Jupiters Travels: Four Years Around the World on a Triumph (49 page)

I was woken by the startling sound of someone running across the bare wooden floor in small hob-nailed boots. It did not stop. In short rushes the sound traversed the cabin from end to end. There were snuffling noises. Sounds of pleasure and excitement. Boxes toppled over. A broomstick clattered to the floor. Whoever it was, was brazen beyond belief. To tell the truth I was delighted that some small wild animal should want to live its life so close to mine but, even so, there was a distinct lack of respect. A lesson would have to be taught.

'Hon
’
said Carol, 'just be careful. If you scare it, it'll stink the place out.'

I watched from the bed. The moon was bright. Something like a big white shaving brush emerged from behind the chest and went bobbing jauntily across the room. Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat-tat went the hob nails. I could just make out the lustrous black fur of the body, polka-dotted with white, but it was the flouncing white tail that enticed the eye, and threatened the nose with doom.

I prowled round the cabin, naked in the moonlight, but the civet knew I was powerless. It was utterly insolent, did exactly as it liked and left in its own good time.

The second night I was bolder. Prodding it with the long handle of a mop, I tried to guide it to the door. Failure. The civet actually seemed to enjoy the game and stayed even longer. The noise it made was phenomenal.

'They have these pads of toughened skin,' Carol told me. 'They signal by thumping the ground.' Under the civet's hammer blows the planks of the cabin resounded like a xylophone. Adorable as it was, we were losing sleep.

The third night I struck lucky. By chance I held the mop the right way round, and brandished the mop head in a way that I imagined would be very frightening to civets. The civet rushed up to the mop head and positively fawned on it, clearly in love at first sight with what it took to be the ultimately handsome civet. I drew it cunningly across the floor and out through the open kitchen door. Then I closed the door.

With the whole side of the cabin missing, that was a very thin gesture of defiance, but the civet did not return. Hideously deceived, it joined the ranks of heart-broken lovers and crept away into the bushes to pine.

Carol and I loved very deeply. It seemed inconceivable that it could come to an end and I lived my life there as though it was for ever. The range felt like home and the people on it became my family.

I learned to know the land, walking round it and working on it. There were many more encounters with animals, including a thrilling meeting with a rattlesnake carried off with great dignity on both sides. The summer held out right through to the end of October, cooling slowly as the days drew in, but staying bright and clear. More and more ranchers were making trips to the city and some were staying there longer than they expected. It was evident that some new impulse would have to be

found to bring everyone back, and as the numbers diminished the prospect of a winter on the ranch became less tenable for those who remained.

Eventually Frog's mother also decided to move to San Francisco. Shortly before she left, Frog stood on the wooden steps of the communal house and declared that he was no longer Frog. His name, henceforth would be T.A. Frog was born with the ranch, and he seemed to have grasped with extraordinary clarity that it was the end of an era.

During the last month I began to dig a drainage ditch across a hillside to intercept spring water that was flooding the foundations of the big house. As I dug, it became a stream, a microcosmic river with cascades, bridges and grassy banks which I imagined might one day blossom with spring flowers. It revealed scores of forgotten memories of streams
I
had camped by, paddled in or simply gazed into as a child. It led me (more than I led it) in a meandering curve around the house, so that the clearing away of old junk and abandoned machinery became part of something new and exciting.

I took the experience of the stream as a parable on life, believing that as long as I did what I did wholeheartedly, it could only go well, and if there was to be pain, then that also must lead to better things. There would have to be pain. The journey had to be finished. I could not take the ranch with me, but I could at least leave something, a part of myself, behind.

The sailing date was 15 November.

I had seen the P&O liner
Oriana,
all forty-two thousand tons of her, the day before when I came over the Bay Bridge from Berkeley. She had a fairy-tale brilliance floating there in the dark winter evening, and just looking made me feel thousands of miles away and sad.

They loaded the bike in the morning. Carol and I were staying at a friend's house on Maple Street, and in the afternoon T.A.'s mother brought her Volkswagen beetle over to take us all to the ship. She was enormously pregnant and very happy about it, and I was allowed to put my hand on her big tummy and listen for the
baby
inside. It was a heartbreaking thing to do in the circumstances. The father of this still unborn wonder was also there with still another rancher, and the five of us, with all my luggage, completely filled the VW's egg-shaped interior.

We drove along Clay to Gough, left and right to Van Ness, left and right again past Stockton to Pier 35.1 fastened on to all the details hungrily. We went through an archway past a pot-bellied guard to the luggage reception, and I joined a queue of passengers while the others made their way to my cabin. When
I
arrived among them, other ranchers and friends had arrived. Bob and Annie were there with the biggest rolls of paper streamers I had ever seen, and Larry, another close friend, had brought two bottles of champagne.

There was a tremendous air of excitement about us all. The ship was so grand, and made such a powerful statement about romantic travel, that nobody could be immune to it. We celebrated as though all of us were going along, and it really began to feel like that. I grabbed one of the streamers and dodged crazily round and between people until I had tied us all into a great knot, and the emotional temperature rose far beyond anything I had ever known before in a group. We kissed each other, all of us, men or women regardless. I felt a distinct rush of love for every person there, and knew that it was reciprocated, and I was able to say a few things that were true.

It was a most moving experience created entirely by those marvellous people out of their real warmth and affection for me, and it bound me to them for ever.

Australia and Malaysia

I stepped off the ship at Sydney wondering what it would be like to arrive there with no name, no past, nothing but a handful of cash and a new life to start from scratch. Until they opened up the moon, Australia was still the farthest I could get from the place I called home.

It was a continent I knew only as a caricature. Perhaps because it was so far away, the only images that seemed to travel the distance were absurdly overblown. Australians were the Ancient Gauls of the Twentieth Century, a good-hearted people so untouched by the niceties of civilization that with one sweep of their good intentions they could do more damage than an elephant in Harrods.

Australian women, I knew, were big and brazen, and went about the streets dressed and made up for the stage in the belief that the right way to catch a man was to incite him to rape. The wounds sustained during this savage form of courtship were soothed by swimming two hundred lengths before breakfast.

Australian men were big and bronzed, and wore shorts and singlets from which their muscled limbs extended like four strings of sausages. At the end of one of the upper strings was attached either a tennis racket or a small bottle of beer called a 'Stubbie'. They ambled about in hot sunshine being disgustingly frank about their natural functions and waiting to be incited to rape. If one of these King Kong figures appeared over the skyline, the thing to do was run for your life.

I came ashore determined to forget all the jokes and cartoons and ridiculous stereotypes and to learn about Australia from scratch.

It was not easy. During the first days in Sydney, getting ready to ride up the east coast, I looked around me with the freshest eye I could manage in the dusty December heat. I saw men ambling in singlets and shorts. Their muscles looked remarkably like sausages. I saw women who had apparently slipped off stage during the interval of a matinee performance of
Cabaret.
They looked as though anything less than rape might be mistaken for indifference. I noticed that many men wore tailored shorts with cute little slits up the seams like
cheongsams
to show a little extra flash of thigh, and the obscene thought crossed my mind that maybe they were hoping to be raped as well.

I saw some men, still in their youth, with the grossest beer bellies it was possible to imagine, cultivated at great expense, and I was overcome by the noise people made and the difficulty they had in showing each other affection.

Then, one day, I set out to photograph the things I had noticed. Not one revolting beer belly came my way; not one girl was dressed in such tasteless extravagance as to be worth recording. To my annoyance I saw men and women appearing to be softly and openly appreciative of each other. The truth bore in on me that I had been seeing only extremes in the crowd: the most flamboyant, the most threatening, the most crass, just as an Australian in London would see only Poms in pin-striped suits and bowler hats.

The vast majority of Australians were not like that, and yet my first impressions had been correct too, and I wondered how a few examples of extreme behaviour could so stamp and characterize a whole society. It became one of my main preoccupations.

For an Englishman, especially one who can remember how things were in England before the Fifties, Australia has a disturbing familiarity. The streets straggle out of Sydney much as they do out of London, and pass through namesake suburbs. You see street furniture and
municipal

architecture that has since been replaced in London by something newer; like old-style post offices and libraries, and Mechanics' Institutes. Or so it seemed to me, for the force of nostalgia is so strong that one old lamp-post can colour an entire street.

Out in the New South Wales countryside, too, there are glimpses of old England. The railway system, seemingly with all its veins and arteries still intact, and local puffer trains running between model stations, is a powerful time-warper. I rode up into the cosy Blue Mountains past village greens and orchards and vine-covered cottages. The strange admixture of Aboriginal names only seemed to point up the quaintness of the English ones, Wentworth Falls and Katoomba; Mount Victoria, Bell and Bilpin; Kurrajong, Richmond and Windsor.

Past meadows and stables and ponds; butcher's shops bursting with the finest and cheapest meat in the world; languid pubs made glamorous with the fancy Victorian ironwork which we, in England, melted down for scrap in the war.

At Wiseman's Ferry a great, green river rolled by between steep grassy banks, and a country hotel founded in 1815 served a counter lunch for a dollar sixty, a plate piled high with lamb chops and brussels sprouts. It was hot, but not too hot. There were flies, but so far not too many. The sun put creases round the eyes and seemed to be richer in ultra-violet than any other sun I had known, but it was tolerable and it was, after all, mid-summer. Riding through it like this, viewing it as an outsider, it was a rural idyll, far away from the troubles of the world.

When I came back on to the coastal highway there was less to admire. All Australia seemed to be moving up the coast in trailers, and camp sites were crowded. As I moved closer to people their prejudices showed through. The flies grew thicker too, and I had to eat my steak with a handkerchief waving in my hand to keep them from totally obscuring the meat. But the great green rivers kept rolling down to the sea, and the beautiful beaches stretched out for ever, and it was still the best steak in the world.

The coast road north of Sydney is called the Pacific Highway for six hundred and fifty miles until it reaches Brisbane. Then it becomes the Bruce Highway. Another five hundred miles north is Rockhampton, right on the Tropic of Capricorn. I crossed the Tropic (for the sixth time on my journey) four days before Christmas and headed on for Mackay. Since Brisbane, the arid summer of the south had been giving way slowly to the tropical rainy season of Queensland. In the southern droughts the cattle died of thirst. In the north they drowned and floated away on the floods. Australia runs to extremes.

After Marlborough, the road takes a long inland loop for one hundred and fifty miles to Sarina, to avoid floods. People had told me lurid tales about this part of the road. 'You want to watch out’ they said. 'There's criminals on the lam from Sydney.'

Only a few weeks before, a married couple had been mysteriously murdered in their car on that lonely stretch. I was served the story several times with relish. There was sometimes a ghostly quality about that land, but it was nothing to do with criminals or even ghosts. Much of the land was covered by a light forest and a high proportion of the trees were acacias called Brigalow. Across broad areas of the land the Brigalow was dead, and the thousands of twisted grey trunks seemed to haunt the forest. It was murder all right; they had all been slain by a poisoned axe to clear the way for pasture.

I took on petrol at Marlborough and set off. It was monotonous country, and empty, but not at all sinister. After eighty miles I came to Lotus Creek.

There was nothing much to distinguish Lotus Creek from the other small rivers I had crossed. It ran in a shallow bed cosseted by reeds and ferns and clumps of tall Guinea Grass. Several small species of gum tree, Black Butt, White and Stringy Bark among them, grew alongside it.

The highway dipped gently to the bridge which was simply made of huge square-cut trunks of one of the bigger species of gum tree, for some gums grow to well over three hundred feet. The trunks were surfaced with smaller wood and tarred over. The bridge had no parapet, but was more than wide enough for the biggest trucks. Most of the smaller bridges were built in this way.

Beyond the bridge on the right was a road house and petrol pump. I filled up, on principle, and went in for a coffee. It was a small restaurant, neater and cleaner than I had expected. Behind a well-stocked counter was a door open to the kitchen. The man behind the counter was busy at something. He was a stocky fellow in a neatly pressed blue bush-jacket and matching shorts. He wore woollen socks up to the knees and a cowboy hat.

'How much is coffee?' I asked. I always asked. Australia was vastly more expensive than I had expected and prices varied wildly from place to place.

'Thirty cents,' said the man without looking up. There was an edge to his voice though, and a hint of middle-European accent. I guessed Polish. Thirty cents was a high price.

'Thirty cents?' pretending mild astonishment.

Then he did look up. He had truculent blue eyes.

'Is thirty cents too much?' he demanded. If it is, I'll make it fifty cents. I'm like that.'

A touch of panic assailed me. There was something funny going on,

and I could not figure it out. I made placatory noises and he let me have a cup for thirty cents after all.

'I'm up here to make money, that's all,' he said. 'Why else would anyone come and live up here in this wilderness? When you're still here in a couple of days you'll be grateful I don't put it up to a dollar.'

'Well, it's very nice here,' I said, 'but . . .'

'If you're thinking of going back to Rockhampton you'd better make it soon, before Lotus comes up too,' he said with a slight sneer, and then the message began to filter through.

'Too?'

There were two others in the restaurant, a man and a teenage girl at a table. The man had got up and was walking over. He said:

'When Connors comes up, Lotus ain't far behind. Right, Andy?'

'What's Connors?' I asked, though I had guessed by now. I just wanted them to know that I hadn't known.

'You didn't know? Connors is the next creek along to Sarina,. ten miles down the road. I just came back from there. She's seven feet over the bridge and still rising. And to anticipate your next question, sometimes she's up for a day, sometimes for a week, and there's no tellin'

I waited to see if there were any other questions I had planned to ask, but it seemed not. His curly blond hair was greying and he wore steel-rimmed spectacles. He looked old for the girl. I asked him what he was doing there, nicely.

'I'm based in Mackay,' he said, 'but I travel around a hell of a lot. I'm the most knowledgeable journalist in Australia about the tropics.'

Between them, I thought, these two fellows could run Australia. They had the confidence for the job. However, after a bit they became quite friendly and interesting. It was just that first aggressive flash that got me. Like an Anglo-Saxon version of Latin America. The comparison pleased me. Also, the coffee when it came
w
^a
s
very good.

I rode up to Connors to have a look before settling in for the week. The queue was several hundred yards along, cars and trucks. It was very warm, with sun striking down between the cumulus clouds, and people were all over the place in their singlets and summer frocks, eating Fast Food and chucking the plastic containers and empty bottles into the countryside. Four truckies were playing an intense game of poker in the middle of the road. The bridge was nowhere to be seen, but the top of the 'Give Way' sign was still visible. The water was black and turbulent, and still rising.