And, nutshelled, that’s my Uncle Roy. It’s lovely to see him, and Eileen. We go for a pie-and-pea floater (a brilliant invention) and fish and chips which, of course, come without vinegar. I go to the supermarket next door to the chippy but all they have is raspberry vinegar. No malt. My God, what have these people got against vinegar? I’m considering wringing my socks out over my chips. We go to a ‘pre-loved’ bookshop in the city which doesn’t have The Diary of a Welsh Swagman and while I’m in there the phone rings and the proprietor picks it up and listens for a moment and then says:
–Mate, you so don’t understand what kind of a bookshop this is. Never ring this number again.
I wonder what was going on there? Wonder what he was asked for? We stay in Adelaide for two days then head out, north, into fairly featureless flatland, green shading into red, long straight roads to the horizon. Road trains; huge, monstrous things, three trailers long, you’d first see them as a dot miles away in front getting bigger and BIGGER and BIGGER and then they’d be on you with a massive blast of iron and backdraft that would set the van madly wobbling. Endless ribbons of tarmac ahead. A low bump is called Mount Remarkable, I think, but then we pass the low bump and I see the real Mount. Which is, yes, kind of remarkable.
The country starts to get emptier, harsher, hotter. Blasted, baked. Red sand. Scrub, desiccated. Leafless and scrawny trees.
Port Augusta. Pleasant, sleepy little town. Laid-back, relaxed air. High aboriginal population. We buy some supplies for the van; dried fruit and water and stuff. Leave. Into sudden, abrupt desert; red, endless desert. Quintessential Australia. Scrub and what grass there is a kind of bluey-grey colour, in sharp contrast to the red dust of the ground. Fine talcum. A dread desert, stretching ahead for a continent. Bit of apprehension creeps in. And now the sun roars in the sky. Flat blue of the sky. Vast and without mercy. I think of blistered, popping skin.
We’re on the Nullarbor, now, its eastern edge. I’ve seen enough of deserts of both sand and ice to know that they’re not barren, desolate places, and to believe so is to bow to a speciously inverted and unquestioningly received ‘knowledge’ that benefits only the aggressively colonialist mindset. Look closely, and listen to what their inhabitants – human and animal, vegetable and mineral – tell you and you’ll realise that deserts are jumping with abundant life. Not just that; they’re labyrinthine libraries of offered knowledge. But I’m daunted, to say the least, as the country’s fierce interior opens up around me and I see ahead of me what I suddenly remember very, very clearly – approaching a distant crest in the road then going over it only to see another distant crest in the road and so on and so on and so on – and I’m filled with a deep admiration for what my mum and dad did, all those years ago, their bravery, three young children and another one on the way and all of them in a Holden car travelling across some of the emptiest, most hostile terrain on earth. Terra nullius. An extremely courageous thing to do.
–Tell yeh what, Tony says.
–What?
–I’m filling up with admiration for me Mum and Dad.
–I was just thinking the exact same thing.
An environment hostile to human life, unless, of course, that life has spent scores of millennia in the environment, patiently learning its moods and sensitivities, learning from it with painstaking care and attention. One lesson lasts centuries, spans generations. But for anyone else? Then this place can raise a red thumb and smudge a human life out against the blistered tarmac. Just more roadkill to be scavenged by the dingoes and crows and wedgies. Small bloody smears, not much bigger than the splats on our windshield.
I feel like a pioneer. Bit hungry, too; I feel like a pie in ’ere. Christ that’s not funny.
The slagheap that rises blackly above Iron Knob is still there, but a lot bigger. Things have a tendency to shrink as you get older, but not this; the hill of muck and sludge is three times the size it was. It’s now a range of hills in itself. Empty, empty place. We park up on the hard shoulder and get out and the silence hits me like the humidity did in Singapore; physically, and powerfully, like a hard slap across the face. Kimba still has its motel. I remember the town, like something out of a western, wooden walkways raised and railings. Another Oz Deadwood, seemingly unchanged, except the menagerie’s gone; the nice lady in the tourist information place tells us that it was in Cleve, south off the main highway. She remembers it; she’s lived in Kimba over forty years. I’m disappointed. And amused, very, by the sculpture of the galah (Kimba promotes itself as ‘The Home of the Big Galah’); a house-high pink model of a galah looking aloof and constipated. It’s rubbish. Makes me laugh. Tony’s in fits, drives around it in the van:
–Look at him there!
He can hardly drive for laughing. The van’s rocking with it.
Kimba opens out into immeasurably vast wheatfields, horizon to horizon, endless. Wales would fit several times into these fields. It’s a sea of green, young corn shoots, immense. Other cars pass us in the opposite direction, as they did thirty years ago, on the plain, and each driver salutes or raises a finger, just a small gesture of support and solidarity. Quite sweet, really. But evidently not for the police; we get pulled over for speeding just outside Minnipa. A big, fat, officious officer crooks his finger at Tony, who gets out to speak to him. I get out too, to lean against the hot bonnet and smoke and eavesdrop.
–What do ya do, back home?
–I’m a civil servant.
–Policeman?
–I was. Merseyside transport police.
I hear the unimpressed and utterly unmoved silence. Small ‘zip’ as a piece of paper is torn along a perforated edge. Then Tony’s voice, incredulous:
–Two hundred and seventy nine bucks?
Aw Jesus. I’m all for not paying the bleeding thing – I mean, they’re not going to chase us back to Wales – but my brother, he’s been thinking that he might want to come back soon; his Sydney poledancer. And they won’t let him in if there’s a warrant out for him for non-payment of a fine. So what can I do? We’re in this together. I suppose.
The sunsets have an intense beauty. They bounce redly off the leaves of roadside trees and look like a million fireflies. Such deep, glowing red. Past Wirrulla, we notice a car following us with its lights off. I think of Wolf Creek.
–It’ll be another copper, Tony says. –That one who fined us will have radio’d on to his mate in Wirrulla and told him to watch out for two brother Poms in a Britz van. Bet yeh.
He overtakes, and sure enough, it’s a police car. He puts his lights on as he passes. So that’s not dangerous, driving at night-time with your lights off? For fuck’s sakes. At the sides of Oz roads are raised plinths bearing the mangled remains of cars; warnings to drive safely. The coppers, evidently, take no notice of them.
Red desert darkening, stars coming out. Ceduna, which is now a metropolis compared to what it was, to what I remember it as being. My dad bought a boomerang here, or rather, swapped twenty cigarettes for it off an old aborigine in a pub. It’s an amazing piece of work, decorated with intricate depictions of emus and ’roos. Which pub, I wonder? There are loads. And will the old aborigine still be around? I doubt it very much, judging by the state of the aborigines I see in Ceduna; they’re desperate, people, drunk, filthy, fighting each other. They’re heartbreaking to see. Facial features of natural nobility and strength, often now obliterated, robbed of all dignity and meaning by centuries of oppression, of conferred non-status. Forgotten as people by those who took from them everything that made them people. Hideous, this. I offer ten dollars to an old lady sitting on the pavement and she takes it without a word, can’t even look up at my face. God, the shame in her. Coming off her in waves. I hope the money helps, in whatever way. Some time later, as I’m eating Chinese food, I hear a commotion outside the restaurant. There’s the old lady, fighting with a younger man. She’s screaming and scratching his face. He’s kicking her. A waiter dashes outside to shoo them away.
We eat our nood
les and ribs and get back in the van and drive on. Hypnotic, this – driving the desert in darkness. The world shrunk to two twin cones of light and the small slice of tarmac they illuminate. Trance. Trance.
THEN
Nullarbor Station to fill up on petrol. The car’s covered in thick red dust, banks of dead insects in the grille and under the wipers, heat rising in a shimmer off the bonnet. The boy likes how it looks. He goes with his father into the shop to pay for the petrol and recognises the man’s accent and his father and the man talk for what seems like hours. What you doing here? Which part of Liverpool you from? The boy gets bored. Outside, his mother honks the horn.
–One thing to watch out for, the man says, –on the desert. The abos, like. They’ll come running out of the bush towards you, waving for help. What you won’t know is, they’ll have a spear between their toes, dragging it, like. So whatever you do don’t stop for them.
And, indeed, a few miles before Ceduna, this happens; an aborigine with a wiry grey beard down to his belt buckle crashes out of the roadside bush, waving his arms. The children shout. Their father doesn’t stop or even slow.
–He might be in trouble!
–And we might be ’n’ all if we stop. Not taking the risk. You heard what that feller said back at the garage.
The boy thinks about this. Ambush. Spear. Robbery on the highway. He’s been warned many times in Oz to look out for the ‘abos’ but he can’t help but find them fascinating. They’re so strange, to him. They have such kind faces. There’d been Afro-Caribbean kids at his school in Liverpool but they weren’t like the black fellers here, in Oz. There’s something intriguing about them, here. Back home, they were the same as him, just with a different skin. But here… he likes their voices. When they speak he likes their voices. And he sees them in Ceduna, lying in heaps on the pavements, sees his father exchange cigarettes for a boomerang and he finds the boomerang absolutely captivating. Loves the feel of it in his hand. It’s a beautiuful thing. The old feller who made it smiles toothlessly at the boy and gives him a wink and the boy is confused further. This bundle of stuff: Deception spear robbery ambush dirt drunkenness artistry no teeth friendly wink asleep in gutter kind faces nice voices watch out for the abos, boy. What’s he supposed to do with such a tangle of information? All will come clear when he’s older, he thinks. All will be explained, some time.
They leave Ceduna and head for Cocklebiddy, but before they reach that they see a motel at the side of the road – the Mundrabilla Motel. Look okay? Let’s stay here. They do. Nice name, Cocklebiddy. Like an old shellfish.
NOW
We’re looking for somewhere to park up for the night and sleep. Somewhere off the Eyre Highway with its road-trains bellowing past, somewhere away from the eyes of bored desert coppers who might knock on the window and search the van just to make their lives a wee bit less monotonous. I’m in a kind of trance. Kind of asleep but with my eyes open. I open the road map on my knees and shine a torch on it and look. A turn off just before Nundroo will take us down to a wee place called Fowler’s Bay, right on the coast. Looks interesting. Let’s go there.
–Wonder why it’s called Fowler’s Bay?
–Cos Robbie Fowler owns property here. As well as most of Merseyside.
We turn off. Tarmac stops. Turns into dirt-track. ‘16 km’, a sign says. 16 km! Christ, it’s a mere millimetre on the map. As if we’re a submarine wobbling through black ink, thick ink, the dirt-track goes on. And on. Fowler’s Bay itself is a few lights and a sign on the outskirts saying ‘NO CAMPING IN TOWNSHIP’ so we turn off and find a layby just behind the ‘WELCOME’ sign. Park up. Climb into sleeping bags. Sleep. I wake at sunrise and go out for a pee and look where I am – huge dunes to the left, a vast bog to the right, a cold and whistling wind. I explore the tiny village, walk out on the pier over the sea, watch the sun rise. I see holiday flats advertised. A sign for a bar. For a caff, too, but that’s closed. Here I go again, thinking about spending a winter in this place, huddled up against the storms that would come crashing in off the sea. Looking out for whales.
I go back to the van.
We drive on. Just past Nundroo, we make a stop to look at the dirt-track that’s been running parallel with us since we entered the desert and on which, as a family, we made the original journey, all those years ago. Tony can recall the tarmac road being built at the same time, on our right, then, as we drove down the track. For all those endless miles. I don’t remember that, but the thought of doing this drive on that potholed and dusty interminable ribbon of a scrape in the desert floor… Jesus.
And we drive on. ‘Nullarbor’ is a Latin word meaning ‘no trees’, and up till now I’d thought it a misnomer; there are hundreds of trees. Thousands. Stunted and scrawny little things, yes, but trees nonetheless. Just before Nullarbor Station, however, the trees stop. Extremely suddenly, they stop. TreestreestreestreesNONE, like that. Flat expanse. We stop to take photographs. The sense of isolation almost overwhelms.
And we drive on.
THEN
The boy makes a moving world with his Action Man and books and pens and anything else that comes to hand that can be turned into a toy. He’s aware that a vastness is going on outside the confines of the car but within the little moving box he creates his own world to explore and explore it he does, every cliff and cranny and coast and cataract and city and river and lake and heath and marsh. They sleep in motels, and, on occasion, in the car. One morning the boy wakes up amongst his slumbering family and, as quietly as he can, creeps out of the car. They’ve been sleeping in a car-park behind a motel or bar or something; ‘NO VACANCIES’ on the sign. It’s hot, and still, and silent. The boy spies a long furry tail hanging out of a dustbin so he approaches the bin and lifts the lid and before the rising cloud of whining flies envelops his face he catches a glimpse of carnage, koalas and possums and wombats all stuffed into the bin, con torted, rotting, boiling mass of slimy fur and gnarled claws and milky-filmed eyes and seething maggots. He drops the lid and runs.
NOW
At the eastern end of the Bight, the great scoop that dents the country’s southern coast, we see a hand-painted sign: ‘COME AND SEE THE WHALES’. We follow the arrow, park up, pay our ten bucks each at the turnstile, move down towards the sea on the grid of wooden walkways that overhang it and my God, there they are, just below us, a group of southern right whales, adults and babies, huge things, lolling in the waves, hanging motionless in the blue. Incredible, beautiful, awesome. The largest weighing fifty tons, huge animals. Through the hired binoculars I see their great grins and callosities and flicking tails. I am completely thrilled. I am breathless. My skin sings. Such incredible, impossible animals. I’ve seen whales before, several times, and at closer quarters, but I’ll never feel anything less than profound awe and wonder were I to see them every day of my life. Their sheer size. The way they play. And nothing prepares you for the sound of their blowing, the huge basso roar of it. And the smell of it, too.
We spend a couple of hours whale-gazing and even continue to squint at them through the binocs when they’re little more than black smudges, way out to sea. And then we drive on. Always we drive on. Approaching Nullarbor Station, we see a young dingo at the side of the road, close by, unruffled, nuzzling the earth next to a sign that tells us not to feed the dingoes. The pub’s still there, the pub where my dad met the scouse feller, but it’s staffed entirely by Aussies, now. I wonder what happened to that man. If he’s still in Oz, or if he’s back in Liverpool. Another dingo is skulking around the pub and the petrol pumps. Pretty animals; like tall, white foxes.
THEN
It’s spelled B-I-T-E, the boy thinks, because that’s what it looks like, as if a colossal sea-creature has taken an almighty chomp out of the country’s underside. He studies the map, traces the contours of the feature, sees that it’s actually spelled B-I-G-H-T and concludes that the mapmakers couldn’t spell.
They enter another timezone on May 13th. The clocks go back fort
y-five minutes. They stop in the desert as the cover has blown off the roof-rack, exposing their cases and trunks to the searing wind and the fine punk dust. Luckily, everything stayed on, held down by the guy-ropes; losing the jerry cans of water would’ve been calamitous. The boy thinks of that, of thirst, of what it’d be like to die from dehydration. How it would feel, in the indifferent desert. He can’t imagine it. Can’t comprehend any kind of death.
They’re on the dirt-track for six hours. Jostling, bumping, rocking six hours of choking dust and heat. The children must cling to the seatbacks or the door-handles, anything they can, for six hours. They see two foxes and an eagle and stop to photograph the eagle which, when developed, will show a speck on a bright blue background. When they stop, the ground feels unsteady and strange under the boy’s feet, like it did when he stepped off the plane back in Brisbane. He’s tired of this journey, now. He wants it to be over, wants to be in Perth.
NOW
Christ but this is getting boring. Pure monotony. Flat and featureless and seemingly endless. Stultifyingly dull. God how it goes on. No settlements between Nullarbor Station and Eucla, and a brief glimpse of the sea on my left is about as exciting as it gets. And Tony’s singing Roy Orbison’s ‘Crying’ for the fourth time. Every word of it, from ‘I was alright’ to the closing ‘OOOOH’. I’m going fucking mad. The landscape’s beginning to pound, pound me down. I can’t stop yawning. I’ve been getting intermittent twinges in my left leg for the past few hours, due, probably, to the unrelieved cramped conditions in the van’s cabin, and I start looking forwards, with genuine excitement, to the next one. Anything to break this flatness, anything. It’s crushing, this journey. Indescribably dull. And it never ends. Flatness, smoothness, on and on and on. Please, God, bring me a hill, a hummock, a bend in the road, anything to relieve this nothing world. What if I’ve died and gone to hell? What if this is my punishment, to travel this featureless road for all eternity?
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