Kamikaze Kangaroos!

by Tony James Slater

  Rockslide

  Our next major stop contained the heart and soul of the trip. When we’d first conceived of driving Rusty up north, this had been the planned route back – for the sole reason that Ayers Rock, or Uluru, would be on our way.

  And now we were there.

  Well, we were approaching the ticket booth, praying that in spite of the crazy temperature, they’d let us climb it.

  As Roo pulled up, she pointed out a Wicked Van parked in the lay-by.

  We’d seen loads of Wicked vans on our travels, their daubed cartoons and graffiti slogans ranging from mildly amusing to downright disgusting – but it had never occurred to us before, that you might not actually get much choice when you hired one. Some vans we’d seen again and again, each time prompting the question, “Who would ever want to drive around in a van that says ‘MASSIVE COCK’ on the side? Even if there is a big picture of a chicken on the other side?”

  Well, now we had an inkling of the answer.

  Because the van sitting opposite us was entirely hot pink – and painted up as an exact replica of Barbie’s camper. (I know it was an exact replica, because, um… because the girls told me? Yes, that’s believable. Let’s say it was that.)

  Anyway, out of this glorious vehicle stepped a muscular bloke with a shaved head and tattoos covering both arms. He glanced around furtively, took several steps away from the van, and lit a cigarette.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone look so tough and so embarrassed at the same time. The poor bloke was obviously waiting for someone in the ticket office, so we had a good chuckle at his expense, debating what kind of person would emerge to join him – a very wholesome young chap named Gerald, perhaps? Or a cowboy in leather trousers with the bum cut out? Or maybe a ten-year-old girl. Rusty rocked with our laughter, until I noticed the bloke glaring at us in the wing-mirror.

  “Maybe we should get on with it,” I suggested.

  “Fine,” said Gill, “but you stay here or you’ll end up staring at him.”

  So I hid in the van while the girls went to buy our tickets. No-one else had emerged by the time they got back, and the bloke was back in his van, looking angry.

  “Was there anyone else in the office?” I asked. “Is he dating Barbie herself?”

  “Nope. Just a medium-sized English girl, who looks about as pissed off as he does.”

  “No prize for guessing who got the last van in the lot, then.”

  “I wonder if they had the choice between something really manly and pornographic, or the Barbiemobile…”

  “Well he’s going to have to do some careful editing of his holiday pictures before he lets any of his mates see them!”

  This sparked a thought. “Hey, we should get a photo of him with the van!” I told the girls.

  Gill and Roo traded horrified looks. “I know you’re a bit short on common sense,” Gill said, “but we’ve driven a long way to see Ayer’s Rock. It would be a real shame to get murdered when we’re this close.”

  I had to concede that point. But then I remembered that we had Barbie Girl by Aqua on Rusty’s MP3 player. I’m not proud of that – in fact, let’s just blame the girls again, shall we? – but it allowed us to roll down the windows and blast out the opening bars as Roo put the pedal to the metal.

  ‘I’m a Barbie girl – in a Barbie world…’

  ‘Life in plastic – it’s fantastic…’

  “He’s still staring at us,” Roo reported, checking the mirrors. “He’s not happy!”

  “No shit,” I said, “he’s probably reading the sign we put in the back window!”

  Gill’s handiwork, of course.

  ‘WE’D RATHER PUSH RUSTY THAN HIRE A WICKED VAN’.

  We chuckled all the way to Ayers Rock.

  Ayers Rock was closed, of course.

  We sat in the car park, looking over a fence at the massive hunk of red rock. I was reading the brochure, and the picture it painted didn’t seem fair.

  “So, it’s closed because it’s too windy? It’s a gigantic, sticky-uppy rock in the middle of a completely flat landscape. Of course it’s bloody windy up there! Every day, I’d imagine. It’s closed if it rains – okay, so that’s never going to happen – but also closed if it’s too hot! Too hot? It’s in the middle of the desert! In one of the hottest places in the whole damn country – probably in the world! Oh, and it’s closed on certain spiritual holidays. And if it’s cloudy. So, pretty much just closed then. It’d be easier to list when they open the damn thing!”

  “The local Aborigines don’t like people climbing it,” said Roo, “because it’s sacred to them. That might be part of the reason why it’s closed so much.”

  “Well they need a sign that says ‘Welcome to Ayers Rock – Australia’s number one tourist attraction! We’re open for three days every September, if you’re lucky, and sometimes again in April.”

  No-one said anything for a while, as we sat contemplating the rock. It truly was a magnificent sight, even cast against the battleship-grey sky.

  “At least our photos will be a bit different,” Roo said.

  “Yeah – they’ll all be taken from the car park.”

  “No, I mean you always see pictures of it with perfect blue skies above. It’s almost never like this.”

  “Great. We’ll be the only people in the world with photos of Ayers Rock looking rubbish. Newspapers will be queuing up to buy them.”

  We sat staring at the rock for a good few minutes.

  This is where our interesting mix of personality types came to bear:

  Sonja was very responsible.

  Roo, left to her own devices, probably would have been responsible – but she was easily overridden by more dominant personalities.

  Gill was responsible when it suited her – which wasn’t often – and had a strong compulsion to do crazy things.

  And I’m a complete idiot.

  So when I said, “Bollocks to it, let’s climb it anyway!”

  Gill said, “Okay!”

  Roo said, “Ummm…”

  And Sonja said, “We’ll wait down here, actually.”

  So I jumped over the fence and ran towards Uluru.

  Ancestor spirits be damned, I thought. They could bring forth their complaints if they felt they needed to. I was willing to listen to reason. I even gave them a few minutes, standing around at the bottom of the rock while the last group of tourists read the info board and moved on.

  Not a single angry spirit appeared in protest, so I figured that put me in the clear.

  And up I went.

  I was slipping and sliding, because Ayers Rock is smooth, worn down by constant wind erosion, and the passage of the few humans lucky enough to show up on the three days a year it’s actually open. And I was running, because at any moment I expected some irate park ranger to yell at me to come down.

  I made it as far as the chain link fence used by regular climbers to haul themselves up to the summit, and paused for breath while I considered my options.

  I was roughly halfway up Uluru. It wasn’t as big as I’d expected.

  I was exhausted, but I really wanted to haul myself hand-over-hand up the support chain. It didn’t seem worth risking the wrath of… I dunno, some multi-coloured flying snake or something – just to climb halfway up Uluru.

  So I took a double-handful of the rusted chain links, and as I did so I felt a spot of wetness hit the top of my head.

  It was almost like rain.

  Nah! Couldn’t be. It never rains on Ayers Rock.

  Maybe once or twice a year – in particularly rainy years. In winter.

  But it was December – midsummer – and one of the hottest days on record, at 46°C (that’s 126°F). It couldn’t possibly be rain.

  It bloody well was though.

  There was a blinding flash of lightening and an ear-splitting rumble of thunder.

  Suddenly the heavens opened, and more water than this part of Australia had seen in a decade poured from the sky.r />
  I was soaked to the skin in seconds.

  As was the rock.

  Time to go, I thought.

  But the rain had done more than make me cold and soggy.

  It had turned the rock to glass.

  My feet went from under me straight away. I landed on my arse, and managed to scrabble to some form of stability. I set off, scooting along on my bum, sliding more than walking, losing more and more control with each passing moment.

  Then came the time that gravity took over.

  One second I was crabbing my way down the rock using my balls as brakes – the next I was sliding in free-fall, bouncing off every little ridge and flailing frantically at the rain-slicked surface.

  It wasn’t the first time in my life I wished I was an octopus.

  But it was very nearly the last.

  I don’t know how I regained control – perhaps those psychedelic ancestor spirits just wanted to teach me a lesson for being such a wise-ass. Maybe the lack of skin on my palms had something to do with it. But my trusty Vans found purchase on a rougher surface, my buttocks clenched the rock, and I slowed to a stop on the very edge of Uluru.

  Laying flat out like a starfish, I caught my breath. Then, feeling the cold, slick surface through the tears in my shirt, I wriggled over to the boulders lining the edge of the climbing route, and slowly climbed down them. I’d been seconds away from being launched off the end of that slide like it was… well, the end of a slide.

  That would really have taught me a lesson.

  Or at least, the hospital bill would have.

  Waiting for me at the bottom was a tour guide, and the windows of his bus were lined with faces eager to watch me get a bollocking.

  “You’re a bloody idiot!” the guide bawled at me.

  He was quite perceptive, this bloke.

  “Do you know how slippery it is up there in the rain?” he demanded.

  Given that he’d just watched me slide all the way down, I was tempted to ask if he thought I had wheels in my jeans.

  But I settled for saying, “Yeah, it is a bit.”

  “Do you know that’s the most dangerous thing you could have done?” he asked.

  “Well yes, I do now,” I told him.

  “I could pick up the phone, and have a ranger here in ten minutes to slap you with a $2000 dollar fine!”

  “You’re right,” I apologized. “I’ve been very naughty. I promise that I will never again try to climb Ayers Rock in the rain.”

  He seemed happy enough with that.

  And it was a promise I was content to keep. Because the chances of it raining again on Uluru in my lifetime are fairly slim. The chance of me being there at the time is even slimmer. And even if that exact set of circumstances did come to pass, why on earth would I want to?

  Because, you know, been there, done that. Got the holes in my t-shirt.

  Mine Kamp

  Smack bang in the middle of the desert, we came to Coober Pedy.

  Definitely one of the most unusual towns in Australia, Coober Pedy was a hard-core opal-mining town, and as tough as you get. By way of example, the sign advising travellers that they are ‘Welcome To Coober Pedy!’ is made of a truck. Not a picture of a truck, or a scale model; an actual opal-mining vehicle about twice the length of Rusty, which had been hauled up five metres into the air and placed on a chunky steel frame.

  Which I climbed, of course.

  They didn’t do things by halves here, you see, so I didn’t want to either.

  More than any place we’d been to this land was empty and (literally) blasted. The only shapes breaking up the table-top-flat plains of rock and sand were conical piles of excavated rock and sand; nothing grew as far as the eye could see in any direction, and the only colours in sight were the vivid yellow-orange of the stone and the impossibly pure blue of the sky.

  Straying off the beaten track here was as dangerous as entering a minefield – which in one sense of the word, it was. Thousands of shafts dropped without warning, littering the area like it was riddled with giant worms. Explosions could be heard – or more often felt – from the hundreds of active mines scattered for dozens of miles in every direction, where the toughest breed of Australian prospectors sought out and ripped out over eighty percent of the entire world’s opals.

  To survive the extreme desert temperatures, everything was underground here – homes, shops, bars, and churches – all chewed from the rock by different-sized tunnel boring machines. But outstripping all the rest for sheer cool factor (at least as far as we were concerned) was the underground campsite!

  Walking into it down a sloping passageway, it felt like we were descending into an Ancient Egyptian tomb. Circular ventilation shafts in the roof cast spotlights on the ground, just begging for a variety of poses to be performed – from Charlie’s Angels to kung fu and ballet, we went through the lot.

  Then we pitched our tents – each one in their own cubical niche – and headed back to the surface to unpack Rusty.

  Rick, a charming old bloke whose cheerful demeanour belied his decades as an opal miner, owned and ran ‘Riba’s Underground Camping’, together with his wife Barbara.

  He booked us straight in for the afternoon tour, conducted in the museum that occupied what had previously been his mine.

  In the tour, which he delivered in a delightfully John Cleese-esque manner, Rick explained that only individuals were allowed to dig mines here – no big companies. Each person had to pick an area to dig in, agreed to work the dig in person, and register their claims with the Department of Mines and Energy.

  This granted them four wooden posts, which they used to delineate the fifty-metre square area of their claim. From then on, it was all about the explosives – drilling holes and blasting the rock, always hunting for that tell-tale blue glint, that seam of opal which could make the lowliest prospector into a millionaire overnight.

  Most of them, I think, broke even.

  Next we got to try dowsing, that walking-with-metal-rods-that-cross thing, which was considered to be a science by the miners. Sure enough, the rods crossed when I held them – at just the place where a small seam of opal was known to run beneath my feet. It was like witchcraft, but these guys were prepared to bet big bucks – and years of impossibly hard graft – on the outcome of a swinging piece of metal not much bigger than a tent peg.

  Rick and Barbara, like more than half the local population, lived in a ‘dug-out’ – literally an entire house dug out from the rock. Roo blagged us a tour by mentioning to them that I was a travel writer (slight lie), and subtly suggesting that their house might be the next thing I’d write about (bigger lie!).

  It’s funny, because at the time I’d been so busy working and travelling that I’d all but given up on writing ‘That Bear Ate My Pants’. The chances of me getting anything on paper about Australia seemed extremely remote – even more so, given my luck with laptops.

  The house was incredible; cool, airy and spacious, with two decent-sized bedrooms, a galley-kitchen, and all the comforts and conveniences of modern living.

  Rather than smoothing the walls or lining them, they’d chosen to leave them rough and bare, making a design statement out of the raw rock that sheltered them. Here and there, alcoves had been chipped out to provide everything from TV cabinets to niches for candles. The effect of all that stone was anything but oppressive; it was beautiful, with the veins and striations of the rock running around the walls, and the pale yellow stone giving off a cheerful, welcoming glow.

  “And if you suddenly find out your wife’s pregnant, as happened to us a few years back, you just have to hire the excavator and dig out another bedroom. Too easy – although it makes quite a bit of dust.”

  “So all this was done with a drilling machine?” I asked.

  “Nah mate. I did the main rooms mesself. Jackhammerin’, pick-axein’, and a good few bombs went into this place! You can tell by the roof – the diggers make ‘em flat and square, but I wanted something a bi
t different. Took me about a year with a pick-axe, to make it domed like that, but I kind of like it.”

  It was surreal to see the bedrooms laid out with perfectly normal furniture; Ikea double beds, even pictures hanging from nails driven into the rock. Only the variety of the colours and textures across the walls and ceiling marked it out as different – well, that and the lack of windows.

  I mentioned this to Rick, and he took me to see his pride and joy: a generous picture window that looked directly outside, drenching his living room in light.

  “That winda’s probably one of the most expensive winda’s in Australia,” he said.

  “Really? Because you had to hire the tunnel-boring machine?”

  “Nope – did that one mesself, all by hand. Normally when I’m mining I use little bombs, so only small bits of the rock come away. But I reckoned this would look great opened right up, so I packed a really meaty charge into it.”

  “Did it bring the roof down?”

  “Nah, the explosion went off perfectly! I had me new winda’, bang on. Only trouble was, when I came to clear out the rubble, I found opal – there’d been a big thick streak of it, right through the middle! Clear as day, and twice as valuable – and I’d pulverized the bloody lot of it. Reckon it’d have been worth half a million bucks at least, if I’d have mined it properly.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah. Still, you win some, you lose some. And it’s a really nice winda’.”

  Rick was a character for sure, but I doubted there were any completely normal people living in a place like Coober Pedy. It was too raw, too frontier for most people – I’d have loved it, for a couple of months. It appealed to my love of weirdness. But to live forever?

  The town bred unusual characters though, and there was one living nearby that we just had to visit – Crocodile Harry, the bloke who was the real-life inspiration for Crocodile Dundee. We did a quick Google search and memorized the directions to his tin shack – he was so legendarily tough that he still dared to live above ground – and set off in Rusty.

  Coober Pedy isn’t big on road signs, however, probably because it isn’t big on roads either. We criss-crossed a variety of gravel tracks scraped out of the desert, and soon had to admit we were hopelessly lost. We couldn’t just look for town as a landmark, because most of it was underground – so in the end we headed for some of the big piles of rubble we’d noticed earlier.