News from Ted
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.
G’day, everyone.
How are you this Sunday morning? Perhaps like me you start the day looking for good news and not finding any. Us humans having pretty much obliterated one small country and decimated its population, and done a similar job on 20% of another, much larger country, it looks like the only survivors in the long run will be the cockroaches and the arms dealers – see if you can tell them apart.
I will make two astonishing predictions. Elon Musk will never get to Mars, and Trump will NOT be elected president. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he won’t be president.
Question is: Can the rest of the world get by without America (I mean the USA)? Very doubtful. What a relief, then, to get back to 1975 in Australia, the lucky country, when the future looked bright and we were ambling up the East coast, working it out as we went.
My naked notes, continued.
Wednesday 17th December. Leaving Brisbane
After running around in the city to get two withdrawal forms from Mercantile Building Society in Queen Street, on corner of George Street, we packed and left.
38 miles out, stopped for pineapple. Met couple in Land Rover, from Townsville.
“Glass House Mountains” visible from road – one conical, one a crooked finger from a fist. Continued through heat under cumulus, among pines, to “Sunshine Coast” – a great speculative housing scheme behind coast, Kawana Homes, 3 B’rooms at $25,000 up.
Stopped at Mooloolaba to swim.
Aussie phones in 1975. Press button B to get your money back. Swagmen did it in mild expectation.
About midday thought of paying $2 for a campsite between beach and road but talked out of it. Went on along Sunshine Coast looking for motels, etc. but nothing seemed good enough. Finally at Tewantin saw the Royal Mail Hotel, which reminded me of the good colonial hotels in South Africa. Carol went to see about price and came back with two old codgers in tow, Sammy and George.
Sammy was bubbling over with bonhomie and G was nodding his head and going “Yes, yes,” as S sold him the idea of putting us up. S was a Geordie. G was a Canadian of English parents. So there we are, set up in this “flat” – slightly grubby and with a succession of increasingly aged hosts a bit overpowering – and yet G and S a lot more alive than the McDonalds of yesterday [the couple from Townsville].
Tewantin itself seems a pleasant place; big fig trees on lawns by the river. But touristy, and always things here are costly. Was sucked in by hotel in the evening and spent too much on a mediocre dinner. Could have had as much for a quarter the price in the beer garden.
Thursday 18th
Spent day in George’s house writing my Oriana diary. Not quite finished.
Friday 19th
Spent another day to get work done on bike. George seems happy. A hot day.
Saturday 20th
From Tewantin.
Aussie poem:
I eat my peas with honey,
I have done all my life,
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.
Riding through cool, overcast day. Occasional flashes of drizzle. Reminded of country in north of South America, of Tanzania, of Swaziland – beginning to feel the world’s scenery – but wait till we see the first kangaroo. Stopped for fruit after 95 miles. Bike is doing an incredible 66 mpg today. Met couple, American dental technician, English wife who read about my departure in S.T. but assumed I’d given up because nothing more got printed.
Found space among trees at side of a small dirt road – “real bad road.” Super rice and veg dinner. Put up awning and tent. Felt physically very uncomfortable. Sweaty. Upset Carol’s mood. Finally slept under net, under awning, alongside bike, over green bag and under sheet. Very sticky and sweaty at first, but slept well later.
[The “green bag” was a bed we designed and made in San Francisco. Made in segments with foam in tent cloth it folded up to make a pillion seat for Carol.]
Sunday 21st
Woke at dawn under the net. Patches of rosy light through heavy cloud on horizon, paled to whey. No kangaroos but a chorus of crazy birdsong, cackling, tinkling, burbling and hooting. Carol made ‘doughboys’ and eggs and coffee while I put away all the furniture, most unused. All this stuff to put away, but the awning really worked. Carol got into a mild state packing the kitchen – I’m trying to learn about giving her that space. Wind blew up from opposite quarter to last night. i.e… N.E. and seemed to be driving banks of heavy wet cloud before it, but no deluge yet at 6.30. On to road, meaning to find out about [illegible] Island. Took loop to Gladstone, a bleak, empty town on Sunday at 8am. Four boys stood on launching ramp. One was particularly bright, and independent, and told us there was no boat to the island on Sunday. We talked a bit and an older boy said his uncle had written from London to say in 30 years there wouldn’t be a Londoner left there – only them darkies. He had a knowing smirk on his face and I told him it was an absolute load of shit. “Well I’ve been there myself.” Then you should know better. “And me aunt has bin too,” but the smirk was close to collapse now. Painful to hear such stuff from a child. Aussie prejudices are strong and outspoken. Gladstone abandoned, we rode on to Rockhampton, where we didn’t buy lunch at an Esso restaurant. Pump man said prices were high because of wages. His wife worked in restaurant and brought home only $3 less a week than he did. And he was a tradesman.
On to the Mackay road, long empty stretches of narrow tar through range land, a mass of dead Brigalow trees killed by the poisoned axe. Just over halfway we cross a bridge with no parapets at Lotus Creek, and stop at a roadhouse the other side.
Phil Pilgrim, Triumph dealer in Melbourne, on a run with his Vincent. He helped me a lot back in the day.
Next Week: Rump steak and beer with the Truckies.
From the outset of my journey, I was very clear about several promises I made to myself.
First: I would do it in one single, unhurried journey and then write a book about it.
Second: It would be a complete journey, overland, uninterrupted, visiting as many countries as I could on the way round.
Third: I would travel as frugally as possible in order to get as close as I could to the indigenous people I was moving amongst. I would go as deep as I could into their lives, accept any invitation that came my way, and make myself vulnerable to whatever came along.
To make that possible my fourth promise was: I would always travel alone.
Two years into the journey, in November 1975, I was about to break that last promise. After several months living with Carol on the commune it became obvious that we should stay together. Our feelings for each other seemed as steady and solid as a rock. It became impossible for me to contradict her desire to travel on with me. She understood my purpose, she was powerfully independent, and I knew she wouldn’t shrink from any risk I felt like taking. So during the last weeks before I sailed away we rearranged things on the bike so that she could ride behind me, although there was no pillion seat. She was unable to get a berth on the ship. Instead, she would fly to Sydney and meet me after I got there.
So that is the truth about Australia and Me.
For six months Carol and I travelled together and I could not have asked for a more perfect companion. She humoured me in every way, and in the end, I found it impossible to explain to her or myself why, but it just wasn’t working for me.
In June I told her I had to go on alone. It was the most painful decision I have ever made. So that’s why, in Jupiter’s Travels, my account of Australia is the weakest part of the book, and she isn’t in it. At the time I felt I had no choice. I can’t second guess it fifty years later.
What follows is from my notebook after we met up in Sydney in December 1975. My notes begin after we left Sydney to move up the East Coast:
December 15
Caravan bed was very comfortable. No insects. Very musical bird in the morning, which changed pitch, or key. Heard nothing like it since the bottle bird [in Africa]. Gloria [our host] made grilled tomatoes on toast, made several shame-faced references to night before. [Don’t ask!]
Rode out along riverside where I photographed the aborigine family the day before – he swore at me profusely – “I’ll fucking toss yer in there,” indicating the river.
Another hot day. The bowls teams were out already – some women among them. Back to highway, the eucalyptus, to Macksville, Nambucca Heads, always broad rivers with banks of dense, dark green vegetation, willows etc. Tried to get lunch at hotel in Ulmarra – seemed like a pleasant, shady little town – but failed. Next town, Maclean, didn’t do so well in a café. Next door was a better place, not seen till later. The menus had articles about Australiana pasted on to them – early servant problems, the birth of amateurism in sport, theatrical history, a gold strike story.
Rode on to Ballina thinking it might be nice, but too busy, likewise on coast. Back on highway to Surfer’s Paradise – visible on horizon from Twerd Heads, Australia’s Miami Beach. Highrise hotels/apts. All the names borrowed from Miami, Vegas, Riviera, but seemed not to warrant staying. Began to think of getting to Brisbane and found Mike MacDonald’s name in my book. Phone engaged. Rode on busy hwy and lunched at road hse. 10 miles south of Brisbane, dropped bike. In Queensland now – no “schooners”, only “tens”, “sevens”, and “fives” [when ordering beer]. Got grilled barramundi. Talked to young Yamaha rider. Lots of nervous twitches, mannerisms, faded blue eyes. “Dja know abaht Mikuni carbs?”
Called Mike’s number again. His mother answered in a thin elderly voice, to say he was away on another trip in south-east Asia and wouldn’t be back till Jan.6th. Eventually she invited us to stay – and then repeated it, so we decided to go. Her house on the river at Brisbane – cool and very pleasant, but her husband senile and she a shrunken spirit, so hard to take. Perhaps alone I could have switched them off, but it’s not necessarily good for me to do that.
We rode into town to a carol singing in town square, with small redbrick church of Victorian mien, trimmed with white stone, squatting at the foot of high rise bank buildings. A tableau of angels and shepherds frozen on the balcony in a floodlight, but ugly amplification made “compère” running it like a night at the Palladium.
Most impressive sight in Brisbane, the bridges, two matching ones like Waterloo bridge. General feeling like, say, Port Elizabeth [in S.Africa] Tall modern office buildings dominate everything but few period buildings in the centre – one called Inns of Court, built 1916. 3 storeys each with balcony and canopy.
MacDonalds actually have a beautiful position by riverside, landscaped as park. House allows air to pass through and cool it. The father, Kev, has a snooker table in the basement and plays, or lies on a couch watching his portable TV set, which he also brings up with him at night. He won’t leave the house if he can help it. She’s sewing for a wedding. One wall has Chinese characters drawn, one on each brick. Mike plans to teach Chinese. It becomes harder and harder for me to place him now in my memory. All I recall is his shorts, and some kind of woolly hat he wore. His mother says she couldn’t remember me from the pictures, but she supposes that’s because she took me for an Arab.
Carol, on the road north from Sydney
Still following the story as it happened, my next stop had to be Australia. As idylls go, my idyllic time on the commune in Northern California lasted longer than most, but after almost four months I had to move on. The Sunday Times had engineered a free crossing of the Pacific for me and my bike on the P&O cruise liner SS Oriana. In return I wrote another in the series One Man’s Week (it was 1975: I don’t think they’d got around to One Woman’s Week).
Saturday
The great leap – more than 7000 miles across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Sydney, from winter to summer – begins tonight. It’s hard to grasp the size of the Pacific from the usual maps of the world. Only on a globe does one see it in true perspective and viewed in this way Europe and America seem to huddle quite close together. Friends from the city (now under a grey drizzle) have come to see me off on the SS Oriana. She’s one of the last great ladies of the ocean, a 42,000-ton steamship. I’ve never sailed like this and probably never will again. Not a time for half measures. We have champagne and the biggest streamers I have ever seen. Twelve of us packed into my cabin, laughing and crying, woven together in a cat’s cradle of coloured paper ribbon. When they leave, when I look down from the rail at their last laughing antics on the quayside below, the impending separation is a great hollowness inside me. After saying goodbye almost daily for two years I’ve become a connoisseur of farewells. A shipboard parting, I think, offers the sweetest sorrow of all.
Out of San Francisco at 6pm, under the Golden Gate (actually terra cotta) into a choppy sea. Try to get my own bearing on the ship and fail. She’s vast – an infinite progression of lounges, bars, dance floors and swimming pools. As a favour to help me on my journey P&O have given me a first-class cabin, which suits my taste better than my wardrobe. Now that the Oriana is a one-class ship, the only remaining privilege of we upper class passengers is to dine in the forward restaurant where we enjoy a more discreet atmosphere as well as the Captain’s presence. Ties and jackets, it seems, are de rigeur at dinner. My only jacket is leather, and I haven’t had a tie in more than two years. What am I to do?
Tuesday
It has taken all Sunday and Monday just to explore the ship. For all the sumptuous appointments, peculiar deck games, and opportunities for sloth and gluttony, no attraction is so splendid as the chance to fulfill childhood fantasies. There’s a fragment of some ancient newsreel that lodged itself in my infant memory – the launching of the Queen Mary perhaps. It was at about the same time that I saw the Princess Margaret Rose on her pony and planned to marry her. Anyway there were “socialites” in shining silks and tails popping off champagne corks and betting on horses in mid-Atlantic. The princess, alas, slipped through my fingers, but I shall at least get my mid-ocean horse race with bubbly. The horses (which nobody explained earlier) I now discover to be wooden. The jockeys are women passengers who sit at the wining post and furiously wind in their horses along wooden rails. I have the race card here and I see there are some very old chestnuts running. I shall put 10p on Faux Pas, by Remark out of Place, Mrs M.Polski up, and I shall try to nobble Miss N.Woodberry who is on Short Pants (by Runner out of Breath).
Dinner crisis partly resolved by Australian gentleman kindly insisting that I borrow his tie.
Thursday
I have cheated and skipped a week. We’re now eleven days out of San Francisco. (Last Thursday while I was ashore in Honolulu I went into a bookshop where the owner stared fixedly at my cameras and with virtually no preamble said “A good way to bring in cocaine is to stuff it into cameras. Have you got any in those?” I still wonder who he was working for.)
Today we came alongside at Suva in the Fiji Islands. Greeted by police band in skirts and sandals. I walk around the town and along the coast until it rains. See hardly any Fijians – mostly Asians, as in “Sunderjee’s Chinese Emporium: save more than ever before.” Come to small strip of beach where all the sea shells get up and walk away. Every one had a hermit crab inside. Yesterday never happened. We crossed the Date Line and I had to return all the hours I’ve been borrowing since I left Greenwich two years ago plus another 12 hours deposit as I proceed. So, no Wednesday.
Friday
This ship has two captains, Philip Jackson who wears four gold rings, and John Wacher who wears one very, very broad one. Since one very, very broad one beats four of a kind Wacher is boss and Jackson is deputy. No job I suppose carries greater prestige than captain of a great ocean liner but how one man can combine such wildly different roles puzzles me. Are you Captain Hornblower, or Chairman of the Board, or a Super Redcoat, I ask. He leads me briskly through the mysterious areas of the ship labelled Crew and Officers Only.
His pride in the ship could not have been simulated.
“Look at that!” he kept exclaiming as we rushed down through the bakery, past the master pastry cook, alongside the cauldron where the bone stock simmers for the soups, and further down still to the generators, the distilling plant, the refrigerating plant (all imposing enough, I thought, to drive the ship) and finally the vast boilers spewing steam into the two turbines at 800 lbs per square inch. “If that tube were to burst, we’d be cut in half. The men who worked down here in the war were awfully brave.”
Saturday
Today there is a glorious sun. A ship like this must attract a high proportion of elderly people, concentrated in the more expensive cabins, but there’s a vigorous band of young people on the lower decks. On fine days they burst up through the geriatric crust and overflow the ship. Golden Australian bodies everywhere with white triangles of zinc oxide on their noses. Action centres on the swimming pools, where they throw each other in, race with their left feet held in their right hands, retire for beer, and then repeat.
Hear of a stowaway who has been caught by a simple error. He tried to pay for his continental breakfast. Like the movies, and the tea and biscuits in bed, it’s free. Also hear that somewhere on the ship is a girl riding around the world on a motorcycle. Must track her down.
Sunday
Found her. She isn’t. Maybe I’ll still make the Guinness Book of Records. Arrive in Auckland.
New Zealand is a pretty, green old-fashioned English country. Everybody and everything seems correct, so it astonishes me to see a girl with naked breasts on a busy public beach and nobody appearing to notice, except me. Makes me happy for New Zealand. Not quite so happy with myself.
