‘What’s this for?’ I’d asked Jim from the Brunswick BP.
‘Oh that’s for cleaning locusts off the car. When it gets really hot and dusty in the wheat belt sometimes there’s … locusts.’
Flash forward to six months later, and sure enough, driving through the wheat belt, on a thirty-degree-plus day with the air rippling in waves in front of us, and no other cars on the back road to Merredin, what looks like a swarm of orange mosquitoes starts to pellet the windscreen.
‘Oh, that’s the locusts,’ says Jim casually, and the scent of burning insects starts to fill the interior of the car. When we pull into a petrol station, there are thousands caught and stuck on the front grill.
‘We’d better brush them off so they don’t overheat the engine.’
Lucky I didn’t turf that filthy brush and pan, even though I’ve been gazing at it every time I sat in the passenger seat, wishing something more glamorous was in the console.
For ten minutes we brush the front grill, washing them off the side of the car with buckets of water. People stop to ask if they can borrow our brush and pan, and we oblige. No wonder the English, Irish and Scottish settlers were once so afraid of the Australian bush. We have so many bizarre insects, such as random locust plagues.
I buy a diet coke to fill my stomach until lunch, as Jim wants to show me Southern Cross, a town where all the streets are named after stars. It’s so hot and dry by the time we get there I want nothing but a chilled sandwich, a cool magazine to flick through, perhaps the sound of running water. Instead I get a dead town with nothing open except a strangely decorated pub. Definitely no glossy magazines here.
He takes me for a quick lap of the humble town, where street names such as Sirius, Mimosa and Acrux contrast starkly with the baked earth landscape and flimsy brown facades of swiftly erected houses.
He pulls in next to a hotel where he once did a gig, and I’m so ravenous I decide to settle for a packet of Twisties if that’s all they have. The dark, dingy pub is, thankfully, air-conditioned. A weathered old crone appears, looking suspicious, her face transforming when she figures out it’s Jim.
‘Look who’s here!’ her face is alight with smiles, she instantly appears younger.
‘Mel …’ Jim drawls, like he’s back with his favourite aunty.
Numerous locks of hair bagged in plastic ‘decorate’ the doorways. Whose hair is it?
‘Oh, that’s what we ask them backpacker girls to leave when they go.’ Go? ‘Back home, silly!’ Mel must think it is a nice decoration. I think it’s creepy.
A chubby English girl stomps loudly downstairs in her pyjamas, grabbing two packets of chips and heading back upstairs with a stack of DVDs. Jim tells me working in these outback WA bars is plugged as the ‘ultimate Aussie experience’ to English backpackers. ‘Apparently they love it. Many of them come over with their girlfriends, and they share the bar shifts. So if you get a Hotel California, it’s not as bad.’
‘How are you enjoying yourself?’ Jim asks the English girl who’s just dished us up toasted sandwiches.
‘Oh, like nothing else.’
Both girls want to extend their stays. It’s like the ultimate summer holiday. They’re sunburnt, they’re working, and meeting real ocker Australian men.
‘They usually end up pregnant to one of the locals. It’s just what happens.’
‘Really?’ I can’t believe these girls could find the hard-drinking, mute men of outback Australia that appealing.
‘It’s exotic, Lou. Like Crocodile Dundee.’
Just then a man walks in wearing an Akubra, smirking at the English girl. She blushes, and pours him a beer.
Onwards we drive through more locusts, until we get to Merredin just as the sun is setting orange in the sky. Sunsets in Western Australia are almost a religious experience, and perhaps one of the main reasons why, despite the less-than-ideal working conditions, I just keep going.
No man-made structure has ever impressed me like the sky on this side of Australia. The scope and magnitude seem to whisper that this life is so much more than you or I could ever dream. Think big. Don’t limit yourself. You are as huge as this world you stand in, bathed in honey-tinged light.
There’s so much more earth, space, time and hope than you could ever imagine. Don’t worry about any of it. Even if you run out of money, you’ll spend your evenings watching – this. How can you think yourself disadvantaged, poor? How can you worry that there’s not enough of anything in this world? Look. It’s right there.
The amber gold, dripping down the horizon, is the richest hue I’ve ever seen.
Merredin was the original rail link between Kalgoorlie and Perth, and still carries echoes of the town that it was. A Target sits on the main street, flanked by Video Ezy and a bakery, which we discover in the morning sells sushi. Sushi in the wheat belt. Miraculous. But the question is, do they make lattes?
I spy Jim bringing his things in from the car and he introduces me to Joe, the gay publican at the pub where he’s due to perform tonight. Symbolising how generic the outback Aussie ‘type’ is, Joe is known throughout the wheat belt only as ‘gay Joe’. I guess there’s only one gay man.
‘Hi honey,’ he says to me, offering me a drink.
‘My God, that’s a great coffee machine!’ I say, spying the shiny San Marino espresso machine glittering enticingly from behind the bar. It’s so out of place here it’s marvellous. And probably why it looks like it’s never been used.
‘Nobody ever orders anything ’cept cappuccinos, but,’ Joe says grumpily.
After catching up with Jim, and planning the night’s gig, he throws us the keys to our room upstairs, saying to come down for dinner later, on the house.
Up the back stairs we go to our lodgings for the night, finding a double bed in a hot room with a little lamp and a table. Someone’s abandoned green thongs poke out from under the bed.
‘I need some thongs,’ says Jim, happily.
We lie down for a little while until the sun has dipped so low on the horizon that a walk won’t scorch our skin, then Jim takes me for a tour of the town. The streets are surprisingly busy, and because there has been a race today, the pub across the road from the showgrounds is overflowing onto the street. When we get back to the pub, we order twin meals like we did that long-ago night in Macksville. Matching plates of fish arrive and Jim even shares a white wine with me. Soon after, firecrackers start to go off in the sky as part of the race day celebration, and the children start jumping up and down, excitedly. We stand up, hugging in the warm night, sipping our wine.
‘This is what I love about the road, Lou. One minute you’re on code red, cleaning off locusts from the car grill, the next you’re eating fresh fish on the house, watching firecrackers on a balmy night in a new town. And I’ve got a gig!’
He pulls out a balloon from his back pocket and blows me a tulip, pulling me to his chest as we watch the firecrackers in the night sky. We wander upstairs with food and wine in our bellies, and I lie on our bed looking at the stars in the night, while Jim prepares his set-list, testing the occasional gag on me.
Ah, life.
Joe knocks off work early and sits near me down the back of Jim’s show, laughing like he’s at home watching his favourite TV show. He is so relaxed, I can tell he’s been looking forward to this. He as much booked Jim for his own light relief as to bring some new punters into the pub.
Seeing that the crowd is mainly families with young children, Jim tones down his Big Night Out show to a cross between a G-rated clown party littered with double entendres to get the adults laughing too.
At around 10 pm the crowd starts thinning and the kids go home. The lone bartender is only serving a drink every ten minutes or so, packing down the shelves, restocking and cleaning and getting ready to go home. Suddenly, about twenty young people push through the door at once, coming into the stage room and joining in on the fun. Jim comes alive, as he always does when there’s a willing crowd, and they lap i
t up, texting others and calling friends. The crowd continues to grow, a mob pushing through the door in only a matter of minutes.
It all happens very quickly, but the girl behind the bar is overwhelmed, with people queuing for drinks. Joe has run to the front door to lock it and keep everyone else out. The pub across from the races had just closed, and its two hundred-odd thirsty patrons are looking to pick up the drinking where they’ve been brought to a halt.
The bartender looks at me frantically from behind the bar, and without even thinking that I don’t know how to use the till, I jump into action, pulling out UDL’s from the fridge, serving beers, and pressing numbers into the till. I make up prices when I don’t know them, ‘Five dollars?’ and they give it to me. I keep pressing ‘no sale’ on the till because it’s all about speed.
‘Over here, love, over here!’
Joe doesn’t seem to notice where I am, and I can hear Jim still performing in the next room to the sound of laughter and heckling.
Two hours later, Joe declares the bar closed. Like a clock winding down, they drift off, leaving rows of empty cans and glasses in their wake. Joe pours us all knock-off drinks, and we sit, sipping icy cold spirits in the hot night. It’s the first physical work I’ve done in a long time, and it felt good.
When we go to bed Jim says cheerfully, ‘Anyway Lou, wasn’t it nice to chat to someone with teeth?’
I laugh then ask why Joe was so panicky about the packed bar, when surely that’s what every publican wants?
‘He’s gay, Lou. Do you know what must have happened to him in these towns? No wonder he gets nervy about guys boozed-up on alcohol.’
He is the first publican I’ve seen pay Jim straight away, without the usual exhausting and repetitive discussion about how much he’s made over the bar, or inane conversation about court orders and AVOs. Joe is a reminder that where some people’s troubles make them bitter, some become better; kinder and more empathetic, generous to the other tattooed souls around them. The unpredictable effect of roads and lives, written under the skin.
I rise early, purchasing a weak, burnt coffee infused with the taste of polystyrene. I’m so far off my detox it’s not funny, but I figure when you’re living like this, you need some pleasures. Even if they do come in the form of a brown drink that bears no relationship to the creamy concoctions of my dreams.
Also, I need to fuel a run. Our detour into the wheat belt has extended for another day, to visit some old friends up the road, and although I only have a few days’ worth of clothes sitting on the top layer of all our belongings in the car, I at least left out my runners. Running in the wheat belt is as much an arm workout as a leg one. The flies are huge – not little flitty insects, but big, slow, buzzing monsters. I stretch my legs and spend the next half hour swatting them and keeping up a slow canter, ignoring curious looks from locals as I gallop down a repetitive lap of the town. I need this. Without knowing what I’m going to do for the rest of the day – sit in a car for eight hours, or eat deep-fried food, or drink beer – at least knowing I’ve done One Good Thing clears me out and reconnects me to free will. Out here on the road in my sneakers, I’m in control. And no matter where I’ve slept the night before or which part of the blokey culture has got me down, I always feel free, always feel myself, again.
Although the sun scorches my skin and melts my sunscreen as soon as I’ve applied it, the psychic relief of exercise means the payoff is worth it. Still, I’m concerned. I’ve started to notice a sun spot come up on my forehead, just where the sunscreen always drips off, and I wonder how much longer I can spend exploring this great southern land which also has the harshest ultraviolet rays in the world.
My fair skin burns easily, and I know that a day in the front seat of a car in the Australian sun is like sitting in front of a fire. No amount of sunscreen can cancel out prolonged exposure. Here I am giving advice on beauty treatments and caviar-infused ointments and I’m burning up a storm, ageing quicker than you can say ozone layer. With every leathery-skinned woman that I see out here, I flash forward to myself, in ten years, or will it be five?
I pull on my new sunglasses, worth a one-way ticket out of here, and quiet my doubts. Keep going, Lou.
Jim is waiting with the car running out the front of the pub when I get back. ‘Just got a clown gig at the primary school in half an hour. Let’s go!’
Guess I’ll shower … later?
22
Dog day afternoon
‘Maybe we shouldn’t have gone there.’
THE BUSH TELEGRAPH OF THE small town is going strong, and Jim is like Corrigin’s favourite son. When he is heading back into town for a gig, word spreads fast. His phone beeps with messages of invites to stay over, catch up, ‘Maaaate! When are ya coming?’ I brace myself for the social whirlwind again, glad I at least ran today.
Corrigin is only an hour’s drive up the highway from Merredin, but with our phones flashing ‘out of range’ almost as soon as we hit the road, I feel we are heading into a black hole. I filed the columns I had due before we left Fremantle, and was up to date on my medical articles and a couple of other columns, too. But what if an editor wants to check a fact? What if a vital piece of information comes through and I miss it?
As the car kicks up dust I scrounge for a scrap of paper to make a list of the things I need to do when we get back within civilisation, to ease my mind. Then focus on my next objective: getting rid of this sweaty stench from the run. Sometimes survival is a full-time job.
We pull in at the Corrigin service station where I head inside for a Clayton’s shower. I can’t find a clean towel so I use scratchy toilet paper as a face washer and dryer, the liquid dispenser as my soap, cleaning off the dust gathered on the unpaved road we just drove into town.
Jim calls, from outside. ‘Lou, are you in there?’
‘Yeah, I’m just washing my face!’
The door creaks open slowly and I am face-to-face with a huge, black python, wrapped around a little boy’s neck. ‘Surprise!’
I shriek so loudly the little boy runs back outside with the snake, where Jim introduces me to ‘Sonny’ and his pet python. Soon, his mother appears with a ‘G’day Jimbo’, then she proceeds to chastise her son, who still has the black python wrapped around his neck.
‘Take him back to your room, Sonny! I didn’t say you could use him to scare people!’
Corrigin has a peculiar love of dogs. With a dog cemetery filled with graves for ‘Rusty’, ‘Scamp’ and ‘my beloved mate’, dog statues and signs rise cheerfully from streets all over the town. Once a year, for the Annual Dog in a Ute competition, utes line the road out of town up past the cemetery. Jim tells a story of pulling into the service station to witness the spectacle of barking kelpies banked up in over two hundred utes. A man came out of the shop, thinking it was a funeral. ‘It must have been a popular dog.’
We pull up at the primary school and Jim is greeted by a swarm of kids. He clicks into clown mode, leaving the car running by accident and forgetting half his tools. I chase after him with the toilet paper and shaving cream, keeping track of both his key and mine.
I watch half the gig, but wanting something else to fill my brain other than the jokes I am beginning to know by rote, I walk to the centre of town, looking for a shop which sells a newspaper or a magazine. I find a takeaway food shop called Top of The Town, settling in to read the endlessly disappointing West Australian and have another weak, burnt cappuccino.
Oh for a New Yorker, right now. A cool breeze and a bit of pretentious Fitzroy conversation would really hit the spot. I search the magazine rack, hoping for something … interesting. Truth and People magazines stare back at me, cruelly.
After finishing my brown drink, I search for an internet café, but all they have to offer here is the ‘telecommunications centre’. After waiting at the counter for ten minutes, an elderly lady shows me to an archaic-looking computer in the corner, where I unsuccessfully try to connect to the internet for fifteen minut
es. No go.
The woman, not particularly fussed, tells me that Telstra broadband hasn’t hit Corrigin yet, so they’re lucky to connect at all some days. She gives me my dollar back, and I leave, feeling like I’ve missed out on a meal I was drooling over.
When Jim’s gig is finished, I collect him in the car with toilet paper and shaving cream stuck to his face, smelling like laughter and cheekiness. Again, my growling dissatisfaction is abated with a mere look at his face. The kids chase our car from their spot in the playground, not wanting the fun to end. ‘Come back, JIMBO!’
Giggles and laughter fade as we drive down the hill.
‘It was a great gig Lou, they even paid me straight away!’
‘Great!’ I say. But I’m just wondering if I can check my emails somewhere.
Corrigin, to some locals, is known as ‘Niggerock’, ‘because that’s what it spells backwards,’ someone once told Jim. The local Aboriginal tribes are all afraid of the rock, so they avoid the place, believing it cursed. Of course, the overruling attitude amongst locals is relief. Racism is so common amongst otherwise cheerful and ‘good’ folk of outback Australia. This is the paradox of the bush: talking to racist people is the only way to learn about the Aboriginal curses and superstitions. I wouldn’t have even known about the curse if someone hadn’t made that ‘Niggerock’ reference to Jim.
Jim takes me up to see the rock, a curved piece of dotted marble spanning a couple of square kilometres at the top of the town. If I’d really been sensitive, I wouldn’t have stepped on it, but my senses were off. I was tired, grumpy, and foolishly ignoring the voice which audibly said, in my head, ‘Don’t go there’. We walk in silence, overlooking the town, and an eerie feeling starts to send shivers up my spine. By the time we get off the rock, a black cloud has descended upon my mood, possibly because of two bad coffees, too much sun, or maybe because of something more. Jim doesn’t look too happy either. He’s kind of disappearing into himself, which is his version of a bad mood.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t have gone there.’
Love and Other U-Turns Page 25