The crowd come freshly showered from the communal toilets at the caravan park, from long, lonely drives on the road to and from Kununurra, and from a town which rarely plays host to the original Aussie swagman come to liven up one evening of their lives. They have no idea he slept on the dirt out the back last night. They sport their best flannel shirts, gulping in Saturday-night gumption, from teenage couples on a date to grey-haired nomads who’ve pulled into the attached caravan park for the night. Lone truckers flank the bar, arriving solo but soon are laughing in unison while the beer flows from tap to glasses rising in between gags.
‘Seen this bloke before?’ I overhear one guy.
‘Yeah mate, up in Katherine … bloody ripper … unbelievable.’
I walk the crowd, nervously collecting the ten-dollar cover-charge from everyone in the room except the staff. They’re all about to spend at least seven times that on drinks over the bar, so they open their wallets easily, too happy to send some money back into the pockets of a ‘top’ bloke who sings for his supper.
On the tingling door to the cashier, an A3 poster flaps in the wind:
JIMBO
SATURDAY NIGHT 7.30
$10 COMEDY – ROAD STORIES – MAYHEM.
The poster is his cheeky smile under a mop of uncombed hair, a photo I’d taken three thousand miles ago under a forty-degree Kalgoorlie full-moon. Spot on seven thirty Jimbo marches up to the stage and launches his attack, after mock-serious confirmation that the crowd knows his comedy is ‘R-rated’.
‘You cunts know what you’re in for?’ He’s commanding up there, sensing a rough crowd, no city gentility here, he needs to let them know he’s in charge from the get-go or they’ll eat him alive.
‘Hey, are you two rooting?’ he asks a young couple who’ve just finished their steak and chips.
‘Don’t pick on her, she’s going out with my son!’ yells a middle-aged woman sitting at a table drinking with some friends. A truck driver pokes his head inside the bar after refuelling on the long road to Derby, decides to stick around, handing a crumpled ten-dollar bill to me. Less than a minute later, after the asinine punchline, he’s clinking a beer with a fellow truckie, grinning like a toothless angel, part of the rising energy of a room full of Aussie strangers drinking, yelling and laughing. The jokes get quicker, and the crowd goes wild, the electrified energy continues for over two hours well into the hot night. Jim banters with the crowd over sex, his travels around the country, and basically a ruder version of the same topics that worked in Sydney.
To drive past the roadhouse, all you’d see is a room full of happy, howling, eighty-odd people bonded by the spectacle they’re both witnessing and taking part in. Laughter is the common denominator and Jim will pull anything out of his arsenal to get it.
Being at the gig is like taking a wild rollercoaster ride with a wayward angel. He dips and weaves like a mastermind, shocking the crowd with ludicrous punchlines too crass to be believable, and achieving his ultimate goal: creating head-shaking guffaws before the intellect can butt in and interfere. It’s magical to watch, everyone shaking their heads with silly grins on their faces. I rise and fall with the crowd. After he’s scaled the peak of rancid humour, he announces that he’s available for children’s clown parties at the end.
‘Is he fuckin’ for real?’ a trucker guy asks me, knowing we travel together.
I nod. ‘He’s really good with kids.’
After a hot, fitful night’s sleep in the donga, I shower in the communal block, where a grey-haired lady with a bun is applying her make-up at the sink.
‘Did you go to the comedy last night?’
‘Yeah, I did,’ I say to her.
She’s shaking her head, still smiling. ‘It was a bit – you know. Rude. But I couldn’t stop laughing.’
When I get back to the room, Jim is chatting to a couple next to his car, who beg to have their photo taken with him. We walk into the shop to a crowd of cheers and the truckers from the night before are enjoying bacon and eggs before they head to their next destination.
‘JIMBO!’
‘Guys!’
His new friends. He trades banter and more gags, gets road tips for the next leg of the drive, and tells them where he’s heading for the next gig. The shopkeeper cooks us both a plate of eggs and plonks them on the plastic table, ‘on the house’, and the truckers nod to me, one of the group, because I’m with him. It’s like his country, his tribe. We hop back into the car, kick up a kilo of dust, and start driving further north.
‘Next gig’s in Turkey Creek. Bring it on!’
28
Kimberley sky
‘You a traveller …’
WE DRIVE THROUGH MILES OF dust, making the six hundred kilometres to Hall’s Creek in just under six hours. In Derby we stop quickly to stretch on the pier, witnessing the vast windy peak between two ports. Boab trees and an eerily vast landscape announce the Territory to my eyes. This is rogue country. Wild and untamed, impossible to understand immediately. By now, the sun is beating down and I can feel my face frying, sunscreen pointless, dripping down my cheeks in sweaty rivers as soon as I apply it. The air conditioner is fanning us with recirculated dust and guzzling more petrol than we are already churning through.
The next leg of our journey is a few clown shows in Aboriginal communities. In Hall’s Creek, Turkey Creek and Fitzroy Crossing, Jim performs to the primary school kids, high school kids and anyone else who happens to be walking past or standing around. I skip his first clown show, deciding to catch the second one after I’ve spent some much-needed time in the interior of a cool shop. The heat is unbearable, and I’m desperately thirsty, even though we have been steadily drinking water all morning. I walk into a little tourist shop, while overweight adolescent Aboriginal women yell at their children in prams on the street. There are a lot of young children roaming the streets of this town. It reeks of sadness, sickness, desolation.
Inside, I queue at the counter to order something. Fried food at the bain-marie is overpriced beyond belief. Soft drinks are four dollars. Two Aboriginal women stuff cans of coke in their sweater pockets as I pull out some water. The white woman behind the counter snarls at me when I order a cappuccino. ‘That’ll be four dollars.’
Her hand is out before I’ve even opened my wallet.
After a wander around the town which is young mother central, I head to the high school, to catch the end of the show. Grumpy kids are pushing each other as Jim tries futilely to get their attention with some playful fun. The teachers are screaming over the top of him at the students, until he distracts them with some chair-balancing on his chin.
As we drive up the road out of town later, a pregnant girl smoking and pushing a pram looks through our window, suspiciously. I feel guilty that we get to leave, and she doesn’t.
Up on the edge of the Northern Territory, the remoteness of where we are makes familiar faces all the more sweet. After I interviewed them over the phone in Newcastle a couple of months ago, Sammy and Doug are good friends of mine now, too. So when Jim tells me that they’re doing some teaching work outside Fitzroy Crossing, I can’t wait to see them. They’ve got their tour bus going and we’re meeting them at the ‘white’ hotel for dinner.
Sure enough, we pass wandering Aboriginal people, physically so different to the tribes we’d seen in Hall’s Creek, but when we go into the pub to meet our friends, only white-skinned faces peer up from their beer. As we sit outside sharing laughter and stories, a young Aboriginal man gets refused entry for wearing thongs. I look at Jim’s feet: he’s wearing thongs.
After a buffet meal and road stories, we go back to their bus, parked in the silent camping ground nearby for more music and drinks. They have kitted it out so fantastically it even has a kitchen, a bed ‘room’ down the back, a booth to eat in, and a record player. These guys do the road in style.
Jim lays down the swag next to the bus and we fall asleep as soon as our bodies hit the ground. I dream of stars and space, a tim
e which has no measure and a journey that never ends.
In the morning, I tag along to Jim’s clown show at Fitzroy Crossing Primary School in an extremely good mood thanks to Sammy’s delightful coffee-making skills.
‘You know how we say you should come to school every day because sometimes very fun things happen?’ The principal is announcing at assembly, while Jim sets up his leaf blower and other props on the other side of the yard. ‘Well today we have a real clown come to visit!’
The kids aged from five to sixteen squeal and giggle excitedly, falling into line two by two to move to where the ‘clown’ visitor is waiting. I walk with them, two little Aboriginal kids chasing me and asking me questions.
‘Where you from?’ says a little boy.
‘Um – Melbourne.’
‘Hey – she from Melbourne!’ he proudly announces to the others. ‘Corrine’s sister been there!’
Jim told me once, Aboriginal culture values where you’re from more than what you do. The little five-year-old looks up at me, like he approves. ‘You a traveller.’
He slips his hand into mine and innocently accepts me as a new friend, giggling loudly during Jim’s show and beaming up at me, like I’m part of his family.
Sleeping in the open in this part of Australia is the only way to savour it, and I’m suddenly more thankful than ever that Jim would always choose roughing it over luxury. Galaxies of stars made their beds in the sky and a symphony of animals starts up in the black night. We sleep perched on the edge of a gorge after a campfire dinner with Sammy and Doug, drifting in and out of dreams to the cooling sound of running water, metres away down the cliff.
When we wake, animal tracks litter the path around our swag. We pack quickly, leaving Sammy and Doug as the sun is just cracking open in the cooling sky, and hit the road at pace. Jim rolls up the swag, and I vaguely comprehend what looks like crocodile tracks, right beside where we slept.
If I needed a reminder that Jim is living his rightful purpose, it has come in the past week. His glory comes in unexpected places: crowds of disparate souls laughing in ramshackled houses and schools, his peculiar mix of disconnection from society and a well-garnered swag of jokes and anecdotes to appeal to every age and background.
I start to get an eerie feeling as if I’m watching a documentary, and the ending won’t have me in it. How could it? I can’t live like this forever, as beautiful as the Australian landscape, lands within lands, tribes and vistas within vistas, I’m different to Jim. The more time I spend with other tribes the more confirmation I have of where I’m from, like the little boy who’d asked me just this morning. My first home says a lot about me.
But when anyone asks Jim where he’s from, he says, now, ‘I’m homeless,’ sounding proud. He’d stopped saying Sydney a year ago. The road defines him, more than any one place ever could. But me? I’m yearning for Melbourne, like a house I need to return to.
After a gig at an Aboriginal settlement run by missionaries, we drive for a hundred kilometres so we can both check our messages. We stop at Argyle diamond mine and I attempt to connect my internet in the car. Outside my window a massive orange snake slithers past like a moving coil, set to its own private agenda. The internet doesn’t work, but my phone does.
‘Ah – Cindy – it’s me. Louisa. Look my internet is down at home and I just thought I’d check you hadn’t sent anything.’
‘Oh, it’s funny you should call. Actually I need you to get me a quick interview with a designer. Do you have anyone in mind that you could call?’
Standing next to a diamond mine, staring at ochre mounds of ant hills and earth, wearing a pair of shorts and another old singlet, I rack my brain for what the fashionistas will be thinking about this week.
‘Jim? We need to find a petrol station that has a computer. Pronto.’
After interminable hours travelling, we end up at Wyndham, the northernmost tip of Western Australia just before the border to the Northern Territory. Jim knows the couple who run the local motel, and remembers an internet café down the road in a kit home.
I type one word in Google and wait three minutes for the search to finish, unless it has disconnected before it finds what I’m looking for. I make a few phone calls, amid strange looks from the woman behind the counter and the guy on the next computer, using my city voice and begging someone from an up-and-coming fashion label to send me photos of her work. Eventually, the column is filed, and the photos emailed as well. It only took an hour. I walk back to the motel and Jim is laughing at the bar, eating a barra burger.
‘Done?’
‘Done.’ But for how long?
Jim has gone into the milk bar while I sit outside in the starry night awaiting a chocolate delivery, when I push through the tinkling door to change my request from a Crunchie to a packet of Smarties. There’s no-one at the counter, but the sound of singing and laughter coming from out the back. Jim’s in the back room looking at photos of the owner who once toured with Elvis. The eccentric old man who works behind the counter is so caught up in his story, he intermittently breaks into song.
Jim is nodding, listening, nodding. He doesn’t appear at all bored. He stays, laughing and trading jokes for songs with the old guy. I throw some coins in his hand, slip back to our motel room, with the vision of the milk-bar owner laughing like a ten-year-old in my head.
Jim doesn’t get back to our motel room for two hours.
29
The wedding from hell
‘Do we have to get back in that truck?’
‘JIMBOOOOOO!’
I’ve woken to the sound of a drunk man on the other end of the phone line. If he’s awake, Jim always answers the phone, a far cry from my screening procedure.
It’s Ned, urging him to ‘Hurry the fuck up and get to Katherine! We’ve got a wedding to piss up!’
‘When’s the wedding?’
‘Day after tomorrow.’
I’ve never met this couple, but like so many of Jim’s ‘road’ friends it all seems to have started with a gig somewhere, an offer of accommodation, which soon turned into a new relationship. Ned has proposed to the ‘love of his life’, Sophie, and because Jimbo performed at the gig where they first met, just a year ago, he’s going to be best man. He gets a look in his eye like it’s a true honour, and I think, quietly, Jim has no idea how much of a breath of fresh air he must be to these small-town men. No wonder they consider him a friend for life. He makes them laugh, gives them companionship and listens to all their troubles, giving them none of his own. Who wouldn’t want him to be their best man?
We pull into Katherine late at night to the tune of cane toads singing, their rotting carcasses splayed across the bitumen in hundreds of hit and runs across the road. We pay for a night at a youth hostel, and Jim leaves early in the morning to find a suit-hire shop.
‘Jim, do I pay for another night, or do I pack up?’ I call, at check-out time. I haven’t heard from him since he left.
‘Ah – can’t talk, Lou, I’m trying on a suit.’ I can hear Ned’s bellowing voice behind him. He sounds like he’s drunk. At 10 am.
I pay for two more nights, then change my mind, and say, ‘Actually, just one.’
All I know is that the wedding is tomorrow. I don’t know how long we are supposed to be here or when we are leaving or where the wedding is. With nothing nice to wear to a wedding in this heat, I search for a clothes shop, and settle on a boutique in the main drag next to a Subway shop. The heat is so dry I guzzle my two-litre water bottle on the way back to our room.
I decide to entertain myself by checking my email at a coin-in-the-slot internet café. My computer doesn’t connect to the internet from the hostel. There’s only one request, this time from an editor I’ve never heard of at the same paper. She wants me to write two hundred words on a ‘look’ for the season. I’d browsed through some magazines in the supermarket buying water bottles, so I have an idea.
Layer skirts have made their official revival after a decade
spent lurking in the closets of late-eighties Kylie fans …
It’s become second-nature now, writing on the fly. I tap away on keys gluey with spilt coke and potato-chip crumbs, save my document, give it a quick skim, then press send. It’s still only two in the afternoon, and I have no idea what Jim is doing. So I jog back to our room, pack a backpack, and go for a hike to the Nitmiluk National Park.
The park is aswim with lizards, birds and dinosauric-looking reptiles. I’m not talking a few stray lazy geckos, I mean big, scaly beasts akin to the bearded dragon we’d seen all those miles ago in Iron Knob. God I love Australia. Terror Australis.
Not for the faint-hearted. You share this space with a thousand poisonous, venomous, scary creatures. And that’s the beauty.
I hike to the steep peak of a lookout point, crunching through straw-like leaves and ancient gums. Drawing out to a sudden plateau, the steep drop gives me vertigo like I got when I stood on the cliff edge of the Nullarbor. Down below me is a two-kilometre river dropped in between a carved gorge. Crocodiles lazily bob down the river, sunning themselves on rocks in the direction of the water. Nothing short of an ancient earthquake could have carved such a dramatic cut in the earth.
Nothing but violence could make something so natural so jaw-droppingly beautiful.
Back at the car park, I call Jim. The sun is about to set, and I’m hoping he can pick me up. ‘Babe, I’ll be there in twenty!’
He pulls up driving Ned’s truck. Ned, a tall, stocky man clasping a beer, burps into his forearm before extending it to shake my hand. I’m covered in sweat and melted sunscreen, in dirty clothes.
Love and Other U-Turns Page 30