Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (51 page)

I rode on over red rocks and mud, laced with rivulets, slippery at times, but mostly steady going in third gear. I felt a vague thrill of apprehension thinking about Cooper's, and all the rivers I had already crossed. The worst had been in Bolivia, on the
altiplano
between Potosi and La Paz. There were two rivers there, and I fell in one of them, and stopped dead in the middle of the other. It was very uncomfortable and made a terrible mess of my arrangements.

Now I forded a few minor creeks and then came Cooper's. It was about twenty feet across with a bed of pebbles and boulders, and I got off the bike to have a good look. To go straight through was out of the question; there was at least three feet of water in the middle. A little further downstream the creek widened and became more shallow. The right course to follow was a wide horse-shoe shape, swinging downstream and then up again the other side. The last bit would be the worst, with the exhaust pipes submerged, trying to find the power to clamber up the bank.

On the other hand there could be no real disaster, because some campers from Cairns turned up in a small truck to give a hand if I made a muck of it. They crossed first and I watched their wheels to gauge the depth. Then in I went, managing alright until the last leg when I turned a bit too sharply against the current. The engine faltered and stopped, but I had both boots planted firmly on the river bed. The campers were already in the river, swimming, and we hauled the bike ashore together. I poured the water from my boots, unbolted the pipes to empty them too, and then took my turn for a swim.

At Noah's Creek there was a clearing by the river, with gardens and thick grasses, and a square tin-roofed house. Extravagant blue butterflies flickered among the trees. At twilight insects chanted as though through amplifiers concealed in the bushes. A paraffin lamp was set, hissing, on the
veranda
, and suddenly, into this circle of yellow light stumbled a dangerous and desperate figure. His shirt was split from collar to waist and the right sleeve was in tatters. He had four days' worth of dense black stubble on his sweaty face, and a crazy glint in his eye. In his right hand he swung a machete.

It was the proprietor, back from his daily chores. He had been hacking his way, painfully, along a high ridge at the limit of his property, looking for the blazes that were made to mark his boundaries in 1896. The forest is a covered maze of towering tree trunks and twenty-foot ferns, knit together by massive trailing lianas and parasitic growths of all kinds. Among the picturesque obstacles to progress through this undergrowth were the 'Wait-a-while', with its long tendrils carrying fish-hook thorns at close intervals in sets of four, and the Stinging Bush, which has a fur of fine needles on the underside of its broad leaves that break off in the skin and hurt for a month.

That night the rain drummed on the tin roof louder than I had ever heard it before.

In the morning I volunteered to go to Cape Tribulation for some provisions. It was a long walk through the forest along a track, with

glimpses here and there of the green ocean. Forays into the undergrowth produced a fruit like a cobalt blue egg, and another purple one with red flesh and three stones. The Cape was a small, easy-going community with a lavishly stocked general store run by a middle-aged couple and their children who had 'emigrated' from Sydney. They spoke of it as of a different country and it was true that Australia did not seem to reach up this far. I had the impression of it being huddled down there somewhere in the south-east corner of the continent. The family were not only happy to be there, they looked it. They went about helping each other and being openly warm and affectionate. Until I saw it, I had not realized how cramped and undemonstrative other families had been. The father was kneading dough for the bread oven. He told me that I reminded him of a copper on the Drug Squad at Cairns. 'Drug Squad?' I asked, taken aback.

'Oh yes,' he said. 'They're very active. Packets of heroin are always floating ashore here. I've found some myself.'

Later I helped to load a small outboard dinghy on to the truck at Noah's Creek and went to the coast to find, not heroin, but my crabs. We floated over thick brown water at the edge of a mangrove swamp and put down two wire traps. Within minutes we had a huge black crab with claws that can take off a finger. The meat of the mud-crab was more delicious than any I had eaten since childhood. Obviously Australian coasts and rivers offered an abundance of good food, and I started to think it was time I bought a rod and took up fishing.

Then the rain fell heavily all night and by morning it was clear that if I wanted to get out across Cooper's for a week or so, I had better leave soon.

I fell once, gently, in a puddle of red clay on the way back, but at Cooper's I learned my lesson and got through with only my boots full.

Charlie was still leaning against the side of his ferry, his one leg thrust forward just as I'd left him. This time we got talking and I asked if there were any crocodile.

'Sure are,' he said. 'Used to be me livin'.'

A one-legged crocodile hunter? Was he retired by one crocodile too many?

'Not a bit of it,' he said. 'If they made it legal again, I'd be off in the morning and no worries. 'Course, they were right to close it down. There's plenty of Freshies to build up the population now they're protected, but there aren't enough Salties left to keep a man in wages.'

Fresh and Salt, he said, referred to the water they came in.

'You might get $20 for a Freshie, double for a Saltie. I got one Saltie that was sixteen foot. It brought $240 for the skin, but I'd never go after one of those again. It was too big to land in the boat. We had to drag it into shallow water and skin it there. The blood brought shoals of small shark in, and they lacerated our legs.

'There were three of us that used to shoot together. Both the others are dead. One was my wife's brother. He died of septicaemia. The other one turned out to be a convicted rapist who'd killed a man. We only found out after he'd killed another man and was shot dead himself.

'Happened over in Burketown. Been there? Favourite place of mine. There was a pub and very little else. The walls and the floor were all at an angle from being hit by storms. When it flooded the clients had to row themselves to the thunder-box at the bottom of the yard.

'The host was a Yank. He was a bit "tropo". He had periods of sanity, then he'd become violent in a Wild West way. Used to punch his customers across the bar and come down the stairs with guns blazing. They put him away in the end. Then the pub was hit by a whirly-whirly.'

I asked him how he had lost his leg.

'Cancer,' he said. 'But it got mashed up pretty badly first,' he added laconically. 'Croc shooting isn't that dangerous though. The shot is the important thing. You've got a six-inch target, quite close to. If you know your job you won't often have to swim for the corpse. You don't get rich either. You get wages and a half. But you're doing what you like best.'

Three weeks later I rode into Melbourne on the Dandenong road, and turned left into St. Kilda, then again left into Robertson Street and stopped outside Number One. Dandenong is a big and busy highway, and the next road was like a neighbourhood high street and Robertson Street was a quiet little backwater of terraced houses, so it was like coming into harbour.

The house was rented by Graham and Cheryl, an Australian couple I had known in London, and they shared it with Dave and Laurel and a small dog of uncertain temper. I took up residence in the
meditation
room.

They were all within a few years of thirty, and very modest in their demands on life. They hardly ever ate meat, for one thing, and they drank very little alcohol. They were all slim and light and did n
ot try to conceal
their anxieties under a mound of muscle in the usual Australian way.

The girls sometimes wore ankle-length peasant skirts and blouses without bras. Graham and Cheryl had travelled in the East, and the meditation room had a
mandala
and a Buddha and was scented with joss sticks. They actually used it for meditating. Their great ambition was to buy farmland and they had already saved enough to start looking for good offers. We used to sit at the kitchen table with mugs Of tea and hear about the mouthwatering acres being
advertised
that week. I found their

situation exciting and enviable, and they shed a new and more hopeful light on Australia for me.

Every weekday morning for two weeks I went to work. I took the tram for St. Kilda to Flinders Road, where I changed onto the Coburg tram to Sydney Street. I loved Melbourne and I loved its green single-deck trams. Generally I avoided the rush hours since I was master of my own time, and I sat at ease in the tram, cruising down the centre of the broad avenue that sweeps past the park and the big boys' school and the art gallery, and over the railway bridge to Flinders Street.

Flinders Street Station was built in the pre-war image of a London terminus, even down to the framed spaces for advertisements, and the news boys shouting the titles of the evening papers on the corner. All about was a bustle of traffic and commerce, with crowds of office workers, shoppers and travellers from out of town weaving their way across the intersecting tram-lines under the pompous facades of Victorian bank chambers and offices. It was London again in an earlier, less self-conscious time, when business still made its presence felt in the street and had not yet withdrawn behind the plate glass doors and anonymous concrete of the modern European office block.

The prosperous and the derelict rubbed shoulders on the pavements. You could see that there were fortunes to be made and lost, and the pursuit of profit was free of shame. There was a rich mixture of city life on the streets and I lingered between trams to absorb it. For all that it was busy, I never felt it was frantic; exuberant, rather, and not a little ruthless, which gave it a slight whiff of Dickensian days. The scale of the houses and streets still allowed human beings their natural place. And I was always conscious of the great, lazy expanse of Australia beyond the city, reminiscent perhaps of the empire that once lay beyond the City of London.

The Coburg tram took me up Elizabeth Street and eventually brought me out of the rectangular heart of Melbourne to pass through open parkland for a while. It skirted the university and finally plunged into narrow, noisy Sydney Road, a long ribbon of small businesses that wound on and on towards the prison. Once I went out to see the prison, and stared with morbid fascination at its high walls and old-fashioned Alcatraz look. It seemed very relevant somehow to Australian life, which has more of a snakes-and-ladders feeling about it than does life in England. I often heard talk about criminals. They were mentioned as a fact of life, rather than in tones of dismay or moral outrage. They were there. If they got you, then you went down. If they were got, then they went down.

On weekday mornings though, I jumped off at the second stop down Sydney Road, or if possible at the lights before that. This is where Frank Musset has his motorcycle business. On one side of the road is the shop, where he presides over the stock with his mournful white face and brown overalls, unless he can escape into his own little workshop hidden round the back. On the other side is the repair shop where my Triumph stood stripped down on a stand. I was overhauling it, slowly, at my leisure. The barrel was being rebored. Some oversize pistons were coming from England. There were new exhaust valves to grind with the cylinder head. I was improving the supporting system for my tank panniers, rebuilding the rear wheel, repairing the oil seals in the forks and doing a lot of other little things that I had thought of.

I was having a marvellous time in that shop. Perhaps it is not surprising that after all the moving about I should relish spending a fortnight in a steady, unvarying routine, but there was much more to it than that.

It was not a pretty shop maybe, but it was big and cool, and there was almost everything I needed. But what gave it the character that stamped itself on me so that I would never forget it, was a transistor radio tuned in to a commercial station called THREE-X-Y. In two weeks I became hopelessly addicted to this radio station, something that had never happened to me before. The programme could hardly have been more rudimentary. It consisted of the same ten songs played over and over again, interspersed by advertisements. Three years later I have completely forgotten the ads, but the songs are clear in my memory.

A tenor screamed 'Who is that lady all alone', ending on a false note. Bob Dylan sang about his wife in a Portuguese war. David Essex did 'Hold me tight, don't let me go.' The Queen sang 'Mama, I've killed a man . . .' Rod Stewart was doing something surreal on Main Street. There was a horribly mawkish song about being music and making the girls cry, and there were four or five others.

The company was congenial, I had a good mechanic working nearby who showed me a lot of dogged enthusiasm and helped me over difficulties. But it was the songs that got me. They drugged me. The radio was never switched off and I was like a cow being lulled at milking time. Once I got into that shed in the morning my day was complete; it was over before it began because I knew nothing could break that mood or change it, and I had 'no worries', as they are so fond of saying. Obviously the treatment was relieving me of some kind of burden. I guessed it was that I had simply spent too long on my own, thinking. For two weeks I had my brain anaesthetized, and I revelled in it.

At midday I went out into the blinding sunshine and walked to the pub for a 'counter lunch'. I learned to treat lunchtime beer with great caution in Australia. It was drawn by the ounce in deceptively dainty glasses at a temperature that numbed the throat and delayed the action.

Sometime after four in the afternoon I dipped my hands in the soap tin

and got ready to leave the great greasy canyon for home. The Queen followed me into the street with a last poignant wail from the transistor '. . . put my gun up to his head, pulled the trigger now he's dead, Mama, I'm leaving now ... I took my life and threw it all away . . .'

Back on the tram, hot sun, hot upholstery, watching the girls in the street, dreaming, taking the song over in my head where the radio left off. A prim-looking woman sits opposite me. By accident, as I cross my legs, my foot touches her leg just below the knee. I'm surprised to see an enormous dusty footprint on her stocking, as though a man had climbed up under her skirt. I murmur an apology but she draws herself up in disdain and pretends not to have noticed. She can't see it and of course I'm not going to tell her now.

'Silly cow,' I thought, 'She'll walk around like that for the rest of the day. Typical.' Everything in Australia seemed typical.
Deja vu.
Dreamlike. Couldn't work it out. Not at all like White South Africa, or Rhodesia. Nothing like America. I gave up and settled back into the dream.

Often at St. Kilda, on my way home, I went to the off-licence at the back of a small pub and bought half a gallon of Angove's white wine, the cheapest of the nicer ones, for a knock-down price. I was a bad influence at Number One Robertson Street. I brought alcohol and meat into the house in unprecedented quantities. I could not help it. I was under a spell and the magic was most intense in the house itself.

Until very recently all Australian buildings were made, as far as possible, in the image of their British counterpart. Number One Robertson Street was the epitome of the trend, just like any suburban semi-detached villa in London, except that it had only one floor rather than two. The roof was pitched and gabled in the same way, the proportions were all familiar, the wainscoting and picture rails were moulded in the same pattern and covered with the same number of layers of the same thick paint in the same colours. The same linoleum covered the same boards, and in the kitchen the doors of the built-in cupboards were even fastened by the same pieces of paint-encrusted metal.

A low brick wall divided the pavement from the little front garden where various shrubs struggled against each other, though some of the bushes were a bit florid by conservative English standards. At the back was a kitchen porch and a potting shed.

At least, that is how I saw it in 1976, and at least once a day I used to look at all this and wonder whether, somewhere on my way across the Pacific Ocean, I had unwittingly passed through a looking glass.