by Luke Ryan
Everyone gets excited and goes reaching for their cameras because it’s a good-looking mountain. One time, when we were stopped in the car park and I explained how it wasn’t actually Uluru, I saw a Swiss couple put away their camera without even taking the photo. I was outraged. ‘Guys, it’s the same mountain! It’s the same mountain it was thirty seconds ago when you were all in a tizzy about it!’
But people want the rock they paid for. You can’t just go springing a mountain on people and expecting them to fall in love with it.
The last hour before sundown is a beautiful time in the outback, Uluru or no. A sudden aching softness comes to a landscape that just five minutes ago seemed barren and unrelenting. I always felt beers were important at a time like that, because you wanted everyone to slow down for what was going on. You could tell the non-drinkers, because they were impatient for something to happen. (Like, what? Uluru miraculously spewing lava?)
Sometimes, if I felt the whole thing could benefit from a sense of occasion, I would tell them that this was the very sand dune from which William Gosse (a white dude) and his party first laid eyes on Uluru. People really liked that. They oohed.
‘But couldn’t they have seen it from the sand dune just over there?’
There’s always one.
‘You raise a good point, madam.’
I never had qualms about butchering the European version of things. For one thing, most of the best places are just named after some dude. What are you going to do, stand in front of that beautiful rock with its thirty thousand-year-old cultural history and talk about So-and-so Ayers who once governed South Australia and had certain hobbies?
One should never let facts get in the way of a good story, because no one remembers facts anyway. The best tour guides will turn an explanation into a story that’s entertaining, even to someone who cares nothing for the subject matter.
Then you’d hear the spiels of other guides: ‘Now, the canyon is made up of two types of sandstone: the Mereenie sandstone, which is 400 million years old, and the Carmichael sandstone, which is 360 million years old …’
If there was ever a more boring sentence in the English language, I didn’t finish reading it. No one’s heard of the Mereenie or the Carmichael sandstone. Furthermore, no one can properly imagine how old 400 million years is, or, for that matter, 360 million years. What exactly are the tourists being offered that they can’t get themselves with an encyclopaedia and a tranquilliser dart?
You have to start early in the mornings. If you let the tourists sleep in and start the walks too late in the day, it will take them a whole day to recover from the heat. The desert is alive in the early mornings, more alive than most can imagine. As the morning goes on, the shadows shorten and the sun drains the colour from the trees. Eleven am brings the death of hope. There’s no more birdsong, just the sounds of buzzing flies and sobbing. You explain this to your passengers well in advance; you want them to feel like they have made the choice (though there is no choice), so they feel like mavericks in the early morning, and not like they’ve been bullied into it.
The other thing we did in the summertime was sneak people into the five-star hotel pool. It was beautiful: shady trees, deckchairs and waiters delivering poolside cocktails – luxuries like that are wasted on the rich. I used to explain the layout of the place to my crew and arm everyone with elaborate backstories to explain how such a ragtag bunch had come into enough money to afford a five-star hotel. Then I would drop them off in groups of twos and threes at various locations and staggered intervals. I’m not sure any of this was entirely necessary, but it helped with the sense of occasion.
The Australian tourism industry is overrun with white bread and overcooked sausages. If you learn to cook healthily for twenty-one people, with a bit of panache and without it looking like a bucket of slops, you will go a long way. You can use economies of scale to provide much better meals than they could ever manage on their own.
It almost (almost) doesn’t matter what you show them during the day, if you feed them well at night. I always carried a packet of Tim Tams with me for when things got rough, the way a cop sleeps with a gun under his pillow.
German girls will commit heinous crimes for Nutella at breakfast time. Europeans in general will not eat white bread, and you shouldn’t bother making them try. The smallest girls from Taiwan and Korea will eat twice as much as any man. And although some Italian men might be incapable of opening a tin of tomatoes, they will nevertheless have strong and vocal opinions on how to make the bolognaise. These should largely be ignored.
On the last night of our tour, we would cook up a big gourmet barbecue at Uluru and have a candlelit dinner. Once everything was ready to go I would hit the lights, plunging us into a darkness broken only by the flickering of candles, and then play Marvin Gaye.
The real difficulty on those nights was not the cooking of the dinner, but the getting people to eat it. They all wanted to take photos of it: sometimes there’d be so many people jostling at the end of the table that there was no one left to photograph. Just me, sitting there like a schmuck, and a sixty-year-old Frenchwoman saying, ‘I never did understand Facebook.’
The catering should never look difficult. Some of my worst tour incidents were precipitated by struggles with over-extravagant (and complicated) meals. I still cringe to think about the night I wrapped quails in sage and prosciutto, and spent two hours trying to balance them over hot coals in a pot-belly stove. The problem was this: no one wants to see their guide running around like a desperate MasterChef contestant. It’s unbecoming.
There is a subtle but important difference between taking care of your passengers and serving them. When they see you running around like I did with the quails, it feels like servitude. And in gaining a servant, they lose a leader. It can spoil a group. You’re taking on expectations that can never be met, and they will resent you for it in ways they don’t entirely understand. They will start blaming you for the flies, the weather, the mediocre sunsets.
Two days after the quail incident, I was still feeling the shame of a bad parent. And then, forty kilometres out of Glendambo, I started smelling burning oil. It had already been a trip filled with mechanical problems: we’d blown a heater hose and had to swap buses; we’d had flat tyres and an air-conditioning system that wheezed like an emphysema patient trying to get out his last words. Our exhaust had broken in two places and was held together with an olive oil tin. I was just trying to keep it all together. When I smelled the oil I almost didn’t stop – by this stage the tourists and I were engaged in high-level psychological warfare, and I didn’t want to lose any more ground – but it smelled like the end of days.
I got out and trudged down the back. The whole underside of the bus and the front of the trailer were sprayed in oil. I opened the engine block and it was absolute carnage; it looked like a Tarantino movie in black and white. But I could see exactly where the oil had come from: a big round hole that should have had a cap screwed over it. I knew this because I’d taken it off the night before to top up the oil. And now we’d lost all of it through the same hole. By some miracle, the cap was still sitting there upside down right where I’d left it. I dropped the cover on the engine block and cleared my throat.
The tourists looked at me with deep suspicion.
‘Folks,’ I said, ‘we’ve got ourselves an oil leak.’ (Which was technically true.) ‘In the gasket region.’ (Which was not.)
There were outraged groans. Someone threw his St Christopher medal out the window.
‘Now listen,’ I said, holding up my hands, ‘I’m pretty sure I can fix the leak.’
I was sure I could fix the leak, insofar as screwing the cap back on would pretty much do the trick, but there was still the problem of the oil.
We had just enough left to make it to Glendambo. While everyone was preparing lunch, I topped it up and told them I was off to fix the leak. I parked the bus behind the roadhouse and sat there drinking a Gatorade and reading Mob
y-Dick. I called my mechanic friend in Adelaide and asked her if she knew enough about gaskets to explain to me how I might pretend to have fixed one. Then I tastefully applied some engine grease to my face so it’d look like I’d been busy, and drove back around to the lunch spot. I was beeping the horn and hanging out the window: ‘Guys, I fucking fixed it!’ And it really felt like I had. On some tours you will claim any victory you can in order to get you home.
When you get a bad group, whether it’s your fault or theirs, the first day or two can be funny. It can be entertaining to see the lengths some people will go to just to have a terrible time. But by the third day you can’t remember who your friends are or if you even have any. You go looking for love wherever you can find it.
The girls who like you will often watch you in the rear-view mirror while you’re driving. Sometimes they’re wearing sunglasses, which makes it hard to tell. I know a guide who, if he wanted to find out, would yawn deliberately into the rear-view mirror. He could tell by people’s psychosomatic responses (aka yawning back) who was watching from behind their sunglasses.
I tried the yawning thing once, but concerned passengers kept coming up to the front of the bus and suggesting we do singalongs or asking me if I wanted to stop for coffee. The gibber plains stretched out interminably.
‘Where?’ I said. ‘Where would we stop?’
I can speak fluent German. I thought it would be a secret weapon, which I could use for good if I wanted to or evil if I needed to. In six years of tour guiding, I almost never eavesdropped on anything interesting.
At Uluru sunsets there was a lot of ‘Ja, I have been thinking the same thing! Why does he cut the tomatoes so thick at lunchtime? Sometimes they are thicker than the bread even!’ What sounds like complaining is really just Germans having a good time. They love bonding over logistical mishaps. It can really kill a good story, though, because they’re always laughing at the wrong bit. You start off setting the scene, explaining how you were in Sydney this one time, and you were caught in the rain because the bus was late, and suddenly the Germans are all falling about with laughter. ‘I know, I know!’ they say, with tears streaming down their faces. ‘The buses are always late!’
At Uluru I was doing some paperwork outside the cultural centre’s gift shop. It was late afternoon but hot still, and the flies were getting their second wind. I was sipping a cold lemonade.
A German girl had been giving me grief for five days straight. Some people are just hard to live with. She plonked herself down across the table from me and started staring at my drink. Her friend sat down too.
Without taking her eyes off my drink, the girl said to her friend, in German, ‘Look at that drink.’ Then she let out a little moan. ‘Ooooooh, what would you give for a drink like that? I’d give anything for a drink like that.’
I was genuinely confused: They’re $3.50 in the same gift shop you just came out of. You don’t have to give anything.
Her moaning was making me uncomfortable, on account of its rising pitch.
I said, ‘Listen, would you like the rest of my lemonade?’
She looked at me suddenly with wide eyes and clutched the drink with both hands. ‘No, I couldn’t. I shouldn’t. Maybe I could …? Can I?’
Then, as she brought it to her mouth, she turned to her friend and said, in her native tongue, ‘Wait. Do you think he’s diseased?’
Something broke inside me that day. I jumped up and started screaming at her in German. I mentioned unmentionable things. I said, ‘Holy Christ, after everything I’ve done for you today, after all the things, the sneaking you into the five-star pool at great personal risk etc. now this?!’
She was pleasantly surprised.
‘Oh! Why didn’t you tell us? You’re German! That’s why you have such good ideas, like the pool!’
Usually I wouldn’t let on until the fifth or sixth day, when we’d just got back from hiking, and people were hot and exhausted and thinking of other things. I would plug the microphone in and just start giving the spiel in German.
On the last morning we’d hike Kings Canyon together. The group would climb to the top of ‘Heart Attack Hill’, essentially the final summit. They’d look back across the desert plains and feel – justifiably so, in some respects – that they had survived the outback. And they’d feel like they did it together. A long-distance tour is so different from a day tour. The group takes on a character all of its own, and has its own hand in shaping the trip’s narrative. Four hours later, we’d traipse out of the canyon, and though they wouldn’t all be friends, even the villains and the sullen damsels would have played their part.
It’s only five hours from Kings Canyon to Alice Springs, but it was going to be a tough drive: we’d had a 5am start and hiked four hours in the heat. I got everyone going with the coffee and the French toast, which the French couple insisted was just toast, then snuck off into the bushes for a power nap. I told the group we’d pack up camp and hit the road by 11.30.
Next thing I knew I woke up groggy and confused to the sound of the bus horn. Somehow it was 11.30 already and I’d missed everything. I jumped up and ran back to camp. I was irritated that they were beeping the horn instead of doing anything useful. When I got outside I saw that they were all just sitting there on the bus. ‘For the love of God, guys,’ I started to yell, ‘we’ve got to pack this place up!’
And then I saw the swags tied down on the roof. I walked into our hut and everything was gone. The food boxes, the bags, the cooking equipment had all been packed into the trailer; the place was swept up and wiped down. It had never looked so good. They’d even scrubbed out the fridge. The only thing left in the place was a cup of fresh coffee with my name on it. They were beeping the horn because everything was done. It was taken care of, and all they needed was me.
Originally published in The Monthly, June 2015
FELICITY WARD
10 Reasons Mary Poppins is a Jerk
❛If you take the sound away, the film is pretty much ninety minutes of Mary Poppins rolling her eyes. I’m surprised she didn’t pull an optic nerve.❜
I get it: Mary Poppins is a beloved children’s film. It’s what warm fuzzies are made of. But after a ‘movie night at Aunty Flick’s house’ I realised, in front of my adoring niece, that there was something harrowing about this film: Mary Poppins is a total jerk.
Now, before you rush to the defence of everyone’s favourite rose-cheeked, Super(califragilisticexpialidocious) Nanny, let me tell you what I’m on about.
1. Her judgy-ness
The title of this movie could easily be changed to Mary Poppins and What She Thinks of Your Stupid Face. Mary must be a banker, because she keeps putting her two cents in about how everyone would be better off if they were just more like her. If you take the sound away, the film is pretty much ninety minutes of Mary Poppins rolling her eyes. I’m surprised she didn’t pull an optic nerve.
Scene from (my) Director’s Cut:
Mary is groaning, bent down, cupping a hand over one eye. Young child, Michael, enters, concerned.
MICHAEL: What’s wrong, Mary Poppins?
Mary, pointing at her eye socket.
MARY: Awww … owww … I was just better than everyone.
Fin.
I get the same feeling watching Morgan Freeman. Don’t get me wrong, the man can act. But in every role, he has that same I-don’t-want-to-say-I-told-you-so smile, and I’m like, ‘Yes you do, Morgan Freeman. That’s all you want to say.’
Unlike Morgan, Mary loves pointing it out. If it’s not their outfit, it’s their tardiness. If it’s not their tardiness, it’s that they’re a two-dimensional animated character singing a song about a horserace. Nothing is ever enough.
Within the first five minutes of getting what is obviously a much sought-after au pair job, she looks around her new bedroom and snarks, ‘Well, it’s not exactly Buckingham Palace.’ No, Mez, it’s not. And I don’t think the Queen advertises for nannies through the Trading Post, or o
n handwritten letters penned by barely literate children.
If those two kids, Jane and Michael, weren’t as dumb as two stones, I’d be worried her mentorship was doing long-term damage. Fortunately they rarely have a thought between them for the duration of the film.
2. Her martyr complex, and the poor sods she takes it out on
He’s a street artist, he’s a chimney sweep, he’s a one-man band. He is: Dick Van Dyke. Despite the many jobs he holds (which most parents would call a ‘red flag’), he has a heart of gold and a tooth of coal. All he wants to do is show Mary and the kids that he can take them on a magical adventure to another dimension. Wide eyes, big dreams, Bert.
Now we can all agree that transcending the space-time continuum is a difficult thing for anyone to pull off, yeah? I’d say … harder than folding a fitted sheet; not as hard as trying to understand why anyone would go on that show Embarrassing Bodies. (They could have a sore elbow but we’ll still somehow end up seeing their anus!)
But Dick Van Dyke tries his best anyway, because he wants these dear people to have a day out to remember. He doesn’t succeed, bless his cotton socks, but at least he tried … right? Right, Mary? He tried? It’s the trying that counts, isn’t it?
Nope. Enter Martyr Poppins, and she is not impressed. She waltzes in, grabs Dick’s hand. Grabs the kids’ hands. Sighs. ‘Why do you always complicate things that are really quite simple?’ (Um, JERK ALERT.) Shoots him a look that says, ‘I am too old for this shit’, and performs what can only be described as the most resentful magic trick of all time.
Well good on you, Mary. Not everyone is a natural Time Lord, you know? The only thing Dick Van Dyke owns that travels well is his accent; it’s like a cockney vinyl record left to melt in the sun. Even watching it now, I can barely make out a word he says. If only you could get frequent flyer points for an accent. He’d be a platinum member by now, able to fly himself away from Mary Poppins.