One for the Road Read online

  Better still to thrust fame upon oneself. The poet Banjo Paterson was working at the Dagworth sheep station in 1895 when he composed “Waltzing Matilda.” The station is actually about sixty miles out of Winton—close enough for the town to claim the poet and splash his name on every local storefront. There’s the Matilda Motel, Banjo’s Motel, and the Matilda Caravan Park. In fact, there isn’t a business in town that doesn’t somehow get Banjo in on the act.

  Except for the barber, Victor Searle. I find his shearing shed tucked at the back of a menswear store. That’s the first warning signal. The second is a rack of hats by the barber chair, placed, I can only assume, to provide quick cover for customers made sheepish by Victor’s work. The final tip-off is Victor himself, palsied and myopic, wielding the scissors like a pair of garden shears.

  It seems Victor is determined to break Jackie Howe’s old record. The shearing is finished in three minutes flat. But then, at three dollars a head, Victor has to keep mowing the fleece at a rapid clip.

  “Cooler now, aren’t you,” he says, dusting talc onto my neck and down the back of my shirt. Blond locks of hair lie on the chair and floor like so much spilled spaghetti. Cooler, yes, and ready to be done with sheep country, with anything to do with shearing.

  Outside, a hot wind blows across my pale, barren scalp. A decapitated hair tickles between neck and shoulder. The jolly swagman feels for his ears, avoids his reflection in a storefront window, and goes a-waltzing on his way out of Winton.

  6 … Beyond the Black Dot

  Dawn. Blinding light. In the back of a ute, trying to figure out where I am. Nothing metaphysical; I just want to know my location on the map, which is blowing around my face as I try to pin it against my knees.

  I am an agnostic on most matters of faith, but on the subject of maps I have always been a true believer. It is on the map, therefore it is, and I am.

  It is, or should be, a town. There’s a black dot a little left of Winton, and a comforting, almost suburban name beside it: Bendemeer. But all I see out the back of the ute is dirt and scrub. There is or should be a major road. It’s called the Landsborough Highway, a nice red line running straight from Winton to Cloncurry. We’re supposedly traveling down it. But all I see is a rutted, unpaved track no wider than a goat trail. And there is no sign at all of the thin string of blue on the map, next to the red line, marked “Diamantina River.” No water anywhere in sight.

  I have entered the twilight zone of Australian cartography. From now on the map will be filled with mirages; there will be un-rivers (the waterless Todd in Alice Springs), lakes that are not lakes (the giant saltpans of South Australia), and towns that are no more than water towers. Mapmakers have to fill up the space with something. So if there are no true landmarks about, ad lib a bit. Sketch in a dry river, like the Diamantina. Or identify individual properties, such as Bendemeer. It seems incredible to me that farms should make it onto state maps. But there they are, dotting Queensland like the footprints of tiny insects. That’s how much impact man has had on the outback.

  Outback. For the first time the word fits. There is no agriculture out here. No towns, only black dots. And nothing more than unpaved tracks connecting them, bordered by endless tracts of arid scrub. “Out to buggery,” the driver answered, when I asked him where he was headed from Winton. He meant what he said.

  Ludwig Leichhardt was one of the first white men to come this way, on an expedition to Perth in 1848. The German explorer posted a letter from a station near Roma, declaring that he was “full of hope that our Almighty Protector will allow me to bring my darling scheme to a successful termination.” The only thing that terminated was Leichhardt and his party of six men. No trace of them was ever found. But there’s still a dot beside the station where he posted that final letter before vanishing into empty space.

  There’s another dot beside the coolabah tree where the Burke and Wills expedition unraveled. As any Australian schoolchild knows, the two explorers, and two other men named King and Gray, became the first whites to cross the continent from south to north in 1861. But they took so long that when they returned to their base camp at Cooper’s Creek (minus Gray, who died en route), the rest of their party had already retreated south. All that remained was a blaze on the coolabah tree saying “Dig 3 ft NW” for a small store of supplies.

  Wills, sun-dazed and half-starved, didn’t think to carve a fresh blaze on the tree. So when a rescue party returned and found the old blaze, they assumed no one had been there. Meanwhile, Burke and Wills and King were just a short way up the Cooper, with nothing to eat but the crushed spore cases of a fern called nardoo. Burke and Wills eventually starved, though King was saved by Aborigines. The Dig Tree still stands in southwest Queensland.

  Outback Australia is filled with memorials like that: to the confused, the thirsty, the lost. If their maps were anything like mine, it’s no wonder so many explorers perished.

  One thing can be said with certainty, though: when a black dot becomes a town, it begets a pub. Poor diet is still a hazard of outback travel but sobriety never.

  The first town after Winton, after several hours of dirt and gravel, is an old stagecoach stop called Kynuna. Its centerpiece—and raison d’être, now that the coaches are gone—is a weatherboard pub called the Blue Heeler Hotel. Kynuna has only twenty-two inhabitants, but the traffic at the pub often swells the town to more than twice that size. Southbound travelers drink to brace themselves for the rough road to Winton. The northbound drink to forget the drive—or in some cases, the hike.

  “Dave and Derry walked to this pub in the mud and rain,” says one penciled message on the turquoise-colored walls. “Here two weeks. Jan. 84.” And a little to the northwest on the wall: “Curly Tru Blu Longfella had a slack attack. 23-1-85.”

  The Blue Heeler is a kind of shrine to bored, bogged, or blitzed bush travelers. Their scribbled testimony has turned the weatherboard into an outback Wailing Wall. In some spots the writing is so prolific that it has spread in lesions from the walls to the ceiling. “Rockhounds never die,” says one prominent scrawl. “They only petrify at the Kynuna Pub.”

  The panels behind the bar are reserved for regulars. There’s a pair of underpants with the pub’s name scribbled across the crotch, and a faded listing of the tariff for the pub’s “answering service for irate housewives.” If a wife calls to ask if her husband’s there, a drinker may pay hush money to the publican for the following answers:

  “Just Left”: 25 cents.

  “On His Way”: 50 cents.

  “Not Here”: $1.

  “Who?”: $2.

  Nor are the messages confined to the walls. Outback Queensland is statement T-shirt territory. “You Toucha My Truck I Breaka Your Face” declares the chest of one drinker. It is all bluff, though. He drains his glass, spies my rucksack, and asks if I need a ride.

  A few beers do wonders for the scenery. Look at the jump-ups! Red rock! And emus everywhere! The road is a runway for the flightless birds and they sprint down the bitumen like jumbo jets that never lift off the ground. Great rolls of uprooted scrub, or roly-poly, blow onto the road. Then high-rise anthills loom on both sides, each one marking a tree brought to earth by insects.

  I am way out there now, beyond the black dot, beyond sheep country, and into the land of precious rocks. They are sprouting up all around in long ridges of iron ore, dotted with spinifex. The landscape is striking, even majestic; it reminds me of some of the weird, colorful formations in the Utah and Nevada deserts.

  Is it possible that this journey is about to turn over a new leaf?

  I consult my tourist brochure. A black dot, bigger than the others, labeled Cloncurry, lies just an hour ahead.

  “We invite visitors to this rugged land of striking contrasts to take in its stark beauty under the midday sun,” the brochure announces. “If it is said ‘See Naples and Die,’ we say ‘See Cloncurry and Live.’” As a general rule of thumb, the more purple the prose in a tourist brochure, the more wre
tched the place described. Cloncurry promises to be a town of unparalleled blight.

  I am not disappointed. In Cloncurry at mid-afternoon, the temperature is idling at 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Three hours later, still waiting for my next ride at the western edge of town, a dry wind has cooled things down to 105.

  Finally, I abandon my pack and run into a nearby pub to guzzle a lemon squash and two beers. “This is nothing,” a facetious barmaid assures me. “You should be here when it’s really hot.”

  January of 1889, for example. That’s when Cloncurry (nicknamed, appropriately, “the Curry”) earned a spot in the record book: 127 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, hottest in Australia and something like third best in the world after the Gobi and Sahara Deserts. Burke and Wills were obviously stunned by the heat when they trudged past the present site of the town in 1861. Why else would they have given this burnt patch of turf a lilting Irish name like Cloncurry?

  I start questioning my own judgment as soon as I leave the pub. Or are those really penguins I see squatting at every street corner on Main Street?

  Closer inspection reveals that the penguins are cleverly disguised rubbish bins. A little printed message encourages citizens to “Do the Right Thing” and shove their rubbish in the penguin’s mouth instead of just letting go of their fish wrappings before they collapse in the street from sunstroke.

  Unfortunately, no one does the right thing by me. I swelter beside the road until dark. Even after sunset the town holds the heat like a well-oiled wok; if I camp here tonight, I might wake up as tempura.

  A neon motel sign beckons: “Vacancy! Air-Conditioned Units!” In fact, the rooms are so frozen that I scale a wall to shut the Kelvinator off. The television isn’t so efficient. “Only one channel,” says a sign beneath the screen. “You are in the bush now.” The TV has adapted to its polar climate; all I get on the screen is snow.

  A good excuse to catch up on my reading. The History of the Exciting Northwest tells me that Cloncurry is the gateway to one of the richest mineral deposits on earth. Of course no one knew that at first. The big break came in 1923, when John Miles went searching the scrub for a runaway horse and found an odd chunk of rock instead. He lugged it back to the Assay Office at Cloncurry where, we are told, “it lay for several weeks on the floor used as a doorstep.” Finally someone cracked it open and found it was rich with silver and lead.

  Mining towns seem to thrive on this kind of lore. I have read these tales—tall ones, I suspect—about the opal country of South Australia and the goldfields out West. Horses tripping over massive nuggets. Little boys falling into fabulous lodes. Rain sweeping slurries of gold dust into diggers’ tents. No one ever bothers to tell you that most of those who actually dig for the riches come home empty-handed.

  My own luck is no better in the morning than it was in late afternoon. The reason, I suspect, is that mining towns attract a rather raffish breed of visitor. When the blow-throughs don’t find gold in the ground, they sometimes look in people’s pockets instead. So sensible drivers think twice before welcoming a scruffy wanderer into the passenger seat.

  Predictably, then, it is a senseless driver who finally weaves over to pick me up. I glance through the passenger window at an unshaven youth with a cigar stuck in his mouth and a half-empty champagne bottle between his legs. Elsewhere I would turn this driver down rather than risk an intoxicated voyage. (“Sorry, mate. Just realized I’m standing on the wrong side of the road. All turned around from my country.”) But I can’t bear another hour in Cloncurry, so I climb inside.

  The driver smiles and hands me a fresh cigar. “Been a husband for twelve days and a father for one,” he says. Right now he’s on his way to the Mount Isa hospital to collect his new wife and child. “I guess it’s a big deal, having a kid. But except for the splitting headache from celebrating, the shock hasn’t set in.”

  The shock sets in for me an hour later, as soon as we catch sight of Isa. In most of the settlements I’ve traveled through, the skyline is so stunted that you don’t know the town has started until you’re almost through it. But Isa’s mining complex is so big that its smokestacks and slurries can be seen from 6 miles out. And that’s just the visible part. Isa’s mine is an industrial iceberg, with only 3 miles showing above ground and another 235 miles lurking beneath. Needless to say, this Colossus of Lodes is one of the biggest silver, lead, and zinc mines in the world.

  Usually, mines are hidden away from the communities that serve them. But in Isa, the mine squats right at the end of the main street, forming a kind of grayish-red shadow following you everywhere in town. The settlement huddled at its feet has the itinerant air of a glorified mining camp: there are barracks, single men’s apartments, and even a few tent houses from early in the century. But it is the mine itself that makes Isa seem so precarious: looming, always lit, always gouging, vast and close enough to run amok and devour the town in one mighty crunch.

  The other shock in Isa is hearing accented English on the streets. Since leaving Sydney, I have seen nothing more exotic than chow mein at the ubiquitous Chinese restaurant; the towns are filled with blacks and whites and no shades in between. In Isa, the mine has lured Arabs, Greeks, Yugoslavs, and others into a rich ethnic mix of about thirty nationalities. The tourist literature even claims a few Eskimos.

  But cultural differences melt quickly in the outback sun. A generation after the immigrant influx, Isa appears as monochromatic as the crusted red earth surrounding the town. Kmart, car dealerships, and fast-food joints clutter the wide, hot streets. There isn’t a piece of pita bread or plate of moussaka to be found.

  I settle for a meat pie at the Phoenix Restaurant, and a chat with the Hungarian-born cook, named Marta Alpin. “If I served goulash, I’d be out of business in a week,” she explains, frying fishburgers and chips for a group of miners at the counter beside me. “Australians, they don’t like strange food. And once in Isa, everybody they are Australians now.”

  The woman-starved miners are more eclectic in their marriage tastes. In recent years about four hundred of them have vacationed in the Philippines and returned with local brides. Others don’t bother to make the trip. They just pick a face from one of the photo albums passed around by Filipinas already in Isa, then begin writing to their intended. If all goes well, the young woman is flown over, bethrothed, and clothed at the miner’s expense.

  A miner named Alan explains this to me between bites of his Phoenix fishburger. His brother sent away for a “mail-order bride” and he’s thinking of doing the same. “An Australian woman isn’t worth two bob—unless she’s your mum,” he says. “And you can’t find one out here anyway.”

  What you will find in Isa are pubs that cover entire city blocks. It’s almost as if they were built as an annex to the mine; workers can poke their noses out from underground and head straight for pubs that are as cool and cavernous as a Pharaoh’s tomb. At the multilevel Irish Club, I count five hundred chairs and stools on one floor. Every seat is filled by eight o’clock. At another pub, the bar is so long that counter meals are announced like numbers at a bingo game—via a crackly public address system. “Eighty-seven, number eighty-seven. Your dinner is now at the counter.”

  The Wintons and Cloncurrys of Queensland have left me restless for a little nightlife. But at the entrance to an underground dance joint called The Cave, I’m told that my singlet and thongs are not appropriate attire. I need a shirt with a collar and “enclosed shoes” to get in.

  Cold down there, I guess; better to stay on the ninety-degree street instead. That’s where I meet John Wright, a young man seated on a wall at the end of the main street, backlit by the candelabrum of lights from the mine.

  “The dress code’s to keep the blacks out,” he explains. “Anyway, if you go inside you miss all the street brawls.” He gestures at the movie theater which offers Rocky IV on its marquee. “Who needs that when you can get it out here for free?”

  On this night, though, the Wild West is tame. We watch th
e broad-faced, broad-shouldered miners pull in at the bottle shop (“thirst-aid stops,” as they’re called in Isa). We watch their weedy offspring, squeezed into tight jeans and tighter skirts, going underground to dance beneath strobe lights at The Cave. And we see nothing more violent than a drunk spewing into the gutter.

  “Sorry,” Wright says with genuine remorse, as the streets begin to empty at midnight. “Gonna be here next Saturday?”

  Not if I can help it. But at this rate, who knows? In a day and a half I have moved seventy-five miles. Perhaps my darling scheme, like Ludwig Leichhardt’s, will fizzle out somewhere in northwest Queensland.

  I rise before dawn, bolt down an indigestible breakfast called the “Mt. Isa Special” (sausage, onion, and egg, drowned in grayish-brown gravy), and hike out of town ahead of the morning heat. Past the car dealerships, past the cheap motels, I am swallowed up by the ancient red hills of the Selwyn Range. Ahead lie the Barkly Tablelands and days of travel through territory even more desolate than what I’ve just passed through. Back east, a lonely smokestack is all that is visible of Isa.

  As I hike down the road, away from the rising sun, the shadow of a huge hunched figure is cast before me. But the unshadowed man appears small in the vast outback spaces. Even a sprawling mine—the most aggressive of human industries and the one most contemptuous of nature—seems but a blip on the horizon. And I am something less. Just a blip on a blip of bitumen, waiting for a ride to carry me on.

  7 … Snort of Blue

  Hitchhiking can sometimes feel like lying on a riverbank with a line in the water.

  With yourself as bait, and only the road and sky for company, you wait with the patience of an angler for a passing car to nibble at your fingertip. And like a fisherman, you pass the time with dreams of hooking something really good.