Australia

​P A R T   T H R E E :

A U S T R A L A S I A 
AUSTRALIA:

PRESTIDIGITACITY IN THE NETHER REGIONS.
Imagine that the Great Creator was a supercomputer. Imagine Europe with its numerical logistics all muddled up. You’d get Australia. 

The outback makes everything seem spacially distorted and strange, having a kind of fantastical Alice in Wonderland ‘Drink Me’ effect on the senses. It’s people and creatures are other-worldly, living in a science fiction climate.
I recently discovered that the female kangaroo has three vaginas. Two for having Joeys out of, and one for spare that nobody knows exactly what it’s there for. How does Mr. kangaroo rise to the occasion? He has two penises. Penii, whatever. I guess he rises twice. Presumably, he can’t work out what fanny number three is for either. Now there’s a creature I really would be curious to watch having sex.
Darwin is the smallest city in Australia, up here on its own at the ‘Top End’ of the Northern Territories. First it was home to the Larrakia people, who travelled and traded widely; as far as Western Australia and South East Asia.

On 9th sept 1839 HMS Beagle landed here as part of a surveyance mission and the captain of the ship named the area after the ships former notable shipmate.

A tiny colony at first, its population grew to 300 when a minor gold rush occurred in the 1870s.

The city has changed its name twice – from ‘Palmerston’ and back again – it has been flattened twice; once by Japanese air raids during World War Two (the same bombers that bombed Pearl Harbour) and once by Cyclone Tracy in 1974. Three quarters of the 40,000 people living here had to be airlifted out of the area.
Its tropical here and during ‘The Wet’ it has thousands of lightning storms; over 40,000 throughout year!

It is one of most lightning prone places in the world and on one day once had over 5000 lightning strikes. (Did some silly sod sit there and count them all? The mind boggles. I bet his did too.) 
Here endeth the lesson.
November 19th

I’ve been in Darwin at Leona’s for six days now. It’s been a bit of a weird time really; the following day after landing I feel like my head is on backwards and I have an horrendous headache. I try eating and am sick. And I thought jet-lag was just an executive wimp-out. 
Thursday (next day November 20th) 

The headache’s gone, but still can’t decide when to be asleep and when to be awake. Doze halfway through the day, go out for an exploratory bike ride at 10 pm. Whilst looking out over mangroves I notice lots of little hermit crabs scuttling about through the grass next to the cycle path. I throw them a few chicken bones into the grass and they home in on them. They seem to like chicken. Leona lives in the suburbs of Casuarina, which to my senses seems like a fairly middle-class kind of area plonked in the middle of a tropical safari park. People go out for evening strolls, jogging, snogging, drinking and cycling. Not neccesarily in that order. 

Fruit bats the size of pigeons fly overhead in a flock. Tree frogs croak the night away. A whole variety of small lizards and geckos wriggle and slither about.
Leona is doing a fantastic job of keeping me fed and watered. This is great as it’s taking time to acclimatise to the tropical stickiness. Landing straight into suburbia and not really doing much moving about is a bit disconcerting. I am a man without a plan.
Over the last few days Leona has taken me off down the Stuart Highway to Adelaide River where together we check out the local flora and fauna (ghost gums, wallabies, small kangas, star fruit, coconuts, cyclids (prehistoric), parrakeets, white cockatoos, bamboo and a range of trees I don’t really recognise by name, but a lot of it looks familiar – things I recognise from being in Central America. There are some absolutely amazing looking palms around that look like they’ve been designed by mathematicians. 

So far the landscape has really pleasantly defied my expectations; instead of a searing barren desert we’re travelling through bush of varying beauty and density, sometimes scrub, sometimes like jungle. Every day has something new to marvel at. 
If I’m learning anything about travel it’s that the reasons I find for not going somewhere are usually utterly unfounded. (Next year I think I’ll go on holiday to Iran…)
Saturday evening (22 November) 

We go to Leona’s brother’s house, Dean + Maureens and watch England narrowly beat Australia in the rugby World Cup. The others had started the evening by scoffing jovially about the English team’s chances of conquering the all-mighty Aussies. 

Jonny Wilkinson saves the day for the English by doing his game-saving, amazing but peculiar looking long-shot drop-kicks. He can kick a ball and score from the other end of the pitch, but in order to do this, he psyches himself up by first doing a weird squatting thing that makes him look like he’s been hit by an unexpected dose of the runs.

Now my Aussie hosts are all swearing at the unlikeliness of it all. Now I don’t do sport – it’s all lost on me, though I do manage a quiet smirk to myself.

I try oysters for the first time.  I expect it will be the last time too. A bit like eating someone else’s snot.
Sunday is market day and we buy mango + papaya from the South-East Asian stalls. 

Darwin has people from over eighty countries living here. Not bad for a population of only 130 thousand. So far most of the non-European people seem to be Orientals and aboriginals though I’m told there are lots of Greeks here too.

After the fruit market we visit the craft market where Leona sells her pottery sometimes.
Sunday night I go out for another quick bike ride up the sea-front. I stop to watch lightning dance all over the northern end of the sky, partly out to sea. 

The lightning strikes are frequent, and unlike anything I have ever seen before; many of the lightning bolts are leaping between between the clouds and not striking at the sky-line. Patches of night clouds burst into light randomly as lightning bursts within them.  Lightning that does earth mostly seems to be shattering into inverted neon tree-shapes.

What a stunning show.
I’m here. I am actually HERE. I got to this end of the world; New Zealand not so hard to get to when the time comes. I can let go now; I’m free.

 

I’m starting to wake up a bit more now, starting to feel my drive coming back. I arrived here with no plan whatsoever other than to actually get on the plane from England in the first place.

The last couple of days before leaving England I felt like crap; loads of fears rising to the surface – I am running out on a sensible stable life in England, I don’t have any financial security, planes trash the planet…

Now I must decide roughly where I’m going and what I’m going to do. I feel slightly constrained by a shortage of funds and currently by the tropical heat. I’m sure I will the hang of both.
Monday 24th. 

We go to the ‘dry dump’ where you can rake through stuff that’s been pulled out of landfill. I get most of a silver tent for three bucks that looks like its already been to the moon and back.
Leona says Darwinians have a keen sense of re-using old stuff and making the most of the things they have; being so distant and isolated from the main population of the country, consumer goods and food can be expensive even now.

After the dry dump, we drive out down an unmade road to Leona’s favourite beach where we collect fossilised crayfish and beautiful shells. I meet a twitchy stranded jellyfish and three purple sea-slugs. On the way back the rain decides to hit and the corrugations of the road combined with the mud and rain make steering the car an effort. The rain is so hard we have to really slow down cos Leona can barely see where we are going through the seemingly melting windscreen.
Thursday November 27th. Leona’s Darwin

I’m finding getting out of the house tricky. I think it’s either the heat making moving in the first place seem a bit laborious or the lack of a plan. I hang around testing my tiny new tent and doing a few household chores. I read up on Australian places and formulate a rough plan; to see a few things round Darwin, get brain and tat together, go to Tasmania. There, now I have a motivating force. 

I go for a bike ride keeping as close to the sea as I can whilst staying on roads. Darwin has got to have the most beautiful suburbs I’ve ever seen; fantastic palms and brightly coloured bushes everywhere. More plant life than I’ve ever seen in any built-up area anywhere. There’s possibly as much greenery going on here as there is in the wild.

Not knowing where I’m going, I arrive at Lee Point, descend off-road through bush down to the sea. I head back along the sand towards Casuarina but get blocked by a small river inlet. I investigate hermit crabs some more and meet a mud hopper which is a three-inch mermaid with the head of Jar-Jar Binks. It’s very tame and is very happy for me to look at it very closely for as long as I like.

It’s either blind, stupid or very chilled out. The latter I like to think, though the boggly eyes on stalks don’t help. 

I cycle back near sundown through an amazing coastal bush trail used by joggers. It’s dawning on me just what an amazingly beautiful place Darwin is. It really is quite spectacular.
Friday 28th. 

I wander round Darwin, get some camera batteries, go to a  very good art museum full of aboriginal dot paintings and other contempory white fella stuff. I buy oil pastels to make Leona a painting as a thank you for my stay. I wander through my new normality, acclimatising, back to Leona’s house. Good day today.
Saturday 29th. 

I am feeling lots of doubts about what I’m doing; am I being dumb and just following some head-trip mission to New Zealand? In my burning need to ‘Do The Right Thing’, I feel certain I am following a delusion. Just because I know that, it doesn’t make it any less deluded does it? Is this how I kill a wandering monkey? Not feeling sad, just open and willing enough to write this. And stuck in my head.
On Thursday afternoon in Nightcliff library I am eyeing up a young woman and to my alarm she responds and flirts with me. This really shakes me up. a completely unhealthy response on my part. I mutter hello back and leave. 

How much I am frightened of not ‘achieving New Zealand’ is bizarre in its side-effects and I feel like I’m selling myself short. Two women have been into me so far. Sexual frustration is getting to me. Don’t want to start a situation that I know I’ll feel conflict about. If I start another reason for avoiding potential relationships when I get to New Zealand then I shall know that I’m being a numpty. What if I meet someone fantastic before New Zealand? This is crazy!? Is upside-down Down Under the right way up? 

No. It probably isn’t.
I seem to be turning this trip into some sort of martyrdom exercise and less of an enjoyable experience. That’s dumb. Change it so it’s fun you twit! Okay, so what do I need to change?

Burble burble burble…
Friday December 6th (or 5th)

Either heat, post-jetlag and/or a sense of disappointment or pointlessness hangs over me. I guess it’s also kind of weird to jump from one side of the world to the other and to just stick right where you land. A bit like throwing a ball that doesn’t then bounce onwards when it first hits the ground. Maybe why that’s why I feel I ought to be bouncing off down the road. Maybe I’m going ‘Troppo’ (Australian version of ‘Doolally’).
Monday, me and Leona drive to Litchfield National Park. Magnetic termite mounds rise up and spread themselves erratically, reminding me of the lines of Neolithic standing stones at Carnac in Brittany.

Leona’s talking twenty to the dozen about something or other. Me, I’m rudely listening to the gaps in-between, the breeze of exotic birds calling brightly to each other. I’m listening to the outback version of space and vastness, trying to find the  silent hum of ancient winds.
Litchfield National Park is a range of differing habitats placed together in an oasis of super-vitality. 

As usual it’s enormous (it only looks small on the map)… God nose what possesses me to think I’d be able to walk round it in a couple of days… 

I am so utterly wrong and Leona easily convinces to immediately abandon any such notion. It would probably kill little unwise pommie tourist me.
The trail road rises up about a hundred metres which is height enough to be able to view the expanse of bush that rolls on forever all around. It’s a wide wide tree-filled place. The grey promise of a thunderstorm looms way off bringing ponderous movement to the apparent stillness. 

We pull into a picnic car park and unload lunch by a beautiful drinkable stream. Hundreds of two-inch fish look interested in us. We jump in for a swim. It’s warm! Not the British ‘Come on in it’s lovely’ kind of warm which actually only means ‘Oh wow my nerve endings have packed in it’s so cold, now I can’t feel anything!’ no not that, but actually warm.

More exotic unidentified birds tootle about idly overhead. The little fish discover my peeling sunburned skin makes a tasty snack and as I stand still in the water I can feel the strange bubbly sensation of hundreds of fish nibbling away at my dead flesh. My legs are strangely back in Belize again. Whilst this is happening, spiders skate like water boatmen across the rippling surface and a water monitor lizard has come by, presumably to keep an eye on things.

He finds a nice flattish rock to lie on and basks. I’m waiting for him to get freaked by us and run off, but it doesn’t happen. We get out of the water slowly, so as not to scare our new companion. I take photos. He still doesn’t seem bothered. Eating a bit of lunch he lifts his head high and does that tongue waggling thing that reptiles do. He wanders over closer and closer to us to see what we’ve got. He seems the most interested when I drop some fruit on the ground and he makes a dive for it. It’s amazing to see such an ancient species of creature so close up and friendly. This critter has been here from the year dot, maybe for about eighty million years. That’s quite an evolutionary achievement. He can afford to move slowly if he wants – he really does ‘have all the time in the world.’
We go visit some pools and waterfalls, all a bit Shangri-La and lovely.

Another big lake before we go home, comfortably hemmed in by jungly bush all round. There are two one hundred foot waterfalls on the far side. A notice confidently informs us that all the crocodiles have been removed. Hopefully it’s up to date. How does it know that some new ones haven’t craftily snuck in whilst it wasn’t looking?

A good healthy uneaten swim and a redundant shower under the waterfall later and it’s time to go home. The rocks under the waterfall have the same coppery look like the rocks at Tofino.
I exclaim to Leona that now I feel like I’ve arrived, like I’m really in Australia, and not so caught up in the head-tangles I brought over with me on the plane from England. 

I have got ‘The Dreaming’ a Kate Bush tune in my head; ‘There goes another kanga on the bonnet of the van-a’. I’m driving, which gives me even more of a sense of ‘being here’. Three minutes later a wallaby bounces across the road ahead so I slow down. So focussed on it are we that we both fail to notice another slightly smaller one tagging along behind it. I get a heavy sick feeling as I hit it just before it manages to cross completely. We stop and Leona tries to find it, to put it out of it’s suffering if necessary. She can’t find it. Hopefully it’s okay or not badly hurt. I drive the 150 kms home as night descends onto an unlit highway back to Darwin.
Over the next few days, sluggishness and procrastination reign supreme. I tape Goon Shows, read M. Scott Peck’s ‘The Road Less Travelled And Beyond’, eat, fart, shower, watch TV and sleep.

So far I feel like I’m on ‘The Road Not Travelled At All.’

I think I’m building up my ‘inertia before the leap’ quotient; mustering sufficient boredom points to focus me for further new adventures (or something). Oh the power of the mind to justify absolutely anything is quite astonishing.
Leona drives the next day up to Berrimah Truck Stop where I enquire about how to hitch-hike to Queensland. With utter bluntness the guy behind the counter tells me: ‘Oh, get a plane. You don’t want to hitch-hike. Everyone that goes down that road gets murdered. That’s the road the everyone gets killed on. Nah mate, don’t do it.’

An exaggeration of the typical attitude way too many people have about hitching.

If more people were less paranoid, the world would be a happier place and I’d also get my rides quicker. Even in Europe, it’s the one definite incident of danger that people can tell you about regarding hitching. The one murder that happened several years ago in Australia. Why don’t people rant and rave about all the really interesting people they meet that really brighten up their day?

I lump this guys opinion into the ‘forget’ part of my brain. I reckon as long as I’ve got enough food and water, and I don’t lose my hat, I’ll be alright. Though the prospect of hundreds and hundreds of miles of deserty bush is a little scary.
Me and Leona keep finding excuses to visit the dry dump. I get myself a wide-brimmed Aussie outback hat for two bucks. Bargain. Leona finds furniture for her new garden.
I like Darwin. It reminds me of a sweaty 50s America. Podgy white folk having ice-creams and picnics amid the swaying palms. Sunsets, drinkies and comfortable podgie lower middle-class affluence.

It’s nearly time to go; my new Oz bank card comes in the post.
Today I sit writing at a green concrete picnic table enjoying a cooling breeze and the gentle lapping of the Timor Sea. A pair of brightly coloured parrot-things gabble and squawk in a nearby tree looking for a lunch of tree seeds. It’s good to see them out of their cages.
Later on that same evening…

All hail to the Great Provider known as ‘The Dumpster’. Verily I do go a-diving; get my arm covered in slightly festering goo (a traditional part of the practice) and come up with bread, cake, fruit and veg. Bizarrely, I have a bit of competition with a busy string of green-bum ants but I don’t think they mind sharing really. Luckily Leona has a food drier, so I can take dehydrated everything with me. Reduced weight and space, and it won’t go off. Hurrah!
Saturday night. The sky is full of thunder, lightning and heavy rain. The gardens are full of grunting frogs and occasional barking dogs. Rain bounces off the ground and smashes back into itself. 

When it relents, I cautiously head out to Drue’s and do odd-jobs; painting a car porch and fiddling with guitar strings and computers. The change of company is good, though I’m still in a silly shy mode a little bit. 

I come back to Leona’s and go out again to take lots of photos of suburbia and then sit and watch an amazing sunset by the sea-front. I watch a distant thunder storm come rolling into town off the water. Beautiful. 

I talk to the sky and sing some. 

My last but one day on the north Coast of Australia. 

Instead of regret or sadness, I am feeling at last the familiar optimistism that can come from the energy of making a move into the unknown, to getting back on the roller-coaster. 

It’s the comfortable perspective of hitching; instant short-lived companions, not much danger of messing things up too much; someone new and intriguing will be along soon enough if anything doesn’t sit right anyway.
The north Coast of Australia is just a smallish part of it all, Darwin soon to be another fondly remembered signpost in my mind.

Bliss;

Tonight it is raining. The air feels clear cool and fresh, the tropical heat having been temporarily washed away. Instead of earplugs to block out the sound of Leona’s electric fan I can fall asleep to the sound of the rain soaking the garden greenery and newly-lubricated sex-mad frogs croaking away merrily in the yard outside.
December 9th 2003. Hayes Creek, Stuart Highway NT.

Leona drops me off on the outskirts of Darwin, laden with dry fruit and a pressie not to be opened til Christmas. 
I get a ride with Lee who a few days ago had found himself unable to resuscitate a friend, his old school teacher, dying from diabetes. 

I wish Lee well. It’s a short ride, but it drives home a wedge of separation from Darwin and Leona and between me and my neuroses.
It’s bloody hot. That I don’t mind so much. What I do mind is the flies. They are on a mission from the Devil himself to drive me insane. I am trying to eat bread. Through a piece of mosquito net that I am wearing over my head. This I discover involves a tactic of hastily lifting the net slightly enough to sneak the bread under whilst waving my head around like a head-banger in order to confuse the flies. What a hassle.
At Humpty Doo (where’s Scooby?) I get a ride with Kasey an old guy previously from Arkansas who’s seen a lot of the world on the way to being here. He’s a gold miner. I bask in the fabulous otherness of his life-story as we hurtle forwards across the endless scrubby outback.

Kasey drops me off at some little roadhouse in the middle of nowhere, then I get a ride with a chap driving all the way down from a camp near Litchfield to Gove up on the north-eastern end of Kakadu on the coast. He is in a hurry to get to his girlfriend up there who is having a baby in two days. He needs to get up there before the roads flood and block access. 
All these stories move me along, creating degrees of separation from what has gone before. There are moments when all that is left is just about being where I am. 

And that is the magic of hitch-hiking.
I Sleep at Katherine by the roadside behind a large rock. Almost full moon. In the morning a hawk circles overhead to check if I’m carrion. (I’m not yet.) 

A ride with a guy driving from Gove back home to Adelaide. Nice chap, drops me a whopping six hours later at Three ways. He offers me a ride straight through to Adelaide.  

Australia is of course dauntingly huge to the new visitor. Conversely, it seems to have the potential to provide me with equally enormous rides. I could be in Hobart at my ultimate Australian destination before I have ever really got the hang of the place.

I decline the offer.
I bake in the sun for three hours at an emptyish T-junction. A rather deja-vu place, reminding me of my first almond-shelling experience of the desert emptiness of Keeler, Death Valley.

Its weirdly blank here. Just breeze and dust.

I begin to wish I’d stayed with the Adelaide ride. Curiously, the road I’m aiming to head down is Route 66; the road that stretches through the Barkley Tablelands. 
Rob and John pick me up next, driving a big blue bus with ‘Murray River Passenger Service’ written on the side. They are towing a Toyota jeep with Rob driving a car behind all that. They look like gypsy traveller types.

Rob has just left his missus and three kids. They are both mineworkers. Rob does explosives. Great job for an angry pyromaniac-type person. We drive across the Tablelands into the night. There’s lots of lightning and rain. To the north we see bushfire far away on the horizon, turning the sky dark grey with billowing smoke. A distant repercussion of the Darwin skies.
We stop to have supper and sleep in the middle of nowhere after the bus develops engine weirdness. ‘You know anything about engines?’ 

‘Nope’

‘Bugger!’

I sleep next to the car. I have Coco-pops for breakfast. For me this is a memorable food event. The bus looks great against the desert backdrop; the best meals are more about the setting than what might happen to be in my food bowl. Which is as well considering some of the things that have to pass for food.

Eat up the scenery.

Fortunately I am also a moderate fan of Coco-pops.

 

John has got the bus going again and we drive all morning to Mount Isa (‘The Isa’), Rob is talking racist shite so I stare out the window at the ever-rolling sand, rocks and scrub; practicing a well-exercised hitch-hiker’s zone-out technique.
We stop on the way to see a memorial to the building of the highway from Queensland to Northern Territory. It was built by American troops as part of the Second World War effort. Horrible Back-breaking work. The kind of work you’d give to a prison chain gang. The photo shows smiling brave white soldiers on bulldozers. The small print says the work was carried out by black American soldiers. What a surprise. 
Mount Isa is a weird and ugly mining town. It gets a bit hilly round here. A welcome relief after the seemingly endless flat flat flat flat flat emptiness of the bush.

I clean my malfunctioning camera at Dick Smiths Electronics Shop and walk out near the edge of town, ready for whatever is to happen next. I pass an extremely pink tattooed/pierced woman. She looks like someone that would stand up to the old adage; ‘Australia, where men are men and so are the women’.

 

I stand at the edge of town for five hours. I get hassled by three bleary wobbling aborigines demanding money. They seem to be a mother and father and their son. 

The son:’Give me five dollar! Give me ten dollar! Friend we share one blood, give me your name and bank account number!’. 

He tries to get me to write this information on his arm so that after he recovers from getting drunk, he will know which bank account to put the money he owes me into. (Yeah, right.)

These people are drunk and rude.
I walk out further to the edge of town upon the advice of another more together aborigine chap. Better to be further away from the town and the bars he says.

I get no ride so I look about for a decent bush to sleep under. I find a good spot. There’s barbed wire on the ground but it’s still okay, I find a clear spot in between it. 

Dinner today is an incredibly out-of-date and odd-tasting packet of carrot and coriander soup (about three years old from England), seaweed, water and dried bread, followed by a small amount of dried fruit and small piece of dried apple cake. 

The cake is from a dumpster in Darwin, the fruit from Leona and the strange soup is from Helen in England, who is about to have her baby.

Under the deeply dark night sky I listen to Indigo Girls (Come on Social), Neil Young (After the Gold Rush) and a bit of Dylan (Highway 61 Revisited). New music to me, just trying it out. It’s what hippy travellers are supposed to listen to isn’t it?

Beautiful full moon, very cloudy. Good stars. Sleep quite well.
Thursday December 14th. 

I wake early and pack my gear. I stand on the other side of the road, sit down to hitch and start to shave. It’s 7 am. Very quickly and halfway through my shave I get a ride with a very interesting, friendly and helpful cattle rancher. His family have been cattle ranchers for three generation in Northern Queensland. I guess that’s practically Ozzie aristocracy. He has a Geordie chap working for him. He hates the aborigines (‘abos’). He says the Tasmanians had the right idea when they wiped them all out. Says they should all be strung up (etc etc). He drops me 130 km further on at Cloncurry.

Its so weird when I meet someone I like and get on with… only to find them drive a stake of hatred through the middle of everything.
Cloncurry Northern Queensland. (Hottest place in Australia; 53 C, 125 F.)

Half an hour later, I am picked up by Sean who’s going all the way to Townsville on the Eastern Coast, just south of Cairns. His dad is from London and his mum is from Geordieland. Not racist. Very nice chap. Very handsome and charming; God’s gift to women I imagine. He has lots of unopened Coke-Cola bottles all over the back seat of his car which he invites me to help myself to. He sells industrial pipe fittings. I spend pretty much the whole day with him. We pass through the White Mountain National Park. Quite nice. It’s very good to see hills and mountains again after so much flat (ish) bush.
On Route 66 I’ve seen plenty of dead roos and cows, dried up like grotesquely battered giant leather handbags with legs and heads. Hundreds of eagles scour the road for carrion. I have never seen so many eagles in my life. (Previous eagle sightings: one golden eagle, Scotland.) 

As prevalent as flocks of crows back home. I know, they’re called murders, stop being pedantic.

I don’t see any live roos; they hide under trees all day and only come out at night to feed by the roadside. Because of the extra water run-off from the tarmac, the grass is greener here. I guess maybe I’m like a kangaroo, on the road where the grass is greener. As long as I don’t end up as a handbag…
According to the interesting but racist cattle rancher, the grass here is called ‘Buffel Grass’. It was introduced by the Afghans who used to run camel-trains in the mining country to move mineral ore about. The Afghans used to run the camels up from Alice Springs to Darwin, this track then became known as ‘The Ghan’, became the main highway and then a railroad. 

This route is about to open as a freight rail track after years of dis-use. The locals have known it all this time as ‘The Ghan’ but the government want to call it ‘The Steve Irwin’ (ridiculous Crocodile Dundee-style nature program presenter). This is clearly a name to serve the tourists and it’s crap (speaking as a backpacking tourist myself). It would be like building a new parliament in Canberra and calling it Rolf Harris Towers.
Aside from all this, I haven’t seen any camels either though they are known to ‘have gone feral’ and have proliferated in parts of the outback. 

Buffel grass makes cattle-ranching possible; very little other grass will grow on this ground. It’s nearly all clay that’s been baked to one vast crumbly brick. Spilled water and rain evaporates immediately. So the Aussies have the Afghans to thank for there being a cattle economy at all. 
Finally reach the coast.

Townsville reminds me of Southern California.

Sunny. Sea. Lush.
Saturday December 15th.

I ‘sleep’ badly at Townsville, lots of little bitey ants trying to share my sleeping bag and I have one of those mornings where I take ages to pack and get my head together. I get washed in the nearby BP ‘servo’ (service station). Some days, like today, I just can’t be arsed to hitch; feeling tired or anti-social or both. I just get on with it anyway.
I wait for a worker in a baseball cap to finish putting up a road sign in the spot where I want to stand and hitch from. While I am waiting a truck pulls in round the corner and the driver, a chap called Matt, gives me a ride south to Bowen. 

He’s from Melbourne and lives in Cairns and drives back and forth picking up fish (today it’s coral trout). He takes back to Cairns where they sell them to Japanese fish-traders for very high prices; The Japs have fished their own to extinction, so now they want everyone else’s stocks. 

Matt likes to go swimming with the fish in the holding tanks and actually wishes the fish weren’t going to end up as sushi. 

‘Oh well, a jobs a job eh?’ he says ruefully.
At Bowen I hitch next to a curious place where salt is extracted from sea-water and forage myself some lunch from a couple of wild trees: five mangoes (desperately unripe) and six youngish coconuts (blinkin’ delicious!) 

Coconuts are very refreshing for the juice and the flesh bit is like jelly and very tasty and filling.
I get a ride with a guy who drives very fast and juggles this with baby care duties at the same time. Alternating between trying to reason with the crying baby on the back seat, and when this doesn’t work, putting him on his lap with a bottle whilst trying to steer.
At Mackay I get picked up by Brett, large and pierced all over. He says he has one request before we go anywhere. ‘What’s that?’ says I, nervously anticipating that he’s going to ask me for a blow job.

‘You have to put up with me listening to loud music’. Phew. thirty-five kilometres of banging techno and country later I get to Serina which is ‘beaut’. (Notice the clever use of the vernacular lingo there.)
Drunken people request I play them country on my guitar. I tell I’m only a beginner and I can’t play a single tune. They lumber off, swearing at me for being a cheapskate and a fraud. 

This is a bit baffling but I don’t really mind as I have just scrumped a load of fabulous ripe mangoes from a tree by the town library.
I get a ride in a Jeep into the night with a friendly mine-worker off from work for a day and a half. (It’s his first break in two months.) We stop at a free ‘driver reviver’; a stall in a car park gives tea and biscuits and idle conversation to drivers to keep them going on all these long distances. This wonderful bit of social aid is sponsored by the government and local charities. It’s a kind of cross between the AA roadside breakdown service, the Women’s Institute and possibly the Samaritans.
I sleep ten kilometres short of ‘Rocky’ (Rockhampton). I put up my tent cos it’s raining (successfully this time) and sleep wonderfully. I wake up warm and very wet and not especially willing. It never occurred to me that the reason this tent is silver is to keep the sun out. It’s not in the slightest bit waterproof. How weird is that? It’s an outback tent. Oh.
Bored of the sound of my own head going round.

Apres-New Zealand lifestyle fantasy for today: Go do Scottish Conservation Volunteering. Have Girlfriend, work in the mountains, meet people, have motorbike, trike or van. Have nice cosy woodland dwelling to live in. Possibilities to fine-tune Scots lifestyle later, travel through U.S later. Still easy to contact Don, Glyn, dad, Norfolk, Esther, Sofie, Blah blah blah…
From north of Rocky, I get a ride with a couple doing garage sale bargain hunting; driving aimlessly arounnd the area until they encounter a likely looking front-garden vendor.

  

They drop me on the edge of town, conveniently deposited so I can purchase a bacon cheese and beef meat pie. The stall-holder asks me if I like it. I underplay it and say ‘Yeah, it’s alright I suppose’ with half a grin. He smiles back with a wave of his arm ‘Yah Go on! Piss off!’ I think I’m getting the hang of Ozzie humour.
I walk up to the nearby roundabout and get picked up briefly by a naturalised Irishman and he puts me back on the Bruce Highway for Brisbane on the junction nearby. This must be the shortest lift I’ve ever had clocking in at about 300 metres.

Boogie in the side of the road to ‘Papua New Guinea’ by Future Sounds of London, played three times over.
I get a ride with a nice young guy who’s a school teacher, twenty-five, and wants advice on travelling cheap. He’s a self-declared ‘free-thinker’ which is a real breath of fresh air. It’s one of the first times that I feel I don’t have to guard what I say. He’s going to the beach; Agnes Waters next to a place called ‘1770’. I’ve never been to a number before; 
1770 was originally called Round Hill. In 1970 the village in celebration of the bicentenary of Captain Cook’s second Australian landing there re-enacted the whole event and renamed the village with its now unique and peculiar tag. Presumably the re-eanctment of the landing must have been lots of fun, as they have decided to stage it every year since. I suspect it may involve large quantities of beer.
My new school teacher friend persuades me to actually stop hitching and get away from the road. I spend a lovely afternoon on a rocky/sandy beach. The water is warm but not as warm as the Caribbean (like I care). The next day I slob about some, take some photos, do the usual ‘wonder where I’m going to end up’ thing (this times it’s Scotland again). Pack up and leave.  
I get a ride to Bundaberg with a nice couple, then a ride with Rob and Darren, two drunk guys that I like. After unsuccessfully trying to score weed and telling me about various backpacker murders and other traveller disasters in the area, they buy me a beer (laarvely!) and drop me off at Childers.
Sleep the night here. It’s cooler here. Thank you thank you thank you.

Now – To the south!
Monday December 15th 

I wake up happy to be in Childers – it looks like Hereford with palm trees. It’s cool, and I am very grateful to the hundreds of ants that are scrambling all over the place for not biting me. They are my friends. Hurrah! 

I think I’m spending too much time alone.
Idly I pack up and walk over to the other side of the road and promptly break the head stock on my guitar as I put it down. This is not so much of a disaster as it had been broken previously coming off the plane from Cuba; it just needs re-gluing. I get a ride after an hour with a nice low-level Christian chap with a super swanky padded leather upholstered cab that a British truckie would give his right arm for if it wasn’t such a necessary implement for driving a truck. The driver politely advises me to get cleaned up cos evidently I stink. I’m actually very grateful for this advice – being on the road it’s really easy to lose my sense of just how filthy I’m getting, and what I think of as clean is probably not someone else’s version of clean at all.
He drops me at a servo in Maryborough and I narrowly miss getting severely pissed on by the rain. I have to do some smart moving with the rain now – if I got wet previously it didn’t matter; I’d dry out almost instantly. (Conversely I’d sweat like a pig.) Now I’ll get wet and stay wet for ages. This alters the way I carry me and my stuff and could be a potentially mouldy-smelling soggy nightmare. I use the shower and hand-wash the tatty clothes I’ve been sweating furiously into for the last couple of weeks. The water goes BLACK and it really does stink. Thank you Mr. Nice Driver, I never noticed.
Otherwise, this servo is crap; no-one stops and all I get is a marked increase in would-be jokers giving me the finger and yelling ‘BLEEEUR!’ at me out of their passenger window as they speed past. In eighteen years of hitch-hiking, I still haven’t figured out what this means. Maybe it’s some kind of Neanderthal greeting. They should stop or at least slow down and do it properly, then I might stand a chance of understanding whatever it is that they are trying to convey. Some people are just in too much of a hurry I guess. 

After some helpful advice from a friendly driver who stops to tell me to stand in a better place I go and stand about a hundred yards down the road. If the guy is of a mind to be helpful why doesn’t he just give me a ride instead? Sometimes people really do baffle me. 
Half an hour later I get a ride with a quietly humbling, very peaceable old bloke who drives me into the town of Maryborough itself and drops me off at what he tells me is ‘A Good Spot’.

Another previously unwritten law of hitching is that old blokes who know ‘A Good Spot’ are probably remembering their army hitching days from when they were young and are forgetting all the extra new roads that have been built since then that render the old roads defunkt. This is the only explanation I can think of for why they always seem to drop me off somewhere really crap.
I walk two kilometres down to the Bruce Highway again, which with sunburned shoulders and back and a rough heavy pack makes me a bit sore. 

Finding a suitable spot, I play the waiting game some more. I remove my hot heavy boots to give my feet a breather. Whilst examining my wrinkly toes, shrivelled from wearing newly cleaned wet socks (I thought it would dry them out quicker – it doesn’t work at all), guess who should pick me up but Rob and Darren again. I am very glad to see them. They’ve had a kip (they weren’t drunk as I previously thought, they are just mind-zapped from over-work), and now their brains are now refreshed and working which is good to see. Rob offers me a bowl of SWEETS which is bloody amazing. I’ve had nothing but dried fruit and dried bread and stale instant soup since I left Leona’s. Sweets are FAB. There’s even a chocolate. Wow!
There was a time in Belize when I’d been eating nothing but bush food for two months. One day Chris came home from work and gave us all an extra strong mint each and it was the most amazing taste sensation ever; an everyday thing back home had, in these utterly different surroundings, become a superbly rarefied treat and became the highlight of my week.
At the end of my ride with Rob and Darren they drop me off at another servo and give me enough money to get a burger at McDonalds. I briefly contemplate saving the 5.96 dollars they’ve given me but decide that as it is meant for a meal that’s how I’ll use it. I’ve got enough for a Big Mac, a chocolate milkshake and fries. It’s great. I eat it all as slow as I can. Lots of thank yous to Rob and Darren! 
Another ride with two young brothers who are also knackered from long distance driving takes me to the southern side of Brisbane and to a fork in the motorway where I pitch up on the top of an embankment in the company of some very large spiders. Listen to Goon Show ‘The International Christmas Pudding’ on my mp3 player. Sleep.
Australia has a bit of a thing about long distance driving. So many drivers I’ve been picked up by either are tired to the point of a kind of drunken incoherence, are fascinated by fast cars (understandably) or drink tons of coke, coffee or booze.

It’s much slower hitching now it seems; towns are closer together, so people are less likely to be going very far in one go. This suits me fine.
Lots of the Northern Territory and Queensland is unbearably hot and the outback mostly pretty bleak and inhospitable looking. New South Wales is – hey guess what – rather like Old South Wales, except it’s much much much larger and they’ve turned the heating up. Instead of sheep it’s European-style cattle and the occasional stand of bananas in amongst all the other tropical greenery. It’s only when you look closely you see that that it’s gums and bananas and not oak and ash.
Wed December 17th. 

Tomorrow I will have been here a month. Today is a very odd day. I get checked out in the morning by a friendly land-owner who comes to see that I am not some runaway kid or something. He mentions the English winning the rugby and grins ‘If I’d a known you was a bloody pom I would a bought me bloody shotgun out!’

The Australian way of saying ‘Nice to meet you’… I love it.
I’m standing in a crap spot with hardly any traffic; one of those nowhere places that doesn’t really justify a motorway junction. I can either go inland to Toowoomba or down the Gold Coast road. I stand at the Toowoomba fork. Most of the cars seem to be going down the other road, so I tell myself I’m going to stand by the road that the next car goes down. It goes down the Gold Coast road; on the way to the world-famous hippy enclave Byron Bay. 
Half an hour later an English guy stops. He’s just got off the plane from London and is on his way to surprise his Ozzie girlfriend on her birthday with champagne and strawberries. He requires my services to roll a large spliff, which to my surprise turns out most successfully. ‘I think the dope has lost it’s smell now’. I think it smells very good. 

‘I bought it in up my arse’ he adds ‘in cling film, of course’. He’s also bought in about six thousand pounds worth of liquid LSD as well.

‘Did you stick that up your arse too? You must have been clanking about like somebody coming back from an off-license with a carrier bag.’ 

‘No, that came in disguised as a bottle of after-shave.’
He’s an ex-crustie* ‘made good’; *crustie – very debauched new-age traveller, ruined by ‘Special Brew’ a chemically-constructed ‘beer’ that gets its drinker utterly shit-faced for almost no money, and habitually leaves the drinker covered in unmentionable filth; hence the name ‘crustie’.
No longer covered in shit and dried sick, he comes from Daventry and runs his own window cleaning business. He’s going to Nimbin (hippy central), near Byron Bay and he drops me off at a junction even more useless than the one he picked me up from.

 

I’m too stoned to give a monkeys about this. I just hang out for a bit here eating far too much of my food stash whilst enjoying the whole sense of just essentially ‘being’ where I am. Then I crash out for a couple of hours. I wander down to the main part of the motorway, which confusingly has a cycle path marked on it instead of a hard shoulder. I figure it must be okay to hitch then. Not that I’m bothered about that particular kind of law, I just don’t want to have to say hello to any coppers in my current state.
My next ride takes me right into the Bay by a guy who lives there. I don’t remember anything about him at all. (There’s a surprise…) 

Byron Bay is very nice; lots of English people. It’s not the brash clubby kind of place I thought it was going to be so that’s a bonus. I get drunk and more stoned with some blokes who are curious about my guitar.

I borrow the guitar of one of their number, an aboriginal fella called Andrew who then plays me a few tunes. We meet a confused-looking Canadian from Toronto and chat with him about the joys of Canada. He’s not in the mood though for idle chat. He has broken his collarbone and is pissed off cos it’s ruining his work and fun plan. 
Later on I dump my stuff in some bushes where I later sleep and wander round town in search of free food. I watch ‘Wild Marmalade’ a busking trio – two drummers with drum kits and a bloke playing techno bleeps on a didgeridoo. Crap name but very good for a bit of a bop.
Next day: Wednesday December 17th. 

Still here, chilling out. Getting stoned got me into ‘Here’-ness and less in my head. Good; I needed that. Now I’m off to see if I can get my gee-tar mended. Strange birds here that look like pigeons with mohicans.

I go to Woolworth’s and get myself some super-glue to mend the headstock on my gee-tar. That works, good-oh. 

I try for ages to hitch out of this place. I am really surprised how rubbish it is. It makes me think of all those times in England when all those ‘love and peace’ hippies in their ‘loved-up’-looking VW camper-vans would never ever ever stop and give me a ride. What’s that about?
I get a very short ride about a mile then another with a middle-aged English woman and her Rasta chap. They drop me off at Suffolk Park a couple more miles up the road. At least it’s a real change of scenery. At this point I feel I should write, and it’s been a long long time since the last one; Oooooooooooooooooooooooooooh! The plant life here is wonderful. Lots of blue convovulus type climbers and funky looking climbers. It’s still a bit too bloody hot though. I see a green and yellow snake. Wow! Wildlife! Fab!

 

Another short lift with a woman and a baby, then another short one with a young chap to a really lovely spot with the road sweeping up into a headland. It’s a cross between coastal West Wales and Cornwall. Ooooooooooh!

(Yeah ok, calm down…)
I quickly get another ride with another woman who is laaaarvely and is into making furniture and did loads of hitching until she got a car. We go to Ballina. She goes home, and I remain on my mission. 

Last ride of the day is with a quirky young bloke whose first name I forget but his last name is Sinjun (as in St. John). As I get in I tell him that he has the untidiest car of the day and has won 500 bucks. He is very interesting to talk to, we talk about family history, Ireland, Tassie, logging, the origin of the name Sinjun (from the French pronunciation of St. John), growing food, the Lord of the Rings and we also get a cane of sugar from the side of the road for me to munch on later. He also lives in a tent. Very good.
He drops me 128 km away at Grafton, which is a dirge of concrete in paradise; motels, KFC, and hundreds of lorries. I can’t be arsed to hitch, the sun’s about to go down anyway. 

I find a spot by the road to hide my tat, I play geetar to an interested horse until it gets dark then go and hunt for free food. All I manage is a few fries somebody has left at McDonalds and seven reasonable-looking chicken McNuggets in a box found in the top of a dumpster. (Oh and some sweet and sour sauce.)
Slowly eating these, I ponder what human beings do and have done throughout the world in order to survive. I watch the traffic passing through the space in front of me, full of plastic advertising hoardings, direction signs and orange fizzing lamp-posts, people going wherever they are going, why-ever they are going there. I imagine what else must have occupied this cubic mile of space. Forest. Hunters, recent and ancient. Dinosaurs. The sea maybe. All chasing a rolling wheel of life and death.

 

Wandering back to my stuff feeling mostly fed, I am enjoying all the exotic plants, flowers, bushes and pods here and think of my mum. She would have loved all these exciting plants.

The town redeems itself by being in possession of the only strange sign I have seen in Australia so far. At the edge of town outside a house it reads: 

‘For sale: rabbits and dwarf babys’.
I try playing guitar to the horses again, but they are all too freaked-out by me moving around in the dark and the continuous disorientating rumble and roar and clashing glaring headlights of passing lorries. It must be like a bad trip to them. They’re all highly strung.
December 18th. Thursday.

I don’t sleep very well. I get a ride for about three and a half hours to somewhere I don’t remember, then a short ride to Kew with a builder who I somehow knew was going to stop for me. This has happened before occasionally so it isn’t too much of a shock. Another short ride with Wes and F18 and F1-11 his two pet budgies who go everywhere with him; he was discharged from the RAAF on medical grounds and now he goes camping a lot and takes the budgies with him on his shoulder. He also delivers pizza for a living. (I think the birds stay at home for that one probably.)
After Wes, I get picked up by Dave who is from Surfer’s Paradise and driving home to stay at his folks in Forster. He decides to show me the sights of the town which is in a very beautiful setting, the north of ‘The Great Lakes’, an absolutely stunning area with lakes, freshwater fishing, the sea, beaches, sea fishing, hill, pasture-land, mountains and rich tropical forest. We see dolphins, take a lookout from a tower on a hilltop and then go and sit by a lake and drink Tooheys stubbies. Being with this guy is great fun and I feel like I’m feeling more confident about being in Australia now.

I sleep fantastically in bush outside Forster that night.
Next morning I find a dead snake (road-kill), which could become breakfast and possibly a daring pair of shoes if I am feeling adventurous but I’m not and it doesn’t. 

I get picked up by three young babbling women fresh out of school and off to spend their hols hanging out on the beach. What a friendly bunch they are.

Another short ride with a gruff guy trying to convince me that I should stay in his hostel. Poor sod’s obviously desperate for custom but it’s wasted on me. He tells me not to steal his groceries when I get my bag out of the back of his car. Cheek.

 

I wait for ages in the beautiful but hideously named ‘Bungwahl’. It’s wonderfully different from a lot of the places I have seen down the East Coast so far; here there is lots of forest and lakes right down by the sea, a complex mixture that the road manages to wend a wigglesome way through.
Another ride with Dan a musician and ‘ex-hippie’ (like me?) who buys me a beer again. It’s true, people in New South Wales do seem to be noticeably different from Queenslanders; the southerners are noticably more civilised. I put it down to the weather. 

From Karuah I get a ride with a young chap from Surfers who has travelled the US, thumped a bus driver, shags a lot, is a lifeguard and is mates with some character off the TV soap ‘Home and Away’. He drops me in Turramurra, a suburb of Sydney. 
I bunk the double-decker train into the city and wander down to the opera house, cos that’s the only reason I came here; to do the cheesy tourist thing. I sit by a dockside and do people-watching and eat the crackers that Dan gave me. 

I walk around to the Opera House and have a closer look. It really is quite a work of architectural wonder in a crazy lines going everywhere abstract kind of way. I discover it looks better and better the closer I get to it.

This part of Sydney is very chilled out, housey tunes and people partying nearby. 
I sleep in the park right next to the Opera House very adequately. (I am later informed that this was a supremely dumb place to sleep rough, but I had no problems.)

Next morning: I have just discovered the herb garden in amongst the rest of Sydney Botanical Gardens which is next to the Opera House. Hoorah! I catch up on two weeks of malnutrition and munch my way through a delicious breakfast salad that I find growing in the flower-beds.

I meet a Brummie couple on a Christmas sea cruise to New Zealand. Nice to meet some homies again.
ADVERT: Situation Vacant for symbiotic relationship with hungry bird or frog. All the flies you can eat. Tiny little peace-destroying bastards. 
In Search of the Chocolate Pudding Tree.

A few years ago, a friend of Gill (an ex-girlfriend) was telling us of the existence of the ‘Chocolate Pudding Tree’. A tree which has gourd fruit with a chocolatey goo inside it. This seems quite plausible to me. Sugar comes from plants, cocoa comes from plants.  I don’t see any reason why there should not be a plant that has both in them. I asked my friends. They thought I’d been tricked. I asked Kew Gardens. They’d not heard of it, though they do have a chocolate daisy. I asked at Hampton Court Flower Show. They just thought I must be on some stoned hippy munchies fantasy. Then a long time later I mention it to Dawn on the farm in Belize and she confirmed its existence; It’s called a Black Zapote (Diospyros digyna) and is related to the Mama Zapote that they eat in some parts of Central America. Leona says it exists; they have it here in Australia. Now I am about to go into the Sydney Botanical Gardens Tropical Glasshouse. Surely they must be able to come up trumps? (Sound effect of drumroll mingled with me scurrying about in undergrowth) 
Doh. No can do, but I do discover a little bit more information about it; it is also sometimes referred to as a Black Persimmon (that’s like a Sharon fruit isn’t it?) or Chocolate Persimmon.

They can get to about the size of a large grapefruit and when properly ripe, have a smooth creamy flesh inside that is the texture of papaya. 

So if you’re ever wondering what I’d like for Christmas (apart from my two front teeth); well now you know…

More successfully, I hunt down Harry’s Cafe de Wheels down on the wonderfully named Wooloomooloo Bay, and have beef pie with mash potato on top, then mushy peas pressed into the top of that with the back of the ladle, then onions squished into the top of that, all served up like a savoury version of an ice cream sundae. So impressed I am that I have it twice.
Afterwards I head back to Townhall train station and jump a ride to Liverpool, a half hour ride out of the city to find a decent hitching spot. Some way along the journey four scary looking ticket inspectors come by. Oh shit – no way can I dodge four of them.

An Asian guy asks to see my ticket.

‘Err. I don’t have one’

‘Any special reason why not?’

‘Nope.’

‘You are British? If you show me your passport there is no problem.’

Fumble fumble. He points to a small badge on his uniform. ‘I was fighting for Britain in the Falklands conflict in eighty-three.’

‘You are a Gurkha?!’

‘Yes. Thank you for your passport, everything is okay. Enjoy your stay in Australia!’
Now there’s loyalty to the Brits, even down to an anti-monarchist like me. Maybe with my short hair, huge pack and scabby boots he thinks I’m ex-services or something. Whatever. (A couple of days later when retelling this incident I am to discover that that day, the ticket collectors in Sydney are on strike and are not collecting fares. Whatever their issue is, it seems now that they’d won their argument.) 
Many stops later; Liverpool takes a long time to arrive. Lots of Arabic. I walk a long way out and check out a supermarket dumpster. I get two tomatoes, two onions, an avocado, half a melon and a pineapple. I walk on a bit, eating the avocado and the melon. No point putting those in my rucksack, it would automatically all turn into lubricated vegetable squish.
I Walk some more and stick my thumb out. It’s the arse end of the day. I get a ride with a family in a camper van. They drop me at a servo about 100 km down the road. I sleep in the bush, very lovely with lots of birds. I can’t get away from the traffic noise though. I sleep good. 
I hitch a ride in the morning with a Ukranian bloke with water in his petrol tank. He’s a bit of a disaster area but he seems harmless. He seems to think everything that goes wrong is possessed by the devil.

He drops me off by the Canberra turn-off on Hume Highway. I eat my lunch of the usual dehydrated nastiness of soup powder and dried bread that I’ve been carrying since Leona’s house. 
I get picked up by a seemingly crazy-looking middle-aged woman listening to hip hop and wearing dark sunglasses. She’s Barbara and I like her a lot, she’s ‘a bit of a gypsy’, grows oysters and makes jewellery for a living. She’s into runes and living right. Off to visit her bloke in prison in on traffic offences. She drops me in Canberra, gives me her address and I accidentally leave a load of my stuff in her car.
I decide to go to the National Museum, I walk in through the entrance straight into a dining hall. I go into food mode and eye up the tables for abandoned meals. I score, and sit myself down to a free lunch. Anyone who says there’s no such thing as a free lunch just isn’t trying.

 

The museum is monumental. It’s a very colourful and rather an in-yer-face architectural explosion. It’s quite avante garde architecturally in a sort-of 1980s big hair and bad trousers kind of way. I think in a place like Canberra with so little history anyway they can get away with it. 

I then walk to Parliament Building and then to the war memorial to hopefully see kangaroos (Barbara said they like to hang out here) and then to sleep. I don’t sleep too well, as the wind has picked up. 
In the morning I look round the war museum, very interesting. Then I go to the National Gallery which I’m rather impressed by the quality of the art they’ve got. As I am walking out into the sculpture garden I am idly wandering how nice it would be to see a Maillol sculpture, and hey presto there in front of me there one is; ‘La Montagne’ – ‘The Mountain’; a lovely chunky lady in repose. Made in 1937. This is a really nice surprise, this is the first piece of his I’ve ever seen for real.
Canberra is a bit of an oddity, as everyone says it is. It all looks like it fell out of the sky last week in one big lump, like an alien Milton Keynes. (Infamous dodgy English ‘New Town’ experiment which is festooned with concrete cows to make it seem more rural. Possibly the distant sound of town planners going ‘cuckoo’ emanating from loudspeakers carefully hidden in trees would be more effective…)

Anyhow, despite its artificial sheen I somehow manage to like Canberra. Maybe it’s the old tourist-tinted sunglasses at work again. Here for five minutes, admire the superficialities then bugger off. No doubt if I had to live here, then maybe I’d be thinking of doing myself in.
I get directions out of town, pick lots of plum cherries on the way (an orchard is built into the town plan – now that IS impressive), I go shopping and buy a huge kilo of cheese for five bucks and some powdered mash potato and a bar of chocolate and a pizza. Eat pizza, blag pen after failing to find one lying about on the pavement then I get a short ride to the far side of Queenbeyan. Sleep in bush, very kushty.
December 23rd 2003

In the morning I get a ride with Jens from Sweden but who has been in Australia for thirty-three years. Aha! That explains his distinctly northern European looks. He’s just been to Canberra to tell them he has found giant dragonflies on his new property. It seems there are only six known pairs in Australia, so he’s very excited. He used to be in tree genetics until they asked him to do genetic engineering and he religiously told them where they could stick their research.
The flies are TERRIBLE. I get a ride with very nice landfill site manager to Braidwood. Now here’s a man who knows a thing or two about flies I bet. 

‘Yes’ he tells me. ‘They are indeed bloody horrible.’
I wait ages for another ride. The flies are still terrible. I have my net over head and I am starting to flail about like a man drowning, which in an unfunny kind of way, I sort of am. Despite looking like a demented bee-keeper, I get a ride with a surfy bloke to Moruya. I hitch with two German and Malaysian students from Canberra to Bumbo Rd. 
I get a ride with a young guy called Brad. We stop by the sea at Merimbula for the night, talk lots and seem to get on okay. He loses his credit card so I sub him fifty bucks which he says he can pay me back when we get to Melbourne. We leave next morning and drive about three hours down the coast to the big southern city. 

Christmas eve is the weirdest ever. A total lack of any signs of familiarity. No old friends, completely wrong weather. Wrong traditional habits. We spend all day driving round Laverton, Werribee trying to find somebody that Brad knows that might actually be in. We loop round in suburb-shaped circles all day. Very odd. I am getting a little anxious. I remind Brad that maybe he could get my fifty bucks from a bank whilst we are doing all this aimless driving around. When Brad does check out a bank he suddenly realises that they are all closed for Christmas. He’ll do it the day after Boxing Day.  

Eventually we arrive at the house of a guy called Alan. 

Alan is a bit heavy metal, has long black hair and doesn’t look like he gets much exercise. It’s a messy smokey bachelor pad with all the curtains drawn and a drum kit taking up half the living room. We smoke, drink and talk and afterwards me and Brad leave to go to sleep by the bay-side on the edge of the suburbs.
Next morning is Christmas day and Brad needs to go and arrange Family Duty with his ex and their kids. I spend my time left to my own devices in a launderette washing my skanky clothes properly for the first time in about three weeks. Its very good to be clean. This is my first full day in Melbourne.
Boxing Day. 

Brad arranges to see his kids. I go to Melbourne and watch the third Lord of the Rings film ‘The Return of the King’ which is very good. Last year ‘The Two Towers’ was my Boxing Day treat on Vancouver Island. 

Afterwards I meet a hammered dulcimer player in the nearby park and I get to have a little tinkle, I like the feel of Melbourne very much. I love the trams, the trees and the diverse peoples and buildings. I wait for Brad to come to Flinders St. station. He doesn’t come, so I head back on the train back towards Alan’s place.

 

Teenage girls on the train are being crap about their passed out mate next to them. One of them is being loudly racist. I tell her to mind what she says on a train so full of people. I get off the train and I am trying to remember where Alan lives. Being suburbia, the houses all look pretty similar. Eventually I find his house. I get wrecked until Brad gets back. Brad is getting increasingly embroiled in family friction. His ex-missus Steph in is some domestic mess with her man ‘Jay’ and her daughters ‘Talia’ and ‘Ber-jean’.
On Sunday I am left again in a lovely park all day reading the biography of Billy Connolly ‘Bravemouth’ whilst Brad sorts out his life. Brad swears and threatens a lot but is essentially a good bloke.

I’m looking forward to going to Tas; I feel ready for it. Australia is what it is. The country is vast and spectacularly beautiful. Its racial tension palpable and evidence of male chauvinism is the ugly side of an otherwise endearingly matter-of-fact approach to things.
Altona Beach Monday December 28th. 

I spent a lot of time on my own yesterday, and notice a distinct quietness in my mind. A total absence of anxiety.

People watching; Eastern Europeans, origin unknown, having presumably escaped from the wrath of some twisted dictator or other. Slav-ish tongues sound like a delicatessen of language. Two African girls. Aussie Aussies in beanies and revealing tops. Big Muslim women in head scarves. Fig trees give birth all over the park to almost-but-not-quite edible fruit. 

Picnics and knee-deep forays into the sea. Post Christmas, good natured.

Brad has left me here because Steph has been hit and needs sixteen stitches. He is very upset, wants to kill Jay, but decides dealing with it through the police is wiser. I am impressed by his resolve. He comes back about 7 pm. He has been at Alan’s since 2 pm getting stoned. I feel put out that he has left me hanging around for so long. We go back to Alan’s and they watch some horrendous porn flick. Brad and me sleep out in open parkland.
December 29th Tuesday. 

Brad goes to talk with Steph and her family whilst I am left to hang out by Werribee River. It’s a very beautiful spot for a suburb, really. Brad comes back much later at 7 pm. He tells me that Steph’s family have decided to go to Painsville (up the coast) to change the locks on the house. Her parents opinion of Brad has changed dramatically, and they realise actually what a good guy he is after all. They want him around to protect Steph and Steph wants him back. This all gets discussed at Alan’s. There ensues a strange conversation started by Alan about the nature of evil. Alan puts on another revolting porn flick. Afterwards me and Brad leave and park up by Laverton School for the night.
December 30th. 

Brad drives me back to riverside spot. Brad is going to say goodbye to the kids just around the corner from where he drops me. He says he will only be an hour, two at the most. I wait by the river, bored out of my wits. When two hours is up, I go to find the house or van where he said he’d be. He’s not there. Brad has all my stuff, even my boots. I strongly suspect that he’s done a runner. I am confused by the fact that he could have done it several times already by now. Weird. 

Back at Alans gaff, Alan says he might be back later. He isn’t. Alan is stand-offish, he obviously doesn’t want me to be there. Maybe I’m just not heavy metal enough for him. He seems alarmed at the idea of me sleeping in the garden. I suspect he might be keeping me occupied whilst Brad makes his getaway. When Alan goes to bed, I look in Alan’s wallet to find out his full name. It’s not his wallet, there’s an ID card of some innocent ordinary unknown bloke, who doesn’t look like he might be a friend of either Alan or Brad. no money in the wallet. Suspicious.
Sleepless night on the couch. In the morning I make a reverse charge call to my bank in England and close my account. Alan makes breakfast. I go to the Salvation Army shop in Werribee and get shoes, clothes and food. I go to the cop shop and talk to the duty sergeant. He knows of this Brad fella, says he wouldn’t trust him an inch. He is a sympathetic sort and offers me the address of the house Brad used to live in. He tells me he’s not supposed to, but he can see I am in a bit of a tough situation. I go and check out the house and talk to Dan the current occupant. Hear the truth about Brad; Dan confirms what the policeman has told me. I have this weird mix of feelings of realisation. The inevitable loss of my stuff, of disgust that I’ve been hanging out with conmen and the thought that my whole trip has just been blown sky-high. 

I feel disgusted, strangely excited by the drama and spun out from all the adrenalin.
Dan gives me Steph’s address and I go and visit her to piece together what is really happening. She’s not injured. I meet Jay, who is nice friendly guy. I go back to Alan’s. Brad hasn’t returned. 

I go to the cop shop 5 pm. Break down after being dealt with by heavy handed young cop (idiot) This copper is unimpressed that I met Brad whilst hitch-hiking. He smarmily points out that its bound to happen doing something so stupid as hitch-hiking. 

I flatly tell him that I’ve been hitching for eighteen years and that nearly all the people I have ever met are good kind people… When he asks where I am going to sleep, I think about my usual response, which would be to hunker down on some empty scrap of land out of the way. But then it occurs to me that it is New Years Eve, and some deep down level of resilience determines that I am not going to be beaten; Partying on New Years Eve is better than sleeping in a ditch in the suburbs. 
I bunk a ride on the train and I feel a glimmer of hope. I realise that I still have the future! I decide to enjoy the evening and really make the most of it. I have a spark of internal power. I dance my socks off to a great jazzy swing band, chat with a nice South African woman and afterwards go and sleep in the park, not before first coming face to face with a possum staring at me in a tree – I think it is a cat at first. It seems to be very timid and certainly is very cutesy looking. Protected in Australia, highly persecutable in New Zealand, I later find out.
New Years Day.

I form a plan to get my act together.

In the city I realise how thankful I am to meet good people and help others where I can. I am feeling ‘helpful’. I feel very pleased with myself that I can turn this into a good situation; re-affirming my resilience. Chumbawumba song ‘Tub-thumping’ in my head; ‘I get knocked down but I get up again, they’re never gonna bring me down’. It reminds me of ‘Priorities’ a prayer; this is a Christianised version I found… I’ve put it in cos I like it);
‘I asked God to grant me patience. God said no. 

Patience is a by-product of tribulations; it isn’t granted, it is earned.

I asked God to give me happiness. God said no. I give you blessings. Happiness is up to you.

I asked God to spare me pain. God said no. Suffering draws you apart from worldly cares and brings you closer to me.

I asked God to make my spirit grow. God said no. You must grow on your own, but I will prune you to make you fruitful.

I asked for all things so that I might enjoy life. God said no. I will give you life so that you may enjoy all things.

I asked God to help me love others, as much as God loves me. God said… Ahh, finally you have the idea.

Stop telling God how big your storm is. Instead tell your storm how big your God is.’
Coff. Where was I? Oh yeah – Karma: All the way across Australia I have been telling people that I don’t have much money. I really ought to take more care with what I put out into the universe. What some would call the law of universal attraction.
It’s lovely for New Years Day to be sunny. Melbourne trams skate between rows of sunlit-dappled plane trees, their branches reach up like cupped hands. Tourists and locals enjoying the holiday, looking at art. The entrance to the National Museum of Art (yes there seems to be two) faced off with an enormous wall of glass thirty foot high and a hundred foot long with water cascading thinly down its face making the whole thing look liquid. 
I discover an 18th century painting of Dolbabarn Castle on Llyn Peris next to Llanberis where I once used to live in 1990 in North Wales. I blew the minds of three young Aussies who happen to be looking at it when I tell them I used to live next to where the painting is set and how we and my mates would go and do full moon and magic mushroom looning about in the castle. It was weird to be able to put my finger up to the painting and show them where it all happened. We get on very well until they ask me what I am up to. As soon as I tell my story about being robbed, its as if the shutters have suddenly come down and they don’t want to know me and my story about Wales suddenly seems like an elaborate lie to them, as if really all I ever wanted to do was tap them for money.

The thought had never occurred to me. Baffling and sad.
At the end of the day in the Botanical Gardens I sit and wonder about everything that’s passed over the last few days. I feel like evil is seeping into my reality. I am feeling paranoid. I question how can I deal with this? I realise I’ve had quite a traumatic time, have done tons of talking, walking, stressing and must be extremely tired. I meditate. Take control of my mind. The spot I have found here is surrounded by beautiful bushes and trees. I am next to a tranquil lake with ducks and swans. The gardens get locked in the evening, so I have a feeling of security here. I go to sleep. I feel lots better in the morning.
January 2nd. 

I go to the British High Commission at 9 am feeling on an even keel and good about that. When I go in and start to tell them my story, then the emotion kicks in again and I’m crying again. The woman behind the counter brings me a cup of tea and settles me down. Then an official chap called Phil from the north of England talks to me and tells me to deal with just one thing at a time, and after another breakdown and another cup of tea, we agree on a plan of action;
I am to go to Alan’s to check if my stuff has been returned to him, go to Werribee Police Station to file a robbery charge, stop my other bank account and inform WWOOF Australia to be on their guard from Brad and his white van.

Phil tells me to make a deal with Alan – if he gets Brad to get my stuff back I won’t file a report. I am really freaked by the idea of having to go to Alan’s. Phil gives me fifty bucks for food and internet and off I go back to Alan’s. 
Alan says ‘Brad just left, he went to drop your stuff at Laverton Police station and then he’s going to see Steph.’ 

I tell him I don’t believe it. Alan says ‘Who knows what to believe’. Alan is too weird. I reckon he’s working with Brad. I go to Laverton Police station. Stuff not there as I expected. I go to Werribee, cancel bank account (ANZ), go to library and discover I’ve got 230 pounds (500 dollars). No joy at Cash Converters, where I thought I might find my MP3 player. 
I go to Werribee police station and as I am being dealt with, a cop tells me a rucksack has been handed into Laverton police station. I’ve been distressed and emotional, my nerves jangling. This feels unbelievable in an emotionally burnt out weird and miraculous believe-it-when-I-see-it kind of way. I tell the woman in the Salvo shop that my rucksack might have been returned. Good feeling. I get to Laverton. There it is. Amazing. Stereo’s there. Passport’s there. Cards are there. Camera’s there. Plane ticket’s there. Now I can get to New Zealand!
No money returned, nor guitar, waterproofs or WWOOF list or Barabra’s address. It looks like he might use these addresses either to try to find me or con other people. I tell the cops this, they help me make a note for Alan to give to Brad. Maybe he can get me the rest of my stuff. D-day is Monday noon. I’m not counting on a result. At least I know I’m safe for New Zealand; anything else is a bonus. 
I go back to Melbourne and sit by the Yarra feeling enormous relief and I am wondering what to do next. Lots of children nearby are marvelling at the hundreds of fruit-bats/flying foxes flying across the River Yarra. Possums scrabble about in trees like cat-sized squirrels. Rats take their chances where they can, sliding almost invisibly through islands of shadow. A woman comes and chats and gives me ten dollars and a drink. God Bless Kindness!
I realise I have to contact everyone I know and warn them about Brad. I go and Email everyone possible – he’s seen lots of email addresses. German bloke sitting next to me gives me the remaining half an hour of internet credit he has to me for free as he’s leaving Melbourne tomorrow. Without me even asking him.
January 3rd

I write an email to my cousin Jackie in New Zealand that I am hoping to visit and Barbara the ‘gypsy woman’ I met just before Canberra. Right; that’s everyone’s security dealt with as far as I can go (except WWOOF). 

I go and buy wash gloves, go to a disabled toilet, wash my clothes in real soap powder (this seems to work loads better than shampoo) and give myself a damn good scrub all over. Re-check what I need to do. Confirm with Melbourne police station that my remaining 450 dollars is safe. More than enough for one way ticket to New Zealand.
I can relax a bit now.

I go to ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) and see a giant talking interactive head on a screen twenty foot high, a rather nonsensical affair. ‘Erotic’ robot Bjork video and other curiosities. Watch ‘body code’ – eight minutes of mind blowing CGI about DNA. You can see it on the internet at http://www.wehi.edu.au/education/wehi-tv/dna/animator.html

 

The human body has a hundred trillion cells in it. Only ten trillion are human. (The rest are bacteria.) Each of the body’s ten trillion cells (that’s 10,000,000,000,000) has a string of DNA 1.8 metres long in it. Hang on, let’s work this out. One thousand metres is a kilometre, so…. That’s…. 18,000,000,000 – eighteen billion kilometres of DNA in your body. This is a string twisted into a helix about seven or eight times over. (‘Very curly wurly indeed’ I believe is the technical mathematical name for this form.) Each DNA has the ability to replicate itself and has recipes for 30,000 different body functions and components (proteins and blood bits etc). Sit back and imagine all this is going on inside you right now. Truly truly mind-blowing. Now next time somebody asks you what you do for a living you can tell them.
And then: our DNA is about ninety-five percent the same as a chimpanzee and sixty-three percent the same as a banana. So we have about ten billion kilometres of banana DNA inside us. No wonder we’re all so goofy.
Outside, the National Theatre on the other side of the road is advertising: ‘The St. Petersburg Poppet Theatre’, which makes me think of sweet little Russian actors who all need to be looked after and treated very gently.
After that I try to find Melbourne’s Salvation Army shop but it is very closed when I get there. I go to the library just as it is closing. I walk up to the university, come back, and decide to celebrate the return of most of my stuff with a double cheeseburger fries and chocolate milkshake at Hungry Jacks. I decide to splash out and buy a pen that actually works and find two dollars hiding in the chocolate counter whilst in the process of buying it. I don’t know why but biros seem to be largely incompatible with Australia. Maybe it’s humidity or something. No gravity jokes please.
I go and sit to munch my happy meal, watching hip-hoppers outside the library doing their break-dance moves. Fancy and neat. Cities can be ace. As much as I love the cosiness of the countryside, so do I enjoy the creative energy and human expression that goes on when you get lots of people together. I sit in the park and watch the possums. I want one. I bet they’d make good pets; they seem so tame. Lots of people partying. 
I feel a bit lonely. No sooner thought than two Irish guys from near Sligo and then moments later four of their mates all come over and say ‘hello!’ 

They’ve just met each other through Danny Wallace in Flinders St, promoting his fake cult ‘Join Me’. 

They tell me that there’s no money involved and the only thing you have to do is perform random acts of kindness every Friday (www.join-me.co.uk). Just days before leaving England I had seen his book in a newsagent and had flicked through it, so I was already roughly aware of what it was about.
Lots of synchronicity today. That’s definitely a good sign. I go back to my usual spot in the Botanical Gardens and sleep very soundly. This has got to be the classiest rough sleeping I’ve ever done. (In a city it’s called ‘rough-sleeping’, out in the sticks it’s just plain old camping*. The term ‘rough-sleeping’ is just a cultural put-down really. I think that by living in the park and eating at the free food kitchens, anyone could live in Melbourne for as long as they liked on no money. Curious thought that.

(*Since I originally wrote this, the term ‘wild-camping’ has been invented; it feels like my lifestyle has been commodified for the middle-classes, which I find hugely irritating…You can probably pay someone 160 quid for a weekend workshop to learn how how to do it. Grrrrr….)
January 4th. 

Very weird clouds; it pisses down with rain. I go and write in the Clematis Pavilion and feed sparrowy things bits of bread. After the rain has eased off enough, I go and take photos in the National Gallery of Frank Geary’s chair and the Sarah Sze book. 

New curious artist Tom Friedman (Phaidon Press); I like his sensibility – a packet of spaghetti boiled and then dried and then each piece of spaghetti glued end to end to form a continuous wobbly loop. Every word in the English language all written down on a large sheet of paper on the floor. Random dots almost all linked together by double-ended arrows. I take photos of the Sarah Sze book without the security guard seeing me. They come out blurry. Oh well.

It’s great to find a new artist I like, a bit like a mental Christmas present. Sarah Sze’s work consists of crazy spacious sculptures made of old bits of wire and plastic junk. They look like day-glo city landscapes made by Heath Robinson on acid. 

I like Frank Geary’s ‘Wibbly-sided Chair’ made from laminations of criss-crossed corrugated cardboard (gives me an idea for making a tree.

I take photos of people in the museum. The stark angular concrete and chrome make a very contrasting background.
Outside the rain has stopped. I contemplate the worthwhileness of removing coins from the four foot deep cold water fountain outside the museum. Looks like a few other people are peering in, wondering the same thing.
I go to the police station at Flinders St. Station asking where I can get free food. Most unexpectedly, a very nice PC gives me two veggie wraps, a big salad sandwich, an orange, two doughnuts and a bagel. WOW! 

My misfortune has led me to some very decent people. 

I go awandering and see Nick Nicholas, an English street performer of wondrous prestidigitacity. 

Dressed in Victorian top-hat and tails, he gathers his audience, flinging his arms wide open and shouting ‘Come! Ladies and gentlemen! For your delight and delectation, I will perform for you now right before your very eyes marvellous feats of prestidigitation that will make you gasp in wonder and ashonishment!’

What a fab word;

‘Presto’: speedy/nimble – ‘digit’: finger. Hence the word for the sleight of hand that is conjuring. And, I suppose that’s where ‘Hey Presto!’ comes from.
After him, I go walking further and come across many wonderful pavement paintings. Very very inspiring indeed. Maybe I could make money in New Zealand being creative instead of only doing farm work? I’d get to talk to arty people too… that would be cool (instead of just bored male car drivers). http://www.chalkcircle.com.au. 

I’d been wondering about this myself in Victoria Vancouver Island last year. After this little bout of excitement, an escapologist. 
I wait for the soup van at Flinders St. train station but it doesn’t look like it is coming. I sleep very well in my usual spot.
Walking into the city next morning a jogging body builder trots past. In the last couple of days I’ve been enormously impressed by the effect on me of encountering people doing all kinds of different things that they want to do, being creative, making beauty, showing kindness, having fun and being surrounded by forms that are all part of the through-flow of inspiration; interesting architecture, paintings. Stuff that makes the world worth living in. People tending beautiful gardens, hip hop graffiti. 
My new-found extreme circumstances are obliging me to re-evaluate what is actually good in the world. 

Now… let’s see if I’m going to get my 600 dollars and my guitar back…

In the Travellers Advice Service whilst typing I hear ‘Wandering Star’ playing on the radio. It reminds me of when my mum used to sing it to me when we sat on the bus going shopping when I was about five. It always used to bring a tear to my eye for years; It’s the first song I ever knew, and I would hear it reverberating through my mum’s belly as I lay with my head across it. I think I’d like it played at my funeral.
In suburban Altona, at the train station a train stops and a drunk bloke gets off it. I ask him for directions to the library and then, whilst he’s telling me, he flops his knob out and goes for a piss in a handily waist-level rubbish bin. This is not quite what I was expecting; passers-by looks disgusted. I cheerfully remark to one particularly incensed commuter that at least there’s thousands of nice respectable people like us to out-number the dodgy ones. At least the fella has made some kind of connection with ‘proper behaviour’, however inadequate. It’s a bit like a young cat investigating a newfangled cat litter tray, standing in it, sniffing it, then climbing back out before doing a big stinky poo on a nice clean carpet.
(Some time later.) 

Well my note doesn’t work, so the wonderful PC Broughton goes round to Alan’s ‘in the wee small hours’ to try and manages to get back my waterproofs and my outback hat and nothing else. Brad spun some story about leaving everything outside the cop shop, and how he’s loaned me money… Well he’s been arrested now; there were two previous warrants out on him anyway, so I’ve been part of some kind of justice being done at least, I hope. Cogitate various ideas of retribution, but can’t put up with the idea of him seeking further revenge or something. WWOOF Australia is issuing a warning to its members.
I finish all my diary typing up at the internet cafe and then go and get loads of sandwiches and rolls at Victoria Market from the free food people and have a chat with one of the volunteers: I haven’t had a proper conversation with somebody for a while. I get my money out of the bank, and after quite some indecision, brought a ticket for Tasmania – that’s where I’d originally intended to go, and I don’t want circumstances to spoil it. I don’t know if there is work there or not. It’s a bit of a gamble. 
On the way to the ferry I find two fresh wholemeal rolls sitting on top of a bin, and several good oranges that a fruit seller has thrown out; so that’s me sorted for breakfast. 

At the departure lounge there are lots of fat old Greeks, waddling about and gabbling loudly, apparently comparing sandwiches and pointing out of the window postulating on the arrival of the ferry and demonstrating that universal middle-aged disregard for dress sense.
I am approached by a bright and smiley chap from Canada. More specifically, he’s from Calgary, which probably makes him an oil man. Actually he’s a globe-trotting geologist, and currently when he’s not flitting about on holidays or doing dare devil extreme sports, hiking or running marathons, he’s scrutinising the rocks of Algeria. He tells me about his family, how they fled from Armenia to Tehran, to Russia to Slovakia and then to Melbourne and then Canada. We sit on the ferry looking out the back window until we run out of conversation. 
I wander off out on deck to revive myself after a bad nights sleep in the park. Sea air does its thing, the ships wake passes  below in hypnotic swirls. Gulls fly alongside hopeful of fish or tasty vomit morsels (I can only presume). 

I get chatting to a Quebecois woman called Annie, at first I can’t work out where she’s from. She’s very lovely, and excitingly has a very similar outlook on life as me; doesn’t want a career, wants to do things with horses, wants to build her own house. Unfortunately she has a boyfriend. Oh well. I spend most of the rest of the journey with her and the two young Germans from Berlin that she’s with. It’s a nice change for me to get to talk to backpackers. Often I feel bored by being places and only meeting backpackers, but every now and again it’s a welcome reality shift to be with other ‘outsiders’.
I scrabble for leftovers to eat and acquire half a plate of cold lasagne (delicious) and rather bizarrely, an entire cucumber, four carrots and an apple. And then I remember the quarantine laws. I try to eat the veg but it all tastes like it’s been marinated in petrol anyway. I bet this is the reason so many meat-eaters think vegetables are inedible. It’s because so many non-organic vegetables ARE inedible. 

I ask some Tassies about work opportunities and I’m told there is lots. I tell them I was trying to find out about work in Tas whilst in Melbourne, but no-one there has any idea. ‘No, no-one on the mainland knows anything about us’ I’m told.

I play with some kids for half and hour, and it’s time to get off the ship; I arrange to meet the backpackers off the ship as I am going to get a ride with them.

We miss each other, which I find disheartening. I wander down the road some and sleep under a bush.