Wrong Way Round

by Lorna Hendry

  We told the camper trailer company about our car and gave them a list of the extra features we wanted: a larger cover so we could heap all our bedding on top of the queen-size mattress when we packed it up and still get the cover over everything; a two-burner stove so we could cook pasta and sauce at the same time; an awning with side walls to protect the kitchen area from wind; an 80-litre water tank in case we got stranded in the desert; a tool box and a stone guard, just because the salesman said we needed one; a Treg hitch instead of a tow ball so we could throw the trailer around on the rough dirt roads we would be driving on; and electric brakes because the whole thing was going to be really, really heavy.

  People starting saying, ‘Are you really going?’

  We painted the worst walls in the house, ripped up the stained carpet, polished the floorboards and threw out an entire skip full of junk from the back of the kitchen cupboards. We enrolled the kids with Distance Education Victoria and then had to find space for the two big boxes of coursework they gave us.

  After pestering the very patient men at our local camping shop for advice, we went and looked at cheaper products at the bigger chain stores, then went back and bought their high-quality, well-chosen stock instead. When they found out that we were planning to go all the way around the country, they recommended we buy their national parks guidebook. I hesitated, thinking of the five books I already had, and the man sighed and said, ‘I’m just going to give it to you’. He even marked some good spots in it when he realised we didn’t know anything at all about where we were going.

  Our route was planned in more detail, this time using a blue highlighter on the map. I handed in my notice at work.

  Finally, we did a budget. It was a bit late, but we were scared if we did it too early we’d realise we couldn’t afford to go.

  We realised we couldn’t afford to go, so we extended our mortgage.

  Our camper trailer was ready just before Christmas and we invited our friends to watch us put it up in the playground of the local school. We loved it, sometimes going outside just to stand and look at it. We couldn’t wait to leave.

  But here I was, eight weeks later, looking at an infestation of ants in the kitchen box. I swore and clanged and bashed things around as I emptied the box, item by item, and brushed the ants off. The containers we had bought for the dried food had done their job and the ants hadn’t been able to get into any of them.

  I killed them anyway, sprayed the outside of the box with heavy-duty surface repellent, repacked all the food, and our first day of freedom finally got underway.

  Chapter Two

  The caravan park was full of retirees. We had been warned that we would meet lots of grey nomads, but I didn’t have a problem with that. People who travelled were now my kind of people, I reasoned, regardless of their age. We impressed some of them by telling them we were on a year-long trip – until they asked how long we had been away and we said this was our second day. They smiled and went back to talking about fishing.

  I didn’t know that James was keen on fishing. In the eighteen years we had spent together, he had been fishing exactly once. Yet here he was, chatting away in the Port Campbell caravan park about bait and lures and rigs and sinkers and floats with the same enthusiasm he had previously saved for the Collingwood Football Club.

  ‘Eric, the guy in the tent next to us, says that salmon are running at Gibson Steps, next to the Twelve Apostles.’ I didn’t even know what that meant. ‘I thought I’d go and give it a try tonight, when you and the kids are in bed.’

  I probably should have taken more notice. At the time, I thought it just a bit of a stage he was going through, brought on by the euphoria of not having to go to work. A new passion that he would chuck in a few weeks, like the unicycling craze of 1990. Or the time he was convinced that his destiny was to be a professional golfer and convinced me that he had to take six months off work to give it a go. He said he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life wondering if he could have made it as a golf pro. For six months, he played golf a couple of times a week and spent the rest of his time lying around imagining what it might be like to be a highly paid international sporting star. For six months, I wondered what the hell he was doing all day and got grumpy if the bathroom was dirty and the fridge was empty. Eventually he agreed that it probably wasn’t going to happen and went back to his old job.

  It didn’t occur to me that, like supporting Collingwood and playing golf, fishing was yet another pastime that involved spending a lot of time out of the house with other men and drinking beer.

  He bought a set of heavy-duty sinkers for fishing in the surf. Later that night he headed off with his new gear, his bought-for-the-trip tackle bag, an esky filled with ice, beer and bait, and a camp chair.

  At Gibson Steps he lugged everything down 300 steps to the base of the cliffs. After carefully setting up his chair and the esky, he strode to the water and made his first cast. The sinkers flew out in a long graceful arc and the carefully baited hooks followed. As the whole lot splashed into the surf, he realised that he only had 15 metres of line on his reel. His brand-new gear disappeared into the water, trailing nothing but empty line.

  Half an hour later, after respooling his reel and rigging up a new line with sinkers and hooks, he was ready to start again. In the meantime, two fishermen and their girlfriends had arrived and set up further along the beach. Twenty minutes later it started to get dark and he thought perhaps he should have brought a torch.

  An hour passed. The surf brought in phosphorescence that glowed in the sand for a few seconds after each wave and the silhouettes of the Apostles loomed out of the ocean. This time last week he was probably sitting inside watching television. Further up the beach, the men caught something. He watched by their torchlight as they pulled in something large. He felt a strong jerk on his line. It was a struggle to reel his line in but, eventually, the rod bending and straining, his catch rolled out of the surf.

  He wasn’t completely sure what it was, so he picked it up by the tail and staggered over to the other fishermen to borrow their light. It was a gummy shark, they said. And he had caught it without the aid of bait. There was one hook in its tail fin, another in its dorsal fin and a metre of line wrapped around its body. Their girlfriends told him how to decapitate it and bleed it out to make sure the flesh was free of blood. He did that, then packed his things and headed back up the 300 steps to the car park. He had less beer to carry now, but was weighed down with a shark that was too big to go in the esky.

  I woke up to hear him hissing at me. ‘Lorns! Come and look at what I caught!’

  I climbed down from the bed and out of the tent. When I saw him holding up the bleeding torso of a huge shark, I was staggered. ‘What are you going to do with it?’

  ‘I’m not sure’, he said, a bit hysterically.

  Just then Oscar crawled out of the tent, not properly awake. When he saw the headless shark he gasped and took a wide berth around us on his way to the toilets.

  I followed James to the designated fish-cleaning area behind the toilet block and watched as he turned what was left of the shark into two kilos of prime fresh flake fillets and ten kilos of stinking mushy mess that we dumped in the fish bin.

  The next day, after spending the morning picking strawberries at a berry farm, we found the town of Timboon and a small row of shops. One sold cheap runners, and the other sold hot chips. Oscar had already lost his shoes, so we bought him another pair, then cooked the flake on the barbecue in the local park and got a bag of chips to go with it. It was delicious and it was free and we loved every bite.

  At the seaside town of Port Fairy, the dream home of bookish retirees, summer and the school holidays were over but the caravan park was full. I couldn’t work out why, until I saw the big striped tents going up in the paddock alongside the park.

  ‘Is there a circus coming to town?’ I asked the lady in the office.

  ‘There’s a music festival here next weekend’, she explaine
d, speaking slowly and carefully, as if to a complete idiot. Which was exactly how I felt. The Port Fairy Folk Festival is an institution. Every year, on the Labour Day long weekend in March, over 400 musicians perform to more than 10,000 people – many of whom were already setting up their campsite.

  ‘You were lucky to get a site at all. I could only fit you in because you wanted two nights.’

  This time we set up the tent in slightly over half an hour. Just as we finished, an elderly couple came over to have a good look at our camper trailer. They were thinking of getting one themselves and, unlike us, had been doing their research. James showed them around and they were very impressed. We felt quite proud of ourselves until an old man shuffled out of his caravan to let us know that we had attached the springs to our tent ropes upside down.

  That evening we walked across the causeway to Griffiths Island, a small rocky outcrop of low scrub and dark rocks that was separated from the mainland by the Moyne River and pounded on the other side by cold Southern Ocean waves. We were going to watch the mutton birds arrive home at dusk after a hard day of fishing for their chicks. Mutton birds, or short-tailed shearwaters, are designed for flight. They travel extraordinary distances – their annual migration around the Pacific Ocean is a round trip of 30,000 kilometres. But they aren’t designed to land. When they come in, they look and sound like someone is throwing winged legs of lamb out of the sky. They crash violently into the scrub and their momentum hurls them forward into the bushes while they flap their wings madly trying to stop.

  I laughed as the boys ducked and squealed while the birds fell to earth around them. I thought the birds knew what they were doing, that – despite the awkward landing – they must have a highly sophisticated navigational system that was more than capable of avoiding people standing on a raised boardwalk. Later a park ranger told me about a young girl who had been knocked to the ground by a bird that crashed into the side of her head.

  ‘It’s really – watch out! – quite common.’

  The next day, we knew we had to start doing some schooling, so after breakfast we dragged the boxes of coursework out of the back of the trailer. We had a year’s supply of handbooks and resource materials that were guaranteed to give our boys a structured curriculum. We were confident that they would come back from our year of travelling well-rounded and bursting with life experience, with all of their Grade 1 and Grade 3 skills under their belts too.

  I was secretly looking forward to it. I imagined the world opening up for them as their natural curiosity and enthusiasm expanded, fed by the amazing experiences we were going to give them. The freedom of life on the road would let the four of us approach their education as another adventure. James and I would adapt the curriculum material to the places we were travelling through. Australian explorers? We would live it as we crossed the Nullarbor in the footsteps of Edward John Eyre and followed the route of the Old Telegraph Track up Cape York. Food production? We would drive through diverse farming land all over the country, past some of the largest cattle stations in the world and see coastal fishing ports that processed tonnes of seafood each day. Ethics of nuclear testing? Maralinga – here we come!

  For each of them, we had a large A4 booklet that held two weeks’ work. Every fortnight had a theme: ‘My Family’, ‘Animals’, ‘The Human Body’. The booklets were divided into ten days. Every day had exercises devoted to handwriting, reading, mathematics and general activities around the theme. There were also art and craft projects and a physical education section. We had maths tool books with cardboard clocks, hexagonal spinners to use as dice, and paper versions of blocks, rods and cubes.

  A smaller booklet was just for us: the parent-teacher. Dylan’s Grade 1 teacher’s guide had scripts for each day that told us exactly what to say and when to say it. Oscar’s Grade 3 teacher’s guide was less prescriptive but just as detailed. There was also a handbook on the official Victorian method of handwriting that showed exactly how letters should be formed and described correct pencil grip and posture.

  As instructed, we had filled pencil cases with 2B pencils, sharpeners, erasers, coloured pencils, textas, crayons, glue sticks, pens, scissors, paper clips, a stapler and staples. Both boys had a clipboard to hold their work. We had been given special paper lined in dotted thirds to help the boys form their letters at the right size. There was a CD with audio tracks for each lesson. We had access to library books that could be posted out to us. There were even classes held live over the internet and the boys could be in email contact with their teachers at any time.

  Each school day, we were to work through one day’s work in the booklet. At the end of the fortnight, we would send back the booklets in prepaid, addressed envelopes. The teachers would check and assess them, then return them to us with feedback. We had arranged for Astrid, a friend in Melbourne, to get our mail and post it to us in batches. We were planning to ring her every week and let her know where we were going to be.

  It was all so well planned that it came as a terrible shock when it fell apart completely on the first attempt.

  It was a very windy day, so everything was flapping about and we couldn’t keep our places in the handbooks. We moved the table and chairs into the tent, creating a small and claustrophobic space for four people to work in.

  We had already decided that we should both pitch in with the teaching, as neither of us could work out how to manage both boys and all the books at the same time. I took Dylan and James worked with Oscar.

  Despite having just one booklet each – the boys with their workbooks and us with our instruction manual – within minutes there was complete chaos inside the tent. There was paper everywhere. Our legs were too long, the chairs were uncomfortable and the table was too small.

  I carefully read the prepared script from Day One, Week One of Dylan’s handbook. ‘Trace the letters without lifting your pencil from the page. Then copy the letters on the lines below.’

  He gave me a blank look. ‘I don’t get it.’

  I read it again. He held his pencil as if it was a dagger, twisted his body around on the bench until he was sitting at right angles to his page, and jabbed at the paper.

  ‘Not like that, honey. Sit up straight.’

  ‘I CAN’T. There’s no ROOM.’

  ‘Yes there is, darling. You just have to sit on the seat properly.’

  ‘Well, I’m TRYING!’

  I pushed his legs under the table and straightened him up. Then I took his hand in mine and tried to sit the pencil in the approved grip. ‘Like this.’

  ‘That feels funny. I can’t write that way.’ He did the absolute worst ‘s’ he could manage. ‘Why can’t I just hold it the way I like to?’

  ‘Because you can’t. Look, the book says so.’ I had a surge of dismay that it had only taken me three minutes to resort to the authority of the handbook.

  ‘You’re being mean!’ he wailed. His eyes were shiny with tears and I wondered how his Prep teacher had ever taught him to read.

  On the other side of the table, James was discovering that Oscar had a concentration span of about fourteen seconds. Every time James took his complete attention off him, Oscar would revert to doodling Pokémon figures at the edges of his workbook. Unlike Dylan, he wasn’t belligerent about doing the work, he was just quietly distracted. When James prodded him to get back to it, he smiled happily at him, did one more sum and then went back to what really interested him.

  ‘Oscar! Stop drawing bloody Pokémon. Just do the maths!’

  ‘James!’ I said. ‘Don’t be nasty. You need to have some patience.’

  He sank his head into his hands. ‘I can’t. He’s driving me mad.’

  ‘I’ll do him then. You take Dylan.’

  James looked over at Dylan, who was sniffing and shaking as he laboriously traced a row of ‘s’ letters that were almost as twisted on the page as he was on his seat.

  ‘No, you do him. You’re better at it than me.’

  An hour and a half later we
were all exhausted. My head pounded as I looked around the tent and wondered how my beautifully organised box of work had turned into this explosion of paper. We had barely got through the maths and handwriting section of the first day’s work.

  ‘It’s okay’, I assured James. ‘It was our first day. I’m not too worried about the reading we missed. They’re both reading in the car. I’d rather they read for pleasure than turn it into a task anyway. And we don’t need to do sport and art at the moment.’

  I had just dismissed half of the curriculum.

  He hauled himself up and looked around at the disaster zone. ‘Can you deal with this? You’ve got a system. You know where everything goes. I’ll go and kick the footy with them.’

  After lunch all the evidence of our failure was stuffed back into the trailer and I took the boys back to Griffiths Island for a walk to the lighthouse. It was still windy, but the sky was bright blue and the sandy track was lined with yellow wildflowers. The kids ambled ahead of me, side by side, deep in conversation. A wallaby bounced across the track ahead of us. I called out, and they looked back at me as I jogged to catch up with them.

  ‘Did you see the wallaby?’

  This was what it was really all about. Not sums or perfectly formed letters, but nature, wildlife, being out in the fresh air and experiencing life.

  ‘No’, said Oscar and they returned to their conversation.

  ‘Charizard is the third evolvement of Charmander. Not Charmeleon. That’s only the second. It doesn’t have the same powers.’

  Chapter Three

  When we arrived at the Princess Margaret Rose Caves campground in the Lower Glenelg National Park on the Victoria–South Australia border, the managers told us we were the only people there. I didn’t believe them – we had just been kicked out of Port Fairy because there was a long weekend coming. But there really was no sign of anyone else around at all. It was very much just us, in the bush, all alone.