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  As luck would have it they were heading all the way to Cobar. I clambered in.

  “Where are you from?” I asked as we pulled off.

  “Papua New Guinea,” said the driver, introducing himself as Pakap.

  The rest of the family were: his wife, Jennly; their three high school-aged daughters, Sandra, Joyleen, and Gaile; and their seven-year-old son, Fraser.

  Pakap was a geologist and had recently moved to Australia with his family to work in the mining industry, a sector that was currently booming due to increased exports to China, causing the overall Australian economy to boom also and the price of everyday goods to hit the roof.

  “How are you finding school here?” I asked his oldest daughter.

  She hesitated, before answering, “It is good.”

  Pakap elaborated for her. “She thinks Australian children are badly behaved. In Papua New Guinea you don’t answer the teacher back.”

  Having at one stage considered going through Papua New Guinea—located just beyond Australia’s northeastern tip—I knew a bit about the country, and so Pakap and I chatted for a while about the place, in particular the astonishing array of different languages there. These number over eight hundred, making it by far the most linguistically varied country in the world.

  “When I hear Aboriginals speak on television, I sometimes think I recognize some of their words,” said Pakap.

  Not more than ten minutes into the journey, Pakap queried where I was staying tonight.

  “Hello, hello,” I thought. I’d already been offered a place to crash by two lifts today, was he about to make it a third? I sure hoped so. Cobar was my final destination, so if not, then it was my dependable old tent and the dusty side of the road for me.

  On hearing of my far from salubrious sleeping plans he turned to Jennly, speaking briefly to her in his native tongue. They culminated the dialogue with a shared nod of the head.

  This was looking promising.

  “You are welcome to stay with us. I’m afraid it won’t be Aussie food tonight, but a combination of Aussie and Papua New Guinea.”

  That was fine by me. Not long on the road and the landscape became less agricultural, far more what I would consider the proper outback—a rather loose term in Australia usually reserved for the wilder areas beyond the farming or “bush” lands. My assessment seemed accurate when the sign for the next remote settlement, Nyngan, announced proudly, “Welcome to Nyngan and the great outback.”

  Make no mistake, the outback is one hardy place, with Nyngan being the perfect example of the wild environmental extremes possible within it. In 1990 a horrendous flash flood tore the town apart, seeing to the evacuation of the entire population. Severe flash floods also occurred the year before and continued to plague the town four times over the next decade and yet, just eighty miles down the road in Cobar, not a drizzle of rain was recorded for a full five years during this period.

  Darkness had fallen by the time we pulled into the remote town of Cobar, where Pakap wanted to show me one of the area’s local mines.

  Driving in the dark through unlit back roads, with the occasional kangaroo bouncing into the full beam of our headlights, we made our way uphill, eventually arriving at a scenic lookout on top of Fort Bourke Hill. Stepping out of the car into a dark and hot night, humming with a low background symphony of insects, I really felt like I had arrived in the outback. I was 430 miles from where I started this morning, and the surroundings couldn’t have been more different. Making our way past a couple of nearby satellite dishes and huge concrete water tanks, we came to a small metal shed perched high above a precipice—open fronted on one side to get in, but with a big protective cage on the other to prevent falling out. Down below was the mine. My eyes took a while to adjust to the light, before the cavernous size of the gaping expanse below me became apparent. Hewn into the rocky earth were massive terraces leading down, like a giant’s staircase, to the base of this enormous chasm.

  Suddenly the sound of an approaching truck reverberated across the landscape, its headlamps appearing on the mine’s distant lip, revealing an unseen gravelly track snaking its way towards the belly of the mine.

  “What do they mine here?” I asked.

  “Gold,” replied Pakap. “Got other local mines excavating copper, zinc, silver and lead. The copper mine north of town produces nearly a million tons of ore a year and is the second deepest in Australia, goes down nearly one and a half kilometers.”

  “Wow,” I replied. That sure sounded like a long way to me.

  “Gets very hot down there. One of the biggest mining costs is air conditioning.”

  I gazed towards an opening cut into the wall at the bottom of the mine that the truck had disappeared into.

  “Are there many people working in there now?

  “They never stop; mining goes on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”

  Pakap went on to explain that one of the reasons mining was so profitable in Australia was that unlike undeveloped countries with similar resources, Australia already had all the modern infrastructure needed to exploit it in place, especially transport. After all, it’s not much use having huge deposits in the back of beyond if there’s no functioning road or rail system that allows you to get the stuff out of there.

  On arrival back at Pakap’s house we retired to the garden with a condensation-dripping bottle of ice cold beer while the rest of the family busied themselves preparing the evening meal. As Pakap and I sat nursing our beers beneath a fig tree amid sweltering heat, I asked him about the differences in lifestyle and culture between Papua New Guinea and Australia.

  “In tribal Papua New Guinea we don’t have the same concept of poverty. If you lose your job in the town or city you would not be destitute, you’d just move back to your tribe who would look after you and give you a row of land to plant vegetables and another row for something else. And we would never put our father or mother into a care home like in Australia. This is very alien to us. In Papua New Guinea, if someone does not have children we say, ‘How sad they do not have someone to look after them when they are old.’”

  Pakap went on to explain that in tribal Papua New Guinea the concept of individualism didn’t exist in the same way either.

  “If someone does something wrong in Australia or urban parts of Papua New Guinea, then it is the individual who is held responsible, but in tribal Papua New Guinea, if someone does something wrong to another tribe, then it is their whole tribe that is responsible. Just as it is my responsibility now to help my tribe financially. This will be a hard concept for my son to understand.”

  Pakap also said that very few marriages broke up in Papua New Guinea, and that if they did then all wedding presents, such as livestock, had to be returned.

  After three beers a piece, little Fraser came out for a chat. He was very well behaved and when, after talking for a while, Pakap decided it was time for him to go in again, Pakap simply said, “That is enough.” To this, Fraser dutifully nodded and went inside without a protest. Moments later the food was ready.

  Laid out buffet-style on a big table was an assortment of chicken drumsticks, chunks of beef, roast potatoes, salads, a big bowl of communal gravy, and a mountain of assorted vegetables.

  “In Papua New Guinea we eat a lot of vegetables,” said Pakap.

  We sat and ate together on the sitting room floor while the rest of the family waited in the kitchen. So much for fasting on my first day on the road; I couldn’t have been better fed. When we’d eaten our fill, Pakap and I finished off with a couple more cold ones in the garden, and when it was finally time to crash, I did so on a super comfy bed in the sitting room, kindly set up for me by Jennly.

  As my first proper day on the road drew to a close, it was with a warm feeling of satisfaction, a deep sense of comfort borne out of the altruism and acceptance that had been shown to me by the people who had drifted into my life today. The family’s hospitality was touching, as was that of my other rides so far, f
rom whom I had been given food, drink, offers of accommodation, cigarettes, even chemical stimulants. And that was all to the good. But it was the gift of temporary companionship that struck me the most. The kindness I’d experienced was so unlike the impersonal toils of my existence in the big city madness of London. On the road it’s easy to cast that madness aside, to connect instead to a simple shared humanity, to emerge once more complete and real.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I’m Not Racist But . . .

  Think Texas is big? Forget it. The state of Western Australia is over three and a half times the size. What about Europe? Well, if you exclude the chunk of Russia within Europe’s borders then every other European nation would collectively fit into Australia. And here’s the thing, you’d still have 667,657 square miles to play with—that’s leftovers just shy of five extra Germanies.10 Ponder that for a moment, if you will.

  In fact, if you ignore Alaska and Hawaii, then the mighty United States, at 3,081,029 square miles, is, give or take, the same size as Australia, at 2,973,952 square miles. Australia is, to put it bluntly, one bastard big country. But that’s only part of the story; with a population of just 22 million people, nearly all of whom reside in major urban centers dotted around its perimeter coastline, Australia is also staggeringly empty. The majority of the continent is virtually deserted.

  I couldn’t quite believe how small a dent over 430 miles of hitching the day before had made into it. In Britain it would equate to two thirds of the country’s entire length, but here it was trivial.

  I should have known better. Ten years earlier I had hitchhiked across Australia in the other direction, starting in Perth on the west coast, heading east over the mighty Nullarbor Plain to Port Augusta, and finally ending north in Darwin. My memory of how oversized the country was had faded. Such large sections of the journey had been along virtually identical, single-lane roads that cut a straight-as-an-arrow course across so flat and similar a landscape that it was difficult to distinguish one section from the other; and more so in retrospect. The Nullarbor Plain was a case in point. A two day drive in a straight line over hundreds of miles showcased nothing but super-flat shadeless red desert with the occasional smattering of low lying rock, scrubby spinifex, and bluebush.

  I had been on the road for the last three hours waiting for a ride.

  Pakap had dropped me just outside Cobar on a long thin road that stretched to the horizon. Earlier in the morning he had shown me the same touching hospitality as the previous night, serving up a delicious home-cooked farewell breakfast of fried eggs on toast, washed down with strong and aromatic dark black coffee. I hoped for the same sort of luck today, but it had yet to materialize.

  Despite being mid-morning the temperature was already baking hot, with a mirage visible on the empty asphalt ahead. There was no breeze to lighten the stifling air and it was only going to get hotter. On either side of the road, and into the distance, was quintessential Australia: scorched red earth, gum trees, and scattered brush. To stop myself from overheating I waited in the dappled shade of a gum. Eventually a huge articulated truck appeared in the distance, but before it got anywhere near me it came to a halt next to a picnic rest-area a couple of minutes’ walk away. A male driver clambered down the ladder-like stairs leading from his cab to sit at the table. This was an opportunity I couldn’t miss. And so, with the intention of asking for a ride face to face, I began the hike back towards him.

  He looked up from his sandwich and briefly stared my way as I approached and must have known exactly what I was going to ask. After all, why else would I be out here on the side of the road with a dirty great backpack?

  “Morning,” I said, in my most cheerful upbeat tone, eliciting from the trucker a reluctant, almost imperceptible, nod of the head, followed by a cagey, “G’day.”

  I came straight out with it and asked him for a ride.

  “Sorry, mate. Not allowed to pick up hitchhikers for insurance reasons. If we do, it’s instant dismissal.”

  “No worries,” I replied nonchalantly, as if it was neither here nor there to me whether I was stuck on the side of the road for another three hours. “So where you heading?” I asked, sitting down at the table with the ulterior motive of building a bit of rapport first, before asking him to bend the rules and give me a ride. We chatted about nothing in particular for a few minutes before he asked me, out of the blue, and with sinister emphasis, “Have you met any of our blacks here yet?”

  Oh great, I thought, here comes that all too familiar Australian—a racist.

  “Got a lift from a delightful Aboriginal couple yesterday out of Narromine,” I replied. “Insisted on giving me some of their pizza and coke.”

  He looked at me in disbelief, as if something didn’t compute.

  “You must have been very lucky. Most of them aren’t like that.”

  He commenced a bigoted diatribe, prefaced, of course, with the classic, “I’m not racist, but . . .” in which I was informed: “They’re not the same as your black fellas in England,” “We call them coons here,” and “They’re very lazy people,” among other kangaroo shit.

  A truck drove past in the opposite direction carrying goats.

  “They’ll be eaten by the filthy Arabs,” he said. “People hunt the feral goats and ship them off to the Middle East.”

  He moved on to that other conversational favorite of xenophobic Australians—how you can barely move in the country now for all the hordes of illegal immigrants overrunning the place.

  “D’you know there’s even a KFC in Sydney where you can’t get bacon on your food in case it upsets the fucking Muslims?”

  He left no doubt as to what he’d like done to those of Islamic faith.

  “Was speaking to a couple of the boys back from Afghanistan, said if the mussies don’t take their hands out of their pockets when they tell them to, then they just shoot ’em.”

  It continued in predictable tabloid fashion.

  “All the hard working tax payers of this country are being screwed by the immigrants. The dirty bludgers even have the right to appeal to the high court now.”

  “Are you not allowed to appeal to the high court, then?” I asked.

  “Err, well, yeah, I guess, in theory,” he responded. “But it would be very difficult to do.”

  The crazy thing about all this to me, was not so much that this stranger held such views, but that he deemed it perfectly acceptable to launch into them with an unknown visitor to the country. I was no longer interested in a lift with him, so in an attempt to divert the conversation for a few minutes while I made the most of sitting down, I asked him about the dangers of driving his truck, which had giant, super-chunky bull bars on the front that looked big enough to tackle an elephant, and a warning sign that announced “EXPLOSIVES.”

  “Roos are the biggest problem at night. If you hit a roo, the bars will normally throw it off to the side, but if it goes underneath it can cause you a bit of trouble. You’ll most likely be stuck on the road next morning fixing up the damage.”

  What he said next was astonishing.

  “If you hit an Aboriginal you don’t stop.”

  At first I thought it was a sick joke.

  “It’s happened to me twice now. Once when a guy pushed a woman into my path. Second one was just wandering about on the road.”

  He was serious.

  Incredulous, I asked him why on earth he hadn’t stopped.

  “Oh, it’s not a problem, you just drive on to the next town and report it there. Hit one on the way down from Darwin and reported it in Alice Springs. Cop asked, ‘Where you heading?’ told him ‘Perth.’ He said, ‘Have a good journey.’ That was it.”

  As I struggled to get my mind around this, the throaty sound of an approaching four-wheel-drive cut through my considerable bewilderment, jolting me back to the task at hand. I jumped up and sprinted from the picnic area to the side of the road and stuck out a thumb. A beefy old-style Ford SUV with huge off-road tires approached a
t high speed. To my delight the driver hit the brakes and came to a dramatic lurching stop just beyond my position. I ran over.

  A big muscular guy in his thirties with a cheerful, rugged face and a broad smile sat behind the wheel.

  “I’m going as far as Broken Hill,” he announced.

  Broken Hill was a full day’s drive westward. This was superb news.

  Running back to the picnic table, I grabbed my backpack and, without so much as a “good bye” to the trucker, headed for the rear of the SUV. Inside was a mattress, two surfboards, multiple fishing rods and assorted camping supplies. I threw in my pack. Moments later I was perched inside the front, high above the road. The engine gave a guttural growl, I was thrown back in the seat from acceleration and we were off, heading into the barren outback proper.

  My new traveling companion was Zedediah—“Zed” for short—an itinerant miner from Coffs Harbour on the east coast, who worked a couple of weeks on, then had a week off, giving him plenty of time to surf, fish and enjoy the considerable wage he earned from mining. We hit it off immediately, and in no time Zed was telling me about himself.

  “I had all manner of boring menial jobs scraping by before getting into mining. Worked in factories, cleaned dishes, you name it.”

  Zed explained that breaking into the mining industry was no mean feat; it was, apparently, a bit of a closed business, difficult to get a foot in the door unless you had a family member or close friend already working there, but once you did, the money was serious.

  “After all the years of terrible pay, I almost feel guilty when I look at my pay packet at the end of the month.”

  With a bit of subtle prying, I asked him how much he got.

  “About two to three grand a week.”

  Not too shabby.

  “I tried for years to get into mining with no luck, and then out of the blue a friend called me up and asked if I was still trying to get into it. He got me a job out in the middle of nowhere. I moved there immediately and have never looked back.”