Ten Pound Pom

by Griffiths, Niall

  THEN

  The family groups together under the sign that says ‘LIVERPOOL RANGE’. The father takes two photographs which will be sent home, accompanying postcards, to both grandmothers. Behind the family are hills and to the right is a wall of thick and scrubby bush which, the boy feels, must go on forever. These things on the other side of the world; echoes of Wales and a place called Liverpool Ranges. And the road atlas says there’s a town called Liverpool, too, outside Sydney. These familiar things on the other side of the planet but familiar in name only so that in fact they only underline the essential unfamiliarity of where the boy now is. Like looking at a pair of favourite shoes at the bottom of a fishtank. Confusing. They’re only a couple of days into the journey, they’ve only nibbled at the continent. It stretches before the boy, too vast to imagine; not even his childhood talent of living almost entirely in the moment can prevent the thought of that distance from dizzying his head.

  NOW

  –There it is, look. It’s still there.

  –Not the same sign though, is it?

  –No, but it’s in the same place.

  –We park up and get out. I dig out the old photo of us standing by the signpost and we hold it up next to the new sign. There’s the steeply sloping hill in the background, and is that the same tree? We try to align the vegetation and the geographical features but even allowing for thirty years’ growth and weathering we can’t. Except the hill looks familiar, the main big hill. And why would a new sign have been erected in a different place? This, after all, is where the Liverpool Range begins.

  –Look at that.

  A giant eagle sits in a nearby tree. It watches us watching it then launches itself off the branch and soars low over us, casting a shadow across our upturned faces as it checks us out then returns to its branch again, a thick branch which bends under the bird’s weight. It’s a huge bird. My heart thumped as it swooped low over my face. I’m sure that it was only ascertaining what we are, us two strange creatures in the alpha predator’s territory, but I can’t shake the feeling that the event is laden with some kind of spiritual significance. I feel slightly unsettled but thrilled; not merely at the pure magnificence of the bird but at the hint of a meaning that I can’t quite grasp. Maybe it’s no accident that, as my brother and I get back in the van, we simultaneously mention our paternal grandfather, nearly two decades dead. I don’t know. But how mysterious this world is.

  We drive through mountains. Low mountains, unspectacular as yet – they’re not Welsh – but by God they go on. And on and on and on. The road to Colo River goes on forever and we’re still on it when night has fallen and all we can see are the packed trees that densely line either side of the road. Just trees, and clotted black shadows beyond the reach of the headlights. Then some bright blue glow as we turn a corner and there surrounded by soot-black air stand three luminous blue crucifixes, each about thirty feet high, free-standing, star-bright in the thick black night. Bright, bright blue. I stand at the foot of one and hear the electricity crackling in it; the hairs on my arms prickle erect. My face bathed in the bone-white blue-bright light and all around me is blackness so thick that it’d be like swimming in ink if I left the thrown illumination of these bizarre and unexpected totems.

  Christ but this is getting strange.

  We park up in a layby in the darkness and sleep. In the morning we find the Colo River campsite which is closed for the winter months but we knock and a Kiwi feller answers. We tell him what we’re doing and he agrees to show us around. He smokes American Spirit roll-ups with filters, as I do, and I like him. Colo is now a private park; all the caravans here are owned. It’s a misty morning, as it was three decades ago, but in that mist the remembered beauty can be seen. That river, that rockface rising up. I recall walking down to this river, standing on this very beach in the morning after we slept in the caravan that my mum called ‘grotty’. Which it was. I recall something of the wonder. And feel again this new wonder of encountering the younger me on the opposite side of the planet.

  Christ but this is getting strange.

  Drive on. Deeper into the Blue Mountains. The ground rises up. At Blackheath we park up and look out for Govett’s Leap. Our youngest sister – who was born in Perth, as you’ll discover – had been here a year earlier and advised us to visit it and, when we find it, we’re glad she did; it’s a suspended patio looking out over an abyssal drop between sheer cliff faces, spectacular, astonishing. Vast plunging space, tree’d escarpments far below immense slashes of bared stone. The waterfall off to the right is such a plunge that the water is gas rather than liquid before it reaches the valley floor all those skull-spinning metres below. I never came here as a kid. I think of the settlers, the explorers, encountering this for the first time; I imagine they felt as I do as they regarded this landscape, both stuffed with terror and bursting with possibility. It’s vertiginous, immense. What lies atop those distant plateaus, across those great gulfs of blue and shimmering air? Oceans of space, here. I feel wonder.

  At the gift shop I buy a Jacaroo hat and some information books and sit at a table with a can of cold cola and read them while Tony goes off to find internet access. I haven’t checked my emails in days and I know that there’ll be several that will require an urgent response but I’m enjoying myself here, it feels like a holiday, and I don’t want to waste time at a keyboard so I sit in the shade of my new titfer and drink my cold cola and read my new books. Or flick through them, at least. I’ll go online when we reach the next big city, when I’ve got a few hours to kill. Meantime, I read what Steve Parish has to say about this area in his Discovering Blue Mountains. What, no definite article? ‘Sixty-five kilometres west of Sydney’, he says, ‘the Blue Mountains parts its shimmering veil to reveal the beauty of its sculptured cliffs and forested valleys’. Grammar, Steve, grammar; sort out your pronouns, lad. Think that should be ‘sculpted’, as well. Still, he’s informative; twenty-four towns, apparently, occupy the main plateau. Chief settlement is Katoomba, the area’s long been a resort for those Sydney-ites wanting to temporarily escape the big and nearby city. Another booklet, called Layers of Time, tells me that where I’m sitting is called the Evans Lookout, and Govett’s Leap Creek is below me; to the left, at the end of the gorge, is Mount Banks, then Mount Wilson, then Mount Tomah to my right, and, after that, Mount Hay. Charles Darwin explored the region, in 1836. He stayed at the Weatherboard Inn, which is a brilliant name for a pub. Wish I could stay there too, if it’s still there. And if I knew where it was. And could spare the time. The book doesn’t tell me who Evans was, but it does tell me that Oswald Ziegler wanted to build a posh hotel on Evans Lookout in the 1960s, and to make a kind of Oz Mount Rushmore, with the faces of three explorers carved into the cliff face opposite, across the canyon, but the soft texture of the rock forestalled the project. Thankfully. Oswald the Idiot. Who’d want the power of that view spoiled and broken by a trio of vast blank faces? The States has a Mount Rushmore. The world doesn’t need another one. God, what is it with some people? The unchallenged surety that the natural world can, and must, be improved if it’s forced to take on a recognisably human form. God almighty. For those with the eyes to see, all faces are contained in the folds and nodules and striations and crannies of rocks. Nature offers the geoglyphs; take them. Don’t try to impose your own. And who was this Ziegler? The thought of that question being asked at some future date no doubt led, in part, to his cliff-carving desires, but it’s resulted merely in his memory being linked to megalomania, twisted vision and supreme arrogance. Where was he from? My third book, the Glovebox Guide to the Blue Mountains, written by Peter Meredith and Dan Fuchs, doesn’t tell me, but it does mention that the Evans Lookout was ‘named in 1882 after local solicitor George Evans’. That’s all it says. Good Welsh name, or half of it is; I’d like to know more about him. This is by far the best book of the bunch; pretty well-written, full of maps and anecdotes and nuggets of information. Should I return here, this is the book I’ll bring.
It tells me that Blackheath is built at an elevation of 1,065.3 m, and has a permanent population of 4,119 (or it did in the year 2000). Sydney is just 133 km away. The whoops and trills and whistles I can hear in the canyon’s trees below me are made by lyrebirds and whipbirds and currawongs. The place was named by Governor Macquarie, who first, in 1815, called it Hounslow (after the London Hounslow Heath), then forgot he’d done so and named it Blackheath (again after a district of London) on his way back through. The thicko. How can you forget seeing and naming a place like this? The book tells me, too, that Darwin also stayed at the Gardners Inn, once called the Scotch Thistle Inn, and that William Govett used to love rolling huge boulders off the cliffs here, supposedly as a way of gauging their height, although he did admit that the activity was ‘an amusement with me’. Fair play. And he was remarkably close; 160 m, he calculated. It’s actually 161 m.

  I’d like to hang about here, for a bit; wait until winter, when the snows come, get a room in one of the balconied hotels and do some walking through the gorges and across the plateaus and, at night-time, get rat-arsed in the Gardners Inn and come to Evans Lookout for a drunken gawp on my way to bed and see it all covered in snow under the blue moon. How would that look? I don’t know, but I know I’d love it. Some bits of Australia are okay.

  But that’s it for Blackheath. Never came here as a kid, anyway, so it’s got nowt to do with the trip. Just recuperation, after the hellish Blackpool-in-the-sun of the Gold Coast. Sightseeing and all that. Sydney’s only about two hours away. I remember quite a lot about Sydney.

  THEN

  The family knew a couple, John and Margaret, who moved from Brisbane to Sydney, and it is they who they stay with whilst they are in the city, in their flat in the district of Vaucluse. It’s a small flat, so beds are made up with cushions and blankets on the floor in the front room for the children to sleep on. The boy likes it; it’s a nest, he thinks, beneath the bay window, through which he can look down on the revellers below, being as they are in Vaucluse’s party area. One Saturday night the boy sees different coloured lights and people moving and dancing through those lights and he hears loud laughter and shouting and music and it looks all exuberantly abandoned and celebratory and suggestive of something good and bright about humanity. One day, he thinks. One day. There are things to look forward to in this life and this world. Plus, one afternoon, they go shopping in the Argyle Centre in the city by the bridge and they go to a bar and the boy wants a shandy but the barman has no more than a splash of lemonade left so the boy drinks a pint of more-or-less undiluted lager which is enough to get him drunk. Colours glow brighter and everything spins. The skin on the faces of the adults around him looks endlessly fascinating and their words reel with mystery and the hilarity and absurdity that underlies everything makes itself known and available. My God, thinks the boy, here is something extremely special. This stuff, this drink, this is something that is going to help him for the rest of his life. This is a gift from God. This is magical. This drink is a beautiful and secretive potion. The world trembles and hums in a curious pale blue light.

  And, even through the sickness and sweating that come on later that night, still these words: This is truly magical.

  They go to the Botanic Gardens and gaze in wonder at the huge orb-web spiders suspended between branches. They go to Coogee Beach. Bondi Beach too, where they witness large rats scampering through the litter on the sand of an evening and where they eat at the Double Bay Steak House after which, in the dad’s words, they all ‘get the wild shites’. On Coogee Beach the boy swims in the sea and, back on the sand, is surrounded by sea-wasps; giant jelly blue-bottles, they pop and hiss and spit and slither towards him with malevolent intent. He panics and leaps across them and runs to his mother. At Botany Bay, John straps himself into a hang-glider, his first attempt at the activity, and is caught by a sudden gust and sent tumbling sideways to the bottom of the hill and cut and bruised and battered. The boy’s eyes have that imprinted on them – the rolling triangle of canvas and the flailing shadowy limbs seen through it like a demented puppet play. Recovering from the accident that night, on deckchairs outside, John sips at his restorative tea and suddenly coughs and splutters and gags. A moth the size of a small bird had drowned in his mug.

  Taronga Park Zoo. The Court House, Lady Macquarie’s Chair. Parakeets and cockatoos and galas. Watson’s Bay. At the Opera House, the children sit on top of the steps while their mother takes a picture, the building soaring, vast white clam shell, behind them.

  –You’re sitting too far apart, the mother says. –Get closer together.

  They shuffle closer and squash themselves together like giggling sardines in a tin.

  –No. Move further apart.

  They do. Ten metres between them now. They find this very funny.

  –You’re going from the sublime to the ridiculous, the mum says, but takes the photograph anyway, and the picture will show them separated by several yards of space and tiny before the cliff-face sail of the building behind them and big beaming pleased grins on each of their faces.

  Inside the Opera House is a huge painting depicting the hallucinations of a drowning man. Vivid squiggles and static starbursts, twisted faces, strange animals and birds on a deep purple background. It captivates the boy. He was born with a caul on his head. He is immune from drowning. These are images which he will never see and they’re not too dissimilar from what happened in his head when he was drunk and they’re not too dissimilar from what he saw of the partying people when he looked through the window of the flat in Vaucluse. Life can be this, that, way, even at the moment of its ending. Wondrous and colourful and immensely exciting. Thrilling and holy, even at the moment of its ending. One day the whole world will quake.

  The boy likes Sydney. The big bridge and the surrounding sea and the towering buildings. He doesn’t particularly want to leave, and when they do, and overnight at Orange in a caravan park and his sister wakes up in the middle of the night being sick off the top bunk and his dad runs to help her in the darkness and cuts his toe open on a chairleg (‘CHRIST! Bastard! Me bloody toe!), the boy sees that as a sign. Should’ve stayed in Sydney. He liked it there. How the beer made people dance and how the people danced anyway. It is 1976.

  NOW

  Love that sight of cities, particularly unfamiliar ones, getting closer as I move towards them. The buildings growing bigger. So exciting; all that glittering glass and steel and concrete, and the narrow canyons between them which will contain bars and music and lights and people. There’ll be a waterfront, full of dark dive saloons and salty air, there’ll be people of many races and there’ll be exhaust and neon and many different languages and many treasures to be found. Differences to be celebrated. Faces both hostile and friendly. Lots to discover, lots to explore. We check into the Palisades Hotel in The Rocks on June 14th. This is one of the oldest pubs in Sydney, in one of the oldest European-settled parts of Australia. The bar is brilliant, dust and log fires and smoking permitted, the rooms basic as hell – bed, wardrobe, side table and that’s it. Not even a telly. But it’s clean and cheap with a wide balcony that overlooks the harbour, the arc of the bridge swooping above and the ships coasting underneath and the skyscrapers in the foreground and also beyond the river, the early-evening sunlight striking their heights. I already like this part of the city. It seems old, or at least as old as European-settled Oz can get. I don’t remember Sydney looking like this, but then I don’t remember much of the city’s physicality at all, and no doubt it’s grown and boomed in thirty years. The Nullarbor is getting closer to us, as is Perth, and those are the things that appear largest and nearest in my memory.

  But The Rocks, The Rocks… this is the place where I first got drunk. My first ever taste of alcohol occurred here, in the Argyle Centre, which isn’t there any more. So I get drunk in The Palisades bar instead and it’s just as interesting and astonishing as it was all those years ago, the hum and hover in the head, raise the glass to your mouth and
the world is one way then lower it and it’s another. It’s changed in those scant seconds of gulping. It’s always the same in that it always changes. Each instance of drunkenness is different from the other, yet connected, somehow, links in a long chain of intoxication. Roundabout midnight, drunk, a taxi carries me under the bridge. I look up at it. Think nothing but a big bellow of approval, untranslatable. Fall asleep thinking; I’ve been drunk, now, on six continents. I know it’s childish to feel proud of that. But now I’ve been on drinking sprees in six continents.

  I have things to do in Sydney. A month earlier, back home, I’d received an email from a feller called Ian Peddie, a native of Wolverhampton who was teaching at Sydney uni and conducting email interviews with contemporary British writers, his field of study. Would I mind answering some questions? Not at all, I said, but if he liked, we could talk face-to-face in a month or so. Great, he said, and he’ll organise a reading for me at the uni. Bit of extra money for me. And my agent’s assistant had put me in touch with a Sydney-based journalist, Geordie Williamson, and we’d exchanged emails and arranged to meet so I bell him and tell him to meet me on the steps of the Opera House, which is why I’m sitting there, slightly hungover, frowning at the rain that threatens to grow in strength, wondering if I’m sitting on the very same spot that my arse occupied thirty years ago. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous. I remember the laughter, and laugh a little again.