Tazzie

​TAZZIE
Next morning Saturday January 10th(?)

I wake up slow and still I haven’t decided whether to head for Launceston where I’m told there is lots of building work, or whether to head down the West Coast. There is spectacular scenery there and I would end up in Hobart. I figure there must be building work down there too, and I’ll still get to see a bit of the island too. It’s said that in Tassie, if the first car doesn’t stop for you the next one will. Let’s see what happens…
Well actually it is the sixth, which is still pretty good going. Melbourne woman driving with her husband, the ex-governor of some tiny South Pacific island. He has a glorious Glasgow accent. Middle-aged, full of life and very lovely people. We drive through the village of Penguin and they drop me at Ulverston.

Twelve cars later, I get a ride with a sparky to Burnie. Plenty of work on the island. Good – good!
Les, a pig farmer. (That explains the ripe smell in his car.) Thick-set and red in the neck and very friendly. He tells me that he would like to travel the world (but instinct tells me he never will). He has a cousin who is the presenter of the Australian version of ‘Sale of the Century’. He tells me that he has a wealth of knowledge on the nutritional value of pigs feet. How useful. I can see him on ‘Mastermind’ now…
I walk up the road. A woman calls out and tells me my bag looks heavy. (It is.) She tells me she can’t give me a ride cos she’s got to take her son to play golf. No I don’t get it either.

Another example of that friendly-but-ultimately-unhelpful thing that hitch-hikers sometimes encounter. 

The view from here looks just like South Wales (more so that New South Wales does), I get a ride with Wes, his daughter Rhianna and Ed the Pitbull/Staffy cross who dangerously and ferociously promptly sits on my lap and demands cuddles. (I am happy to oblige.) We drive to Warrimah, Wes reckons there might be work in a hotel here, but first would I like to go back to his place for a cup of tea? Yeah sure. Two cups of tea later, Wes is talking cars to his mate, smoking bongs and I have this overwhelming feeling come over me that this is a huge waste of my time and that I might get stuck here in his sideways reality forever. I tell Wes I really do have to get on, and leave. I go to the hotel. 
The manager is very friendly, but there’s no work going on. ‘Maybe I could come back in the Winter?’ Warrimah is an empty place of small wooden shacks perched at the head of a valley. It looks like the last time anything happened here may have been when someone might have done a particularly loud fart in 1942. It’s quiet and the place has a magical eerie lightness in the air, even though it’s grey and misty at the same time, like you get in the Highlands of Scotland. I am therefore drawn to the place in a ‘retire and die’ kind of way.
Pondering the unlikeliness of ever getting a ride out of here. I resign myself to walking the seven kilometres to the main highway. I am examining a Broom bush and its pods, when I hear someone yelling ‘You wanna lift?’ Tootling over to where the sound comes from, a couple in their sixties offer to get me out of here. She has wisely deduced that my interest in the local flora means that I am probably not an axe-murderer (correct of course). I am with Geoff and Lyn, quite unlike the Geoff and Lyn cartoon that appears in the English Sun newspaper; (He rugged and pointless, she even more pointless but with her jubblies flying about all over the place on account of her always being inexplicably naked by the second frame of the cartoon.)
Anyhow. Lyn is a human dynamo and her jubblies most definitely and thankfully restrained under her clothing. She’s on a mission to do everything. So it really is a good job her jubblies are under wraps.

When we stop for a cup of tea she even buys me a sausage roll. I’ve already bought a chocolate ice cream and a large onion, and almost had her convinced when all deadpan and straight-faced I tell that I like to eat ice cream and raw onion together. I tell Geoff that she reminds me a lot of my friend Leona in Darwin who seizes every opportunity she can after living a repressed life with a crap husband. 

At the end of the ride, Lyn asks me if she’s too old for me, with a crafty twinkle in her eye and a huge grin. I ask her if she’s into doing things with horses and going to New Zealand. She says yes and before I can think of a clever response she says ‘Only kidding!’ gives me a peck on the cheek and off they go. Doh! Chances fumbled again!
Being on the road with a backpack and being thirty-five can get a little disconcerting sometimes. Pretty much ninety percent of people I meet either are settled and professional or the back packers are teenagers on a gap year to somehow compensate for their eventual careers as bank managers and settling down. Most of the rest are scumbag blokes roughly my own age who can’t afford to stay in the same place lest they get their heads kicked in. These are not people I wish to identify with either especially. When I meet people like Lyn, who are refusing to follow prescribed roads; it satisfies me immensely. My own parents, apart from working their nuts off for a meagre living, spent their free time asleep in front of the TV mostly. I take heart from people past their forties who take the attitude that life goes on and doesn’t stop until they bury you in a hole in the ground. At every turn, life can be savoured and celebrated and new possibilities explored. Lyn has broken her neck twice, but she is still on a mission to shine like a star and perform death-defying acts of adventure; Lyn has handed me a print-out of a speech she gave at her local Women’s Institute back home. Her pride somehow gives me a shiver that runs down my back. The full word-for-word speech giving an account of her middle-age adventures is listed in APPENDIX ONE *IN* LINK at the end of the book…
Bless you Lyn and all your ripples!
Onwards then with my own delicately yawning stroll….

I wave them goodbye and bumble off into a bush for a piss. Very quickly, I hear a car and turning round sharply I instinctively stick my thumb out whilst rapidly retrieving my dignity and a bright blue rally car screeches to a halt for me. ‘I’ll warn you now, don’t talk to me about cars, I won’t understand any of it!’ says I. The driver is twenty-one, clearly slightly hungover and is called Ben. I mentally register this as probably going to be yet another ride with a redneck only capable of talking about how fast his car goes, how crap women are and crappy sub-fascist politics. Thankfully I am utterly utterly wrong. Ben is going all the way to Hobart, and is a very open-hearted chap and easy to talk to. He tells me how he originally left Tas in desperation, went to work in mining in Calgoolrie Western Australia and learned to grow up fast. He says it feels strange to come back to his old mates who still live at home being looked after by their mums and have miserable stoned and unmotivated lives. I tell him how impressed I am by his sense of determination at such a young age.
When we get to Hobart he drops me by a park that will be good to sleep in and says he’ll see if he can find some labouring work for me. What a fine chap.

Next morning. I’m knackered. I stumble down to the town centre. I stop about four times in the half a mile walk I have to make to get there. I can’t be bothered to think. Feel really blank. Re-capping on what I’ve been up to, it suddenly occurs to me I’ve eaten hardly any hot food, slept out every night for a month and had a very crazy time in Melbourne, all without a day off at any point. No wonder I’ve come to a standstill. In that knowledge, I feel better about my day. Feeling the cold quite acutely. I notice that whilst I am wearing my hat and coat, everyone else is just in shirts and tee shirts. I must get some hot food in me!
I sleep fabulously under a tree in the park. I dream I am talking to Billy Connolly on a plane and then that I am witnessing a giant two foot queen ant move her nest. I wake up with ants scurrying all over the place where my head is resting, but no sign of Billy Connolly though. 
I bumbled around Hobart half the day, read ‘Lost Continent’ by Bill Bryson and eat endless cheese and Vegemite sandwiches. I found the book on the ferry across and it’s a welcome find. Someone obviously didn’t want it anymore, so it’s been keeping me occupied in my more horizontal moments.

Marmite vs. Vegemite. I am a turncoat. Vegemite is superior. It tastes of something other than just salt. Not so harsh and altogether a more interesting taste. Oh and it doesn’t drip goopily everywhere and run off the end of the knife throwing Jackson Pollock style sticky messy threads, cacking up my trousers like Marmite does. Marmite is dead; Vive la Vegemite.
There’s a lot of very English-looking buildings in Hobart. I’ve been to a few places outside Britain that emphasise their ‘Englishness’. What this often seems to mean is that there’s one or two government-type buildings over a hundred years old. In Victoria British Columbia, the few buildings look Scottish (big stones and round turrets) and there is another one that looks like the architect had been working off the side of a HP sauce bottle for inspiration. Tokenistic Englishness. Hobart on the other hand is a lost major Cornish town. It’s not a ‘seaside’ town (which you’d think it would be, being on the seashore as it is); it doesn’t have houses seemingly made of ice cream like we have back in England, but apart from that, the whole town is ingloriously uneventfully English-looking in the kind of way that Sir John Betjeman would have something to say about; No grand allusions to the Motherland, just a broad range of dull (but satisfying for all that) Victorian town houses, knackered looking ex-warehouses, quiet brick semis, and ordinary small blocks of flats and buildings that were built by your local council in the 1960s. It’s just so ordinary and convincingly English. It’s rather strange that everyone here should happen to be Australian.
I must admit to being slightly disappointed by the lack of difference in the people here. I want there to be more of a sense of stepping back in time or something or of being in another country (apart from Hobart being built by the English). I want there to be a fierce independence from the mainland apart from just referring to it as ‘The North Island’. What a fussy bugger I am. I think it is the result of having visited so many places that something in me is looking for ‘a bigger thrill’.
I phone Ben to see if he’s found me any work; he hasn’t. I figure something has to turn up between now and February 18th (or I’m stuffed – I need enough to pay for my return ticket out of New Zealand).

I walk up to the beginning of the main road south out of Hobart, and after standing in the wrong place for a while, I get helpfully directed to somewhere better and safer some way down the road.
A very few minutes after sticking my thumb out again, I am picked up by someone who bears an uncanny resemblance to Yul Brynner, even up to the slightly wacky eyebrows. He’s not going very far, and is not even certain whether he should be offering me what he thinks is a useless little ride to just down the road. ‘Every little helps’ says I. 

I tell him my tale of woe, and why I am going down to Huonville to look for work. He thinks maybe a couple of mates of his might be able to point me in the right direction doing some landscaping work. As I get out of the car a few minutes after getting into it, he offers me the opportunity to come back to his place to clean up and sleep in a bed for a couple of days. He gives me his business card and points out roughly the direction I should head if I decide to take up his offer.

I figure at first that really it would just be a distraction. I watch Rupert drive off down the road, and I sit by the road wondering which option to take. Just as I am thinking that maybe it might be a good idea to go to Rupert’s, here he comes again walking across from the other side of the highway in a very unexpected fashion, having plainly decided to seize the moment and turn round down the road to come and get me again.

So, after a brief chat further, a decision is made, and off we go back to the house of Rupert.
It’s a nice airy arty house with passive solar heating and chickens. (The chickens live outside.) Very tasteful decor. Obviously thoughtful and intelligent people live here. I breathe a sigh of relief. In the next few days, I am going to feel myself relax. A lot.

After a couple of days noshing and sleeping, Rupert lines me up with a job. Great! I really am soooo grateful for my change of fortune. Beyond words. Fantastic. The next day I’m out in Margate (of all places – I am tickled to be in the namesake town of my mad royally-deluded Auntie Gladys, but the extra weird bonus is that next door is the exotic and important-sounding ‘Australian Antarctica Centre’) 

I am pulling up brambles round a dam (reservoir). Phillipa, the woman I am working for has bought me muffins for breakfast too. Pulling brambles is hard work. The next day, I am utterly exhausted, which is awkward and embarrassing. I really need the money and really don’t want to seem to be a slacker. 
The day after that I start work at Rupert’s house, cleaning and then re-painting his house. It’s starting to dawn on me that I’m somewhat burnt out. One of the days I only work to lunch-time and then sleep right through the rest of the day. Knackered. I take a week to re-paint the house, and after Rupert’s family (Sue, Rhia and Hamish) all head off to South Bruny Island. I am invited along but stay in Rhia’s tent by myself for two days somewhere else up the road. I am feeling a bit rejected and paranoiac.

A really decent sleep, and dreams that make me realise the paranoia is bollocks; and is the product of a very very tired mind. I spend a day and a half totally enjoying this most wonderful spot; reading ‘Milligan’ a biography of Spike, eating lots of food, hibernating and occasionally looking out of the tent and admiring the sublimely beautiful view. 
I am pitched at the edge of a calm lake, with a few mostly sleeping black swans on it. On the other shore is a wide sweep of hills and mountains. It is utterly peaceful. I can hear the waves gently lapping, wind in the tall gums behind me, the occasional car and the sound of the sea hissing it’s waves onto the other shore behind; I am on a spit of land that is joining two larger land masses. There are huge dunes here, and king penguins too! (Though I don’t get to see them as that involved the unwanted effort of having to walk somewhere.)
Rupert has done a wonderful job of looking out for work for me, though nothing much has turned up. At least it’s saved me from wasting my time and effort doing the same thing.

I’ve had a wonderful time recuperating, eating fantastically, reading ‘Billy’ (another Billy Connolly biography), watching films on the telly and hanging out with the chickens. I think I’d rather like to come back as a chicken actually.
Friday January 27?

Today I go to STA travel in Hobart up by the university to find out about ticket options. Scarily, it’s turning out to be a very expensive screw by the air companies (again). Why can’t these bastards behave fairly? It’s so stupid that I have to buy return tickets for everywhere I go. It’s causing me lots of stress, so I go out for a walk in the woods afterwards.

It’s the first time (rather stupidly) I’ve actually gone for a walk in woodland that is not by a roadside since leaving Darwin. The rain that we’ve been enduring over the last two days has left a low cloud haze in the air, which has made the woods look especially ethereal.
Tonight we have sausage and mash for tea and lemon curd and ice cream for afters followed by ‘Finding Nemo’ afterwards (and then I write this). 

On Sunday afternoon, Rupert drives me on down further south where he passes me over to a chap called Russel who I am to stay with for a few days until Rupert’s new computer turns up for me to put together. In the meantime, there might just possibly be a little bit of yer actual paid employment down here; Rupert hinting that maybe someone has a bit of building work going on.
We meet Russel at somebody’s birthday do at a boathouse in Dover, a small small ‘town’ which is the local version of the sprawling metropolis. The reality of it is that it is a large village by a cute bay (they are all cute round here) and it has a few shops and the all-important post office – the nearest bank is an hours drive away in Huonville. With the expanses of water and all these tall trees round here and the little villages, I get that Scottishy Small-town Canadiany feeling again.
After a bit of a soul-searching conversation with Rupert on the way down here about what life is about and how to feel secure and good about things, I’m not feeling at all like mingling with new folk, so I say hello to Russel and promptly go and sit by the water and twang the guitar that Rupert has loaned me.

When all have finished doing the social rounds, Rupert scoots off to visit a mate and Russel drives me off to what is to be my new home for a few days. The first thing that strikes me about Russel is the strange gizmos on his dashboard. A blue wooden windmill buggy insect thing and a gyrating plastic Elvis hanging from a string suckered onto the windscreen. I’m feeling a bit quiet but we manage to talk fairly freely about the whys and wherefores of bio-diesel. It’s good to have a bit of common ground so immediately.
Russel’s place is beautiful. I’ve seen quite a lot of idyllic homestead/small-holding kinds of set-ups, and this one looks pretty together. Lots of functioning clever alternative technology, home-built shacks, a stone-built house with beautifully crafted wooden furniture. I never thought I’d ever get enthusiastic about a fitted kitchen until I see this one. It looks like it’s straight out of a ‘House and Home’ style mag.

The quiet here is amazing. The kind of quiet that feels thick and warm and inviting. After dinner I retire to my latest bedroom but have to linger outside first for quite a while whilst cleaning my teeth, craning my neck skywards to the stars and the shoosh of the tall tree tops in silhouette, soaking up the vibes.
Rupert and Sue’s place is the ‘eat, sleep, get cleaned up and get some money together’ place.

This one I think is the ‘chill out and get a good perspective’ part of the roller-coaster that I’m trying not to take quite so seriously.

This is the kind of place that reminds me of the kind of lifestyle I feel suited to. This is a Good Thing.
Over the next few days, I am to do a surprising amount of unwinding; me yawning very deeply, seemingly endlessly. The kind of yawning that transports me back into reality bit by bit. I am behaving in a very off-the-ball manner.

The first few days require me to demonstrate my joist placing and floor building talents. My vagueness-filled head and the fact that there’s not one straight edge amongst thirteen beams of wood doesn’t bode well. Russel has asked me whether I know how to do basic carpentry, and I have told him that I do. He has left me with a bag of six inch nails and some beams to join together and when he comes back all I have done is wreck half the nails. It never occurred to me that the beams would be some fantastically tough hardwood the like of which I have never encountered in my life.
Here’s me on the face of things bullshitting about my abilities, and just plain getting things wrong. Rather a lot. My confidence takes a nose-dive to a point where it seems for a few days that I feel like everything I do is going wrong. I catch myself giving myself a hard time and give myself a break instead. Russel doesn’t seem to be too bothered by my actions, though he does get pissed off quite a lot by other things I can’t quite fathom.
We swap music on his swanky computer, he books me a couple of flight tickets; firstly one from Melbourne to Auckland, and then another from Hobart to Melbourne when he points out to me that it’s cheaper and easier than getting the ferry from Devonport. Wow. I’m on my way. Well, assuming I don’t get hit by a bus or break my leg or something. One doesn’t like to assume.
Russel goes into town one day and leaves me to my own devices here. This is a good sign that he now trusts me.

After he goes off, I spend the morning doing the jobs I’ve been set; strimming the orchard and attempting to repair an upright post on the veranda of his little shack. I strim through a clematis and bugger up the joint on the post…

After that I do a big meditation thing and make the most of the quiet vibes here. Lying on the floor indoors for an hour or so, I manage to mend some physical crankinesses. I manage to get rid of a trapped nerve in my shoulder that has being making my left arm feel almost dead since Christmas. My middle finger on my right hand feels less achey and more like it actually belongs to me too. I’m a firm believer that as we take on the mental and physical stresses that accumulate into illness, so too can we release those stresses so that the body can put itself back how it is meant to be.
The week goes on, Russel’s lady friend Karen comes for the weekend and we go off collecting seaweed for the garden beds and the two of them go hunting for abalone. Someone else at the shore-side has the same seaweed notion as us, and he goes into glorious detail about the biochemical ins and outs of seaweed and why it’s good for the garden. The whole event feels to me like the ultimate in the good life. Down by the sea doing proper physical work so you can make your garden healthier. The new guy asks me how I like being down here in Southport. Within earshot of Russel I tell him: Out of all the many lifestyles and environments I have been in over the years, this is probably one of the best. I want Russel to feel proud.
Lugging the full grain sacks of seaweed is a good way to build an appetite. At home again, we spend an hour taking the shells off the abalone and I get to have a go at cleaning them up (taking the guts off and all that). Russel bashes them with a lump of wood to tenderise them.

We have them for supper. They are deeelishush. Russel tells me the Japs buy abalone a hundred dollars a go for them, and here we are in a little wooden shack with almost no mod cons and dim light eating like kings (and queen) a meal potentially worth a thousand dollars. Yum!

Russel is cheered by Karen’s being here and things are easier all round.
The next few days we fell two really dodgy gums that are threatening to fall on the barn and wreck it.

Russel anticipates me using the log-splitter to chomp up a couple of the trunks into a log pile for the winter. I get all super enthusiastic and I think I surprise him by being very keen to do lots. He has only got the use of the log splitter until the end of the week. I reason with him that we might as well make full use of it. We end up sorting out all the available felled trunks that are cluttering up the place. I make a wood stack about three metres by three metres by two  metres. I imagine it being set in resin or ice and placed in the middle of a city square and calling it art. I have this knack of taking a potentially dull job and imagining it into something interesting or beautiful. Sometimes you have to for your sanity, but this I enjoy (even though I nearly bugger my back up again..Doh!)
At the end of my ten days with Russel, I think he has been impressed by my genuine willingness to work, despite my cock-ups. He tells me how he gets too many ‘WWOOFers’ that are keen to eat and take time off but don’t know how to do much.

It’s a good farewell at Dover again where he drops me off whilst he goes and gets his weekly provisions.
Getting a lift proves slower than I am expecting. Russel has informed me that people in logging country are not at all keen on ‘greenie’ upstarts; he has experienced this distrust, being one himself. It stemmed from activists making a nuisance of themselves when there had been an old growth forest getting wrecked some years past. Maybe that and the fact that I have a dodgy beard and a bad hat isn’t helping. I am highly superstitious about beards. I never hitch-hike when I have a beard. I am rather beardy now but I don’t have a razor; It shall come off as soon as I get the chance.
Holding my hand across my hairy chin (no not really), I get a ride with a Rhodesian chap who has been in Australia for thirty years. I anticipate a racially slanted conversation, but actually he tells me how he hitch-hiked around Africa at the age of fourteen. (Certainly beardless I suspect.)

In Huonville he stops for petrol and this is the end of my ride. I dive in to the servo to fuel up on chocolate and a ‘National’ meat pie. There’s a freebie can of Coke on offer as a deal with the pie and a two for one offer on the chocolate. Everything is Cadburys round here, what with the factory being in Hobart.

They have types of choc we don’t get back home. ‘Scuse me banging on about chocolate – I’ve been busting for a serious sugar hit for ages.
Quickly I get my next ride with a young woman who has just arrived back home a week ago after hitch-hiking herself round Europe.

Walking back up to Albion Heights where the MacGregor household live (Rupert and Sue and Rhia and Hamish and Ruby the dog), I have a pleasant feeling of familiarity. It’s the closest I get to the feeling of coming home when I’m on the road. I enjoy the feeling of returning to someone who already knows me at least a bit, and that I already know them some. 

Here I am to muck about with Rupert’s new computer. I end up with my head up the backside of the said monster almost the entire weekend but somehow manage not to turn into a bad-tempered zombie. Wonders will never cease.