The Long Hitch Home Read online

  It wasn’t long before a lone seventy-five foot high, square sandstone tower, topped with battlements, appeared among distant bushland, standing proudly above red cliffs at the entrance to Twofold Bay.

  “That’s Boyd’s Tower,” announced Tony.

  The tower had been built by a Scottish entrepreneur, Benjamin Boyd, in 1847 as a lighthouse, but ended up being used as a lookout by local whalers to spot their prey. It was now part of the Ben Boyd National Park, at the entrance of which it stood. Just up from the tower was a pulp mill of colossal proportions, complete with several mountainous hills of reddish wood chips, the likely source of the scent that had alerted us to land when miles out at sea.

  A pleasant day of sailing commenced, followed by a night shift of epic proportions. Jessica, Tony, and I were treated to marine phosphorescence the likes of which I had no idea existed, its sublime arrival coinciding with the appearance of a pod of dolphins playing about next to the yacht. It was as if I’d taken some super strong LSD, such was the intensity of the colors radiating from the water. One moment the dolphins were up close, exploding out of the sea beside us, throwing psychedelic-colored water into the air and sounding off their characteristic clicks and whistles, the next they had darted off, and the ocean was silent again, leaving us scanning for their return.

  “Over there!” one of us would shout on spotting an illuminated wake, and the party would start over again. It lasted for about ten minutes before the dolphins departed for good, leaving me on a natural high for the rest of the night.

  “I’ve seen phosphorescence like that once before in Thailand,” said Tony, in the calm considered manner of an experienced mariner, something I took to be rather telling. Tony was in his sixties and had sailed most of his life, so if he’d only seen phosphorescence of such brightness once previously, then I was very lucky to have scored such a sight on my first major sailing trip.

  All things considered, it was a pretty uneventful trip back to Sydney from here on in. We moored up in the marina of the exclusive Castlecrag area five days after setting off, having covered 630 nautical miles.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Meth to My Madness

  “Where you bloody going?” asked a tired-looking and wrinkled middle-aged woman through the open passenger window of a powerful-looking Holden Commodore sedan. Behind the wheel sat an equally aged man wearing a baseball cap and a pair of shades. We were on the western outskirts of Sydney—a location I had arrived at early in the morning after scoring a ride from Tony.

  “I’m heading west, trying to get to Port Augusta,” I told them.

  “We can take you to Dubbo,” said the driver, revealing the most horrendous set of worn down black-and-yellow-stained teeth I’d ever seen.

  I had no idea where Dubbo was, so I began to make inquiries and handed over my map to the woman, holding up three cars on the thin strip of truck stop exit road behind us.

  They began blasting their horns.

  With no further ado the woman leaned out of the car window to face those waiting behind.

  “Oh, fuck off with yous!” she yelled, accompanying this with the middle finger.

  She turned to me and calmly pointed out where Dubbo was. It was to the west. I got in.

  Tires screeched and we were off.

  A bony hand thrust into the back.

  “I’m Bindi.”

  We shook.

  “I’m Jamie, nice to meet you.”

  “Robbo,” announced the driver, reaching around with his palm down and elbow up for a handshake in the manner of a gangster holding a gun—taking his eyes off the road for an uncomfortably long period in the process.

  “We’re not a couple by the way,” he said, gesturing to Bindi, as if this was important information to state upfront.

  “Nah, been mates for years,” replied Bindi. “Be too weird to root now!”

  They both laughed.

  I hoped Robbo wasn’t clarifying for my sake in case I fancied a crack at her.

  “You’d be a bloody pommy, wouldn’t you, Jamie?” asked Bindi.

  I answered in the affirmative, that I was indeed an Englishman—“pommy” being Australian slang for their English betters.

  Robbo, it soon became clear, drove like a lunatic, weaving his way in and out of traffic at far too high a speed on the Great Western Highway that led from Sydney towards the Blue Mountains, a region of spectacular forested gorges, roughly thirty miles west of the city. As we approached the Blue Mountains, houses became more sparse and the landscape gradually changed, until we were twisting our way down craggy hillside roads cut into the cliff, eventually giving way to pastures and rolling hills dappled with gently swaying eucalyptus trees.

  “If there weren’t so many fucking cunts on the road we’d be flying along!” exclaimed Robbo.

  He could have fooled me.

  Despite Robbo and Bindi’s penchant for profanity, they were super friendly to me, offering cigarettes, sodas, and candies my way and taking genuine interest in my trip. With a bit of prompting they began to tell me about themselves. Both were Koori Aboriginals, which came as something of a surprise to me as neither was particularly dark skinned. (The Koori are the original inhabitants of land that now encompasses the states of New South Wales and Victoria.)

  I asked them some generalities about the Koori as well as other Aboriginal people.

  “The Murri Aboriginals from Queensland are a bit uppity, think they’re better than us,” said Robbo.

  “And you’ve got to be careful of them ones from the Northern Territory,” added Bindi. “They’ve got powers. Can point a bone at you or sing you back.”

  Pointing a bone, Bindi explained, was the Northern Territory Aboriginals’ way of placing a curse on someone; singing you back, a method of magically enchanting the subject of their affection to return to them, willing or not.

  Robbo put on a CD of Koori country music, by Roger Knox.

  “He’s known as the black Elvis and the Koori king of country,” said Robbo. “Listen to the words.”

  These featured the chorus lyrics, “The brown skin baby, they take him away.” This, I knew, was a reference to the so called “stolen generation” of Aboriginals, a racist government policy based on theories from the eugenics movement, whereby Aboriginal children—usually with a degree of mixed blood—were forcibly stolen from their parents and placed in Christian missions where their culture and language was banned, in a quest to “civilize” and have the color “bred out of them.” Roughly 100,000 children3—equating to as many as 1 in 10 of all Aboriginal children4—were kidnapped from their parents, causing untold misery and suffering. The practice also saw stolen children shipped off as bonded labor to ranches or white middle-class homes as servants. Many were lied to and told their family had died; others, as documented in an official inquiry of 1997, were physically and sexually abused.5 Astonishingly, the policy ran from 1910 right up until 1971.6 Such was the social upheaval and trauma caused, that huge numbers of Aboriginal children turned to alcohol, drugs, and violence, which resulted for many in a premature death. Even now, the life expectancy of Aboriginal Australians is lower than the rest of the world’s other 90 indigenous peoples.7 Sadly, Bindi’s own family bore this out. She was forty-seven years old but told me she had seen five of her fifteen siblings die. When we drove past a roadside cemetery she leaned out of the car and shouted, “Hello sis!”

  “When I die I’m gonna have my Maltese dog buried at my feet,” she said, adding, “Don’t worry, he’s already dead. Had the poor bugger cremated.”

  “Came pretty close to copping it myself recently too,” continued Bindi. “Hubby was driving with me in the passenger seat when we got hit head-on by a truck with bull-bars. Broke my wrists, had my spleen patched, broke my right hip, collar bone, lost eight teeth and broke my right leg. Hubby died four times over, broke his jaw, cheekbones, and his head swelled to the size of a beach-ball. Family only knew him from his tattoos.”

  Bindi showed me, with
a touch of pride, some of her scars.

  “Tell him about the surgeons,” said Robbo, with a giggle.

  “Oh, yeah,” laughed Bindi. “After my hubby came round from his operation, to check he was with it they said to him, ‘Davo, can you tell me who the Prime Minister is?’ He says, ‘How the fucking hell should I know!’”

  After about two hours on the road we arrived in the small town of Bathurst, the oldest inland settlement in Australia and the site of the country’s first significant gold discovery, which led in the 1850s to a frenzied gold rush. Gold was discovered here by an English jack-of-all-trades, Edward Hargreaves, whose first foray into gold mining came with an unsuccessful attempt to strike it rich in the gold fields of California. Despite two fruitless years of panning in the U.S., his trip there was not in vain. Having noted a remarkable similarity between the geography of California and areas he had previously seen in Australia, he decided to try his luck Down Under. His hunch paid off, and it wasn’t long before he found payable amounts of gold at Summer Hill Creek, just outside Bathurst. News spread like wildfire, and within a month of his discovery the area was descended upon by a thousand prospectors panning in streams, lifting up rocks and cracking open boulders.

  Soon gold was found all over the place and in massive quantities, especially in the neighboring state of Victoria, setting off a gold rush of such epic proportions that within just a year of Hargreaves’ discovery, over half the male population of Victoria were searching for it. Towns and cities suffered severe and rapid depopulation as fortune seekers abandoned their jobs and families, and rushed to the gold fields in search of riches. Such was the manic stampede that in under ten years six hundred thousand new migrants flocked to Australia, a country which, until the discovery of gold, it had been nearly impossible to encourage anyone to settle in.

  The ramifications of this were huge, for it effectively saw the end of Australia being used as a vast dumping ground for Britain’s undesirables. To be sent there in chains before gold’s discovery had meant an effective life sentence no matter how short the prison term since few could ever hope to raise the funds to return to Britain. But now, with prisoners having the prospect of discovering riches beyond their wildest dreams on completion of their sentence, getting transported to Australia became an opportunity. And so a fatal blow was dealt to Australia as a prison continent, and slowly a country began to emerge instead.

  We drove through the area now, one of its few notable features observable from the road was a sprawling red-brick prison complex—in which you could see prisoners exercising inside through the perimeter security fence.

  “Wouldn’t fancy being in there,” I casually remarked to Bindi, just making conversation.

  “Nah, did eight months myself for shoplifting,” she responded in the same manner.

  This was interesting.

  In no way do I mean to justify Bindi’s light-fingered tendencies, but it is a fact that Aborigines are imprisoned in Australia today at five times the rate that South Africa imprisoned blacks during its universally acknowledged ultra-racist apartheid era.8 And for the state of Western Australia it climbs to eight times the apartheid rate.9 I wondered if this had played a part in her sentence.

  Conversation flowed between us about law and order, prison and the police, leading Robbo to tell me about a friend of his who had been robbed at gun point. When interviewed by the police the officer had asked him, “Can you tell me what sort of gun it was?” To which he answered: “The type that puts great big fucking holes in you!”

  It wasn’t long before we rocked up in the town of Orange, known, ironically, as “The Apple City,” due to the district’s prominence as a center for apple growing. Named after the Prince of Orange, not the fruit, the town’s elevation and climate prevents the growing of oranges, or as Robbo put it to me, “You piss ice cubes here in winter.”

  “D’you wanna Macca’s, Jamie?” asked Bindi (Macca’s being Australian slang for McDonald’s) as we pulled into the parking lot of said restaurant.

  “I’ll get us a Happy Meal each,” insisted Robbo.

  Having intended, like many trips before, to fast on my first day on the road in order to get into the proper mindset for the rigors of the journey ahead, I initially tried to politely decline.

  Robbo overruled me.

  “Don’t worry about it, mate,” he said, “I help so many people out I’m thinking of joining the fucking priesthood!”

  It sure would have made for some interesting sermons.

  Robbo went in by himself, coming out minutes later with a Happy Meal apiece and a fistful of straws.

  “D’you mind if I keep the toy for my grandkids?” asked Robbo, as he handed me a meal.

  Wow. He looked aged, in a worn kind of way, but not old enough to be a granddad.

  I thanked him for the meal and handed over the toy, a plastic alien figure.

  “Jamie, have you got a pair of scissors?” he asked.

  “I’ve got a knife, will that do?”

  Robbo nodded his agreement. I dug around my backpack and retrieved my Swedish “Mora” bushcraft knife. Using a cigarette packet as a makeshift cutting block, Robbo proceeded to delicately slice through one of his many straws, doing so at an angle to create a stumpy shovel-like implement at one end.

  “What’s it for?” I asked.

  “Smoking meth,” he answered matter of factly, as if this was the most normal thing in the world. I realized now why his and Bindi’s teeth were so horrendous—they both had “meth mouth,” a side effect of crystal meth addiction, which causes addicts to clench their jaw and grind their teeth, while the drug dries out the mouth and accelerates tooth decay.

  Ten minutes outside town and we came to a stop on a deserted stretch of road. Out came a small folded-up piece of what looked like greaseproof paper from the car’s glove compartment. Inside was the methamphetamine—crystal meth. Bindi was first up. Using the purpose-made straw shovel, she scooped up a serving of meth and placed it in the middle of a piece of aluminum foil, about four inches square. Robbo held a cigarette lighter beneath this while Bindi sucked through the straw, taking a deep drag of the wispy vapor spiraling off the foil. She held it back, then, with a palpable “huh,” exhaled, filling the car with fumes. Robbo followed suit afterwards then offered the straw my way.

  “You fancy one, Jamie?”

  “I’m okay, thanks,” I replied, having never really been one for drugs.

  “It’s alright, we’ve got extras. We sell a bit in Dubbo, that’s why we made the trip to Sydney,” replied Robbo, as if surely the reason for my refusal must be polite concern for his dwindling supplies, as opposed to not wanting to become an addict.

  I declined again, laughing inwardly to myself at the rapid change in my situation since this morning. Hours earlier I was hanging out with a millionaire, sailing about on his spectacular yacht, and now, here I was with a couple of small time drug dealers, passively smoking crystal meth in the back of their car.

  I loved hitchhiking.

  I stood by the side of a quiet and peaceful length of road, surrounded by an expanse of dry-looking flat fields peppered with gum trees, and bade farewell to Bindi and Robbo.

  “Don’t forgot to call me tonight if you can’t get a lift,” said Robbo, having offered me a sofa to crash on at his place moments earlier.

  With a big dusty wheel-spin, they pulled off back in the direction of Dubbo, having gone out of their way to drop me on the other side of town on the road heading west. Their lift had covered roughly 250 miles and lasted over four hours, and by now it was early afternoon, and a hot one at that.

  Vehicles were a bit thin on the ground but soon enough an SUV pulled up with two beefy guys about my age inside, who drove me to a spot opposite a tiny regional airport a few minutes up the road.

  “Don’t camp past Cobar on the road tonight,” advised the driver, on hearing I intended to throw my tent down for accommodation. “Could be Aboriginal land and they might not be too friend
ly.”

  Soon I was moving again, driving through the small rural town of Narromine with a dark-skinned Aboriginal couple in their middle years, Thomas and Irene. As we headed west in their large saloon they insisted I help myself to pieces of their recently purchased pepperoni pizza, and swigs from a big bottle of coke.

  “I used to work all over here in the cotton fields,” said Thomas, as he drove through vast agricultural areas of endless dry fields.

  “Have you traveled much around the country?” I asked.

  “Never left the state.”

  Being something of an outdoor/survival enthusiast and amateur botanist, I was keen to learn something of Australia’s wild edible flora, known colloquially as “bushtucker.” I asked Thomas if he retained any of his ancestors’ traditional knowledge in this area.

  “Nah, white man fucked me!” he replied, flashing a smile my way.

  They dropped me in the tiny village of Nevertire, just down the road from a huge grain-handling facility. I waited across the road from a tin-roofed pub, opposite a railway track and some scrub bushland beyond. By now it was late afternoon and although still hot, the sting had gone from the sun.

  Would I make it to the outback town of Cobar by nightfall? It was possible, but far from guaranteed. After about thirty minutes of smiling with a thumb raised at the occasional passing motorist, the majority of whom drove farming pickups, a people-carrier pulled over. Inside was what I first took to be a family of Aboriginals.

  “Where are you going, mate?” asked the male driver in an unidentifiable accent that was definitely not Australian, despite his efforts to embellish the question with a local colloquialism at the end.