AUSTRALIA, 1975: 4 Melbourne, Brisbane and Mackay

In Sydney I’d stayed with Hampo, who was an old schoolfriend of my aunt (‘Hampo’ being her school nickname). She’d helped my mother look after me and my four siblings one summer when we were young and we’d all fallen for her. She’d emigrated to Australia and lived there with her husband Charles and their three young children.

    I’d rung them from the airport in the middle of the night without any warning. I had intended to meet a cousin in Melbourne but, after what felt like days sitting in an aeroplane and in Bangkok airport while the plane refuelled, I couldn’t face any more travel. They came straight out to fetch me, showing no signs of surprise at my sudden appearance.

    Hampo, the children and I spent the day at a beach. A city with a beach! How wonderful.

    ‘The beaches are netted’, said Hampo, ‘to keep out the sharks.’

    A city with sharks!

 

Sydney, a city with beaches (and sharks)

On their verandah Hampo and Charles had a whole fridge devoted to wine. We drank Australian wine from a box with a tap on it, not something I'd ever seen before, but how practical. 
    That evening after supper, Charles unrolled a map of Australia on the dining-room table and tapped the top right-hand corner with his finger.
    ‘The Great Barrier Reef,’ he said. ‘That’s where you want to go.’
    He was encouraging me. He acted as if the urge to explore was perfectly normal. I wasn’t mad after all, in spite of what everyone had said back home.
    I loved this country already.
 
I sounded Helen out and to my astonishment she agreed to come with me. I’d often asked her to come out walking but she’d always groaned and turned away. Perhaps she was recovering too.
    We caught a train that was to travel anti-clockwise round the coast of the continent for several days all the way to Queensland, a place that was spoken of in hushed tones. I wasn’t quite sure why. All that  people would say was, ‘It’s different.’ How could things be any more different? I couldn’t wait.
 
First stop Melbourne, where we stayed with a friend of Darryll’s who was a chef. He cooked us a vat of crispy mixed vegetables drizzled with a strong black sauce. I’d never tasted anything so delicious. Back home we boiled our vegetables till they’d lost most of their colour, texture and taste. This dish was of course stir-fried vegetables with soya sauce, the result of Australia’s proximity to Asia, but something that would take several more decades to reach mainstream UK.
    He shared his flat with a Japanese man who said that I reminded him of Japanese women. He reminded me of English men – polite, reserved – except that he taught me that silence with other people was a compliment not an embarrassment as it was to the English.
    I didn’t like Melbourne. It was too cold, too European, too city-like.
 
We travelled on, spending our nights on the floor of the carriage, rolling into other people as the train went round corners and, after a brief stop in Sydney with some other friends of friends, arrived in Brisbane where we were to drop in on an aunt of Helen’s.
    We climbed broad wooden steps to her little wooden house painted white, hidden in streets of similar little wooden houses. Inside was an exact replica of a suburban British house. Neat and spotless, Lace mats and dainty china.
 
At last we reached Mackay, gateway to the Whitsunday Islands, themselves gateway to the Reef.
     A beautiful soft heat hit me as soon as we left the train and, as we lugged our suitcases along dirt paths between more wooden houses in a beautiful soft sparkling light, I felt as if I was in a dream. I was where I was supposed to be. I had arrived.
    We checked in at the YWCA, a large white clapboard house with lush green grounds, and spent several days washing ourselves and our clothes – arguing over the correct way to use a spin dryer. (Helen was right, I know now.)
    Then we presented ourselves at the office of the Whitsunday hotels, where they weren’t at all excited to see us, even though I had a glowing reference from Darryll. Many people wanted to work for them. We just had to wait and hope.

My reference from Darryll. I was proud of it then and I'm proud of it now.

I’d heard of the Great Barrier Reef but I didn’t know anything about it. It was mythical, like Queensland. But now I’d got this far I was determined to make it further.

AUSTRALIA, 1975: 3 Wilpena Pound

As I walked from one cabin to the next with my mop and bucket, looking up at the forested slopes dotted with frost, smelling the pine and feeling the early morning sun on my face, I was happy. This is so much better than London, I thought. Even though I have a lowly job, I’m happy. How strange. It went against everything I’d been taught.

It had been a long bus journey along empty dirt roads to arrive at the Wilpena Pound Motel where I was now working as a housemaid, but hoping soon to move to waitressing. Food and meals were more my thing than cleaning. And the waitressing hours were better too as I’d have the afternoon off and could go exploring. The wildness all around called to me.
 
At first, I'd panicked. I was with strangers for the first time, and with each new location I'd had to cast off more ties to home. I found a bookshelf of crime novels in the motel lounge – where an enormous log fire burnt all day in deference to the onset of autumn – and when not working glued myself to them, blotting out the panic and hoping it would go away before I ran out of reading matter.

 
The guests had neat modern cabins in a row near the main hotel building. The staff had older detached ones dotted through the trees. I shared one with Helen, who was 28 (ancient) and Scottish and had recently split up with a long-term boyfriend. She hardly talked. I think she would have preferred to be on her own.
 
Darryll ran the kitchen and dining-room and when I joined his band of waitresses he seemed to find me funny. He kept encouraging me to get a job as a Jillaroo, which meant working on a farm, or to ‘try one of the ships’. He obviously thought I needed roughing up. Quite probably. I'd found London scary, but here anything went. Most of the male staff were bisexual (which I'd not come across before). One of the men was consistently unfaithful to his lovely girlfriend. Staff had one-night stands with guests. People drank all day. 
 
Darryll organised an outing which meant taking a bus along dirt tracks. Clouds of white parrot-like birds flew out of the trees.
    ‘What are those?’ I asked, astonished
    ‘Galahs,’ he replied.
    I’d never heard of them. I had to ask him to repeat the word and spell it for me.
    The bus stopped at a waterhole and someone stripped off and dived in. What freedom, I thought. You never swam in fresh water back home. Either you’d catch polio or you’d be poisoned by discharges from factories. Or so they said. I wanted to join him but didn't dare. There were too many people around. How was I going to dry myself afterwards?

    We sat on the bare ground to eat our lunch and a band of emus wandered up and stood around watching us, as if wondering when we were going to vacate their territory. Darryll looked serious.
    ‘Don’t go near them,’ he said.
 
A guest went out walking and didn’t return. They sent a plane to look for him but found no trace. I too went out, every afternoon, following a track that led to a nearby clearing with a ruined shack. I watched kangaroos chase each other round and round the clearing, and as I walked back in the dusk wallabies leapt out of the woods giving me kittens. I sat on a rock above the cabins, and unfamiliar thoughts wafted through my brain.

One night, at a party in someone’s cabin, a housemaid started to scream. The next day, with her left eye bright red from a burst blood vessel, she was sent home to New Zealand.

 
I knew how she felt. It was dawning on me that, while these people spoke English and even looked English sometimes, they were actually an alien species. The country too fooled you into thinking it was normal – with trees and birds and animals like everywhere else – but all of them were new and weird. It wasn't a different country. It was a different planet. But so long as you knew both those things you were OK.

I became friendly with the son of the motel owner, who was on holiday from school. We decided to climb together to the nearest high point, St Mary’s Peak.

The path to St Mary's Peak. (Sorry about the state of the photograph - it is 51 years old, after all.)

It took us hours and we made several wrong turnings but when we arrived at the top there was a 360-degree view of Australian bush. In spite of my borrowed shoes that pinched and a bout of diarrhoea that had sent me running into the undergrowth every half an hour, I was suffused with a feeling I didn't recognise. I think it was joy.

On St Mary's Peak

I'd been in Australia for two months now and was starting to catch up with myself. I felt better, stronger, ready to move on again.

To be continued . . .

AUSTRALIA, 1975: 2 The Murray River

In this instalment, I’ve found myself filling gaps in the original piece and making the story much longer - it's amazing what surfaces when you start digging into memories. It's all still true, but the shape and direction of the account are changing. I hope you will bear with me. You are my guinea pigs.

Heartfelt thanks to Carol and Trish for their encouragement. All comments and commentators welcome.

Bella, my faithful friend, arrived at last - in a pickup truck – and drove us to a shack in the woods where I was greeted by a man with long blond curly hair, wearing nothing but a turquoise-flowered sarong around his waist. I gulped. I’d never seen a man wearing a sarong before. Come to think of it, I’d never seen a sarong either in real life.

    ‘He and his girlfriend were caught in The Darwin Cyclone,’ whispered Bella as she showed me around. ‘They’re very Traumatised. This is the bathroom.’
    She turned on the shower which produced a trickle of rusty water and pointed to the lavatory. ‘Best avoided if you can.’
    ‘I think I’ll go for a walk,’ I said.
    I was finding it hard to keep up. A few days ago I’d been in filthy, grey, strike-ridden London, working in an office. Now I was . . . what?
    ‘Watch out for snakes,’ said Bella, ever thoughtful.

    She was three years older than me and had supported me through the miseries of the last two years.
    Five minutes away I found a river. It was caramel coloured and warm to my hand. Sandy beaches and unfamiliar trees lined its banks. Large black birds, like pterodactyls, swooped and squawked above my head. I felt that I was somewhere very old, somewhere before humans, from another era of Earth’s history.
    I’d completely forgotten about Bella’s warning.

The river

We rose before dawn the next morning and drove to the vineyard in the pickup truck, where I was paired with a middle-aged Italian woman. We worked together down a row, one each side. She was expert and I found it hard to keep up.

 

Arriving at work

On Bella’s advice, I’d brought a scarf from England and she’d shown me how to tie it round my head before we’d left that morning. I needed it. The sun was merciless and we ate our packed lunches in the shade of the vines.

Lunchtime

On our day off, we all swam across the river – the Murray, I now knew – and sunbathed on one of the beaches. The Australians wore nothing. Bella and I wore our bikini bottoms.


A few weeks later, sunburnt, scratched and stained with red grape juice, I headed west with Bella to Streaky Bay to stay with Tom whom she’d met on a bus in South East Asia. He lived in a shed roofed with corrugated iron. He was a gentleman, lonely, bewildered and in love with Bella. Bella and I slept in his bed while he slept on the floor.
    He took us to a nearby beach. It was deserted, thunderous with breakers and stretched as far as the eye could see. We shared the sand with seals and dived into the water to get away from biting flies. I think we might have seen dolphins too.

Seals on the beach near Streaky Bay

Then we went to Adelaide and stayed with some more friends of Bella’s. She’d travelled much of the way to Australia by land and made friends everywhere. These friends were arty and cagey and reminded me of English people.
    ‘What on earth do you want to go to Australia for?’ people had asked me back in England. ‘There’s nothing there.’
    Exactly, I thought. I was sick of it all – culture, class, rules, money.
    I didn’t want to be anywhere or do anything in Australia that reminded me of home.
    Another friend of Bella’s took us lobster fishing on his boat. That was more like it.

 

Lobster fishing with one of Bella's friends

Bella had an offer to fly over Ayers Rock*.
    ‘You could come too,’ she said excitedly.
    ‘Thanks but no,’ I said. ‘I need to get another job.’
    My father had been against me going to Australia but had still given me the money for the plane ticket (£600 – a fortune - even though I’d bought it from a ‘bucket shop’). I'd decided to assuage my guilt at going by saving enough money to pay him back.

    Now, I also wanted to set out on my own, away from Bella’s protection. As for leaving her alone to meet up with D, her lover – that didn’t occur to me.

I caught another bus. This time I was heading for mountains – South Australia’s Flinders Ranges.

Next instalment

* Many Australian place names have been changed back to their Aboriginal versions. I've left them as they were known in 1975 when I was there.

AUSTRALIA, 1975: 1 Sydney

Because I can’t think of anything to write about at the moment, I’m reproducing here the start of something I wrote for a creative writing course way back in 1993. Let me know if you want more. If I don’t hear from you, you won’t get any more!
 
The brief was the ‘loss of a place’ and as far as I remember it was meant to be autobiographical, which this is.
 
I intended to copy it out exactly as I wrote it at the time, but I haven’t been able to resist tweaking it – and improving it, I hope, not killing it.
 
 
Early 1975

I’ve got a job grape-picking’ said Bella’s letter. ‘Why don’t you come too?’
    Bella was in Australia pursuing a lover who’d been coming over to England on business once a year for the last few years, picking up with Bella for a mad few weeks, and then going back home to his wife and children.
    I was 21, eking out an existence in London, trying to forget a failed university career and staggering round the broken glass of a dying romance. My days were propped up with bars of chocolate and my nights with interminable parties.
 
Six weeks later I stepped into the arrivals lounge of Sydney airport.
   ‘Welcome to Austrilia,’ said a large sweaty man in a pale grey uniform.
    I was pleased to be welcomed but it was disconcerting to travel halfway across the world and find people still speaking English.
 
After a few days with friends in that brilliant white-blue-and-green city . . . 

Here is Sydney and some members of the family I stayed with

. . . I set off in an ancient bus piled with mail and newspapers. Every few hours we stopped at one-horse towns with wooden sidewalks and saloon bars.

   People hurried from side to side of the street. The older men wore immaculate baggy white shorts with long white socks and brogues, the younger ones flipflops and tiny, bum-hugging black items which I later learned were called ‘stubbies’.
    I wandered round to the back of one of the rows of buildings only to find stretching to the horizon a pulsating plain of red earth dotted with squat blue-grey bushes. I couldn’t breathe. It was terrifying. There was nothing human anywhere. What on earth had I done?
 
At last, along with a bundle of newspapers, at the intersection of two dirt roads, it was my turn to be dumped. I sat on the bundle and waited. Bella and I had arranged our rendezvous weeks ago by letter. How could it possibly work? What would I do if it didn’t?

Next instalment

What happens when we die

 

The stark beauty of the new saltmarsh on the Otter estuary in East Devon. Ellie and I walked here at the beginning of the month

I read on Instagram this morning that scientists have now discovered that energy leaves the body (of both humans and animals) when we die. Tibetan monks comment, ‘You need science to tell you what silence already knows?’ 
 
I agree with the monks. It's our own experience that matters. Science is a clumsy tool. As my little book of Chinese wisdom says, 'Why light a candle to see the sun?'
 
When our first dog Brindle died (and Frog, Brindle and I were out in the garden with the vet), I saw Brindle's energy fly from her body like a puff of smoke and zoom northwards over our shed. It was a discrete entity and it was in a hurry. I presumed it was her soul. Brindle had nearly died a year before and I’d prayed for her to stay alive because I wasn’t in a position to deal with her death at the time. She’d waited for me, even though she’d wanted to go. I write about this, and more, in a previous post.
 
I feel annoyed when I read about things like the above because I don’t talk about most of what I experience because people mock. They need science to ‘prove’ things. Then the world catches up with me and I wish I’d had the courage to speak sooner. 
 
This blog is one of the few places where I do speak out, and my time here now without either parents or Frog is for me to learn to be my whole self without shame or doubt (not that Frog ever caused me to feel either of those, but my upbringing had). That’s something else I ‘know’, and I knew it as soon as Frog died.
 
I didn’t see Frog's soul go. It vanished in a second, as we stood together halfway up a hill admiring the view and he dropped to the ground with a cry of surprise.
 
Then the emergency services arrived - by helicopter, two ambulances and a car - and spent about an hour trying to revive him at the side of the road. Then they took him to hospital and tried some more with bigger machines.

When they stopped trying and pronounced him dead, I was almost relieved as the resuscitation attempts were gruesome. I was also unsurprised. And that’s something else I’ve never admitted before. He wanted to go. It was his time to go. He was removing himself for the moment so that I could learn without pressure. (My grief had yet to kick in.)

And none of that is what I intended to write in this post. I intended to tell you about another moving film from the Right to Roam campaigners. In September I directed you to a film about their mass trespass swim at Kinder Reservoir. This new film is about looking after a neglected river in East London and about what they call ‘wild service’. And I hope to tell you more about that when I know more myself.

Sunset last week as I walked home with Ellie

PS I realised after I uploaded this post that today is the winter solstice - the shortest day. How appropriate then to be talking about death - and resurrection perhaps. But that's another story.