The Long Hitch Home Read online

  “I should be okay,” I replied, trying to allay his concern, “I’ll be camping near the road and I’ve got plenty of gear with me.”

  “No, I meant murdered,” he stated. “There’s some bad sorts around these parts. Have you seen the film Wolf Creek?”

  I hadn’t, and had no intention either. It was, I knew, loosely based on true events, where several backpackers were killed by a serial killer in the outback.

  I told him I’d be careful.

  A painfully slow three hours of waiting passed before I struck it lucky again, with another white SUV pulling up—a popular choice of color out here because of its heat reflecting qualities.

  Two tough-looking guys sat up front, the driver of which looked as hard as they come with deep set eyes and a furrowed leathery face. After quickly establishing where they were going, I jumped in.

  “I bet you’re loving the cricket,” said the driver as we pulled off—a reference to England having just beaten their Australian foes in the Ashes series.

  “Always good to see you guys lose once in a while,” I replied.

  The driver introduced himself as Billy and the passenger as his son, Duke. Both worked in the steel trade in Whyalla, about 130 miles away.

  “Got a good pommy friend from London, he was amazed at the scenery out here. He’s an old fella but a real good cunt, can drink a pint of piss standing on his head,” said Billy as we drove through a panorama made up increasingly of agricultural land. More “bush” now than outback.

  If a particular journey is summed up by a particular topic of conversation, then this one was hunting, and Billy and Duke’s love of it. Pigs, rabbits, goats, wombat, you name it, they were into shooting and trapping it.

  “Got all the freezers stocked up with meat and fish at home,” said Billy, who did most of the talking, with Duke only chipping in rather sheepishly now and again. It left me with the distinct impression that Duke was still in his old man’s shadow, despite being in his late twenties or early thirties.

  “Catch so much fish that we sell it to the local fish and chip shop,” said Billy, before adding, “On the sly, like. If you get caught busting conservation quotas the cunts will throw the fucking book at you!”

  “What would you get?” I asked.

  “Big fine and you’ll be looking at about a year inside.”

  Seemed fair enough to me.

  The further we drove the lusher the scenery became. Up ahead, about five minutes’ drive in the distance, the dark form of a lone rain cloud drifted from left to right towards the center of the long straight road in front of us. As if on cue, upon it reaching the road the cloud burst open, relinquishing a long, slightly curved, trail of water in an otherwise blue sky. On either side was sunlight, illuminating the cloud and creating a picture-perfect contrast of light and dark.

  We found ourselves passing through a twisting section of hillsides, where Billy pulled over so we could all take a leak. “See that, Jamie,” said Duke, pointing with his free hand to a beautiful pink cockatoo in a nearby tree. “That’s a galah.”

  “Do they make good eating?” I asked jokingly, since he and Billy seemed to hunt most everything else.

  “They say the best way to cook a galah is in a billy can,” replied Duke. “But you’ve got to weigh it down with a rock inside. After a couple of hours boiling, you carefully take the galah and the rock out, then you throw away the galah and eat the rock. If you’re lucky, it doesn’t taste of galah!”

  Back on the road I mentioned my ambitious plan of reaching Uluru by tomorrow night.

  “Used to call it Ayers Rock,” said Billy in disgust, clearly disapproving of it now being officially recognized by its original Aboriginal name. I wasn’t particularity surprised; earlier he’d referred to the Aboriginals as “coons” and “niggers.”

  “I thought Uluru was spectacular when I went there,” piped up Duke.

  “Nah, just a big rock in the desert,” said Billy.

  This seemed to be the way of it with Uluru. You either loved it or couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I wondered what I would make of it.

  By late afternoon we finally arrived at Port Augusta, a city by Australian standards but a small town most everywhere else, having just 13,000 people. The place was cut in two, with half of it on the west side of a vast sloshing coastal inlet, the Spencer Gulf, and half of it on the east side. As we drove over a bridge spanning the surprisingly foamy water between the two, Billy asked me where I wanted to be dropped.

  “Outside the city if possible, on the road to Alice Springs if you’re passing it.”

  “No worries, we’ll go by it on the way home.”

  As we approached the necessary junction on the outskirts of town, I thanked them for the ride and began scanning the area for a suitable spot to throw down my tent.

  “If you want you could always come and stay at my place,” said Billy out of the blue. “Get yourself a good night’s sleep and I’d even give you a fish feed too.”

  The image of a full plate of fish and chips drifted into my consciousness. I’d only had a meat pie today so the thought of a good meal was mighty tempting, illegally caught or not.

  I agreed.

  We drove west past five huge old water tanks, covered from head to toe in murals and graffiti, then took a turn south towards Whyalla. Industrial infrastructure appeared on its outskirts, including a steel works and a huge landlocked war ship outside a maritime museum.

  “That’s the HMAS Whyalla,” said Billy. “World War Two warship built locally.”

  We dropped Duke off first at his house, then Billy and I headed towards his place.

  “That’s where we sell our excess fish,” said Billy as we passed a fish and chip shop around the corner from his bungalow, on a quiet suburban street.

  He welcomed me into a surprisingly kitschy home and made a beeline for the fridge. Out came two cans of ice cold Cooper’s lager.

  “Cheers, Jamie,” said Billy, raising the can in a welcoming toast.

  Three dogs in the backyard spotted him through the kitchen window and went crazy. No sooner had Billy unlocked the back door and the dogs were near frothing at the mouth with excitement, jumping up on him and me—with a little too much enthusiasm for my liking.

  “They’re pig hunting dogs,” said Billy proudly, play-wrestling with one in the process, before leading me out back into a huge metal shed. In here were several freezers, a speed boat with a humongous outboard engine, and multiple nasty-looking animal traps with horrible metal jaws—of the type an animal would have to gnaw its own limb off to escape from.

  “This one’s a dingo trap,” said Billy, picking up the biggest of them all. “Gave one to my pommy friend as a sort of souvenir to take home to England, but the bloody customs wouldn’t let him take it out the country.”

  After a quick look at the traps, boat, and mountainous freezer contents, which looked big enough to feed half the town, we adjourned inside to look at his gun collection. Or should I say, arsenal: bolt-action hunting rifles in a range of styles, huge double-barrel shotguns, sniper-like rifles with telescopic sites; you name it.

  “Wanna have your picture taken with one?”

  Why not, I thought, and posed in the backyard with a shotgun that looked capable of taking down an elephant.

  “I used to have some lovely guns, Jamie, some beautiful semi-automatics, but that cunt in Tasmania ruined it for all of us,” said Billy, referring to a massacre at Port Arthur where a lone gunman killed 35 people, after which semi-automatic weapons were banned.

  It wasn’t long before Billy was good to his word of earlier and cooked me up a delightful “fish feed,” taken from a stockpile of fresh stuff in the fridge, which he fried in a homemade beer-batter and drizzled in juice from lemons taken from a small tree in the backyard. It was fantastic and there was far more than I could possibly finish.

  Over our meal, Billy told me about his former work as an armed guard on security vans.

  “My
only regret was not getting raided, so I never got the chance to jump out, all guns blazing, and shoot the cunts.”

  Despite Billy’s clear and appreciated hospitality to me, I can’t say I particularly warmed to the bloke, despite my outward friendliness. He seemed an odd sort of person; a bit too obsessed with guns and killing for my liking, with what at times seemed the mentality of a fourteen year old.

  “I would have loved to have gone to war!” he said to me when talking about Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War—a subject which, along with military history in general, he was eager to discuss.

  He showed me a picture of his other son, Duke’s brother, in military uniform.

  “He had to pull out of going to Iraq after getting irritable bowel syndrome. Broke his fucking heart it did. He was so excited at the prospect of going to war. Before his diagnosis, Duke said to him, ‘I want you to bring me back an ear.’”

  My opinion of Duke took a nosedive. Despite my revulsion at his sick request for a war crime souvenir, I’m ashamed to say, that in the interests of keeping my free accommodation, I didn’t articulate my disgust, but remained silent instead and went back to my fish and chips.

  After eating we retired to the sitting room with a cup of milky tea, where Billy showed me some photos of himself in his twenties playing “Aussie Rules,” or Australian Rules Football, a rough and tumble game where burly men in skimpy shorts and “wife beater” tank tops run about a field with an egg-shaped ball that they punch to each another instead of throw—in addition to doing plenty of punching of each other too.

  “I referee it now but back in my day I was a force to be reckoned with,” said Billy with a satisfied smirk. “You could say I played the game,” he said. “I was up in front of the disciplinary board many a time.”

  We chatted of this for a while before Billy appalled me again. This time when talking of how hard he had found it when his sons left home.

  “It was awful, like I lost my best mates who I would go trapping and fishing with,” he said, starting off innocuously enough, before adding, “We still do it together but it’s not like it was. Back in the day we’d be sitting around the house and one of them would turn to me in the evening and say ‘Dad, d’you wanna go shoot cats at the dump?’”

  “You shoot cats?” I asked incredulous, interrupting Billy’s happy reminiscing of the good old days.

  “Yeah, shooting cats is great fun, you’d love it!”

  Billy was definitely a strange character, that’s for sure. Later in the evening he surprised me again, this time when he spoke movingly about his father’s battle with leukemia and how it had killed him, showing a sensitive side so very different to the macho gun nut of earlier. But then, not thirty minutes later, when again relating his passion for military history, he recalled a discussion he’d had with someone about the Japanese.

  “Cunt tried telling me there was nothing wrong with the Japs now, so I said to him, ‘The best thing about Hiroshima is that it’s still causing leukemia there today!’”

  I made my excuses and retired to bed shortly afterwards.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Indecent Proposal

  The road to Alice Springs and I have history. In 2001 that long, straight, barren stretch of asphalt handed me my longest, hottest, and most demoralizing hitchhiking wait ever. At the time I’d been dropped roughly 100 miles outside of Port Augusta, after hitching there from Perth, in an area called Nurrungar where a lone roadhouse and a few scattered tin-roofed dwellings stood in an expanse of nothing. I’d camped there overnight and got out on the road at dawn the following morning, with hopes of making it to Alice Springs by nightfall, 650 miles away. But no plan survives contact with the enemy.

  There were so few vehicles heading north that I ended up sitting by the shadeless roadside, squinting into the heat-haze, waiting for the shining reflection of a car or truck to appear on the horizon. It took so long before it reached me that I’d watch its gradual approach for several minutes, until I was within sight of the driver, at which point I’d get up and attempt to thumb him or her down, only to watch forlornly, time after time, as they drove on past. I waited eight hours in temperatures that climbed to 110 degrees Fahrenheit with no sun hat, shades or sunscreen, and with water that got so warm it was like sipping from a hot bath, until, finally, someone showed mercy upon me and stopped. By the time they did I was battered and delirious from the sun. To this day I have never tasted a beverage as sublimely satisfying as the frozen carton of iced coffee the driver gave me from his cooler, which turned from a solid block to a drinkable slush within minutes.

  I hoped to God I didn’t get stuck at the same spot today.

  Getting out of Whyalla proved easy enough with Billy dropping me on the outskirts of town by a factory. Here two steel workers who had just finished their shift, gave me a lift to Port Augusta. On the way there I was asked again, “Have you met any of our black fellas?” and also warned of the dangers in the outback, with the film Wolf Creek getting another plug, and the notorious murder of a British man on the road out of Alice Springs to Darwin mentioned. Billy had been similarly vocal about this and described his own characteristic precautions.

  “Whenever I travel on the road up to Darwin, I always keep a gun on the front seat with a full clip ready to go.”

  And so, with such fears, I perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised by the response I got from the first person to stop for me on the road to Alice Springs; although, with hindsight, it was something of a surprise they stopped at all.

  “You’re not going to harm me, are you?” asked a startled-looking woman in her seventies, as she pulled up in a rust bucket of a car, making for the oddest introduction I’ve ever had from someone who’s pulled over for me.

  “No,” I answered, “I’m British.”

  I have no idea why I said that. Although in a sense it held within it the overall message I wanted to convey—that I was a foreign visitor, here to take in the sights not dump her corpse in the trunk.

  “Are you sure you’re not going to harm me?” she asked again.

  I reassured her as best I could.

  She looked wary and on edge, like she wanted to help but had heard one too many horror stories.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, nervously clutching her hair.

  I didn’t want to see my lift slip away from me. And so, I decided it best to reassure her once more, and then to just open the door and get in before the old girl changed her mind.

  “I promise I’m not going to harm you,” I said, gently opening the front passenger door, constantly talking to her in soothing tones as I did so. I got in. There were several blister packs of medication in the passenger foot well. She gave me a hesitant nod and we were off.

  “Say hello to Tiny?” she said, nervously.

  “I’m sorry?”

  She partially unwrapped a blue towel on her lap revealing the most scrawny little dog I’ve ever seen, with legs thinner than my fingers.

  “You’re not going to need to pee are you, Tiny?” she said to the little runt. “He might need to go,” she concluded. “Would you like to hold him?”

  Hell no. But before I had a chance to decline she reached over and dropped towel and animal on my lap. Both stank. Of mangy dog and urine. I recoiled at the stench.

  “Are you afraid of him?” she asked, misreading my reaction.

  “Err, yes,” I said, in the hope she’d take him back. It didn’t work.

  “Oh, silly,” she said, touching my forearm, “He’s only little.”

  She introduced herself as Margaret, and then moments later was asking me again if I was going to harm her. This turned out to be a mildly disturbing repetitive feature of a generally strange and awkward ride. I’d talk to Margaret for a while, trying to engage her in conversation, and just when it looked like she’d settled into the idea of driving with a hitchhiker, she’d ask me again if I was going to harm her. The worry for me was that at some point her paranoia would get the b
etter of her and she’d have a change of heart about picking me up, and would leave me in the middle of nowhere, which was exactly where we were. The next gas station was one hundred miles away.

  Adding to the feeling of overall awkwardness was another, by now familiar, element to the ride, which reared its head once more when I mentioned my excitement at soon seeing Uluru.

  “Aboriginals think it’s their land now!” said Margaret, raising her voice to a near shriek, leaving no doubt as to what she made of that.

  The ride eventually came to an end at my old hitching nemesis—the desolate outpost of Nurrungar. Here a fork in the road—the first proper turning we’d come across so far—led east towards the small town of Woomera, where Margaret was heading. I needed north so this was the end of the line.

  As I watched Margaret’s lone car disappear into the distance towards Woomera, I gazed out across the familiar flat landscape where I’d spent those torturous eight hours all those years ago, and wondered how I would fare this time. Like it or not, I was where I was, and felt a certain defiant attitude towards the area, a sort of “bring it on” mentality that was willing and able to take anything it could throw at me.

  The last time I was out here, it had been with the express intention of hitching to Uluru. In fact, this had been the only reason I’d hitchhiked out of Perth in the first place. I had desperately wanted to visit the mysterious and iconic rock, whose color reflected the shifting mood of the sun, images of which I had been bombarded with from television, magazines, posters, and brochures for years. But things hadn’t quite gone according to plan, and since then Uluru had been a thorn in my side, something that had riled me for the last decade. The plan back then had been to first reach Alice Springs—the nearest town to Uluru—and to then hitch on to Uluru itself. But by the time I arrived in Alice Springs I was in a dire financial situation, down to my last thirty Australian dollars. This hadn’t been through poor management of my funds, but rather, from getting ripped off by a man whom I had briefly worked for, along with several other travelers, selling vending machines—only to find myself issued with wage checks that bounced.13 Having no credit card, access to an overdraft, or return flight home, I traipsed around every bar, restaurant, shop, and office that I could find in Alice Springs, in a desperate search for work. None had any. I was left with a stark choice: either continue hitching north another 930 miles to the next substantial settlement, the city of Darwin, where I could almost certainly find work due to its size, or stick around in Alice Springs and become properly destitute. Having already hitchhiked 2,640 miles specifically to see Uluru, I was damned if I was going to leave without attempting to hitch the extra 290 miles out there to visit it first. However, try as I might I failed to get a ride, despite waiting nearly as long as I had at Nurrungar—racking up about seven hours on the side of the road at Alice Springs in insane temperatures, during which some hilarious joker threw a bag of half-eaten McDonald’s at me from the window of his car. The next day I took my last throw of the dice in Alice Springs, spending it in a fruitless search for work until the evening, when I reluctantly decided to try my luck hitchhiking north instead to Darwin. I promised myself though, that I would return after I’d found work and had the funds to get out to Uluru. And in the strictest sense, I was true to my word. I arrived in Darwin the next day and secured a job soon after; and I did indeed head back towards Uluru; it’s just that at a decade later, this took longer than envisaged.