Articles published in February, 2024
After that extraordinary interlude with the truckies the rest of Australia seemed rather dull at first. In fact the word “dull” crops up too often in my notes. But before I get into Christmas in Oz, here’s a picture that somehow got away last week.
PJ is in the middle, McCarthy on the left, and that’s Ferret in the hat.
Tuesday 23rd December
We rode on. Felt like making time. Doubtful weather. In Mackay looked for waterworks and Mr. Cooley’s house, but missed it and felt unlike chancing a dull encounter. Rode on toe Proserpine – a dull town. Sugarcane everywhere, at all stages of growth including some that couldn’t be harvested in time. Big sugar mills, of sheets of corrugated iron, bits added to bits. Saw Central Guest House advertised and went to see. Too institutional for Carol. Little rooms with twin beds and mosquito nets. Looked around and saw nothing else. Off to Shute Harbour across a creek that looked like flooding soon. Darkness gathering – came to free campground, but I was beginning to think about telephoning London and wanted to be inside somewhere. We were both very tired. On to Airlie Beach where the biggest motel was $21 a night – outrageous price (though for full “units”). Found Bali Hai for $16. Still a vast amount of money, but felt like Xmas, and we moved in. Owner was a curious mixture of slyness and friendliness – eyes creased, short beard, open shirt. Didn’t quite trust him. When I saw the tariff ($16 plus $5 for an additional adult) I felt sure he was going to ask for $21, and it upset me for a while to have to anticipate the bad feeling – but I was wrong. Made the call to P.H. [Peter Harland at the Sunday Times] He had the addresses at home (again). But told me I’d got another $100 to my name.
[Harland had a number of contacts in Australia that he wanted me to look up, but I was having trouble getting them off him. I was also worrying about running out of money and finding Australia more expensive than I had expected. There was no fixed arrangement with the newspaper – just a general understanding that they would hope to keep me going somehow.]
The rate for O.M.W. is £85 it seems. [I have no idea now what that refers to.]
The “unit” had big bed, sliding tinted glass doors and curtains, electric plate and grill, frig, sink, crockery and cutlery, toaster, immersion kettle, reed floor covering, wicker furniture, two bunks for children, shower & loo, all in good taste and good nick.
Cost him $70,000 a year ago. Says it would cost $100,000 to build now, which he plans to do, on the other side of the lot. He was a panel beater in Adelaide for twenty years before coming up here.
Wednesday 24th, Christmas Eve
No call from P.H. We decide to stay a day, fritter the time away playing house. Aussie families all around, here for Xmas – staying for weeks at a time – a lot of money being spent. Kids running up and down the balconies. Weather stays bright and dry despite heavy-looking cumulus.
Most vivid impression, unfortunately, is that although the resort is a pleasant one (though it’s hopeless as a beach) the prices of everything are totally out of proportion for us. A family of four could not be spending less than $40 a day (say £30). Wages here seem to range from $300 to $500 a week – i.e up to £16,000 a year for tradesmen and professionals.
At the Beach Hotel- Motel – large ladies in ankle length “frocks” – gents in natty leisure wear, less evolved than in U.S.
Green sea, shoreline strewn with rock, pebbles, leaves twigs and silt, probably washed to sea by flood waters. Mixed grasses, palms, mangoes, eucalypts, cedars. Older houses of boards and tin roofs, raised on stilts. New cement and brick shops. And tourist shops in vague Polynesian styles. Immediately behind the road the hill rises high and steep, covered with trees (probably acacias).
Thursday 25th, Christmas Day
Packed lazily and went off down road towards Shute Harbour and the free camp ground, where we put up the tarp and tent. Went off to the “Wild Life Show” – 40 acres of kangaroos, brolgas, rainbow lorikeets, cassowaries (female with helmet, larger than male, magenta and neon-blue neck) koala bears, the birds in the aviary, brown with white splashes, long stick-like legs and the funny lorikeets fiddling about at their feet. All animals and birds remarkably tame. $1.50 to go in, but good value.
Two lads came into reptile house struggling with a huge lizard, called a monitor – it had cut them with its claws.
Since we rode in from Proserpine and I felt the rhythm of the bike suddenly change I’ve been worried about the possibility of one of the pistons having distorted. Couldn’t bring myself to take the bike apart on suspicion in those conditions. Thank God I didn’t. The rain hit us this night and caused near disaster. The tarp flew off the stuff, my box on its side, jacket and clothes soaked. Miserable night at first, but we got used to it. Water came up through the floor of the tent. But pad kept us above it. Only in the morning did we see what had happened outside.
Before sleeping we ate a fish caught by two guys, Martin and Neil, and two girls – a big fish that Neil had caught with a spear.
Good evening to you all. Still hoping for a fragment of good news. See you next week.
Before we get down to the pleasures of Australia in the Seventies, I want to say something about Putin, in the light of what has just happened. Like most people, I suppose, I have found it hard to imagine a human being of evident intelligence, acceptable appearance and in comfortable circumstances (to say the least) . . . it is hard to imagine such a person willfully causing murders and assassinations, and consigning hundreds of thousands of his countrymen to death, apparently on a whim.
Like many of my generation my understanding of human nature is rooted in Shakespeare’s tragedies, and I think I can see a solution to the problem more clearly now.
Putin, in his own mind, is no longer a person.
He has become Russia. Not symbolically, as you might think, but ACTUALLY. Just as mediaeval kings enshrined their nations (with the assistance of God, to be sure) Putin IS Russia, he embodies Russia. So it is Russia that demands sacrifice and bloody deeds. And so it will go on until, ultimately, he over-reaches and the tragedy works itself out – possibly taking us down with it.
I once knew a famous French historian who had fought in the resistance alongside Mitterand, later president of France. They were still friends and I asked him what Mitterand was really like.
He said, “You know, Ted, they are all monsters.”
But Putin transcends that description, because HE IS RUSSIA.
And so, back to Australia in 1975 (when Putin was 23 years old.)
When you left me last week, Carol and I were riding up the coast of Queensland and at Marlborough we took the inland road to Rockhampton. It was the main road running from Marlborough to Sarina. The road ran through a rather ghostly forest of naked, bone-white eucalypts with very little sign of human life. We found out later that a couple of grizzly murders and other crimes had been committed on it, and it was talked up as a “Horror Road.”
My Naked Notes, continued:
Sunday, December 21st
Just halfway and we cross a bridge with no parapets at Lotus Creek and stop at roadhouse the other side.
Cocky fellow with blue eyes, blue tunic and shorts and a cowboy hat said coffee was 30cents, with traces of an accent which I took to be Polish, partly influenced by his manner.
“30 cents?” I said, with mild surprise.
“Is that too much?” he said. “If it is I’ll make it 50 cents. I’m like that.”
Here’s Andy
He went on to say: Why come from Marlborough to live in the middle of nowhere, except to make money.
Suitably placated he became pleasant enough. Then, into his remarks drifted a few references which began to take on an ominous reality. It transpired that he knew, and thought we knew, that the creek ten miles up the road was flooded to seven feet or more above the bridge.
Another man, curly-haired, grizzled, over-confident, started telling us things, saying he was a journalist. Called Geoff Little. Has a monthly advertising handout for tourism and sells palms. Says “I’m the most knowledgeable journalist in Australia about tropics.” In spite of this quite likeable and seems to have observed a lot.
Café well made of Mackay cedar, lustrous multi-coloured wood. Gradually realised we wouldn’t get through today, and rode off to Connors River to look.
The scene at Connors River
Cars queued before bridge. Four men playing poker on the asphalt. River was up to the base of “Give Way” sign. No sign of the bridge.
Came back to take space in the corner of the campground. Andy, proprietor of the “Lotus Creek” Roadhouse, sold us six eggs (50cents) & a tin of stew.
In rode four big refrig. trucks and parked outside, their motors running constantly. The drivers were beering up in the café and moved later to outside shelter with benches and tables. When we went to sit in café, we were sent out to join them and became involved.
Main characters are Peter, alias “Ferret”, PJ, and Clive. We got some beer off them after trying Andy. He said he couldn’t sell beer, never had sold beer. After, he came out with one for me, but by then we were already saved.
Spent a pleasant evening listening to various versions of the truck drivers’ code – Ferret writes doggerel verse – “ode to a trucky” – a friend who died when he overturned a truckload of bottles outside Gladstone, and so on. There was a young lad who ran all the errands – and another driver, McCarthy, who was a butt for their humour – simple expression, concave face, rubber legs set astride – from Tasmania, a peace sign on his shirt.
Learned about roads in the interior – the dirt road everybody takes as a matter of pride though there’s a good bitumen road now – the best routes down south again – and from Geoff, the various national parks to see up north. In particular he mentioned Euengella Park, West of Mackay. Meeting of tropical and temperate vegetation.
Ferret became sentimentally attached to Carol, and his personality tended to dominate, though the PJs were granted their space (he had his wife and son with him). Clive, the portly man on my right, had a more respectable look and told his stories as though he were on stage – but Ferret’s tales were the priceless ones.
“Woo-woo” is about a man discharged from an asylum who wants to shoot a bear. Warden sends him to gunsmith. Gunsmith explains how to find bears sleeping in caves – he searches caves shouting “Woo-woo” but hears nothing. Finally at last and biggest cave of all he hears noises of movement and “woo-woo” comes back to him. He’s about to fire when get run down by train.
Ferret was on a roll.
A fellow in the outback has just come back from his first ever visit to Melbourne. His mate asks, “What did you do there?”
“I met Bishop Lennox.”
“Who’s he?”
“Only the foremost Catholic in Australia. He’ll have holy water in his toilet.”
“What’s a toilet?”
“How would I know. I’m not a Catholic.”
Monday 22nd
Night in tent. Few mosquitoes, but hot a sticky. A lot of rain. Things under a tarp on the ground. Collected a gallon of rainwater but kept stuff dry. Much speculation on level of floods. – Lotus Creek has come up as high as Connor’s when I saw it. Meanwhile Connor’s has risen to the highest point it has reached before except in grave floods. Not known whether it is still rising.
Ferret comes over to ask us for breakfast. The truckies have broken into their loads. A carton of prime Victoria rump, Angus, supplies magnificent rump steaks. All truckies have been drinking XXXX bitter all night. It’s not considered decent for a trucky to sleep when there’s beer in range. Kevin made a trip across Lotus [before it flooded] for a crate. Meanwhile two busloads of passengers had arrived, Lotus itself had flooded, and the truckies were having a monster barbecue behind the house.
Andy came over at one point to warn them angrily against charging for the meat.
“I’m not having people doing business on my property.” He was already pissed off at the beer all over the place – afraid it would be thought that he’d sold it. (Sly Grog is what it’s called) because he’s after a license. They were openly contemptuous of him, rating him only a few notches higher than his neighbours. (The one the other side of Connors, they said, sold water at 20cents a glass during a previous flood.)
So on through the day, rump steak coming out of our ears. Flood was still high by nightfall, but Lotus was right down again. We packed up and slept in Ferret’s empty van with net over us. In morning PJ was reading “Overdrive,” a magazine devoted to trucks [with a Playboy style centrefold of a shiny new Kenworth].
The floodwaters flowing among the gum trees makes an unforgettable picture. Dark, swirling waters, moving very fast, stuff floating with it spread out over the land. The tall guinea grass, (18” to 2ft) flattened in clumps, rises and falls so fast.
Breakfast was more steak and bacon. Clive explained that the shippers knew what was taken, and always accepted that in a similar situation some of their food would go. No question of subterfuge.
We were first to leave for Connor’s River after the traffic started to come the other way. I wanted to see the cars stranded in the middle. By the time I got there cars were already streaming across [Although there was still a foot or more of water on the bridge.] – and two bikes had gone through. A third, a young coloured guy on a Honda, was waiting. He gave a strangely forceful impression – a pronounced bone structure, brown to yellow skin, a long waterproof jacket with tattered cuffs turned up and what seemed like deliberately ragged appearance. He had just got his Honda 750 – must have just passed his test.
Ferret, P.J and Clive came along too and ripped down the side of the queue of cars waiting to cross until they met cars coming the other way when they forcibly joined the queue. Carol hitched a ride over, after I’d crossed with the bike – a little wobble at the other end, but no problem. Ferret and PJ came roaring across after us. Swinging the huge rigs deftly into the space and stopped to make farewells. Ferret obviously deeply moved by his meeting Carol.
Eventually after a lot of open range and dead kangaroos, their rig passed us again and stopped. Would we meet them at the hotel in Sarina?
We rode into a small range of hills down steep, winding road of bad tar – and saw two men loading the Honda onto a trailer while the ragged rider stood resignedly nursing a bruised hand. Sad.
Motorcycle insurance in Aussie costs over $200 in NSW for third party alone (which includes passengers). More expensive than cars. There are a lot of bikers; they ride as though it’s dangerous, (there are no choppers on the road: must be illegal), and lots of them have P signs for provisional license. Provisional is for the first 12 months after passing the test. (I thought it was for learners – not so.)
In Sarina we all met again for beers and scotch and counter lunch. PJ was there to spend Christmas with his mother – hadn’t seen her since two and a half years “when she was dying in hospital” His is a Scots family – father was a schoolmaster from the West. Got impression that PJ was the black sheep.
Ferret told his “shops” story.
“Shops” is about a half-wit couple working in a Park.
“You know it must be twenty years since I last had a game of Shops,” says the big man. His mate agrees.
“Well, let’s have a game.” OK. “Right! Here’s the shop. It’s a butcher’s. I’m the butcher, see. This rake here’s the door, and you’re the customer. Right?”
So the customer comes in and the butcher yells “Who do you think you are! Get out of my shop – you want to be served here, you get on the end of the queue, or I’ll throw you out.”
He does. Queues up for twenty minutes, and again and again for most of the afternoon, at last he slogs wearily past the rake and the butcher punches him furiously in the face. He’s on the ground in the leaves when a park policeman comes by. “’Allo, ‘allo. What’s up here?” he asks the big man.
“He got punched in the face.”
He asks the little guy, “What happened to you?”
“I got punched in the face.”
“Anyone can see that. Who did it?”
“I don’t know. There was that many people in the shop, I couldn’t tell.”
Once more we all said goodbye – with much warmth.
Ferret: “You’re a lovely person, I knew straight away – you too Ted. Most people don’t do anything for me. They can be nice – I can be nice – but it doesn’t mean a thing.”
PJ: “You’ll be right.”
Changed $100 (US) at bank. That makes $220 since I landed in Sydney 3 weeks ago.
Carol coming back from Nowhere Else
Later I heard that Ferret overturned his truck outside Sarina, but he was unhurt.
G’day, everyone.
How are you this Sunday morning? Perhaps like me you start the day looking for good news and not finding any. Us humans having pretty much obliterated one small country and decimated its population, and done a similar job on 20% of another, much larger country, it looks like the only survivors in the long run will be the cockroaches and the arms dealers – see if you can tell them apart.
I will make two astonishing predictions. Elon Musk will never get to Mars, and Trump will NOT be elected president. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he won’t be president.
Question is: Can the rest of the world get by without America (I mean the USA)? Very doubtful. What a relief, then, to get back to 1975 in Australia, the lucky country, when the future looked bright and we were ambling up the East coast, working it out as we went.
My naked notes, continued.
Wednesday 17th December. Leaving Brisbane
After running around in the city to get two withdrawal forms from Mercantile Building Society in Queen Street, on corner of George Street, we packed and left.
38 miles out, stopped for pineapple. Met couple in Land Rover, from Townsville.
“Glass House Mountains” visible from road – one conical, one a crooked finger from a fist. Continued through heat under cumulus, among pines, to “Sunshine Coast” – a great speculative housing scheme behind coast, Kawana Homes, 3 B’rooms at $25,000 up.
Stopped at Mooloolaba to swim.
Aussie phones in 1975. Press button B to get your money back. Swagmen did it in mild expectation.
About midday thought of paying $2 for a campsite between beach and road but talked out of it. Went on along Sunshine Coast looking for motels, etc. but nothing seemed good enough. Finally at Tewantin saw the Royal Mail Hotel, which reminded me of the good colonial hotels in South Africa. Carol went to see about price and came back with two old codgers in tow, Sammy and George.
Sammy was bubbling over with bonhomie and G was nodding his head and going “Yes, yes,” as S sold him the idea of putting us up. S was a Geordie. G was a Canadian of English parents. So there we are, set up in this “flat” – slightly grubby and with a succession of increasingly aged hosts a bit overpowering – and yet G and S a lot more alive than the McDonalds of yesterday [the couple from Townsville].
Tewantin itself seems a pleasant place; big fig trees on lawns by the river. But touristy, and always things here are costly. Was sucked in by hotel in the evening and spent too much on a mediocre dinner. Could have had as much for a quarter the price in the beer garden.
Thursday 18th
Spent day in George’s house writing my Oriana diary. Not quite finished.
Friday 19th
Spent another day to get work done on bike. George seems happy. A hot day.
Saturday 20th
From Tewantin.
Aussie poem:
I eat my peas with honey,
I have done all my life,
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.
Riding through cool, overcast day. Occasional flashes of drizzle. Reminded of country in north of South America, of Tanzania, of Swaziland – beginning to feel the world’s scenery – but wait till we see the first kangaroo. Stopped for fruit after 95 miles. Bike is doing an incredible 66 mpg today. Met couple, American dental technician, English wife who read about my departure in S.T. but assumed I’d given up because nothing more got printed.
Found space among trees at side of a small dirt road – “real bad road.” Super rice and veg dinner. Put up awning and tent. Felt physically very uncomfortable. Sweaty. Upset Carol’s mood. Finally slept under net, under awning, alongside bike, over green bag and under sheet. Very sticky and sweaty at first, but slept well later.
[The “green bag” was a bed we designed and made in San Francisco. Made in segments with foam in tent cloth it folded up to make a pillion seat for Carol.]
Sunday 21st
Woke at dawn under the net. Patches of rosy light through heavy cloud on horizon, paled to whey. No kangaroos but a chorus of crazy birdsong, cackling, tinkling, burbling and hooting. Carol made ‘doughboys’ and eggs and coffee while I put away all the furniture, most unused. All this stuff to put away, but the awning really worked. Carol got into a mild state packing the kitchen – I’m trying to learn about giving her that space. Wind blew up from opposite quarter to last night. i.e… N.E. and seemed to be driving banks of heavy wet cloud before it, but no deluge yet at 6.30. On to road, meaning to find out about [illegible] Island. Took loop to Gladstone, a bleak, empty town on Sunday at 8am. Four boys stood on launching ramp. One was particularly bright, and independent, and told us there was no boat to the island on Sunday. We talked a bit and an older boy said his uncle had written from London to say in 30 years there wouldn’t be a Londoner left there – only them darkies. He had a knowing smirk on his face and I told him it was an absolute load of shit. “Well I’ve been there myself.” Then you should know better. “And me aunt has bin too,” but the smirk was close to collapse now. Painful to hear such stuff from a child. Aussie prejudices are strong and outspoken. Gladstone abandoned, we rode on to Rockhampton, where we didn’t buy lunch at an Esso restaurant. Pump man said prices were high because of wages. His wife worked in restaurant and brought home only $3 less a week than he did. And he was a tradesman.
On to the Mackay road, long empty stretches of narrow tar through range land, a mass of dead Brigalow trees killed by the poisoned axe. Just over halfway we cross a bridge with no parapets at Lotus Creek, and stop at a roadhouse the other side.
Phil Pilgrim, Triumph dealer in Melbourne, on a run with his Vincent. He helped me a lot back in the day.
Next Week: Rump steak and beer with the Truckies.
From the outset of my journey, I was very clear about several promises I made to myself.
First: I would do it in one single, unhurried journey and then write a book about it.
Second: It would be a complete journey, overland, uninterrupted, visiting as many countries as I could on the way round.
Third: I would travel as frugally as possible in order to get as close as I could to the indigenous people I was moving amongst. I would go as deep as I could into their lives, accept any invitation that came my way, and make myself vulnerable to whatever came along.
To make that possible my fourth promise was: I would always travel alone.
Two years into the journey, in November 1975, I was about to break that last promise. After several months living with Carol on the commune it became obvious that we should stay together. Our feelings for each other seemed as steady and solid as a rock. It became impossible for me to contradict her desire to travel on with me. She understood my purpose, she was powerfully independent, and I knew she wouldn’t shrink from any risk I felt like taking. So during the last weeks before I sailed away we rearranged things on the bike so that she could ride behind me, although there was no pillion seat. She was unable to get a berth on the ship. Instead, she would fly to Sydney and meet me after I got there.
So that is the truth about Australia and Me.
For six months Carol and I travelled together and I could not have asked for a more perfect companion. She humoured me in every way, and in the end, I found it impossible to explain to her or myself why, but it just wasn’t working for me.
In June I told her I had to go on alone. It was the most painful decision I have ever made. So that’s why, in Jupiter’s Travels, my account of Australia is the weakest part of the book, and she isn’t in it. At the time I felt I had no choice. I can’t second guess it fifty years later.
What follows is from my notebook after we met up in Sydney in December 1975. My notes begin after we left Sydney to move up the East Coast:
December 15
Caravan bed was very comfortable. No insects. Very musical bird in the morning, which changed pitch, or key. Heard nothing like it since the bottle bird [in Africa]. Gloria [our host] made grilled tomatoes on toast, made several shame-faced references to night before. [Don’t ask!]
Rode out along riverside where I photographed the aborigine family the day before – he swore at me profusely – “I’ll fucking toss yer in there,” indicating the river.
Another hot day. The bowls teams were out already – some women among them. Back to highway, the eucalyptus, to Macksville, Nambucca Heads, always broad rivers with banks of dense, dark green vegetation, willows etc. Tried to get lunch at hotel in Ulmarra – seemed like a pleasant, shady little town – but failed. Next town, Maclean, didn’t do so well in a café. Next door was a better place, not seen till later. The menus had articles about Australiana pasted on to them – early servant problems, the birth of amateurism in sport, theatrical history, a gold strike story.
Rode on to Ballina thinking it might be nice, but too busy, likewise on coast. Back on highway to Surfer’s Paradise – visible on horizon from Twerd Heads, Australia’s Miami Beach. Highrise hotels/apts. All the names borrowed from Miami, Vegas, Riviera, but seemed not to warrant staying. Began to think of getting to Brisbane and found Mike MacDonald’s name in my book. Phone engaged. Rode on busy hwy and lunched at road hse. 10 miles south of Brisbane, dropped bike. In Queensland now – no “schooners”, only “tens”, “sevens”, and “fives” [when ordering beer]. Got grilled barramundi. Talked to young Yamaha rider. Lots of nervous twitches, mannerisms, faded blue eyes. “Dja know abaht Mikuni carbs?”
Called Mike’s number again. His mother answered in a thin elderly voice, to say he was away on another trip in south-east Asia and wouldn’t be back till Jan.6th. Eventually she invited us to stay – and then repeated it, so we decided to go. Her house on the river at Brisbane – cool and very pleasant, but her husband senile and she a shrunken spirit, so hard to take. Perhaps alone I could have switched them off, but it’s not necessarily good for me to do that.
We rode into town to a carol singing in town square, with small redbrick church of Victorian mien, trimmed with white stone, squatting at the foot of high rise bank buildings. A tableau of angels and shepherds frozen on the balcony in a floodlight, but ugly amplification made “compère” running it like a night at the Palladium.
Most impressive sight in Brisbane, the bridges, two matching ones like Waterloo bridge. General feeling like, say, Port Elizabeth [in S.Africa] Tall modern office buildings dominate everything but few period buildings in the centre – one called Inns of Court, built 1916. 3 storeys each with balcony and canopy.
MacDonalds actually have a beautiful position by riverside, landscaped as park. House allows air to pass through and cool it. The father, Kev, has a snooker table in the basement and plays, or lies on a couch watching his portable TV set, which he also brings up with him at night. He won’t leave the house if he can help it. She’s sewing for a wedding. One wall has Chinese characters drawn, one on each brick. Mike plans to teach Chinese. It becomes harder and harder for me to place him now in my memory. All I recall is his shorts, and some kind of woolly hat he wore. His mother says she couldn’t remember me from the pictures, but she supposes that’s because she took me for an Arab.
Carol, on the road north from Sydney
