Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (50 page)

I got back to Andy's place to find four big refrigerated trucks had parked outside, their engines thrumming away to keep the coolers working. The drivers were already piling up empty beer bottles in the restaurant. There were five men, a jolly red-headed woman and a boy. I decided to get my stuff unpacked and into the tent before it started to rain, and rode the bike out to the trailer and camp site in the field.

I walked back to the restaurant to find that the drivers had moved outside to some trestle tables under a waterproof canopy. I felt like joining them and asked Andy to sell me some beer. I had a great knack for treading on Andy's toes. Either that, or his toes were a permanent mess.

'I don't sell beer,' he said hotly. 'I have never sold beer. I have applied for a licence and you will never find sly grog sold on my premises.'

'Oh well, I only thought . . .' I said, sniffing the fumes that still hung around the room, and went out to sit with the truckies. After five minutes, Andy came out with a bottle of beer he wanted to give me, the sentimental fool. But by then I'd already finished one and been given another.

Two of the truckies were doing most of the talking, and they were both comedians in their way. One of them was a brisk tubby fellow who told conventional jokes like a club comic. I could imagine him with a spotted bow tie and a microphone going T say, I say, I say,'. That was Clive.

The poet among them was a man they all called Ferret. He was a slightly built man with a daft little cloth hat on his head and an expression that managed to be both sad and humorous at the same time, in the Celtic manner. He was the acknowledged leader of the truckies and was famous throughout Australia for his verse epic,
Ode to a Truckie.
It was about a pal who had died overturning a truck full of empty bottles outside Gladstone, having probably emptied a good few of the bottles himself.

I liked Ferret immediately. He had a warm manner and a sympathetic way with stories. The real humour ran all the way through them, between the punchlines, and I thought them very funny and subtle and not a little astonishing. Travelling with Ferret was a handsome, athletic fellow called 'P.J.' with a wistful manner. He was going to see his mother in Sarina for Christmas. He hadn't seen her, he said, with a slight grin, since two and a half years ago when she was dying in hospital.

The fourth truckie was a chirpy little Tasmanian they called McCarthy. He had rubber legs and a concave face and played 'fall guy' when one was needed. He enjoyed the role and encouraged it, and his T-shirt showed a hand with two fingers up, meaning Peace or Piss Off, depending on how you saw it.

The fifth man's name I never knew. He was husband to the redhead and they both made an appreciative audience for the others. Even before the beer warmed them all in a deep amber glow, there was a great kinship and liking between them, a quite tangible thing. They were mates, of course, which is a powerful enough bond, but it was more than that. They

were truckies, and in Australia that was tantamount to being an outlaw.

I had heard about truckies from the outside, stories of reckless violence and villainy. For respectable Australians, truckies ranked with drought, pestilence and 'criminals on the lam' as one of nature's chief hazards. 'No truck with a truckie' was their motto, and they locked up their daughters when the big rigs rolled in. Now from the inside I saw that they had many qualities I had missed badly on my way up the coast, and the most surprising was sensitivity. The boorishness that I had begun to accept as inevitable was absent, and in its place was a delicacy of touch that seemed little short of amazing. Yet, thinking it over, it was natural. They were all long-distance drivers, not short-haul cowboys. Anyone who spends long hours alone with himself on the road has to have more in his head than a stock of sterile prejudices.

Clive's son made regular runs to the truck for more beer.

'Are you trucking beer?' I asked Clive.

'No, I've got general groceries. He's got ice cream,' he said, pointing at the fifth man.

'McCarthy's got prime Victoria rump, and Ferret's going empty.'

We talked and told stories. I learned about the roads in the interior and what I heard convinced me that I must give up my idea of crossing the North in the rainy season. The only way out of Cairns would be the way I had come. I heard chilling tales of reckless driving over the roads of Hell to get to the pub in time; of truckie pride and the awful falls that followed. Then the boy brought the bad news. The beer had run out.

Cars were still coming in over Lotus Creek, so without hesitation McCarthy went out to his big truck, wheeled it round and roared off across the bridge. Somewhere out there was a pub, and as long as there was a pub open in Australia, they would have beer at Lotus Creek that night.
The sun
was fading, black clouds lowered all around. There were flashes of lightning off to the north-east. The journalist came out looking worried, and walked over with an expression that tried to look threatening but was just a bit silly.

'Have you seen my daughter?' he said. We all looked at McCarthy's empty seat and smiled at a nice thought, though none of us believed it. The journalist sat in McCarthy's seat and gazed at the sky.

'She'll be filling up tonight,' he said. 'It's raining over the catchment area. We won't be out of here tomorrow.' He was very authoritative, so I had no way of knowing whether he knew what he was talking about. Nor did I really care.

Andy switched on the lights in the grounds and the bulb under the canopy created a pleasing intimacy in the warm tropical evening. I heard the frogs honking down by the river. Lotus was beginning to rise now. Two tour buses came in and some cars. McCarthy was last over the bridge, with a crate of Castlemain's XXXX, the beer they all agreed was best, and with much relief they set to drinking again.

The place was filling up fast now, and looking like a refugee camp. The holidaymakers were sleeping in their buses, and made a big crush with their visits to the bathrooms. The car travellers had filled all Andy's annexed rooms, and others were camped in the field, but all this activity swirled round the canopied island of yellow light where the truckies sat drinking and murmuring with a low key energy that seemed inexhaustible. Hours later I left them and slept through a heavy rainstorm.

I woke up to the sound of an old-fashioned hurdy-gurdy playing outside my tent. The melody had been coded in a secret cipher, but all the notes were there, creaking and squeaking rustily together. I looked out at what looked like a very fat magpie, waddling about and making this cheerful but extraordinary music.

I saw Ferret approaching across the field with a 'Stubbie' in his hand, his feet scarcely bending the blades of grass, his face rosy as the dawn.

'What is this amazing bird?' I asked. In a steady, sober voice, he said it was called a Butcher Bird, and I added it immediately to my list of top creatures.

'Come and have some breakfast,' he said. 'We're doing steak.'

Connors River had risen in the night to equal all previous records at thirteen feet above the bridge, and McCarthy was celebrating by breaking into a fifty-pound carton of rump steak.

I wandered over to see a heap of timber blazing in the big barbecue stand and Clive cutting the rump into slices an inch thick. There was no indication that any of them had been to sleep or would ever sleep again. The refugees from the buses had come out after a cramped night in their seats and were huddled at a safe distance gazing in awe and envy at the terrible truckies. I was given half a square foot of the most delicious steak I had ever had, or would ever have, and a bottle of beer to start the day right.

The truckies were as contemptuous of the tourists as army men are of civilians, and took pride in their fearsome reputation, but as men they were too kind-hearted to ignore the distress all around them. In Australia, meat eating is a religion. P.J. and Ferret called over to them to come and get it if they wanted it. Most of them shrank back in horror as though they had been offered a cup of cyanide, but a few bold spirits risked coming in for a nip, like jackals round a camp site.

Andy came out from his house stamping his boots hard in anger as he walked.

'If I see you taking money for that meat,' he shouted at Ferret, 'there'll be trouble. I'm not having people doing business on my property.'

He was so far out of line it was ridiculous. The truckies laughed and swore at him, and he stomped back to his overcrowded restaurant.

'He's better than the bloke up the road,' said P.J. philosophically. 'They were selling water at twenty cents a glass last flood.'

'Who pays for this meat?' I asked.

'No worries,' said Clive. 'In a situation like this, they expect us to break into the load. They're happy enough if the refrigeration equipment keeps going while we're standing here.

'There should be several tons of strawberry ice cream running over the road by nightfall,' he added, jerking a thumb at the fifth man. 'His cooler's packed in.'

It was true. The magnitude of this potential disaster fascinated me, and my mind was linked by telepathy to these slowly liquefying tons of frozen goo for the rest of the day, hoping to be there when the first pink dribble appeared under the doors.

We had steak for lunch and for tea, and then we had steak for supper. I tried to talk to some of the bus crowd. There was a couple with a small boy who seemed nice, on their way to their home in Townsville. They asked me to come and stay on my way through. We hadn't been talking long before they wanted to tell me about the 'Abos'. I had had only one encounter with Aborigines up to then, at a small town on the coast south of Brisbane. I had seen a couple standing barefooted in the shallow water of a lagoon, fishing with a line but no rod. They were short dumpy figures, he with his trousers rolled up, she in a cotton frock. I had taken a picture of them from the jetty and he had seen me. His reaction was fierce and bitter.

'I'll fuckin' toss yer in there,' he screamed, pointing at the water. I thought it a sad story and hoped these people would understand.

'You don't want to have anything to do with them,' the woman said firmly. 'Don't you ever trust one. Never. They'll lift anything off you. Good as the Arabs, they are.'

'You know Palm Island?' said the man. I shook my head. 'It's an Abo reserve off the coast up here. Well, you know those flagons of cheap wine that cost a dollar fifty? Take one over there and you can flog it for forty-five dollars. They go crazy over grog.'

'They're not human beings really - they're another species of animal,' said the woman. 'They live with animals, don't they? And it's a medical fact that every girl over three has been molested.'

'If you hit them on the head,' said the man, 'you can only injure yourself. But they're the only people with any money in Australia.'

It made me sick to listen to it. And they were really nice people. Several times coming up the coast I had heard these outpourings of filth that seemed to proceed from some deep hurt, like pus from a wound. I registered the fact that in all the hours we had spent together, not one of the truckies had ever uttered a single word of prejudice, and I was glad to get back among them as soon as I could.

The journalist's daughter came and stood by me for a while. She screeched a lot but she didn't have anything to say. The frilly bodice of her yellow cotton dress held her breasts up for my inspection, and then she disappeared again. I thought she was a disaster waiting to happen.

During the afternoon Connors started dropping. By evening it looked promising. I was advised to be ready to cross, since it could easily start to rise again. I packed up all my stuff and slept in the back of Ferret's empty truck. P.J. spent the night in the cab with the last bottle of beer. When he had finished it I believe his eyes closed briefly. I woke to find him studying the centrespread of a magazine called
Overdrive,
gazing lustfully at a big and luscious colour picture of a new Mack Truck.

Soon afterwards the first car came through from Mackay and we all got ready to go. The pink ice cream was safe after all. I said goodbye and rode off to Connors. There were still a few inches of water over the bridge, but I went across alright. Further along the road, Ferret's big truck started hooting at me from behind. I slowed and he swung it deftly onto the verge in front of me.

'See you at the hotel in Sarina, Ted,' he said. P.J. grinned, and I said okay. I didn't feel like hurrying, and when I arrived they were already at the bar. Ferret was finishing one of his shorter stories:

So this fellow said, 'Who did you see down there in Sydney, Dave?'

'Well, I was in the same room as Bishop Lennox.'

'Who's that then?'

'He's only the foremost Catholic in Australia. He's so holy he's most probably got holy water in his toilet.' 'What's a toilet, Dave?'

'How should I know. I'm not a bloody Catholic'

We were drinking out of dainty seven-ounce glasses at the counter instead of those stubby bottles. It didn't seem right, but the fumes were stronger in the enclosed space and Ferret and P.J. seemed to thrive in the atmosphere as though it were pure oxygen. One day, I thought, they would be leaning against a bar like this and they would just fade and dissolve into the atmosphere. I had got to like them both very much.

I said I had to go, because I did not dare drink any more.

Ferret looked hard at me with that sad little smile on his face.

'You're a lovely person,' he said. T knew straight away. Most people don't do anything for me. They can be nice - know what I mean? I can be nice too. But it doesn't mean anything.'

I knew exactly what he meant.

'You'll be right,' said P.J. cheerfully.

I often thought about them afterwards but when, weeks later by a million-to-one chance, I met Clive in a pub in Victoria, I didn't know him at first.

'You know what happened to Ferret?' he said grinning the way Australians do when there's bad news. 'He turned his truck over outside Sarina that day.'

'Is he alright?' I asked anxiously.

'Oh, yeah, he got away with it. Beer softened the fall.'

A man I had met in Nairobi two years before had given me four elephant hair bracelets to deliver to his sister. The hair was pulled from the elephant's tail, and was supposed to confer virility on men and fertility on women. His sister's home was in a small town near Cairns, and this romantic little mission gave my journey to 'Far North Queensland' a nice human focus, but by the time I arrived the sister had long since abandoned her husband and taken her children off to England.

The husband was very kind and said that it would probably not have made any difference if I had got the bracelets there sooner. He gave me two of them to keep, but they never did much for me either.

I learned that it was still possible to go a bit further north, with the promise of a unique rain forest to see at Cape Tribulation a hundred miles away. The first seventy miles were tar. Then came a ferry across the Daintree River, and after that, dirt. The real problem was Cooper's Creek, which crossed the dirt road. If the creek was up, 'no way'. If the creek was down 'no worries'. We tried to get Charlie the ferryman on the phone, but there was no reply. So I went anyway.

I found Charlie leaning, against the ferry rail, waiting for custom. He was a snub-nosed, fair-haired young fellow with a wispy beard and a saucy look. He was leaning back at an easy angle but very alert, and it was a moment before I noticed that one of his legs was missing.

He eyed the mud-spattered bike with amusement, following the route I had painted on one of the boxes. 'How's Cooper's?' I asked.

'No idea,' he said, offhand. 'Haven't had anyone through from that side. Should be okay.'

As I rode off the other side he called, 'See ya later.' He only sold return tickets, he knew I had to come back that way.