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.
 
Daryll 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. 
 
Daryll 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 grumpily. Daryll 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 crashing 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 four months now and was starting to catch up with myself. I felt better, stronger, ready to move on again.

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