Articles published in May, 2024
March 19th to 26th, Adelaide
Our hosts John and Judith Brine were academics who enjoyed our company, as we did theirs, and they looked after us for a week while we explored the city. There was plenty to see but I made only one short note.
Visit to Art Gallery. A quiet mood. Aboriginal bark paintings. The Pleiades and Orion in a T and Oval shape respectively. Some good Australian landscapes, by H.J. Johnstone, John Glover, Heysen, Walter Withers (all 19th Cent.) Some Dutch – a cavalry battle, bulbous white horse glistening like swollen intestines.
Adelaide is the last big city on the south coast before getting to the other side. We set out on:
March 27th and 28th to Laura and Wilpena
Averaging 63 mpg. Spoke gone in the morning. Very brown flat land. Grain silos and sheep trains drawn up at sidings. Big grey and white gums. 50 miles between towns going towards Flinders Range. Melrose seemed a pretty town, just beyond us last night. Hawker was a surprise, but is a tourist outpost, with two grandiose hotels, one now derelict (Grand Junction and Royal) – or were they in Quorn? Will check today. Took wrong road from Hawker for a few miles – under construction. Then 30 miles to Wilpena Pound Nat. Park. Shop. Wine. Stew. Galahs. Sweet-smelling pines and gums. Roseate sky. Walk in the Pound. Kangaroos and babies. Fine woods. Derelict house with graffiti.
March 29th, from Wilpena
Hard ride back to Quorn (Grand Junction Hotel).
[The hotels were in Quorn after all.]
Port Augusta power station, all in smog. Amazing in all this space to see small town in smog. On to Whyallah. Turns out to be a steel foundry (BHP) and almost nothing else. Next pt. on coast is Cowell, another 64 miles. Long ride and turn off on a whim to Lucky Bay. Dirt road. Little row of holiday houses on the coast. Great heaps of sea grass on the beach. Little sign of life. Bed down behind some scrub bushes in the white sand. Grilled steaks, cabbage and potatoes. Perfect bed with net cover.
March 30th
Up with the sun. A man put his gill net out and caught a dozen whiting in half an hour. Gave us two for breakfast. Delicious. On to Port Lincoln. To Cowell, to sharpen knife at butchers. Stopped first at Port Arno where found a man who sold cockles. Then decided to move more slowly round the coast and really do the fishing seriously. So turned off at Port Neill. Quiet holiday resort., Two adjoining bays, one with long jetty. Houses all locked up, likewise caravans, pretty green park, with attendant Scotsman and white tomcat. Spent the rest of the afternoon fishing off beach in rough water but no sign of anything. So went over to jetty towards sundown. Felt a few knocks on the line, but nothing much. Tried the silver lure, but still nought. The Scotsman told Carol there were no whiting here. Only a few Toms – or Tommy Ruffs – which are a small herring-like fish with yellow dashes on their sides.
Somewhere near Venus Bay
March 31st, Wednesday
600 miles from Adelaide and two thirds of a pint of oil gone.
First thing after love, i.e. at 7am, to jetty to try again. In first light sea is beautifully illuminated. Can see bait on the bottom (sand among the grass) and also the Toms swishing about. Gradually I learn where they’ll pick it up – i.e, floating and in motion about halfway down and so, painfully slowly over a period of three hours catch four little Toms, and lose two off the hook. But it’s a beginning, and they make a breakfast. We had just finished eating when a young man came to ask if we’d help move some furniture.
“There’s five bucks in it!”
“Not half!!”
The furniture is made of cardboard and is moving into a plasterboard house. Job takes fifteen minutes. Lucky Country.
From Port Neill to Lincoln, long and straight. Huge granary, grain loader, rail head. Spent winnings on a cask of Coolabah and tied plastic bottle on the back. Took wrong road to Coffin Bay but came back to it after eight miles. Big bush fire filled sky with fiery smoke. Sparse, dry country. Scrub. Brown sheep. Coffin Bay, three miles of road, a small town with lots of holiday houses spreading from it. Jetty and series of interconnected bays. We camped on a beach beyond houses on dirt road. Shallow cockle bay. Towards evening, Andy Spiers, the new ranger for the newer Yangie Reserve drove up with wife Helen and three children, and a surf boat. They later invited us to lunch the following day. We had a beautiful night under the net. Went cockling in the morning.
Thursday, April 1st
Caught a sprat from the jetty. Rain clouds formed. Lunch with Andy and Helen. Then rode through the reserve to Avoid Bay, to catch a big one off the rocks. It took the tail off my bait. Then I lost bait hook and sinker in rocks, twice, and cut my foot trying to retrieve them. Stone is volcanic, sharp and friable. Back to Andy’s at night. Listened to his tapes. Then home to tent.
Friday, April 2nd
Weather still cool and damp. Went on to Venus Bay with four lamb chops. Camped on bluff overlooking most rugged coast. With mile-long rollers breaking on rocks. Took pics. Made good fire, in spite of strong wind and had lovely meat and sautéd potatoes. Very warm and comfortable behind bush.
April 3rd
From Venus Bay to Ceduna. Through fifty miles of bad dirt road. Then good road. Said caretaker at Venus (his wife feeds the pelicans, 24 of them) it’s what the Nullarbor is like when it’s bad.
[Ever since Melbourne we were haunted by the prospect of the Nullarbor road, three or four hundred miles of it, across the huge waterless wasteland that divides the south of Australia.]
To Streaky Bay. The café with the couple dressed up in little white numbers – like McDonald’s. Nothing again for 70 miles. Then André’s Garage [in Ceduna] and invitations from A. for dinner. Wife Helga from Munich – the ultimate “Level Gaze” as Carol put it. Children Bernard and Andrew.
[Next weekend I will be at the Touratech travellers’ meeting in the Black Forest, where they want to put me on the stage and make a fuss of me, so there probably won’t be another episode that Sunday. The following weekend, still in Ceduna, and André’s strange story.]
Edging along the south coast towards the Nullarbor
The Rises, 3rd to 13th March
The Handbury family made us feel at home on their sheep station, and even allowed us to earn a little money doing labouring work. I learned a lot, but my most vivid memory was of watching the foreman kill and dismember a sheep. It was done with amazing speed and precision. We stayed for ten days, and I made very few notes.
Helen’s manner a trifle odd at times. Paddy the kindly, strapping younger brother. Ted Jagoe, ex-jockey, Farm hand or foreman?
Worked to make a little money, clearing sticks from paddocks under the big blue gums. Then we cleared out an oat silo together. Hard and itchy work. But had wonderful meals, lovely room.
Fishing. Red fins and one glorious salmon trout, plus a turtle.
My first catch: two redfins and a salmon trout
On Monday (a holiday) we went sailing on lake Natimuk – and went out on the trapeze on Tony Mitchell’s boat.
On the big paddocks a sheep occasionally dies, debilitated by worms.
Saturday 13th MacArthur
From The Rises, left late, 1pm, Went 70 miles in great heat, stopped at MacArthur for drink. Saw a 28lb conger eel being trailed by two boys on a stick. Looked like a long grey stocking stuffed with jelly. To park, free. Put up my gazebo of tubes for first time – works quite well, but obviously now the sheet should be made to fit it better. One of several lads came to borrow a fork.
Back later, three of them, with a carton full of beer bottles. We talked and drank, and they left a bottle for us. A little later three possums came to roam around. One was particularly tame. All lowered themselves head-first into litter bin.
Trestle bridge on south coast
Sunday 14th Port Fairey
Phillip Pilgrim & his ’52 Vincent Rapide, with the Vincent Owners Club at Port Fairey. Amazing coincidental meeting with my Melbourne mechanic friend. Carol gets to ride in a sidecar. I get advice about forks and spokes (heavy duty)
Monday 15th from Mt Gambier
Long straight roads near the coast through endless plantations of Pinus Radiatus from 196 to 1976 some being cropped now. Softwood Holdings Ltd. Crossed state line. Gained half an hour. Beach before Beachport, loads of kelp, collected spherical shells. On to Robe, past lakes (George, etc.) Swans. Theosophy centre. To Robe. Camped on beach. Fished off jetty. Caught one sprat. Ate good dinners at Robe Hotel, slept in perfect little bay, but at 3am heavy sea mist came and got us scrambling for cover. Slept on under lean-to against bike. Woke at 6, good exciting night. Dried things, breakfasted. Talked French, packed. Adjusted timing (LH plug sooty). Big moon hanging over horizon.
Tuesday 16th from Robe
From Robe to Kingston. Little but scrub and sheep. Then along north side of several dry salt lakes, the Coorong National Park, big dunes in the background, Malley trees and succulents. Wandered in over sand and salt to find big ramshackle house with derelict-looking property around it (perfect for heroin lab) but we got no further. Miles to the sea.
Ninety miles of this, then Meningie on Lake Albert. For sandwich lunch. Three ladies from Sydney returning from Adelaide Festival. V Good they said.
From Meningie to Murray Bridge, having remember that Mari gave me names there. Forgot, though, that they were the ancient man/young woman couple. (32.34.29 phone for Bill and Peggy Graton at M.B.)
Wednesday 17th Murray Bridge
A conventional house with a good well-ordered flower and veg. garden. Peggy is the librarian of Murray Bridge – 7000 volumes, about one per capita. A physically self-effacing woman, non-descript clothes, a wad of blue tissue clipped on to the left strap of her bra, but not fastidiously concealed (a mastectomy?) – busy getting things done in the kitchen before a journey to Adelaide. Like any working wife. Then Bill returns. Assume at first that he’s her father. Sparse hair almost white, but covering the crown of a well-shaped hard-tanned head. Features clean, skin clear, though much folded, slightly bowed, trousers hung high on braces – bright eyes, an easy laugh. He’s able to recount events of 25 years ago as though yesterday – but seems to have a good focus on the present. Was a dairy farmer – appears to have enjoyed much success and respect. Read and absorbed as much as possible on the subject. Built stone house (German stone mason) but insisted on concrete foundations, lintels and ties. Says super-phosphate does not leach out, though lime does, according to Rothampstead. Obviously their relationship is very good, though marriage is a convenient word for it.
Murray River water – too thin to plough, too thick to drink.
Thursday 18th to Adelaide (Addleyade?)
But first to Hahndorf – founded 1830s by a German sea-captain and his passengers. All Lutherans escaping persecution. Saw a few attempts to recover early atmosphere. Museum and art gallery in old board school. Interesting paintings by Ruth Tuck of figures, faintly obscene behind lace curtains. Relics of early settlers – lace-trimmed petticoats, baby carriages, etc. Some pottery and jewellery sold there is good. Otherwise, little to recommend.
Hilly country around Adelaide, freeway, then looking down on city and ocean beyond. Into city centre along broad streets to railway station. Had a couple of pizzas then phoned John and Judith Brine and were immediately invited to their vine covered villa on the edge of the city. Heavy polished wood, wainscoting a foot high, Immensely thick brick walls, vines screening the windows, etc.
We spent almost a month in Melbourne. Much of the time I was working on the bike and looking for a ship to take us away from Australia. With Darwin destroyed by a typhoon, I felt the least I should do to be able to say I’d seen Australia was to ride the two thousand miles across the south to Perth, but finding a boat was difficult. One ship would have taken us all around the Philippines to Bangkok but it was too expensive. Another would have had us travelling with racehorses to Djakarta but that fell through. Finally the only acceptable choice was the Kota Bali, a small cruise ship sailing out of Fremantle to Singapore. It cost $200 each, bike included, still a lot of money at the time.
Looking for an antidote to Okker, I was bowled over (a suitable metaphor for cricket-crazy Oz) by the art in the Melbourne Gallery. My notebook lists Sidney Nolan, Perceval, John Brack, Arthur Boyd, Justin O’Brien, Russell Drysdale, Charles Blackman, and I even made tiny sketches of the paintings I admired most.
I see I also visited Kodak, probably trying to get my film processed, but I don’t know if I succeeded. Having to carry all my exposed film around on the bike was a persistent worry.
I see I made a mistake earlier in these notes. We did stay a full month in Melbourne before I was ready to leave.
Friday, February 27th
Melbourne to Colac. Road to Geelong, past docks, competing petrol stations, and along the freeway. Geelong ancient wool port, then to join the Ocean Road. A triumph. Quite as lovely as the Hwy 1 [in California] and much more deserted. To Lorne and Apollo Bay. (Fish & Chips). Then through attractive hills and forests to the hot inland grazing country and to Colac where found Chris at his parents’ house waiting for Karen [friends made in Melbourne]. Went to pub to meet Stephen the publican who owns two pubs and vaguely reminds me of Tom Merrin [a ruffian from my newspaper days] Then back for chops and a cold night ride to Gellibrand and their home – ten acres, fibreboard house on a rise with sheds and then steep slope to small river with some acres of potatoes cultivated with their permission by Vic, a perfect potato grower who calls everyone sheriff. Chris is big, blonde, complacent, affable. Karen pretty, dark, contained.
Back to Lorne on Sunday for the day, where I fished with his rod. He had caught a trout the night before.
Monday we looked for work. Saw several farmers and Dept. of Agriculture. [Presumably we failed.]
Wednesday, March 3rd
Colac to Apollo Bay, Port Campbell and Balmoral.
From Apollo Bay across the headlands, dirt and lush sub-tropical veg. most beautiful. Stopped for dynamiting of tree on road. Coast continues. Bare grazing land. Sandstone bluffs and great sandstone pillars carved out by the sea.
A few of the Twelve Apostles
Carol’s headache disaster. [She had a migraine attack. We were on our way to Matt Handbury’s parents at “The Rises” but she couldn’t continue. We spent hours above the cliffs as I massaged her head and neck until she felt able to go on.]
Convalescence at Port Campbell. Man from Berkshire. BMW rider from Perth (Hunchback?).
Four hours to Balmoral. Long cold ride through the night, just managed to find petrol in time. Caramut Hotel, where we phoned.
From Balmoral, over bridge left on to dirt road, to find house all lit up to welcome us. Such nice people.
I marvel at Carol’s stamina and our determination to get there. Perhaps we had no option. I would never have imposed the ordeal upon her. There’s so much my notes don’t tell.
First, thank you all so very much for your many birthday wishes. I truly appreciate them.
I made a bad mistake in last week’s pages. I said that Melbourne’s famous newspaper, “The Age,” belonged to Murdoch. Untrue. It is and always has been quite independent of Murdoch, and my error is possibly due to my own mild obsession with him. Not everything belongs to Rupert Murdoch. Although we have never met, and he has certainly forgotten the one time we spoke 55 years ago, he has been a fairly constant presence in my life.
In 1969 I was editing an issue of the Observer colour magazine in London and I chose to make “influence” the theme. I made a list of people I thought most influential, and planned to ask them whom they thought were most influential. Rupert Murdoch had just landed in England from Australia. He was making a lot of noise, having acquired two newspapers, The Sun and The News of the World, and he was stretching his wings. I phoned him to say we thought of him as having growing influence, and all I remember him saying, quite pleasantly, was “Don’t be silly.” He wanted nothing to do with it.
In 1975, when I was riding through Ecuador, I met and spent some time with Matt Handbury, a young man on a BMW, who happened to be Rupert’s nephew. He was on a long, unfocused journey trying to decide whether to shelter under his uncle’s umbrella or live an independent life. His mother Helen was Rupert’s sister. He told me that when I got to Australia I should visit their sheep station, The Rises, and – he added – I should also go to see his grandmother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch in Melbourne. He gave me addresses and telephone numbers and so here I was, in Melbourne.
The political scene in Australia had just gone through unprecedented turmoil, and the Murdochs were nothing if not political, so it could be interesting to meet the Dame now. I phoned, and she invited us to come and have lunch at Cruden Farm. We went on the bike, of course. This is what I wrote:
The road from Melbourne to Frankston was along the East side of the bay. At first it comes inland a bit from St Kilda, where the massage parlours earn constant shy allusions – small villas, painted in rather bright distemper colours, windows painted over and the street numbers in large figures a foot or more high as their principal recognition points; where the smart movie houses (Palais and National) were showing classic movies every night (Borsalino & Co, Delon: Day of the Locusts: Death in Venice), and Leo’s Spaghetti Bar did a generous bowl of Spag Carbonara for 60 cents, on Fitzroy Street, among cheaper hotels (Nightly: Miss Sammi Davis) and cafés and Luna Park on the beach.
So the Nepean Highway, which is a continuation of St Kilda’s road goes out to Moorabin through “Autoland” and then past the Lucas factory on the right, to the more leisurely resorts along the coast where nautical sports keep their dinghies and yachts.
Downtown Melbourne in 1976
Cruden Farm is about three miles inland, not a lot of land but sufficient for the house to be well back from the road on a long drive. Stone house, old English, early 19th century perhaps, the Dame appearing at upstairs window saying “I’m just changing. Go in please, make yourselves comfortable.”
Polished wood, piano, delicious aroma of baking, When she comes down she’s a slighter figure than one expects of a Dame, wearing a simple calico dress (frock?), spectacles, easy light-limbed walk (she is presumably in her middle or late sixties.) We talk at first about the election – her son’s change of heart, her criticism of “The Age” for changing its attitude to Liberal in the last days before the election.
[“The Age” was Australia’s greatest newspaper, and Graham Perkin it’s famous editor. He favored the Labor Party but died suddenly before the election. “The Age” changed allegiance, to the Liberal Party, which was distinctly conservative.]
She (the Dame) felt that Perkin would have stuck to his guns. She is herself a convinced Liberal. It’s difficult though, on reflection, to believe that she would have been able to sustain a different opinion from the men. Keith Murdoch was her husband. Geoffrey – Matt’s father – is a son-in-law, daughters Helen and Rachel (married to John Calvert-Jones). She really believes that Labor was ruining Australia, and that Rupert was reluctantly convinced of it.
Rupert I didn’t meet but saw on TV – a broad-faced, cuddly person with a legend of ruthlessness about him. She pooh-poohs the ruthlessness, says talk of his power mania is foolish, that he’s just not like that to meet. Like so many people, she can’t distinguish, at least in her own son, the difference between a personal affectation of ruthlessness, and the ruthless consequences of rational business decisions taken in boardroom vacuo.
We sip white wine with cheese biscuits – the proper kind that are soft and crumbly and taste of cheese and salt, and the Dame talks easily, beginning each sentence by opening her mouth wider than usual and aspirating the first vowel, a curious mannerism that seems appropriate to her generation and reveals the schoolgirl in her.
We are both flattered by her attention – she is perfectly courteous and seems to pay real attention to what we say. At first she tends to address her general questions to me (about Australia, Australians, etc.) but I turn them over to Carol and the Dame picks that cue up very easily. Calvert-Jones arrives with the coffee – he has a rather obsequious attitude to her – I was surprised to hear later that he was a general’s son. Much later, at The Rises, we heard that he had been surprised by the amount of time she had lavished on us.
He showed us around the grounds, a fine old stable with horses’ heads carved on the post heads, and an ornamental garden.
She came out at the end to see us off, and clambered onto the pillion seat to see what it was like, showing suspenders and stocking tops and knickers, and was very sprightly about it, though when she caught my glance at her deshabille she seemed, for a moment, frozen in anger, as though afraid she’d gone too far.
We’re on a circular drive, in front of the house. Big tree has fragments of honeycomb fallen at its base, and Calvert-Jones seems unnecessarily nervous of them.
House has some leaded windows, and colonial white pillars of wood which always seem so unsatisfactory to me where they meet the joists they support.
Perhaps the essential point about Cruden is that the life it describes is so divorced from the Australia we have got to know – as different as upper-class used to be in England.
A few years after my journey had ended Rupert Murdoch acquired both The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers and he offered Harry Evans the editorship of The Times, an offer he couldn’t refuse.
I was in something of crisis at home so I took an assignment from Harry as a roving correspondent of The Times. I was halfway down South America, in Argentina, just as Margaret Thatcher sent her naval armada to the Falklands. I was in a great position to report the story, as Argentinians went into conniptions about the “pirate fleet” they thought was coming to shell Buenos Aires. But Murdoch chose that moment to sack Harry for not doing as he was told, and I didn’t have the stomach to continue. So I went home to the ranch.
Since then, Rupert, together with his gang at Fox News, has become a monster. I am as likely to blame him as I am to blame Trump or President Pudding for all the ills of the world. He’s the same age as me. We’ll see which of us outlasts the other.
PS: I have a new character in my rogue’s gallery. Along with Vladimir Pudding, Porky and Percy K.Pistachio, I welcome Benny Notonyernellie. (Brits might make more sense of this one).
