by Joanne Glynn
Neil’s first real job was back in Northern Rhodesia with the Standard Bank and he was sent to their branch in Kasama, the main town of the country’s north. He’d think nothing of hitchhiking 500 miles (800 kilometres) to work, taking a shortcut through the Congo and waiting days for a lift. Sounds heroic now, and today it would be foolhardy bordering on impossible, but those were more halcyon times. Once, having been dropped off near a village, Neil had to shake the hand of every inhabitant after the headman had gathered them in a deferential line. Another time, in the middle of the bush and miles from any white settlement, any other white person in fact, he sat down to an extraordinary three-course meal with the visiting district commissioner, attended by white-gloved servants.
He moved on to work for BP Southern Rhodesia in the country’s capital, Salisbury, and while there he was called up to do National Service, a common requirement of many countries at the time. This was followed up by fortnightly territorials, and photos taken on one such training exercise show an almost unrecognisable Neil, as fit as Phar Lap and as pumped up as Rambo. He was transferred to Shell BP in Northern Rhodesia, now independent and called Zambia, but the grass of the outside world was too green to be ignored and the next year he resigned and headed for Europe. After twelve months of backpacking around there, living life to the full, finding new friends and working just long enough to finance the next leg, he thought he should knuckle down. So it was back to Africa and the University of Cape Town to study economics. More fun and games and new friends, and lectures in subjects that turned out to be pertinent and dynamic. Although the regulated life of a student was not for Neil and he threw it in after the first year, his study of African history and African government and law turned an interest into a passion and he left with a life-long interest in Africa’s failings and fortunes.
Then it was back to Europe and work in a factory in Münster, ostensibly to learn German — but something odd was happening. Neil was feeling the opposite of restless for the first time. The notion that this life couldn’t go on forever was lapping at his feet and he sensed that it was time for commitment, to put a stake in the ground. He had learnt enough to know that newly independent African countries such as Zambia would go through long and hard periods of adjustment in which the quality of life and opportunities for young white males would lessen considerably. South Africa was relatively stable then, but Neil found the regime of apartheid abhorrent and he couldn’t see himself living there with any conscience. So instead of returning to Africa he went to Australia via the United States and an old girlfriend.
It was the time of Poseidon, when Australia was experiencing a mining boom and stock exchange floors were a hotbed of soaring shares and instant fortunes. Neil walked into a Sydney stockbroking firm and asked for a job. He chose this particular one because Neil made up part of their name and perhaps because of this cheeky reason he got the job as an operator on the stock exchange floor. He made big money, and good friends on the rugby field, and it didn’t take long for him to decide that Australia was where he wanted to be; he became a citizen as soon as he was allowed.
Between then and when I met him three years later Neil had flown to Perth in a light aircraft, been stranded in Fiji during a cyclone and backpacked around New Zealand. The old need to be on the move was always there, but he compromised by staying put at the stock exchange and getting his light aircraft licence so that he could at least go flying on weekends.
In comparison, my upbringing was very pedestrian. I’d grown up in a New South Wales country town, Mittagong, at a time when a trip to Sydney with Mum, dressed in our Sunday best, took two and a half hours in a sooty steam train. We’d emerge at Central Station to the smells and sights of an altogether different, more glamorous life. It was escalators and lifts, and lunch at David Jones’ sixth-floor cafeteria. La de da. Our family went away twice a year for school holidays, always in the car except very early on, just within the reaches of my memory, when it was by flying boat from Rose Bay to Grafton. May school holidays were spent on the south coast, Uludulla and later Batehaven, from where we’d go for drives inland in search of cheese and in-breds. In the September holidays we’d drive up to Mum’s family home, a property outside Grafton, where we’d ride horses and collect bush lemons and watch proudly as Dad, originally a city boy but an ex–Light Horseman, mustered cattle with the best of them.
These commutes to holiday destinations were a necessity, a means to an end, and sitting just beneath the excitement there was boredom and bickering. Bedding stacked high under our feet in the backseat, our turns at the window being timed to the second, and stupid games that I never won. One successful year Dad bought all the kids a carton of Life Savers each and we spent the hours swapping rolls, making necklaces and rings with them, and having competitions as to who could keep one in their mouth for the longest time without chewing. I remember these trips as endurance tests but they must have cast the seed of adventure too. Back home it was a different matter: the car was our magic carpet, our escape from the mundane.
There were seven of us in the family, and on Sundays we’d all pile into the Ford Customline and go for drives around the district, exploring fresh landscapes and old back roads. Sometimes on a Saturday someone bored would say the magic words let’s go for a drive and Dad would back her out and we’d be fighting for a window seat before he could say where to? Sometimes Mum would stay at home, overcome by the business of having five young children, and we’d bring her back souvenirs of our trip — a big brown feather, a waratah (not picked by us, honest), and once, a dead wombat we’d come across bloated by the side of the road.
Dad was an avid bushwalker and would take us up tracks on Mount Alexandra, behind Mittagong, where he taught us orienteering along with his love of the bush, and of photography too. We all had cameras, and we were very proud of Dad’s movie camera, really an 8 millimetre cine camera. The older kids made home movies in which the final scene was always my younger brother on the ground in the last spasms of death. We all had bikes as well, and it was nothing to ride for miles, way out beyond the airstrip, to creep through the old cemetery or to check for zebra finches in my brother’s bird traps.
My dolls were dressed in kilts and grass skirts, and my books were picture books of bullfighters in Spain and maharajahs in Rajasthan. I’d save copies of church missionary booklets and stare at the photos of New Guinea natives with albinos among them staring back flateyed and unsmiling. In high school I loved geography but had no time for history. It was the here and now I was interested in, and who all those people out there were and what they were thinking.
I’d been in Sydney for two years and was about to sit my final radiography exams when I met Neil in a pub. He was the blind date for my flat-mate and in my ignorance I thought that his unfamiliar accent was from somewhere in the United Kingdom, like the rugby mates with him. This accent plus his unusual phrasing was a bit of a turn-on to a country girl who’d never been outside her own country, rarely even her own state, and when the flat-mate declined an impromptu visit to Luna Park my hand shot up in a flash. We still have a strip of photos taken that night: three couples crammed into an instant photo booth, me looking startled after the uncharacteristic number of beers I’d downed earlier in an attempt to appear sophisticated and worldly. We fell into bed on the second date, fell in love on a Queensland beach and were married within a year.
Early married life was not quite the bed of roses I’d imagined. Living blissfully together was overshadowed by the banalities of keeping house, sticking to a budget, watching Saturday rugby games with other new and uninterested wives. Before the wedding I’d sit in my car outside Neil’s flat under cover of darkness just to catch a glimpse of him; now I saw him every day, all the time. Where’s the romance in that? Before, I’d spend ages on my clothes and make-up before seeing him; now he’d come home to find me in hair rollers, with cucumber slices on my eyes. Neil wanted rugby training nights and I wanted flowers. He wanted to travel; I wanted to shop.
The one thing we both wanted was each other, it was just that we didn’t know how to compromise or to share.
Neil did, however, know what to do about it and twelve months after our honeymoon we both quit our jobs and headed overseas for six months. This first trip outside Australia was a bombshell for me. It was one thing reading about these places, but actually being there, surrounded by strange languages, different customs and unusual smells, not to mention the volumes of people, was the first time in my life that I felt truly intimidated. France was our first stop and after flying into Charles de Gaulle airport we caught the train in to the George V Métro stop. I was ready to come home after my first mumbled, laughable attempts at ‘Ou est rue Vernet, s’il vous plaît?’ And Neil did laugh. It was his reaction as much as my inadequacy that upset me, and I’ve hated that part of Paris ever since. My confidence improved as we went along but unfortunately my linguistic skills didn’t.
We had many arguments in these first months of our holiday as I came to grips with new environments and experiences. I suspect that I was hard work, becoming despondent when I couldn’t make myself understood and sulking when Neil’s strict adherence to budget deprived me of a souvenir or a second bottle of Coke. On top of this, being together for 24 hours a day for weeks on end was trying on both sides, and small things like ordering beans and bacon over artichokes and bacon turned into a battle of wills. But gradually, without being conscious of making compromises, we began to consider the other person and settled into a comfortable alliance. Or maybe we just got tired of disagreeing.
By the time we got to Africa four months later I believed myself to be a seasoned traveller. We arrived in Nairobi, took a room at the Norfolk Hotel and ordered something to eat. After some time I answered a knock on the door and, whoa, got the fright of my life as all I could see in the gloom was a plate of sandwiches and a row of white smiling teeth. I was going to have to get used to seeing black faces in dark places.
As soon as we’d landed in Nairobi there had been an immediate though subtle change in Neil. He became less of a cajoler and more of a teacher; he wanted to show me something special of his and share with me its wonders. I thought him confident and in control in Europe, but here he was comfortable, at home with his history, and the new rapport we’d acquired in Europe made it easier for him to convey this to me.
Our funds were getting low so we set off from Nairobi for Arusha in Tanzania using local buses, Neil and I sitting grandly up front in first class. However, not everyone appreciates the concept of user pays, and the Maasai we picked up along the way squashed into the front section with us. I remember it being close and uncomfortable, but that was a small price to pay for the excitement of sharing space with such extraordinary people. One lean, beautiful youth couldn’t take his eyes off the inappropriate red and yellow raffia sun hat I’d carried all the way from Sydney, while I constantly stole glances at his smooth chocolate head, stretched earlobes, and rows and rows of bright beaded jewellery. Then, not yet out of Kenya, we were passing through a lightly wooded area when a face appeared over the treetops — a giraffe! In the wild, just hanging around! I could hardly believe it; this was the Africa I’d only ever read about and imagined, and the moment is one that is still with me after all these years.
When we returned home we were on a tight budget and fell into the habit of driving out to Sydney’s airport on weekends to watch planes come in and fly out. This free entertainment only stopped when we ourselves began to fly off to destinations new and far away on a regular basis. At first it was a Christmas in Noumea, then five days in Vanuatu, then a return visit to Italy one year kindled a great fondness for the country and we found ourselves making an annual pilgrimage there, bracketed by stopovers in Asia. We discovered that as soon as we were in the air we fell into the companionable state of mind forged in Europe and cemented in Africa on that first trip, and that in itself became an incentive to pack our bags and head off. On the canals in Venice, in the streets of Hanoi, it would all come together again and we’d experience the world from a world of our own. Kurt Vonnegut describes it as a nation of two, and that’s how it often feels on our charmed journeys through foreign lands.
Now here we are in Africa, and the prospect of twelve months together in constant co-existence fills me with excitement and optimism.
NO OFFENCE TAKEN
We leave Cape Town after lunch, having squashed everything we possess into the Troopy. It’s just an hour or two’s easy drive to Paternoster, a Cape Coloured fishing village up on the west coast, and the contrast with Cape Town is dramatic. It’s isolated and starkly attractive, with whitewashed low-lying buildings on a treeless inlet and flat blue surf stretching along the bay. The day is almost perfect as we walk along the beach to fishermen cleaning and salting their snoek, and I see more of those disconcerting very pale fox-green eyes I’d noticed in Coloureds on the boats in Cape Town. In fact, apart from a handful of white locals and a similar number of tourists, all we see are the distinctive flat, round faces of the Cape Coloureds.
The predominant population group in the Western Cape Province, Cape Coloureds have an ancestry originating in the mid to late 1700s when breeding and intermarrying existed between the local Khoisan peoples, the Dutch settlers and the slave labourers they brought to South Africa from places such as Madagascar, Malaya and Indonesia. From what I’ve seen they are a modest and hard-working people who enjoy life and keep to themselves, but under apartheid and then since independence they have become increasingly marginalised, and their rights and livelihoods are constantly being reviewed. Just before our arrival the South African government withdrew all fishing licences then re-issued them to blacks as part of Black Empowerment, a move that takes even more rights from the Cape Coloureds who have traditionally been the fishermen of the Cape. Adding to their woes, the crayfish season has officially ended and here in Paternoster they can be seen hanging around town trying to sell illegal catch for a bit of income.
At our little rented beachside house we sit on the verandah and watch the sun set over the natural rock breakwater with a glow bright with purples and pinks. Young children come to the door and ask shyly if we’d like to buy long chains of beachbleached shells, and dogs trot back from the water’s edge, wet and sandy and looking pleased with themselves. We befriend a lean black dog we’ve watched on the beach; it’s his beach, and he’s been out there all day chasing off seagulls, moving long stems of kelp around and escorting other dogs along his stretch. Beach Blackie we call him and he only ever runs or trots. He belongs to everyone and no one, but for the time being he’s ours.
Neil buys Beach Blackie a rissole at a Pick n Pay supermarket. It’s eaten with surprising delicacy and in return we’re given protection for the rest of the day. Things turn from cute to ugly in no time as he stations himself up on the front deck for maximum visibility and barks loudly at anyone, black, white or Coloured, walking past our door. He growls at cars driving past and when there’s another dog in the backseat BB practically attacks the vehicle. One driver shouts and waves a fist in our direction. BB comes back to us jaunty and eager for praise, and we don’t have the heart to reprimand him. But someone else must have taken the problem into their hands because BB suddenly disappears and we don’t see him again, not even on the beach.
We don’t need to say it but we’re both totally relaxed and happy to be here, and tingling at the prospect of happening on a hundred more special places like this in the months to come. We rouse ourselves and wander down the beach for dinner in a converted old beach shed where the highlight is a commercial hash brown dead centre in my smoked salmon salad.
We head west to the Cederberg, an area of soaring rock formations and deep, fertile valleys where we’ve read mountain leopards still roam, protected by a conservancy of local farmers. On approach the road passes through Citrusdal and, not surprisingly, this pretty town in a lush valley is surrounded by green citrus orchards. At a stop in town to pick up diesel and provisions a white down-and-outer e
yes the Troopy, approaches us and says, ‘Hello, welcome. From the United States?’ When we say, ‘No, Australia,’ he responds apologetically, ‘Oh forgive me. No offence.’
It’s a beautiful drive through the Cederberg Mountains, and the lodge we’ve booked is dwarfed by the folds of a valley of spectacular scenery. Already there’s a feeling of isolation, that the land holds dominance over the scattered human population. In the evening we walk along a creek bed in the fading light accompanied by Stompy, a large floppy mastiff whose face is in a permanent smile after a run-in with a porcupine, and he’s still with us at dinner where I’m served an avocado cocktail with a Jatz biscuit in the middle. At this rate I’ll be off salads for the rest of the trip.