arrived with a screaming headache of dehydration, right eye blurry with the throb. From the front balcony of the hotel I could see Surfers Paradise, the high-rise buildings like a row of broken teeth, curving away into a rotten smile to the north-east. Windows facing west were honey-gold in the late afternoon, though I doubt if anyone noticed – everyone looked out to se
a.
At the bar of the hotel I ordered a jug of iced lemonade and wore hot narrow eyes on my back from the bronzed blue-signeted patrons of the public bar. They probably thought drinking lemonade in a public bar was the violation of an unwritten law. With a pleasure born of need I ignored the men around me and heard nothing but the hum of the overhead fan and the tinkle of ice against glass as I poured the sweet, cool liquid into my body.
As my thirst was slaked I considered the following day. It was another 35 kilometres to Surfers Paradise, a repeat of the walk from Brunswick Heads. Already in pain, my hands beaded with sweat thinking about how hard this would be. When I sat at a barstool for a few minutes the blood pooled in my feet. To straighten my legs was to allow gravity to have its way and more blood rushed toward the ground. I imagined my feet exploding, the bottom of my legs just bloody stumps. Having underestimated the training necessary for this trip, I rapidly concluded that to continue walking I had to get my feet up for as long as possible at the end of each day.
Rather than walk along the beach I chose the road, to rest my sinews and tendons stretched by the giving sand. Just out of Kingscliff I moved inland from the beach and the concrete began. After an hour or so I rested for a few minutes in a bus shelter on the Gold Coast Highway. My skin was greasy and sticky and grit stuck to my face, the sand blown from the beach and the dirt of so many exhaust pipes. The bus shelter was opposite PK’s Chooks, where you could get ‘the best chicken in Australia’, and I watched the cars and buses go by with their colours and coughed dirt. Blue Nurse, Greyhound Pioneer buses, Regent Taxi, Positive Pest Control, Australian Air Express and Multi Constructions all hurrying, hurrying to the Gold Coast and Surfers Paradise. Alone, on the opposite footpath, was an old lady with purple-grey hair, grey handbag and white polka dot shift. She shuffled into the Palm Beach Mobile and Tourist Park while the world rushed by and paid her no attention at all.
