Antebellum

Antebellum

I remember when I first heard Pink Floyd sing “I’ve always been mad” and it struck a chord with me. Pink Floyd’s Wish you Were Here is the first album I ever bought. Some kid played it in music class and I just had to have it. I’ve always been fascinated by songs that point to the same sense of confusion and anger that I feel. From the same period, Jethro Tull’s Thick as a brick, and Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day. “And the wise men don’t know how it feels, to be thick as a brick.” That line still resounds within me. From later period, from the anger of my late youth, the Pistols, Pretty Vacant and from my late twenties, Nirvana’s Smell’ Like Teen Spirit. All posing the great philosophical question, “why the fuck am I here.” Or in the words of John Lydon, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?” Who’s responsible for this pain I feel every day? What answers are there when God seems like a foolish fantasy? How do I make this pain stop? Like many angry young men I turned to substance abuse, alcohol, to stop the ache, to dull the roar of human stupidity that I see around me every day. That didn’t work, which is not to say that I don’t still go there. Like many, I also saw love as the answer and threw myself into sad, mad and bad relationships. If love was just the touch of skin on skin, of holding someone close, then it would probably work, but it is all the other stuff, whose friends you’re going to hang out with, what colour doona cover to buy, where to spend Christmas, and the lies, and petty machinations that make it part of the problem.

At least when you are in pain from love it dulls the pain of life. Not much else does. Sunshine. The smile of a dying father or a loving daughter. A cat’s purr. Much else is just dross. And in this modern age, with my tastes, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the noise, the braying of asses that constantly bombard you. For example, an ad for a dietary supplement recommended that you should take it a month before getting pregnant. Only for clairvoyants, obviously. The words “planning to” might have helped. And on a beat up on a Current Affair or a similarly dubious program, talking about food terrorism, an equally beat up concern of so called terrorism experts, the voice over talked about Mad Cow Disease, as if this were a thing you could inject into food, when instead of terrorism, it is the result of modern factory processes and allowing cows to eat shit and other cows. Who needs terrorists when you got scientists?

A right wing commentator recently provided a list of people who don’t get terrorism, and included comedians and humanities academics. I could my write my own list of those that don’t get terrorism and would almost certainly include right wing commentators. A leaked report suggested the Iraq war has fermented terrorist feelings. Der. The whole invasion was based on a tissue of lies that any man and his dog (with the exception of Johnny and Alexander) could see through. The people who don’t get terrorism were not fooled by talk of Weapons of Mass Destruction, or Israel’s pretense for invading Lebanon. And who gets proved right? But more importantly, who suffers. Lots of people. I do. It is as if can feel every death of a child in Lebanon, young girl’s rape in Darfur, the pain of women burning when a bomb explodes while they are queuing for cooking oil, the death of children in a Russian school, or Chechneyan children, whose fathers don’t come home. Who justifies the pain of such innocents? Surely not the church anymore? Does the great Hebrew Yahweh condone the blowing up of ambulances? The murder of children? Does Allah suggest that killing women in their domestic routine is the way to heaven? Do these killers, and apologists for such things not feel their pain? Everything tries to stay alive. Which is why I can no longer eat many things. And in that dying I’m sure a little ripple is passed into the world. Why is it that I am like a beach onto which this pain falls as waves. And I’m not a speciest about this, the death of a magpie on the highway chills me the same as seven people stabbed to death in a Japanese street. The mosquito that I crush beneath my hand hurts me as well. And no, I’m not concerned by the millions of bacteria I kill all the time. But I’m sure they strive to stay alive just as hard as I do.

People ask me why I get depressed. They worry that I might be suicidal. They don’t see the blackness that lives in my head. They don’t feel the anger and the pain. Dying would not achieve anything. I would just be shuffled off into the great nothingness earlier than needed. And I have no wish to do that, at least not yet. I lie awake in bed in the dark and think about dying. I can feel the void. Our society does not cope with the void and certainly in Australia, courtesy of the media monopolies, it is getting worse. We had Irwin and Brocky die, both doing stupid things, what they do, one trying to make money by getting too close to animals and one speeding. How many people do you think have slammed into trees because of the culture of speed that Brocky represents? More than just him. The whole ford/holden rivalry has killed many mother’s sons. You see the pathetic little tributes to them on the sides of the road. More evidence of our lack of cultural understanding of death. I’ll put up a sign that says my son why so stupid he could not avoid this tree. People laying floral wreaths for Irwin and Brocky, people who never met them, who knew nothing of them that did not come from the tube. How is this an understanding of death? We all die. We usually don’t know when it’s coming, and it is no sin to take matters into your own hands.

I’ve been reading a very powerful book, Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral (1997), in which a lot of what formed the characters is discussed, what made Merry the Bomber angry, what made Dawn crazy, what made the Swede placid, and Leroy angry. When could you pinpoint it in their lives? I think back on mine. There is no point that I can remember where something happened that changed me. I had a loving mother and father, and though I’m sure my father belting me had something to do with my anti-authoritarian streak, there is nothing there that I can see that should have made me so angry, so sensitive to the bullshit people circulate, so pained. Nothing I consciously remember points to it. And the depression, the great black tide that washes over me at seemingly random times, where did that come from? Growing up as a fat kid, my lack of success (in my mind) with women, the rejections, my lack of money, fame, future? Why the black dog? God knows, in the scheme of things I am better off than many others. And when I’m depressed I don’t think, if I had some more money I’d be happy, no I think, how can people act like this, how can they not see, how can they not care. How can they live their lives when so many people in the world die, how can they drive those big 4WDs when they know Tuvalu will go under water and displace hundreds of thousands, how can they advertise products that they know will kill, and maim, and rob children of their parents? Zoom Zoom. How do people not feel the pain that I do? When they lie, are they being stupid, or malicious, or do they have some esoteric rationalization of the ends justifying the means. If that is the case, if the ends justifies the means, what cannot be justified. If I kill 200 school children in a school is that ok if one day my nation gets independence, even though it is virtually impossible to show any causal linkage. Is it OK to kill, and torture, and incarcerate people without trial, if that defeats the terrorists? Again, where is the causal link? All the evidence is to the contrary. If you take away people’s rights then they will fight more to retain those rights, for themselves and for others. Leaving the foolish gods out of the equations, how many people do you have to kill to bring about the change you want? All of them? I call this humanistic despair. If humans are capable of rational thought, and can work out the right thing to do, given time, why do so many chose the wrong thing? Is this the best humanity is capable of? Sure, you say, look at Einstein. But there are 6 billion people on the planet at the moment, that’s more people than have ever lived throughout history. How many Einsteins have we made? The joke is that a million monkeys with a million typewriters couldn’t produce one Shakespeare, which is clearly silly. A million monkeys did produce Shakespeare. Dumb apes.

When people ask ‘why are you depressed’ I think, why aren’t you? Is it true that I have a chemical imbalance, and enlarged hyperthalamus or something? Why does a chemical imbalance make me capable of seeing the truth? I know that I am being arrogant here, but I did know, along with many who also must have a chemical imbalance, that there were no weapons of mass destruction, that there were no children thrown overboard, that the AWB lied. Australian values. I would have thought not lying was one of them. And if you give me a pill to fix my imbalance, have you fixed my problem, or merely fixed yours. Removed my thorny disposition from the world. Why is the truth such a problem?

Do not go gently, Thomas said, rage against the dying of the light, and I agree, avoid the void if at all possible, but rage against the removal of the truth. I won’t let them cure me with their little pills. They tried that once. When I was young (and maybe this is something I can point to) they gave me Ritalin to slow me down. Mum was funny. She said one day that no, it wasn’t Ritalin they gave you, it was a drug beginning with F. For the life of me I could not think of a drug that started with F. And then she rang me up, said she remembered the drug. Ephedrine she said. I laughed.

I often laugh. As Burton wrote of Democritus, it is only the laughter that keeps us sane. Not that I necessarily think I’m sane. To quote Harvey Danger - Flagpole Sitta, “I’m not sick, but I’m not well.” There is much to laugh about. There are many joyous moments to life, with family and friends, and lovers. On rock. And there is so much that is ludicrous that you have to laugh. If you didn’t laugh then, like Grendel, the monster of pain would rip from my chest and rampage through the world.

I wish I could just avoid the world, turn of the TV, unplug the broadband, not stand in the Coles queue and look at the stupid magazines that adorn the shelves. That must be a great job, working for those magazines, sit around each weekend and compete with each other for the most bizarre headline, but within the realm of the world view of the readers. I’d have a go at that.

And the so called serious newspapers are not much better. Their pretense that they report objective truth and that only the Left wing have ideologies? All silly. All manipulative. All deceptive. All to make money. I’d love to leave that world, but what would I do. Sit in the bush and eat potatoes I grow. I’d rather kill myself. Same effect. You must rage against the human, surely. Like a dying man (which of course we all are) clutch the straws of hope that are offered. A lot of people do a lot of good things. You need to applaud them, and criticize the evil and mendacious.

So I watch the TV and read the newspapers and go about my insignificant life, angry. I wait for the next war. There always sees to be one. Antebellum. Always between the wars. Though currently we’re in a couple. We’re, and I speak as an Australian here, at war in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the larger global ideological conflict. In an age where there are national boundaries are merely arbitrary, where capital and rich people, what Bauman calls tourists, move around at will, is this conflict not a civil war. And like what, due to the American media, is possibly the most famous civil war, there is an injustice that needs to be ameliorated. The slaves now are the poor nation states of the world, working in the Nike plantations, out in the Coca Cola fields. How do you think America would feel if some one said that the Muslim extremists were the equivalent of the Yankees, and Osama Bin Laden good old honest Abe.

Antebellum. Before the war. As people keep breeding and the population grows, the demand on finite resources such as water and land are going to be exacerbated. The demand for energy resources intensified. No one wants to be cold, or too hot. No one wants to go hungry, to die of thirst. What can the rich countries do? Stop the poor at the borders? Kill them? Allow them to die of aids, disease, pollution, neglect. The famines of the twentieth century are a small indication of what is to come. And as arms manufacturers feel the right to contribute to the free market, then people will rise up against governments, against other states and there will be many deaths, but never enough to stop it happening, never enough to ease the tension of over-population. And with every death the black tide in my head swirls around. The ache in my heart, and my distrust of the monkeys grows, until it is unbearable.

Page: I once lived in a big white house and loved my fellow man ...

Page.

Memoir is the most unreliable of genres. Even more so than fiction. Because memoir purports to have a factual basis, and yet as one ages the line between fact and fiction blurs to the point of being indiscernible. Like all dichotomies, when pushed, it turns out to be a continuum. Between black and white there are too many different greys.

How does one talk about Page for example, a place long ago in my history, and a time when, even when I was awake, life was quite blurred, whether by alcohol, drugs, or just confusion. How does one write a page about that time, when it should be a larger tome? What did I learn in Page? Well, don’t live with junkies for one. Secondly, don’t live kleptomaniacs. Thirdly, and most importantly, don’t live with junkies and kleptomaniacs at the same time. That’s a good rule to take with you through life. And fourthly, that no matter what meal you contrive in which you get rid of, either beetroot, gherkins or mayonnaise from the fridge, they will always be replaced.

Page is a suburb of Canberra. My sister now lives in Macquarie. It is perhaps telling of our introspective solipsistic lives at the time that I could not have told you where that suburb was, even though the sign for it was clearly visible from my bedroom window. We lived on Belconnen Way, just down from the Coulter St lights. It was, and is, a big white house, with a concrete forecourt. At the time the landlord’s mother lived downstairs. I hope she was deaf.

My parents had moved to Canberra after I had left home to go to University in New England. After two years of struggling through a zoology degree I decided to have a year off and make some money. We didn’t have the term gap year then, but that is what I guess I was doing. It turned out to be an eight year gap followed by 17 years of study but I had no idea at the time that would be my future, of course. I came down to Canberra and got a job working on the gas pipeline that was being laid into Canberra at the time. It was with my father’s company and he was happy to see me following in his footsteps. 5 months later, one month from the supposed end of the job, after having three car accidents in a day, I quit. He didn’t talk to me for years. I headed north to go rock-climbing, the real reason I had struggled at University.

I spent the summer in southern Queensland and around Armidale, on the dole, and climbing. On leaving University I’d transformed a grubby little climbing magazine, that now would be termed a Zine, into a more, and I stress slightly, national publication, Screamer. It was this plan that would lead to an interest in Journalism and Editing, a Degree in Journalism and a PhD in Literature. But in the early 80s it was just something I did to amuse my little subculture of rock-climbing, or if I’m being truthful to gain kudos in a sport where I lacked a little in ability.

The first and second issue had been printed in Canberra, so I came back to that city, to lay out the next issue before heading off to climb again. It was 1980. I moved into the house in Page where some of the friends I had met the year before were living. And the printer lost the proofs for the magazine. I was trapped in Canberra, in the depth, and I do mean deep, of winter. The large cavernous lounge-room had one small bar heater, around which we all huddled in front of the TV. Soon another friend turned up. I met him in a sandpit when I was six. We’d been climbing and studying together up north. He brought with him his girlfriend, S. whom we’d met one night the year before.

I tried to get all my contributors to re submit, but this was before computers and most of the stuff I received was hand written on scraps of paper, the inside of tampon boxes, or crudely typed.

The household played a dice game called zilch for everything. Whose turn to make coffee, who’s turn to cook, empty the bin. For everything. And UNO. We spent a lot of time deciding who would do things.

It was a sparse life. My bed only had three legs and I never realised until someone joined me, and we fell on the floor. P. similarly brought a woman home one night, and a spring from his mattress pierced her side. We were very classy.

The night my bed collapsed I had drunk a lot of tequilla. I woke to hearing P.’s girlfriend screaming “There’s a turd in the sink. There’s a turd in the sink!” I staggered out. She was standing in the hall pointing into the bathroom. I looked in past her and there on the edge of the pink enamel was a small piece of shit. I walked closer. As my field of vision extended to the whole basin I realised that the small piece was just a precursor to a huge turd, about 20cm long.

We played zilch to see who would clean up the turd. I went out first, meaning I had the high score and the lowest lost. P. Lost. He was throwing up as he scraped the shit into newspaper. We coined the expression, ‘ a bad zilch to lose’. The weird thing was that it was only a small party, a select group of friends. We knew everyone well. I only found out years later that I was the prime suspect because I had disappeared early in the night. I maintain that it could not have been me because I would have been lying beside it in a pool of blood. I have never passed a turd that big in my life.

About once every two weeks we ran out of cups. They were always all in I.’s room. He was incapable of bringing them back to the kitchen. The journey into his room was a journey from light into darkness. The blind was always down and the bed far worse than Tracey Emin imagined. Clustered around the sides were half filled cups of coffee, with cigarettes jammed in the scum, and the odd dead blowfly.

Only one of us was working. There was no thought of budgeting. Our payments went on expensive deep fried stuff, the sort that tastes good when you wasted, which only lasted a week. For the second week I’d concoct what they called ‘gunges’, sometimes little more than rice and a packet of soup, with some gherkins thrown in. We invented Kellogg’s Special K, extra weight watcher’s breakfast, which was black coffee and a couple of cones. We never had milk or sugar. When this got too much, P. and I would ride his motorbike into Civic. We had some friends, two single mums, living in the Bega Flats. They’d order pizza and we’d ‘arrange’ some alcohol, and end up sleeping on their floor, being woken by small children.

When we could, we went out to see bands in the town’s bars. It was a time of punk (though there were a handful of Skins and two persistent and heterodoxical Mods, complete with green jackets and Vespas. One of the Skins attacked me in the broad daylight of a Civic Sunday, because I dared to wear a Dead Kennedy’s shirt that I had made myself. Unlike his expensive store bought uniform of docs and Exploited T-Shirt. Mostly we coexisted relatively peacefully and drunkenly. In places like the Jameison Inn, the Cock and Bull, the Jam Factory in Phillip and the almost mythical ANU bar. I used to wonder what were all these people wasting their lives as students for? Musically it was a very rich period, and I’m pleased to say I saw some of the finest of Australia and England’s new wave at the time. We couldn’t go to see the big names, because we couldn’t afford it, but it didn’t matter. When you have seen the Cure and Elvis Costello play at the Uni, most others gigs fade from your memory.

On other days P. and I would ride, heavily laden, up into the mountains to Booroomba and go climbing. It was a magic world. Some days the fog in the city would not lift and all you could see from thousands of feet above was the fairy castle of Black Mountain poking out of the fog. We’d take our shirt off and bask in the winter sun, and scare ourselves shitless on some of the most terrifying climbs in Australia at the time. We’d come home, on an adrenalin high, sunburnt faces, to find the other denizen’s of the city all gloomy and morose and Vitamin D deficient.

One day, after sleeping on the floor in the Flats, I listened to Tom Waits before going for a walk around the lake, savouring the autumn chill and the colour that Canberra turns on in that season. The lake was  glass smooth and reflected the trees that overhung its banks. The water spout was tall and thin, falling back on its self. I went back to the flats and wrote two poems. One of the women in the flat, S. was a little older than me, and read books. She bought me a black journal and a pen, and I fell totally and totally unrequitedly, in love with her. But that simple act of kindness led to a life of words, in all their myriad forms.

After one such trip into town, I arrived back in Page to chaos. It turned out that J’s girlfriend S. was a kleptomaniac, and had been stealing, amongst other things (we later worked out) B., the junkie’s money. He thought we all knew, and were guilty of complicity, though we were totally clueless. He turned up in the lounge-room waving an axe and yelling strung out accusations.  He was talked down, but moved out that day.

There was much laughter associated with living there. Maybe the dope. And sadness. I met a Hungarian woman at a party one night who talked of removing curses and who asked if I found the age of 22 was when my friends started dying, and I laughed and said no.

Not long after, one of my friends, M. Got knocked off his pushbike by a drunk and died. Another, a beautiful young woman in her thirties, died of leukemia shortly after being diagnosed. Over the next few years the Australian rock-climbing scene would be decimated by mountaineering accidents. So many beautiful talented young men died.

Winter finished. The printers found the proofs. I finished the magazine. I hitched off with a pack of copies to distribute then in Melbourne and Sydney. When I returned, the house was breaking up. People had found other places, relationships had broken up. We gave notice, and started to clean up. This was tiring work, so we went and got some beers and pizzas. We rang some people, they brought more beer. I woke in the morning realising that the landlord was coming at one and the house was more of a mess than when we started. And we were all hung-over, terribly.

We didn’t have a rubbish collection. The laundry was full of garbage bags. Some weeks previously someone had optimistically pulled a frozen chook out of the freezer and put it on the bench. A week later, remembering a little from my microbiology lectures, I swore at their stupidity and threw it in the garbage bin. Ph. Started to grab the bags to take them down to the car. One split open, and I watched the still plastic wrapped chook slide from the bag and hit the floor with a dull thud. Engorged maggots exploded over a three metre area of the kitchen floor. Ph. Took one look and vomited onto the floor as well.

When the landlord arrived we were all standing in the lounge-room surreptitiously hiding damage to walls or standing on cigarette burns or worse. He explained that B., the junkie, had owed him some rent so we wouldn’t be getting the bond back. “Well boys.” He said, “Let’s call it quits.”

We all withdrew from our positions and left via the front door. I hitched back to Melbourne the next day. I have not lived in Canberra full time since there, until now, but my Mother and Sister are there so I visited regularly. And over the years I have seen many different collections of cars parked on the concrete forecourt of the large white house. I hope the occupants of the house are having as much chaotic fun as we did, and are also enjoying their tenuous youth.

Europe on Five Dollars a Day

I arrived in Berlin from the Trans Mongolian with $200 US to my name. I figured that if I could live on $5 US a day, I could last 6 weeks. But I would have to economise. Fortunately, travelling through China had suppressed my appetite. Most days I lived on a litre of multi-vitamin buttermilk (in Germany) or drinking yoghurt (in France). I lasted two months.

I hitched down to Eckental to Wolfy’s place. He had just fallen off the Master’s Edge and hurt his back so couldn’t get up the stairs to his bedroom, so I occupied it, and Kurt showed me the delights of the Frankenjura. The guys there were great and I sponged off them for a week, but then headed south before I wore out my welcome. Kurt assured me I could live at Fontainbleau on nothing but oranges.

The problems of living on $5 a day became apparent the day I left Eckental. While hitching on the on-ramp to the autobahn a Polish guy wandered past and asked why I was not hitching on the autobahn itself. I said I thought it was illegal, but he said no, he did it all the time. I followed him up onto the autobahn, walked a respectable Australian distance ahead, put down my pack, picked it up again and walked back to meet the police that were talking to him.

They wanted to fine me 10 Deutschmark for hitching on the autobahn. I insisted I was leaving Germany and had no Marks. They decided to take me to their station. I asked if they would take US dollars and they assured me they would, as I suspected, losing on the exchange rate. So I was down my US dollars for the day and it was early.

Later in the day, a guy who gave me a lift took me to Zingen, assuring me that it was OK to get off the autobahn because he would pay for a train ticket to Basel. He was horrified when we arrived in Zingen to find the trains had stopped at 6pm. I said, “no sweat. Only 90ks to Basel, I’ll be there in an hour”(fool). In an act of contrite generosity, and despite my protestations, he gave me the train fare of 20 Marks. I was now $5 US up.

I was then to learn that hitching in Europe is a different proposition to Australia, especially if you have to cross a border or two. I did not arrive in Basel until lunch the next day, but I’m jumping ahead. I tried hitching in Zingen that evening, but as it got dark, the largest most vicious mosquitoes I’ve ever experienced came to chew on my face. Eventually, I said fuck this, and shouldered my pack and walked back into town, I went to a bar and drank Weissen beer, spending ten Marks. I staggered back to the road, and slept in the forest; my inner sheet pulled over my head and kept open with my Indian umbrella to keep away the mosquitoes. As I sweated in my hot bag I did the maths. On paper this was a zero sum day. I had not spent a cent, and I was pissed. But I had not eaten anything at all.

In Basel I went to look up an old girl friend but she was off at the Mediterranean, but her house mate let me doss in her room. A respectable amount of time later I headed off to France, to Font, where I spent some time sleeping in the forest.

After Font I went to Paris. Someone told me that it was not illegal to steal food in France, because of the revolution. This did not explain why there were lots of French beggars with signs that said Pour Mange Si Vous Plait (for food, if you please). Despite this, I decided that to supplement my budget I would steal food. I would buy a baguette, and because I didn’t want to get into too much trouble would pocket something cheap like sardines. But then I’d think, hell, I need some wine with this and if I was going to get done for stealing wine it might as well be good wine. Being the middle of summer in Paris most people had left and the little supermarket around the corner from the Youth Hostel where I was dossed used to leave the back door open to let the air (and me) out.

I’d go back to the YHA and offer alcohol to strangers. Not surprisingly, not many wanted to drink with me. I fell in love with a girl from Stuttgart who did. I then met an American guy Tim, who said he only showered there but had a room over looking the Opera. “Can I stay with you” was about the first words I spoke after learning this fact. He said no, he had two Germans staying with him, but they were leaving tomorrow so then I could. The room was a bed and about the same area floor space. I don’t know how the Germans fitted in there. Tim and I would drink my stolen wine and crawl out his seventh story window to sit on the roof and admire the view of the Opera. In Paris you can walk for miles on the roof tops and Tim and I spent a week running around, jumping walls and leaping across voids. His night vision was not that good so he had to trust my judgement at times.

During the day I walked all over Paris. Tim had given me a map of the subway entrances that did not have guards, where you could vault the turnstiles and travel for free. One afternoon, I was walking into a station and the guy in front of me vaulted the turnstile, and out of the shadows stepped two controllers, who maced him to the ground. I was only a metre behind him and was also on the ground coughing. I crawled to the ticket box and bought a ticket, for the first time.

While I was in Eckental, I’d met Jerry. Later Kurt told me that Jerry had taken the train from Paris to London without paying. I was getting sick of European hitching and figured this would be the way out of Paris. I’d heard stories of people being thrown in gaol though. I went to Gare Nord and put my pack on the train, then got off to have a cigarette on the platform. A little wizened African guy walked up to me.

“You takin’ the train.”

“Yep.”

“I did that once.” He seemed to know I had no ticket. I must have stuck out like dogs balls. “They caught me.”

Horrified, I asked “What did they do to you?”

He looked at me squarely, and then smiled. “No, I’m not going to tell you what they did to me.” And with that he walked off.

An Australian couple on the platform said they’d taken the train before and that they didn’t check the tickets until near the coast, so I figured if they threw me off I’d at least be out of Paris. They only check the tickets late if you are at the front of the train. I was skulking at the back. One minute after we pulled out the conductor started walking along the carriage checking tickets. I walked into the next carriage and watched him, and then ducked into the toilet. I was in there for what seemed like hours, but was probably only ten minutes. Someone tried the door and I sat silent. The blood was pounding in my head. I stuck my head out eventually and he was way down the end of the next carriage. At the coast I had to buy a ferry ticket and I was so hyped up that I didn’t sleep all night, and stood out on the deck feeling the wind on my face; ah freedom.

I hitched up to London and spent my first night in the great city, sleeping in the railway station. I went to a climbing shop that owed me twenty quid from copies of Screamer I’d sent them two years previously. There was no way they were going to refuse given the way I looked and that I’d come all this way to collect. They coughed up the money.

I hitched up to Sheffield to Woodstock Ave and when Jerry turned up I said, “I did what you did, I took the train out of Paris with no money.”

Jerry looked perplexed. “I’ve never done that.”

Published in Crux magazine.

Background on the Monologues

Hi, Thanks for coming.

I thought I’d start with some background to this series. So you’re lucky you’re at the first one because subsequent audiences will miss out. 

I have always been talkative. My parents and teachers that I could talk to anyone about anything. I claim I was born middle-age. I was certainly precocious. I still have a heavy tome called The Manual for Sedimentary Structures that I bought when I was 8. I was into rocks and animals from an early age. Every holiday we would drive to Castlemaine where my grandparents lived, from wherever far flung construction town we were living in at the time. And the special treat was to go to Stoneman’s book shop in Castlemaine. It’s still there.

As well as books on Natural History, I read all the Enid Blyton’s I could get my hands on. I still get a charge if I think there might be a secret island or a cave somewhere. I guess that fed into my passion for doing new climbs, for exploring. As I got older I read Science Fiction. Those 1950s to 1970s SF books were amazing. The imagination of those writers is rarely surpassed. That period culminated in 1974 when I read Harlan Ellison’s A Boy and his Dog which was in some anthology of 70s Science Fiction, the ones with the yellow covers. His speculative fiction was incredible. As was his anger with the way the environment was being treated. His introduction to Approaching Oblivion, called Reaping the Whirlwind, remains with me as a classic of dissent. Similarly, his story Silent in Gehenna, where the protagonist continues to protest despite knowing his cause is futile, I think summed up my life before I’d even lived it.

But I had no wish to be a writer, or an artist. At the age of 14 I got into rockclimbing and that would be a major passion for the rest of my life, still. I was never very good at it, and got scared too easily, but I have to do it. It embodies me. It is how I know I am in the world. 

I have a friend Jack, who features in a few of these monologues. We met in primary school and because our parents worked on similar projects we ended up living together in three separate towns and going to the same schools. My technique for coping with new schools was to be funny. To tell jokes. I worked on the theory that if people are laughing with me they weren’t laughing at me. This did not always walk.

Did I mention the background is most of this monologue? No, sorry. 

On TV at the time was the English TV show, The Dave Allen Show, as well as other English comedies. I hated Benny Hill. But Dave Allen was the consummate joke teller. He understood the ebb and flow of the tide that is joke telling, he had exceptional comic timing, and he did a mean Irish drunk/catholic accent. I still remember many Dave Allen jokes, such as the Wide Mouthed Frog joke. I think my brain was in a formative state at the time, and his Irish brogue rewired the synapses into some kind of joke-telling pattern.

In my last years of school I was a focused science student, though perhaps not too focused. In 6^th form I spent more time telling jokes, drinking and thinking about girls than studying. I had an arrangement with my English teacher that I did not come to class, and others got work done. I approached my pure math’s teacher with same arrangement and he said yes. Sadly my Applied Math’s teacher, who was also my Chemistry teacher, and my Physics teacher, did not go for the deal. I’d worked out that to get into a New South Wales University all I had to do in Victoria was pass. So I was slack, but I almost blew it. A pass was 50. I got 50, 51, 53, 56, and 63. The 56 was for English, not an auspicious start for a career in Literature.

Jack introduced me to rock-climbing, on the cliffs around Nowra where we were living. He and I had arranged to go New England University because of its reputation with Natural Sciences and because it was surrounded with bush, and as it turned out, had an active climbing scene. 

Needless to say that the climbing scene was so good that it severely impacted on our university studies. Ironically Geology was a subject both Jack and I failed. I think we have a science degree between us. 

Several important things happened at Armidale however. I met Mark Colyvan and Dr Brian Birchall. Mark was my age and though he didn’t look it, knew more about punk music than I did. Brian was older. He lectured in philosophy at the Uni and was a Hegelian. In our campfire society, I learnt that I was a natural born raconteur. I also learnt that I needed to understand what Brian, another natural born raconteur and bon vivant, was talking about. Mark obviously felt the same need. He is now the Chair of Philosophy at Sydney University and an awesome intelligence. Although, I have never understood his obsession with the Beatles.

The other thing that happened was I started a small photocopied climbing magazine, what today has the fashionable term Zine. The first one was described by a friend’s feminist girl friend scathingly as 1^st Year Boarding School humour. And in hindsight, how right she was. It was called the Monthly Rag, and was described as a periodical for the C.U.N.Ts, the climbing union of the North Tableland. Well may you groan. It is nothing I am proud of. And I promise that is the most sexist thing, and possibly the most offensive joke that will come up in the course of these monologues.

Surprisingly, for a young male, I was quiet piqued by the comments, particularly as the feminist girlfriend’s boyfriend was a major contributor to the conversation that had given rise to the Zine, and clearly had not admitted this.

I then produced another Zine with title Screamer, which is a climbing colloquialism for a very large fall. It had poetry in it. Admittedly drunken pub poetry, but some of it stands the test of time. Some photos, quotable quotes, and I think I wrote my first adult short story.

So just to refresh, in dot points, which I learnt much later in life. In fact I set down with some textas and butchers paper early and wrote them down. Clearly too long in the world of Arts Administration.

• My brain is hard wired in some way that remembers jokes and the art of telling them.
• My brain does the same to anecdotes and stories. I love to tell stories to people.
• I was interested in natural science, the environment and philosophy.
• I had embarked on an embryonic writing and publishing career.
• I was passionate about rockclimbing.

There’s a SWOT analysis on the other side if you want to see?

There are two dot points that aren’t on the list but that were evident to me from this period, but I can’t track them back to an amusing anecdote.

I suffer from melancholia. What has been professionally diagnosed as dysthymia, permanent low grade depression. However,  I refuse to validate the Depression – Beyond Blue, by using that that word to describe myself.

Hand in hand with this is a feeling of not belonging in the world. Of seeing everything as if refracted.

Wow, that brought the room down. It’s OK. I’m not going to dwell on those aspects of my psychology, or at least not in this monologue.

Shall I tell the Wide Mouthed Frog joke to break the mood?

Now we track forwards thirty something years. I have a PhD in literature, and environmental ethics, a field called Ecocriticism. But I also have a Masters in Visual Art in Shadows and Performance. And I begin to think about how this came about? Most of my peers came straight out of schools and got into theatre, and it has been their passion. They are younger, more skilled and more experienced than me. They also have a better professional reputation. 

So the question were why did I want to perform? What form was that going to take? Was there a place for me in the contemporary theatre industry? And that demon question all performers face, would anyone come and see me? And enjoy it?

There’ll be an evaluation sheet available on the way out. Or you can log on and do the Survey Monkey.

I looked back at my life. As I said, I was always a bullshit artist. A friend once said that I could tell the story of an easy climb and have everyone’s palms sweating. I was accused of embellishing the truth, hell I was accused of lying. I will admit to the former charge. Campfire conversation is one of the oldest art forms in the world, and still occurs in many cultures. Joe Strummer discovered it late in his life. 

I spent ten years rock-climbing and living in camps. At night, there was not much to do. There were little to no women and most of us were heterosexuals. While there was daylight and often after we invented bizarre games, that often hurt people. But after we calmed down, we would drink and the conversation would move fast. Rockclimbing was an oral culture, and a lot of probably still is. We had all read the books from early in the century, of the 50s and the exploits in the Mountains. Some of those at the campfire would go onto to equal such exploits. Some never returned to the fire. Rock-climbing was still a new sport in the early 80s and its mythopoesis was still being created. Myself and a few others were the story-tellers, those that kept the fire side group entertained into the night.

I started working as a Climbing Guide and learnt a lot about teaching in that situation. The first rule is gain their attention and their respect and then work from there. This has stood me well in university classrooms and with my work with youth with poor literacy and numeracy skills.

Another monologue, is about another performative aspect of my life, hitchhiking. I have claimed that I was Australia’s Greatest Hitchhiker, but on reflecting on my performing it occurs to me that this was also my greatest performance, 10 years of intimate conversations, of putting people at ease so they would let me stay in the car, keeping them entertained to either keep them awake or so they would let me stay in the car.

The third aspect of my life that has been performative is my teaching. I say that my teaching is a cross between teaching and stand-up comedy. Not-surprisingly, some of actor training I have done has helped my teaching and presentation skills.

In 2006 I crossed the line. I asked my friend Anna if she would do a performance with me inside a visual art piece I had made, the Sistine Fieldbin – or Greg Chapel. I had turned a large 5m bin for keeping wheat into a church. Every artist wants to make a church don’t they?

I figured we could perform inside, and project the performance outside in real time. This way I would be confident enough to do it. I did a number of performances with Anna, behind puppets, inside cubes, always hiding. I learnt a lot about theatre from Anna who was one of those people who had matured in theatre. She had worked all around the world and done all sorts of training. Not only did we do that, but she encouraged me to do other workshops. I did a Stomp with Zen Zen Zo in Melbourne and Viewpoints there. I have done more since.

In 2012 I did a solo performance on a remote salt lake. There was nothing separating me from the audience. 

Since then we have been trying to put together a show that neither of us will perform in. It is an audaciously technological with another friend Dave, one of Australia’s greatest geek. Unfortunately, despite some successes that have allowed us to advance the idea and the technology we have not been able to bring this show to it’s completion. If anyone out there has a spare 100k meet me after the show.

Which brings me back to the questions I asked. Why did I want to perform? What form was that going to take? Was there a place for me in the contemporary theatre industry? And that demon question. 

I discovered in conversation once that Anna and I both have the same, what she calls a ‘ghost hobby’, more of a terrifying dream, to be a stand-up comic. I have had a taste of that and it feels good but I’m not sure I’m cut out for that gig. Despite my encyclopedic memory for jokes, and an allright delivery, I’ve got lazy, that is not what people go to see for comedians for anymore. I would have been better in the days of Tommy Cooper and Morecombe and Wise.

Eric Morecombe. “Every Sunday my dog and I go for a tramp in the woods. The dog really enjoys it, but the tramp is beginning to get a bit annoyed.”

Sorry, that just slipped out.

Which brings me to the Monologues. One of my favourite performers was Spalding Grey. I didn’t realize until recently when I did a Richard Schechner Masterclass in Brisbane what an amazing actor he was in his youth. Dionysis 69. Awesome. Spalding killed himself by jumping into the East River in 2004 at the age of 63.

I came to him though his writing, and his monologues. He wrote one about having an eye operation which a friend gave me after a similar event. I laughed, I cried, I lived through my pain again through his pain.

So I have long thought that the Monologue might be the form that suited me, if (and it is a big if) if I could remember the lines. Anyone in the audience who is an actor knows that learning a long monologue is one of the hardest script memorization tasks in theatre, you can not get cues from the other actors. And you are entirely responsible for it’s presentation.

And the other big if, and this is another one of those demon questions, did I have anything interesting to say?

Australia’s greatest hitchhiker or my greatest performance

Australia’s Greatest Hitchhiker Performance.

 

 I have claimed a number of things in my life, either rightfully or not. One claim is that I was Australia’s greatest hitchhiker. Another, after I got into performing, was that the hitchhiking I did was my greatest ever performance, and the third claim was that it was mostly undocumented. Sitting in a box in my house in Victoria a number of journals that have some details of lifts that I took. It occurred to me that the documentation is also in my head, and that I could write it down. So the following is the account of my hitchhiking, in Australia and Europe, and it is called Australia’s Greatest Hitchhiker Performance.

 

I have recounted a small percentage here. Many lifts I don’t remember, but many I do. And I think the ones I do is because they had something about them that was memorable. Not now, but at a date after the lift, that caused me to retell the events to someone, and in that re-telling the original events stuck in my memory. Some were funny, some weird, some to illustrate a point, like the Butter and Cheese taster, and some I have told many times, like the guy who could not hold a conversation or the guy who turned every conversation to ‘big dicks’. Some were scary.

 

I was Australia’s greatest hitchhiker not because of the distances I travelled, though they were considerable. It was because of the speeds that I travelled, the fact that I raced other people and always won (though there was a memorable tie). And it was because of my method. I thought about it. A Welsh friend (also a contender for the title) taught me to write where I was going on my camping mat. I thought this was a good idea, but refined it and used to have sheets of white cardboard where I would write my suggested destination, and underneath, the word ‘Please’. Often I would fold the sign in half so I would hold up the destination, and at the moment I realised they were not going to stop I would flash the ‘Please’. You be surprised how many times that worked.

 

Late one night going into Canberra I stopped a car with a young girl driving. I ran up opened the door and lifting my pack said “can I throw this in the back?”

She sat there firmly gripping the wheel and looking straight ahead – “What?”

“Can I throw this in the back.” I held my pack higher. She nodded. I jumped in and put my belt on but she just sat there, and then she said, 

“I’ve never picked up anyone before and it will be OK as long as you don’t do anything.” I realised she was scared and serious.

“It’s OK,” I said reassuringly, “I’ve never hurt anyone.”

Later in the drive she admitted that it was the word please that had made her stop.

 

And I say my suggested destination, because what was on my sign was not always where I was going. I spend a lot of time standing on the side of the road and I thought about this a lot. Too long some might argue. If it was a simple thing, like standing at Yass and going to Canberra, then sure, I’d put Canberra on my sign. But somewhere it was harder to predict where everyone was going required more thought. At Upfield, at the Ford Factory, which at the time was the place to leave Melbourne, I would have one sign that said Seymour, and another that said North, that I flashed if the first failed. One day a kombi was overtaking a truck, saw the North, cut across in front of the truck and howled to a stop. He was going to Queensland, but turning off low and going up through Wagga. He had some nice hash and when we got stopped by roadworks we’d skin up. I should have got out in Albury but enjoyed his company and stuck till Wagga. I was standing there near the airport, swaying, and this guy went past the wrong way, slow, looking at me. I was stoned enough to be paranoid, especially when he pulled up. But then he said “I can’t give you a lift, but I can give you a beer.” I stood on the side of the road and we drank a beer together, and when he finished, he drove off. I was putting the empty in my pack when a car pulled up, and dropped me off at my door in Canberra. A good day all up.

 

Other times you’d predict the most common destination. Leaving Melbourne one time for Arapiles, I arrived at the Arch in Ballarat (a common place to get dropped – if it was raining you could shelter under the vaulted stone), to find other climbers there, Chris Shepherd and Jon Muir and his wife Brigitte, and a large stuffed toy dog, Krondorff. Now, hitchhiker theory was that a couple normally moved faster than a single male, and etiquette said that last to arrive, you took the front spot, furthest along, the last for a vehicle to go past. So I dutifully walked out to the front. We all stood there for half an hour and no one was stopping. I had Horsham on my sign, still 200km away. I changed it to the next town Beaufort, and within 5 minutes was away. I was at Arapiles in 4hrs, Chris took 7 and Jon and Bri, slept on the side of the road and arrived with a time of 12hrs.

 

Sometimes drivers can’t face the thought of having you in their car for hours and if they think they can drop you off in 20 minutes they stop. Often if they’re not stopping, you’ve won them over and you’re with them for longer.

 

And this is where the performance element comes in, or one of them. The side of the road is like gravel wings where you wait for your performance to start. You must be present. You must sell yourself to every car, despite your frustration, the weather, or your shocking hangover You have to be smiling and happy, and you make eye contact (no dark sunglasses) with each driver. You need to make them say no personally (a lot suddenly notice something of great interest on the floor of the car or in the trees on the opposite of the road).

 

But when the car stops, you’re on. And every car is a new first line. You have to stick it, and be confident. In live art, and contemporary Australia theatre, ‘intimate performances’ are all the rage and this was an extended series of these. Within seconds of getting in the car and saying hello I had appraised the car and the driver. Were they well dressed, were there guns in the back, did they stink of cologne (a sure sign of someone in the military who often gave lifts), and more importantly, for your safety, did they appear drunk – or more importantly, too drunk to drive.

 

After this quick appraisal, I would take on a character that I perceived would be most likely to put them at easy. If they were a farmer, I grew up on a farm, a University lecturer would meet the student in me, a bogan would find my accent getting harsher and I would swear more. Anything to put them at ease, so that you would be allowed to stay in the car as long as they continued in your direction.

 

I always saw hitchhiking as a sort of contract. You got a lift, and in return you had to entertain the driver, and sometimes keep them awake. Sadly, with the demise of hitchhiker in Australia this is not the case anymore and most people I pick up can hardly talk, let alone entertain, unless it’s to elucidate me about their particular god.

 

And this is where the second part of the method came in. I always tried to look presentable. I wore a collared white shirt, which at a distance always looked clean, even if you’d slept in it for days. As I often had scary haircuts, I would hide my hair under a nondescript blue terry towelling hat. One pair of elderly women, who picked me up on my way out of Canberra one Christmas said the reason they picked me up was the word ‘please.’ “So many people your age are on drugs and have funny haircuts. It’s so nice to meet a young man with manners.” I didn’t take my hat off, or mention I’d been awake for a few days for a few chemical reasons.

 

Coming out of Perth, I was in Norseman. This is a hitchhiker graveyard. There were dates of up to 8 days scratched on the backs of the signs. I’d got a lift to Coolgardie with a man who said he’d spent 5 days in Norseman, and he married the woman who picked him up. I’d arrived late and slept under a tree which was the only shade at the Servo on the corner. Early, I walked onto the side of the road and stood there. Others turned up and stood there. It got hotter and hotter. Eventually we all gave up and went back under the tree onto the grass, taking turns to proposition cars.

 

Eventually, I said, “Fuck this.”  Reached into my bag and pulled out a clean white shirt, pulled my hat down and walked up to a guy at the pump and asked if he was going to Melbourne. He said he was only going to the next town, 200 k's away. “That’s fine,” I said, “Anything to get out of here.” I walked back to my disbelieving colleagues, grabbed my bag and left. He was going to Melbourne, and took me the whole way, after I convinced him I was no threat.

 

He was hard work. He would only drive at 80km an hour. On the NULLABOR! Most people are going as fast as they possibly can. It’s 3000km. And he wouldn’t let me drive so we had to stop a lot. Every evening, long before dark, he would stop, find a room in a hotel, and I would lie down on the ground next to the car, and when we started I’d get back in. And he could not sustain a conversation. I would say, “Look at that, that is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” And he’d say “Yep.” 3 days!

 

We listened to ABC radio that for two days was the cricket. I still know things about moisturizer that I learnt from the radio that trip.  He had a small box of cowboy books. I read them all.

 

But it did not matter. I was going to get to Melbourne. Ahead of time. A friend had scoffed when I told him I was Australia’s Greatest Hitchhiker. “Have you hitched the Nullabor.”

“No.”

“Then you can’t claim that you’re Australia’s greatest hitchiker.”

“Fair enough. I’ll do it between dole cheques (11days).”

“Bet you can’t.”

“50 bucks.”

 

But though I did it in 10 days, and had a day relaxing on the beach in Perth, he never paid up.

 

I first went hitchhiking with my friend Steve whilst still in high school. We wanted to go Hattah National Park and caught a train up from Melbourne. Hattah didn’t turn out to be as much fun as we’d hoped so we hitched to Mildura. But the hitch that cemented my obsession was later at University in Northern NSW. My friend Jack and I wanted to go climbing in Nimbin, close to the Queensland border, and then we were going to visit my girlfriend on the coast and hitch back down south for semester break. Now, the couple hitching together rule only works if it’s a mixed sex couple, so we had a slow day. We got a lift about 30ks to Guyra, and stood there freezing on the side of the road, reassessing our confidence. A few more lifts got us to Tenterfield, and then just on dark we got a lift down the hill. We arrived in Lismore like we were walking into another country. It was warm, people were out and about and friendly. We spent the next few days hitching around Nimbin. One car picked us up even though they had room for one. Jack sat on my lap and we held the packs on the roof. Leaving the area we got a lift to Alstonville in the back of a ute with some Aboriginal kids. We were in the tropics, the warm wind was in our hair, we felt the world was ours.

 

My girlfriend’s house had puppies. And fleas. I was not allowed to sleep with her so Jack and I slept on the lounge-room floor, with the fleas. About dawn Jack said “Are you awake.”

“Yep.”

“Want to go.”

“Yep.”

“What about Kylie?”

“I’ll call her later and explain.”

We snuck out and it felt so good to be on the road. Later in the day. I was on my knees begging, while Jack was pretending to play the violin. Which didn’t work, but we got there.

 

We soon worked out that hitching together was not the way to go. It takes a special car, or some hippies in Nimbin to pick up two people with large packs. So we began to race.

 

I remember Jack and I raced from Armidale to Canberra. He went via Sydney and I took the inland route. I got a lift with a panel van somewhere north of Bathurst. I was in the back. They handed me a beer and we accelerated in a scream of gravel. Well god looks after drunks, doesn’t he, and I drank the beer and all they passed back. Coming into Bathurst they decided to do a circuit of Mount Panorama, at high drunken speed.  Then they decided that they should raid the orphanage for girls (stay with me here). I remember a guy with a shotgun running after us as we took off (and not much else) showering him with gravel. In Bathurst I 'remembered' a friend (that old line) and they let me out. I’d never got out of a car. Made it stop I mean. I always felt that as long as we were moving in the direction I wanted it was OK. Once only, I feared for my life because of the driver, not their driving. But this is one of the lifts where I should have tried to get out earlier.

 

I fell asleep in the restaurant waiting for my prawn curry. The only other people in the restaurant was an old guy chatting up a brunette with too much make up. I stayed in the cheap hotel attached to the restaurant. When I was hitching out early next morning, the brunette was staggering through the morning's frost. I bought some flavoured milk for breakfast, but didn’t get a chance to open it until at the turnoff outside Cowra. Shit. Off. The worst thing, and no water within a kilometre to rinse the taste out of my mouth. After two days and 700 km I walked in the front door in Canberra just as Jack was walking past the back fence.

 

Another race against Jack was from Melbourne to Canberra. He decided to pair up with Nyrie, working on the old couple theory (although Nyrie was small Chinese woman and looked more like a boy at a distance), and another friend Simon was in the mix. We all left Upfield at the same time. With ‘the method’ I got away first.

 

I did Melbourne to Canberra in 6 hours. Yes, I hear you laugh. That’s impossible. And that was before the freeway. I got a lift with a guy out of Albury who sat on 140 the whole time. Going across the plain near Coolac there were three cars all doing this speed. The first car blew a front tire, which picked the car up by its end and spun it around on its nose three times before it dropped in the dust, upright. We, and the car in front of us had come to a fast stop. As the occupants of the first car open the doors and stepped out, clearly surprised by their survival, we all gave them a round of applause. Simon also made good time, arriving in Canberra after 8 hours but the couple came in a poor last, taking 12 hours.

 

As I mentioned, part of the reason for my claim, was the speeds. The Canberra race was one example, the Perth and back another. The third one was Canberra to Adelaide in 15 hours. Yes, I can here you saying again, impossible. And I concede, extremely implausible. Especially because I had a slow morning. Somewhere west of Wagga I picked up a couple in a beaten up old Fairmont. Somewhere short of Balranald, where they had said they’d take me, the car boiled. I  stood by them while they fussed over the boiling car. Then I politely said if they didn’t mind I’d hitch while we waited. I still had the Balranald sign on my cardboard. A guy in a white holden ute full of truck tyres stopped. I changed persona. He said he could not take me to Balranald. I said I was actually going to Adelaide and he laughed, “Oh, I’m going to Adelaide.” And that was how I learnt the backway into Adelaide, coming across the ferry at Wellington and driving right through Mitchum where I was to stay. Dropped me off at the bottom of Pat’s Mum’s street. Once again, 140 -160 clicks the whole way from the Hay plain. My only regret was that I had ‘road lag’. Pat said that the Clash were playing that night if I wanted to go, and I said I was too tired. TOO TIRED! To see THE CLASH. One of my life’s great regrets.

 

A month later I was to hitch away from Pat’s house with a huge gash in my foot from a razor fish, covered by a bloody bandage, and my jeans smelling of Pat’s vomit after he drank 21 slammers on his 21^st. I drank 23 and drove him home. Pat’s Mum asked me to leave. I couldn’t walk. I’d get out of a car and just stand where I was until I got picked up. Standing at the only place to leave Adelaide before the freeway I was annoyed when a French couple ran for a car I had stopped with my sign, and climbed in. I got to Bordertown, and my record longest wait ever. I spent 7 hours on the side of the road there. But, what sweetened that wait was just before I left, a car pulled up and let out the French Couple. They’d made the classic mistake of accepting a lift to Hahndorf, a well-known hitchhiking graveyard, because you can’t get out, as they’d found out. I was just savouring this small victory, when a car and trailer pulled up. A chainsaw salesman going all the way to Melbourne. He had a sore back and asked if I’d drive. It was an automatic so the damaged foot was not an issue. He dozed all the way to Melbourne and whilst he was asleep we made good time.

 

I always maintained that on a good day hitchhiking was the best way in the world to travel. I remember dropping down out of the Blueys in a hotted up Torana, so fast I felt my ears popping. The sunroof was opened and Jack and I were pressed in the back, a very loud Kiss’ I was Made For Loving You’, the wind and the G Force all pushing us hard against the vinyl seats.

 

On a train or a bus you weren’t waiting by the side of the road, waiting for a pair of red lights to come on, but you couldn’t stop when you wanted. In your own vehicle you could stop whenever, but you didn’t get the narrative of the local people that hitchhiking offered. Part of my performative skill, in putting them at ease, was to be interested in their stories and to tease these out. The classic example was another race.

 

My friend Russell and I were traveling from Armidale to Queensland to go to Frog Buttress to go climbing. We were going to hitch the straight obvious way but I was keen on a girl called Janet who was going to Lismore. The offer was to drive us to Lismore, we’d stay the night at her friends, and then hitch the back way the next day. Needless to say, I persuaded Russell that this was the best option. There was more to this story than I’ll tell now, including a broken windscreen, playing pool in the pub while it was repaired, which it wasn’t, and me driving down the hills with a plastic screen, like a giant sensory video game. It also turned out that Janet’s friends weren’t in Lismore but up in the Shannon which is where the hippies too cool for Nimbin live.

 

We left late because one of Janet’s friends wanted a lift to Lismore to go down the coast to save some whales (I kid you not). It took him all morning to decide what to put in his small satchel. Russell and I hit the road at about noon, late to be starting such a remote road. We had a bet on this race. One beer in the Dugandan Hotel in Boonah for every hour whichever of us won by. Russell got pole position and quickly got a lift and vanished in a cloud of dust. I waited for an hour. Then an old Aboriginal guy picked me up in a beaten yellow ute. We wound up through the hills, and he told me the stories of all the volcanic plugs that reared up out of the rainforest around us. It was amazing, but slow. We had to stop, buy pumpkins, have cups of tea, share more stories. The best lift I ever had. But I was conscious of the amount of beers I would be buying. We got to the T intersection at Woodenbong and he dropped me off. Russell was sitting there, and had been for three hours while I had been winding my way through some of the most beautiful country in northern NSW. Not long after a car came speeding up, it slammed on its brakes and skidded to a stop in front of Russell. He jumped in and in a shower of gravel they headed off. It was just on dark. My image was of sleeping in the forest and arriving 24 beers after Russell. The cars tail lights went on, and it wheeled around, raced back past me, wheeled again, and stopped screeching in the dirt beside me. Russell and the driver had had a brief conversation about whether he knew me or no and bless his soul he had admitted he did. We arrived at the Dugandan at exactly the same time.

 

At times hitching was time travel. I often got lifts with trucks. Often this meant talking for hours through the long night, but as often as not they would say, jump in the cab and get some shut-eye. And then they would wake you six hours later and you were almost home and you’d been in a space travel like stasis. One time hitching with my girlfriend Jan from Melbourne we were again late. We were in Seymour and it was almost dark. A panel van pulled up and Jan crawled into the back onto a comfy mattress. I sat in the front. Hitchhiking etiquette. The guy introduced himself as Beefy, a name he had earned for obvious reasons. It transpired that he was a Penrith boy, 30, and that he had never been out of Penrith, except last year on a cruise, when he’d met a girl from Bendigo, and he was going back to Penrith after the weekend with her. He was very tired. I talked till I was hoarse. “And then there was the time …” Again, he would not let me drive. He dropped us at the Yass turnoff about one in the morning. Jan got out of the back, yawned, and said “That went quickly.” 

 

You soon learnt all the places that were good to leave cities. It was knowledge shared amongst other hitchhikers. They needed to be before the freeway, and this was changing regularly. The Ford Factory at Upfield leaving Melbourne going north, Altona station going west, Dandenong going east. From Sydney it was Casula station going south and Hornsby going North. Cold Chisel, a band I liked at the time for the simple fact that wrote songs about places I knew, not some West Coast of America destinations. In their song, Hound Dog Blues, they write, “Catch the train to Hornsby station… up the coast the grass is greener, the girls are sweeter.”

 

Some towns were nightmares. Albury you always got dropped off on the wrong side and had to walk for ever. And Tamworth. And Newcastle. It wasn’t even worth going into Newcastle if you were headed up to New England, you take the inland bypass, or coming from the Bluies take the Putty, one of the most beautiful roads in Australia.

 

Coming through down the Putty one night in a truck, it was pissing with rain. There was roadworks and one lane of the bridge was closed. The Stop sign guy was sheltering under a tree and only realised we were on the bridge when we were almost over it. He jumped out in front of the truck and then out of the way. I remember the look of horror on his face as he realised how close he was to going under the truck. A pair of headlights coming the other way was not so lucky and swerved to avoid us, crashing into the flooded river. We barrelled off up the hill and I don’t know the outcome of that event. Another night in a truck we blew a tyre in the middle of the Gundagai Bridge. I jumped out to help and landed on the soft rubber above the wheels. This promptly collapsed and I fell onto the railing of the bridge, almost falling the 10 metres to the cow paddocks below.

 

The truck drivers were a world of themselves, with a coarse sense of humour and a strict set of rules. On the CBs they were scathing of the ‘little wheels’ that got in their way, wary of the Mermaids (‘cunts with scales’ – weigh-bridges) and would always ‘catch you on the flip’ (referring to the flipside, the return trip). One driver near Singleton laughed when I bounced all around the cab as the truck acquired a resonance on the grooved road. Another kept telling about this corner he’d had an accident on and that if there was water on the road you couldn’t take it and we came round the corner and there was water on it and we sailed through it harmlessly, with him laughing at the look on my face.

 

The two most interesting truck drivers I met were on the first trip to Perth. I got dropped off at the east end of the Nullabor, where the road goes south to Whyalla, or turns west for the long haul. I quickly learnt to stand a fair way away from the corner as the trucks took it wide, not slowing at all, and I had to dive out of the way several times. Eventually one of them braked to a stop, and I met Mixed Grill, a wiry little guy nicknamed that because at each break he would devour that very thing, a plate of sausages, chops, eggs, tomatoes, and veggies. I wondered how he could do that and be a thin as a cricket stump. Every town we went through he played the Radiators ‘Give Me Head’ on the CB, or ‘Fess’s Song’. Somewhere on the Eyre Peninsula, the weigh bridge was open so we pulled off the road. He said he was going to get some sleep and that I should monitor the CB and wake him when the Mermaids left. I sat with the truck pointed perpendicular to the road. When trucks went past I’d flick the lights (scaring “the shit out of” several) and ask the status of the bridge. After about two hours it was closed and I tried to wake Mixed Grill. No luck. Even shaking him and yelling at him didn’t work. After another couple of hours he woke on his own. I apologized but he seemed unconcerned. We were back on the road shortly.

 

Coming out of Eucla station we waited for twelve identical Mack trucks to pull out ahead of us. It was a sight to remember, these long road trains strung out along the road as you drop off the escarpment.

 

Mixed Grill started a conversation with the truck in front about a problem he’d had with the carburettor. He’d pulled it apart and it had some unexplained black material in it. But the conversation went more like:

“The fucking carby wasn’t working. I pulled the fucking thing apart and it had some fucking black shit in it.” He just kept repeating that. MG would turn the radio down and talk to me and when he sensed a lapse in the words coming from the other driver he would add something like ‘fuckin black shit?’ or ‘in the carby?” and the other driver would go off again repeating the same thing. They were both clearly taking too many amphetamines. We arrived in Perth in the early morning. I had to wait till the banks opened to get some money. MG went off to unload, and then head back East, with no sleep.

 

As soon as I got some cash I walked into a seedy hotel near the Railway and asked the barmaid, “Is this the cheapest hotel in Perth.” A drunk asleep at the bar, or so I thought, lifted his head and slurred, “No mate, you want the Shaftsbury.”

 

The Shaftsbury was like something out of  Herzog movie. There was a dwarf, and a giant man, and a cripple. There were shared bathrooms, and all for $10 a night, or $25 for a week. I should have gone the latter option. What I only found out later, after living with a Musician from Perth, was that shambling old hotel was also the best place for Indie bands in Perth. I was to discover later that evening, after swimming at Scarborough all day, that one of those Indie Band’s was to play just below my head the next night, Melbourne’s Serious Young Insects. I had reached Perth relatively effortlessly so I took a day off, and then got so confident that when I left, I thought I’d hitch back the scenic route, via Albany, adding an extra 1000 plus kilometers to the trip. I came undone. Somewhere in the forests near Pemberton, with the smell of bush fires in my nostrils, I walked across the road, stuck my sign out, and got a lift back to Perth, and checked back into the Shaftsbury for my third night. Contrite, I headed out towards Coolgardie early.

 

Somewhere out past Northam and Meredin, I got a lift in a semi-, without a trailer on. This was the single scariest lift I ever had, and one that I seriously felt that if I asked to get out I would be buried out there in the wheat-belt somewhere. It’s not that he threatened me, it was what he talked about and his action towards other drivers on the road. He could have of course been winding me up, and a lot of what he said I couldn’t hear. I’d smile and nod when he looked at me, and if he then looked perplexed, I’d frown and shake my head. We did this for 500 km. He was a self-confessed murderer and rapist both in Australia and Vietnam. He'd roar up behind someone at 150km/hr and would sit inches behind a car until they panicked and pulled over, and then he would slow down to 60 until they got so frustrated they’d go around them, and then he’d repeat the action. There were a number of heavily loaded mini-buses on the road, a group of Aboriginal elders coming to a conference. He not only tried to run them off the road but when we were stopped at a roadhouse he yelled at them with terribly racist abuse. In the end he went into Kalgoorlie, and I was free. I was scared he would come back out of Kalgoorlie and I’d still be on the road. Fortunately I got a lift quickly.

 

Jack and I, inspired by perhaps the Beats or Tom Robbins, formulated this idea about the Angels of hitchhiking. If you were a heterosexual male, at which we both qualified, then it would be a young woman in a sports car (or two when we hitched together). The chance of getting that lift depended on how much time you sacrificed on the road. I must never have spent enough time standing on the road, because I never got to meet the angels. A friend got a lift with a blonde woman from Berlin to Paris. Another got picked up by two erotic dancers and shagged silly (though he deadlocked himself accidentally in a six storey Brisbane flat when he was supposed to meet them for a continuation of their activities over the weekend). I was picked up by some lovely women, but never asked the question. I was always more interested in moving forward than up and down. Two lovely women took me into Paris, and another drove me out of her way up to the Swiss border.

 

And of course, if there’s angels, there has to be a Devil. Someone who pulls up when you’re having a really hard day and offers you a lift, at a price. The Devil drives a black limousine. Ok, so we weren’t being particularly creative. But we saw the Devil one day. We were hitching down to the Snowies to go climbing at Talbingo. We got to the turnoff out of Cooma, and we were standing there for a while, Everyone was going up to Alps, not over the mountains. The biggest blackest mountains' storm was coming. You could see waterfalls the size of Niagara coming over the paddocks towards us. We were frantically pointing it out to the cars that passed us.

 

While we were waiting, a big black Mercedes with tinted windows pulled up at the T, as if deciding to come our way or go ahead. The Devil. We acted nonchalant and unconcerned by the impending storm. We didn’t need the lift that much. The black car drove on.

 

Nicest car I ever rode in? Possible the 1930s Citroen that picked me up in Fontainbleau and drove me to the outskirts of Paris. I’d wanted only to go ten kilometres but didn’t want to get out of the car. Or, one night in Tamworth, after coming the last 30 kms with a very tired nurse who was falling asleep at the wheel. I would guide the wheel while she nodded, pulling my hand away when she opened her eyes. Another who wouldn’t let me drive, and another car I should have got out of, and another car that dropped me off on the wrong side of Tamworth. I needed a piss and went around the back of a servo where I was accosted by a large Alsatian. I came running back to the road just as a pair of headlights were about to pass. I threw out my hand and the car stopped.  I hopped in, and we took off. I was forced back into the seat.

“So, what kind of car is this then?” I enquired.

“Jensen Interceptor” said the driver. We went up the hills north of Tamworth, the Moombis, at 140km an hour. Most cars struggle to stay over 80. I’ve been up the same hills in a laden truck at 5km an hour. The Jensen was much preferred.

I hitched down to Gippsland to see a girlfriend. I’d just got back from Asia and began to feel really sick, so much that I almost passed out getting out of one car. I got a lift in a hearse. I joked “I’m feeling really sick, do you mind if I lie down in the back?”

He thought that was funny and regaled me with Undertaker jokes, like “Most of my passengers don’t talk to me” and when I commented it was roomy said, “Yes, I have seven people in the front.”

Disbelieving, I asked “7!”

“Yes, me, and six guys in pots where you’re sitting.” Boom/Tish.

 

The obvious question after all this is, ‘If it was so much fun, why did you stop?’

By the end of the 80s, hitchhiking was changing. People started to get more paranoid. I got bigger and uglier. One night, trying to make Castlemaine for Christmas, I was stuck in Mooroopna and everyone was loaded down with children and presents. I reneged and called my father to come and get me. I was 150ks away. I thought later that the perfect thing for hitching on Christmas Eve would be a Santa costume, and disguise your pack as presents and have a deflated reindeer. No kids in the Western world would let their parents go past you.

 

But the end came hitching down to Natimuk after grape picking. I got to Hopetoun in the middle of the Mallee. I stood outside town for two hours. About six cars went past, all loaded with cricket players. I walked back into town and asked if there was a bus to Horsham.

“Oh yes they said.”

“Great,” I said. “When does it leave.”

“Tuesday.” They replied. It was Friday.

 

I wandered into the pub and enquired if there was a train?

“Train hasn’t come through here in 10 years.”

“The cricket team are going down.” Someone pitched in.

“Yes, I saw them.”

I rang my friend Phil, and he took a 400k drive to pick me up. I felt I’d lost my edge. I had a child and bought a car.

 I still hitch occasionally, short distances where I feel safe. And because so many people picked me up, I generally pick up hitchhikers. But they are a poor lot nowadays. I picked up some Koreans and let them camp on my lawn, but they were the exceptions. It’s hard to get a good conversation out of anyone. Because Aboriginal people always picked me up I always return the favour.

 I gave a lift to a guy Peter recently. He was an exception to the current norm. He intrigued me. Late 60s, and he had been hitching around Australia and doing piece work since he was young. He’d just snuck into a roadhouse and had a shower, so his hair was, wet and freshly combed. He knew everywhere I’d lived, and had done some sort of work there. He knew every place he could get a shower and all the places in towns he could get a free feed. I dropped him off in Narrandera to hitch to Wagga where he knew he could get dinner. I felt it only fitting that I should surrender my title to him.