by Ted Simon
The vast majority of Australians were not like that, and yet my first impressions had been correct too, and I wondered how a few examples of extreme behaviour could so stamp and characterize a whole society. It became one of my main preoccupations.
For an Englishman, especially one who can remember how things were in England before the Fifties, Australia has a disturbing familiarity. The streets straggle out of Sydney much as they do out of London, and pass through namesake suburbs. You see street furniture and municipal
architecture that has since been replaced in London by something newer; like old-style post offices and libraries, and Mechanics' Institutes. Or so it seemed to me, for the force of nostalgia is so strong that one old lamp-post can colour an entire street.
Out in the New South Wales countryside, too, there are glimpses of old England. The railway system, seemingly with all its veins and arteries still intact, and local puffer trains running between model stations, is a powerful time-warper. I rode up into the cosy Blue Mountains past village greens and orchards and vine-covered cottages. The strange admixture of Aboriginal names only seemed to point up the quaintness of the English ones, Wentworth Falls and Katoomba; Mount Victoria, Bell and Bilpin; Kurrajong, Richmond and Windsor.
Past meadows and stables and ponds; butcher's shops bursting with the finest and cheapest meat in the world; languid pubs made glamorous with the fancy Victorian ironwork which we, in England, melted down for scrap in the war.
At Wiseman's Ferry a great, green river rolled by between steep grassy banks, and a country hotel founded in 1815 served a counter lunch for a dollar sixty, a plate piled high with lamb chops and brussels sprouts. It was hot, but not too hot. There were flies, but so far not too many. The sun put creases round the eyes and seemed to be richer in ultra-violet than any other sun I had known, but it was tolerable and it was, after all, mid-summer. Riding through it like this, viewing it as an outsider, it was a rural idyll, far away from the troubles of the world.
When I came back on to the coastal highway there was less to admire. All Australia seemed to be moving up the coast in trailers, and camp sites were crowded. As I moved closer to people their prejudices showed through. The flies grew thicker too, and I had to eat my steak with a handkerchief waving in my hand to keep them from totally obscuring the meat. But the great green rivers kept rolling down to the sea, and the beautiful beaches stretched out for ever, and it was still the best steak in the world.
The coast road north of Sydney is called the Pacific Highway for six hundred and fifty miles until it reaches Brisbane. Then it becomes the Bruce Highway. Another five hundred miles north is Rockhampton, right on the Tropic of Capricorn. I crossed the Tropic (for the sixth time on my journey) four days before Christmas and headed on for Mackay. Since Brisbane, the arid summer of the south had been giving way slowly to the tropical rainy season of Queensland. In the southern droughts the cattle died of thirst. In the north they drowned and floated away on the floods. Australia runs to extremes.
After Marlborough, the road takes a long inland loop for one hundred and fifty miles to Sarina, to avoid floods. People had told me lurid tales about this part of the road. 'You want to watch out’ they said. 'There's criminals on the lam from Sydney.'
Only a few weeks before, a married couple had been mysteriously murdered in their car on that lonely stretch. I was served the story several times with relish. There was sometimes a ghostly quality about that land, but it was nothing to do with criminals or even ghosts. Much of the land was covered by a light forest and a high proportion of the trees were acacias called Brigalow. Across broad areas of the land the Brigalow was dead, and the thousands of twisted grey trunks seemed to haunt the forest. It was murder all right; they had all been slain by a poisoned axe to clear the way for pasture.
I took on petrol at Marlborough and set off. It was monotonous country, and empty, but not at all sinister. After eighty miles I came to Lotus Creek.
There was nothing much to distinguish Lotus Creek from the other small rivers I had crossed. It ran in a shallow bed cosseted by reeds and ferns and clumps of tall Guinea Grass. Several small species of gum tree, Black Butt, White and Stringy Bark among them, grew alongside it.
The highway dipped gently to the bridge which was simply made of huge square-cut trunks of one of the bigger species of gum tree, for some gums grow to well over three hundred feet. The trunks were surfaced with smaller wood and tarred over. The bridge had no parapet, but was more than wide enough for the biggest trucks. Most of the smaller bridges were built in this way.
Beyond the bridge on the right was a road house and petrol pump. I filled up, on principle, and went in for a coffee. It was a small restaurant, neater and cleaner than I had expected. Behind a well-stocked counter was a door open to the kitchen. The man behind the counter was busy at something. He was a stocky fellow in a neatly pressed blue bush-jacket and matching shorts. He wore woollen socks up to the knees and a cowboy hat.
'How much is coffee?' I asked. I always asked. Australia was vastly more expensive than I had expected and prices varied wildly from place to place.
'Thirty cents,' said the man without looking up. There was an edge to his voice though, and a hint of middle-European accent. I guessed Polish. Thirty cents was a high price.
'Thirty cents?' pretending mild astonishment.
Then he did look up. He had truculent blue eyes.
'Is thirty cents too much?' he demanded. If it is, I'll make it fifty cents. I'm like that.'
A touch of panic assailed me. There was something funny going on,
and I could not figure it out. I made placatory noises and he let me have a cup for thirty cents after all.
'I'm up here to make money, that's all,' he said. 'Why else would anyone come and live up here in this wilderness? When you're still here in a couple of days you'll be grateful I don't put it up to a dollar.'
'Well, it's very nice here,' I said, 'but . . .'
'If you're thinking of going back to Rockhampton you'd better make it soon, before Lotus comes up too,' he said with a slight sneer, and then the message began to filter through.
'Too?'
There were two others in the restaurant, a man and a teenage girl at a table. The man had got up and was walking over. He said:
'When Connors comes up, Lotus ain't far behind. Right, Andy?'
'What's Connors?' I asked, though I had guessed by now. I just wanted them to know that I hadn't known.
'You didn't know? Connors is the next creek along to Sarina,. ten miles down the road. I just came back from there. She's seven feet over the bridge and still rising. And to anticipate your next question, sometimes she's up for a day, sometimes for a week, and there's no tellin'
I waited to see if there were any other questions I had planned to ask, but it seemed not. His curly blond hair was greying and he wore steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked old for the girl. I asked him what he was doing there, nicely.
'I'm based in Mackay,' he said, 'but I travel around a hell of a lot. I'm the most knowledgeable journalist in Australia about the tropics.'
Between them, I thought, these two fellows could run Australia. They had the confidence for the job. However, after a bit they became quite friendly and interesting. It was just that first aggressive flash that got me. Like an Anglo-Saxon version of Latin America. The comparison pleased me. Also, the coffee when it came was very good.
I rode up to Connors to have a look before settling in for the week. The queue was several hundred yards along, cars and trucks. It was very warm, with sun striking down between the cumulus clouds, and people were all over the place in their singlets and summer frocks, eating Fast Food and chucking the plastic containers and empty bottles into the countryside. Four truckies were playing an intense game of poker in the middle of the road. The bridge was nowhere to be seen, but the top of the 'Give Way' sign was still visible. The water was black and turbulent, and still rising.
I got back to Andy's place to fi
nd four big refrigerated trucks had parked outside, their engines thrumming away to keep the coolers working. The drivers were already piling up empty beer bottles in the restaurant. There were five men, a jolly red-headed woman and a boy. I decided to get my stuff unpacked and into the tent before it started to rain, and rode the bike out to the trailer and camp site in the field.
I walked back to the restaurant to find that the drivers had moved outside to some trestle tables under a waterproof canopy. I felt like joining them and asked Andy to sell me some beer. I had a great knack for treading on Andy's toes. Either that, or his toes were a permanent mess.
'I don't sell beer,' he said hotly. 'I have never sold beer. I have applied for a licence and you will never find sly grog sold on my premises.'
'Oh well, I only thought . . .' I said, sniffing the fumes that still hung around the room, and went out to sit with the truckies. After five minutes, Andy came out with a bottle of beer he wanted to give me, the sentimental fool. But by then I'd already finished one and been given another.
Two of the truckies were doing most of the talking, and they were both comedians in their way. One of them was a brisk tubby fellow who told conventional jokes like a club comic. I could imagine him with a spotted bow tie and a microphone going T say, I say, I say,'. That was Clive.
The poet among them was a man they all called Ferret. He was a slightly built man with a daft little cloth hat on his head and an expression that managed to be both sad and humorous at the same time, in the Celtic manner. He was the acknowledged leader of the truckies and was famous throughout Australia for his verse epic, Ode to a Truckie. It was about a pal who had died overturning a truck full of empty bottles outside Gladstone, having probably emptied a good few of the bottles himself.
I liked Ferret immediately. He had a warm manner and a sympathetic way with stories. The real humour ran all the way through them, between the punchlines, and I thought them very funny and subtle and not a little astonishing. Travelling with Ferret was a handsome, athletic fellow called 'P.J.' with a wistful manner. He was going to see his mother in Sarina for Christmas. He hadn't seen her, he said, with a slight grin, since two and a half years ago when she was dying in hospital.
The fourth truckie was a chirpy little Tasmanian they called McCarthy. He had rubber legs and a concave face and played 'fall guy' when one was needed. He enjoyed the role and encouraged it, and his T-shirt showed a hand with two fingers up, meaning Peace or Piss Off, depending on how you saw it.
The fifth man's name I never knew. He was husband to the redhead and they both made an appreciative audience for the others. Even before the beer warmed them all in a deep amber glow, there was a great kinship and liking between them, a quite tangible thing. They were mates, of course, which is a powerful enough bond, but it was more than that. They
were truckies, and in Australia that was tantamount to being an outlaw.
I had heard about truckies from the outside, stories of reckless violence and villainy. For respectable Australians, truckies ranked with drought, pestilence and 'criminals on the lam' as one of nature's chief hazards. 'No truck with a truckie' was their motto, and they locked up their daughters when the big rigs rolled in. Now from the inside I saw that they had many qualities I had missed badly on my way up the coast, and the most surprising was sensitivity. The boorishness that I had begun to accept as inevitable was absent, and in its place was a delicacy of touch that seemed little short of amazing. Yet, thinking it over, it was natural. They were all long-distance drivers, not short-haul cowboys. Anyone who spends long hours alone with himself on the road has to have more in his head than a stock of sterile prejudices.
Clive's son made regular runs to the truck for more beer.
'Are you trucking beer?' I asked Clive.
'No, I've got general groceries. He's got ice cream,' he said, pointing at the fifth man.
'McCarthy's got prime Victoria rump, and Ferret's going empty.'
We talked and told stories. I learned about the roads in the interior and what I heard convinced me that I must give up my idea of crossing the North in the rainy season. The only way out of Cairns would be the way I had come. I heard chilling tales of reckless driving over the roads of Hell to get to the pub in time; of truckie pride and the awful falls that followed. Then the boy brought the bad news. The beer had run out.
Cars were still coming in over Lotus Creek, so without hesitation McCarthy went out to his big truck, wheeled it round and roared off across the bridge. Somewhere out there was a pub, and as long as there was a pub open in Australia, they would have beer at Lotus Creek that night. The sun was fading, black clouds lowered all around. There were flashes of lightning off to the north-east. The journalist came out looking worried, and walked over with an expression that tried to look threatening but was just a bit silly.
'Have you seen my daughter?' he said. We all looked at McCarthy's empty seat and smiled at a nice thought, though none of us believed it. The journalist sat in McCarthy's seat and gazed at the sky.
'She'll be filling up tonight,' he said. 'It's raining over the catchment area. We won't be out of here tomorrow.' He was very authoritative, so I had no way of knowing whether he knew what he was talking about. Nor did I really care.
Andy switched on the lights in the grounds and the bulb under the canopy created a pleasing intimacy in the warm tropical evening. I heard the frogs honking down by the river. Lotus was beginning to rise now. Two tour buses came in and some cars. McCarthy was last over the bridge, with a crate of Castlemain's XXXX, the beer they all agreed was best, and with much relief they set to drinking again.
The place was filling up fast now, and looking like a refugee camp. The holidaymakers were sleeping in their buses, and made a big crush with their visits to the bathrooms. The car travellers had filled all Andy's annexed rooms, and others were camped in the field, but all this activity swirled round the canopied island of yellow light where the truckies sat drinking and murmuring with a low key energy that seemed inexhaustible. Hours later I left them and slept through a heavy rainstorm.
I woke up to the sound of an old-fashioned hurdy-gurdy playing outside my tent. The melody had been coded in a secret cipher, but all the notes were there, creaking and squeaking rustily together. I looked out at what looked like a very fat magpie, waddling about and making this cheerful but extraordinary music.
I saw Ferret approaching across the field with a 'Stubbie' in his hand, his feet scarcely bending the blades of grass, his face rosy as the dawn.
'What is this amazing bird?' I asked. In a steady, sober voice, he said it was called a Butcher Bird, and I added it immediately to my list of top creatures.
'Come and have some breakfast,' he said. 'We're doing steak.'
Connors River had risen in the night to equal all previous records at thirteen feet above the bridge, and McCarthy was celebrating by breaking into a fifty-pound carton of rump steak.
I wandered over to see a heap of timber blazing in the big barbecue stand and Clive cutting the rump into slices an inch thick. There was no indication that any of them had been to sleep or would ever sleep again. The refugees from the buses had come out after a cramped night in their seats and were huddled at a safe distance gazing in awe and envy at the terrible truckies. I was given half a square foot of the most delicious steak I had ever had, or would ever have, and a bottle of beer to start the day right.
The truckies were as contemptuous of the tourists as army men are of civilians, and took pride in their fearsome reputation, but as men they were too kind-hearted to ignore the distress all around them. In Australia, meat eating is a religion. P.J. and Ferret called over to them to come and get it if they wanted it. Most of them shrank back in horror as though they had been offered a cup of cyanide, but a few bold spirits risked coming in for a nip, like jackals round a camp site.
Andy came out from his house stamping his boots hard in anger as he walked.
'If I see you taking money for that meat,' h
e shouted at Ferret, 'there'll be trouble. I'm not having people doing business on my property.'
He was so far out of line it was ridiculous. The truckies laughed and swore at him, and he stomped back to his overcrowded restaurant.
'He's better than the bloke up the road,' said P.J. philosophically. 'They were selling water at twenty cents a glass last flood.'
'Who pays for this meat?' I asked.
'No worries,' said Clive. 'In a situation like this, they expect us to break into the load. They're happy enough if the refrigeration equipment keeps going while we're standing here.
'There should be several tons of strawberry ice cream running over the road by nightfall,' he added, jerking a thumb at the fifth man. 'His cooler's packed in.'
It was true. The magnitude of this potential disaster fascinated me, and my mind was linked by telepathy to these slowly liquefying tons of frozen goo for the rest of the day, hoping to be there when the first pink dribble appeared under the doors.
We had steak for lunch and for tea, and then we had steak for supper. I tried to talk to some of the bus crowd. There was a couple with a small boy who seemed nice, on their way to their home in Townsville. They asked me to come and stay on my way through. We hadn't been talking long before they wanted to tell me about the 'Abos'. I had had only one encounter with Aborigines up to then, at a small town on the coast south of Brisbane. I had seen a couple standing barefooted in the shallow water of a lagoon, fishing with a line but no rod. They were short dumpy figures, he with his trousers rolled up, she in a cotton frock. I had taken a picture of them from the jetty and he had seen me. His reaction was fierce and bitter.
'I'll fuckin' toss yer in there,' he screamed, pointing at the water. I thought it a sad story and hoped these people would understand.
'You don't want to have anything to do with them,' the woman said firmly. 'Don't you ever trust one. Never. They'll lift anything off you. Good as the Arabs, they are.'
