The Long Hitch Home

by Jamie Maslin

  The gorge lived up to its name, channeling the merest of breezes into a cooling draft and providing a welcome respite from today’s temperatures, now over 100 degrees. On either side of the trail was a green belt of vegetation that roughly followed the route of a small trickling stream. I stopped off and dunked my head in the water. It was bliss. I remained with my head submerged for a good twenty seconds, as my temperature dropped and my hair yielded to the current. It was a short walk of around forty-five minutes, up and then back down the valley, and by the time I finished I was bone dry. I stayed in the area with Olgar and Valery for some time, just soaking in the atmosphere, until they decided to head on to Alice Springs, my next stop, roughly 270 miles away, offering me a ride along the way.

  Several close calls occurred on the journey there when, once again, Olgar pulled out on the wrong side of the road following a refreshment break, but eventually we arrived in one piece. By now it was late afternoon, and raining hard. Olgar, Valery, and I said our goodbyes in the center of the town, where they dropped me so I could source somewhere to stay. My options were limited. The cheapest single room I could find was over a hundred dollars, so I had little choice but to opt for somewhere I normally avoid with a vengeance—a youth hostel.

  I hate hostels. And in particular I hate dormitories. Maybe it’s a throwback to the two year stretch I served in boarding school dormitories from the age of ten to twelve, but I find dorms, and hostels in general, thoroughly depressing. However, with nowhere near enough money to fork out for a single room, my only other option was to sleep rough, something I had previously done in Alice Springs. But with tonight’s heavy rain this option seemed even less appealing, and since there was nowhere feasible in sight to throw my tent, a hostel it would have to be. So it was with a reluctant sigh of resignation and a deep intake of breath that I stepped inside the Alice Springs YHA to inquire about a bed for the night.

  “Our cheapest is a sixteen share mixed dorm at twenty-four dollars a night,” said the girl behind the counter.

  I did some quick mental arithmetic. That was 384 dollars for every night they filled the room. I asked to see it. It wasn’t like its state was going to sway my decision one way or the other, rather I was stalling the inevitable. I knew what it would look like and it faithfully matched my expectations—it was shit. Backpacks, clothing, wash bags, and assorted knick-knacks were strewn over nearly all the bunk beds, which were crammed, sardine-like, into a musty smelling room. The bathroom was down the hall. To make the best part of 400 dollars a night out of such a crappy room was disgraceful.

  “How much did you say it was?” I asked again, despite knowing the price.

  “Twenty-four dollars a night.”

  “Mmm,” I responded, pretending to be only mildly pondering a stay.

  The girl looked about, then spoke in the hushed tones of someone departing sensitive information. “I tell you what, if you don’t tell anyone I’ll give you the member’s discount.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Twenty-one-fifty.”

  I took it.

  I left at first light after a restless night having been woken up by a streetlamp shining into the curtainless room. I made it to the outskirts of Alice Springs in double-quick time after a fortuitous bit of in-town hitching at some traffic lights, where a young Asian car salesman picked me up and dropped me outside his place of work: a Ford dealership on the edge of town. It was the perfect spot, just beyond lay the beginnings of the desert. I waited for about two hours before another car pulled up, this time driven by a young Polynesian girl, Sinaboana, who, from her actions, I can only conclude was new in the country. If cheerfulness and enthusiasm to help was all I needed to get to Darwin, then Sinaboana was just the ticket. Unfortunately, her concept of the realities of hitchhiking and what it actually entailed were limited.

  I told her I was heading north. She told me to get in. We set off.

  “How about that spot?” she said, gesturing to a shaded area on the side of the road after driving—and I kid you not—no more than 500 feet from where we started. I looked at her bamboozled; surely she was joking. She wasn’t. When I explained that I was trying to reach Darwin, 930 miles away, it was her turn to look bamboozled. She was apologetic to a fault.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, looking downcast. “I saw you from the other side of the road and felt sorry for you, so thought I’d turn around to help.”

  In soothing, if slightly confused tones, I told her it was okay. Moments later I was back on the roadside scratching my head in sheer bewilderment at the absurdity of the situation. She drove off back into town.

  Thirty minutes passed and it looked like my luck had changed when a car with three Asian guys in pulled over. I grabbed my pack and headed towards it.

  “Thanks guys,” I said in an upbeat voice through the open front window, then asked them where they were going.

  The driver looked back at me with an awkward smile. “Err, Darwin.”

  “Excellent, so am I.”

  “Hold on,” piped up a lone disgruntled-looking guy in the back. “We don’t have room.”

  There was loads of room.

  “Then why did you stop?” I asked with a mixture of annoyance and confusion.

  “I’m sorry,” said the driver, who sounded like he meant it, then pulled off.

  I was speechless, and stood open-mouthed staring as the car disappeared in exactly the direction I needed to go. It seemed to me that the driver had decided to give me a lift and was eager to do so, but during the small interval between him stopping and me reaching the car, he had been talked out of it by the other passengers.

  Why did I always find hitching out of Alice Springs such a pain in the arse?

  Another hour passed and while aimlessly glancing around I spotted some hitherto unnoticed text-like graffiti on the back of a nearby road sign. I ambled over for a gander. Scribbled haphazardly in different pens was an assortment of messages from past hitchhikers.

  “Hitching for the fun of it . . . all the way from home town Toowoomba—Emily (that smelly kid), 18/2/01—OK!” “Patrick was here 12/04/99 (France),” “Jan Fanna 30/08/2002,” “Miguel was here 12/02/03 (France),” “1st hour, Playa Czech,” “Fred was here for 6 hours, remember to smile.” “Were still waiting hours,” “Us too it’s so long 12/02/03 Julien Miguel (French)” “Valentin Rechand & Julie dest hitcca French represent.”

  After these was scribbled the message: “If U R here U are doing the right thing. Take your chances! Look for the adventure and U just might find what every body is looking for.”

  I corrected some grammar and moved on.

  After somewhere in the region of four and a half hours in total, my wait finally came to an end when a white pickup truck towing a small enclosed trailer pulled up. Behind the wheel sat a guy of about forty, and this time, thankfully, there was no nonsense with him changing his mind or trying to drop me a minute’s drive down the road.

  My new companion was Mark, an army transport soldier driving from Tasmania to Darwin, where he was heading to relocate for work. To be on the move again and take the weight off my feet was bliss, and in no time we were deep into the country’s rusty colored desert heartland, a colossal expanse of nothingness. We could have been on another planet.

  Conversation filled the void, ebbing and flowing from subject to subject until Mark turned it, without prompting, to that favorite Australian conversation killer—at least with foreign visitors—asylum seekers.

  “Some of them,” he said, referring to asylum seekers trying to reach Australia by boat, “arrive with Gucci clothing and iPads. If you can afford 20,000 dollars to get here, then you’re not a refugee!”

  He was talking bollocks.

  It was reminiscent of the media smears I’d witnessed against asylum seekers when in the country back in 2001. The canard in vogue at the time was that a group of despicable Iraqi asylum seekers who were trying to reach Australia by boat in order to bleed its welfare system
dry, had thrown their own young children overboard into the perilous waters in a dastardly, sacrificial attempt at garnering the attention of the gallant Australian Navy, so as to “blackmail” them into taking them ashore. The Australian Prime Minister of the time described the asylum seekers’, behavior as “against the natural instinct” and a senator labeled the Iraqis as “repulsive” and “unworthy of Australia.” Others gleefully got stuck into those seeking the right of refuge, with the country’s immigration minister claiming their actions were “clearly planned and premeditated [with] the intention of putting us under duress,” and the leader of the opposition alleging that the asylum seekers carried out “an outrageous act.”

  None of it was true.

  The asylum seekers had abandoned ship after the nearby Australian Navy opened fire across the leaking vessel’s bows.15 (It sank the next day.) And of course there were no children “thrown overboard”—confirmed by a senate inquiry into the affair, and admitted to by the chief of the Australian navy.16 The whole charade had been used to defend the government’s anti-refugee policies, which had recently come under fire following the government’s refusal to allow a Norwegian freighter to land in the country after it had plucked 433 Afghan asylum seekers from a near-certain watery grave.17 Instead of helping the traumatized men, women, and children, the Australian government ordered commandos to storm the Norwegian freighter18 and for the Afghans to be sent to remote island detention facilities in the Pacific.19

  Even today, years after the government and media’s claims about asylum seekers deliberately throwing children into the water have been proven as false, you still hear people bandying them about. After all, it’s so much easier to put a lie out there than to retract it. So I did my best to put this case to Mark, and tried to convince him that his Gucci and iPad claims were likewise bullshit. I proceeded in as diplomatic a manner as possible. After all, I’d had a long hot wait before he’d picked me up, so I didn’t fancy seeing the lift terminated by him due to a difference of opinion. I mentioned a highly publicized case that had occurred just weeks earlier where a rickety wooden craft full of asylum seekers—the majority from Iran and Iraq—had been smashed to pieces against the rocky coastline of Australia’s Christmas Island, killing fifty on board, including women and children.

  “None of those struggling in the water for their lives or getting smashed lifeless against the rocks appeared to be decked out in the latest Gucci threads,” I suggested.

  He pondered this for a second.

  “Yeah, you might be right, mate,” he thoughtfully conceded.

  After driving for about two hours we reached Barrow Creek, a tiny township with a permanent population of around ten people. We pulled up outside a red tin-roofed pub and popped inside for a cool drink. The interior was something else. Covering the walls, and just about every available surface both in front of and behind the bar, as well as on the bar itself, were impromptu adornments left by visitors from around the world: handwritten messages, bumper stickers, foreign bank notes, postcards, signed Aussie Rules footballs, baseball caps, photographs, flags, business cards, etc. The quirky tradition of leaving behind memorabilia was apparently inspired by an old sheep shearer’s practice where, in order to ensure they had enough money for a drink the next time they happened by, itinerant shearers would write their name on a banknote and pin it to the wall.

  Other curiosities inside the pub included a collection of antique leather bush hats and several lumps of what, at first glance, appeared to be strange bits of rock, but were—if the local nursing a cold beer at the bar was to be believed—fossilized animal excrement.

  Not long after setting off again, when roughly eight miles north of Barrow Creek, we passed a notorious spot on the side of the road where, in 2001, British backpacker Peter Falconio was murdered. The case had gripped Australia, and was something that numerous people who gave me a lift, both on this and my prior hitchhiking journey through Australia, brought up to highlight the dangers in the outback.

  Mr. Falconio and his British girlfriend Joanne Lees had been traveling the Stuart highway at night in their Volkswagen Kombi van, when they were tricked into stopping by the driver of a white pickup, who indicated there was a problem with the back of their van. Falconio pulled over, as did the driver of the pickup, who came to a halt behind the Kombi. Lees stayed in the vehicle while Falconio got out to investigate, at which point Lees heard what she initially assumed was their exhaust pipe backfiring. The next thing she knew, the stranger from the pickup was pointing a gun in her face and forcing her from the van. She was bound behind her back with linked cable ties, then gagged, and bundled into the pickup truck. Soon after her assailant briefly disappeared—thought to be so he could move Falconio’s body—at which point Lees seized her opportunity, running into the dark and desolate landscape to hide among the spinifex bushes. She was quickly pursued by her abductor, who attempted to hunt her down with his dog and the use of a flashlight. Despite coming close enough that Lees could hear his footsteps, her pursuer failed to find her. After hours in hiding she emerged onto the highway and flagged down a “road train,” by which stage she had managed to slip her bound hands back behind her legs and out over her feet. Falconio’s body was never found.

  It was an interesting case, to be sure, and one I’d had a somewhat loose encounter with—in the form of getting picked up by one of the original suspects on the same stretch of road in 2001 (the year of the murder), when hitching out of Alice Springs to Darwin. Back then a car had pulled over for me in the early evening, whose driver looked a carbon copy of a widely distributed police sketch of the man wanted for the murder. Now this may sound foolhardy, but I can’t say the driver’s uncanny similarity to the wanted poster put me off accepting the lift. I’d spent nearly the entire day prior to this failing to get a ride and was down to around twenty dollars, so I urgently needed to get to Darwin to find work, otherwise I’d be fully broke. And so, I figured I’d just have to deal with any potential shenanigans from the driver if and when they came.

  Within five minutes of setting off on what was about to be a nine hundred mile overnight drive on a sparsely used road through a barren desert, the driver regaled me with an encounter he’d had at a local service station. As he was filling up, a staff member working the register had repeatedly looked his way with concern. When his tank was full the driver popped inside to use the bathroom and buy a drink, but as he was leaving several police cars came screeching to a stop in front of him, from which jumped a swarm of panicky-looking cops, all guns drawn and pointed in his direction—the staff member having tipped them off that a dead ringer for the widely circulated police sketch was currently buying gas.

  “It all ended okay in the end,” my lift back then had told me, turning to look me in the eye while displaying the faint indications of a suppressed smile. “Guess they must have believed my alibi.”

  He paused for a moment, letting the emphasis of his remark sink in.

  “Ahhhhh!” he exclaimed with a laugh. “Just kidding, mate. It all checked out fine.”

  Oh, how very funny.

  The next spot of significance that Mark and I passed was the tiny settlement of Wycliffe Well, billed as the UFO capital of Australia, an area where you could, supposedly, see something the Aborigines called the Min Min lights—mysterious balls of light said to appear in the sky and randomly hover about, before disappearing again. We passed straight through the place, which was little more than a solitary road house, only stopping some twenty miles further on, when we got to an area just off the side of the road known as Devil’s Marbles, or Karlu Karlu in the local Aboriginal dialect.

  I’d been here once before but only in the dead of night with my murder suspect friend, and for no more than five minutes. And so, as Mark and I now reached the site in the full glare of an intensely blazing sun, it was with a feeling of intrigue and excitement to finally see what the place was actually like.

  It was magnificent.

  Giant bould
ers, many smooth and near spherical in shape, ranging from the size of a car to larger than a house, were strewn across the desert landscape, piled into random heaps or perched in the most haphazard manner imaginable, balancing on tiny, delicate-looking bases. Some were cleft perfectly in two by the forces of nature, others eroded into elongated cigar-like forms, or giant soccer ball shapes, all were the color of tangerine.

  We got out on our feet and had a good walk about, scrambling over the surface of a rock formation to reach a lookout where several “devil’s marbles” perched. A wondrous view greeted us at the top, a panorama across a wide open landscape punctuated by random outbreaks of similar formations that stretched far off into the distance.

  After a good exploration of the site, we headed down to read a noticeboard in a designated camping area, where we learned that the reserve covered nearly four and a half thousand acres, and was considered a sacred site to the Aboriginals, who believe that people from their creation period, the dreaming, still live in caves among the rocks. Part of a sign included a passage from a senior traditional owner:

  They’re real people like us. You can see them. A long time ago I went with my billycan down to the creek here to get some water. One of these secret people came out and started playing with me. I couldn’t go away. My mother came and got me, saved me. After that we never camped at this place again, never. They’re kind these secret people, but they can make you mad. They can change you into one of them. They can say, “Follow me,” and you can’t go back. It happened like that for my cousin. He disappeared. The old people made a big ceremony, singing the ground and the rocks to make them let my cousin come back. We’ve lost that song now. We’ve got no songs to bring children back.