One for the Road (6 page)

The writer Paul Theroux once observed that conversing with strangers is a peculiarly American compulsion. “To get an American talking it is only necessary to be within shouting distance and wearing a smile,” he writes. “Your slightest encouragement is enough to provoke a nonstop rehearsal of the most intimate details of your fellow traveler’s life.”

He’s right, of course. Whenever I replay my first hitchhiking trip across America, ten years ago, it comes out like a blurry home movie—Rocky Mountains, Grand Canyon, the wet green Oregon woods—with a voice-over of one Middle American after another reciting his life story. That was one of the things I liked so much about hitching: getting a personalized tour of the continent with people I’d never otherwise meet.

So far on this trip I’ve been lucky to extract a complete sentence from a driver, much less a life story. As a reporter in Sydney, Australians have sometimes struck me as shy, at least by American standards. But I assumed it was a city-bred reticence, or maybe some remnant of English reserve. Now, after riding with so many silent country folk, I’m beginning to suspect that it’s the bush that is the true home of the taciturn Australian.

Near Tambo, Paul touches my arm and points at an astonishing tree that has a short and grotesquely stout trunk, rising to a bushy head. It looks like a bowling pin with an Afro haircut.

“Bottle trees,” he says. “Fattest trees in the world.”

I dig into my rucksack’s library for a paperback guide to Australian fauna and flora. Bottle tree.
Brachychiton rupestris
. Also known as Australian baobab, or boab. Native to South Africa, Australia, and nowhere else. Girth of up to fifty-nine feet. Sumo wrestlers of the Southern Hemisphere.

Paul turns between two really obese specimens—some kind of signpost, apparently—and enters a sheep station the size of a medieval principality. It is six miles before we reach the manor, a split-level palace with tennis courts and swimming pools girdled round. The lord and lady are in Europe, Paul explains, while the prince and princess are being finished at a boarding school in Toowoomba. But there is a feudal retainer on hand to escort us by motorcycle to a back paddock of the forty-eight-thousand-acre property. Forty-eight thousand acres. That’s bigger than my birthplace, Washington, D.C.—but with a population of five instead of seven hundred thousand.

Not counting the animals, of which there seem to be several million. But for some reason our sheep don’t want to join this livestock ghetto. As soon as Paul opens the tailgate, the rams retreat into a rugby scrum at the back of the trailer. First in is the caretaker’s sheepdog. He barks and howls and emerges a moment later, butted and bruised. We prod at the animals from the sides of the trailer. Still nothing. Finally, Paul crawls in on hands and knees to drag a ram out by its horns. The others follow, as sheep are wont to do.

“Bloody dumb beasts,” Paul mutters before catching himself and falling silent. Receipts are exchanged. One vassal nods to another. And a
transaction worth several thousand dollars is done without the absentee owners missing a ray of sun on the Riviera. Some among the Lucky Countrymen have ridden far atop the merino’s back.

From the “rolling down” country of the sheepocracy we drive into the dusty towns of the wool proletariat. Here the homes are modest, the men brawny from wrestling and shearing sheep. It is late in the day, though, and most are hoisting nothing weightier than a pot of beer. Paul has to keep moving stock, so I pile out at a town called Blackall and retire to the Bushman’s Hotel to wash down all that quiet.

Over a tinnie of Fourex, served outback-style in a Styrofoam holder, I learn that a husky lad named Jackie Howe made shearing history near Blackall in 1892. He clipped 321 sheep in less than eight hours (almost one a minute), a feat that took fifty-eight years and mechanized shearing to surpass. The standard-issue singlet that shearers wear has been known ever since as the “Jackie Howe.”

The crush of drinkers and the sweaty Jackie Howes give the Bushman Hotel all the jostle and stink of a woolshed. But then, after four days on the road, I’m no rose either. My shorts and khaki shirt are coated in dust. My hair is matted and much too long for soliciting rides, not to mention standing in the outback sun. What better place than Blackall to get the shearing done?

The local hairdresser takes one look at my sweaty locks and decides she is closing early. So I hitch a ride with two shearers deeper into sheep country, deeper into sheep history. Barcaldine, an hour farther on, was the site of the “Great Shearers’ Strike” of 1891. When the shearers laid down their blades and manned a picket line, the stationmasters brought in scabs and the Queensland government sent troops. Eventually, the strike was broken and the union leaders arrested under an ancient statute barring “unlawful assemblage, riot and tumult.” But the strike spawned nationwide union meetings, and later, the creation of the Australian Labor Party.

Northwest of Barcaldine, the land becomes flat and bare again. The map shows almost nothing for some distance after a place named Winton, so just before sunset I hop out at a turn-off to the plainly named town.

If Blackall is the woolly shoulder of Queensland sheep country, Winton is its neglected dag end. Even at tea time the streets are so scorched and dusty that I feel like Lawrence of Arabia navigating from the highway to the business center. The first sign of impending civilization is the public
toilet, labeled “Rams” on the men’s door and “Ewes” on the women’s. I turn on the cold tap and feel my arms scoured by hot artesian water.

Time to consult my tourist guide. Maybe there’s someplace more inviting a little farther along. There isn’t.

Anyway, the tourist guide tells me that even wretched Winton has its claims to fame. A “large predator” chased some smaller dinosaurs near town 100 million years ago, leaving tracks that are “a tourist must.” More recently, a plane carrying Lyndon Baines Johnson touched down on a Winton airstrip. It was twenty years before he became president, but in a place like this, even brushes with fame-to-be are worthy of recording.

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.

D
awn. 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:

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.