Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  We never went to the beach once.

  We did go ice skating, though – in fact Roo’s entire family squeezed into Rusty for the trip, to an ice rink amusingly named ‘Cockburn’.

  “Probably because that’s the most common injury men get when ice skating,” Gill quipped.

  “No,” Roo explained, “it’s pronounced ‘Co-ben’.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I told her, “I’ve never suffered from it.”

  We also made a couple of return trips to the bottle shop, hereafter to be referred to as the ‘bottle-o’ – because Australians suffer from a pathological inability to use complete naming-words, and must shorten everything and add an ‘o’ on the end. Don’t ask – it’s the law. Even if it ends up harder to say than the original word. I found it hilarious, listening to my new co-workers call to each other around the yard. Every one of them was a ‘Johno’ or a ‘Steve-o’. It confused the hell out of them for a while, when I introduced myself as Tony. I could see them racking their brains, trying to figure out where to put the ‘o’. They had to call me ‘mate’ for the first couple of hours, but it didn’t take them too long – halfway through my first morning I was rechristened ‘Tone-o’.

  Sitting with Roo’s family on their deck, watching the sun set through the trees, I took a swig from my stubby (small beer bottle), and breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s what you need – a nice cold beer, after a hard day’s work.”

  Gill was quick to respond to that; “Awww, you poor man! Is it heavy, lifting all that toilet paper?”

  “Hell yeah it is! I can steal you some, if you want.”

  “Dude, I work as a toilet cleaner. One of the few perks is a endless supply of free bog roll. And unlimited bathroom breaks.”

  After ten days of work, I had amassed a little more than eight-hundred dollars.

  After tax.

  It was a stunning revelation. To achieve the same level of income back home, I’d need a qualification considerably more impressive than my degree in Acting. Admittedly, every qualification is better than a degree in Acting, with the possible exception of a degree in Philosophy.

  But there was no doubt about it; my earning potential, at least in Perth, was incredible. In my last temp job in England, it would have taken me a month to accrue this much money. Now, after just two weeks, I was good to go.

  The long-awaited road trip was about to commence.

  It was time to head north.

  Step One: pack the car.

  This can be a bit of a chore, especially when you’re travelling with two young women.

  Neither Gill nor Roo were particularly ladylike at this point, so at least I wasn’t loading suitcases full of cocktail dresses and Jimmy Choos. They didn’t even pack a hairdryer! But still, they conjured up an impressive amount of gear, from pots and pans to folding canvas chairs. My sole contribution came in the form of one large holdall crammed with diving equipment. I managed to wedge it under the last row of back seats, well out of the way – and there it stayed, completely untouched, for the entire time we travelled in Rusty.

  It was a bit of a mistake, that. But how was I to know? Australia – at least the bit we were planning on visiting – is defined by its distinct lack of water. Damn it.

  And speaking of water, we put a twenty-five litre plastic tank full of the stuff in the boot, because getting stranded in the outback kills dozens of people every year. Most die in less than two days – of thirst. You’ve got to respect that kind of environment.

  For the same reason, we added a jerry can with 15 litres of petrol in it. Not to drink of course; north of Perth, fuel could be hard to come by. Gas stations were generally spaced a full tank apart, so too much detouring could leave us unable to reach the next one. ‘Avoid becoming stranded in the bush at all costs,’ is the advice routinely dispensed by the AA and the RAC. We had membership of the latter, but would be well beyond their call-out range for much of the trip. Beyond the range of mobile phones, even.

  “What happens if you get lost?” Roo’s sister Sonja asked. “Do you want to take my GPS?”

  “Nah, we’ll be fine,” said Roo. “We’ve got a map.”

  “That map is ten years out of date,” Sonja pointed out.

  Roo wasn’t fazed. “Don’t worry! I’m pretty sure there’s only one main road, once you get out of Perth.”

  I admired her confidence. Even if I didn’t share it.

  “What if we do get lost?” I whispered to Gill.

  “That’s alright, we’ve thought of that.”

  She led me around the back of Rusty, and pointed to a sign stencilled across the tailgate.

  It read, ‘Don’t Follow me – I’m Lost!’

  “See?” she said.

  “Fair enough.”

  It took us a day and a half to get Rusty fully packed.

  Because I had so little equipment, I had to borrow various things from all three of Roo’s sisters. A sleeping bag, a pillow, cutlery and a plate – and most importantly, a towel with a purple octopus embroidered on it. Any fan of Douglas Adams can tell you, when setting off on an adventure such as this, you must always know where your towel is.

  Rusty’s boot was stuffed to the gills. A tent and blankets, cooking gear and clothes, a huge plastic crate full of all the food we could scrounge from Roo’s parents’ kitchen – and another, not substantially smaller, plastic crate of books. Books? Well, we had a van instead of a bunch of rucksacks – might as well fill it!

  Poor Rusty. With the three of us sat inside, it was a miracle he could get out of the driveway – which, like all the driveways in Roo’s home town, angled downwards at about forty-degrees.

  We said an emotional farewell, particularly to Frieda and Gerrit, who had fed and sheltered us without a second thought. Roo was particularly upset, leaving her entire family all at once, for an unknown length of time. We’d all had to do it at some point; my family farewell was now almost a year behind me, and yet not a day went by when I didn’t miss my parents. I worried about them constantly, because… well, if you’d met my parents, you’d know.

  And so, we pointed Rusty north, and set off into the wilderness…

  Heading Up

  As we drove through Perth’s charming outer suburbs, Gill and Roo explained their carefully crafted plan for this trip. They’d had three months to prepare, to research alternative routes, to pick desirable stopping places and to choose which of the attractions along our path were ‘must see’.

  This is how they laid it out for me:

  “We’re going north,” Gill explained.

  “Okay! Why north?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Just ‘coz.”

  “Ah.”

  “We can’t go west,” Roo pointed out, “because Rusty can’t swim, and west goes into the sea. To the east, there’s nothing between here and Sydney but the desert, and I’m not sure Rusty would survive that trip.”

  “And south?”

  “Ah, well… we already went south,” Gill admitted. “A bit…”

  So they took turns in describing to me the trip they’d undertaken as a maiden voyage for Rusty, weeks before I was due to land in the country.

  To say it was a rip-roaring success would be a lie.

  Roo’s mum Frieda had accompanied the girls to see a massive rock formation, which was known as Wave Rock because… What? Oh, you’ve got there before me? Well I can’t help it if the Aussie style of naming things lacks creativity. Then again, what else do you call a fourteen-metre high chunk of rock that looks like a wave?

  Answers on a postcard…

  Anyway, about halfway there Rusty had started to overheat, so they pulled off the highway onto the amusingly-named ‘Strange Road’. They’d waited till he cooled off, put loads of water in him, then went to start the engine – and nothing.

  Just a click. The battery was dead.

  Noticing they’d parked Rusty on a slight incline, the girls decided to try jumpstarting him. Backwards, because that was the direction the sl
ope was in…

  They’d had no problem picking up speed, but it was around that point that Roo, in the driver’s seat, had realised that Rusty’s brakes were hydraulic, and only worked when the engine was switched on. As did the power steering.

  Careening backwards at quite a clip, Rusty had left the road, ploughed down a steep bank, and crashed arse-first into a stout wooden fence. The fence snagged the bumper, and luckily so; otherwise, it would have been all downhill from there.

  After several hours waving at the handful of cars that passed, they’d managed to enlist the help of a group of local farmers. The guys drove off and came back with a beat-up old tractor. Together with chains, elbow-grease and a goodly amount of swearing, they extricated Rusty from the fence, hauled him back up the hill, and got him running in an epic eight-man push-starting marathon.

  Before they drove away, the helpful farmers had given them two pieces of advice; one, to drive without stopping until they found a place to buy a new battery, and two, join the RAC.

  Which is why we now had a membership.

  Because it always pays to be prepared.

  After hearing how scary and remote the outback seemed, the reality was somewhat softer and less threatening. As the buildings became more sporadic, the urban areas gave way to farmland. Before long we were enveloped by it; thousands upon thousands of acres of wheat crops, wilting in the afternoon sun. Stands of tall, white-barked trees broke up the monotony, adding to the foreignness of the landscape, but what set it apart most of all was the scale. I was used to seeing fields neatly divided up by hedgerows and roads, littered with electricity pylons and never far from a village or six. Here, the fields stretched to the horizon in all directions, with only log fences and the occasional barn to prove that humans laid claim them.

  The further we got from the city, the less tamed the land became. Red dirt showed through a covering of spikey-looking grass and shrubs. We’d gone from arable, wheat-belt farming to a much harsher wilderness frontier; probably whilst I was asleep. I know, this was my first taste of rural Australian countryside; but it was lovely and warm inside Rusty, with the throb of the labouring engine and the rumble of the road beneath our wheels…

  Sleep was impossible to avoid.

  But don’t worry! I wasn’t driving.

  I was cabbaged full-length across the middle row of seats, with my head on a pile of blankets. I defy anyone not to doze off under such conditions!

  Almost at sunset, we arrived at our destination; an area of desert full of strange protruding rock formations called The Pinnacles. They were like the stalagmites that form on the floor of caves, only here there was no limestone dripping from the ceiling – just the rocks themselves, thrusting up through the earth like talons. Or termite mounds.

  We parked right amongst the rocks, having arrived late enough to avoid both the crowds and the admission fees, and Rusty was dwarfed by the stony spires. The girls ran around, taking far more photos than was strictly necessary. I had to point out that when they looked at them later on, all they’d really have were dozens of pictures of pointy rocks. “It’s gonna make for a fairly boring slideshow,” I warned.

  But there was a raised wooden viewing deck, which we duly climbed up to investigate. The added height meant we could see even more rocks – and could confirm for ourselves that they were, in fact, all pointy, for as far as our new vantage point allowed us to see. Oh yes! None of this fobbing-you-off-with-a-few pointy-rocks-when-the-rest-of-them-are-completely-normal shit. You get so much of that these days.

  As a tourist attraction… well, it’s never going to rival Disneyland.

  “We should probably go,” Gill said, “because there’s only so long you can run around a bunch of big pointy rocks and go ‘oooh!’”

  We stayed for the all-important sunset photo opportunity, and the girls were suitably impressed. The flaming orange sky cast a dramatic silhouette, which looked remarkably like the shadows of lots of big pointy rocks.

  “Shall we rock on?” said Roo, climbing back into the driver’s seat.

  My response was a stony silence.

  It wasn’t hard to locate the campsite, because there was only one; it was on the road, of which there was also only one. Roo had been dead right – since leaving Perth’s northern suburbs, we’d seen exactly one junction. We were only a few hours north of the city, and already the land felt… desolate. Empty. Wild.

  We set up the tent, for the first time, in complete darkness. Which is easy enough, if you know the tent, and each other, and can work as a team. But there were three of us, all with our own opinions, and one rather small tent which seemed to be missing most of its vital components. By the time we thought of using Rusty’s headlights it was fully night-time, and we still hadn’t had anything to eat.

  “Right!” said Roo. “To the kitchen!”

  “Woah? There’s a kitchen here?”

  “Of course! All campsites have kitchens. How else would we cook dinner?”

  “I thought that was what the little gas stove was for.”

  “Only in emergencies. If we’re free camping by the side of the road! But no, this is a proper campsite.” She held up the paper map we’d been given on arrival. “There’s the kitchen, and there’s a games room, a TV lounge – ooh, and a pool!”

  “Wow… that’s just… wow.”

  “Don’t they have this stuff in campsites in England?”

  “Um… no. They’re more like, a place to pitch your tent. Some grass, you know. And that’s about it.”

  “Oh, we have those too. We call them fields.”

  All Creatures Great And Small

  The next morning, after a leisurely breakfast of leftovers, we carefully packed all our gear and ourselves back into Rusty.

  Our first stop-off, just down the road, was Lake Thetis, an inland salt-water lake that was home to The Stromatolites. No, not a cheesy rock tribute band – they are unique, microscopic creatures, known from the fossil record as the earliest form of life on earth.

  It’s Gill’s fault for raising my expectations, by telling me we were going to see the oldest living organisms in the world. When I hear something like that, my mind goes instantly to T-rex. Sadly, the stromatalites were small lumps of rock at the edge of the lake.

  “You can see the bubbles, where the bacteria is doing… whatever it does.” Even Gill sounded disappointed. How excited can you get over bacteria?

  “Maybe we should come back in a few million years,” she added. “By then they may have evolved into even bigger creatures that blow even more bubbles…”

  “The possibilities are endless,” I agreed.

  So we decided not to sully their three-and-a-half billion year legacy with our continued presence.

  “And no,” I told Gill, “before you suggest it – we do not need a pet stromatalite.”

  “Aw! But they hardly eat anything…”

  Since leaving Perth, the temperature had been rising dramatically. Now, only three-hundred kilometres further north, it was already becoming uncomfortable. Sitting still for ten minutes had turned the inside of Rusty into a sauna. We opened all the doors to vent the baking hot air, replacing it with marginally less hot air from the surrounding desert.

  And then we drove, and drove, and drove.

  If we’d been back home in the UK, we’d have fallen off the edge.

  Not so in Australia; one of the few things I had known before coming here was that it’s a fairly big place. Size, I feel, is a relative concept, and my idea of ‘big’ was limited to things I already knew that fell into that bracket. Like my credit card bill. Well, I was about to gain a new understanding of ‘big’.

  Starting with kangaroos, which are commonly represented in the western world by cartoon characters and cute, fluffy toys, giving the impression that they are small, friendly, somewhat comedic creatures.

  They are not.

  The few we saw in the distance, as late afternoon tinged towards evening, were the size of Gill – whic
h, I’ll grant you, isn’t huge. But I’d been expecting something the size of a dog stood on its hind legs, so to see animals weighing in at close to what a person does, was a bit of an eye-opener.

  As was the fact that Roo kept referring to her namesakes as ‘cute little greys’.

  “They come bigger than that?” I asked her, when she pointed out another little group.

  “Oh yes! Wait till we get a bit further north. The reds are everywhere out in the bush.”

  “How big? Like, my height?”

  “Yeah, I’d say the girls would be about your height.”

  On up the western edge of Australia we journeyed, the road now hugging the Indian Ocean to spectacular effect. After the previous day’s drive through over two-hundred miles of flat red dirt, the change of scenery was a welcome relief.

  The beauty of that coast is in its raw elements; the rust-coloured rock giving way to a narrow fringe of golden sand, and then to the sea – the water mirroring the sky, both of them as blue as any postcard of paradise. The wind blasts and buffets, carrying a hint of Antarctic chill as it surges inland; there’s nothing to stop it, no obstacles either man-made or natural. And above it all, the sun rains down its fire, more potent here than almost anywhere else on Earth. That hole we tore in the ozone layer back in the 1980s might have dropped out of the spotlight of the world’s media, but it’s still around – and Australia is where it likes to hang out. So while the rest of the planet views Aussies as a nation of sun-worshippers, the vast majority of them avoid going out in it as much as possible. Skin cancer is rife, owing to dangerously high UV levels, and TV ads regularly drive home the message: Slip, Slop, Slap. As in, slip on a shirt, slop on the sunscreen, and slap on a hat. ‘Because you don’t want to end up wearing your bum on your face!’ (A reference to skin cancer surgery, where they replace the cut away bits – commonly on the nose and cheeks – with a graft from your nice, soft buttocks!)