From My Notebooks in 1976: A New Year In Australia

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.