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Chapter Four, in which Domenick wakes up in a crocodile's mouth,
we shave off Weasel's beard for the first time in twenty five years, I
get called a poof for drinking shandys and we scare a busload of tourists
with a fake wrestling match in the outback. Oh yeah, and I burn a hole in
my arse.
All the way up the Queensland coast we'd been riding through
sugar cane country just before the start of the harvest. The fields were
at their tallest. All that you would see at times was a wall of green beside
the road with a deep blue backdrop of sky. Add the network of cane train
rail lines to the landscape, solitary stout wooden Queenslander homes and
looming mountain ranges and you had grand cycling terrain.
The Daintree River marks the end of sugar cane country. The
other side of the river is World Heritage listed rainforest, home of
unseen cassowarries, big trees by the lumberyardload and acres of old
growth ferals. The ride from the ferry to Cape Tribulation seemed to
take a long time but I did make lots of stops just to suck in the air. It
had a presence of its own.
Our Cape Tribulation show was at PK's backpacker bar. We
hadn't had the best of luck with backpackers venues. The patrons
weren't in need of our help to start having fun. If anything, we were
going to be distracting them from the kind of fun they wanted to be
having. And rest assured their champagne bottles didn’t have a coating of
dust on them that made it look like they’d been lying untouched din the
wine cellar since the middle ages. They also didn't have to worry about of
having to get up early the next morning. So by and large everyone was too
pissed to pay us much attention. But for a change our show was going well,
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we were getting big laughs and had the crowd focused. Then a shrill
female voice rang out from the side of the room.
"You're not funny."
I turned to find my heckler was one of bunch of feral locals
who'd wandered in from the jungle earlier on in the night. They'd blithely
been chattering away amongst themselves all show and I was surprised
that she'd even bothered to close her mouth for long enough to listen to
what we were doing.
For the next few minutes she kept shouting out "not funny",
pretty much at random. I pointed out to her that a hundred or so of her
fellow patrons seemed to be disagreeing with her evaluation and I told
her to turn around and look at her soap dodging buddies who were also
enjoying the show. Though they stopped smiling when she did. I guess
they knew her well enough not to get into her bad books. It took the
momentum out of the night. We never quite got the crowd back which was
a shame because it had finally looked like we were going to do a gig in a
room full of drunk Scandinavian girls that would have made us look worthy
of fawning over like rock stars. Alas we spent our post gig warm-down
liaising with the "drunk and ugly blokes in the room club." I got button
holed by a diminutive berk who suffered not only from short guy
syndrome but one of the worst cases of short town syndrome that I'd
ever encountered. I hadn't suggested that there was anything wrong with
living at Cape Tribulation. I may even have remarked that it looked like a
good place to live. That didn't save me from having to endure a solid
haranguing about how people in the city thought they were better than
people from the bush and that we all were up ourselves and spent all our
spare time at the ballet.
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He then revealed that he was worth about four million dollars. He
stepped back to take in my gasp of awe, which I didn't do, even though I
was genuinely amazed that a dumb fuck like him could be worth four
dollars let alone four million. Ironic then, for all his wealth he actually did
something that I saw no-one else do for the whole tour. He put a twenty
dollar note in our donation bucket, which was very generous, but then he
fished around and pulled out a ten for change. With all that money he was
saving by not buying expensive tickets to the ballet, he could have left
the other ten in there, but I guess looking after your money like that is
how you become a millionaire in the first place.
I also found a note in our donation bucket where instead of giving
a donation our feral friend had written us an encouraging note. "Racist,
Homophobic bullshit," it said, though it took us a while to work out that it
wasn't meant to be a compliment.
Cape Tribulation is where the sealed road ends. Northwards runs
a controversial dirt road known as the "Bloomfield Track."
James and Dom had been talking up the Bloomfield track since
we'd left Sydney. They'd ridden along it a year ago and from their
accounts I was bracing myself for having to hack my way through virgin
rainforest with a machete. I remember there was a kerfuffle, maybe
even a brouhaha, when the road was originally built back in the 1980's
under the auspices of the totally off his trolley Joh Bjelke Petersen. It
was described as a scar on the landscape and an excuse to open up the
rainforest to logging, though twenty years later it's only major downside
seems to be that it gives hippies easier access to the area.
It did turn out to be a challenging bike ride. The drizzle came
and went. Some of the uphills were so steep they were paved to allow
four wheel drivers to climb them without toppling over backwards. The
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creek crossings were under water. I told people who looked the photos of
me pushing my bike through them that they were crocodile infested but I
was lying. The biggest danger would have been from cutting your feet on a
discarded bong and getting tetanus. Riding on the gravel slowed my
average speed down, so it seemed to take forever to get to the Wujal
Wujal aboriginal community and lunch at the general store.
The slightly weatherbeaten white lady at the store was
expecting me. Bushy and Dom had passed through an hour earlier and left
a description of me.
"You're not that fat," she said, giving me a good looking over. "I
think your mate was exaggerating a bit."
It was the quietest town I'd ever been in, I reflected, as I sat
outside and ate my lollies.
The midday silence was shattered by the agitated shouts of a
thin bloke walking towards the shop. He didn't seem to be shouting at
anyone in particular, just the world as a whole. I hoped he wouldn't think
that I was part of the problem. When he saw me his mood lightened and
he stopped for a chat. He liked living at Wujal Wujal, especially the
serenity. I guess there's no point in loosening the lungs and having a good
shout unless it's to break a heavy silence.
It was my first introduction to the alien, unfathomable and never
dull life of remote aboriginal Australia. I'd had a few aboriginal
acquaintances but by and large my experience of Australia's indigenous
population was limited to that episode of Skippy where a scary looking but
ultimately benign tribe rescue Sonny when he gets lost in the bush. The
next few months were to be an eye opener.
On the way out of town, as I slogged up a hill that overlooked the
backyard of one of the houses, I stopped when a strange scene caught my
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eye. A very skinny old bloke, stripped to the waist and not showing a gram
of excess fat, was shaping up to a young kid of about sixteen. It was a
real two fists up in the air boxing pose, like the sort you see Jimmy
Carruthers painted in on the outside of a boxing tent. He was working the
young kid around the yard, urged on by a few other family members. I
thought the old guy might have been actually giving the young bloke some
boxing lessons and I was tempted to stick around and watch but everyone
looked a bit too serious and I thought maybe it was a proper fight in
action. I pedaled off out of there with a surreal image stuck in my head
and a feeling of confusion about the ins and outs of the local culture, not
for the last time in this part of the world.
The cycling was no easier after lunch. I encountered my first
loose cows on the road, not benign moo cows but belligerent looking tough
outback cows who moved out of the way reluctantly. These cows would
prove to be the most unflappable cows I met in the whole of the trip.
A lot of the traffic was mini buses promising adventure tours up
the track for backpackers. We questioned one of the tour guides about
how much adventure their clients experience from the air conditioned
seats of the vehicle.
"You know, sometimes they have to get out and push the bus." He
knew this sounded a little sheepish so he reached for more. "Everyone
gets their feet wet."
I hadn't been carrying a lot of liquid with me so the Lions Den
Hotel was one of the most welcome pub stops of the ride. The Lions Den
is one of those legendary pubs that always crops up when the
conversation turns to Legendary Pubs. Located 35 k's south of Cooktown,
it's big claim to fame is that it's the only pub in Australia that's been
continuously licensed to a female owner since it was established,
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sometime more than 130 years ago. It's current owner was at the bar
practicing responsible service of alcohol, Far North Queensland style.
"What'll you have."
"A shandy thanks."
"What are ya, a poof. It's full strength beer or nothing. You're
not cycling all the way here from Cape Trib and drinking a shandy."
I couldn't argue with that, though I did sneak some water in to
avoid dehydrating, but only when she wasn't looking. I didn't want to end
up suffering the same fate as the snake.
The snake, or what was left of it, namely about twenty five foot
of skin, was only produced from under the counter after we'd been
drinking and chatting at the pub for more than an hour. It was some kind
of python, the type that strangle you to death, and it had been putting
the moves on the pub's dog when they'd pumped a round of bullets into it.
Only after they'd unrolled it did they realise it was an endangered
species. So the skin was kept under the counter and it was only proudly
produced once they were satisfied we weren't undercover agents from
the National Parks and Wildlife Department. It was a big snake. The skin
stretched the length of the front bar and out the door into the lounge
bar.
We picked up a souvenir from the pub, a bright pink T-shirt that
immediately became the object of the most intense competition of the
ride, the battle for the "Pink Jersey". The "Pink Jersey" was sort of like
the Tour de France's "yellow jersey", except that it was awarded to the
slowest rider, not the fastest. It basically came down to Domenick and
myself dueling our way around Australia, revealing a competitive side to
our natures that bordered on the ugly. There were times when I felt that
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if I could have strung razor wire across the road to stop him or at least
slow him down I would have.
We set off for Cooktown in the fading afternoon light like men
possessed. I gave him a good kilometres head start out of the pub but
caught him once the gravel ran out and we hit the last stretch of highway.
Every time we passed each other we'd sing a song with the word "pink" as
one of the lyrics. Though once we got past "Lily The Pink" we ran out of
songs and had to resort to random insults as we passed.
"Hey, ‘Statue Busker Magazine’, just called. They want you to
pose for next month's front cover."
One time Domenick passed me without insulting me. He slowed
down, let me get ahead again and then passed me again this time with an
insult and an apology for not insulting me the first time.
The people at the Cooktown RSL were super friendly and the
show really went off. A clue to this may be found in an exchange
Domenick had with the audience.
"We rode up the Bloomfield track today. I don't know why they
called it that. We didn't see a single field in bloom."
"Yeah, but you can see them from the Police helicopters," a local
said, and the whole crowd as one went "Yeahhh."
So maybe our good reaction was chemically enhanced. It didn't
matter. I really didn't want to leave Cooktown. There's not much to do
once you've checked out the view northwards, over the estuary to a dune
covered bank backed with indistinct green hills that fog out to the
horizon, but that's a lot of the attraction. The road will be paved all the
way from Cairns in a few years and they won't know what's hit them once
the tourist tat wagon rolls into town.
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But move on we did, to a destination with fate and town called
Lakeland. Lakeland lies in a surprisingly fertile plain 80 kilometres inland
from Cooktown, though it was void of anything resembling a lake, though
to be fair there was plenty of land with room for a lake if anyone wanted
to build one. The pub didn't look promising. The half dozen inhabitants
sat slumped open mouthed at one end of the bar engrossed in a suburban
club rugby match from Sydney on the TV. Greg, the publican, put us on
early so we'd be well out of the way before the night was too old and we
could do too much damage to the ambience.
Domenick started off the show, sweating away to a great round
of indifference and when I came on I did my utmost to take the energy
level even lower. The only person paying any attention at all was the three
year old daughter of the biggest, toughest looking bloke in the bar. She
wandered over and sat in the chairs that we'd optimistically provided for
the audience and her dad came over to keep her company and glower at
us. I came to point in my act where I try to get the crowd to sing the
theme music from "Hawaii Five-o" for me. I figured she mightn't
remember the show, so I asked her dad what her favourite song was.
"She likes the Bananas in Pyjamas".
Right.
"Attention", I said to the whole pub. "For this next joke, I need
everyone to sing the theme song from Bananas in Pyjamas."
If you've never inspired a bored Saturday afternoon pub full of
cattle station workers and truckies to sing the "Bananas in Pyjamas" song
put it on your list of things to do before you die. The kid loved it. Her
dad gave us his stamp of approval. The barflys started listening to our
show and per head they might just have been the hardest laughers in
Australia. I'd never seen an audience turn from lynch mob to overwelming
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enthusiasm in so short a space of time. Domenick brought the show home
in great form and whole place just transformed.
At the end of the show we fronted the bar to find that
Samantha, the cute barmaid, had four beers poured for us.
"Greg wanted to stay but he had a dinner party to go to, but he
gave us instructions to get you guys slaughtered."
Behind the four beers she started laying out four shots of some
evil looking shooter.
"That's for in between the beers."
Well, we're nothing if not polite and it would have been bad
manners to knock the drinks back. Half an hour later we two thirds of the
way to legless and we started to involve the crowd in a few of our
favourite drinking games. There was our usual drinking of beers standing
on our heads and a game of soccer broke out using my giant ball of
clingwrap. Then it became time to play flaming arseholes.
Now there are regional variations of how this game is played so
I'll explain how we play it. We buy three beers. Middies. We’re not totally
irresponsible. We line them up along the bar; one in front of us, one in the
middle and one up the far end of the bar. We then take a page out of the
local newspaper, roll it up into a tube, drop our strides and carefully
clench one end of the newspaper in our bums. The other end of the
newspaper is set alight. The aim of the clenchee is to waddle down the
bar and drink all three beers before the flames can reach the
undergrowth, so to speak. I volunteered to go first because I'm a little
insecure and I wanted to look tough in front of the North Queenslanders.
Besides, I fancied myself at this game. I was the flaming arseholes
champion of the 1993 Macquarie University ecology field trip, a fact that
I’ll have to remember to highlight when I submit my Ph.D thesis. I was no
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novice. Now I'm not too sure what went wrong. There are several
theories. One is that we're from Sydney and we're used to doing this
with our local paper, the Sydney Morning Herald. That's a big newspaper.
Broadsheet is the technical name for it. The only available newspaper in
Lakeland is the Cairns Post. That's a considerably smaller newspaper. A
tabloid.
Some eyewitnesses suggest that the fault lay in how the
newspaper was lit, that the person with the matches was at fault for
lighting it in the middle instead of at the end. I've also had a talk with an
experienced flaming arseholes player who suggested that the way the
paper is rolled is very important. A tightly rolled paper will burn slower
than one that is loosely rolled as more oxygen gets in. (In retrospect,
maybe this is what my Ph.d thesis should have been about, rather than
the immune system genes of sea squirts.)
Whatever the reason, I didn't even get to the bottom of the
first beer before the flames started licking at my cheeks.
Domenick was standing behind me, holding a jug of water,
because he was the occupational health and safety officer. I've got, or
rather had, a hairy arse. When it went up, Dom just wasn't ready. He was
hypnotised by the flames. So was everyone else. They were holding beers
and could have thrown them on the flames but they made the calculations
and decided that saving my arse wasn't worth wasting a beer over. I was
feeling the same way myself. I could feel my arse on fire but was
determined to skull my own beer down. There was pride at stake.
Eventually I tossed half the glass in the general direction, hard to judge
because I was facing the front. I finally knocked the paper out with my
free hand and Dom finally reacted in time to put out some of the spot
fires that were starting up all over my bum.
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I stayed around for a few more beers before passing out face
down on my bunk. I wasn't the only casualty during the night. Bushy and
James decided in their drunken wisdom that a barefoot race around the
parking lot of the hotel was a good idea. The parking lot was surfaced
with small stones, sort of like the ones you find in a Japanese garden but
sharper.
Four well and truly slaughtered carcasses woke up on Sunday
morning. One sporting a three inch by three inch burn on his arse, two
with feet cut to shreds and one merely hung over.
Doing what anyone with nine square inches of bubbling open
wound on their arse would do, I jumped on my bike and cycled 140
kilometres. I wasn't feeling too well the next night at Mount Molloy,
feeling alternately feverish and chilly and so I retired early to bed,
though not before making this observation about the previous night.
"You know, if I hadn't burnt a hole in my arse and passed out, I
reckon I could have done okay with those barmaids."
I wish I had a dollar for every time I've made that statement.
We crossed the Atherton Tablelands to the town of Ravenshoe,
the highest town in Queensland. (In regards to altitude above sea level
that is. Cooktown is at sea level, but considerably higher in other
aspects.) Bushy arrived late because I'd mistakenly ran over his bike with
the car and trailer when he'd left it leaning up against the support vehicle
when he'd gone to admire a feature called The Crater. I hadn't seen him
arrive or seen the bike placed on the passenger side of the trailer and
didn't even feel it as I ran over it. It wasn't until he wonkily made his way
into town that I realised what had happened.
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Marge, from the Tully Falls Hotel, had done a sensational job
promoting the show. She'd even hand painted a large banner that was
hanging out the front of the pub advertising our presence.
Domenick got into a conversation about life in town with one of
the locals.
"One guy hung himself once. Another bloke went nuts and the
cops had to shoot him. But don't get me wrong. We like it here. It's not
all hangings and shootings."
We hung around in the pub after the show, chatting with some of
the local guys. It was all pretty friendly but you could sense the pub
owner was keen to lock up. He slipped away and quietly put a porno film on
the video player, then patched it through to the TV monitors over the
bar. The conversation dwindled as one by one each bloke noticed the
action on screen. Before long all the guys had made their excuses and
slipped away home. No doubt self abuse was on everyone's mind. You've
got to take your hat off to the ingenuity of that pub clearing tactic.
The pub at Innot Hot Springs impressed me, not only because of
the giant painted turtle shell on the wall but because the walls also
sported a full set of “the dogs playing pool” paintings. We picked up a
couple of good scar stories. One was from a middle aged lady called Di.
"I was a bit of a tomboy when I was a kid. I was climbing this big
tree in our backyard. I'd got to the very top when I lost my hold. I
banged my little twat on every branch on the way down."
Nothing too special there, but I did enjoy hearing a middle aged
lady say, "twat".
Our winner came from an aboriginal lady called Angela, but we
had to have it explained to us later.
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"Me and my husband, we're going forty miles an hour one night.
He hadn't cut his toenails and he ended up cutting me lip." The crowd
seemed to love this one but it left us baffled till James was chatting to
her afterwards.
"Forty miles an hour, it means rooting", he reported back to us.
What about the toenails cutting the lips? I never did work it out. I think
I need someone to draw me some diagrams. Maybe if I had watched some
more porn at the Tully Falls Hotel, I might have learnt something.
Past Innot Hot Springs, the proper outback started. The roads
grew straighter and flatter, often narrowing down to one lane. There
were only two types of traffic, road trains and caravanners. It was
startling to realise just how many "grey nomads" were out and about.
They'd number in tens of thousands. They joked that they were on their
SKI trip, for Spending the Kids Inheritance, which was moderately
amusing the first time I heard it but after hearing it from the fiftieth
wrinkled old coot, it started to wear a bit thin.
The road trains were intimidating at first but after a while I
worked out I wasn't going to get sucked under the wheels every time one
passed by and soon started to relax. I just braced myself and held my
line and it became a thrill to be passed by so close to these vehicles.
They're the best and most experienced drivers on the road so I never
felt in danger around them.
The "grey nomads"? Very good at brewing up tea and being able
to produce chocolate biscuits from the dark insides of their caravans but
not the most confidence inspiring drivers in the world.
The cows out these ways were a lot more wary of cyclists. A
fifty metre long road train wouldn't bother them but one man on a bike
was seemingly the most terrifying sight of their lives. As we rode up to
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them a few of the braver ones would make an effort to stand their
ground, but then their knees would start to shake and their little bottom
lips would start to quiver and then they'd turn and flee. I wondered if
there wasn't some pervert cycling around outback Australia specially
molesting cows. I discussed it with a person from the bush who suggested
that it's possible that these cows have never seen a human being outside
of a vehicle before.
The cows would normally dash into the bush beside the road and
take up a new position a respectful distance from us. But late in the
afternoon, on the way into Georgetown, James and I encountered a herd
of cows at the top of a long downhill. The road also headed into a mini
canyon at that point. The result being that there was nowhere on the side
for the cows to escape to. This being one of the only downhills that we'd
hit for the past few days we weren't keen on hitting the brakes and
missing out on it. The cows bounced from wall to wall like leather pinballs.
We sucked in a big breath and weaved and braked and threaded our way
through till we reached the bottom of the hill and the cows poured out
either side of the canyon and we rolled out onto the flat road. We had
thumping pulses and an exhilarating urge to turn around and go back to
the top for another go.
They were pretty excited about the show in Georgetown and the
pub was full. We copped a bit of good natured and intelligent heckling off
a bloke in the crowd who sported a magnificent white beard. His name was
Weasel and we learnt that he hadn't shaved his beard for thirty years. A
scheme was hatched. Weasel's beard had to go. He took a bit of
persuading but finally agreed that if we could raise five hundred dollars
from the crowd he'd let us shave it off. The crowd was up for it because
most, if not all of them, had never seen Weasel's head without a beard on
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it. We quickly got the pot up to three hundred dollars before the crowd
decided that this was close enough and a razor, chair and towel were
produced. A girl named Billie, short for William because her parents
apparently wanted a boy, took on the job of de-bearding Weasel. As more
of his face emerged it became more and more understandable why he
grew the beard. A rousing cheer signaled the finish. But now it was
Weasel's turn for revenge because part of the deal was that if we shaved
him, he could give one of us a haircut.
Domenick was the victim. Weasel attacked his head with a gusto
that was frightening. Most people might have gingerly gone in with a few
meek cuts but this didn't seem to be Weasel's style. In a whirlwind of
scissors, fingers, blood and huge chunks of hair he set about shearing
Dom at a lightning pace. It left him with a hairstyle that is known in hair
cutting circles as the Dog's Breakfast. There were large areas of
exposed scalp mixed with thicker tufts of untouched hair.
Once the pub closed, the party made its way to someone's house
where a texta was produced and Billie decided that as I'd missed out on a
haircut the least I could do was sit still while she drew some black lines
on my face. Weasel also copped a face full of texta. Dom was to later
describe the sight of me and Weasel in intense conversation while we
sported black rings around our eyes and clown smiles as the single most
weird sight of the tour. I myself wouldn't have minded being a fly on the
wall at Weasel's house the next morning when he woke up next to his
wife, who'd never seen him clean shaven, having to explain to her who he
was.
I'd lent my bike to James a couple of days earlier and he'd
returned it to me with the back wheel bent out of shape. I left
Georgetown early the next morning with a borrowed wheel that wasn't
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wide enough to allow my back brakes to work. With the lack of hills and
sparse traffic I figured correctly that the brakes were something I
wasn't going to be needing till we got to Perth. I made good time and just
as I was congratulating myself in covering half the distance to Croydon in
under three hours my front tyre packed it in and threw me down onto the
road in a slow motion accident that left me with my handlebars facing
backwards and my brake levers bent. It wasn't too serious, though now
my front brakes weren't working too well either.
A big motorhome pulled up behind me. It was Ross, a friendly
bloke from Cairns who'd been at the show the night before. He'd just
started a drive around Australia with his wife and they happened to be
carrying two bikes of their own. Importantly, they also had a good supply
of bike tools with them. We knocked my bike back into shape, pumped up
my tire and I said goodbye, though it wouldn't be the last time our paths
would cross.
The show at Croydon turned out to be one of our duds. I might
have been better off staying lying on the road. Friday night at the pub
seemed to be kids’ night and not just any kids. These were rough, tough
cattle station kids who'd think nothing of wrestling a poddy calf to the
ground and trussing it up before breakfast and would, if given half a
chance, treat a couple of wet behind the ears Sydney comedians the same
way. We gave up trying to entertain the kids and handed the mic over to
them and let them tell the jokes. The night got considerably better after
that. People wanted to pose with us for photos afterwards so maybe we
didn't do as bad as we thought. Then again, there were lots of photos of
dead pigs and crocodiles on the walls so maybe they just liked taking
pictures of things after slaughtering them.
17
Normanton was almost deserted when I drove in the next day
except for the hawks that flew up and down the main street. They
begged for food, sort of like the pigeons in Venice, though none of the
pigeons in Venice look like they're capable of flying off with a small child
in their claws. Everyone in town was at the rodeo, this being the highlight
of Normanton's social calendar. I checked out the rodeo because, once
I'd looked at the giant croc statue in the middle of town, there was
nothing much else to do. Everyone was pissed of course. There was a
sideshow alley, with stalls manned by the same scary looking carny folk
who man sideshow alleys the world over. There were people riding bulls. It
wouldn't be a rodeo without them.
This was my first rodeo. I'd kind of thought that there must be
some floating population of professional bull riders who travel from rodeo
to rodeo doing the actual dangerous stuff. It's surprising to find out that
this isn't what happens. Most of the bull riders are amateurs. Basically
anyone who was pissed enough to think that they could ride a bull, which
was just about everyone there, got up and had a go. No-one appeared to
get hurt, or at least no-one was a big enough wuss to show that they got
hurt. A local guy with no previous form stayed on long enough to win and
then everyone trooped over to listen to the band and continue drinking.
The boys were impressed at the lack of skills needed to participate.
"I think it's settled then", said Dom. "Next rodeo we find, we're
all having a go."
We then did the next most dangerous thing you could do at the
Normanton Rodeo. We ate some Dagwood Dogs.
We rode back into town but our pub was virtually deserted which
was probably a good thing. There were three pubs in town. One was the
tourist pub. One was the respectable pub and one was the bloodhouse.
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There was no doubt we'd drawn the bloodhouse. There were no loose
furnishings and no fixtures that couldn't be cleaned by running a high
pressure hose over them. We chatted amiably to the barman and the few
barflies that were present. The barman went down to the basement and
brought back up a six foot long crocodile. A stuffed six foot long
crocodile I should add. When still alive it had floated into the bar on the
back of some floodwaters and met a sticky end because it refused to buy
a few rounds.
We sat around out the front of our room the next morning
soaking up the atmosphere and watching the hawks. There was a guy who
helped around the bar who looked remarkably like George Clooney. He
might well have been George Clooney. For all I know helping out at the
middle pub in Normanton is what he does between movies. Every half hour
he'd disappear into his room and come out wearing a complete change of
clothes. He was a friendly bloke but there was obviously some kind of
mental health pathology behind this behaviour. It was hypnotically
compelling to watch.
"Strange one that one," said one of the other hotel employees.
"He went missing once. We couldn't find him for days. Finally found him
fifty miles out of town standing in a waterhole."
We had to drag ourselves away eventually to get on the road to Karumba,
a town that makes regular appearances on the news when it's under water
and the town residents retire to their roofs to await rescue. Forty k's
out of town the landscape changed from a mixture of scrub and swamp to
an eerie treeless plain. Small landmarks like windmills and water tanks
were visible for ages. On the plains like this and traveling at our speed, an
insignificant structure like a shed or a microwave repeater station could
19
be the only focus you have for an hour or two. I pushed my helmet up to
widen my perspective and let the bigittyness of this open space
overwhelm me.
Karumba was a lot more popular than I expected it to be. People
come from all over to watch the sunset sinking into the Gulf. I had a
shower and wandered out to watch the famous sunset. There were lots of
people walking the opposite way. I’d missed it by a minute. This was a long
weekend in Queensland so a lot of station workers had headed to the gulf
for a spot of fishing and drinking and socialising. Karumba is also the only
town on the Gulf Of Carpenteria that's accessible by a sealed road, so
the grey nomads were there in number too. There was also a row of
Harleys parked out the front of the pub. A bikie gang was in town.
The bikies were hustled out of town before our show started,
which was a shame because they didn't look too unfriendly. The crowd
that stayed were mainly grey nomads and as lively as roadkill. It didn't
help that the pub owner decided, against our protests, that meal time was
the best time for us to perform. Every punchline, and I mean every one,
was trampled on by this sort of announcement.
"Number eighty five to the snack bar, number eighty five. Your
mixed grill and chips is ready."
It was as if the kitchen staff were watching and waiting for the
end of every joke.
We retired to our own tents and pondered how we'd get up in
time the next morning, because Dom had managed to line us up a gig the
next night at Wondoola cattle station, a convenient 200 k's back down
the road.
I got packed up and under way while it was still dark. The
treeless plain on the edge of Karumba had inspired awe in me on the way
20
in. Now, with the wind against me and no trees to break its path, I
realised there was a downside to treeless plains. Then the sun rose and I
forgave the plains. It was a sunrise to die for. I stopped and admired, but
not for too long as I heard some wild pigs snorting somewhere nearby and
decided lingering would not be wise.
I struggled into Normanton mid morning.James caught me and
after gutsing out on donuts and ice cream we made good time heading
south. The turn off to Wondoola was down a dirt track, surface variable,
from good and smooth, to tooth rattling and corrugated, to nearly
impassable, wheel eating sand. We travelled much slower on the dirt and
estimating distances became hard. The sun started to set and it seemed
that we'd been riding for way too long on the dirt for our liking. We
debated if we should turn back and try one of the side tracks we'd seen,
but luckily we pressed on and found the turn off. The station manager
passed us by and assured us we were on the right track. A few minutes
later we had to pull over to let a road train pass.
If you ever get a chance, get passed by a road train on a dirt
road at least once in your life. Sensational. We were left in a fog of dust
for a solid five minutes, the sunset colouring the scene purple. The
progress of the truck ahead of us was easy to follow, the dust rising in a
great plume above it.
We arrived at the station right on dark. I'd been on the road the
entire length of the day. It was the hardest days physical effort I'd ever
put in in my life, which may say more about how sheltered my life has
been than how hard the ride was. Whatever; I was stuffed.
Not too stuffed to enjoy the barbecue. They must have knocked
off the biggest cow in the world. I'd never seen a taller pile beef. Every
piece of the cow seemed to be there. It was hot and juicy and I was
21
gnawing meat off the bones the shape of which I'd never seen lying in a
butcher's shop window. You can't hoe into a feast of this proportion and
not wonder why anyone would want to be vegetarian, but I guess it takes
all types. I guess they'll be laughing into their lentil burgers at my
funeral.
The station people seemed pretty excited to be hosting us, or as
excited as station people get, which is hard to gauge. It was fascinating
listening to people describe why they loved working there. It's far more
than just a job. There's a real romance to the lifestyle that draws
someone to want to live out there. Everyone seemed to take great pride in
the skills they had acquired. They had faraway look in their eyes as they
talked about their work that I don't have when I talk to strangers about
what it's like to write jokes for Australia's Funniest Home Video Show.
We put on a fun show, polished off a few of the social club's
beers and learnt that one of the station hands was on crutches because
of an accident he'd had whilst "scruffing weiners". This sounded vaguely
obscene till I found out it was a rodeo event where two people try to
wrestle a feisty calf to the ground. The next morning we took a look
around the station, comprising a dozen or so buildings set in surprisingly
lush and well tended gardens. We took a peak into the “School of the Air”
classroom, which was pretty cool. There was only one school age kid on
the station. He'd kicked all of our arses at pool the night before and had
proudly shown us a photo of his first wild pig kill. The drawings on display
showed that he also had a softer, artistic side, which I'm sure he'll be
glad I'm telling the world about right now. Maybe he’ll think twice before
he beats us at pool again.
22
I rode out the next morning following Domonic down a very sandy
and difficult to ride on track. He'd driven the car in from the direction
that we were heading the night before so I assumed he knew where he
was going. After an hour struggling along, a ute pulled up and the station
manager stuck his head out and asked us if we knew where we were going.
We were on the wrong road. If he hadn't happened along it would have
been a 150 kilometres before we came to the next property, though by
then we'd have already been drawing straws to decide who was going to
eat whom.
We accepted a lift to the right road and after the previous day's
effort, the 100 k's to get to the Burke and Wills Roadhouse seemed
almost relaxing. Burke and Wills came through this way in 1868. No doubt
they remarked upon the coincidence of finding a roadhouse named after
themselves when they arrived. The roadhouse was well stocked with Mars
Bars and other goodies, so how Burke and Wills died of starvation out
here beats me. Obviously they were idiots.
The roadhouse was run by a lovely couple named Julie and Peter.
Julie was renowned for never swearing, though in moments of extreme
passion she had been heard uttering the phrase "pig's bottom", so we
kept our ears open in the hope that she'd let fly. Everyone kicked on a bit
after the show, Tom from Tully played "North to Alaska" for us on
Bushy's guitar and another bloke called Laurie regaled us with some
stories. Laurie was one of those quiet, serene storytellers who kept you
enthralled without having to add any great dramatics.
"This roadhouse, it never used to have guard dogs. It had guard
geese."
He let that sink in.
23
"Vicious. One day a truckie stops here. Big truckie. Gets under
the truck and starts working on his truck. He's wearing tight stubbies.
Very short stubbies." He let that image sink in.
"No underpants. This goose sees this slug hanging out. Grabs hold
of it. The roadhouse manager hears the commotion going on, comes
running out. Shouts, "What's happening?"
The truckie says, "Get this goose off me."
The bloke from the roadhouse runs back inside, comes running
out with a meat cleaver. The truckie looks up.
"What are you going to do with that."
"I'm gonna chop his neck off."
"Don't do that," says the truckie. "I don't know how much he's
swallowed."
Now he might have been economical with the truth. We didn't
care. He then provided us with one of the scar stories of the tour.
"This is about three blokes working out on a cattle station.
They're building a fence. One bloke, his job is to hold up the star picket
fence posts in place. Another bloke has a big sledge hammer, hammering
the posts into the ground. The third bloke, he's just there, watching. The
bloke with the hammer, takes a big whack. Misses the top of the post
that his mates holding. Gets his mate on the hand between the thumb and
the pointer finger.
Blood starts to gush out. The third bloke decides he's the
doctor. Leaps into action.
"Look at all that blood. Mate, you're gonna bleed to death. We
need to do something about that blood. You need to put a tourniquet on
that arm. That's what she needs."
24
They look around for something to use as a tourniquet. The
doctor spots the perfect thing.
"That bail of wire over there. That'll be a great tourniquet. Just
wrap it around the top of your arm there. Sweet as."
The blood slows down but our man is still worried.
"Better get you to a hospital. Stop that bleeding for good. We'll
get you into the ute."
They carry him over and place him in the back of the ute. They
don't want to put him in the cabin. They've got new car seat covers. Don't
want to get any blood on them.
They put the foot down and off they go, down the track to take
him to the hospital. But they had forgotten something very important.
The bail of wire they used for the tourniquet. It's the same wire they're
building the fence with.
It's still attached to the rest of the fence.
They get ten foot down the road before the bloke in the back
works out what's going on. He's watching the wire get less and less slack
in it. He's looking at his arm and he's looking at the fence and he's
putting two and two together. He starts banging on the roof of the ute.
The blokes in the front hear him banging and they think, "Struth,
he's in pain. He must want us to speed up."
They really floor it, get another fifty foot down the road and
they hear a loud twang. And our man disappears from the back of the
ute."
Laurie summed up the guy's scars.
"He's got nothing on his hand. That was just a scratch. Would
have stopped bleeding by itself in ten minutes. He's got a massive red
25
wire rip going up his arm. And he walks with a bit of a limp because he
broke his hip when he hit the gravel."
We could have listened to Laurie's stories all night. We would
have but there were cute English backpackers working at the roadhouse
and they needed us to dance with them.
After a couple of weeks in the savannah, we were starting to look
upon Cloncurry as a kind of throbbing metropolis. We were looking
forward to once again acquainting ourselves with the world of
supermarkets, laundries, banks, e-mail and bakeries. Not to mention a
chemist shop where I could purchase a nice fresh piece of gauze to put on
my arse as the burn hadn’t quite healed yet. I was still sleeping face
down.
After 58 days on the road, Cloncurry was show number 50.
Fresh from a quiet night in Quamby, population 3, the Cloncurry show was
a good one. The scar competition was won by Tom, a traveling chook judge.
Looking back he may well have been the most distinguished person to win
one of our scar competitions. He shed his shirt to reveal a melanoma scar
the size of a satellite dish in the middle of his back. I had a pretty good
chat about what it's like to be a chook judge too. (A bit of clarity here,
Tom judged prize chickens at agricultural shows. He doesn't were a wig
and black gown and sentence chooks to jail terms.) The information
centre in town played a video that prided the racial harmony of Cloncurry
and the town didn't have that threatening air about it that some of the
outback places had. The only disturbance was from a lass who was loudly
screaming outside our hotel window at two in the morning that she was
"going to break that white bitch’s fucking arm." I guess she was a visitor
from out of town.
26
I dropped in to visit the ghost town of Mary Kathleen halfway
through the next day's ride. It used to be a uranium mining town but all
the buildings had been packed off out of there in the mid 1980s. All that
was left were the roads and concrete slabs of foundations and a few
double headed goannas running around. It was fun cycling up and down the
empty streets. I used to do this along the paths in my own backyard when
I was a kid and imagined I was riding around a town. Now I was in a real
town pretending I was in my own backyard. This time I didn't pretend I
was a bus and make engine noises. Okay, maybe I did.
You could see Mt Isa coming from a long way off. There was a
great big smokestack dominating the town. "The Isa," as you're supposed
to call it if you really want to sound like a wanker, is the sort of place
that attracts a lot people from other parts of the country who then think
that because they've moved to a town with a tough reputation that makes
them tough. It's probably the "short guy syndrome" capital of Australia.
"You're in 'The Isa' now," said more than one person when trying to
justify why they were acting like a tool.
Our gig was at the Irish Club, arguably the largest man made
structure in Western Queensland. We were directed through a bistro,
down a flight of stairs, along a corridor, were rowed across a lake, hiked
for a day or so and finally found the room we were performing in. A
decent sized crowd managed to find us, though this may have been due to
the disco that started after the show more than any pulling power we
had. James had spruiked the show up at the race track and there's
nothing you want at your comedy show more than a bunch of off duty
lead, zinc and silver miners who've already been on the piss all day long.
It was strange show. I was off in the toilets wrapping my head up
so I missed what was going on but I could hear Domenick getting
27
indignant at some sections of the audience. The table at the very front
contained one young lady who had bitten the bullet and gone to hospital to
have the sense of humour bypass, though I'll give her the benefit of the
doubt and put her not getting any of our jokes down to the fact that she
was simply as dumb as fuck. She chatted away all through the show and
gave her editorial opinions on whatever jokes she didn't get, which were
all of them, and generally drove Dom to distraction. I came in with all
guns blazing and got stuck into her, "Seven Eleven called. They want to
open a store in your mouth. It never shuts either." I enjoyed the gig
myself but it was Domonic's least favourite of the whole tour. Her
boyfriend had the misfortune to resemble Shrek, so we had him on toast
after this was pointed out.
There were signs though that they don't build rough, tough
mining towns like they used to, because our scar contest was won by a lad
who'd injured himself in a shelf packing accident at Coles.
Shrek turned out to be a pretty good bloke and he was apologetic
after the show. I'd never seen a heckler show more remorse for having
stuffed up someone's act. I even started feeling sorry for him, he was
that remorseful. His mate "Toxic" even gave me his favourite stubby
holder as a present because he'd enjoyed the show so much. I was
touched, and it still sits today with pride and place in my stubby holder
collection. He was called "Toxic" because he farts a lot when he's drunk.
While I was getting all touchy feely with the locals, Dom was
getting agitated. He'd taken such an extreme dislike to Mt Isa that he
wanted to get out of town right away, in the middle of the night. It
wasn't such a bad idea. Our plan had been to get up at dawn and set off
for Cammooweal to get there in time for the next show. But we were wide
awake and probably would have wasted the time until dawn just tossing
28
and turning so we raced home to the caravan park, packed up and set off
at midnight.
I made about a kilometer before getting a flat tire, so we
lingered in town for another hour fixing that and stocking up on hot food
at an all night diner. Bushy wasn't having any of this. He stayed behind
and got up at 7:30 in the morning. James had the car so he slept in.
There was a full moon so we didn't even need our lights. I only
turned mine on so passing trucks would know we were on the road. We
kept ourselves entertained by backstabbing other comedians. There's
really little else that comedians talk about. I don't know what the
truckies thought of us, to suddenly come across two cyclists having
laughing fits beside the road at two in the morning can't be something
that happens every night. The moon would go behind clouds and look
freaky every now and then. The low hills beside the road looked a lot
more dramatic in the night then they would have in the day. Eventually we
got beyond hill country and onto the plains and the slight tail wind got a
little chilly. We may or may not have stopped at one stage to take out a
black texta and vandalise the "road narrowing" signs so they looked like
fourex cans, depending on how much of a felony this is in Queensland and
whether it carries a jail sentence.
The dawn was again something special, though by this time I was
getting a little woozy and was starting to have microsleeps while still
pedaling. We'd knocked off 110 kilometers in the dark. I flaked out in a
roadside rest area for a twenty minute power nap, then got up and beat
on. Dom found a sandy creek bed and dozed off there for a couple of
hours. It was slow going even with a tail wind but I eventually rolled into
Cammoweal around midday.
29
Cammooweal is not the most prepossessing town in the world.
There's about four streets, a couple of roadhouses and a pub which sits
in the middle of a largely featureless plain. Well worth a twelve hour
cycle to get to. The staff at the Shell Roadhouse didn't seem to be
expecting us. I nodded off to sleep at one of the tables and was politely
asked to book a room or move outside. I moved outside and dozed off
again on a bench. Near the bench, in a small grove of scrub, was a seven
foot tall fibreglass kangaroo with two buffalo horns in its head, the not
very legendary Cammooweal Buffaroo. I'm proud to present the award for
most pissweak piece of dodgy tourist tat in Australia here and now to the
Cammooweal Buffaroo.
Bushy arrived in town an hour and a half after me. He was
chuffed to have given Domenick a six hour head start and still beaten
him. So chuffed that he implored me to mention it if I ever wrote a book
about the ride. So here it is.
Domenick eventually arrived and managed to locate the person at
the roadhouse that knew that we were coming and we installed ourselves
in the camping area out the back. It was nice and grassy, and we loved
the facilities. Say what you want about the rest of Cammooweal, but the
showers at the Shell Roadhouse were top of the range. A bench in each
cubical, a plethora of hooks and leopard skin shower curtains. Shower
facilities were starting to become important to our lives. We'd get
together and have fifteen to twenty minute long talks about what we
liked and didn't like to find in our shower facilities and at the time, none
of us would think this was odd. We were getting into a groove and life was
simplifying itself for us. In order of importance life went comedy gig,
after show adventures with weirdo locals, cycling, sleeping, eating ice
30
creams at roadhouses, shower facilities and Laundromats. The rest of life
fell into a 5% miscellaneous column. It was hypnotic. It was great.
Just before the show that Domenick pulled me aside at the back
of the cafe. "The manager's just told me that at every night at 10 o'clock
the Macafferty's Bus stops here for a toilet and supper break. All the
passengers get off and come in here to stretch their legs. They've just
come from the Northern Territory and haven't stopped for six hours. He
reckons we should do something to freak them out. What can we do?"
We came up with a few suggestions and asked our audience to
vote for their favourite. We narrowed it down to three options. The first
was that we'd all play dead. The second option was for everyone to find a
partner and pretend to be passionately kissing. The passengers would walk
in and find everyone going the pash, like some kind of outback swingers’
club. With any luck, there'd be Swedish girls there and they might want
to join in. We went for option number three, a full-on no holds barred
wrestling contest.
The show was going well. The crowd was a nice mixture of
truckies, oldies, a few younger travellers and the roadhouse staff. We
kept in touch with the bus driver, who was in on the joke, by radio. He
gave us a two minute warning that he was about to pull in and we got to
work. Bushy and I stripped off our shirts and got stuck into each other in
the middle of the room, grappling like ancient Greek wrestlers. We're not
the two most attractive blokes with our shirts on, take them off and we
look like um...... the sort of blokes who'd be fighting each other in remote
wayside town in the middle of the night. Domenick picked up the
microphone and started commentating. The audience played their part
and went nuts. They got in a circle around us and pulled out ten and
twenty dollar notes and started waving them in the air and shouting and
31
cheering. We're talking grannies, truckies, the lot. When either of us
would roll out of the circle they'd kick us back in.
Into all this the Macafferty's bus pulls in, and out stumble thirty
or so stiff and tired passengers scraping the sleep out of their eyes and
about to get every fear they've ever had about the Australian outback
confirmed for them.
The staff were still talking about it the next day.
"It was their eyes. The terror. It was a beautiful thing."
The first in was a kid of about nine or ten. He gave the scene a
puzzled glance and then took it all in his stride. I checked our video later
and I'm pretty sure I actually saw him trying to put five dollars down on
Bushy to win.
The rest of the bus came in bunches and stayed that way, edging
their way up to the back of the shop where they suddenly found
themselves very interested in the motor oil and jumper leads for sale up
there. To get to the toilets they had to go past us, which they did by
staying together and hugging the walls as much as possible.
My knee gave way and Bushy leapt up in victory. Domenick raised
his arm.
"The winner." The crowd roared. "Your prize is freedom from
Cammooweal jail and a free bus ticket out of town. Grab your bag. The
bus is about to leave."
You have never seen a busload of passengers fill up a bus quite so
fast and with quite so haunted expressions on their faces. Bushy stalked
ominously towards the bus and I swear I heard this from inside it.
"Bus driver, for God's sake close the door. Close the door."
We settled back in to our normal comedy night and heard
another of our favourite scar stories, off Terry from the navy.
32
"I was in port in a south east Asian country that I won't name.
Late at night after a few beers some of us decided that we wanted a
souvenir. A local flag. So we scaled a flagpole. I was at the top. I grabbed
hold of the flag. As I did this, the authorities arrived. My mates
scampered. I was left at the top of the pole thinking should I still be
here or should I let go and join them. I let go and slid down the pole. Now
flagpoles have these little bits of metal on them to tie the ropes onto.
Cleats they're called."
He gave a sardonic smile and looked around the room. A few of
the blokes could already see where this was heading.
"Sliced me clean open on the way down. I was so pissed I didn't
notice till the next morning and woke up and there was blood all over my
sheets.
Please take time out to go, "Ooooooooooh!". Every male in the
Cammooweal Roadhouse did.
"That's the same injury that Dawn Fraser did to herself when
she stole the flag at the Tokyo Olympics," I said. Actually, I didn't say
that. I didn't think of that line till the next day, which is a pity.
We got talking to a couple of the truckies. Their eyes filled with
glee as they told us stories about what sort of damage trucks can do to
caravans. The truckies and the caravanners are like the Israelis and the
Palestinians of the Australian road. There's not much love lost between
them.
"Some of the old coots like to leave a window open in their
caravan as they drive along. They want to air them out, get that old
person smell out of them. You shouldn't do that. You see when a road
train passes by them it creates a drop in air pressure in the immediate
33
vicinity. This sucks all the air out of the caravan. When they finish going
past the road train, the air gets sucked back in. It blows the roof off."
He took a suck on his beer. "That wrecks the holiday."
He continued on with another horror story.
"There was a bloke driving a rig out the other side of Hay
heading for Adelaide. Copper pulls him over.
Says to him, ‘Hey mate, do you remember passing a caravan about
fifty kilometres back down the road?’
The truckie goes, ’No.’
‘Well, I was wondering how you can explain your rear wheels.’
The truckie gets out of the cabin and walks down with the cop.
Wrapped around his rear wheels are a dressing gown, tablecloth, bath
towels, frilly ladies swimming costume.
‘Gee,’ says the truckie.
‘Must have blown there off someone's clothesline,’ says the cop.
‘Must have,’ says the truckie.
There's some good cops out there."
"Ever blown the roof off a caravan yourself?" we asked.
He just smiled enigmatically, which probably meant "Yeah and I
enjoyed it."
There was only us and a young couple camped at our next stop,
100 kilometres of flat and treeless big sky country into the Northern
Territory. We built a campfire and chewed the fat with Darren and
Jocelyn, who were good value and even shared their damper with us.
They then introduced us to a new game.
"We discovered this the other night. We were camped beside a
bit of the highway with two little dips in the road. We had a joint and
then waited beside the road for a road train to go past with all its lights
34
on along the side. When they went over the dips, all the lights went up
and down. It's very exciting. We call it the ‘rollercoaster’."
We had to give this a go. The road trains are lit up at night like
Christmas trees with, for want of a better word, "fairy lights" strung in a
row along their sides. Jocelyn seemed to have a Radar O'reilly style
ability to hear road trains coming before anyone else. When she heard
one approaching we'd all leave the campfire and race up to the roadway
and lie down on our stomachs with our heads about a foot away from the
bitumen. We weren't on a dip in the road so we weren't getting the full
roller coaster effect, but it's still a thrill and a half to have so many
tonnes of heavy machinery whizzing past your face and the light show was
pretty solid.
It didn't pay to think about what might happen if a kangaroo
hopped onto the road and the truckie had to swerve to avoid it. Who am I
kidding? A truckie wouldn't swerve to avoid a kangaroo.
As the earth in the rest area was diamond hard, banging in tent
pegs wasn't an option unless you wanted to end up with pegs that
resembled spaghetti. But then we realised we didn't need to put our tents
up. It was the middle of the dry season in the middle of the worst
drought of the century. We slept under the stars.
Of course it rained.
I pulled my tent fly over my folding chair and constructed a little
fort for myself but still spent most of the night moving myself out of
puddles and listening to the spooky windmill creaking in the wind.
The night around the campfire was the sort of thing I'd
dreamed about doing before we set off. It had taken almost two months
to ride up the Queensland coast and then out to the Northern Territory.
We'd played pubs, clubs, senior citizens centres, converted movie
35
theatres, backpackers, roadhouses and a cattle station. We still hadn't
played under a boab tree and somehow, because of that, I felt
incomplete. It was something that we had to rectify.