Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (6 page)

We rode through long grass with hills bordering the paddocks and the clear waters of the creek running by. It was a beautiful morning. Helen led the cattle with me trailing behind them and three dogs keeping the little herd together. It
was
easy; once the cows saw the dogs they knew what was expected and we moved them from one paddock to another. The only bit of hassle was when they were spooked by Claudio’s camera.

After lunch the boys showed up in their utes. They came trailing up the dirt road, three shining examples of the kind of custom-car culture I’d heard about. We’re talking chrome and alloy, metallic paint and the rumble of V8s.
Utez.com
has something like two thousand active members, people who buy a Holden or a Ford maybe, and do it up. I suppose it’s a bit like Harley culture or sports-bike culture in the UK.

They had come to drive us up to Cairns, these three young guys in T-shirts and dark shades: Cameron, Ronnie and Ben, or Camshaft, Rocket and Big Ben, as I decided to dub them. Cameron was driving a Ford BF XLS, Ronnie an HSV Maloo and Ben a VZ 55 Holden.

We showed them where we wanted to get to on the map, and Ben reckoned we ought to be able to make Mackay that night, while another eight hours tomorrow should see us in Cairns. Saying our goodbyes to the Old Station, we took off along a dirt road heading for the main A1. We were planning to camp that night, so we stopped at a supermarket to buy ice boxes and food. It was after three o’clock now and we still had three hundred kilometres to go before we got to Mackay, and over a thousand to Cairns. We didn’t make it to Mackay; in fact, as it began to get dark we were only half way there, so we pulled off into a rest area close to the Waverly Creek Reserve. We had no stove and no barbecue and I’d been hoping there would be fixed gas barbecues so we could cook the steaks and ribs Claudio and I had picked up. But no such luck.

There was lots of dust, a couple of camper vans and the sound of road trains thundering up and down the coast. Sam was moaning - he claimed that I’d forgotten to pack his sleeping bag and although he had an Aussie swag (a bedroll with built-in mattress and waterproof base), he had nothing more than a child’s blanket to go on it.

‘The stuff was all there,’ he told me. He was talking about the last day in London when the kit was laid out with each pack.

‘I asked you if it was yours, Sam,’ I said.

‘Yes, but you didn’t check what it was. What you thought was a sleeping bag was only a pillow.’ He held up the blanket - pink and blue with those little woolly holes in it, you know the kind of thing. ‘This is all I’ve got, Charley. You’ve got your sleeping bag, Robin’s got his and Claudio’s got that really warm one filled with goose down.’

‘I used it in Africa,’ Claudio said matter-of-factly. ‘It was very good in the cold.’

‘Terrific.’ Again Sam held up the blanket.

‘You’ll be fine,’ I assured him. ‘Some hot food and a couple of beers, you’ll sleep like a baby.’

Hot food? Right. We still had nothing to cook on. It was dark now and with my head torch in place I wandered over to the camper vans where two elderly couples were sitting at a table laid with a chequered cloth, eating the dinner they had cooked on an open fire. It was burning brightly a few yards from the table.

‘Sorry to interrupt your dinner,’ I said, ‘but you wouldn’t have any spare wood we could use by any chance?’

‘No, sorry,’ the man sitting closest to me answered as he shovelled steak and potatoes into his mouth.

‘Did you find the wood here?’ I asked.

‘No,’ his wife said. ‘We brought our own.’

Oh dear. They introduced themselves as Keith and Joy Bailey and together with their friends Trevor and Sorrell they were on a road trip, and unlike us they were fully prepared with wood and a fire complete with hot plate for cooking.

‘I tell you what,’ Keith said. ‘Why don’t you cook your food on our fire?’

‘Can we?’

‘Sure, why not?’

It was typical Australian hospitality. I remember when we ran out of diesel the last time I was here, we found a lovely couple in another camper who gave us their spare can. Grabbing the food, I set about preparing the meal while the others gathered round the fire and opened a few tinnies.

‘Hey, Charley,’ Keith called from the table. ‘I’ve got something for those steaks.’ He produced a bottle of his own recipe Worcestershire sauce. ‘There you go,’ he said. ‘The main ingredient is treacle, and there’s a little vinegar and herbs. You’re supposed to put peppers in it too, but it makes it too hot. Slather it on the meat, it tastes great.’

‘Thanks very much,’ I said, taking the bottle.

‘The only thing is what it does to your stomach.’

‘Oh I see. So if we spend all night running to the toilet we’ll know why, eh?’

He laughed. ‘No, mate. That sauce will
stop
you running to the toilet. That’s the point. It’s that effective, if you poured it over Niagara Falls the water would stop flowing.’

 

 

The next day, the ute boys got us to Cairns and we took a day off from the travelling to do some essential housekeeping. I was running very short of underpants (though the least said about that the better) so we found a much-needed launderette. The following morning, the ninth day out since we left Sydney, we hitched a ride with the flying doctors.

I was up just after six and it was dark and wet. I sometimes forget that it’s winter here, so it’s darker in the mornings of course, but I hadn’t thought we would see so much rain. The bad weather seemed to be following us up the coast and I have to admit it was beginning to affect my mood. It was at times like this when the responsibility started to weigh heavily on me, and I began to worry about the trip and all the logistical problems surrounding it.

But nothing matters when I’m on a motorbike and hopefully tomorrow, once we’d hooked up with David Williams, everything would be fine. David runs a company called Fair Dinkum Tours and we were planning to ride the forest roads to a place called Cooktown, a few hundred miles up the coast.

Today, however, I would be on another plane, only this time in the company of the flying doctors as they made a primary-healthcare visit to an Aboriginal community at a place called Pormpuraaw.

 

 

The Royal Flying Doctor Service was started back in 1928 by a guy named John Flynn, a Presbyterian minister who wanted to bring healthcare to people in remote areas of the country. It was no more than an experiment to begin with; in fact, it was only supposed to be in operation for a year. Eighty-one years later the service has grown to a point where there is coverage for the entire outback, and the Cairns operation looks after not just the Cape area, but the whole of Queensland, which is just a little bit larger than Western Europe.

At the airfield we met a girl called Gil who explained that although most people think of the flying doctors as landing in the bush in the middle of the night, their main function is to provide primary healthcare. There were three planes in the hangar; one was always on standby and the others were rotated between primary healthcare and what Gil called ‘aero medical retrieval’ - heart attacks, accidents and other incidents that required a swift response. In other words, the rescue missions.

It was hosing down again and I was getting sick of it, but the pilot, Emma, was going to fly us up to Pormpuraaw in the rain. As we settled in the back, the wipers were working nineteen to the dozen and I was thinking of tomorrow and what the dirt roads in the bush were going to be like.

Fortunately, as we left Cairns the weather began to improve, and by the time we landed at Pormpuraaw the sky was clear and the sun shining. We’d flown some four hundred nautical miles and were deep into the bush, a beautiful but wild part of the country. The airstrip was close to a stretch of fresh water where all kinds of birds were nesting. Pormpuraaw is an autonomous Aboriginal community that has proven to be one of the most successful in the country. Alcohol abuse, and the kind of domestic violence that can be a by-product of it, has been an issue among the Aboriginal population for some time. This was a self-managed town where the strict drinking rules had a beneficial impact. Some of these towns in the Cape are completely dry, but this one still had a bar. Only low- to medium-strength beers are sold, however, and the bar only opens between 5.30 p.m. and 8 p.m., five days a week.

I spoke to a guy called Kurt who was the director of the corporation that oversaw the Women’s Resource Centre, a broad social programme that began life as a shelter for the victims of domestic violence. The town had a population of 720, and Kurt explained that since they introduced the drinking legislation, the attacks on women had been reduced significantly, in both frequency and intensity.

Kurt was a cool guy, very knowledgeable about his people. He told me about the stolen generation, when the Australian authorities (partially guided by the church) believed that the quickest way to assimilate the indigenous people into Australian society was to remove their children and place them in dormitories in different parts of the country. Often the children never saw their families again.

The practice started in 1869 and Kurt told me it was still going on as late as 1970. It is similar to what was done to Native Americans, and it caused untold problems and suffering. Generations were lost, children grew up with no link to family or their past and the repercussions went on for years and years. Even today you get the feeling that there is still a huge divide between the whites and the Aborigines in Australia.

Standing there in a remote little town, watching pelicans on the lake and listening to Kurt speak about a culture that is fifty thousand years old, was extremely moving. Around us the bush all but swallowed up the tin-roofed buildings, and beyond them mountains dominated in a dusty kind of grey.

The town has its own council, hospital and police force - two Queensland cops who are based there permanently. We were given a lift to the council buildings in a police car. Sliding into the passenger seat alongside a guy called Tim White, I glanced back at Claudio. ‘This is the first time I’ve been in a police car voluntarily,’ I whispered.

‘Why am I not surprised?’ he replied.

Tim turned out to be the Queensland police psychologist. I had no idea such jobs existed, but as we drove he told me it was vital that the police officers who worked in these kinds of areas were of sound enough mind to do so.

‘Think about it, Charley,’ he said. ‘You take a twenty-two-year-old police officer from Brisbane who has lived in the city all his life and bring him up here. There are no creature comforts, no McDonald’s or anything like that. Eighty per cent of the Australian population knows nothing about the indigenous culture, so the parallel to that is eighty per cent of the police officers don’t either. There are only two of you up here and you’re rotating shifts all the time. You’re permanently the potential target of an assault and you’re permanently armed. When you’re not working there is nothing to do except fish and hunt. You need to be able to cope with those kinds of pressures emotionally.’

He was right of course and I tried to imagine being a copper in a place like this - beautiful but remote and both small enough and yet big enough to cause you all sorts of problems. At the council buildings we met Edward, the Deputy Mayor. He was a thoughtful-looking man, softly spoken, and when he heard where we were heading next, he gave me a card with his sister’s phone number in Papua New Guinea. ‘She’ll put you up if you need a place to stay,’ he told me.

Gil was keen to show us the Primary Healthcare Centre, a grey building half hidden among the trees. Inside she introduced us to Natalie, who basically runs the place. She loves her job; I mean really loves it. Every new day brings a different challenge. With no doctor permanently assigned, she has to think on her feet, not just in terms of patients’ needs but also the logistics. The hospital was state-of-the-art - they had a crash unit, digital x-ray, a visiting dentist and enough drugs and dressings to last six months. They had to cater for the rainy season when the planes could still get in but could not carry heavy cargoes, so everything the hospital needed had to be in stock before the weather turned.

It was a humbling place to visit, reminiscent of the sort of facilities I’ve been to with UNICEF, and the people have the same dedication. Natalie had been there seven years and was not planning to leave. In fact, everyone we spoke to, including the police officers, loved Pormpuraaw. Some said that when they first arrived it had been a bit of a culture shock, but after a couple of months they were settled in and nobody wanted to leave.

I was feeling much better. There’s nothing like a place like Pormpuraaw to make you realise that sometimes the things you stress about don’t really matter at all. All the stuff I’d been fretting over was back in its proper perspective, and even more so as we landed back in Cairns. Another of the RFDS planes had just flown in with a man who’d had a heart attack. The aero retrieval plane is basically a flying intensive care unit. There was a doctor on board and the chap they wheeled to the ambulance had been in expert care ever since the pilot landed.

 

 

The following morning, 27 May, I woke up early. It was raining. Again. We had had a little respite up in the bush yesterday but this morning it was dark and overcast, and the clouds just seemed to dribble over the city. After a short drive north I was feeling much more positive. First there was David Williams, a cheerful soul with cropped hair and the kind of granite-like features I’d seen in Mark, the Diamond T driver. David was younger, though - in his thirties. He’d ridden with some serious dirt-bike riders and one wall of his house was devoted to newspaper cuttings of their exploits. He greeted us warmly and, better still, he had three motorbikes all ready and waiting - a pair of Suzuki DR Z400Es and a KTM 640 that he had borrowed from a mate of his. I’ll come to the KTM later but suffice to say I think I put the hex on it.