–We’ll see.
–I like Currumbin.
–I know you do. We’ll see.
It’s still dark when the family get up in the bare house. The car, the travelling home, waits outside. It’s very early morning, May 1st, 1976, although by the time the final preparations have been made it’s fifteen minutes past midday when they leave Brisbane. The boy’s in the back with his two siblings although there’s another one on the way, in their mum’s belly, new human growing, unknown at that point to everyone.
NOW
It’s a Britz van, distinguishable by the company logo of the colourful lizard stencilled on the side door. And the big ‘BRITZ’ above the side window. We pick it up at the depot outside the city, by the airport, on 11th June 2007. It’s got a fridge and a stove and a microwave and a sink and a table and two beds and some overhead storage which can be turned into another sleeping space for a child or a very small adult. It’s a bank holiday in Oz, not that that makes any difference to anything, except the machine in the office spits out my credit card.
–Aw Jeez, why? There’s loads of money on that.
–You’ll have to ring their central office.
–Now? Will they be open? It’s a bank holiday.
The guy leads me into an office and shows me the phone. I call the number on the card and press for several options several times and I’m just about to boil over when a human voice asks me if they can help. I explain the problem. Seems the card was refused because it’s a large amount of money to put on it in one go but they’ll clear it and in about ten minutes I can go ahead and make the transaction. I go back to the reception area, explain the situation.
–Righto. We’ll give it another go in a few minutes. In the meantime, what type of insurance are you needing?
–What types are there?
And he lists many. I switch off. I’m bored to tears and restless because I want to be off, on the journey, away from bloody Brisbane. Want the Gold Coast – that Southend in the sun – to be miles behind me. The trip ahead is huge and I want to get it under way but the guy’s going on about various types of cover and telling us that we need bedding and a whole load of other things and I’m feeling slightly sick at the thought of what this is going to cost. Like buying a house, this; all these hidden extras. You need this and this and this and everything costs. Nothing comes free, or even cheap. Even the information pack, which, for some reason, is a compulsory purchase, costs extra. And you return the bedding at the other end of your journey but what you pay for it isn’t a deposit, it’s rent, non-refundable. You get bugger all back.
–And you’re going all the way to Perth?
–Yeh.
–That’s a bladdy long way, boys.
If he thinks he can tempt me with an ‘I Crossed the Nullarbor’ T-shirt for thirty friggin’ dollars he’s sorely mistaken. I pay, wince, go outside to find a bench to smoke on whilst the van is tinkered and dithered with. They’re making an inventory of scratches and nicks and other tiny damages, I think, something like that. Uninteresting, anyway. Much more diverting is the ‘Safe Driving Information for Australian Roads’ leaflet, which is a tad terrifying; it recommends the ‘Outback Safety Kit’, at one hundred dollars rental, again non-refundable. A satellite phone at seventeen bucks a day. Truly terrifying. The stuff about animals and dust-storms and the like is quite exciting; it’s the expense that scares me. And should a ’roo dart out of the bush, whack into the side of the van, wreck the door? The insurance doesn’t cover that. You’d have to pay for a new door, a new panel, maybe even an entire new body for the van. So what’s the point of this insurance? Why doesn’t it cover the most obvious and, I’m sure, frequent form of damage?
Nothing for nothing in Oz. But fuck it anyway; I’m off. Across the vast red continent.
–She’s all yours, boys. Enjoy yaselves and be safe.
Tony and I get in. Little house on wheels. Tony circles the car-park a few times to get the feel of the vehicle and then we’re off.
–D’you know how many miles are ahead of us?
Shudder to think. That desert. Watched Wolf Creek a few months ago and now wish I hadn’t. Maybe we should try and get hold of a gun or something.
It’s a bright blue day. First stop is Currumbin. I remember lorikeets.
THEN
The boy stands in a storm of feathers, a typhoon of noise and thrashing colour, red and green and yellow and blue so bright, eye-rippingly bright, and the frantic cacophony the birds make in their flocks thousands-strong cyclones around him, perched on his head they are and on his shoulders and arms and on the plate of fruit he holds outstretched getting heavier with the massed weight of the birds. There is nothing he knows here, no Liverpool no Brisbane not even any Australia, no long jaunt no family not even any him, lost he is in this mad hurricane of feathers and beaks and chattering. Only pulsing in the many rapidly flapping wings like light is his contentment in which everything, origin and present and future, falls away except for the exactitude and clarity of his need to be nowhere else but here.
NOW
Ey, look; it was founded by a feller called Griffiths. Wonder if he was any relation.
Alex Griffiths, the noticeboard tells us, ‘in 1947… began feeding the local lorikeets to protect his colourful gardens. Before long, visitors to Currumbin found out about the birds flocking to the area to feed twice a day and one of Queensland’s oldest tourist attractions was born.’
Nice feller. There’s a painting of him reproduced in the booklet I buy at the ticket office and he looks like a nice feller; swept-back silver hair, blue shirt, kind of a noble set to his face. I don’t recognise the park itself, so changed is it; then, it was more or less just a small field, but now it’s a small zoo, with walkways through large flowering plants and a small train chugging around with children on it and echidnas and Tasmanian devils and dingoes and wombats in enclosures. The koalas are entrancing; they sit low in trees and eat eucalyptus leaves and when I watch them they do a kind of double-take as if in surprise to find me staring at them. There’s an odd intelligence to them, a peculiar awareness and alertness; I’ve heard that eucalyptus, when eaten in large quantities, has a narcotic effect, and I can easily believe that, watching these animals, but inside their louche stoned-ness there seems to be an active and inquisitive mind at work. Bizarre creatures.
I like Currumbin. All I recall of it is a sort of rapture as I stood in the centre of a mad blizzard of lorikeets. I remember the surprising weight of them on the fruitbowl, how my arms ached for a day. How calm and content I felt as the birds sat on me and shat down my back and screeched in my ear. If we want to feed them today, however, we’ll need to wait for hours, which we can’t do, not with a continent to cross. So we wander round and look at the animals and then sod quite quickly off.
Wonder if he was any relation. Could easily be. One branch sprouted over the Dee into Liverpool, the other over the planet into Oz. And there’s an obvious shared passion for birds, although whether such things are hereditary is of course debatable. But still: I wonder.
We take the Pacific Motorway through Beenleigh and Coolangatta and Mullumbimby and stop at dusk in Byron Bay, which holds a literary festival to which I was once invited but couldn’t go due to prior commitments and, wandering around the place, am now glad I didn’t. There’s a tree full of lorikeets under which I stand and marvel but the town is all gap-year types in batik trousers and dreadlocks and uniform faux-Celtic or faux-Maori tattoos and the entire place reeks of parental indulgence and superannuated self-satisfaction. Home Counties accents batter my ears in the internet caff and signs lobby for coach-firms, excursions down the nearby valley on which you will see ‘natural wonders’ and ‘authentic aborigines’. Authentic? For fuck’s sake. Enjoy your gawp-year, all you Barnabies and Tristrams and Jacintas. Oh what funny stories you’ll have to tell back in Richmond-upon-Thames.
Ballina, Lismore, Casino on the Bruxner Highway. I’m beginning to get some notion of the ver
tiginous scale of Australian distances; what looks adjacent on the map takes hours of driving to reach. The place is colossal. Mallanganee, Drake, Sandy Hill, Black Swamp. The incantations in these names. So many histories we’re driving through. Our intention is to reach Armidale because that was where we made our first stop on the journey thirty years ago but we’re deep into night by now and Tony is tired so we park up outside Tenterfield, on the edge of the Blue Mountains. It’s freezing. I wrap my feet in woolly socks and my head in a bandanna and my body in a sleeping-bag and sleep for a few hours then wake and crawl outside for a pee in the before-dawn and I’m shivering so bad my teeth are a-chatter. Dull dawn rising. Frost on the grass and on the reef of McDonald’s wrappers in the ditches. Back in the van, sleep more, wake early. Wash with baby-wipes. Drink water, eat cereal bar. Drive on.
Dundee is four houses on the river Severn, which here is a muddy dribble. A sign welcomes us onto the Bald Knob Road and we laugh. There are a lot of ‘Knobs’ in Oz, I am to discover. Already met several. And we’re evidently in Celtic Australia because there is the Gwydir Highway and Shannon Vale and Glencoe and Stonehenge and Ben Lomond and, look, Glen Innes, which declares itself to be the ‘Celtic Capital of Australia’ on a sign next to another sign that says, on entering the town: ‘Domestic violence is a crime. Please report it’. We stop here, in the car park of a kind of pan-Celtic theme park, with rings of stones and a mock-up of Excalibur protruding from another stone and a wall with holes in it containing separate chippings and pebbles brought here from far Celtic parts, including Llantrisant and Caernarfon and Blaenan [sic] Ffestiniog by Mrs Enid Watkins-Jones. There are stones from my mountain, Pumlumon. I tell myself that I’m not going to stroke them but my hand reaches up as if of its own volition and gives them a wee caress. All small towns in Oz, as they tend to do in the States, lay some claim to individuality, whatever that might be, but this is important, really, here; as the noticeboard in the car-park says, the town was set up to ‘commemorate those early settlers of Celtic origin who helped to build the Australian nation’. All Celtic languages are represented here, both Brythonic and Goidelic; there’s even a reconstruction of the Tynwald, a small hill surrounded by stone slabs to sit on. Kernow is here. Breizh. Of course there’s also something here of the speciously Romantic and mystic, of Clannad and the kilt and the kindly old mam cooking cawl in the cottage in the cwm, but still there’s a good core to this commemoration. It’s okay. I approve. And Llangothlin, some miles outside, is a few clapboard houses and bleating sheep and drizzle in a cold wind. Low green hills. Close your eyes.
The New England Highway dominates this Celtic region of Oz. Cuts straight across it, separates Oban from Llangothlin. I wonder if that was deliberate? There’s a hamlet called Wards Mistake which sets me off wondering, intrigued, but it’s miles away down some barely-there road and no doubt when we get there it’d be little more than a shack or two so we continue on through Guyra and Tilbuster and soon, no, not soon, but eventually we reach Armidale.
THEN
The Highland Caravan Park. A sign with a piper on it in a kilt.
–Why’s there a Scotchman on the sign, dad?
–Dunno. Maybe the feller who owns it is from Scotland.
–Can you only stay there if you’re Scotch?
–Maybe. You’ll have to say ‘och aye the noo’ and ‘hoots’ and eat neeps.
–What’s neeps?
They drive in, park, rent a chalet for the night. It’s small and cramped and the boy claims the top bunk, mere inches from the wooden ceiling. He goes with his father to the camp shop for food, basic food to feed the family; potatoes and baked beans and cooking oil. But there is no oil. The boy’s father speaks to the man behind the counter and another man enters from the back room, a big man in glasses and a woolly jumper and a big grey beard with his hands in the pockets of his trousers jiggling the change in them and doing a funny little dance to the song on the radio. He stops and stares at the boy’s father and nods at him and says in a strong Yorkshire accent:
–Lancashire.
–Well, no, the dad says. –Merseyside. Same area, kind of.
They talk. There is a chocolate bar on display. On the wrapper is a picture of green fields in mist and grazing brown horses and it makes the boy think of cottages and log fires and dairies and farms and cosiness in the country. He wants the chocolate.
There is no oil so the boy’s father buys a few tubs of margarine and they return to the chalet and the boy climbs up onto his bunk to be out of the way while his mother cooks. The smell of the melted margarine surprises him with its sweetness. Shortly after they’ve eaten they all go to bed and the boy imagines he’s in a war as he falls asleep, a hero, protecting his family from armies of baddies and he wakes with a start to see wood so close to his face and they have breakfast and get back into the car and drive again into Uralla where they stop, briefly, to look at Thunderbolt’s grave, which is when the boy becomes a bushranger on a strong and faithful horse which can leap across valleys and off mountains. It’s not so much the chocolate the boy wants as the wrapper.
Tamworth. Goonoo Goonoo, which sets the children off singing ‘I’m a gnu, how do you do?’ Scone and Aberdeen, Scotland in Oz. A long day’s drive across the Great Dividing Range whose landscape both exhilarates and scares the boy, and the sky turns dark and they enter the tiny scattered hamlet of Colo and find a caravan which the boy’s mother says is ‘grotty’ but they stay there anyway and in the morning they leave the caravan and take a walk down to the river and now in daylight they can see where they are and the river gives up its mist like grey wraiths twisting slowly across the water and climbing the walls of the canyon, delicate tendrils that wave and ripple and are quickly gone.
NOW
It’s still there, the Highland Caravan Park, still with the piper on the sign and the shop still in the same building and still with the meagre supplies, a few tins and a bread rack and a chiller cabinet. Some cooking oil, this time. We speak to reception and ask them how long the camp’s been there.
–Ages, they say.
Look around, remember, drive into Armidale, park up, breakfast, Tony goes off to find an internet caff and I wander, buy some books, enter the fluorescent hell of the underground shopping centre and find a camping shop and buy a ten-gallon water jug in case the water runs dry in the van in the middle of the desert. Pretty enough frontier-style town, this. I’d heard a lot about the merits of Tim Tam biscuits so I buy some and eat them and am disappointed. Sit on a bench beneath a tree, smoke, read a local paper. Tim Tams are just like Penguins but with jam and stuff inside. One capuccino-flavoured which is so sweet as to be inedible. Need fruit. Can’t keep fresh fruit in the van as it has to be given up at each state boundary because of the fruit fly so should stock up on it now, really. Can’t be arsed. Eat another Tim Tam. Peach or something. Tastes of purple.
On to Uralla. The grave of Thunderbolt.
–Remember stopping here?, Tony asks, and I shake my head.
–Not really. Vaguely.
Just recollected heroics in my head. Bushranger Thunderbolt: robbed mail coaches and homes in the Liverpool Ranges District. Shot dead by Constable Walker in 1870, who first shot Thunderbolt’s horse to draw the man out of hiding. Apparently, or so the sign says, Thunderbolt, for an armed robber, was a nice enough feller. These outlaws were once an Oz embarrassment; cruel, criminal, the convict strain asserting itself. Now, they’re pioneering heroes, defiant, true rebels, exemplars of the Aussie spirit, untameable and beautifully wild. I’ll see this most forcefully when I reach Ned Kelly country, but it’s here, too, in Uralla; the well-tended grave, the iron statue at the road-side, Thunderbolt on his rearing steed.
Apparently there’s a New England region in Oz as well as in the states because I’m in it and I’ve got a booklet that tells me so. It’s ‘renowned for its impressive historical buildings, aboriginal rock art and Regional Museums’. Main town is Armidale. ‘Traditional landowners’ were the Anaiwan pe
ople, who left their rock art in the Mt Yarrowyck Nature Reserve. White settlement began around 1830. Ben Lomond has a railway station, opened in 1884 and named after the area’s highest mountain. Aboriginal name is Or-one geer, which means ‘plenty white gum’. Wine is produced here; fourty-four growers and labels. Loads of national parks. Armidale is known as the ‘Third City of the Arts’, I’m told; regular events include the Women’s Comedy Festival and the Pack Saddle Art Exhibition. There’s a university, with 18,000 students. Armidale’s population is 25,000, the ‘city’ has ‘two pedestrian malls, surrounding these malls are many fine cafés with alfresco dining and wonderful shopping arcades, from large department store’s to small gift shops and more’. By God, I can feel their pull. And it seems that an ineptitude with apostrophes is not confined to British greengrocers. The town was named Armidale by John Oxley, first European to explore the area in 1818, named after MacDonald’s castle on the Isle of Skye. Uralla, where I am right now, is from the Anaiwan dialect and means, maybe, ‘ceremonial meeting place’. The booklet tells me that there are many antique emporia in the town ‘for those who prefer fossicking in shops’, and I’m impressed at the word. Always pleasing to see the resurrection of archaic terms. It’s used again, though, in the section on Guyra: ‘Imagine trying your hand at trout fishing in pristine streams, fossicking for gemstones, playing a round or two of golf.’ Once is great; twice is a bit irritating. It’s had the arse ripped out of it, now. And ‘imagine playing a round of golf’? Why on earth would I want to do that? The desperately grasping nature of guidebooks never fails to divert and entertain. Imagine playing a round of golf. If I can’t sleep, or if I require a vision of wasted time, then maybe I will.
We drive into Tamworth. This is the ‘Country Music Capital of Australia’; more Billy Ray Cyrus than Hank Williams, I’ll wager. It’s also the ‘Tidy Town Winner 1999’, as was Llandinam, between Llanidloes and Newtown, back home. We stop for petrol in Tamworth and I eat a Golden Rough, which is a large coin of chocolate stippled with bits of roasted coconut, and the taste of it unleashes a torrent of associative memory, the force of which knocks me back a bit; I remember eating these when I was here last, in Australia, I mean. When the world was nine years old.
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