News from Ted
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).
Sunday, January 11th
From Coonabarrabran. Very quiet on the roads and in the towns. Passed along a section of dirt road to Cudal. Stopped a while to talk and look at parrots. Beginning to realise how many there are – oddly enough there are more to be seen in the South than in the North. The grey ones with red breasts and heads are everywhere – Galahs – and another, even more gaudy, is common too. Found one by roadside and took feathers as a sample.
The Galah
Country made strong impression. Rolling pasture for hundreds of miles – seemingly in all directions. Towns, particularly Canowindra (owin = oun) have a more evolved look, the older hotels with spacious balconies of decorative ironwork and good proportions are well-kept.
Canowindra in 1976
The Garden of Roses
A weather-beaten gent. stood by the bike, waiting to talk to me. He had a mild, humble manner, said he’d done some gold-mining himself and though he’d never travelled he read about foreign places, especially where there was mining.
“How is it in Peru?” he asked. He’d heard about that. I enjoyed being with him for a while.
The Pembertons received us kindly. She has a strong, vital personality but he’s rather burned out (deaf and drinks a fair bit). Carol observes how often one or other partner is a wreck. They built the home fifteen years before – a big expensive place – she was very sensitive about the state of the lawn. We slept in the girls’ room – single beds on opposite sides of the room (“You don’t mind sharing a bedroom?”) She told us at length about Glenice’s [the daughter] surprise wedding, and Christopher [husband] didn’t get a very good press. She’s going out to visit them in Salvador.
Monday, 12th
At Clunes, on the road from Canowindra to Cowra, with family called Young. Son Ian, daughters Rebecca, Margaret, Sue, Letitia. Rode up to house along avenue lined with immature trees. House, of brick, seemed fairly new. People seen through windows stretched out in easy chairs.
Ian had just come back to garage on his Agricultural Yamaha and I rode up there to talk to him. Pleasant, almost sweet young man, sideburns, reddish hair very thick on forearms, wearing toweling shorts – his expression reminded me of John Clarke, from my childhood. Talked to us forever, while we still sat on our bikes like dummies, although it was obvious that we would be able to stay on the land. At last he fetched his father. The whole family came out and we talked for a good while in the evening light, with the Galahs swooping and screeching in the gum trees. (they kill the biggest trees by stripping their bark).
The father offered us the use of a disused cottage at the back of the property, near the sheep-shearing shed. Ian accompanied us there and we thought that would be the end of it, but then we saw headlights approaching, slowly, halting at each set of gates. The girls arrived with beer, salad, orange juice and a bottle of Coke. Very generous.
13th – 15th, Canberra, but no notes.
16th To Kosciousko Park, the Snowy Mountains
We’ve spent four days in the Southside Caravan park and it’s time to leave. The magpies are strolling around as usual – exceptionally bulky birds in their tattered black suits with flashes of white underwear showing through. They have a strangely musical chant, like squeaky machinery but at a very sophisticated level, and look very much at home among the campers. Said goodbye to the Beissmans, young Germans – he a welder/fitter/turner, she an optometrist. They’ve lived nine months in Australia, with tent and Land Rover and plan to go on working like that to buy land and build.
Weather was perfect for riding, blue sky, hot sun, cool air. Up into Snowies – above 5000 feet – bought steak and few veg at Adaminaby. Admired the wild flowers and gum forests, and the dams and switching stations. Day ended gracefully in a forest clearing, where we swept away leaves and twigs to make places for the bed and the fire – a good stone fireplace – to avoid any chance of a forest fire. Only sad note was Carol’s increasing discomfort with what later seemed to be a cyst, together with various aches and pains and glandular swelling. We also had little money and had forgotten it was Friday – so a weekend of difficulty unless Carol’s theory of easy money changing was born out.
Saturday 17th
Woke up at dawn. Aching night, but clear and cool. Carol went for a walk. Found a little beetle on helmet visor – brown with speckles and toy feet. Left a little turd and flew off. Wonderful to watch it gear itself up for flight, with the slightest movement of wing cases, pacing back and forth on the edge of the plastic (like that bizarre Southern priest we saw on TV preparing to smash bricks with his forehead.)
Set off to complete the circuit of the Snowies – the threatening dirt road climb was not as bad as it might be. Road winds up and down over creeks named after Groggin and Swiggin – a veritable Hobbit land. Filled up from stream water, took some pix, went over the top (at Leather Barrel) and came down to Lake Jindabyne where a wily Italian took 40 cents for a coffee, and Carol’s theories began to seem unfounded. On to Cooma where further efforts to change money proved futile. I kept up a sort of bloody-minded indifference for a while, letting her do the running in and out of motel offices. It had annoyed me the day before when I pointed out a bank and she had not wanted to go in. Sometimes I resent being forced into a position of having either to insist on some point or having to suffer again the consequences that I already went through on my own a year or two ago.
Decided to go on to Eden anyway, with only 90 cents. At Merimbula saw a likely motel and got $15 off the proprietor. In Eden drew up outside the Australasia for a drink – and was hailed by a tall man with one leg, and some others. They were a work camp building a house for an Aboriginal family. They asked us to join them, were very friendly, wanted us to go back with them for “tea’ but Carol really exhausted so we bought food (chicken) and ate it in the pub with wine and beer to relax. Then rode back to the school where the kids were living (right next to park where we intended to camp). They were going to sleep on the beach with a fire. Though often illegal, they thought their numbers would prevail. It was a bit of a performance getting down there, and we were a bit overtired to be much entertained by the resident “performer” singing about old ladies locked in the loo – and the foggy, foggy dew. But eventually, despite a few mosquitoes, it was a good night.
Sunday, 18th
Morning was beautiful. Beach was glorious, water was cool and heavenly. Collected shells – a film canister full – and came back to the house where most of them were packing up to leave. The house was unfinished and some of the principal people were staying behind.
In the afternoon we were taken to the swimming falls they had discovered about 20 miles inland where a river has worked its way through a great rock in a series of falls and cavities more beautiful than anything I’ve seen on that scale.
19th to 28th
We stayed with them – Tim Seale, Kevin Goode, Chris, Brian Spillsbury, Helen, Judy, etc, to help finish the house. I drew a floor plan on the inside back cover of my notebook.
In a church hall we were joined by a reinforcement from another camp. The difference in tone was quick to appear. Three men, two women, churchy over-age pranksters, not very “mellow” as Carol would say.
Had much difficulty working with flimsy materials, fibre board, asbestos, pacific maple moulding and skirting – light as balsa, all walls and ceilings out of true, doors featherweight but monstruous size to ceiling so that inhabitants dwarfed (to reduce damp in roof – lets hot air flow out) floor of fibre-board sanded down. Banks give 15 years life to these houses for mortgage purposes.
Wednesday 28th
Carol’s uneasiness continued through the night (another cancer dream) but in the morning we were able to talk it out better. She feels that I don’t value her, think her contribution is of insufficient value (intelligence, articulacy, says she was learning from me ways to discuss and question – that the “movement” language was not sufficiently broad to deal with everything) while I said it disturbed me to find myself constantly provoking her uneasiness by references in passing (as yesterday when I asked people whether they would prefer travelling through India alone or in company.)
It’s true that I am still profoundly suspicious of women, and I do anticipate that they will “pull the rug out” – and of course this suspicion breeds uneasiness in me, etc., etc. So we talked about expectations, good and bad.
Today will pursue the problem of parts for the bike, and perhaps approach “The Age” (Murdoch’s Melbourne newspaper) to see if they’ll take some stuff from me for money.
What I need for the motorcycle
Pistons, standard plus 20 LC
Spokes, Q.D. wheel, RH side
Petcock RH side
Gearbox oil change
From 30th January to 18th February we stayed in Melbourne, St Kilda, with friends. Most of those days I spent in Frank Mussett’s shop working on the bike. Described at length in the book. Here’s a note, for gearheads, of what was done:
Change – two inlet, one exhaust valve
Pistons to 7:1 Hepolite
Re-sleeve barrel to standard
Removed and inspected oil tank. New washers
Replaced original oil pump. Found other had badly worn seats
Removed rotor, expanded core and replaced with new tab washer (I’ve forgotten what this means).
Replaced wrong chain from Renold and fitted new one.
Front fork reassembly with missing seals and washers. Compressed springs using old oil seals as spacers.
Removed rear wheel, replaced missing spokes and rebuilt wheel with rim the right side round
Re-riveted speedo gear box
Washed and packed wheel bearings – added missing spacers to hub assembly and refitted
By Friday 13th the work was done, the bike was ready, and I was searching for a ship to take us from Perth to somewhere in East Asia. Meanwhile we visited museums and had lunch with a Dame.
See you next week, I hope.
1879 was a year in which the British Empire confronted some 4000 Zulus at the Battle of Rorke’s Drift, with tales of heroism and a splurge of Victoria Crosses to excite the British public. It was also the year in which George Lucas launched his bicycle lamp, which might seem of relatively little importance. Nonetheless his lamp, mounted on the front wheel of penny-farthings, went on showing the way through darkness long after the battle was history. His was a small one-man business, selling oil and other things from a cart in the streets of Birmingham, but his lamp, which he called “King of the Road,” was the foundation of a business which came to flourish throughout the Empire and was still a household name when I began my journey in 1973.
All Triumphs were fitted with Lucas electrics and, because they had offices and workshops in most of the big cities along the route I had planned, they agreed to help by allowing Avon to send me new tyres at various places along the way. So I came to know the Lucas culture well, in Nairobi, in Cape Town, in Rio and Santiago, in Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, Penang, Madras, Bangalore and Delhi, and I paid courtesy visits even when there were no new tyres to fit. The managers were very old-school British businessmen, jacket-and-tie, belonging to the right clubs, occasionally inclined to grandiosity, very much wedded to the idea of Empire even though it had been dismantled around them. All the jokes and sarcasm among bikers – “Prince of Darkness” was the most current epithet – didn’t seem to impinge on them at all, and although I had my share of trouble, I think the criticism was generally unfair. More often problems arose from connectivity, and Triumph had to share the blame. In any event they seemed unaware of the encroaching doom and were always generous and helpful to me. So in Brisbane too I made contact with Lucas.
Carol, I, and the bike arrived in Brisbane on the morning of January 9th by train. I must have done some phoning beforehand, because we were invited to have lunch that day. The manager’s name was Gribble. Here is what I wrote:
Friday 9th
Brisbane at 12.30. Lunch with Gribble, a firmly fat man, fawn trousers, light brown shoes, white shirt stretched over his chest and belly. When I heard him over the telephone he reminded me of all the other Lucas men, and I thought of portly tolerance and good humour, and a good steak.
He greeted me with a necktie folded in his palm – a token of his extraordinary powers of anticipation – for me to wear in the club. He showed no pleasure, it isn’t his style. He prefers an impassive stance and delivers verbal blows unheralded by expression. The effort to maintain this poker face cause a muscle at the corner of his mouth to twitch a little and adds a slightly sinister cast to the general blandness. He has a butcher’s face; square, fleshed, opaque.
He started the conversation immediately by his hatred for Germans, all Germans. He loathes them, despises them, won’t allow one across his threshold. “There are only two kinds of German . . .” dramatic pause “ . . as Churchill once said, they’re either groveling at your feet or lording it over you.“
He continued with a terrible tale of punishment inflicted on some putative Nazi in Nigeria before the war, who said Heil Hitler and was foolish enough to leave an outboard motor on his, Gribble’s, property.
The motor was pitched directly into the sea. The Nazi came to remonstrate.
“ ‘I shall give you exactly ten seconds to get out of here,’ I said, but he stayed one second too long. I was wearing African army boots, you know, the ones with laces up to here, and on the eleventh second “ – Gribble lost his cool and became ecstatic – “I kicked him where it would do him most good, and pitched him out into the street.”
Gribble’s adjutant in Nigeria, when he was commissioned, was Quintin Hogg – later Lord Hailsham.
[Hogg, who had a distinguished war record, cut short by injury, later became a man of considerable importance in British politics and was almost Prime Minister. Read Gribble’s account in that light.]
He told a story of how he “unmanned” Q.H. He delighted in the word “unmanned,” repeated it several times. It was some foolishness about not having asked the C.O’s permission to marry.
“I don’t know what he’ll say,” quavered Q.H. according to Mr. Gribble.
“The best way to find out is to ask him,” said G.
In all his stories the protagonist makes strident or pathetic remarks in a silly voice, and G snaps them smartly to account with the pithy voice of reason and courage.
At one point Gribble evidently blundered into some perilous enterprise with his men and was lucky enough to get away with it. He rationalises that since the enemy would never expect such impudence (stupidity?) it was tactically brilliant to perpetrate it.
What upset Carol most was how Gribble taught his servant to refer to himself as “a gentleman’s personal gentleman.” In Australia, I imagine, there might be some kudos in some quarters to have actually had an officially legal black slave. When he joined the army, a regulation was promulgated that all officers’ servants had to be soldiers too. The black man promptly (and voluntarily according to G) joined up.
Quintin Hogg approached Gribble in the officers’ mess. “What do you suppose your fellow said he was when I gave him the attestation?”
“Gentleman’s personal gentleman,” replied G. [With satisfaction.]
He claims that the Germans rendered him childless. Did they kill his child, or render him sterile? I don’t know.
The vital point is that his stories, all perfectly acceptable in their time, seem gross today. Yet he has preserved his attitudes unchanged – and they are apparently still valid currency here.
[Gribble was the only insufferable Lucas man I met. The others, as I’ve said, were true gentlemen, but nice with it.]
We escaped from Gribble at about 2.30 and rode off to find the New England Highway, through Ipswich – nothing special – along the Cunningham Highway and past the National Park where there were fine forested hills, and up to Warwick where the N.E. Highway begins. Here we looked for vegetables, but the shop was a travesty (beans at 45 cents and not much else) so we got a steak (1lb 2ozs for $1.10 – very good rump). A heavy shower caught the bike while we were there. Then we went on for a way and found a gate into a field.
At first, difficult, Carol was nervous being on private land. Then we found we had no matches. I rode off to find some, and came back to find her calm, and lit a fire. Then it went very well. We slept out, there were a few mosquitoes, and I didn’t sleep much, watching the wind sweep the clouds away, and listening to odd sounds, and feeling Carol’s presence very lovingly.
This is hilly country at about 3000 feet: a cool area where sheep graze and apples grow. Stouthorpe, Tanterfield, etc. All Italian fruit growers.
What was that you said?
Saturday 10th
Blue sky with bars of white cloud. Cool, rather English countryside. Tanterfield a busy town, full of life. Had a poor lunch but enjoyed the place. Armidale is obviously the most prestigious of these “New England” towns, with the main street blocked off to make a pedestrian area, but no life – all home at lunch. After Armidale many ups and downs, but mostly downs, with safety ramps on the steeper descents, then into great heat of Tamworth. Old thin guy, called Walt, who owned village store and burned his sawmill for the insurance to build a new motel opposite, where we had a beer. Carol came out with a beer and a packet of crisps (SMITHS CRISPS) saying how gross it was, and that someone had said something about arses, but she wasn’t sure it was aimed at her.
In Tamworth I stopped to fix my helmet and passed a man in a half-shell helmet on a tiny bike with an even smaller tank. Turned out to be a 1934 Velocette, and he an old-time m/cycle mechanic who had restored it. Said he’d worked on them for 13 years (as a race mech. I suppose).
At Tamworth we took off on the Newell Highway, into big flat land where an increasingly strong wind blew, ‘till it was quite hard work to stay upright. Going West in the setting sun – with dust clouds in the air – like N. Nebraska, said Carol. Nearly a hundred miles of that, but some relief towards the end as ground rose and wound among hills before coming down into Coonabarrabran where Coolcappa turned out to be name of the sheep station where the Pembertons (?) lived. 800 acres of wheat, 2500 head of sheep, 600 head of cattle, etc. (10,000 or more acres). Earlier passed slaughterhouse, with shed for skins to dry out (like tobacco). Passing the cattle in the fields, it can be odd to reflect that each cow goes to support one person in the city for a year.
The Pembertons, it turns out, are people I heard about in Central America. Next week, if we’re lucky, parrots and Pembertons. Cheers!
I think I mentioned a while back that I’ve been to Mexico. Got back two weeks ago. I flew into Mexico City and from there made two trips, one north to Mazatlán to see two dear friends from California whom I miss, the other south to San Cristòbal to see my German cousin’s daughter who has a house there. She’s a doctor, married to a doctor, and their two sons are doctors so it’s obviously important to keep in with them.
In Mazatlán it turns out I have a fan called Hector Peniche, who not only rides motorcycles but also happens to run a very fancy restaurant called Hector’s Bistro. He started his career in London as a pastry chef (I think I got that right, Hector?) where he met his wife Victoria, also a pastry chef, who comes from Worcester, in England. They married and came to Mazatlán to start a restaurant in a small, rented place; but they were so good at it that a wealthy customer decided to back them, and they now have a whole block humming away, with the bistro and a café. I ate there twice and it’s not to please him that I say the food was wonderful.
Hector’s place
Victoria rides too, and Hector showed me a lovely, retro-seeming new BMW parked outside that he had just bought for her, but a forgot to take a picture of it, or her (she’s lovely, by the way) so the best I can do is a picture of Hector himself. Here he is:
Hector Peniche
Later we all went to a tiny cinema called El Retro, where I gave a slide show for about fifty people.. I’m very out of practice and did the show really badly, but everybody claimed to have loved it – which is not an uncommon experience. Once, back in the nineties, when I was still using Kodachrome slides and a projector, I did a show at a BMW rally somewhere in the American South. Just before it started the cassette tipped over and all the slides fell out. There was no time to sort them – all I could do was stuff them back in any old how, so I never knew what was coming up next. The audience was delighted and kept me in pizzas and beer for the rest of the show. [“It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.”]
In the old colonial centre of San Cristòbal, as in Mazatlán, the low facades of the houses disguise the fact there is usually a large area of ground behind them with one or more larger houses and gardens.
Outside in the street the houses look like this:
But inside, behind these modest facades . . .
. . . are big properties like my cousin Christine’s house and garden.
San Cristòbal de las Casas, to give it its proper name, is a wonderful old town, with a great climate, but I got there too late in life.
At 7000 feet I discovered that at my age my tolerance for altitude has vanished. I was breathless the whole time I was there, and really only comfortable sitting down. Where is the man who was once quite happy coming down to Potosí from 15,000 feet in Bolivia? Not only that, but I suffered the indignity of a tummy bug coming back to Europe. I have always prided myself on my gastric fortitude and I’m humiliated.
In fact the last time I can remember losing it was when I squatted in a field in India, in the state of Bihar, 47 years ago. That’s when I composed my most memorable poem:
One should not stray far,
After lunch in Bihar,
For the food in Bihar is rather bizarre.
Not even as far as the nearest bazaar,
For none can outrun the food in Bihar.
When I came to check in to my flight at the airport hotel, Aeromexico offered me a business upgrade at a price I couldn’t refuse. I snapped it up because it meant I could spend my last six hours in Mexico waiting in their business lounge. But it was not like any business lounge I’ve ever lounged in – it was more like a works canteen, a huge noisy barn of a place full of people eating off paper plates. Well, I’ve nothing against people having fun, and I have no reason to blame my condition on the one mouthful I took of the “bife” and rice, but it was not nice.
The flight home however was very comfortable.
PS: I hear that Vladimir Pudding leaned on his buddy and drone supplier, Pistachio “Percy” Kameni, to persuade HIS buddies, at Hamas, to start something awful and take the world’s eye off Ukraine. Probably rubbish, but it certainly worked.
Here, at last, what you’ve been waiting for – the tale of the croc’ hunter.
We are in far north Queensland, where we had just caught a mud crab, but I forgot to note how utterly delicious it was. Huge clumps of white flesh. Never had anything like it since.
So, on again, word for word . . .
Monday 5th January, 1976
We are advised to leave while the going’s good. The tractor repair guy has returned and says Cooper’s Creek is still down. It’s beginning to rain after a dry night. Bill comes with us on his trail bike to help in case I get stuck, and we move gingerly off. As far as the creek the going is tolerable and this time I ride through the creek unaided. Bill waves and turns back, and we go on into worse adventures on clay slopes, eventually falling over in a puddle – but no damage, and Carol takes it well. The rain goggles are a disaster – fog up inside like all the others, and the lens also falls too easily out of the soft frame. At speed perhaps the airstream might help, but it’s at slow speeds, stumbling through mud and potholes that one wants to see best, and can’t. The answer is to wear nothing. Brakes, likewise, will only dry out at speed.
Ted in the Bush, smelling the flowers
Back at the ferry, not realising it was Susie passing us coming over, we get into conversation with the one-legged ferry man. A wispy fair beard, a saucy expression, he talks about his life as a crocodile hunter – up to $20 for a “freshie” – double for a “saltie” – he had one 16ft saltie that brought $240 for the skin. Said he’d never go after one of those again. Too big to land in the boat, they had to skin it in the water, attracting shoals of small shark (water very shallow) which lacerated their legs. H says there were three of them shooting together – both the others are dead. One turned out to have been a convicted rapist who’d killed a man, and was eventually shot dead after killing another. The other was his wife’s brother, who died of septicemia. His own leg he lost to cancer, but after it had been badly mashed up. Croc shooting, he claimed, wasn’t all that dangerous, nor that rewarding. “You get wages and a half, but you’re doing what you like best. If they opened it up again I’d be off in the morning.”
It seemed like a brave boast, but perhaps not. The shot is all-important – a target of 6” diameter at relatively short range, and if you know your job you won’t often have to swim to collect the corpse. Says there are plenty of freshies left to build up the population, now that they’re protected, but there aren’t enough salties left to keep a man in wages.
One of his favourite places is Bourketown, in Queensland. There’s a pub, and very little else. The walls and floor are all at an angle, from being hit by storms, and when it floods the clients have to row themselves to the thunderbox at the bottom of the yard. A Yank was the host, but he got a bit “Tropo” and after periods of sanity he would become violent in the Wild West manner, punch his clients across the bar, and come down the stairs with guns blazing. They put him away, and then the pub was hit by a “whirly-whirly.”
Another character he knew who was “Tropo” had a pet white cockatoo which he used to put on trial for misdemeanors – the case for and against was considered carefully before judgement. At the time it was doing twenty days for chewing a shoelace.
Tuesday 6th
Back in Redlynch. The green frogs on the doors, windows, leaping impressively, all sizes. The huge cane – 8ft or more – mosquitoes of different sizes and pitch – the croaking in the river – covered with floating vegetation – the big, brown bush pheasants settling down on the cane field.
[The cane trains – a complete railways system to serve the sugar mills – counted 200 hundred baskets south of Sarina.]
Brian Adams decides to give us three of the four bracelets to take away with us. Carol buys a tongue to eat for dinner. A convivial evening, each describing his own building.
Wednesday 7th
We planned to go to Green Island but missed the boat through laziness, compounded by Brian’s kitchen clock.
Went to Cairns and Atherton Tableland, to Kuranda and half-way to Mareeba. Dinner with Brian and Anne, then train at 10pm.
[Apparently we then took a train back to Brisbane to avoid riding the same roads back. I remember nothing of this now. The train took two days. We arrived in Brisbane on the 9th.]
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PS: Vladimir Pudding has been putting the lights out in Kharkiv for a couple of days and nights. We really must do something to stop him. If you have a congressman, please write to him.
For a year or so I have been digging back into the notes I kept on my journey round the world in the Seventies. Here they are, word for word, as I wrote them.
1976, and it’s a New Year in Australia
Friday, January 2nd
Finished working on the bike in the morning. Went into Cairns to get food and see Botanical Gardens. Teak, Sausage tree, Rain tree. Fine variety of hens and cockatoos.
Finally talk to London that night, to Peter Harland’s secretary, Jean. She says she will try to get Triumph to send pistons to Melbourne.
Saturday, 3rd
Off to Cape Tribulation at about 11am. Some rain. Good road as far as ferry beyond Mossman. Then wonderfully bad dirt road through gathering rain forest, dipping into coast gullies, creeks, torn up rock surfaces, sandstone of every shade of brown as closely leaved as puff pastry. We travelled close to a small truck with about 8 young men, women, boys, girls, all in swim trunks, up to the Cape for the weekend. They followed us along the road up to the notorious Cooper Creek, a wide river with a thick pebble bed that has to be negotiated along an arc swinging downstream and then up again. Carol took a lift across on the truck. I followed, but finally stopped near the opposite bank in a trough left by car wheels as they urged their load onto the bank. Three of us pushed it out and as I poured water from my boots and exhausts, they all went swimming in the creek, where I later joined them. Most delicious cold water with a deep green tinge to it as though stained by the reflection of the rain forest all around. From there we rode on looking for the sign for Noah’s Creek. But Carol’s directions were vague and she thought the drive-in was after the creek. We eventually crossed a bridge of squared off tree trunks, and she’d caught of glimpse of something before the bridge that might have been the white Toyota described by Brian – but I went on until we came to another formidable creek. At this point I would, reluctantly, have gone back to look had a car not driven up with a man and two children. We asked him and he said it was further ahead. It never occurred to us to doubt him as he was going there himself to repair a tractor. So once again I set off into two feet of water, got stuck, was pulled out, emptied my boots, and waited a while as the man drove off. Almost immediately a Landrover came after across the creek to ask us whether the other driver knew he was losing oil from his sump. They (a local couple) pointed to the oil on the road, we said no, and they drove off after him. We set off too to find them again coming out of a sidetrack to the beach (where the first truck load were camped). They said they’d thought their man might have gone down there.
“Oh no,” we said. “He’s going to Noah’s Creek to mend a tractor.”
They smiled.
“Noah Creek is back there by the bridge. He’s already passed it.”
Stupefied, we laughed and felt foolish, and I turned to face the creek again. This time I managed the crossing unaided while Carol watched petrified as it seemed I might go over the edge of the stone ridge built up by the current and disappear altogether.
Ozzie dirt
At Noah Creek we found Bill (U.S.) and Sonia (disinherited Canadian heiress) who live there, and Susie, who owns it with her husband David, who was out in the forest beating the bounds of his property with John Bisset. They were tracing the blazes made in 1898 and not seen since – most of the trek involving cutting the way with machetes.
Sonia is a very combative lady who needs to tell everybody what to do, how to do it, and then what they are doing is either wrong, stupid or dangerous. Apart from that she longs for sympathetic company. Bill is a very young guy hiding under a beard, who’s been to places and has a smattering of this and that, but not much seems to have rubbed off. He talked about Mexico and being ripped off – and said the same of Asia.
David and John appeared from the forest, David with his shirt ripped from neck to waist – like actors in a cheap adventure movie. Perhaps because D is a designer his black beard looked unconvincing. John had blonde hair, a wispy moustache, and a gammy leg, something to do with racing cars.
An Ozzie spider
Sunday, 4th
We slept on mattresses in the back of the tractor shed – built very neatly by Brian. It rained on the tin roof more heavily and loudly than I can ever remember.
We volunteered to walk to the store at Cape Tribulation to fetch whatever there might be in a rucksack. We walked the first mile to Arsenic Creek, admiring the forest around us – and walking into it a little way, trying to avoid the Stinging Bush and the Wait-a while. The S.B. has very fine needles on the underside of its leaves which break off in the skin and hurt for a month. One wonders why a plant should be equipped with such a vengeful and unpractical weapon. The W-a-W has long tendrils with fish-hook thorns at close intervals in sets of four, which attach themselves to anything. There are ferns growing out of trunks, all 20 feet or more high; lianas of all dimensions swinging down, looping round branches; creepers encircling everything; staghorn plants bulging from the crotches of tall trees many feet above, encircling them with a fringe of leaves. Later, on the beach we found a tree whose roots stood four feet above the surface in an almost vertical cluster, like pipes running down into the soil.
Blue fruit like a stone egg. A small purple one, the Davidsonian Plum, dark purple with juicy red meat and three stones, very edible.
At Arsenic – or strychnine as some call it – we met yesterday’s campers splashing about, and later they overtook us and gave us a ride to the Cape – a magnificent, and apparently unique view. This is the only place where the rain forest still runs to the edge of the ocean.
The Hewistons have an 800-acre plot of it from ocean to high ridge.
At the store a tubby middle-aged man was kneading dough with a machine (which Carol didn’t know was possible). He kept repeating that he’d come there to escape the rat-race. [Escapees are always having to account for themselves] Said I reminded him of a cop in Cairns on the drug squad. Heroin is floated ashore in large quantities on this coast, he claimed, and said he’d picked some up himself. Wife and children all seemed very happy to be there. Most people, though, say the rain eventually gets too much for them and they have to get away for a respite. ’74 was a very dry year, didn’t rain till January ’75 – but ’75 has been fairly wet all through.
Towards evening we went out with John in an aluminium dinghy to lay down two crab traps he’s made from netting.
We floated past the mangroves, with their contorted roots rising out of the mud like writhing ghosts, looking down into tannin stained water to avoid sand bars and submerged logs. The traps were placed under the mangroves in about 3ft of water and tied to the branches above by a line. The bait was small, rotten mullet. Within an hour we’d got one crab – dark, massive claws that can cut off a finger or a toe. The females are thrown back. Males show a triangular mark underneath (Check that!)
Next week, conversation with a crocodile hunter.
Early on my journey, when I was passing through Kenya I became friends, briefly (all my friendships were necessarily brief) with a man whose brother had married and gone to live in Australia. When he heard that Australia was on my route he asked me to take along two bracelets woven with the hair from an elephant’s tail. They were remarkable objects. The hair was like wire, black and polished, and he said they were supposed to confer virility on the male, and seductiveness on the female. I was already carrying a ceremonial sword from one brother in Egypt to another in Brazil, and I rather enjoyed the idea of being a sentimental postman. This brother, Brian Adams, lived near Cairns. and I had his address, in Redlynch, so naturally that was where we were headed, two years later.
Riding north after crossing the Tropic of Capricorn for the sixth time:
December 27th
Road reports say only obstruction to Cairns is flooding just before Ingham. A fairly easy day – except for pushing the bike through the flood. Above Ingham, country seems to change finally to tropical and for both of us, it seems to symbolise a sort of escape from the rigidity of Australia. Sun out a lot of the way. Bike seems to be going well and everything has dried out well before we reach Cairns at about 3pm. However, Redlynch is on the north side. The low range of mountains we’ve seen to the north-west slide in closer until we’re facing into them and pointed at the heart of a small but very black rainstorm. No matter how the road wriggles it always comes back to the same bearing and at last we ride into an absolute torrent of rain falling exclusively on Redlynch. The P.O. is shut (Why? It’s taken for granted) but two Italian brothers in the store next door – they’ve been here for decades and still can hardly manage an English sound – say they’ve heard of an Adams (Edems?) across the river, 3rd house after the cane barracks, but the creek might be up. So on we go, both with our separate premonitions.
The house is empty, but a dark young man in grey working shorts and shirt drove past the cane field on the right in a tractor and pulled up in front of his house. He was farmer and landlord of the other houses. Says Mary was in England and Brian was “up to the Cape.” They had split up. The time and distance I had travelled to get here from Kenya weighed on me. While I was riding, the world was changing – too fast for me perhaps. If I had arrived a year before with my “elephant tail charms” – virility to the male, seductiveness to the female – would it have saved the marriage? Rot!
In the tropical north strange creatures lurk behind the lush vegetation
Talked to the Adams’ friends, Jan and Jean (French). They explained a bit of what had happened. Said Brian was back from the Cape. When we DID meet Brian, red hair and beard, the sort of green marble eyes I imagine on Drake, he took our presence entirely for granted.
Tuesday 30th
First day at Cairns. Brian suggests we go with him to Port Douglas. There his friend Anne and 3 kids meet us. We eat pies and walk to the beach, the harbour, and up to the head. Sensitive mimosa on the ground. Long narrow beaches under coco palms. But can’t swim in summer because jellyfish (box jellies) are very painful and can kill.
(There were three types of jelly on a warning poster at Shute Harbour – Box, Seawasp and Bluebottle. Also Stone fish and sea snakes can kill.)
Triumph agent in Cairns is Trusty Rusty Rees. His son was at the shop when I arrived – blonde hair slicked down, young face coarsened and battered with discoloured teeth, a fancy blue denim suit flared in all directions (lapels, shoulders, skirt, legs) with raised seams all over, and a tie like a sunburst flat fish hanging at his neck and almost covering his shirtfront with dayglo. He was, incredibly, just on his way to a funeral.
Behold. the marsupial tractor
Cairns is a noughts and crosses grid of a half dozen streets, and a neat harbour. It’s a favourite place for high-powered, deep-sea fishing maniacs. (Dean Martin?) and the strange craft with scaffolding and long alloy rods like antennae are lined up along the jetty, their prestigious-looking barbers’ chairs facing back. Marlin is what brings them all here.
The town has a pub/hotel at every corner, and a number of others in-between. Men sit on stools, staring out vacantly. The facades have an aura of something exciting in the past – but even that I now feel is illusory – just monuments to a time when men’s rapacity had freer reign than now.
Those men who left the cities or country of their youth to make fortunes at the frontiers must have left terrible traumas behind them of envy, resentment. Australia seems to me to be overcast by their influence.
Minerals, sugar-cane, logging – already many kinds of timber are scarce – silky oak, cedar. Australia imports much timber from Oregon. Before the war, says Sonia (?) [Australia] sold coal to Germany for 5 cents a ton. There they found enough gold in the coal to pay for the shipping.
Wednesday 31st
Last thing I’d noticed before stopping the bike yesterday was rough noise and burning oil. Took the engine down today in the morning and took barrel into town. A lot of wear on one cylinder – and that very uneven – as if some abrasive material got in. Lot of carbon on piston crown too. But no good pistons to be had in Cairns or Brisbane. Decided that [indecipherable] pistons would see me through, and to ask Triumph to send some to Melbourne while we limped back there. Called London that night, but Peter Harland on holiday.
[THEN THIS. I DON’T KNOW WHY]
They believed a man should choose his own name, so they wanted to give their son all the initials in the alphabet. But the vicar objected to having to read the alphabet out loud at the christening. Why not call him Alphabet, he suggested? So they agreed thinking he’d change it some day. But he never did, and Alphabet Jones is what he was when he died.
New Year’s Day, 1976
Reassembled the bike. Failed again to reach London. Brian made a super curry. He’d hoped to celebrate with Anne, but she didn’t dare go out under threats of violence from her husband.
I’m away in Mexico for a few weeks, so you may not be hearing from me for a while. Just listened to “State of the Union.” I leave you in the hope and belief that Joe Biden can turn the tide. He should be able to. After all he’s a young man from where I stand. If he can’t there will be hell to pay.
When I read what I’d written half a century ago, I found it so harsh that I almost skipped over this episode, but it’s a long time ago, things have changed and Australians reading this will know how much they’ve changed. You left me last week as we were recovering from a downpour in the night.
Friday, December 26th
At first the prospect seemed awful. Everything wet, although some more so than others. Only the bags and Carol’s jacket were dryish, and her boots. My ST cuttings were hopelessly soaked, and I threw them out.
We wobbled off towards Townsville. Took on petrol – Two and a half gallons. Then took a chance on a side road to Bowen. “In for a penny – “ I muttered. Went through some shallow floodwater to come out on Bruce Highway just past Myrtle Creek where all the southbound traffic was stuck. We were lucky and it improved our morale. On to Gumlu where we took on more petrol – 1½ gallons for 99 miles – most reassuring – at 66 miles per gallon I don’t see there can be very much wrong inside the barrel. A pint of oil a bit farther on, and we ate sandwiches, prepared under Carol’s close supervision. Then spread our clothes and bags over the landscape to take advantage of the sun and wind. Dried tent, bags etc., then back on bike. To Townsville through a long succession of floods, some quite deep – where we were hailed by Jim Kennedy and Faith and invited to their place. Passed Laverrack (?) barracks, Aussie Army Task Force 3. Lots of council flats and houses round the back of the town, and with great relief guided into their RAAF house for a dry night.
We are invited to stay with the Kennedys. A box-like structure. Walls of hardboard panels joined by strips; ceiling likewise. Floor of beautiful tongue-and-groove. Varnished. Strip lighting throughout, white and pastel green. Overhead fan. Collection of uncoordinated furniture – harsh, jarring, an energy sink. The Kennedys relate to each other with violent displays of affectionate abuse, which could all too readily slip into the real thing.
Across the road, the ultimate horror toy – a $3000 electronic organ beats out a mindless, tuneless, soulless rhythm while the obsessed owner tries to finger a dance tune in a different key. The environment in terms of colour, shape, sound, smell is so hostile to anything beautiful that it hurts. At this point I’m forced to stop writing by Jim, who comes in to disturb me by explaining that he understands why I shouldn’t be disturbed.
Then comes the ride – never quite clear why – to see whether Rollingstone Creek is up, perhaps – or just to exercise the car. Jim drives us for endless miles up the same road we’re going to take when we leave. He drives too fast, explaining the while how drivers fail to follow the rules. A good deal of the time Jim’s only contact with the wheel is one wrist resting on top of it. He has a watch (Swiss) with metal work so sharp he has to have a woolen strap under it to protect his skin.
Pass the nickel plant which he wanted to show us. Pass some Aborigines at riverside to remind us of the degrading state of relations between people. Later to the RAAF base and watch television. In the Test [cricket test match] Lillie is bowling, and the crowd noise has a quality I have only heard before at all-in wrestling. Murderous. A colleague of Jim’s appeared at his house in the morning – ‘Smithy’ – a 21-year-old with a body so grossly flabby as to be obscene. Jim himself is in perfect physical shape for 33. He told us of his nervous breakdowns. His wife was 5’ 4” and 19 stone [266lbs] ¬– how he loathed the look of her – (though Faith says his loathing was implanted in him as aversion therapy after the break}. His touching confession that the two people who helped him most were a homosexual and a lesbian (both from the clinic).
The fascination and horror of being with the Kennedys is to see how people whose primary intentions are good can be trapped by their fears into a set of attitudes and circumstances which are a violation of the human potential.
Faith was married to a man who brutalised her life (violence and threats) for 14 years.
Jim is very hot on rules – firefighting, driving, relationships between people, games, always Jim is ready to lay down the rules. “If I had been asked, there’s one hotel in T’ville that would never have been built, and that’s Louth’s (the smartest one). The only way out of there is by the lift. A fire trap.” (Hints of City corruption follow inevitably).
Sad to see how ready everyone is in Aussie to pick up the political slogans and follow like sheep. “Dole bludgers,” “Abos”, etc. But perhaps Aussie only shows openly the workings of our own society.
Most of Townsville built on reclaimed swamp. Too flat to drain – and streets awash with mud. All houses raised – some more than others.
[About 40 miles by ferry from Townsville is Palm Island, which was an Aboriginal Reserve. This is what the Kennedys told us about it.]
It’s a medical fact that every girl over 3 has been molested.
If you hit ‘em on the head you can only injure yourself.
They’re not human beings really – they’re just another species of animal. They live with animals, don’t they?
You know those flagons of cheap wine that cost a dollar fifty? If you take one over there you can flog it for $45.
They’re the only people with any money in Australia.
Don’t you ever trust one. Never. They’ll lift anything off you. Good as the Arabs, they are.
I have to say that among the things I learned on my travels was the cardinal importance of prejudices in binding groups together. Hidden or open, their forms may change, but their effects can be as virulent and destructive today as they ever were. They are the levers by which we are manipulated.
I photographed these Aboriginals fishing, and he was very angry, rightly perhaps. “I’ll fucking toss yer in there,” he said.
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.
