One for the Road Read online

  My first reaction is relief that nothing sinister is afoot and that I can atone for my suspicions by helping them out. For the first time on my journey, I feel as if I’ve violated the unwritten contract of trust between hitchhiker and hitchhikee. But they don’t know that, and anyway, I can make up for it by buying a few beers.

  But as I dodge sand traps on my way back to the main road, another dilemma surfaces. We are still two hundred miles of rough empty road from Coober Pedy. With a case or two of beer on board, it could be a long, even futile journey.

  Or is this prejudice again, welling up in the background as it threatened to do a moment ago, when I began hearing the racist chorus of Territory voices I’ve managed to ignore until now? … “Don’t turn your back on a black fella.” … “An Abo will cut your throat faster than you can say boomerang.” … “Whatever you do, mate, don’t take a ride with boongs.”

  My contact with Aborigines has consistently contradicted these dire warnings. From Cunnamulla to Tennant Creek to Ayers Rock, I’ve been treated by blacks with an openness and generosity not always evident among whites. This last incident is further proof of Aboriginal goodwill. How many white drivers would entrust a scruffy hitchhiker with their piggy bank and sole means of transportation?

  That’s what makes me nervous; there is a whiff of desperation about the request. But the real problem is, I have no way of knowing if this will lead to a blowout, and no way of coping if it does. North of Alice, there was the occasional roadhouse at which to abandon ship. Here, nothing; we haven’t even seen another car in four hours. The barrier between us isn’t racial, it’s linguistic. If things get sloppy, which they easily can after two cases of beer, we’ll need more than dust drawings to sort the situation out.

  As the roadhouse comes into view, I am leaning toward a compromise. My instinct is confirmed by a huge sign above the bar, which announces that it’s illegal to buy alcohol before heading into Aboriginal territory. Two cases of beer might make me conspicuous. Two six-packs won’t, and it also won’t be enough to leave me on a walkabout in the South Australian desert.

  The publican is the only person in the pub and he doesn’t ask any questions. So I load up the beer, and fill my tucker box with stale bread and overpriced cheese. My companions appear unsurprised when I return with most of their money unspent and only a dozen beers. And the speed with which the tinnies are drained, crushed, and tossed into the scrub quiets any qualms I had about disobeying orders.

  I am about to pass around my bread and cheese when two of the men begin helping themselves. Their offhand manner makes me realize that the gesture is neither rude nor ravenous. Rather, it seems that food and drink are assumed to be public domain. Every twenty minutes or so through the morning, a waterbag and a lit cigarette were passed to me in the back of the truck. This was my ration, my right as an occupant of the ute. It would be inappropriate—even insulting—to suggest that my food was anything but part of the collective. We eat a few slices each, share the waterbag and cigarette pack, and climb aboard for the long drive to Coober Pedy.

  This time my companion in the back is Joe, he of the “black fellas can’t buy us grog.” His English is good enough for a halting dialogue interspersed with sign language and sketches on the dusty side of an oil drum. As far as I can make out, the men are traveling from their home on a reserve in the Northern Territory to spend a few weeks “noodling” for opal around Coober Pedy. Noodling, as Joe describes it, is a leisurely sort of look-see through the piles of rubble left by white miners and white machines.

  “White fellas always go, go go,” Joe says, pantomiming men driving drills and pickaxes into the ground. “They miss so much riches that way.” Noodling, it seems, is not a bad metaphor for the difference between our cultures.

  Indeed, Joe doesn’t miss a beat along the sixty miles of unpaved road we travel after stopping for beer. Every ten minutes or so he touches me on the arm and points off toward an empty horizon. Each time there is an emu or kangaroo, almost invisible to me, but obvious as a skyscraper to Joe. The foreground is clear enough, though; long lines of abandoned automobiles stretching beside both sides of the road, like parallel queues to a scrapyard just over the horizon. Burnt cars, stripped cars, overturned cars. The place looks like a training camp for terrorist car bombers.

  “Black fellas bad with cars,” Joe explains. “No buy fixing out here.” At least there are plenty of dead cows to keep the car bodies company. But otherwise, nothing. It is as bare and bleak a landscape as I’ve ever clapped eyes on.

  For several thousand miles, I’ve been struggling for un-superlatives to communicate the un-ness of outback scenery. The towns and people are easy enough; they have faces, buildings, features. But what can you say about a landscape that is utterly featureless? A landscape whose most distinguishing quality is that it has no distinguishing qualities whatsoever? Flat, bare, dry. Bleak, empty, arid. Barren, wretched, bleached. You can reshuffle the adjectives but the total is still the sum of its parts. And the total is still zero. Zot. Nought. Ayers Rock has a lot of blank space to answer for.

  To the early explorers, this arid region north of Adelaide was simply Australia’s “Ghastly Blank.” Charles Sturt set off into the desert east of here in 1844 to find the inland sea, and so sure was he of success that his party included two sailors and a boat (as well as eleven horses, two hundred sheep, thirty bullocks, and four drays). “I shall envy that man who shall first place the flag of our native country in the center of our adopted land,” he declared. But after staggering for some months through the desert, Sturt reached neither sea nor center—just the dry expanse of Lake Torrens. “The desolate barrenness, the dreary monotony, the denuded aspect of this spot is beyond description,” he wrote in his journal, having described it rather well. Daniel Brock, a member of Sturt’s party added, “This scene is the Climax of Desolation…. Miserable! Horrible!” Not long after, Sturt launched his boat on the Darling River and then retreated to Adelaide.

  Looking out the back of the ute I am amazed that Sturt made it as far as he did. Desert to the right of me, desert to the left of me, a plume of car dust shooting down the middle, I claim this spot as the landing pad for the alien probe I imagined my first day in Australia. The alien probe that drops down, declares “No life,” and heads back to outer space. The probe people could sniff around here for a few hundred miles in every direction and come to the same conclusion. No life. No bloody way.

  Just the sort of place you’d never want to break down in; just the thought that comes to me as the engine coughs and goes silent, leaving the ute half on and half off the highway. It seems the moaning beast under the bonnet has finally been put out of its misery.

  The four men pile out and take turns staring through the steam rising out from under the bonnet. They study the ute’s Japanese repair manual, upside down. Then they begin staring vacantly off into space. It is the noodling school of car repair. We are about to join the long queue of automobile corpses. Looking out at the empty desert, I don’t like our chances either.

  I am an automotive moron. But desperation makes for marvelous self-improvement. Studying the manual, and then the tangle of metal under the bonnet, it becomes obvious to me that we no longer possess a fanbelt, if indeed we ever had. Also, whatever water the radiator once held is now evaporating on the ground at the rate of about fifty quarts per second.

  Joe fashions a fanbelt by knotting the spare rubber flapping around under the bonnet. But feeding our meager supply of water to the radiator seems a little risky. If we do, and the ute still doesn’t move, we’ll be fashioning straws to drink from the radiator within a few hours.

  So once again I am called into service for the purpose of liquids procurement. While the four men huddle out of sight—or as out of sight as you can get in a desert, which means behind the ute—I wait for a passing car to beg some water from. It seems that for black fellas in this stretch of outback, water is as difficult to come by as beer.

  The first car
to pass is driven by a Romanian refugee named Milos. He’s headed north from Adelaide to “see some bush” and is happy to give me his entire water supply, all two quarts of it. I explain to him that there’s no Danube running through South Australia and hand him his water back, along with the tourist guide the New Zealander gave me yesterday.

  A short while later, two Aborigines pull up in a battered truck. When my companions hear the familiar, accented English of fellow blacks, they pop out from behind the ute like guests at a surprise party. The six men chat away for half an hour, then conversation is followed by a pirate raid on the newcomers’ water, tucker, and cigarettes. Then everyone begins chatting again. I assume that I’m witnessing a chance reunion of long-lost friends or relations. In actual fact, one of the newcomers tell me, they’ve met only once, on an earlier noodling expedition to Coober Pedy. The color of one’s skin can be as powerful a bond in the outback as it can be a barrier.

  An hour later, the party gets around to fixing the radiator. Water doesn’t revive the ute. But with the truck pushing us from behind, the engine kicks into life again, or a tubercular version of it. We cough and wheeze down the highway for a hundred yards or so—before everyone decides this is cause for further celebration. So we pile out, chat, and smoke for another half hour, then get kick-started again down the road toward Coober Pedy.

  Relieved, I let out an Indian war cry—Yihaaaa! YiHAAAAAAAAAAAA!—and Joe imitates me for the hour-long drive. “Do it one more,” he says, as if prompting a singer to repeat a favorite refrain. The two of us are roughly the same color from the waves of reddish-brown dust we’ve been swimming through all day. So there we sit, two red-skinned Apaches, belting out war cries all the way to the opal fields of South Australia.

  Late in the day we reach Coober Pedy with the fanbelt still intact, the radiator cool. I climb out of the ute, shake each man’s hand … “Hey mate, okay” … “Yes” … “Okay, yes” … and hoist my pack over one shoulder. It feels like a bag full of wet fish is crawling down my back. I yank the pack off and discover that one of the cans of diesel fuel has been leaking onto it for the past ten hours or so. I think of all the lit cigarettes passed between Joe and the cab during the day, directly over the diesel-soaked pack. One stray ash and my clothes would have launched into outer space.

  If they had, they might well have touched down in Coober Pedy. Lunar landscape is too generous a metaphor for this ugly, eerie place. Imagine, first of all, an endless plain of sand-colored cones, spreading like an abandoned tent camp all the way to the horizon. That’s the outskirts of town: a man-made—or man-ruined—expanse of dirt kicked up by the picks and bulldozers and explosives used to uncover opal.

  The town itself is in perfect harmony with its surroundings, which is to say, as raw and ruined and forbidding a settlement as you’ll find anywhere in the outback. It looks like an inhabited vacant lot. Abandoned and burnt-out cars litter the streets and yards like so much rusty lawn furniture. Discarded timber and sheets of corrugated iron are strewn about as well. And the dust is so thick when I arrive, several hours before sunset, that cars motor through slowly with their headlights on, as if piloting through fog.

  Getting your bearings in Coober Pedy requires a kind of twisted sixth sense. There are few street signs and few real streets to speak of; just a dusty tangle of unpaved trails cutting every which way between the burnt-out cars and litter of timber and iron. Finding the inhabitants is almost as difficult. According to the tourist guide, there are five thousand Coober Pedians, “give or take a thousand.” Many of them are underground, if not in the mines, then in subterranean homes called “dugouts.” All you can see from outside is a doorway set into the ridge, like the entrance to a mine shaft. That’s home.

  This molelike life-style began after World War I when miners rushed here to scratch for opal. Veterans mostly, fresh from the trenches of France, they got the bright idea of escaping the dust and blast-furnace temperatures by gouging underground. The habit survives today because it is cheaper to light a dugout than to air-condition an aboveground home through months of desert heat.

  “This wing was started with pickaxes, then blown out with dynamite,” says Edward Radeka as nonchalantly as if he were showing off an addition to his split-level suburban home. In fact, he is leading me down a black tunnel to a room in Radeka’s Underground Motel. “Nice and quiet, don’t you think?” The room is a cave, literally, with a bed and a chair beneath a canopy of shot-out stone. No windows, no natural light, just a few drawings hung from the stone and a small airshaft winding up to the earth’s surface to let in a little oxygen.

  Washing up isn’t easy. The name Coober Pedy is derived from an Aboriginal phrase meaning white man’s burrow, or boy’s waterhole, depending on which tourist brochure you look at. But whatever waterhole there once was has long since dried up. Now fluid comes in by truck or pipe and it costs about twenty dollars just to water the lawn. This explains why the only lawn in town belongs to the pub, which gets a helping hand from spilt beer. At the motel, Edward Radeka says I can have a bucketful of soapy water to wash with so long as I toss it on two of his stunted trees when I’m done.

  The diesel fuel washes out well enough. But after an hour of drying on a clothesline above the motel—that is, at ground level—my clothes are coated with a dense layer of reddish-brown dust. At least now they’re color-coordinated, with one another and with the color of my skin.

  At sunset I wander through town past underground homes, underground restaurants, underground bookshops. You can even pray underground in Coober Pedy at the Catacomb Church. About the only thing you can’t do underground is find much opal, at least not anymore. Apparently, the easy pickings are gone and most of the serious miners have moved off to Mintabie or other settlements. The only new work in the last few years came during the filming of The Road Warrior, when about 120 locals were hired to loll around as extras. They didn’t really have to act, nor did the town require any modification; it is already a natural setting for a postnuclear fantasy.

  After an hour of sightseeing—abandoned cars, humpies, broken glass—I stop to ask a man for directions to the nearest pub.

  “You want to buy opal?” he answers in a strong Eastern European accent. I repeat my question and he repeats his. “You want to buy opal?” I shake my head and he points me to a pub up the street. I have just had my first sip of beer at the bar when a man at the next stool edges over and whispers hoarsely in my ear: “You want to buy opal?” Is this some kind of password or is every Coober Pedian a portable gem shop?

  “Not many miners have a luck anymore,” the man explains. “But you can’t sell small bits of opal so easy. So we make our tucker money by selling this way.”

  Stief (“No last names, please. I not pay tax in nineteen years”) is a Yugoslav by birth, as are many of the miners in Coober Pedy. The town is so isolated that ethnic differences have been preserved in a kind of Southern European aspic. Croats gather at one end of the bar; Serbs at the other. And Italians and Greeks go to a different club altogether. “Every nation in this place, except fair dinkum Aussies,” Stief says, wandering off to hustle another tourist at the bar. The phrase “Want to buy opal?” is the Esperanto that joins all the different cultures together.

  I leave in search of a souvlaki to fortify myself against the procession of pies and pasties on the road ahead. At nine o’clock the streets are almost silent. It seems that all the life has been coaxed out of Coober Pedy, along with the opal. Except for the gem sellers, of course. I am propositioned three times between the takeaway and the motel, twice by the “Want to buy opal?” set and once by a tall, painted lady, whispering from the doorway of an opal shop.

  “You have money I give you a sex.”

  No, thank you, I have a sex. I have a souvlaki. All I want to do is get to my cave and go to sleep.

  But there is one more voice in the night.

  “Hey mate, okay!” It is Joe and company, greeting me from the ute, which is parked on the main
street. Their eyes are glazed over with beer.

  “Rama-rama,” I say, casting my arms around the town. Crazy.

  Joe smiles. “Say it one more time, Tony. One more time.” I shake my head, exhausted. So he does it for me, letting loose with a bloodcurdling war cry into the desert air over Coober Pedy.

  “YiiiiHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

  14 … The Unbeaten Track

  In the morning I enjoy the leisurely wake-up of the Motel Man. Or in this case, Cro-Magnon Man, crawling from his cave, squinting once at the sun, then sloping off into the cool gloom of Radeka’s Underground Restaurant for a cup of coffee and a look at the morning newspaper.

  The opal fields seem even stranger in the matter-of-fact newsprint of the Coober Pedy Times. “SEALING CELEBRATION FOR STUART HIGHWAY,” screams one headline. “WATER AT INDULKANA,” shrieks another. And then, “WEATHER: NO RAIN FOR APRIL.” Elsewhere, paved roads and running water, from ground or sky, would be taken for granted; here, they’re lead stories. And the crime reports are written in a curious sort of Newspeak. One story tells of “a drastic increase in the number of cars taken and used without the consent of the owner”—car theft, I guess—and another of “night shifts in the opal fields,” which apparently refers to miners making midnight raids on other people’s claims.

  The home improvement section is most primitive of all. “EXTEND YOUR DUGOUT!” says one advertisement, beneath a dimly lit photo of a man in a bulldozer, clawing at the rock wall of someone’s living room. “NO JOB TOO BIG OR TOO SMALL!”

  All this underground action is making me claustrophobic. So I linger over the recipe page (Camel Stew, straight from the Goanna Grill in Mintabie), then go out to face the day. By dusk, Coober Pedy had been homely enough. In the morning glare it is a wrecked and hideous hag. Staggering past burnt-out cars and dilapidated humpies, a piece of cardboard as shield against the blinding heat and light, I feel as if I’m touring Ground Zero after the bombs have hit. I have never wanted to get out of a town as much as I want to leave Coober Pedy.