1
Chapter Two, in which we meet a bloke with half a kneecap who gives
James a set of goat's horns, our show gets gate crashed by an aboriginal
wedding reception and we meet a bloke who dived headfirst onto a turtle. Oh
yeah, and James burnt the magic mushrooms.
Gosford was our first destination. Domenick, Bushy and I finally took off
at 1:30 in the afternoon, leaving James to travel with Kirk and Merilee to sort
out the rest of the belongings. The weather had turned to torrential rain which
would be a familiar companion for the first couple of weeks. The gears on my
bike weren't working whenever I was going uphill, something I wasn't to work
out for a day or so. If you're interested in the technical side of the trip, the bike
I was riding was a Shogun something or other, which is a mountain bike or a
hybrid or something in between. I'm not too sure. I had invested in a brand
new seat with super duper gel technology developed by NASA for the bikes
they ride around on the moon.
We threaded our way hairily through the streets of the CBD and onto
the Harbour Bridge. As the least experienced rider I took up what would be
my customary position for the first few weeks of the ride, waddling along
behind the others. I had to get off and push my way up the hill to escape
Kiribilli and I lost the rest of the blokes completely after crossing the Spit
Bridge though I later found out they'd taken a detour to Manly. I had a rather
entertaining panic attack halfway up the climb after the Spit Bridge because
the lanes weren't very wide and the trucks were big and I couldn't get into the
right gears. So I climbed over the safety rails and found some quiet
backstreets that eventually wound their way up to the top.
2
I got pitying looks from the people in cars as I toiled away in the rain. I
felt a bit sorry for them, poor bastards with dry cars and proper jobs. No more
of that daily stuck in the traffic routine for me, I thought, just as a bus slooshed
a huge wave of water over me. I made it to the ferry wharf at Palm Beach in
the nick of time.
The ferry ride was a little cold but the rain stopped for long enough for
a sensational sunset to break out over the Hawkesbury River. The ferry itself
housed a cosy little society of regular passengers, who all knew each other
and pulled out cans of Bundy and Coke to drink as they dissected the affairs
of the world on their way home from work. The houses in Ettalong also looked
cosy, lit up with people cooking dinner and watching the news and giving
themselves whatever pampering they felt they deserved after a long days
work. But we had another twenty kilometers to ride through drenching rain to
make it Gosford, where thoughtfully Bushy had negotiated us into a cabin at
the caravan park instead of having to pitch our tents.
James called through with the news that the Yanks had bailed out. One
afternoons worth of driving through Sydney traffic with James as company
had been just too scary for them. I didn't blame them.
"So Kirk has put himself into the stay pile, which means he's going?", I
inquired, but James didn't seem to have much of a sense of humour about the
situation. He was going to drive his van up to meet us at the show, so without
any dry clothes to wear we cycled back through Gosford to the RSL Club, the
site of gig number 1.
Gosford on a rainy Wednesday night is even less appealing than it
sounds. A juvenile delinquent did liven up our journey through town by
3
stepping out on the road in front of us and yelling, "Cycling dickheads!", which
would have sounded more threatening if his voice didn't choose to break just
at that moment. At the club they were very welcoming and they'd given us a
huge auditorium to put on the show.
It really looked big when the audience filed in and took their seats, all
four of them. Two of them were our friends, Ronnie and Dave. The other two,
John and Olga, were on a date. There's something special about performing a
comedy show when you get to know the names of every person in the crowd
after two minutes. They turned out to be a great audience. Olga was up for a
chat. John was a bit more laconic but they laughed in all the right places and
weren't above tossing in the odd contribution to the show themselves. So in
wet cycling knicks we ploughed on through. Maybe because I'm used to
pulling a crowd of about four people to my shows, it was far from
disconcerting. I'll do a show for four interested and switched on people ahead
of a bigger but less involved crowd anyday.
Domenick emceed the shows. That's a tough job, having to walk out
cold in front of an audience and getting them focused. More so when most of
the rooms that we played weren't proper comedy venues and a lot of the
crowd weren't there especially for our shows. After twenty minutes or so
Domenick would bring me on for my stand up spot, which ran for twenty
minutes to a half hour depending on the crowd. Then Bushy was introduced to
play a couple of songs on the guitarcycle. After that I would join Domenick
onstage for our finale, the scar and accident competition.
The scar and accident competition was something that Domenick had
invented during his stand up act as a way of involving the audience in the
4
show. Every comedy crowd seems to contain a certain proportion of
boofheads who've hurt themselves in new and unusual ways and have the
scars to prove it. From where Domenick comes from out west the scars are
considered to be trophies. It was the part of the show I always looked forward
to the most because every night was different and it gave us a chance to do
plenty of ad-libbing. It also produced some sensational laughs because it
touched upon universal truths that are the base of good comedy. Everyone
can relate to having made a complete dick of themselves, especially when the
stories related to some childhood or alcohol related incident.
We managed to get a scar story out of John from the Gosford show,
involving a chainsaw that bounced off a tree and carved a niche into his arm.
One chainsaw scar out of four people was a promising start. We raised a
grand total of twenty dollars for the cancer Council, also a promising start. At
this rate we'd only need to play another 62,500 shows to reach Domenick's
projected target of $1.25 million.
The crowd was small but we put that down to the rain and a lack of
publicity. Our second show at the wonderfully rambling Clarence Hotel in
Newcastle drew 7 people. Things were definitely looking up. Once again we
learnt the names of every member of the crowd. It was a fun show because
we were still working without our props or a change of clothes so we looked
the part, standing on stage in dripping cycling clobber. It also meant I had to
ad-lib a lot more and try out some topical material about the end of the Iraq
war which went over well. (Okay, the end of the Iraq War if you believe Fox
News only, as hindsight has shown us.) We'd sent James back to Sydney to
finish sorting out his luggage and to make the decision on which vehicle to
5
bring. To his credit he turned up in Newcastle with my Lancer towing the
trailer.
Without support drivers we were going to have to take turns driving the
vehicle ourselves. That meant we had a roster of three days riding on the bike
followed by a day in the car. This gave us a welcome day off so we could
recover and also use the extra time to take care of shopping, sleeping in and
sightseeing. James asked us if it was possible for the rest of us to share the
driving for the next week and a half till school holidays were over. This was
when we found out that his drivers license was disqualified and it was double
the fine if he was caught driving in this period.
I nervously took the wheel for the next day. I'd never driven a car with a
trailer before, especially not one loaded up to about twice the mass
recommended for the car to be pulling. In an effort to avoid having to do
things like reversing I always parked it with plenty of room in front of me so I'd
never have do anything tricky to get back on the road again.
I made it into Dungog without sideswiping too many fellow motorists.
Dungog was full of Party Pigs. They'd gone for an Easter bike ride that was
planned to intersect with our ride and I had a couple of beers with them and
waited for the boys to arrive. We hadn't pre-arranged a show for Dungog. It
was Good Friday and the pubs were going to be shutting early but there was
a sizeable crowd gathered in the top pub so we talked the publican into letting
us put on a show in the dining room. They were a loud and slightly unfocused
crowd but we had a good time and we concluded with a bit of a jam session
with a few of the more musically talented Party Pigs helping out. The bloke in
the crowd with the biggest mouth, who'd disrupted the show the most, turned
6
out to be the friendliest character in town once we started yarning to him
afterwards.
"Morgo" was his name and we ended up back at his place after the
show. It was at the other end of town so we jumped on our bikes and rode
part of the way there, only stopping to walk after the local copper suggested
that it was unsafe for us to be riding and carrying full schooner glasses at the
same time.
At Morgo's there were about fifteen or so family members and various
hangers on and after we worked out that none of his daughters were single
we turned our attention to getting some good stories out of them. We went
around the circle swapping "first root" stories and vomiting stories, as
strangers are apt to do, and supped on a mighty fine spaghetti marinara that
one of Morgo's daughters had cooked up. It was a contrast from the average
gig in Sydney where everyone goes home to their own suburb after the show
and you never learn if any of them lost their virginity at the Charlestown drive
in.
I was feeling so chipper the next morning that I even went and bought
some fruit to eat from the IGA supermarket, breaking my carefully planned
dietary regimen of cakes, hamburgers and buckets of lard. The rain had
eased off and the scenery consisted of serene rolling hills of Kermit The Frog
green. Having mastered gear changes and offloaded most of my carry on
luggage to the trailer, I was even looking forward to a few hills. I flew down the
best downhill so far, feeling so elated that I started singing out loud, a raucous
off key version of Aussie Crawl's "Boys Light Up" which scared some black
and white moo cows into running away.
7
Actually, cows kind of fascinate me, as do many things found in the
country that you don't find in the city. I caught up to Domenick one day and
asked him a question that had been bothering me.
"Do you reckon cows have friends?"
"Pardon?"
"Do they have cows that they like better than other cows? Do they have
special cows that they like standing next to in the paddock?"
He didn't seem to know either. In fact he just put his head down and
pedaled faster and soon he was just a dot on the horizon. I guess he needed
time alone to think about the answer. By the way, cows all face the same way
because they like to position themselves so that they catch the wind in a
manner that blows the flies away from their rear ends. I already knew the
answer to that one.
Bushy had made productive use of his turn to drive the car by going
busking outside the pub in Gloucester. He gathered a crowd of little kids who
liked his version of "Old Macdonald had A Farm", a standard that more
buskers should put onto their songlist.
I haven't painted a really kind picture of "James the neurotic roadie" so
far, which is a bit unfair. There's a lot to like about the guy. I'm in awe of his
ability to make friends. I'm an unfriendly git myself but James seemed to be
able to ride into any town and make friends with someone straight away. He
made a friend in Gloucester called James Tully and the thing I liked most
about the friendship was that the basis of it was that they both shared the
same first name. Tully turned out to be an engaging character. He'd just won
some kind of rodeo riding championship recently and was still pretty chuffed
8
with himself. In between stories of fightin' and rootin' and yelling at every car
that drove past and repeated requests for Kenny Rogers songs he showed us
a few of his scars. He was missing half a kneecap, had an ugly gash in his
belly and he opened his mouth to show us where he'd had his tongue sewn
back on. His girlfriend, whom he called "The Princess", was a big fan of that
scar or so he said. I was kind of impressed. He was only about eighteen or
nineteen. I guessed that rodeo riding was a young man's game. When I was
nineteen the worst scar I had was a paper cut.
James hoisted his bike onto a pole outside the pub which had a "no
bicycles parking" sign on it, the big rebel. It wasn't a bad way to advertise the
show and we kept it up all the way around the country, always managing to
find something tall to hang a bike on, then taping our posters to it. We weren't
even doing the show in that particular pub. We were on around the corner in
the Senior Citizens Centre. Yes, the Senior Citizens Centre.
Our Gloucester show had been organised through the very kind people
of the Gloucester Rotary Club. They even threw on a barbie for us which was
extra lovely of them. They were mostly old blokes in cardigans but they were
up for a laugh. They all took turns to take us aside and gently say that if we
wanted to get a big crowd in Gloucester we needed to start the show at 7
o'clock, not 8:30, because most of the people in town went to bed at 9.
It was a fun show for me because I finally got to use all my props and
for the first time on tour got to wrap my head up in foil and make a big
entrance.
We ended up at the top pub with all the hard living townsfolk that dared
to stay up till at least 10:30. Tully was there, looking less scary in the dark but
9
that could just be that he looked relatively less scary when compared to the
rest of Gloucester's youth getting pissed on a Saturday night. We were
introduced to Tully Senior and even got to meet "the Princess". Tully the elder
started off on a scar story that morphed into an old joke about a three legged
pig and a farmer. We learnt that the cops in town, instead of arresting you, will
drive you home if they catch you causing a disturbance in town late at night.
This meant that every Friday and Saturday night at closing time anyone
feeling too lazy to walk home would wander down the main drag till they found
a garbage bin and start banging it on the road till the cops picked them up.
Back at the campground we got the chance to have a look at what was
packed into the trailer. James was not a light traveler. The rest of us seemed
to have cottoned onto the idea that saving space and weight was a good idea
because the Lancer was going to need all the help it could get if it was going
to survive the trip. Plus fuel costs were going to be a drain on our limited
funds. Before I'd left I'd made a pile of what I thought I might need and halved
it, then culled it again and finally let myself take two totally unnecessary items
that I thought would be fun to have along on top of what I thought were the
necessities. These were a telescope and my giant ball of used clingwrap. I
could have argued that the giant ball of used clingwrap was a necessity. It
turned out to be a bit of a millstone because I couldn't argue with anyone
about anything extra they had brought along. They'd just point at my clingwrap
ball and I'd have to back down.
But James had never been a boy scout because he'd never learnt to
pack light. Searching the trailer in some kind of awe at how he'd managed to
10
fill it up to the roof, we discovered amongst other things: two waffle irons, a
bathtub sized metal container filled with all sorts of food, an esky of similar
proportions filled with pots and pans, a four griller stove that folded out and
included a servery, various flower pots, a mysterious lump of wood, a set of
paintbrushes and spraycans, an industrial sized toolbox full of heavy duty,
oversized tools, one of those washing up draining trays that has special
grooves to put your plates in, one of those fold out plastic washing lines,
fishing rods and best of all an electronic vegetable juicer. Not to mention the
various bits and pieces of junk that he found beside the road every day and
added to the collection; ratty old pieces of rope, buckets, coconuts, tourism
brochures. Things would go missing in the back of the trailer and not reappear
again for months.
James Tully came up with a parting gift for his new friend James the
Roadie, a magnificent set of goat's horns that James attached to each end of
his handlebars. It made his bike look like a Harley from a distance. It
impressed the kids in Taree which was full of jet boat racers zooming up and
own the river. The waterside was alive with happy, smiling people. The sun
was out and if I was going to personify Taree that day, I'd say she was a
carefree maiden skipping lightly through a meadow, rather than the menacing
thug waiting to mug you in an alley that I'd usually personify Taree as. I
bought an ice cream and sat on the riverbank and blissed out, reflecting on
the fact that I'd just covered 80 kilometers on the bike without putting in too
much effort. I was starting to get into condition. I decided this needed
celebrating with a beer so I found the Royal Hotel where Domenick had
managed to wrangle that night's show.
11
It might be worthwhile to pause here and point out something that will
become blindingly obvious if you read on. All four of us are partial to a beer.
The Last Legs tour was a mixture of extreme good health and extreme bad
health. On the good side was all the riding we were doing, the fresh fruit we
were eating and the fresh country air we were breathing. On the opposite side
of the health ledger (Is he an actor?), every day we'd be doing a show in a
place that sold beer and riding a bike all day long is thirsty work. Not to
mention that if we put on a good show there was a good chance that
afterwards people would like to buy us lots of beers. In the long run, I reckon
these things just about evened themselves up.
If you're a fan of the movie "Withnail and I" you may have heard of a
drinking game that you can play while watching the DVD. It involves taking a
drink whenever a character in the movie takes a drink. By the end of the film
you'll be sloshed. If you want to, you can play a similar game while reading
this book. All you'll need is a carton of Toohey's New. Oh yeah, and a carton
of Fourex for the Queensland leg. Oh, and a carton of Emu Bitter for Western
Australia, a carton of Millers, a carton of Victoria Bitter and a carton of
Cascade. You'd better add a carton of Boag's for Launceston. And some
Mercury cider. And some bottles of chocolate, chilli and mango beer from the
Wicked Ale Brewery in WA. Oh yeah, and six bottles of Geoff's home made
red wine. You'll need a couple of bottles of champagne, a carton of Toohey's
Old, some goon, boxy and Fanta, some decent bottles of red from the Clare
Valley in SA. And a Gideon's Bible. There's more, but I don't think there's any
need to make it too complicated. If you are going to play, it's probably best not
to try to read the whole book in one go, or while driving.
12
Anyway, back to Taree. In the pub I splashed a couple of beers down
and watched the footy and then free pizza was provided by the pub owner. I
really didn't think at this point in time that the day could have gotten any better
when from across the room a girl caught my eye and gave me a bit of a come
hither smile. She came over to my table and introduced herself as Felicity, or
Jess, or something like that. The whole conversation was a little vague. That's
the thing. It was one of those conversations where one of the participants is
off in their own little private joke and the other person is trying hard to keep up
but is not quite sure what that joke is. I was that person and I was doing my
best to keep up with the conversation because; A. she was a girl, B. she
seemed to be interested in me, and C. she was a girl. The chat lurched
bafflingly on, her name seemed to change every few minutes. I'd try to laugh
at the right spots and then add something that I thought might have been
relevant to whatever the conversation was about. I convinced her to stay for
the show. Then I went upstairs, showered, shaved and put on my best get a
root shirt.
The audience looked a bit scary, all blokes in checked shirts and
goatees and they seemed more interested in the pool table. We had to shut
down the pool table to do the show, which really endeared us to them. They
turned out to be a sensational audience. One guy got so carried away he
even made us autograph his shirt. I kept chatting up Miss Vague but the hard
word seemed to elude me and I let her escape.
Domenick came to perform the debriefing.
"Well?"
13
"Yeah, she's a bit loopy. She did invite us all around for breakfast in the
morning"
"So you know where her house is?"
"She gave me instructions.'
"So why are you still here?"
"I don't think that's what she wanted."
He gave me one of his "Why do I have to put up with this level of
incompetence looks?", that he always gives me when I try to explain why I've
let another girl get away from me.
"Go. Go now. Knock on her door. Say I'm here for breakfast but my
watch is ten hours fast."
I jumped on my bike and pedaled down the street to her place,
knocked on the door, smiled my seductive smile and tried the line on her.
She invited me in, made herself comfortable on the lounge, let me rub
her back for about fifteen minutes, then as mysteriously as it all started she
got cold feet, made me a coffee and shooed me out of the house. Women are
strange cattle.
That was the closest any of us came to a girl till we reached North
Queensland and I had a sleepless night to ponder what ever went wrong
because I really shouldn't have drunk the coffee.
We finished setting up our gig in Port Macquarie and sat back to see if
anyone would come in. In walked a skinny red haired guy in a checked shirt.
"Are youse the comoydians?" he asked.
14
His name was Trent. He was eighteen and he was traveling with his
best mate, also called Trent. The Trents were from Dubbo and they'd decided
to get away from the farm and sample the bright lights of the North Coast. It
tells you something about Dubbo when people from there look at Newcastle
and see it as a bit of a fleshpot. There'd been an incident at Newcastle, which
helped Trent win our scar competition that night.
"We was just walking around after a few schooies and these tough
guys started followin' us. We didn't like the look of em so went into this pub.
We thought we'd had a lucky escape. Then we looked around this pub we'd
gone into. There was just guys in it. Then we saw this guy kissin this other
guy. We thought we'd rather take our chances with the guys outside, so we
got out of there. We got punched out by this gang and here's me scar."
The crowd also contained the typical fighting middle aged couple that
according to the law every pub must contain at least one example of. I'd seen
them earlier in the day in the front bar drinking and sniping at each other, a
sort of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Bogan." Liz Taylor decided that she wasn't
going to shut up during the show, so she let fly with something incoherent
every few minutes or so, usually right on top of one of our punchlines. But she
then made the mistake of trying to do some talking of her own. She entered
the scar competition and started telling a rambling story that wasn't going to
have made much sense anyway, and made none at all. That's because
Domenick and I got our revenge by standing to each side and shouting
something incoherent at her whenever she tried to open her mouth. She
learnt her lesson and gave up in a quivering heap. Richard Burton had a go at
telling a story too, some old joke about breasts and blondes that he never got
15
to the end of because Trent shouted out the punchline and told him to sit
down and shut up. It's very satisfying when the rest of the crowd starts
roughing up the hecklers for you. We just refereed.
We had a beer afterwards with a big chunk of the crowd who turned out
to be John Farnham's road crew; his "Last Time" tour was set up in town and
we were shadowed all the way up the coast by him. I chatted to one of the
girls who I'd asked during my act to tell us about her first kiss. I remembered
her smiling really dreamily when I'd asked her so I asked her for more details.
"Yeah', she said, smiling dreamily again. "It was with a girl."
Another sleepless night. And this time there was no coffee.
We tried to stay off the main roads where it was practically possible, a
strategy that anyone familiar with the traffic on the Pacific Highway will heartily
endorse. We followed a forty kilometer track of mud, sand and corrugations
that led to Crescent Head. The road began with a sign stating that the local
council had disowned it as a public road and wasn't going to take any
responsibility for us if we disappeared into a mudhole and were never seen
again. Making it to the end made us feel pretty macho and if bikes could have
strutted that's how we would have rode into Kempsey.
At Kempsey no-one turned up for our show.
The RSL club had kindly lent us a huge auditorium, something akin in
size to the warehouse that the Ark of the Covenant is stashed away in at the
end of "Raiders of the Lost Ark." As we waited hopefully for someone to turn
up, Bushy set himself up and played a few songs anyway. We took advantage
of the situation to put James on a bicycle and send him circling around Bushy
16
with the video camera, thus shooting a very arty video of him playing in the
middle of the empty room. Eventually a nice lady wandered in from the euchre
club that was holding its regular Tuesday night session in another part of the
club and feeling sorry for us donated a couple of dollars. She theorised that
maybe the reason that we didn't pull a crowd had something to do with the riot
that had occurred in town over the weekend.
That might have explained why there was a certain tension in the air
around town. As far as we could learn fighting amongst some aboriginals had
spilled out of the pub and onto the road and had closed the Pacific Highway
for a few hours on Friday night. The cops were still a bit skittish. They bailed
up Bushy as we rode home and made him explain why he was riding around
town late at night with a guitar slung across his lap. I wasn't too disappointed
to be leaving Kempsey behind, though to be fair, it did look a lot friendlier on
the way out in the morning's light.
We rode back roads into Bowraville. One stop was at Taylor's Arms to
have a beer in the legendary "Pub With No Beer", which we were relieved to
find didn't live up to its name.
The route climbed up and down endless hills that I was barely fit
enough to handle. I hitched the bike up outside the pub and slumped face
down on the bar. Literally. With a loud thud. I'd only just caught my breath
when James motioned for me to join him outside with a secretive look on his
face. Of course, having learnt to trust James I followed. He led me down a
side street to where an old bloke was leaning on a ute. He was introduced to
me as John.
"Okay John", said James conspiratorially, "show us what you've got?"
17
John pulled back the tarp at the back of the ute. We peered inside.
"What do you reckon Greeny?
There was a large selection of cow's skulls in the back. James had
decided that his bike had needed something extra to go with his goat's horns.
"I asked John if he had any skulls lying in his paddocks and he jumped
in the ute and went and got these for me."
It was an impressive collection. I helped him choose two of the finer
examples. It was like a really weird drug deal but paid for with a couple of
schooners. It reminded me again how much I like the country. You can't walk
into a pub in the city and confidently think that the first bloke you talk to is able
to leap into his vehicle and bring you back a smorgasbord of cows’ skulls.
James now had an evil looking skull that sat between the horns on his
handlebars, making it a lot of fun to ride just behind him and watch the faces
of the people in the street look a bit freaked out as he cycled by. It attracted
the cameras of the Coffs Harbour news crew who met up with us and filmed
us riding into town. We ended up as the after the weather story usually
reserved for tigers having a birthday party.
Coffs Harbour likes to boast of having the nicest climate in Australia, so
of course it didn't stop raining the whole time we were there. Actually, I like
riding in the rain, something that's hard to explain to non cyclists. Water itself
isn't inherently unpleasant. After all most of us enjoy taking showers. Riding in
the rain gives me one of those tingly all my senses alive kind of feelings,
though writing about it makes me feel weird so I might stop now and talk
about the Big Banana instead. The Big Banana is the mighty granddaddy of
all the "Big" things that you find around Australia, and no visit to Coffs is
18
complete without stopping there to eat a chocolate covered banana. They
taste like shit of course but you always forget that until it's too late. I can also
state with a reasonable degree of confidence that James became the first
person ever to ride a bicycle through the Big Banana with a cow's skull on its
handlebars. I also went skiing, snow skiing, because the Big Banana complex
includes an artificial indoor ski slope. Returning to the rest of the blokes and
telling them I'd just been snowtubing was probably more fun than the actual
event. Much like eating a chocolate covered banana. Having exhausted all the
possibilities of how you could have fun in Coffs Harbour on a wet autumn
afternoon, or any afternoon for that matter, we retired to the caravan park to
do more route plotting and wait for the SBS movie to start. Bushy showed me
how to fix a flat tyre because I'd come down with the first one of the trip.
I was feeling kind of chuffed about learning how to do that, though the
feeling wore off after about the third or fourth time I had to do it the next day. I
realised that the split in the inner tube was too big for me to repair so I had to
give up and start pushing. Eventually I pushed the bike into the village of
Glenreagh, which apropos of nothing, is not far from where Russell Crowe's
farm is, though we didn't spot him punching anyone. I called Bushy and got
him out of the pub at Grafton to drive back and rescue me. I ended up riding
the "Guitarcycle" (minus the guitar which can be removed from it for riding
long distances) into Grafton, which was a bit hard because its pedals were
designed to clip onto the sort of fair dinkum riding shoes that proper cyclists
wear.
We were hoping that, as it was a Saturday night, we might have drawn
a decent crowd, but the big crowd who'd been at the club for the badge draw
19
had gone away by showtime leaving us with about six punters. The night was
saved by the guests from an aboriginal wedding reception who rocked up
from somewhere else in the club. As an audience for a comedy show they
sucked but as bunch of guys to hang out with they were good value.
Not many of our jokes made it out of the starting barrier. The idea of
sitting quietly and letting the performer do their thing didn't seem to be a part
of this group’s way of thinking. Everyone loudly put in their two cents worth.
Our stories were interrupted with requests for someone to come up and sing a
song; but it was anarchic more than ugly. I wrapped my head up and waited
my turn, hearing Domenick trying to impose some kind of order and not
getting far. I felt like the next bloke waiting for the firing squad in a position
where I could hear the volley of gunshots and the thud of the body hitting the
dirt. Sure enough, I died horribly. I got through about a third of my act and
decided I was wasting everyone's time. I pretended that all was going to plan,
said goodnight and, as a loyal friend, let Domenick take over. He then threw
the mike open to the crowd. A bloke called Stephen rose to the challenge and
got up to tell a joke. He was a natural storyteller, albeit a natural storyteller
about ten schooners behind the parade. But once one of their own gang was
up at the mike the crowd started to pay attention. Stephen got to the end of
his joke eventually. I still have no idea what the joke was about but he got a
rousing hand and the night started to turn around. It got easy after that.
Different people got up to tell a joke. This allowed me and Domenick to start
paying out on them when they sat down, which worked rather well, and
everyone was friends by the time we got to the scar stories.
20
The scar stories had a flavour all their own. I liked one where a girl with
a plaster cast shyly came up to explain that she'd gotten the injury when she'd
tried to karate chop her best friend and had missed, sending her arm through
a plate glass shop window. The winner was Joel. He'd done a backflip off a
rope swing and poked his leg bone out through his heel. Afterwards everyone
gathered around us for a session of singing and good natured bonding.
Stephen played us a selection of traditional Koori love songs on the guitar,
starting with "Red Roses For a Blue Lady," followed by "If Tomorrow ever
comes". If you're traveling somewhere remote and fiddling with your radio dial
and suddenly hit a lot of dodgy old country and western standards, it's a good
chance you've found the aboriginal program on the local community radio
station. There's plenty of things that Europeans should be apoligising to the
aboriginals for, and maybe not at the top of that list but close to it, should be
saying sorry for taking fifty thousand years of unbroken culture and replacing
it with Glen Campbell.
The next day was our longest ride so far, slightly over 100 kilometres to
the beef town of Casino, which claims to be the beef capital of Australia and is
the home of "Beef Week", where the local good lookers compete to be the
"Beef Queen." We ate chicken. It was still raining heavily. The caravan smelt
funny in the morning, a combination of wet clothes, wet feet and wet farts that
encouraged me to start cycling very early. It was dead flat riding to Kyogle,
where misty green hills heralded the start of the "I could leave the city and live
here. This is paradise" section of northern New South Wales.
Kyogle was incredibly charming. An old bloke walked past me in the
street whistling, "Beautiful Dreamer. Another grandparently couple were
21
patiently letting their grandson scratch their instant lottery ticket for them. I
brought a newspaper and an apple turnover and sat out the front of the
bakery and let total strangers say hello to me. It was spooky 1950's horror
movie hellos too. People would cross the street, say hello to me and then
cross back again. They were all obviously pod people, a paranoid thought that
I was having several hours too early because I wasn't even going to be in
Nimbin till later in the day.
I knew I was approaching Nimbin because the amount of square feet
devoted to community notice boards was getting bigger and bigger in every
hamlet that we rode through. The main crop around Nimbin isn't dope or
organic vegetables, it's pamphlets and leaflets. Everyone seems to be
advertising some kind of course, workshop, performance or esoteric skill,
which is nice. I'm glad that all these people have left the city, found their
passion and want to share it with others. Though judging by the amount of
paper they go through to advertise themselves, I'm just not sure how fair
dinkum they are about wanting to save trees.
Nimbin is an amusement park. Dopeland. Come here and see tame
hippies. Like the Gold Coast, I'm glad it's there to visit when I'm in the mood
for it. I'm equally glad the rest of the country is not like it. I'm glad I don't have
to live there. It's a madhouse, full of backpackers, big white-bearded stoners,
scary looking teenagers wanting to sell you drugs and people just wanting you
to sail into their orbit so they can smile at you benignly just to let you know
that everything is running peachy keen in their own little world. If you linger on
the streets of Nimbin for long enough, a minute and a half ought to do it,
someone will come up to you and offer to sell you some smoke. We had to
22
keep pointing at our Cancer council tee shirts and suggest that it might be bad
PR to be seen doing this. I got drawn into a discussion with one guy about the
theraputic benefits of smoking dope as a pain reliever for people with terminal
illnesses. He made pretty good sense to me.
That's Nimbin for you. It's like a drug itself that creeps up on you. You
start out cynical about the hippie tree huggers. Then you start watching them
and they look kind of happy. Then you start listening to them and what they
say makes sense. The world would be a better place if it was a bit more like
Nimbin, you start thinking. Luckily, it wears off with time but it is a nice feeling
while it lasts.
James expressed a desire to try some magic mushies, so the next time
someone accosted me in the streets I bought a packet, along with some of the
dope laced chocolates. Unless you're my mum, in which case I said, "No
thanks you ruffian. Get out of my sight!" We procured a recipe for cooking the
mushrooms from a bloke with a long white beard at the back of the Nimbin
museum, whose job seemed to consist of hanging around the Nimbin
museum sporting a long white beard and dispensing recipes for cooking
magic mushrooms and other genial advice on how to prepare drugs for the
kitchen table.
We started setting up the show in the pub and left James in charge of
the cooking. As the day ended and the tourists left, Nimbin began to wind
down. The hippies all got out of their scratchy hemp clothing and put on their
suits. (Like you'd really wear that scratchy hemp gear if you couldn't smoke
the leftovers.) The drug dealers all wearily straggled into the pub for beer
23
o'clock and a game of pool. Hassling people on the street all day long can
really tucker you out.
James seemed to be taking his time so we wandered upstairs to the
balcony to see what was up. He was looking a bit sheepish.
"How's it going? Something smells good."
"Yeah. Um. The guy said brew it up for half an hour and drink it like
tea."
"That's right."
He picked up the pot off the stove. It was very dry with a couple of dark
stains at the bottom.
"I had the stove turned up a bit too high. They've gone."
"You boiled away the magic mushrooms."
"All gone."
We had to make do with the chocolates to put us in the Nimbin mood
for the show, which was a good thing. I've always found brushing the pixies
away tends to distract from a comedy performance. In the end I could have
been flying around the room for real and they crowd wouldn't have noticed.
I guess we were expecting the crowd to be pretty cool, switched on,
politically savvy and up for a bit of surreal humour. It turned out to be one of
our worst shows. The pub's sound system that we were using was a brand
new one that we helped unpack from the boxes so we weren't sure if
everything was properly connected to everything else. The sound was
muffled, like we were performing underwater. We tried getting the pool table
shut down, but the guys playing got a bit ugly and testosteroney on us, so we
wisely let them be. There were lots of people in the crowd giggling but that
24
had not much to do with us and a lot to do with the amount of mind altering
chemicals they'd imbibed. There was a loud Scottish bloke up the back who
heckled regularly and incoherently in the belief that being born in the same
country as Billy Connolly and the Edinburgh Comedy festival made him an
expert on what's funny, and not just a bit of a prat. There was a cranky guy
with a beard who walked up to the front to abuse us, but he was also at odds
with the Scottish bloke, so they started abusing each other. The Neanderthals
at the pool table threw their two cents worth in between shots and for good
measure some blokes from up the back also got stuck in. Whose side they
were on was a mystery; though no-one seemed to like the cranky guy with the
beard.
Wandering around in the midst of all this was a young lady who, even
by Nimbin standards, came across as a bit of a weirdo. Dressed in a flowing
white gown, she made her way up to the front and grabbed the microphone.
"There's a beautiful energy that binds us all and it rises up out of the
earth", she informed us.
We thanked her for the advice and managed to regain control of the
mic. She waited for a chance and got control of the mic again, this time to tell
us about the aliens. Again we coaxed her into giving it back to us. She got
hold of it a third time and we wondered what piece of vital scientific data she'd
be sharing with us this time. In lavish detail she recounted the wide mouthed
frog joke.
I don't think anyone was expecting that.
25
When she wasn't fighting for control of the mic she sat on a nearby
window sill and repeated precisely everything that anyone said on about a half
second delay.
"I wouldn't fight with her," a local helpfully advised me. "She knows
martial arts and she'll break your arm." This was sound advice. We we did our
best to leave alone the only person in Ninbim who might have actually
benefited from raising the dosage of their medication. Incredibly enough, right
up the front were a couple of people actually listening and enjoying the show.
So I blocked out the rest of the crowd as best as I could and focused on them.
The scar competition was won by the Scottish bloke, who
commandeered the mic for about ten minutes telling his story in minute detail,
though I didn't understand a word at the time. In plain English the story went
like this.
"I'd just arrived in town and everyone here kept telling me I should go
for a swim at this really nice swimming hole in the forest. I follow the directions
and found the place. It's a water hole up in the hills behind town. There's a
little waterfall, and a twenty foot high cliff above the pool that looked like it
would be a good spot to do some diving from. But I remembered my mum's
advice about diving into strange bodies of water. I went for a paddle around
below the cliff first to make sure there were no logs or submerged rocks that
might hurt me. Nothing. Great. I get out, pick my way through the bush up to
the edge of the cliff. I'm about to dive in when my wife comes up the track,
carrying the picnic basket, the beach umbrella, the carton of beer, the blanket
and so on. She sees me about to dive in and goes nuts.
26
"Are you mad, get down in the water first and check for rocks and logs
etc etc...."
“I'm a married guy. I can't argue with this. I know I can't get away with
saying I've already done that if she hasn't actually seen me do it. So I climb
back down, paddle out again, dive under, swim back up. Still nothing there.
Now she's satisfied. Out I get. I climb all the way back up again. Have a
stretch. And in I dive.
Head first onto a passing turtle."
He then whipped off his baseball cap to reveal a tortoise-shell designed
scar on the top of his forehead. Granted in the time it took him to tell the story
a tortoise actually got up and went to the bar and returned with an order of
drinks but it was a pretty good story. He was our mate after that, which meant
I spent the rest of the night smiling and nodding at his stories, hoping that he
was telling me something funny because I still had no idea what he was
saying. The last we saw of the lady in white was her standing in the middle of
the road outside the pub still burbling away to no-one in particular. Yeah, it
was probably a good thing that James burnt the magic mushrooms.
There were only about a dozen people at the next night's gig at the
Bangalow Sports and Recreation Club but it was a friendly show and we
stayed around to chat with the people there. We got some more scar stories
off Bob, an amiable bloke with a head that only a not too discerning or blind
mother could love.
"I was up at the club one night and I win the raffle. Big tray of meat.
Beauty, the wife will love this. I stick around till closing time. Then I'm walking
27
home in the dark. Start hearing this noise behind me. Soft footsteps. Turn
around. There's this bloody great big Rottweiler following me home. I know
this dog. I’ve seen him around town. He's a bastard. I think quick. Pull a lamb
chop out of the meat tray. Drop it on the ground behind me. Hope he'll leave
me alone. He wolfs it down. Except that just whets his appetite. Now he's after
more. I drop more meat out. It slows him down but now I've made it worse
because another dog's joined in. I end up with six dogs chasing me. I'm
sprinting, tossing out bits of meat behind me. I get to the corner of my place
and I don't even wait to get to the front gate. I vault over the fence. Caught my
leg on some wire."
He shows us a three inch long scar on his leg.
"When I get to the door, I check the meat tray. Nothing left. Not a
sausage."
He then pushed aside some of his hair to show us a scar on the back
of his head.
"Now this scar. I was walking home from the pub again, late at night.
Carrying a couple stubbies to finish off on the trip. This car comes along the
road, driving slow. Looks like it's going to pull up near me. I'm thinking this
might be a bunch of yahoo's wanting to rob my beer off me, so I duck off to
the side of the road and hide in a bush. The car stops right next to my bush. I
hear the two guys get out. They start talking. I recognise the voices and I
relax. I'm not going to get beaten up. It's only a couple of mates of mine,
stopping to finish off their own beers before driving home. But I'm too
embarrassed to come out of the bush and explain what I'm doing hiding there
28
so I keep quiet and wait for them to finish their beers. When they do they toss
the empties into the bush. Smacked me clean in the head."
Byron Bay copped eight and a half inches of rain the night before we
arrived there. We set up camp between puddles in a mosquito infested
caravan park and explored town. At the beach we saw something we hadn't
seen in a while, girls. Topless ones doing yoga at that, standing on their
heads. Even without the ladies it would still have to be the best beach on the
east coast, if not the world. James and I rode our bikes along the sand and
took in the view of the mighty volcano caldera that surrounds this stretch of
coast. We tried riding with our eyes closed and ended up falling in an
undignified heap on the sand. Dom rode out to the cape on the "Guitarcycle"
and started strumming away on a bench, earning us our most easterly
donation of the trip. The owners of the Beach Hotel let us talk them into
putting on a show. We fanned out around town and started drumming up
interest. As showtime approached no-one looked like turning up and we were
about to cancel when I went out to the front area of the pub, cupped my hands
and yelled that the show was about to start. About seventy people got up and
filed in. They were all keen but hadn't known where to find us. It was a good
lesson in how to publicise ourselves. It was our biggest crowd so far and to be
heard, we had to shout at the top of our lungs as we had no sound equipment.
I finished happy but with a sore and raspy throat. The scar competition was
close, between a guy who'd dropped a toilet seat on his dick when he was
four years old, and a girl called Sonia who had no less than ten different
scars. She showed them all with the crowd counting them off for her. We
found Jo, a cyclist friend of ours from Melbourne, and she got up and told of
29
the time a cocoanut had fallen on her head. We awarded the beer to Sonia
with her multitude of scars, going for quantity over quality, though to be fair
she didn’t have a dick that she could have dropped a toilet seat on which put
her at an unfair disadvantage.
The next days ride was just sensational, through Mullumbimby and up
a river valley into the hills. The road meandered around a stream with a dozen
small fords to cross. I stopped to listen to the kids from a one room
schoolhouse practice singing. Brightly coloured butterflies chaotically bopped
around and contemplated how to start hurricanes on the other side of the
ocean and I wondered again what the people with proper jobs were doing on
a fine morning like this. The road surface changed to gravel and I careened
wildly downhill into Uki, arriving with a mixture of relief at not falling down and
losing all my skin and sheer "Yippy, boy that was fun" exhilaration. On the
outskirts of Murwillumbah we passed a hare krishna riding a bullock cart.
That's not something you see everyday, unless you live in Murwillumbah, in
which case you just wave, say “hello Fred" and go about your business.
We stayed with one of James's brothers in Murwillumbah. He turned
out to be surprisingly normal.
James is one of a family of ten brothers. When he talks about his
brothers he doesn't make an effort to distinguish them from each other which
makes his stories about his family impossible to follow. We get him to try to
tell brother stories when ever we can.
"Tell us the story about the van James. That's a good one."
"Again. Okay. We were driving home. I was in the back next to my
brother. My brother was on the other side. My brother was driving and my
30
brother was in front of me. We'd been drinking. So my brother says he wants
to throw up. So I tell my brother to stop driving. " By which point in the story
everyone except probably James has lost track of which brother is which and
the uninitiated are politely asking James just how many brothers he has.
The Murwillumbah show was a little quiet. We had opposition from the
lingerie girls performing in the pub across the river. Even we wanted to be at
their show. The next day we were up and on the road before eight to make it
to Beaudesert by sundown, 130 kilometres away and not much of it flat. High
in the ranges we crossed our first state border, where we encountered a
border guard. His job was to keep fruit fly from crossing into Queensland, not
keeping Queenslanders from crossing into the rest of Australia, as you might
have thought. We coaxed him to come out of his fruit fly station and pose for
some photos with us, which judging by his enthusiasm for the task might have
been the highlight of his day. Or his year.
I was amazed. Two weeks down and we'd made it all the way to
Queensland without everything going kaput. The shows were funny. We
hadn't murdered each other in our sleep and we'd secured lots of dead
animals to tie onto James' bike. I still hadn't been given a back rub by
someone with Ross River Fever which really surprised me. But maybe that
would change.