Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph

by Ted Simon

  The company was congenial, I had a good mechanic working nearby who showed me a lot of dogged enthusiasm and helped me over difficulties. But it was the songs that got me. They drugged me. The radio was never switched off and I was like a cow being lulled at milking time. Once I got into that shed in the morning my day was complete; it was over before it began because I knew nothing could break that mood or change it, and I had 'no worries', as they are so fond of saying. Obviously the treatment was relieving me of some kind of burden. I guessed it was that I had simply spent too long on my own, thinking. For two weeks I had my brain anaesthetized, and I revelled in it.

  At midday I went out into the blinding sunshine and walked to the pub for a 'counter lunch'. I learned to treat lunchtime beer with great caution in Australia. It was drawn by the ounce in deceptively dainty glasses at a temperature that numbed the throat and delayed the action.

  Sometime after four in the afternoon I dipped my hands in the soap tin

  and got ready to leave the great greasy canyon for home. The Queen followed me into the street with a last poignant wail from the transistor '. . . put my gun up to his head, pulled the trigger now he's dead, Mama, I'm leaving now ... I took my life and threw it all away . . .'

  Back on the tram, hot sun, hot upholstery, watching the girls in the street, dreaming, taking the song over in my head where the radio left off. A prim-looking woman sits opposite me. By accident, as I cross my legs, my foot touches her leg just below the knee. I'm surprised to see an enormous dusty footprint on her stocking, as though a man had climbed up under her skirt. I murmur an apology but she draws herself up in disdain and pretends not to have noticed. She can't see it and of course I'm not going to tell her now.

  'Silly cow,' I thought, 'She'll walk around like that for the rest of the day. Typical.' Everything in Australia seemed typical. Deja vu. Dreamlike. Couldn't work it out. Not at all like White South Africa, or Rhodesia. Nothing like America. I gave up and settled back into the dream.

  Often at St. Kilda, on my way home, I went to the off-licence at the back of a small pub and bought half a gallon of Angove's white wine, the cheapest of the nicer ones, for a knock-down price. I was a bad influence at Number One Robertson Street. I brought alcohol and meat into the house in unprecedented quantities. I could not help it. I was under a spell and the magic was most intense in the house itself.

  Until very recently all Australian buildings were made, as far as possible, in the image of their British counterpart. Number One Robertson Street was the epitome of the trend, just like any suburban semi-detached villa in London, except that it had only one floor rather than two. The roof was pitched and gabled in the same way, the proportions were all familiar, the wainscoting and picture rails were moulded in the same pattern and covered with the same number of layers of the same thick paint in the same colours. The same linoleum covered the same boards, and in the kitchen the doors of the built-in cupboards were even fastened by the same pieces of paint-encrusted metal.

  A low brick wall divided the pavement from the little front garden where various shrubs struggled against each other, though some of the bushes were a bit florid by conservative English standards. At the back was a kitchen porch and a potting shed.

  At least, that is how I saw it in 1976, and at least once a day I used to look at all this and wonder whether, somewhere on my way across the Pacific Ocean, I had unwittingly passed through a looking glass.

  Naturally I had expected Australia to be influenced by English forms. What gave it the power of an enchantment, though, was the feeling of period. This was London Suburbia of the thirties not of the seventies. This same house in New Eltham, say, would since have been changed out of all recognition with wall-to-wall carpets, designer's colours, formica kitchen units, bathroom improvements and all the appurtenances of Mr. and Mrs. 1970. In Robertson Street I had the vivid impression of having returned to New Eltham in the thirties, and since it was in just such a house in New Eltham that I did, in fact, spend the first five years of my life, the effect on me was hypnotic.

  And to make any resistance impossible, there was the sun. Against all reason I remember my childhood as having conducted itself exclusively in hot sunshine. In the thirties there were no winters. Regardless of the meteorological records the sun shone on New Eltham constantly, and though it may not have been the happiest of times, in that respect it was a Golden Age. Picture then my astonishment, after decades of disillusion, at finding myself back in the imagined world of my childhood, bathed in that same eternal sun, but with me the important and tantalizing difference that this time it was ME in charge.

  Just like my father in the thirties, I walked out of the house every weekday morning through the swing gate, turned left down the road and went off to work. Only where he took the 8.15 to London Bridge, I took the Flinders Street tram from St. Kilda.

  I felt a great urge to spend the rest of my life there, lost in this fantasy come true.

  I sank deeper and deeper into the luxury of the illusion, which was like a balm to ancient hurts. All the pains of growing and becoming which lingered in me like the rheumatic twinges of old wounds seemed to be soothed away in hot nostalgia. To hell with all the agonies of the Western conscience, the gropings for awareness, the soul-wrenching efforts to root out unworthy prejudices. To hell with the nuclear holocaust and the coming ecological cataclysm and solidarity with the victims of totalitarian oppression.

  I was in Australia, the Lucky Country, and its unofficial motto was 'No Worries'. A large infantile part of me grasped at this heaven-sent chance to wipe the tapes and start again. I resented bitterly every reminder that I was not here to stay, that there were plans to make.

  There were enough sensitive, intelligent people in Melbourne to make the prospect of staying acceptable to my conscious adult self. We had pleasant evenings and weekend lunches where I paid lip service to problems of conscience, but there was no obligation to take an enlightened view of anything. It was perfectly respectable in Australian society to say: Down with the Abos, Up with the Uranium, Out with the Blacks, In with the Beer, and so on. Wit was appreciated, but the maximum of Vulgarity would do as well and qualified as 'Okker', which is Australia's revolutionary response to the tyranny of the intelligentsia. Since Australians are equal, by definition, a point may be made by quoting

  Virgil or by pissing on the carpet. The main difference is in the cleaning bill.

  The enigma that had bothered me in Sydney was beginning to resolve itself. If Australians allowed themselves to be represented world-wide as a nation of beer-sodden boors and hysterical Amazons, it must be through sheer lack of imagination. Like most people everywhere they spent most of their lives just getting by, but there was no collective dream or mythology that told them what it was they were supposed to be doing. In that respect they were far behind the Aborigines they had decimated and despised.

  Yet many signs indicated that the time might not be too far away, when Australians would agree on a better reason for living than to eat a pound of beef a day. When that day came, I thought this would become one of the world's best places to be.

  The faces of the old men told me there had been something once that was lost and could be found again.

  On a hot, quiet pavement in Adelaide I saw an old sun-dried gent wearing loose, tobacco-brown clothes, so accustomed to the brightness that he had taken on the colour of his own shadow, bent and gnarled and resilient as a tree in the desert; and passing in front of him a small boy, very conscious of his grown-up little boy's trousers, while the old voice steeped in loss and yearning, said: 'G'day mate.'

  The greeting was aimed at the little boy (who appeared not to hear it), but it seemed to encompass the universe and it cracked my heart.

  There is a silly sentimental dream alive in Australia, a pot-bellied householder's dream of security and Sunday lunch, but it is rooted in something else much older and sadder and more powerful. Sometimes the old men seemed to know what it was.

  I
rode the coast road from Melbourne through Geelong towards Adelaide. At one point I went inland towards Hamilton and spent a few days on a sheep station visiting the parents of the Australian I had met in Ecuador. I did a little work and bought a fishing rod, and in the Glenelg river I caught my first fish: some redfin and a salmon trout that filled me with pride.

  The foreman took me to the shearing shed and showed me how to kill and slaughter a sheep, impressing me with his speed and precision. All those thousands of acres were maintained by four people, father, mother, son and foreman, but teams of men came in at crucial times to do the shearing, drenching, dipping and a gruesome operation called mulesing which involved peeling the skin away under the tails of lambs.

  In the shed, where every inch of wood had been polished by contact with hands and sheep, it was easy to imagine all that furious labour amidst a river of wool, but most of the time the broad paddocks and their great shady gum trees slumbered peacefully, and the only sounds were made by flocks of parrots scolding each other in the trees.

  Going west it was getting drier. In Victoria State, fourteen inches of rain a year, in South Australia seven or less. Sheep gave way to grain. Big gums to smaller ones. Around Adelaide, high ground and a western-facing coast trapped more moisture and there was a brief greening, perfect for the grapes of Maclaren Vale and the Barossa Valley, but beyond Adelaide the aridity gripped hard, drying out the nostrils, gritting up my chain, burning everything the colour of tobacco.

  All the way the coast was spectacular, empty, endlessly inviting. I dawdled along from Port Augusta to catch whiting at Lucky Bay and Tommy Ruffs at Port Neill, to go cockling in a cove at Coffin Bay, and meet the pelicans at Venus Bay. The land dried further on, the settlements thinned and by the time I got to Ceduna I could guess at the thousand miles of waterless waste that lay beyond: the Nullarbor Plain which divided the West from the East.

  The Crossing of the Nullarbor was a legend that died hard. People had been trying to frighten me with it for months.

  'Watch out for the bulldust, mate!'

  'The what?'

  'The bulldust. It's a fine powder that fills the potholes. You can't see them until you're in them.

  'And the 'roos. They come leaping across the road in droves. You don't want to hit a kangaroo, mate. They're a lot bigger than you.'

  I thought of the aggressive young salesman who had entertained me in Adelaide in one of those big, hermetically sealed lunch clubs that businessmen patronize there. The walls were lined with fruit machines, and men stood with their backs to the room playing two machines at once to save time. My host was crammed into a fashionable suit with yards of superfluous material at the cuffs and lapels, and despite the air conditioning he glistened with the sweat of good living. He listened to my plans, and declared with ominous finality:

  'You can perish in Australia.'

  Australians in cities love to shudder at the merciless hostility of their continent. I wondered whether it was a sort of apology for betraying the national ideal, an excuse for not being out there digging.

  Truth to tell, the Nullarbor may have been rough once, but now the road is sealed and tarred all the way from Melbourne to Perth. I was privileged to ride the last two hundred miles of dirt before the new section was opened, and they were no more than ordinarily awful.

  But the Nullarbor itself is a beautiful, mysterious land. A spry old gent called Gurney showed me one of its secrets. He lived halfway along the

  dirt stretch in a ramshackle bungalow, with a wife, a petrol pump, some emus, a wombat and other more familiar animals. He said he owned eleven hundred square miles of South Australia, but it did him no good because the only drinkable water on the whole property came out of a cave a mile from his house.

  It was the cave I wanted to see, and he didn't usually allow visitors -'not since those three blokes with guns. They were sitting down there firing rifles at the roof. Mad drunk or something.'

  The Nullarbor is extremely flat, so you get into the cave by clambering down a crater. Miraculously, at the bottom of the crater among rocks and boulders, Burney had an orchard, the only place where fruit trees could survive the heat. The cave is a series of great caverns, and an important experience for it suggests that the whole plain must be largely hollow. Indeed there's a theory - or fancy - that the Southern Ocean flows by subterranean passages to the interior of Australia. At any rate, the hollowness seemed most significant there, because you can feel the earth reverberate when you stamp on it, because emus call to each other by inflating bladders under their croups and making a noise like the underground echo of a steel drum, and because hollowness is a sign of great age. So in the night, half asleep on the ground, listening to the emus drumming and the clank of distant goat bells and not knowing what they were, I thought I was hearing the sound of a great tribal celebration drifting across the plain.

  If the Nullarbor was not an ordeal, it was perhaps a last straw. Bouncing over it was too much for the spokes of the rear wheel after all they had been through in two and a half years. I had been warned. In Melbourne and again in Adelaide I had replaced broken spokes, and every time I stopped for the day I checked them.

  At Eucla, where the dirt ended and the highway began, they were still in order. The smooth tar enticed me to greater speed. After five hundred miles, just before Norseman, I noticed a growing vibration through the steering head. I stopped in the absolute nick of time. Only four of the twenty spokes on one side of the wheel were left, and the rim was a terrible twisted shape. A few seconds more and it would certainly have collapsed. I shuddered to think of the mangled mess that would have left.

  As it was, I spent one of the nastiest hours of the journey rebuilding the wheel in a twilight plagued by squadrons of vicious mosquitoes.

  The following night I was within reach of Perth and saw the whole western sky lit up like molten lava, with white lightning and black rain tracing fantastic patterns over it. I arrived in Australia's Windy City on the first day of the winter rains, and four days later when I sailed for Singapore, it was still pouring and blowing as though it would never stop.

  The most natural way to leave Australia would have been from Darwin, in a short hop across the Timor Sea and then up the islands of Indonesia to Bali. My hopes were dashed in Melbourne.

  Timor was at war. Darwin was still in ruins from the cyclone that destroyed it in '77. There was no known shipping out of Darwin at all. To go that far on the off-chance seemed out of the question.

  Even from Perth the only escape was by cruise ship to Singapore. It was outrageously expensive as well as being heavily booked. It would have been cheaper to ship the bike and fly myself, but I would not let the bike travel unaccompanied. And the bookings made it impossible to delay the decision.

  I raved and cursed. Indonesia had tantalized me for so long. The thought of paying so much money to sail right past it rankled in me. The whole thing was cock-eyed. I could not rid myself of the feeling that something had gone seriously wrong, but in the end I had to accept it

  and put down my four hundred American dollars. Sailing date was 15 April.

  I had come most of the way through Australia with my dream of California intact, thinking of Carol and the ranch, anticipating the life I would begin when the journey was over. As I sailed for Singapore I felt that dream slipping away. Time passed. Distance increased. The pressure of everyday experiences piled up relentlessly, and I found my concentration on past and future events was interfering with the present.

  I began to see my commitment to California as an obstacle to The Journey, and I realized I would have to free myself of it, just as I had had to free myself of my earlier commitment to Europe. The Journey was once more making its ravenous demands on me. I felt as though I had entered a priesthood.

  These thoughts were always most intense when my morale was low, and the voyage to Singapore did not help. It was a disaster. The ship was called the Kota Bali, but it was not going to Bali and the other half of the name r
eminded me of sanitary towels. I found myself with a ship-load of Australian primitives goaded by a fussy, waspish Welsh captain and ministered to by an unctuous Chinese crew. The women changed their frocks four times a day, while the men poured their holiday funds into the fruit machines and over the bar counter. Had it not been for the beer fumes thickening in the air and lending some support, they would have all fallen down. There was better company on the lower deck where several hundred sheep were herded in pens, bound for Moslem slaughterhouses.

  To dramatize my disappointment I managed to catch a virus and arrived in Singapore in feverish cold sweats. I struggled through the formalities at the docks and the shipping office feeling worse and worse, and it was perhaps no wonder that I formed a poor impression of Singapore. It struck me as a crowded metropolis entirely devoted to business and money and with no heart at all.

  The streets were filled night and day with a torrent of traffic and only the most expensive hotels could put their guests out of earshot of the noise. On Bencoolen Street, where I stayed, the pavements were factory space for all the carpenters, mechanics, and other assorted artisans who spilled out of their lock-up shops. The rivers were clogged with filth, and the huge storm drains that ran into them down each side of the street were alive with rats.

  Yet, even through my fever, I found all the startling variety and detail very exciting after the barrenness of Australian life, and knew that when the culture shock had subsided I would enjoy it.

  Meanwhile, in my delirium I decided that I was carrying too much stuff on the bike and planned to send a parcel home. Among the things I thought I would never use was a spare stator for the alternator, a heavy luxury in spare parts. I made up my package, wrapped and tied and sealed as the law demanded, and sent it off to England before setting off up the Malaysian Peninsula.

  It was from Ringit in the Cameron Highlands that I wrote to Carol to tell her that The Journey was taking me over and that I would not be able to keep all my promises.