Discussion
These are e-mails from my friend, Dave, who is currently travelling through Australia. He was my housemate at university, got the top first in our year and was recruited by the foreign office out of university. He lasted 3 months before leaving, claiming that the job was immoral. He now spends his time living in Cornwall. smoking dope, writing poetry (he's published) and irritating those of us with real jobs.
And I think that his (lengthy) travel diary is amusing, and wished to share it with you chaps. Sort of Bill Bryson-esque, but funnier and ruder.
S.
Position: Melbourne, Australia
Status: Sober
Disposition: Amiable, Bleary
Zen Meditation Topic: The turtle flits
WARNING: this email is inconsiderately lengthy.
Readers may want to delete large sections of it at
random before reading.
So, I'll rewind you, if I may, to Sydney. Ah,
Sydney. The most visually spectacular city I've ever
been to - or seen on tv or in print, for that matter.
I thought San Francisco was impressive - large city on
large bay with large bridge - but Sydney blew it out
the water. Faultless blue skies and cobalt blue seas
that seem to go on and on forever, via the coast or
the spreadeagled and insinuating harbour/river waters
with their numerous coves and inlets and tributaries.
I caught a ferry from Watsons Bay back into the city
(people commute by ferry), and then out again to a
beach suburb called Manley, and the views were
phenomenal. And I'm becoming aware, writing now, that
I can't really say much more about the views and the
dominance of the water - words can only do so much
and, frankly, my literary talents are low on battery
right now - you'll just have to take it from me, on
trust, that they make the city great, or go and look
up images on the net. Oh, I could mention the numerous
gorgeous topless women on the beaches as well, never
further from a car ride from where you live. But that
would be a cheap and superfluous move for you people
of arse-tight puritan morality, so I'll refrain.
Apart from its natural splendour, Sydney didn't
really leave much of an impression on me. I mean, I
wasn't impressed, I wasn't unimpressed, it was just a
load of buildings in various states of proximity to
the water. The night life did seem fairly primitive,
I suppose, though obviously what I saw was a small
selection - but perhaps I could fairly paint a
portrait of a preponderance of cheap (as in crap, not
characterful) bars and burger joints and shitty mass
drinking tourist style joints - and the Aussie
consensus also seems to be that Melbourne has the
better night life and bars. We shall see. I did go
to one bar that was full of Phunk (emphasis on the
Ph), and remarking on this to a girl, she looked
pleased and said she went there every Friday and
Saturday night. Which perhaps suggests there were no
other such places to go.
As for the race riots - or mass race-inspired
beatings, which would be more accurate - I saw nothing
of it, being in the richer parts of the city, but it
dominated the newspapers, radio and Sydney-sider
conversation. And I probably can't add anything that
you haven't already found out for yourselves: the
Australians I've met were as horrified as you or I
would be, but then, they were from the kind of circles
where you would expect horror as a response. One
weirder impression the trouble made on me was to
confirm my feelings that Sydney was a real city - as
in, slightly chaotic and disorganised and seedy and
unjust and dangerous and fractous, with several
genuine no-go areas - which is what I understand a
city to be. My limited contact with Melbourne (which
I'm seeing this week) has left an impression of a
trainer city, a city with all the real and pointy bits
left out: so pleasant and easy and rational as to be
slightly dull.
The sun was immense: dangerous. On the first day I
used factor 8 sunscreen, my British staple: our solar
grandaddy treated it as a form of marinade. I've
since gone up to the standard 30+. Having said that,
since leaving Sydney we had three days of intermittent
thunder storms, so the weather isn't consistently
scorching.
After Sydney, Chris and I picked up the car we were
going to use to take a road trip down the coast to
Stonelea ('Stonelea Country Estate' no less), the
place where his parents have their business. The car
was a 1978 Triumph - a name whose venemous irony even
now causes my hands to curl into rage-filled claws.
To begin: the indicators failed within 5 minutes of
getting in the car. In city traffic this is not
amenable to tranquil progress. After some frankly
bizarre driving from Chris we somehow fluked our way
into a garage which was able to administer to our
Henry Ford era dinosaur. I wish now we'd given the
mechanic permission to blowtorch into a small molten
puddle while I watched and laughed scornfully, perhaps
taking photos or sketching its demise while a string
quartet played soothingly in the background. But no:
we regained the wheel and drove off.
That day we busted down the coast, stopping to swim
on the aptly named seven mile beach, and generally
gawking at the sea. We camped for a night in a place
called Bateman's Bay (God rain down fire upon it), a
small town on - go on, have a guess - a bay, with a
wierd preponderence of fish and chip shops and only
one pub. But no matter, we were only passing through.
The next day we got up at half 6 and had breakfast
and left, with me at the wheel, Chris remarking, in
his relay of our route, that we'd be fine as long as
we didn't run into any police, because our
registration had expired which made it slightly dodgy.
Leaing town a police car pulls out behind me. I
clamp myself to the speed limit, smile winningly into
the rear view mirror, make imploring signs to heaven
with my free left hand, and generally look devout.
But we get pulled over anyway, fined, and despatched
back into town to get the car registered.
Back in Bateman's Bay. The outskirts: concrete
sun-blasted tedium. Flies, flies everywhere.
INTERLUDE: flies should be proud of their efforts in Australia, because they single-handedly prevent it from being a natural paradise. I've since been on a golf course (can't be bothered to explain) and you see everyone else's back almost black with flies - and you know yours is the same, but shaking the little sods off only causes them to investigate your face as an alternative parking site. Satan reigns here, is the obvious conclusion to be made, and England is, indeed,
a green and pleasant land. END OF INERLUDE.
Chris rings his dad up and he re-registers us,
contrary to the instructions of the cop, who'd said to
do it some other way, which leaves me slightly
nervous, but off we go anyway. Ten minutes out of
town I put my foot down to go up a hill and the engine splutters and dies.
Luckily, motorways (highways) in Aus are generally
empty - and also, I may as well add, astonishingly
slow. You can be alone with one other car on a dead
straight two lane road in the middle of nowhere and
the other car will be sticking religiously to the 110k
speed limit. Astonishing. Obviously, the conclusion
I've drawn is that the Aussies drive like wusses, and
would presumably mince around the land in carts drawn
by flower-laden ponies if it was only practical. But
their highway emptiness meant I could pull over
without having to weave my way between traffic, which
was nice.
We begin to walk back to the nearest small town to
call a mechanic. An old guy in a pick up pulls over
to give us a life: his hoarse impenteratable voice is
inaudible to me, sat in the back, but Chris says he
was sure the guy was describing how he, too, had often
walked by the side of a road - during the war, at
gunpoint. Still, he stopped to pick us up, so fair
play to the guy, and thank god my tan wasn't a little
deeper.
We reach the small town. Ah, new world small towns.
Small, indistinguishable outposts of tedium miles and
miles and miles from the nearer, slightly larger
puddles of tedium. Shops and houses and bush and a
road going through it. The city was made for big
countries. Still, I bought a second hand copy of
Appolonius's 'Argonautica' in a 2nd book store, so I
wish the place well.
Unlike Bateman's Bay: may large uncannily-evolved
sharks emerge from its waters one night and trash its
one-pub fly-ridden purgatorial expanses.
We call out a mechanic. He comes and is fairly old.
That's all. He calls out another mechanic. This one
is young. He calls out a two truck. We wait. The
tow truck comes, and takes us to a garage, which sends
us to another garage. We're told we may get the car
by the end of the day. It's Friday. if we don't,
we'll be there till Monday at least. We trudge back
into Bateman's Bay. Flies accompany us, perhaps full
of sympathy for our plight, who knows. Bateman's bay
has malls - about three of them - all full of small
shops selling small plastic snow-shaker globes and inconsequential wooden objects. I weep into my newly acquired sunscreen, and tool round a bookshop. Hours pass. Hours.
It's 5 o'clock. I'm busily trying to estimate how
much dynamite I would need to blow the bridge and the
road that leads to the place, declare myself king,
spray the place with an insecticide, put the fish and
chip eaters on a diet and open more pubs. But then -
we have a car! We leave. The car stops. We wail,
and it starts again. We drive over some small
mountains, with me stoically accepting that certain
death awaits if the engine stops (I later learn
Chris's stoicism was caused by this not having occured
to him - and to be fair, while death was certain, it
was not necessarily OUR death). We drive through
Canberra, Australia's capital. There is, and I'm not
joking, NOTHING THERE. We drive on. Then it gets
dark, and after I've been driving for a while, the
road narrows to a two lane motorway and I discover,
upon going to dip my headlights, that I have no
low-beam headlights.
Massive, massive trucks growl at me and flash their
lights as I dazzle them with my full-glare rays. I
politely dim my lights and can suddenly see absolutely
nothing - and presumably, as far as the trucks are
concerned, I vanish from the road. I turn my lights
on again, and vacillate between two equally
undistinguished forms of exiting this vale of tears.
Luckily a lay-by comes along and we can pull over.
But there's police monitoring trucks on the other side
of the road! Quick, quick, look innocent, pretend
we're not examining out headlights. We creep back the
way we came for 100 metres, to a pub with a motel
attached. The motel is bug-infested, and uncannily
similar in appearance to the one in Psycho, but what
the hell, it doesn't have an engine.
Eventually we make it to Stonelea, which is a kind of assemblage of cabins and a couple of conference rooms, and a golf course, bar, restaurant, swimming pools, billiard rooms, tennis courts and so on. Chris's astonishingly generous parents inform me that the bar is open and free. I tell you, people, the place was so classy there was even a complimentary dressing gown folded and waiting for me on my bed (in my cabin facing onto the water). So unaccustomed to the concept of this was I, that I took it for a strangely waffle-textured towel until I came to pick it up.
Just back into Melbourne, where I'll be for this
week, going out each night, it seems, and meeting up
with various mates of Chris, and generally drinking.
Or drinking generally. Probably both. I hope you're
all peachy and would be tremendously glad to hear from
each and every one of you - but until out next
rendezvous in the splendid ether realm of the internet
I say
Boom out
~d
CHAPTER II
IN WHICH THE AUTHOR LOCATES HIS NARRATIVE; WITNESSES
AND PARTICIPATES IN VARIOUS ASPECTS OF AUSTRALIANA,
INCLUDING CRICKET IN SUNDRY LOCATIONS; MUSIC AT THE
FALLS, THROUGH THE BUSH; ITS DISMAL NATURE; THE
VAGARIES OF SHEEP; THE AUTHOR FINDS 18TH CENTURY LOVE
UPON THE FARM; THE GREAT FORCED MARCH OF EARLY '06; CONCLUSIONS, RELFECTIONS, THREATS
It is a truth universally acknowledged, dear reader,
that I cannot for the life of me remember where I
parted company with you. Was it in the fly ravaged
malls of Bateman’s “Black Hole” Bay? Or by the azure
shores of Sydney, where I composed rhyming couplets to
the distant sounds of race-hate violence floating
gently over the waters? Or in the sylvan pastures of
Stonelea, where gentle philosophers such as myself
mused on the vagaries of life over a free bar and
billiards, then mused over a free bar while playing
the life of billiards, then mused over the floor
beside the free bar while the billiards and life were
left to sort themselves out in the background?
Yep, it was there. I’ll get on with it, skipping
Christmas because I can’t be bothered. Oh, alright
then: I went for a swim on Christmas day and ate some
crayfish. There were some barbecues happening around
that time, too. Everything we were told in Neighbours
is Truth, and you can simply insert the plotline of
your choice here, including your humble narrator as
one of the protagonists (i.e. someone dies then comes
back to life, serves someone else coffee despite them
being angry with someone else, then everyone has a few
tinnies with their tucker while I rescue Bouncer the
dog from a small snake-infested pit in the Bungle
Bungles).
On Boxing Day I went to the MCG (Melbourne Cricket
Ground) to watch the first day of the 2nd Test,
Australia versus South Africa. The Boxing Day Test is traditionally a big event round here, and doubly so this year, because it was the first opening of the ground after a major revamp in which they’d torn half the stadium down to fit more bars in. Seventy thousand people and myself poured in to watch an incredibly slow few sessions of play, in which the Australians seemed determined to test the theoretical quantum limits of the game by accumulating a negative run rate. Finally, after ninety thousand minutes, Ponting got a century, was applauded, got out, and the Australian batting order collapsed like so many flimsy matchstick houses before the inevitable hubristic gale, post-Ashes trauma written on the face of every one of them. I left, cheered and contented, and feasted on Vietnamese food.
I then saw the Narnia film in a cinema located in a
big casino (was I unknowingly involved in some
gigantic betting game of which I was unaware? Was
some oil-fat Russian, diamonds on every finger,
watching the audience from a hidden viewing platform
high above the screen, laying bets as to whether I’d
yelp at the first sight of the Witch, or become
spontaneously converted to Christianity at the first
sight of Aslan? Gentle reader, I do not know). The
sight of snow and steam trains and tea and fauns and
wardrobes was enough to leave me feeling slightly and
strangely home sick (damn I miss those fauns), but I
put my grief behind me and bravely strode onto the
beach a day later, with only a solitary tear trickling
down my sun-tanned, spray-soaked cheek to mark the
passage of those manly and terrestrial emotions.
Did I frolic in the surf? Yes, dear reader, we can
safely call it frolicking. Though the sun here is a
vicious egomaniac bully, and must be foiled by the use
of cunning creams, hats, tinted glasses hooked over
the ears, shawls, tents, umbrellas, trees, the shadows
of passing fat people and various other stratagems.
Did I play beach cricket? Gentle reader, I did, and
bowled some kind of spin, though I don’t know enough
about cricket to tell you which kind of spin it was.
Possibly a lot of googlies (much like this email),
with the occasional Chinaman thrown in.
On the day before New Year’s Eve Chris and I
accompanied his younger brother Alex, and several of
his mates, in jumping the fence into the Falls
Festival – a musical event in which various …
musicians play to an assembled crowd of 20,000
sun-addled half-naked tent-sweated young Australians.
Breaking in involved getting dropped off a few hundred
metres from the site entrance and going on a seventy
minute “Bush Bash” – a crashing lurching stumble
through trackless forest. It was quite good fun, in a
humid and thorn-scrapy kind of way. The majority of
the party assumed “Predator” personas, one brave soul
imagined himself into that cinematic rainforest
classic “Aguirre: Wrath of God”, while I fell back on
that going-nuts-in-a-jungle staple “Apocalypse Now”,
and only broke from the conviction that I was there to terminate, with extreme prejudice, some dude called Kurtz, after I had leapt the measly barb wire fence into the festival site. I then became aware that I was actually there to witness various incomprehensibly rubbish Australian bands playing to adoring compatriots who loved their every note. Top of the bill were ‘Wolfmother’: imagine, if you dare, The Darkness with a worse name. And The Zutons had come all the way from Liverpool to be like the Beatles (but
rubbish) in front of a generally indifferent southern hemisphere crowd. They were all waiting for Wolfmother, you see. Still, it was a stunning setting and a fine experience, the sun was out and doing its solar business, and I did see a superb Blues guitarist called Jeff Lang, who had presumably sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads (somewhere near Bateman’s Bay, I’ll bet) before coming along to the gig.
New Year’s Eve itself was spent at a 2200 acre farm
near the 12 apostles (several big rocks in the sea),
down the coast from Melbourne. The night itself was
decent enough, but the next couple of days were
excellent. The farm is run by a mate of Chris’s
called Rich, who owns it with his dad, and after a New
Year’s day rounded off with a merry drinking game he
took Chris and I round with him aboard his Ute to do a
few farm jobs.
First off we tore round various massive fields to
check that all the sheep were still standing upright.
They get so heavy, you see, with their woolly coats,
that if they fall over they sometimes can’t get back
up by themselves, and need human assistance to regain
the use of their four dumb feet. Luckily, vertical
sheep integrity had been universally maintained across
the agri-zone. We then helped Rich move some cattle
from one field, over the road, into another. This
involved Rich tearing around in the Ute, reversing and careering and honking his horn, while Chris and I stumbled through the long grass waving our hats and shouting and trying not to think about snakes and being fairly useless. For those who are interested, sheep are massively stupid, cattle are quite intelligent (“sometimes too intelligent for their own good”, Rich remarked cryptically), and on the evidence of that day, I come in somewhere in-between the two species. Though I did see one bull try to mount a cow from the wrong end, so maybe in the cattle world the male of the species – an unusual natural anomaly, this – is a little less mentally deft than the female.
Then, dear Reader, I found love.
We had to move a couple of sheep, who are kept in a
pasture near the house as pets (and are all called
“Maaaaaz”, a little confusingly, after the sound they
make), to another pasture. This involved chasing them
down and grabbing them, then hauling them on to the
back of the pick-up truck and holding them while they
were driven them over the road to another grass-rich
pasture.
My mind was elsewhere as I entered through the gate:
I forget which subject was demanding the focus of my attentions. Perhaps I was considering the duel I had arranged to fight later that week with Patterson, on the Common outside the Club; perhaps I was anticipating the dance that Major Cloverly had arranged at Heathchester Hall, with the ladies of the district, for the following night.
My mind was elsewhere, therefore, as I passed
through the gate, and my eyes were abstracted and
disengaged. But I had the vague sense, as I entered
through those rural portals, of some unbidden emotion
entering my heart. Then, suddenly, the flies parted
across the crowded field, the music of the insects
momentarily paused, and there she was: Clarissa.
Her coat was white and curly, with a few gay posies
of straw scattered through her hair. Her eyes were
amber and disarmingly unintelligent. She trotted with
a provocative bouncing gait, looking behind her every
so often as though to check the world was still there.
Sweet Temptress!
Rich introduced us, hauling her down by her
hindquarters and lugging her over. I stuttered,
cleared my throat, bowed, and made my introductions,
wretchedly conscious of my blushing as I did so; she
nodded and looked around her, but was not, I thought, displeased. Rich suggested that I take the next turn with her; she did not demur from the suggestion. The insects launched into a sweeping waltz (or perhaps it was a volta) as he left us. I placed my arms around her, clasping tight, and she swooned into them, her every snowy limb going limp. ‘I adore you,’ I whispered into her ear, fiercely. She replied with a low moaning sound, heavy with passion and neural vacancy. ‘Let me take you away from here,’ I continued. ‘Away from all this strife and all this anguish; away from the pettifogging concerns of a world that cannot understand the breadth and moment of our passion – this passion that might set the very heavens alight!’ Her head slumped across my thigh.
‘Maaaaz,’ she replied.
We caught the next Ute departing from that place and
drove away, her body swooning in my arms (sheep, dear
reader, go as limp as rags if you haul them up and set
them on their hindquarters). But Fate was against us,
the demands of an unfeeling economy necessitating that
I take my beloved and lob her over a fence into
another pasture. She fell, landed, staggered, and
trotted away without looking back.
That was the last I saw of her.
But hey, that’s life, and I got over it. The next
day the four of us (Chris, Rich, myself and another
guy called Sippo – 80% of Aussie names end with ‘o’,
perhaps as a kindly aid to poets writing odes to
multiple people) decided, in a spirit of reckless
historical abandon, to recreate the Chinese Long March
along The Great Ocean Path – a new coastal walk that’s
due to open next week. About seven hours and thirty
kilometres later, with another 15 K still to go and a
couple of hours of daylight left, we called for
unhistorical motorised assistance, and our
fly-bothered and aching bodies were driven back to the
farm and dumped into a spa with a load of booze. The
walk had been good, though, and what views of the
coast we were granted were stunning: a long file of
cliffs with brutal seas raking landwards in massive
combs of foam. The large sections where we were away
from the sea perhaps might be constituted a design
fault (I like some Ocean in my Great Ocean Paths), but
even those were enjoyable. My suffering co-walkers
had even lugged, heroically, a cake and four cold
bottles of beer along with them to celebrate my
birthday, and so we consumed all that on a promontory overlooking the 20Ks we had just walked along. Or to put it another way, I forgive all you sorry sons of bitches who forgot it was my birthday, and completely rescind my decision made that day, in a storm of tears, to never speak to any of you again. And that includes you, mother.
Well, that seems like a cantankerous note to end
upon, but I can assure you I’m full of long-distance
love again now, so it’s all OK. In the next few days
I’ll be praying for a weather change and some more
beach action (the sun has taken my animus personally
and disappeared), and then attending the Lorne
pier-to-pub weekend, in which lots of people do some
swimming and then do some running, in order to feel
virtuous when crammed into the pub until the early
hours of the morning. And then, on the 11th, I’ll be
flying home.
And that, it seems, is that. For those few of you
who have made it this far be reassured that I’ll be
conducting tests on email readership and attentiveness
upon my return, and those semi-literate dullards who
dropped out before the end (LONG in literature means
GOOD, damn them!) will be suitably punished.
Until then, ta-ta, and fare thee well.
And I think that his (lengthy) travel diary is amusing, and wished to share it with you chaps. Sort of Bill Bryson-esque, but funnier and ruder.
S.
Position: Melbourne, Australia
Status: Sober
Disposition: Amiable, Bleary
Zen Meditation Topic: The turtle flits
WARNING: this email is inconsiderately lengthy.
Readers may want to delete large sections of it at
random before reading.
So, I'll rewind you, if I may, to Sydney. Ah,
Sydney. The most visually spectacular city I've ever
been to - or seen on tv or in print, for that matter.
I thought San Francisco was impressive - large city on
large bay with large bridge - but Sydney blew it out
the water. Faultless blue skies and cobalt blue seas
that seem to go on and on forever, via the coast or
the spreadeagled and insinuating harbour/river waters
with their numerous coves and inlets and tributaries.
I caught a ferry from Watsons Bay back into the city
(people commute by ferry), and then out again to a
beach suburb called Manley, and the views were
phenomenal. And I'm becoming aware, writing now, that
I can't really say much more about the views and the
dominance of the water - words can only do so much
and, frankly, my literary talents are low on battery
right now - you'll just have to take it from me, on
trust, that they make the city great, or go and look
up images on the net. Oh, I could mention the numerous
gorgeous topless women on the beaches as well, never
further from a car ride from where you live. But that
would be a cheap and superfluous move for you people
of arse-tight puritan morality, so I'll refrain.
Apart from its natural splendour, Sydney didn't
really leave much of an impression on me. I mean, I
wasn't impressed, I wasn't unimpressed, it was just a
load of buildings in various states of proximity to
the water. The night life did seem fairly primitive,
I suppose, though obviously what I saw was a small
selection - but perhaps I could fairly paint a
portrait of a preponderance of cheap (as in crap, not
characterful) bars and burger joints and shitty mass
drinking tourist style joints - and the Aussie
consensus also seems to be that Melbourne has the
better night life and bars. We shall see. I did go
to one bar that was full of Phunk (emphasis on the
Ph), and remarking on this to a girl, she looked
pleased and said she went there every Friday and
Saturday night. Which perhaps suggests there were no
other such places to go.
As for the race riots - or mass race-inspired
beatings, which would be more accurate - I saw nothing
of it, being in the richer parts of the city, but it
dominated the newspapers, radio and Sydney-sider
conversation. And I probably can't add anything that
you haven't already found out for yourselves: the
Australians I've met were as horrified as you or I
would be, but then, they were from the kind of circles
where you would expect horror as a response. One
weirder impression the trouble made on me was to
confirm my feelings that Sydney was a real city - as
in, slightly chaotic and disorganised and seedy and
unjust and dangerous and fractous, with several
genuine no-go areas - which is what I understand a
city to be. My limited contact with Melbourne (which
I'm seeing this week) has left an impression of a
trainer city, a city with all the real and pointy bits
left out: so pleasant and easy and rational as to be
slightly dull.
The sun was immense: dangerous. On the first day I
used factor 8 sunscreen, my British staple: our solar
grandaddy treated it as a form of marinade. I've
since gone up to the standard 30+. Having said that,
since leaving Sydney we had three days of intermittent
thunder storms, so the weather isn't consistently
scorching.
After Sydney, Chris and I picked up the car we were
going to use to take a road trip down the coast to
Stonelea ('Stonelea Country Estate' no less), the
place where his parents have their business. The car
was a 1978 Triumph - a name whose venemous irony even
now causes my hands to curl into rage-filled claws.
To begin: the indicators failed within 5 minutes of
getting in the car. In city traffic this is not
amenable to tranquil progress. After some frankly
bizarre driving from Chris we somehow fluked our way
into a garage which was able to administer to our
Henry Ford era dinosaur. I wish now we'd given the
mechanic permission to blowtorch into a small molten
puddle while I watched and laughed scornfully, perhaps
taking photos or sketching its demise while a string
quartet played soothingly in the background. But no:
we regained the wheel and drove off.
That day we busted down the coast, stopping to swim
on the aptly named seven mile beach, and generally
gawking at the sea. We camped for a night in a place
called Bateman's Bay (God rain down fire upon it), a
small town on - go on, have a guess - a bay, with a
wierd preponderence of fish and chip shops and only
one pub. But no matter, we were only passing through.
The next day we got up at half 6 and had breakfast
and left, with me at the wheel, Chris remarking, in
his relay of our route, that we'd be fine as long as
we didn't run into any police, because our
registration had expired which made it slightly dodgy.
Leaing town a police car pulls out behind me. I
clamp myself to the speed limit, smile winningly into
the rear view mirror, make imploring signs to heaven
with my free left hand, and generally look devout.
But we get pulled over anyway, fined, and despatched
back into town to get the car registered.
Back in Bateman's Bay. The outskirts: concrete
sun-blasted tedium. Flies, flies everywhere.
INTERLUDE: flies should be proud of their efforts in Australia, because they single-handedly prevent it from being a natural paradise. I've since been on a golf course (can't be bothered to explain) and you see everyone else's back almost black with flies - and you know yours is the same, but shaking the little sods off only causes them to investigate your face as an alternative parking site. Satan reigns here, is the obvious conclusion to be made, and England is, indeed,
a green and pleasant land. END OF INERLUDE.
Chris rings his dad up and he re-registers us,
contrary to the instructions of the cop, who'd said to
do it some other way, which leaves me slightly
nervous, but off we go anyway. Ten minutes out of
town I put my foot down to go up a hill and the engine splutters and dies.
Luckily, motorways (highways) in Aus are generally
empty - and also, I may as well add, astonishingly
slow. You can be alone with one other car on a dead
straight two lane road in the middle of nowhere and
the other car will be sticking religiously to the 110k
speed limit. Astonishing. Obviously, the conclusion
I've drawn is that the Aussies drive like wusses, and
would presumably mince around the land in carts drawn
by flower-laden ponies if it was only practical. But
their highway emptiness meant I could pull over
without having to weave my way between traffic, which
was nice.
We begin to walk back to the nearest small town to
call a mechanic. An old guy in a pick up pulls over
to give us a life: his hoarse impenteratable voice is
inaudible to me, sat in the back, but Chris says he
was sure the guy was describing how he, too, had often
walked by the side of a road - during the war, at
gunpoint. Still, he stopped to pick us up, so fair
play to the guy, and thank god my tan wasn't a little
deeper.
We reach the small town. Ah, new world small towns.
Small, indistinguishable outposts of tedium miles and
miles and miles from the nearer, slightly larger
puddles of tedium. Shops and houses and bush and a
road going through it. The city was made for big
countries. Still, I bought a second hand copy of
Appolonius's 'Argonautica' in a 2nd book store, so I
wish the place well.
Unlike Bateman's Bay: may large uncannily-evolved
sharks emerge from its waters one night and trash its
one-pub fly-ridden purgatorial expanses.
We call out a mechanic. He comes and is fairly old.
That's all. He calls out another mechanic. This one
is young. He calls out a two truck. We wait. The
tow truck comes, and takes us to a garage, which sends
us to another garage. We're told we may get the car
by the end of the day. It's Friday. if we don't,
we'll be there till Monday at least. We trudge back
into Bateman's Bay. Flies accompany us, perhaps full
of sympathy for our plight, who knows. Bateman's bay
has malls - about three of them - all full of small
shops selling small plastic snow-shaker globes and inconsequential wooden objects. I weep into my newly acquired sunscreen, and tool round a bookshop. Hours pass. Hours.
It's 5 o'clock. I'm busily trying to estimate how
much dynamite I would need to blow the bridge and the
road that leads to the place, declare myself king,
spray the place with an insecticide, put the fish and
chip eaters on a diet and open more pubs. But then -
we have a car! We leave. The car stops. We wail,
and it starts again. We drive over some small
mountains, with me stoically accepting that certain
death awaits if the engine stops (I later learn
Chris's stoicism was caused by this not having occured
to him - and to be fair, while death was certain, it
was not necessarily OUR death). We drive through
Canberra, Australia's capital. There is, and I'm not
joking, NOTHING THERE. We drive on. Then it gets
dark, and after I've been driving for a while, the
road narrows to a two lane motorway and I discover,
upon going to dip my headlights, that I have no
low-beam headlights.
Massive, massive trucks growl at me and flash their
lights as I dazzle them with my full-glare rays. I
politely dim my lights and can suddenly see absolutely
nothing - and presumably, as far as the trucks are
concerned, I vanish from the road. I turn my lights
on again, and vacillate between two equally
undistinguished forms of exiting this vale of tears.
Luckily a lay-by comes along and we can pull over.
But there's police monitoring trucks on the other side
of the road! Quick, quick, look innocent, pretend
we're not examining out headlights. We creep back the
way we came for 100 metres, to a pub with a motel
attached. The motel is bug-infested, and uncannily
similar in appearance to the one in Psycho, but what
the hell, it doesn't have an engine.
Eventually we make it to Stonelea, which is a kind of assemblage of cabins and a couple of conference rooms, and a golf course, bar, restaurant, swimming pools, billiard rooms, tennis courts and so on. Chris's astonishingly generous parents inform me that the bar is open and free. I tell you, people, the place was so classy there was even a complimentary dressing gown folded and waiting for me on my bed (in my cabin facing onto the water). So unaccustomed to the concept of this was I, that I took it for a strangely waffle-textured towel until I came to pick it up.
Just back into Melbourne, where I'll be for this
week, going out each night, it seems, and meeting up
with various mates of Chris, and generally drinking.
Or drinking generally. Probably both. I hope you're
all peachy and would be tremendously glad to hear from
each and every one of you - but until out next
rendezvous in the splendid ether realm of the internet
I say
Boom out
~d
CHAPTER II
IN WHICH THE AUTHOR LOCATES HIS NARRATIVE; WITNESSES
AND PARTICIPATES IN VARIOUS ASPECTS OF AUSTRALIANA,
INCLUDING CRICKET IN SUNDRY LOCATIONS; MUSIC AT THE
FALLS, THROUGH THE BUSH; ITS DISMAL NATURE; THE
VAGARIES OF SHEEP; THE AUTHOR FINDS 18TH CENTURY LOVE
UPON THE FARM; THE GREAT FORCED MARCH OF EARLY '06; CONCLUSIONS, RELFECTIONS, THREATS
It is a truth universally acknowledged, dear reader,
that I cannot for the life of me remember where I
parted company with you. Was it in the fly ravaged
malls of Bateman’s “Black Hole” Bay? Or by the azure
shores of Sydney, where I composed rhyming couplets to
the distant sounds of race-hate violence floating
gently over the waters? Or in the sylvan pastures of
Stonelea, where gentle philosophers such as myself
mused on the vagaries of life over a free bar and
billiards, then mused over a free bar while playing
the life of billiards, then mused over the floor
beside the free bar while the billiards and life were
left to sort themselves out in the background?
Yep, it was there. I’ll get on with it, skipping
Christmas because I can’t be bothered. Oh, alright
then: I went for a swim on Christmas day and ate some
crayfish. There were some barbecues happening around
that time, too. Everything we were told in Neighbours
is Truth, and you can simply insert the plotline of
your choice here, including your humble narrator as
one of the protagonists (i.e. someone dies then comes
back to life, serves someone else coffee despite them
being angry with someone else, then everyone has a few
tinnies with their tucker while I rescue Bouncer the
dog from a small snake-infested pit in the Bungle
Bungles).
On Boxing Day I went to the MCG (Melbourne Cricket
Ground) to watch the first day of the 2nd Test,
Australia versus South Africa. The Boxing Day Test is traditionally a big event round here, and doubly so this year, because it was the first opening of the ground after a major revamp in which they’d torn half the stadium down to fit more bars in. Seventy thousand people and myself poured in to watch an incredibly slow few sessions of play, in which the Australians seemed determined to test the theoretical quantum limits of the game by accumulating a negative run rate. Finally, after ninety thousand minutes, Ponting got a century, was applauded, got out, and the Australian batting order collapsed like so many flimsy matchstick houses before the inevitable hubristic gale, post-Ashes trauma written on the face of every one of them. I left, cheered and contented, and feasted on Vietnamese food.
I then saw the Narnia film in a cinema located in a
big casino (was I unknowingly involved in some
gigantic betting game of which I was unaware? Was
some oil-fat Russian, diamonds on every finger,
watching the audience from a hidden viewing platform
high above the screen, laying bets as to whether I’d
yelp at the first sight of the Witch, or become
spontaneously converted to Christianity at the first
sight of Aslan? Gentle reader, I do not know). The
sight of snow and steam trains and tea and fauns and
wardrobes was enough to leave me feeling slightly and
strangely home sick (damn I miss those fauns), but I
put my grief behind me and bravely strode onto the
beach a day later, with only a solitary tear trickling
down my sun-tanned, spray-soaked cheek to mark the
passage of those manly and terrestrial emotions.
Did I frolic in the surf? Yes, dear reader, we can
safely call it frolicking. Though the sun here is a
vicious egomaniac bully, and must be foiled by the use
of cunning creams, hats, tinted glasses hooked over
the ears, shawls, tents, umbrellas, trees, the shadows
of passing fat people and various other stratagems.
Did I play beach cricket? Gentle reader, I did, and
bowled some kind of spin, though I don’t know enough
about cricket to tell you which kind of spin it was.
Possibly a lot of googlies (much like this email),
with the occasional Chinaman thrown in.
On the day before New Year’s Eve Chris and I
accompanied his younger brother Alex, and several of
his mates, in jumping the fence into the Falls
Festival – a musical event in which various …
musicians play to an assembled crowd of 20,000
sun-addled half-naked tent-sweated young Australians.
Breaking in involved getting dropped off a few hundred
metres from the site entrance and going on a seventy
minute “Bush Bash” – a crashing lurching stumble
through trackless forest. It was quite good fun, in a
humid and thorn-scrapy kind of way. The majority of
the party assumed “Predator” personas, one brave soul
imagined himself into that cinematic rainforest
classic “Aguirre: Wrath of God”, while I fell back on
that going-nuts-in-a-jungle staple “Apocalypse Now”,
and only broke from the conviction that I was there to terminate, with extreme prejudice, some dude called Kurtz, after I had leapt the measly barb wire fence into the festival site. I then became aware that I was actually there to witness various incomprehensibly rubbish Australian bands playing to adoring compatriots who loved their every note. Top of the bill were ‘Wolfmother’: imagine, if you dare, The Darkness with a worse name. And The Zutons had come all the way from Liverpool to be like the Beatles (but
rubbish) in front of a generally indifferent southern hemisphere crowd. They were all waiting for Wolfmother, you see. Still, it was a stunning setting and a fine experience, the sun was out and doing its solar business, and I did see a superb Blues guitarist called Jeff Lang, who had presumably sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads (somewhere near Bateman’s Bay, I’ll bet) before coming along to the gig.
New Year’s Eve itself was spent at a 2200 acre farm
near the 12 apostles (several big rocks in the sea),
down the coast from Melbourne. The night itself was
decent enough, but the next couple of days were
excellent. The farm is run by a mate of Chris’s
called Rich, who owns it with his dad, and after a New
Year’s day rounded off with a merry drinking game he
took Chris and I round with him aboard his Ute to do a
few farm jobs.
First off we tore round various massive fields to
check that all the sheep were still standing upright.
They get so heavy, you see, with their woolly coats,
that if they fall over they sometimes can’t get back
up by themselves, and need human assistance to regain
the use of their four dumb feet. Luckily, vertical
sheep integrity had been universally maintained across
the agri-zone. We then helped Rich move some cattle
from one field, over the road, into another. This
involved Rich tearing around in the Ute, reversing and careering and honking his horn, while Chris and I stumbled through the long grass waving our hats and shouting and trying not to think about snakes and being fairly useless. For those who are interested, sheep are massively stupid, cattle are quite intelligent (“sometimes too intelligent for their own good”, Rich remarked cryptically), and on the evidence of that day, I come in somewhere in-between the two species. Though I did see one bull try to mount a cow from the wrong end, so maybe in the cattle world the male of the species – an unusual natural anomaly, this – is a little less mentally deft than the female.
Then, dear Reader, I found love.
We had to move a couple of sheep, who are kept in a
pasture near the house as pets (and are all called
“Maaaaaz”, a little confusingly, after the sound they
make), to another pasture. This involved chasing them
down and grabbing them, then hauling them on to the
back of the pick-up truck and holding them while they
were driven them over the road to another grass-rich
pasture.
My mind was elsewhere as I entered through the gate:
I forget which subject was demanding the focus of my attentions. Perhaps I was considering the duel I had arranged to fight later that week with Patterson, on the Common outside the Club; perhaps I was anticipating the dance that Major Cloverly had arranged at Heathchester Hall, with the ladies of the district, for the following night.
My mind was elsewhere, therefore, as I passed
through the gate, and my eyes were abstracted and
disengaged. But I had the vague sense, as I entered
through those rural portals, of some unbidden emotion
entering my heart. Then, suddenly, the flies parted
across the crowded field, the music of the insects
momentarily paused, and there she was: Clarissa.
Her coat was white and curly, with a few gay posies
of straw scattered through her hair. Her eyes were
amber and disarmingly unintelligent. She trotted with
a provocative bouncing gait, looking behind her every
so often as though to check the world was still there.
Sweet Temptress!
Rich introduced us, hauling her down by her
hindquarters and lugging her over. I stuttered,
cleared my throat, bowed, and made my introductions,
wretchedly conscious of my blushing as I did so; she
nodded and looked around her, but was not, I thought, displeased. Rich suggested that I take the next turn with her; she did not demur from the suggestion. The insects launched into a sweeping waltz (or perhaps it was a volta) as he left us. I placed my arms around her, clasping tight, and she swooned into them, her every snowy limb going limp. ‘I adore you,’ I whispered into her ear, fiercely. She replied with a low moaning sound, heavy with passion and neural vacancy. ‘Let me take you away from here,’ I continued. ‘Away from all this strife and all this anguish; away from the pettifogging concerns of a world that cannot understand the breadth and moment of our passion – this passion that might set the very heavens alight!’ Her head slumped across my thigh.
‘Maaaaz,’ she replied.
We caught the next Ute departing from that place and
drove away, her body swooning in my arms (sheep, dear
reader, go as limp as rags if you haul them up and set
them on their hindquarters). But Fate was against us,
the demands of an unfeeling economy necessitating that
I take my beloved and lob her over a fence into
another pasture. She fell, landed, staggered, and
trotted away without looking back.
That was the last I saw of her.
But hey, that’s life, and I got over it. The next
day the four of us (Chris, Rich, myself and another
guy called Sippo – 80% of Aussie names end with ‘o’,
perhaps as a kindly aid to poets writing odes to
multiple people) decided, in a spirit of reckless
historical abandon, to recreate the Chinese Long March
along The Great Ocean Path – a new coastal walk that’s
due to open next week. About seven hours and thirty
kilometres later, with another 15 K still to go and a
couple of hours of daylight left, we called for
unhistorical motorised assistance, and our
fly-bothered and aching bodies were driven back to the
farm and dumped into a spa with a load of booze. The
walk had been good, though, and what views of the
coast we were granted were stunning: a long file of
cliffs with brutal seas raking landwards in massive
combs of foam. The large sections where we were away
from the sea perhaps might be constituted a design
fault (I like some Ocean in my Great Ocean Paths), but
even those were enjoyable. My suffering co-walkers
had even lugged, heroically, a cake and four cold
bottles of beer along with them to celebrate my
birthday, and so we consumed all that on a promontory overlooking the 20Ks we had just walked along. Or to put it another way, I forgive all you sorry sons of bitches who forgot it was my birthday, and completely rescind my decision made that day, in a storm of tears, to never speak to any of you again. And that includes you, mother.
Well, that seems like a cantankerous note to end
upon, but I can assure you I’m full of long-distance
love again now, so it’s all OK. In the next few days
I’ll be praying for a weather change and some more
beach action (the sun has taken my animus personally
and disappeared), and then attending the Lorne
pier-to-pub weekend, in which lots of people do some
swimming and then do some running, in order to feel
virtuous when crammed into the pub until the early
hours of the morning. And then, on the 11th, I’ll be
flying home.
And that, it seems, is that. For those few of you
who have made it this far be reassured that I’ll be
conducting tests on email readership and attentiveness
upon my return, and those semi-literate dullards who
dropped out before the end (LONG in literature means
GOOD, damn them!) will be suitably punished.
Until then, ta-ta, and fare thee well.
Dave said:
Stonelea, where gentle philosophers such as myself
mused on the vagaries of life over a free bar and
billiards, then mused over a free bar while playing
the life of billiards, then mused over the floor
beside the free bar while the billiards and life were
left to sort themselves out in the background?
I really like these things.
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