by Ted Simon
'You know Palm Island?' said the man. I shook my head. 'It's an Abo reserve off the coast up here. Well, you know those flagons of cheap wine that cost a dollar fifty? Take one over there and you can flog it for forty-five dollars. They go crazy over grog.'
'They're not human beings really - they're another species of animal,' said the woman. 'They live with animals, don't they? And it's a medical fact that every girl over three has been molested.'
'If you hit them on the head,' said the man, 'you can only injure yourself. But they're the only people with any money in Australia.'
It made me sick to listen to it. And they were really nice people. Several times coming up the coast I had heard these outpourings of filth that seemed to proceed from some deep hurt, like pus from a wound. I registered the fact that in all the hours we had spent together, not one of the truckies had ever uttered a single word of prejudice, and I was glad to get back among them as soon as I could.
The journalist's daughter came and stood by me for a while. She screeched a lot but she didn't have anything to say. The frilly bodice of her yellow cotton dress held her breasts up for my inspection, and then she disappeared again. I thought she was a disaster waiting to happen.
During the afternoon Connors started dropping. By evening it looked promising. I was advised to be ready to cross, since it could easily start to rise again. I packed up all my stuff and slept in the back of Ferret's empty truck. P.J. spent the night in the cab with the last bottle of beer. When he had finished it I believe his eyes closed briefly. I woke to find him studying the centrespread of a magazine called Overdrive, gazing lustfully at a big and luscious colour picture of a new Mack Truck.
Soon afterwards the first car came through from Mackay and we all got ready to go. The pink ice cream was safe after all. I said goodbye and rode off to Connors. There were still a few inches of water over the bridge, but I went across alright. Further along the road, Ferret's big truck started hooting at me from behind. I slowed and he swung it deftly onto the verge in front of me.
'See you at the hotel in Sarina, Ted,' he said. P.J. grinned, and I said okay. I didn't feel like hurrying, and when I arrived they were already at the bar. Ferret was finishing one of his shorter stories:
So this fellow said, 'Who did you see down there in Sydney, Dave?'
'Well, I was in the same room as Bishop Lennox.'
'Who's that then?'
'He's only the foremost Catholic in Australia. He's so holy he's most probably got holy water in his toilet.' 'What's a toilet, Dave?'
'How should I know. I'm not a bloody Catholic'
We were drinking out of dainty seven-ounce glasses at the counter instead of those stubby bottles. It didn't seem right, but the fumes were stronger in the enclosed space and Ferret and P.J. seemed to thrive in the atmosphere as though it were pure oxygen. One day, I thought, they would be leaning against a bar like this and they would just fade and dissolve into the atmosphere. I had got to like them both very much.
I said I had to go, because I did not dare drink any more.
Ferret looked hard at me with that sad little smile on his face.
'You're a lovely person,' he said. T knew straight away. Most people don't do anything for me. They can be nice - know what I mean? I can be nice too. But it doesn't mean anything.'
I knew exactly what he meant.
'You'll be right,' said P.J. cheerfully.
I often thought about them afterwards but when, weeks later by a million-to-one chance, I met Clive in a pub in Victoria, I didn't know him at first.
'You know what happened to Ferret?' he said grinning the way Australians do when there's bad news. 'He turned his truck over outside Sarina that day.'
'Is he alright?' I asked anxiously.
'Oh, yeah, he got away with it. Beer softened the fall.'
A man I had met in Nairobi two years before had given me four elephant hair bracelets to deliver to his sister. The hair was pulled from the elephant's tail, and was supposed to confer virility on men and fertility on women. His sister's home was in a small town near Cairns, and this romantic little mission gave my journey to 'Far North Queensland' a nice human focus, but by the time I arrived the sister had long since abandoned her husband and taken her children off to England.
The husband was very kind and said that it would probably not have made any difference if I had got the bracelets there sooner. He gave me two of them to keep, but they never did much for me either.
I learned that it was still possible to go a bit further north, with the promise of a unique rain forest to see at Cape Tribulation a hundred miles away. The first seventy miles were tar. Then came a ferry across the Daintree River, and after that, dirt. The real problem was Cooper's Creek, which crossed the dirt road. If the creek was up, 'no way'. If the creek was down 'no worries'. We tried to get Charlie the ferryman on the phone, but there was no reply. So I went anyway.
I found Charlie leaning, against the ferry rail, waiting for custom. He was a snub-nosed, fair-haired young fellow with a wispy beard and a saucy look. He was leaning back at an easy angle but very alert, and it was a moment before I noticed that one of his legs was missing.
He eyed the mud-spattered bike with amusement, following the route I had painted on one of the boxes. 'How's Cooper's?' I asked.
'No idea,' he said, offhand. 'Haven't had anyone through from that side. Should be okay.'
As I rode off the other side he called, 'See ya later.' He only sold return tickets, he knew I had to come back that way.
I rode on over red rocks and mud, laced with rivulets, slippery at times, but mostly steady going in third gear. I felt a vague thrill of apprehension thinking about Cooper's, and all the rivers I had already crossed. The worst had been in Bolivia, on the altiplano between Potosi and La Paz. There were two rivers there, and I fell in one of them, and stopped dead in the middle of the other. It was very uncomfortable and made a terrible mess of my arrangements.
Now I forded a few minor creeks and then came Cooper's. It was about twenty feet across with a bed of pebbles and boulders, and I got off the bike to have a good look. To go straight through was out of the question; there was at least three feet of water in the middle. A little further downstream the creek widened and became more shallow. The right course to follow was a wide horse-shoe shape, swinging downstream and then up again the other side. The last bit would be the worst, with the exhaust pipes submerged, trying to find the power to clamber up the bank.
On the other hand there could be no real disaster, because some campers from Cairns turned up in a small truck to give a hand if I made a muck of it. They crossed first and I watched their wheels to gauge the depth. Then in I went, managing alright until the last leg when I turned a bit too sharply against the current. The engine faltered and stopped, but I had both boots planted firmly on the river bed. The campers were already in the river, swimming, and we hauled the bike ashore together. I poured the water from my boots, unbolted the pipes to empty them too, and then took my turn for a swim.
At Noah's Creek there was a clearing by the river, with gardens and thick grasses, and a square tin-roofed house. Extravagant blue butterflies flickered among the trees. At twilight insects chanted as though through amplifiers concealed in the bushes. A paraffin lamp was set, hissing, on the veranda, and suddenly, into this circle of yellow light stumbled a dangerous and desperate figure. His shirt was split from collar to waist and the right sleeve was in tatters. He had four days' worth of dense black stubble on his sweaty face, and a crazy glint in his eye. In his right hand he swung a machete.
It was the proprietor, back from his daily chores. He had been hacking his way, painfully, along a high ridge at the limit of his property, looking for the blazes that were made to mark his boundaries in 1896. The forest is a covered maze of towering tree trunks and twenty-foot ferns, knit together by massive trailing lianas and parasitic growths of all kinds. Among the picturesque obstacles to progress through this undergrowth were the
'Wait-a-while', with its long tendrils carrying fish-hook thorns at close intervals in sets of four, and the Stinging Bush, which has a fur of fine needles on the underside of its broad leaves that break off in the skin and hurt for a month.
That night the rain drummed on the tin roof louder than I had ever heard it before.
In the morning I volunteered to go to Cape Tribulation for some provisions. It was a long walk through the forest along a track, with
glimpses here and there of the green ocean. Forays into the undergrowth produced a fruit like a cobalt blue egg, and another purple one with red flesh and three stones. The Cape was a small, easy-going community with a lavishly stocked general store run by a middle-aged couple and their children who had 'emigrated' from Sydney. They spoke of it as of a different country and it was true that Australia did not seem to reach up this far. I had the impression of it being huddled down there somewhere in the south-east corner of the continent. The family were not only happy to be there, they looked it. They went about helping each other and being openly warm and affectionate. Until I saw it, I had not realized how cramped and undemonstrative other families had been. The father was kneading dough for the bread oven. He told me that I reminded him of a copper on the Drug Squad at Cairns. 'Drug Squad?' I asked, taken aback.
'Oh yes,' he said. 'They're very active. Packets of heroin are always floating ashore here. I've found some myself.'
Later I helped to load a small outboard dinghy on to the truck at Noah's Creek and went to the coast to find, not heroin, but my crabs. We floated over thick brown water at the edge of a mangrove swamp and put down two wire traps. Within minutes we had a huge black crab with claws that can take off a finger. The meat of the mud-crab was more delicious than any I had eaten since childhood. Obviously Australian coasts and rivers offered an abundance of good food, and I started to think it was time I bought a rod and took up fishing.
Then the rain fell heavily all night and by morning it was clear that if I wanted to get out across Cooper's for a week or so, I had better leave soon.
I fell once, gently, in a puddle of red clay on the way back, but at Cooper's I learned my lesson and got through with only my boots full.
Charlie was still leaning against the side of his ferry, his one leg thrust forward just as I'd left him. This time we got talking and I asked if there were any crocodile.
'Sure are,' he said. 'Used to be me livin'.'
A one-legged crocodile hunter? Was he retired by one crocodile too many?
'Not a bit of it,' he said. 'If they made it legal again, I'd be off in the morning and no worries. 'Course, they were right to close it down. There's plenty of Freshies to build up the population now they're protected, but there aren't enough Salties left to keep a man in wages.'
Fresh and Salt, he said, referred to the water they came in.
'You might get $20 for a Freshie, double for a Saltie. I got one Saltie that was sixteen foot. It brought $240 for the skin, but I'd never go after one of those again. It was too big to land in the boat. We had to drag it into shallow water and skin it there. The blood brought shoals of small shark in, and they lacerated our legs.
'There were three of us that used to shoot together. Both the others are dead. One was my wife's brother. He died of septicaemia. The other one turned out to be a convicted rapist who'd killed a man. We only found out after he'd killed another man and was shot dead himself.
'Happened over in Burketown. Been there? Favourite place of mine. There was a pub and very little else. The walls and the floor were all at an angle from being hit by storms. When it flooded the clients had to row themselves to the thunder-box at the bottom of the yard.
'The host was a Yank. He was a bit "tropo". He had periods of sanity, then he'd become violent in a Wild West way. Used to punch his customers across the bar and come down the stairs with guns blazing. They put him away in the end. Then the pub was hit by a whirly-whirly.'
I asked him how he had lost his leg.
'Cancer,' he said. 'But it got mashed up pretty badly first,' he added laconically. 'Croc shooting isn't that dangerous though. The shot is the important thing. You've got a six-inch target, quite close to. If you know your job you won't often have to swim for the corpse. You don't get rich either. You get wages and a half. But you're doing what you like best.'
Three weeks later I rode into Melbourne on the Dandenong road, and turned left into St. Kilda, then again left into Robertson Street and stopped outside Number One. Dandenong is a big and busy highway, and the next road was like a neighbourhood high street and Robertson Street was a quiet little backwater of terraced houses, so it was like coming into harbour.
The house was rented by Graham and Cheryl, an Australian couple I had known in London, and they shared it with Dave and Laurel and a small dog of uncertain temper. I took up residence in the meditation room.
They were all within a few years of thirty, and very modest in their demands on life. They hardly ever ate meat, for one thing, and they drank very little alcohol. They were all slim and light and did not try to conceal their anxieties under a mound of muscle in the usual Australian way.
The girls sometimes wore ankle-length peasant skirts and blouses without bras. Graham and Cheryl had travelled in the East, and the meditation room had a mandala and a Buddha and was scented with joss sticks. They actually used it for meditating. Their great ambition was to buy farmland and they had already saved enough to start looking for good offers. We used to sit at the kitchen table with mugs Of tea and hear about the mouthwatering acres being advertised that week. I found their
situation exciting and enviable, and they shed a new and more hopeful light on Australia for me.
Every weekday morning for two weeks I went to work. I took the tram for St. Kilda to Flinders Road, where I changed onto the Coburg tram to Sydney Street. I loved Melbourne and I loved its green single-deck trams. Generally I avoided the rush hours since I was master of my own time, and I sat at ease in the tram, cruising down the centre of the broad avenue that sweeps past the park and the big boys' school and the art gallery, and over the railway bridge to Flinders Street.
Flinders Street Station was built in the pre-war image of a London terminus, even down to the framed spaces for advertisements, and the news boys shouting the titles of the evening papers on the corner. All about was a bustle of traffic and commerce, with crowds of office workers, shoppers and travellers from out of town weaving their way across the intersecting tram-lines under the pompous facades of Victorian bank chambers and offices. It was London again in an earlier, less self-conscious time, when business still made its presence felt in the street and had not yet withdrawn behind the plate glass doors and anonymous concrete of the modern European office block.
The prosperous and the derelict rubbed shoulders on the pavements. You could see that there were fortunes to be made and lost, and the pursuit of profit was free of shame. There was a rich mixture of city life on the streets and I lingered between trams to absorb it. For all that it was busy, I never felt it was frantic; exuberant, rather, and not a little ruthless, which gave it a slight whiff of Dickensian days. The scale of the houses and streets still allowed human beings their natural place. And I was always conscious of the great, lazy expanse of Australia beyond the city, reminiscent perhaps of the empire that once lay beyond the City of London.
The Coburg tram took me up Elizabeth Street and eventually brought me out of the rectangular heart of Melbourne to pass through open parkland for a while. It skirted the university and finally plunged into narrow, noisy Sydney Road, a long ribbon of small businesses that wound on and on towards the prison. Once I went out to see the prison, and stared with morbid fascination at its high walls and old-fashioned Alcatraz look. It seemed very relevant somehow to Australian life, which has more of a snakes-and-ladders feeling about it than does life in England. I often heard talk about criminals. They were mentioned as a fact of life, rather than in tones of dismay or moral outrage. They were ther
e. If they got you, then you went down. If they were got, then they went down.
On weekday mornings though, I jumped off at the second stop down Sydney Road, or if possible at the lights before that. This is where Frank Musset has his motorcycle business. On one side of the road is the shop, where he presides over the stock with his mournful white face and brown overalls, unless he can escape into his own little workshop hidden round the back. On the other side is the repair shop where my Triumph stood stripped down on a stand. I was overhauling it, slowly, at my leisure. The barrel was being rebored. Some oversize pistons were coming from England. There were new exhaust valves to grind with the cylinder head. I was improving the supporting system for my tank panniers, rebuilding the rear wheel, repairing the oil seals in the forks and doing a lot of other little things that I had thought of.
I was having a marvellous time in that shop. Perhaps it is not surprising that after all the moving about I should relish spending a fortnight in a steady, unvarying routine, but there was much more to it than that.
It was not a pretty shop maybe, but it was big and cool, and there was almost everything I needed. But what gave it the character that stamped itself on me so that I would never forget it, was a transistor radio tuned in to a commercial station called THREE-X-Y. In two weeks I became hopelessly addicted to this radio station, something that had never happened to me before. The programme could hardly have been more rudimentary. It consisted of the same ten songs played over and over again, interspersed by advertisements. Three years later I have completely forgotten the ads, but the songs are clear in my memory.
A tenor screamed 'Who is that lady all alone', ending on a false note. Bob Dylan sang about his wife in a Portuguese war. David Essex did 'Hold me tight, don't let me go.' The Queen sang 'Mama, I've killed a man . . .' Rod Stewart was doing something surreal on Main Street. There was a horribly mawkish song about being music and making the girls cry, and there were four or five others.
