Walk across Australia Read online

  My goal and finish for the day was the Marriott Hotel, and for a moment as I sat its bar I thought it was Paradise. From a hot, slogging day, I sat down to the gentle hum of an air-conditioner, the clink of ice-filled glasses and the tender attentions of Natasha the barmaid. All that day the high rise of the Gold Coast hotels were easy enough to make out at the end of the curve of the beach to the north while concrete radiated heat and the Pacific Ocean blinked the sun just a few metres away to my right.

  Around 10 the next morning I glimpsed the sea for the last time and headed north-west to follow the Beenleigh Highway. The rest of that day was spent battling all forms of motorised road transport and construction equipment. This highway was a four-lane, dual carriageway slash across the landscape. It was no place for camels or pedestrians. There was stinking road kill every few hundred metres, glued to the road like ripped and scuffed squares of carpet.

  I passed well-attended amusement parks that catered to some people who had so few thrills, so little time and so little imagination that they paid for them. From the side of the road and above the noise of traffic I heard screams and laughter bought with the dollars of people who traded living a life for the security of sameness. It seemed to me that many people paid good money for stimulation to displace the fear and quiet knowledge of an emptiness inside themselves. In knowing a little about myself I knew what I had to do. No matter what others thought, this was my adventure; I researched it, risked things for it and lived it. I owned it. The people in these amusement parks were like people I met who brought memorabilia – to experience and try to own in a small way some of the excitement of risk and of something special and unique. Many did this rather than risking or achieving for themselves. Sadly, some did it because they never had the chance, and never would, to do something themselves.

  The grey-green scrub that flanked the highway choked off any hint of a sea breeze so there was just the dirty breath of passing vehicles against my skin. I was happy to finish the day at the Yatala Pie Shop more than 40 kilometres from the morning’s start.

  The pie shop opened early next day and with a pie inside me I walked across the road bridge into Beenleigh and eventually west onto Browns Plains Road. As the sun began to make its way above the trees I passed two women, perhaps in their forties, in a park. I stopped and witnessed a curious sight. They were standing a few paces apart wearing pink chiffon dresses with fairy wings. They raised their arms to reveal paintbrushes. I watched for a moment as they studied each other very carefully and painted each other with a caress that appeared both tender and loving. I could have expected this in Byron Bay, where assisting others to self-knowledge and expression was an industry.

  Around midday I stopped to drink the last of the water I carried. I sat down opposite the gates to the Greenbank Military Training Area range control. The red flag was up indicating that live ammunition was being used somewhere within the 4500 hectare facility, but sitting outside range control I heard nothing more than the occasional backfire of a vehicle.

  Later, at the end of a hot, humid day in Brisbane’s west, I called my brother Brett. The laces on my boots were tight from the swelling of my feet and each step on the grease-stained concrete outside a petrol service station was a burning brand against my soles. I was in trouble and not up to much more walking. I needed to recover so spent the next two nights with Brett in Brisbane, wishing my feet would shrink so that I could fit them back into my boots. I spent most of the time with my feet up, a fan cooling my skin and a glass with plenty of ice in my hand.

  Brett dropped me off on Sunday morning at the point where he had picked me up two days before. We stood for a moment looking at each other. After Law School, Brett went to Cambridge to do a postgraduate degree. I joined the French Foreign Legion. While I planned my trip across Australia, Brett worked to secure preselection for the Senate. Rather formally we shook hands in a patch of long grass beside a road littered with broken bottles and dog shit. He screwed up his eyes and indoor skin stretched tight across his face; the stress and paleness from spending long days on the telephone doing deals. I wondered what the year would bring for us both.

  As I walked a few prohibited kilometres along the Logan Expressway and west into Ipswich I reflected again on choices and why some people chose to do difficult things when a far easier life lay very close to hand. As I strolled past sharp-sided schools, dark green treed parks and shaded verandah pubs, it became clear to me that for some people at least, their choices were made, or made for them, when they were very young. I stopped to ask directions of two skinny young men. Their naked white knees were thrown over the arms of shredded cane chairs which sat among the weeds in front of their house. The rip in the fine wire mesh front door was a frozen grimace. Their faces were sickly green and greasy in the sun. The blue shirted one said, ‘Get fucked. Waddjya want in our town?’ I looked at them for a moment, said nothing, and then walked on just as a cloud passed overhead.

  From the start of that day my right ankle gave me trouble. As the day progressed it got worse. With every pace it felt like a length of hot wire was being drawn around the outside of my ankle. I felt my foot swell in my boot and the day ended with me shambling along beside the road. In an ecstasy of shuffling I saw myself as an old man, a small pack on my back, a set of lungs wheezing and a pain in my foot that filled my mind with redness and stars.

  The mental effort of blocking out the pain became as tiring as walking. By the end of the day I was exhausted. I made it to Walloon, named by settlers who brought the name with them from Prussia, passing on its outskirts an enthusiastic evangelical congregation celebrating their joy in the warm and moist Sunday evening air. Through the window of the church I could see people with sure, knife-edged creased pants, shirts, hair and beliefs.

  Walloon was eight kilometres short of Rosewood which had been my aim that evening. I asked the barmaid at the hotel if there was any accommodation. ‘No – sorry love, don’t do accommodation.’ I had a glass of lemonade and thought through my situation. I could not walk further that day and so I decided to hitch-hike to Rosewood.

  I hobbled to the first floor of the Sunshine Hotel in Rosewood to find the only other occupant of the public rooms. He was an Irishman, perhaps in his sixties, on his way to watch TV in baggy pyjamas, silver chest and fragrance of hops. In a soft burr to match his eyes he said, ‘Son, I’ve never known it to be as hot as this in March. It was 37 Celsius today.’ The Sunshine was what Queensland hotels used to be. I could easily imagine a team of shearers or canecutters sleeping four to a high-ceilinged room, the overhead fan cutting through the heat of the evening blessing those below with a shiver.

  In keeping with the trip being one walk across the country, next morning I hitch-hiked back to Walloon. Greg was in his twenties, in a bright red bubble car, matching bright red short-sleeve shirt, very dark sunglasses and platinumblonde hair. As soon as I was sitting in his car we got talking. He told me that he was a sponsored skateboarding professional looking to compete in Sydney the following weekend. He was an expert in ‘verts’ – going up and down a wall up to 14 feet high. He had broken his wrist, his leg twice, and driven his upper arm through his elbow. He showed me the scar.

  From Walloon I walked back to Rosewood and its video shop with posters of two action hero brand names – Stallone and Van Damme. Had I arrived a day earlier I could have ridden on a steam train. A banner suspended across the main street told me that on the last Sunday of every month train rides could be taken from town – from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The destination was not clear, but it could have been fun, and it cannot have been far. I did know for certain that it would be a burning and humid 24 kilometres to Laidley. The way out of town was flanked by the dark green of the long grass by the road’s edge and sub-tropical green of the fields.

  Later that day I sat at the bar of the Grandchester Hotel in Grandchester, a town that was just a small dot on my map. Down the bar a little way a bald local in shorts and with a tattooed, very sun-browned upper
arm told me that the very first train in Queensland ran between here and Ipswich in 1865. It made me smile that the town’s name was changed from Bigge’s Camp; apparently the railway’s terminus deserved something grander. In the valley, on the left into town, was a corrugated-iron roofed steam-driven saw mill. According to Fred, who sat along from the tattooed arm, it was one of the few remaining steam-driven mills in Queensland. As I watched his fist around the frosted glass I wondered if he had lost his fingers at the mill.

  I was going to ask the publican if she would like to step outside to have a photograph with me but she had a black eye and I did not want her to have to say no or have to explain how she got it. Her husband sidled up to her with an air of possessive and distracted menace. I did not feel very comfortable and I do not think she did either so I let my eyes go to the small model train that ran around the back of the bar, just below roof level. On just one loop it ran around and around the back of the bar. It must have been very hypnotic for the regular patrons. It certainly was for me.

  On the wall of the pub, next to the entrance, was a noticeboard with yellowed reminders of tennis matches and tractors for sale. There was a note that read:

  Peacocks for 2 cartons

  Mum, Dad and kids Ph: 43598

  With cool lemonade in hand I mused over the cryptic note and figured it meant that in exchange for two cartons of beer one could have a family of peacocks.

  I arrived at the outskirts of Laidley, what the locals call the ‘country garden of Queensland’, as the sun began to throw a long shadow behind me. I noticed stationary cars, one behind the other, with large water containers on trailers or in the trays of utilities. Nearby was a sign indicating it was a council water filling station. It seemed that the green of crops all around was deceptive. Lush crops were thanks to water from deep underground. There was no water in the creeks or in the rivers. It was drought and it was affecting many people. I met Frank and Gwen, a couple in their fifties who had been ‘married longer than we can remember’ and who finished each other’s sentences as they leaned against their front gate watching the proceedings. According to them, there was often insufficient water in their house tanks for people who were not connected to the town water supply. So they fell into line and filled up at the water station. At least they did not have to pay. Watching the water stream from the hoses I knew that someone would eventually have to pay the price of convenience, thoughtlessness and greed.

  After the filling station I stopped at the Queensland National Hotel in Laidley. I arrived sticky and relieved I was merely footsore and still able to walk. I lay on the bed and its threadbare pink cover and must have dozed off for a few minutes because the room had become darker as the sun set on the day. Along with a couple of beers, I had a T-bone steak so big it hung over the sides of the plate and its juices dripped bloody to the bar. As I chewed the beef I listened in to talk of rain, or the lack of it, and of stock and feed prices.

  After a breakfast of eggs and as many cups of tea I could drink, the road next day took me west to a picture postcard town. In Forest Hill two old pubs faced off under wide verandahs and at the end of the street stood a war memorial, where a white stone soldier rested on arms reversed, eyes bent to the sunrise. Every town I walked through in my crossing had one; a memorial to its lost men of World War I. Often, on another face of a column or the reverse of a plinth, the names of those who had served or lost their lives in World War II or later conflicts were also remembered. Thanks to directions from a council worker in a fluorescent orange waistcoat, I took a short cut and followed a track parallel to the railway lines into Gatton.

  The tarmac on the road to Gatton was sticky from the sun and sucked at my boots. In town I bought myself a litre of mango juice and a meat pie. I lunched on a bench beside the road watching the traffic speed by. Then, with a belly full of juice I headed to Grantham and a walk up the escarpment toward Toowoomba and the west. I arrived at the Helidon Motel Spa just an hour or so before sunset.

  Once in my room, I took off humid and smudged clothes and walked the few metres to the soothing waters of the Helidon Spa, known even in Aboriginal times as having healing powers. The spa was roofed and enclosed by clear glass panels. I was alone, and in the still quiet floated on my back, the only sounds the pulsing in my ears, the lick of water against my body and the gentle click as cartilage, bone and muscle disengaged in my lower back. I hoped the spa worked its wonders on me; my body ached and I knew the next day would be no easier.

  A big voiced journalist from the local paper took my photograph and interviewed me the following morning. She had a firm view about the drought and use of the water in the Lockyer Valley. ‘It’s just no longer sustainable. They’re rooting the land,’ she lectured. The water was being pumped out of the natural chambers underground and on to crops of the valley at a rate far exceeding projected future rainfall. It meant, in her view, that our grandchildren, if we had any, would be left without the resources necessary to manage the land as we did today. ‘It’s bloody criminal,’ she said, which made as much sense as anything I had heard over the last few days.

  I left the Helidon Motel and its spa and turned left onto the Warrego Highway. Just a few kilometres away to the west the country buckled up to the Great Dividing Range. The range is the geographical, spiritual and economic divide that marks the separation of the coastal dwellers from the people of Australia’s hinterland. On the right-hand side of the road I came across a plaque commemorating Allan Cunningham, the earliest European explorer through this part of Queensland. It read:

  Cunningham and his party passed this way on 27 June 1829. During this portion of his journey he climbed Mount Davidson (Sugarloaf) and discovered Mount Tabletop. The spa water region was also discovered by him at this time.

  (Gatton and District Historical Society)

  Cunningham was recognised as the first European explorer through much of the country to the west and south-west of the penal settlement of Moreton Bay, later renamed Brisbane. It was Cunningham who named the Darling Downs further to the west, a mere 50 kilometres away. I reminded myself I was crossing the paths of many people, some of whom were remembered, though most I understood very well were not.

  From the small plaque beside the road I began the steep walk to the top of the escarpment. On the walk to the top it rained fat warm drops. I looked down to the right where the ground fell away to dense rainforest and the air I breathed was thick and heavy with moisture. Once I crested the ridge, however, the environment changed and the subtle soft light of the coast became the brittle hard light of the inland.

  I walked through Toowoomba, a town of warm blooms and smiling people, and then down to the western plains. In just one day’s walking I had moved from the moist green of the coastal plain to the dry brown of Australia’s interior. I stood on the western outskirts of Toowoomba and looked down on wide open plain and another country. The distance was shortened in the haze of late afternoon – filmy gauze to obscure and perhaps soften the future. There was no more green, no lush fecundity.

  Instead, there was this other land, a place generally little understood by those who lived on the coast who peopled it with clicheś; of drought, of burned land, shrivelled ideas and flies. To some people, those who owned shares in the great agricultural enterprises of the country, a drought was a loss of profit, perhaps a tax deductible loss. For others, flood and drought were a death in life, something that touched the heart and made people fear for the present and their future.

  Late in the day, I stopped at the truck stop at Charlton for something to eat. The truck stop lay at the bottom of the range on the Warrego Highway, named after the river at the end of the highway almost due west. It was a brown place that smelled of greasy eggs, oil and people moving on.

  Next morning I continued west to Oakey, the home of Bernborough, ‘The best race horse,’ according to the plaque at the foot of the statue next to the Shire Council Headquarters, ‘ever produced in Queensland.’ Further along, on the footpa
th in the middle of town and under a wide verandah, I walked past a lady in her sixties. She sat behind a card table and a handwritten sign, under a large wide-brimmed hat with a plastic flower in its crown, selling raffle tickets in support of the local Scouts. She was engaged in a very animated conversation with a woman wearing a long flowing floral skirt, sensible flat black shoes and a lavender scent to match the colour of her hair. Her eyes were bright and hard and the floral skirt said, ‘and you wouldn’t believe it. She walked in as bold as brass and she said …’ I didn’t linger to listen.

  Oakey is also home to the Australian Army Helicopter School, and the Black Wasps followed me west. I could not imagine there would be too many navigational problems for the pilots; there was only one road and one railway track and they paralleled my direction – unerringly and always west.

  By mid-afternoon I was becoming dehydrated and my breath made a rasping noise. Soon after, I arrived at Jondaryan. The small town was the home of the largest operating woolshed in the Southern Hemisphere and marked my earliest arrival at a night stop. The pub’s front door was just a few metres off the highway and its interior was cool, dark and welcoming. The only sounds were the hum of a fat fly batting itself against the ceiling and the low drone of the television. All I wanted was to sit down and rest with a cold glass. The barmaid ignored me, far more interested in what was happening on a flickering screen than someone wanting a drink at her bar.

  She sat at the other end of the bar and refused to turn to me. I said ‘Hello,’ and her back said enough. It took a commercial break before I was able to order a tall glass of cold lemonade. Even showing me to a room was a real task for her though I waited until her program was over to ask if one was available. Maybe I upset her daily routine of not doing much at all but sitting and watching television.

  As the sun came up next morning, I walked between golden fields and began to think more of what lay ahead. The first part of this trip had taken 10 days and I wondered about the camels. Even though Gibbo and Mary-Anne assured me over the phone they were fine, I wondered if they had forgotten me. I wondered too if I would be able to walk with them; whether or not they would follow.