With Every Step

by Cadigan, Neil;

  Bushby’s story became the stimulus for Cad’s own epic journey. After Christmas 2008, he had six weeks without work in the building industry so he decided he’d walk from Sydney to Brisbane as a conditioning run. He lasted a day and a half, making it from Manly to Bateau Bay on the Central Coast, when he could not shirk the sharp pain in his left knee and painful shins. The fact he’d done little preparation was an obvious hindrance (and characteristic Cad!). He went to a sports medico and was told he had ‘runner’s knee’ and needed to rest and do specific stretches.

  And what did he do? Cad asked if my second-hand mountain bike was roadworthy enough for a long-haul trip; he was going to ride from the Central Coast to Cairns, a casual 2350 kilometres. So after making a bracket to bolt a plastic storage box to the rear of the bike, he set off and rode to Cairns in under five weeks, before catching a plane home (after my unsuitable bike had snapped the bracket and had to be repaired first day in).

  However, the walk remained on his radar, but first he wanted to complete the renovation of his home at North Avoca. From mid-2009 until December 2010, mere weeks before his Oz On Foot expedition began, he almost exhausted himself by combining full-time work as a carpenter/site foreman with a complete rebuild of his house, sparing not enough time to relax with Jaime and friends and family. But the result was a beautiful home.

  Cad had no exact plan or departure date, and the classic hike around the country remained an idea, a bucket-list experience, until his mate Chris Simpson passed away six days after his twenty-fourth birthday, in May 2010. Then it became a promise.

  ‘Simmo’ was one of the young blokes who mixed with Cad around Killcare and the neighbouring suburbs where he spent much of his late teens and twenties. They always got on very well because they were quite alike. Simmo was just one of many mates in Cad’s group, but they became closer just before and during Chris’s illness. Their fates were destined to intertwine.

  Andrew was shocked by Chris’s death after a twenty-nine-month battle with aplastic anaemia and myelodysplasia syndrome (MDS), which is a pre-leukaemia blood disorder. Simmo came home from a trip to Bali in December 2007 feeling crook on the stomach and thought it was a case of ‘Bali belly’. After it didn’t improve, he went to a doctor, who told him it was most likely a gastro ailment. Not satisfied after continuing to feel off-colour, Simmo went to another doctor and was ordered to have blood tests. He was diagnosed with aplastic anaemia and underwent immunosuppressive drug treatment (ATG) in May 2008.

  His parents, Wayne and Kim, and older brother, Josh, were tested for suitability as bone-marrow donors, and Josh was found to be an almost perfect match. But a week before Josh was scheduled to donate, a further bone-marrow biopsy detected that Chris’s condition had developed into MDS. In extreme cases like his, the only cure is a successful bone-marrow transplant, and Josh wasn’t 100 per cent compatible.

  A donor from Hamelin in Germany was found, and Chris underwent a transplant on his twenty-third birthday. Unfortunately, it was not successful. A year to the day later, on his twenty-fourth birthday, doctors transplanted marrow from a Tasmanian donor but Chris died six days later from complications. It was such a sad thing to happen to a wonderful family.

  At the wake, Cad was talking to his mate Matt Hansen and Chris’s girlfriend, Jamie (amazingly, Chris’s and Andrew’s partners had the same names, just spelt differently), when it hit him. He’d had the idea of an epic walk in Karl Bushby style, and the opportune time to do it would be when he’d finished the house renovations, so why not do it as a memorial to Simmo while raising money for cancer research? He told Matt and Jamie what he was going to do.

  Josh Simpson remembers Cad coming up to him and explaining how he had it in his mind to do a ‘walking mission’ around Australia, and asking if Josh thought it would be okay with the family if he dedicated it to Chris. Josh thought it would be perfect – adding a cause to a dream. Cad shook hands with Josh, and the idea became a commitment he would live up to. It became Andrew’s new mission. As Josh emotionally stated on Cad’s testimonial video, he definitely was the mission man.

  Later, he decided he’d try to raise money for a charity appropriate to Simmo’s plight, and he settled on the Cancer Council. Cad became quite passionate about this – and even more so when he switched his allegiance to the Leukaemia Foundation.

  Unsurprisingly, in the ensuing months – as Cad ran himself into the ground with his daytime job and night shifts that often went after midnight (including most weekends), and with frantically carrying out his renovations – undue stress was put on his relationship with Jaime. Andrew was often not the most enjoyable person to live with when stressed, and this period certainly made him that. In his eyes, everything would be alright once the house was completed and he’d got the Oz On Foot walk out of his system, but Jaime, who had been living with him for nearly six years, wasn’t so sure. She broke off the relationship a couple of months before he left – and, to be frank, I could understand why. After living in a virtual building zone for about fifteen months and watching Andrew work day and night for most of the past few years, she had been asked to spend a year away from him as he embarked on his trek. They talked of reconciliation on and off over the next few months but it didn’t happen.

  After a frantic and exhausting last push to finish the renovations and a tough period emotionally, living alone in the dream four- bedroom home that he’d just created, Cad put the house on the market a few weeks before he left. A week before Christmas 2010 he hosted the extended Cadigan family at his place, a great day on his beautifully built and landscaped outdoor entertaining area. On Christmas Day it was down to Sydney for lunch with Chris’s side of the family; Cad was always close to his cousin Matthew Ruff, and they were in good form together that afternoon. His intention was to leave the next day with his second-hand Chariot pram, bought on eBay from someone in Adelaide less than two weeks earlier.

  Typically for Andrew, the build-up to this momentous day was cyclone-like and his preparation too brief; in fact, he’d done no testing with the pram, and to my knowledge had not walked so much as five kilometres as a warm-up for the 15,000-kilometre journey. But he was leaving on this one-man expedition that none of us, himself included, could fully anticipate.

  I was anxious, concerned about what Cad might encounter, knowing he would be charging full-bore into it. Most likely, he’d become his own worst enemy because of impatience and his underlying belief that he was bulletproof. My main worries were that he might be hit by a truck, be mugged at night in the middle of nowhere, or disappear into the vastness of the Nullarbor Plain. But I also knew he’d ridden to Cairns without incident and was as determined, resilient and industrious as anyone I knew.

  Armed with a big heart and imbued by the spirit of Chris Simpson, but still fragile after his separation from Jaime, Cad was leaving, no matter what. A man, a pram, two feet and a heartbeat … and a game plan of working it out along the way.

  3

  OFF AND WALKING

  Andrew was due to leave on Boxing Day but was still fussing around making last-minute adjustments to his pram, buying food for his first few days and generally stressing out. So, rather than leave late in the day, he decided to get going the next day, 27 December 2010. I hooked the trailer onto my car, loaded up the pram and drove for over an hour from our Point Clare home to Sydney Airport; Cad thought he’d start and finish at a landmark location.

  He left with a mix of excitement, trepidation and anxiety, because everything to do with the trip had been a rush and more of a mission than it should have been. He had less than $200 to his name but both his car (acquired only five weeks earlier, when he had to hand in his company vehicle) and beautifully renovated home were up for sale to fund the journey.

  Because he and Jaime had left the door open to reconciliation, he’d committed only to walking to Perth, via New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia, meaning he would be away for around six months. But always in his mind was the urge to
still trek the whole continent, as he had originally planned to.

  Our first stop was a byway next to the airport, where Cad did his first of about 250 video blogs, which was short and sweet and delivered with his usual laconic colloquialisms. It was there that his journey – and his amazing story – truly began.

  DAY 1, 27 DECEMBER 2010

  BLAKEHURST TO LOFTUS (10.5 KM)

  ‘G’day. My name’s Andrew Cadigan. Just leaving Sydney Airport on my way to Perth. This is day one, pretty crappy weather – it’s been gale-force winds all morning, just died off a bit now. First and foremost, I’d like to say I dedicate this trip to my mate Simmo, Chris Simpson, who tragically passed away this year at the age of twenty-four, and that’s why I plan to raise as much money as I can for the Cancer Council of Australia on this trip.

  ‘A bit about the trip. I haven’t planned it too well: I only got me pram about a week ago, chucked some shit in there and I’m away. Don’t really know how long it’s going to take or which way I’m going to walk. All I know is first stop Tassie, then heading over to Perth, and who knows, I might even keep walking up to Darwin. So anyways, without further to-do, I better keep going. I’ve had a pretty slow start to the morning – I was actually supposed to start yesterday but fashionably late as usual. Anyways, catch you tomorrow.’

  So began what became much-followed video blogs, which are now treasured as a lasting memento of Cad’s life, a live digital archive of an experience that, for many people, came to define him. (The videos can still be viewed on the website he set up for the walk, www.ozonfoot.com.au.)

  We had to agree to a little white lie that day: it was so late by the time he did the blog that he would have been walking in the dark by the time he cleared the metropolis, so we drove down the Princes Highway, with his pram sitting in my trailer. We stopped just past Tom Uglys Bridge over the Georges River, had fish and chips and he was away.

  I drove north towards home but just had to turn around and go past Andrew, taking in my last vision of him for I didn’t know how long, and beeping as I doubled past. He would have thought his old man was a real dork but I didn’t care; I wanted to keep that scene in my mind.

  Cad’s first on-the-road entry in his diary, in the satirical style we became accustomed to, was written from his first campsite, at Loftus Oval on the edge of the Royal National Park. It included this: ‘I felt very surprised I didn’t feel excited [beginning the walk], or anything for that matter, it was like I was just off to work or something. Started to get arsehole chafe about 5 kilometres into it, stopped and lubed up my arsehole in a bus stop, cars driving past would have thought I was playing with myself with my hands down my pants.’

  Maybe that was not entirely out of place with the place he decided to set up camp that first night. The bush next to the oval was supposedly a well-known rendezvous for homosexual men; seeing some ‘suss’ blokes lurking, Andrew chained his pram to his tent and set up an alarm system when he went to sleep. An electronic alarm that gave out a piercing sound was fixed to the end of a line that was attached to a wheel on his pram at one end and to a zipper on the fly of his tent at the other. If the line was moved, the alarm sounded. ‘If the pram goes, I go with it,’ he wrote.

  He was woken at 1 am by the flashing blue lights. ‘It was coppers or firies, they were on their walkie-talkies in the car park at the other end of the field,’ he diarised. He blogged next day with traditional Cad wit: ‘Thank Christ day one’s over. I’m down at Loftus cricket oval, and I tell you what, there’s a bit of dodgy brothers going on here … There’s blokes lurking in the bushes and cars turning up every five minutes, going in there for five minutes at a time. I don’t know if they were poopunching or drug dealing, but suss as. I slept with one eye open and my knife next to my sleeping bag.’

  DAY 2, 28 DECEMBER 2010

  LOFTUS TO STANWELL PARK (26.4 KM)

  If the fear and mystique of his first overnight camp was enough to put Cad on alert to expect the unexpected, he was in for more alarm during his first full day of walking – and an event that affected him quite deeply. He thought he was the catalyst for a fatal motor accident.

  He wrote that he ‘felt excited this morning, was singing away to my iPod’ when, two hours into his day’s walk, he was on the median strip waiting for a break in the traffic to cross the Princes Highway and heard a loud crash. He turned to see a motorbike had ploughed into the back of a four-wheel drive vehicle, which was the first in line at a red light. ‘I don’t reckon he even saw it because I didn’t hear any brakes. It was obvious he was gawking at me. I felt bad, especially when I saw all the coppers and shit flying past about twenty minutes later. I just took off, I couldn’t look at this guy, he was all bent up, I’m pretty sure he was dead.’

  Andrew called me not long after to talk about it. He was obviously upset, saying, ‘I think I just caused a fatal accident; I feel terrible.’ I tried to reassure him that if that was the case, it was the rider’s responsibility to concentrate on the road and he couldn’t blame himself. Only now, as I write this, the irony of this hits me, considering how Andrew died.

  Andrew had papered to the front of the pram a simple sign that said ‘Oz on foot.com – for cancer’ and had thought he would direct anyone who wanted to donate to his cause to go online. However several people stopped to donate money on Day 2, but at that stage Andrew hadn’t considered taking donations on the road but only through the website’s online mechanism. Days later he decided to order receipt books from the Cancer Council and take advantage of the many opportunities that he realised would come.

  Later in the day he met a stranger, but a very interested one, in Mandy Verdich, who told him she was planning to walk from Sydney to Perth with the same Chariot pram and her kelpie dog. ‘Spin-out … wish I had taken Redge,’ he wrote. I guarantee his blue cattle dog/bull terrier cross couldn’t have kept up the pace and would have been too big a handful. Mandy, who had cycled from Perth to Sydney years earlier with a friend, joined him that evening for an hour and gave him a light fold-up chair, which came in very handy until he left it at a roadhouse in Western Australia.

  Cad followed what he had been told was the law and walked into the face of traffic when there was no road shoulder, but found it ‘scary when a car comes ripping around the corner coming at you’. He got used to it but there were still plenty of scary moments.

  That night he camped at a picnic area and amused a European family who were having an early evening feast when he rocked up to the tap next to them and lathered up for his first Oz On Foot ‘shower’, before explaining to the bewildered family what he was doing. As they left, the mother came over to his tent and left him some ‘yummy cakes’.

  DAY 3, 29 DECEMBER 2010

  STANWELL PARK TO NORTH WOLLONGONG (26.4 KM)

  Andrew wrote in his diary that he was trying to live off $10 a day and spent $30.20 on a three-day shop. At that stage he had $133.60 to his name; he was desperately trying to get a buyer for his home; he hadn’t worked for over a month while he spent day and night finishing his renovations. He was also hoping to get $1200 for his old Commodore wagon, which he’d left with me to sell. He knew I was there to ‘sponsor’ him if he asked (I’d already offered) but, typically, he wanted to be self-sufficient if he could.

  During a two-hour break in the middle of the day, Cad recorded that he was exhausted after matching the previous day’s distance of 26.4 kilometres (he refused to go backwards in daily distance until he was regularly walking 30 kilometres a day). Little did he contemplate then that he would often double or triple this daily odometer before too long.

  DAY 4, 30 DECEMBER 2010

  WOLLONGONG TO KIAMA (37 KM)

  Only four days in and Cad had already distinguished his pet hate: taking the time to say hello to people as he walked by only to get no response or, worse in his eyes, a strange stare that he reckoned said, ‘What do you want, you freak?’ The fact that he had several earrings, lip and tongue piercings and one in his chin, plus
heavily tattooed legs and was pushing a pram, obviously led some people, particularly older ones, to judge this book by its different, perhaps hobo-looking, cover. He swore at one middle-aged lady who ignored his greeting and regretted it instantly, but he was sick of people not bothering to acknowledge him.

  He should have become used to it over the ensuing months, but he never accepted it. He also started his habit of taking the pram into any store he entered as he didn’t want to let it out of his sight in case it, or something inside, was stolen. This caused more stares. Cad described the look: ‘It’s like a mix of intrigued, dumbfounded, amused, curious and “what the fuck” rolled into this blank expression.’

  A reporter from the Illawarra Mercury newspaper approached him out of the blue and did an interview, sending a photographer out later to get a snap – Andrew’s first on-the-road media coverage.

  Cad got inventive and found what looked like a good spot to camp at the rear of a church. He thought he’d do the right thing and knocked on the door to ask the priest and was given the go ahead. He then realised to the rear was a camping ground, and one loud-mouthed resident whose van was up against the fence kept him awake for hours. He saw the irony: ‘I now know how my neighbours feel when I rock up maggot at 3 am when the pub shuts and drink til the sun comes up – karma. I suppose that’s why all the P-platers hurled abuse at me all day as well. It’s funny how things come around eventually, even if it takes over a decade.’