One for the Road Read online

  I leave the camp at sunset and go for a swim in the shallow waters of the Tennant Creek. It is the first running water I’ve seen since southern Queensland and it feels as clean and soothing as a quiet bath at the end of a long day’s work. No lurching on and off the highway, no heat and dust. Just a gentle current carrying my naked body into the slipstream. Two Aboriginal boys skip rocks across the black water. Giant red anthills loom like mini-Ulurus on the riverbank. Cicadas wail as loudly as fire sirens.

  I let my ears dip below the water and gaze up at the desert sky through the silver boughs of a ghost gum tree. The world becomes still and strange and silent. And I feel far away, farther away than I’ve ever felt before.

  I think about the Aboriginal business, about my own business, and how as an adolescent in America, hitchhiking was a way for me to go bush and “get man.” This time it is something different. A way to “get boy,” perhaps—to rediscover some part of me that is still adventurous and open to whatever comes my way.

  I spend a lot of time at home composing lists and filling date books. My life normally has all the order and direction of a five-year plan. But it is always the detours that move me, like meeting another culture by firelight, or swimming at first dark in a desert stream. The writer Annie Dillard has a theory about these moments. Insight can come to those who wait for it, she says, but it is always “a gift and a total surprise.”

  “I cannot cause light,” she writes. “The most I can do is try to put myself in the path of its beam.”

  The calm that comes over me in the black water doesn’t have the force of a vision. It’s simply a gentle feeling that I have put myself in the path of that elusive beam. As the desert sky falls dark over Tennant Creek, I make a silent wish that I can keep my foot on the path when the journey turns homeward again.

  9 … The Alice Is Only Beers Away

  “I never miss a pub,” Bill Gillholey says by way of introduction. “No chance.”

  I am back in the white fellas’ Territory, on a motorized pub crawl from Tennant Creek to Wauchope to Tea Tree to Alice. Each settlement a pub, each pub a snort or two of blue. Then back on the road, like two men in a canoe, weaving down a river of beer.

  “Europe, it has the culture,” Bill says, holding the steering wheel in one hand and spilling a beer with the other. “Australia, Australia it has the pubs.”

  Bill left his native Hungary after the Communist takeover in the 1950s. He opposed the new regime and couldn’t find work as a mining engineer. Bill hasn’t found engineering work in the Territory either, but he’s stayed, laboring as a handyman on outback stations and moonlighting as a pub crawler of Olympian dimension. He even adopted the surname of an Irishman he met over a green can somewhere in Darwin. At the Top End, it seems, beer helps cement the ethnic mosaic together.

  Beer is also the lifeblood of the Territory’s road traffic. There is one central artery, the Stuart Highway, running from Darwin to the South Australian border. Smaller vessels feed into it all along the way, carrying goods and traffic from the body corporal into the greater flow. It is at the junctions that the roadhouses appear to pump and prime the system with gas and beer.

  There is nowhere else to stop along the hot dusty drive down “The Track,” as Territorians call the Stuart Highway. So the same faces appear at every pub. Travelers drink and nod at one another, then move in a convoy to the next hotel. By Alice Springs, I will know everybody at the bar.

  If I don’t lose consciousness. Pub crawling with Bill makes me realize how much I still have to learn about Australian-style drinking. Americans don’t necessarily drink less but they do drink differently. A beer or two after work. Cocktails before dinner, wine with it; maybe a blow-out at the weekend. Like everything else in the United States, drinking is done at prescribed times, for a prescribed purpose.

  In Australia, as I’d discovered, drinking occurs at all times, for no specific purpose. Down a drink at an 11 A.M. press conference, no worries. Knock back a bottle of wine at lunch and head straight back to work. Drain the hotel minibar, just because it’s there. Don’t let a little grog get in the way of whatever else it is you’re doing.

  So for a year I drank and learned and drank some more. I learned that it’s bad form to make a social visit without a bottle in hand; still more gauche to leave the pub before it’s your turn to shout a round. I even accustomed myself to the pub around the corner from my Sydney home, an “early opener” where the dockworkers gather for a quick beer before their shift begins. At 6:30 in the morning.

  The Territory is my graduate education. Bars can be crowded at any hour, any day of the week. The distinction between public bar, saloon, and lounge dissolves altogether. And as the roadhouses become more isolated, the atmosphere becomes more bizarre. Aviaries and zoos are a common feature. Usually the wildlife is just a camel or emu milling about outside, but sometimes the animals wander inside as well. Other roadhouses host special events. The tiny settlement at Wauchope, for instance, holds an annual cricket match against the world. The home team has an advantage, of course; Wauchope’s so remote that it’s difficult for challengers to field a team.

  But it is the heroic drinking that is the distinguishing feature of outback roadhouses. Again, etymology is the key to Territory thinking. A ten-ounce glass of beer isn’t a schooner, or a pot; it’s “a handle.” Apparently, ten ounces is what’s needed to get a handle on yourself before returning to the road. Just don’t forget to take away a six-pack of blue tubes to hold you until the next hotel.

  “The esky, it is just for back-up,” Bill explains, emptying a carton of Foster’s into his cooler outside the Wauchope roadhouse. “Even if I’m loaded up, I never miss a pub. No chance.”

  One pub in particular. South of Wauchope, in the middle of a sandblasted, sun-bleached desert, there is a road sign painted on the trailer of a capsized road train: “Barrow Creek Hotel—21-⅛ km.” It is the first time since entering the Territory that I’ve seen the distance between two points calculated, well, as distance. Never have I seen it measured so precisely.

  The pub that appears two tinnies farther on doesn’t look like much, but outback pubs rarely do; a plain collection of iron and timber, piled onto concrete blocks. The rest of Barrow Creek consists of a few houses, a windmill and an old building that once housed a repeater station for the Overland Telegraph. When the telegraph was built between Adelaide and Darwin in the 1870s, Morse code couldn’t leap more than two hundred miles at a time. So outposts such as Barrow Creek were set up to keep the dots and dashes moving along.

  Now it’s the road traffic that must be resupplied. Not that anyone will emerge from the pub to pump fuel.

  “I have a rule—never go out to serve petrol,” says the publican, Lance Pietsch. “If you’ve got some competition, then you have to do something. But Barrow Creek? If they don’t fill up here they’re stuffed. And if I don’t come out, they come in. Then I’ve got them drinking beer, buying pies and T-shirts. That’s where I make my quid.”

  It is the first clue to Pietsch’s proprietary thinking. The second is a photograph of himself hung crooked behind the bar. Pietsch is a big-shouldered bloke with the broad chest and thick arms of a butcher. But no harm in making himself even more picturesque by turning the portrait askew.

  “I hang everything crooked,” he says. “Gives the place character.”

  The entire establishment is an essay in calculated kitsch. There’s a pet kangaroo hopping around behind the bar, an emu somewhere out the back. And the walls at Barrow Creek make the artwork I’ve seen in Queensland pubs look rudimentary. Nude photos and rude bumper stickers are the main adornment. Then there’s a row of tattered stationmasters’ hats hung like headstones in a medieval cathedral: Telecom Tom, Shim Ree, Tossa Reidy. Each man remembered by his hat, and by a short epitaph.

  “Been there—done that,” says the writing beneath Tossa Reidy’s crumpled hat. “Has a very short fuse and prolific swearer.”

  And beside Telecom Tom’s: �
��Just passing through, 1952. Been here ever since.”

  And he still is, a crinkled, khaki-clad figure perched atop a bar stool marked by a plaque that says: “Reserved for Barrow Creek superannuated citizens.” In a community of fourteen people, he is the only one.

  Tom once took part in a dingo cull. He was paid by the number of ears he turned in as proof of having killed the wild dogs. Tom put a few ears on top and filled the rest of the bag with dried apricots. “No one ever bothered to look too close,” he says with an impish grin. “The smell’s too revolting.”

  Nearby on the wall is something really revolting: an icon labeled “Genuine Northern Territory Bullshit.” It’s a large and convincing blob attached to a framed piece of cardboard.

  Pietsch swears it’s the real thing. “Genuine cow turd, fair dinkum,” he says. “I nailed it up myself and held it together with hair spray.” I’m dubious but not dubious enough to poke a finger into the thing and find out if he’s telling the truth.

  The hotel’s pièce de résistance is a tapestry of dollar notes hanging on a wall behind the bar. It’s called the “bush bank,” and there are smaller branches at several other Territory pubs. Drinkers can plan their financial future by signing a note—$2, $10, even $100—and pinning it to the wall. Then, when passing through at a later date, drinkers can simply make a withdrawal by reclaiming their note, and keep on drinking. Foreign currencies are also accepted.

  The bush bank is obviously a liquid investment, but not a foolproof way of saving money. Most of the depositors are station hands or oil workers who return to Barrow Creek infrequently, if at all. When there is a run on the bank, the money usually lasts about as long as chips at the roulette table. “I’ve never seen a bloke claim his money without spending it before going out the door,” Pietsch says. “The house always wins.”

  Sometimes the drinkers don’t make it out the door either; they collapse on the wooden floor instead. One binge during an annual horse race went on for five days. “Blokes just fell off their stools, woke up and started drinking again.” Most days, though, the hotel stays closed between about midnight and 7 A.M. Eight of Barrow Creek’s fourteen inhabitants work at the pub, filling beer glasses or making beds. The dead of night is their only break between shifts.

  “But if a bloke needs a beer real bad at four A.M., he’d probably get served,” Pietsch says. “Bush rules.”

  After all, it’s about sixty miles to the next pub. Only a heartless publican would exile a man into that much desert empty-handed.

  Pietsch claims to have been a candidate for the priesthood before becoming a publican. He was deep in the classics, Latin, and Greek when he landed a summer job as a station hand. That’s when he discovered drinking, smoking, and sex. “I asked myself, ‘How long has this been going on?’ and gave the seminary a miss.”

  It’s been downhill ever since; first as a bookmaker, then as a barkeeper in South Australia. “My only claim to fame was thirteen convictions for being present at a two-up game,” he says, referring to a popular Australian game of chance. “Occupational hazard.” Genuine Northern Territory bullshit, perhaps. But out here, who’s to know? Who’s to care?

  Barrow Creek’s isolation helps Pietsch escape another hazard of his trade: the regular drinkers. Pietsch hates them. “In South Australia they’d come in every day for six years and say ‘How’s it going, Lance?’ They couldn’t even remember being carried out the door the night before.”

  At Barrow Creek, the only face he sees on a regular basis is Telecom Tom’s. Almost everyone else is passing through. Myself included. I deposit a two-dollar note at the bush bank, just in case, and head out into the desert with Bill again.

  “Europe, only Europe, you find a Prado, a Uffizi, a Jeu de Paume,” Bill says, becoming more grandiose with every swallow of beer. “But tell me. Where in Europe you find a Barrow Creek Hotel?” He puts his tinnie between his legs, presses the tips of his thumb and forefinger together and kisses them. “Nowhere.” For Bill, Barrow Creek is the Louvre of outback pubs.

  It is in a beer daze somewhere south of Barrow Creek that the scattered images start coming together. Tattersall’s Hotel at the border of New South Wales and Queensland. The Blue Heeler Hotel in Kynuna. And now the picturesque watering holes of the Northern Territory. They are kin to one another, but kin to nothing else I’ve ever seen.

  At first I regarded these pubs as eccentric outposts on the way to the Main Event. Somewhere “out there,” I subconsciously supposed, a scene or character would bound off the horizon screaming “This is it, mate! Fair dinkum Australia!” I would stumble across the gem (like the mythical prospector at Cloncurry) and carry its wealth with me back to the city.

  Travel rarely pays out in that fashion, least of all in Australia. The civilization is too far-flung to allow for many generalizations. And in the outback, home and work life are usually sealed away from view, way off in the scrub.

  The lonely roadhouse offers a window into this remote society. And peering blearily through it, I see an irreverent and whimsical world that intrigues me—if not the real Australia, at least something more exotic than the international gloss of Sydney. A Michelin Guide to the outback would, like Bill Gillholey, never miss a pub. No chance.

  10 … Centered

  Two cartons later I land in the town called Alice.

  My arrival is as indirect as the pub crawl that’s carried me there. Bill bypasses town and drives to a rocky slope facing west into the MacDonnell Ranges. No verdant Blue Mountains here, just eroded ridges of red rock, winding into the desert. But it isn’t the scenery Bill’s after. Unable to be a mining engineer by profession, he has taken up mining as a hobby. And this arid hillside is one of the best places in the Territory to scrape for amethyst.

  “In my country, every inch of earth has been turned,” he says, sinking his pickaxe into the stony red earth. “Here, who knows what is still buried beneath the ground?”

  His passion for precious stones is contagious, particularly after a dozen beers. So for several hours we take turns with the pickaxe, then sift through the upturned dirt for the purple-black shimmer of amethyst. All we find are tiny shards, nice enough to keep but not of any value.

  “Some day,” Bill says, cracking our final tube of blue, “some day I hit it big. I not come halfway across the globe to live like a peasant.”

  Bill leaves me at a bottle shop in Alice. He will do some electrical work for a friend, then head back to the Top End around midnight; best to have some beer on board, just in case.

  I wander into Alice, drunk, covered in dirt, and loaded with gemstones, like an outback digger ready to blow his hard-won claim. But I’ve walked onto the wrong set. Alice has none of the frontier character of the outposts I’ve passed through en route. The town’s old center has been torn down for a pedestrian mall. The once dusty streets are paved now with tourist gold; a casino, gift shops, and Kentucky Fried Chicken have been grafted on top like so much alien skin.

  At a coffee shop I hear a middle-aged man with an American accent and go over to greet him. We exchange the obligatory “Where ya from?” and then he invites me for a hamburger at a nearby restaurant. “Almost like home,” he says, sinking his teeth into a thick slab of ground beef, hidden inside an enormous bun. Remarkably, it is.

  The man works at Pine Gap, or the “space base,” as the satellite station is known in Alice. Not known, really, because everything about Pine Gap is a secret. Everyone assumes it’s a CIA base, but the U.S. won’t confirm or deny this. Everyone “knows” that the strange white domes in the desert are a listening station, taking in data from spy satellites—but, again, that’s unofficial. Christopher Boyce, the California communications technician who sold secrets to the Russians and whose story is told in The Falcon and the Snowman, said at his trial that his work for the U.S. involved “day-to-day deceptions in our transmissions to Australia.” He didn’t go into any detail, though he later named Pine Gap as a conduit for the false information. Again, no one
knows.

  And this employee, munching his hamburger and chatting amiably about baseball, isn’t about to make me any wiser. We talk about the Los Angeles Dodgers (“headed for the World Series next season, no fuckin’ doubt about it”), the difference between American and Australian beer (“Aussie stuff makes our beer taste like dishwater”), and the weather in Alice (“fan-fuckin’-tastic”). But neither he, nor another American I meet, utters a clue as to what it is they do at Pine Gap.

  “My job’s so classified even my wife doesn’t know what I do,” one of them tells me, “and she used to work at the base herself.”

  I ask how the two hundred or so Americans at the base cope with the isolation. He says that they join as many clubs as possible to give them some “neutral ground” to share with their Australian neighbors. Baseball clubs. Bridge clubs. Astronomy clubs. Make as many friends as you want, just don’t ever mention what it is you do for a living.

  It is an apt commentary on Alice Springs. Like the space base employees, Alice has traded its identity for a patch of neutral turf to unfurl for the world. Tourists can come from Anywhere, Western World, roll dice at the casino or pitch and putt at the golf course, and never feel too far from home.

  Far from home is how I’m feeling, though, standing at a street corner with a rucksack, a heavy beer buzz, and two thousand miles of sweaty travel behind me. It is the kind of faraway feeling that has me squeezing into a phone booth with enough twenty-cent pieces in one pocket to counterbalance all the amethyst in the other. I’ve called Geraldine two or three times for a quick reconnaissance (“I’m in such-and-such … all in one piece … I miss you….”). But we haven’t had a proper conversation.