A few years back, my ad agency won a significant piece of new business, Qantas airlines of Australia. We did some speculative ads to gain the business, but as usually happens when the work is assigned, that initial stuff is put aside and the real work begins. We sold Qantas initially on kangaroos - Hop Over, Fares Dinkum - that kind of thing. Qantas said we had better hop over and have a shuftie for ourselves. Fair dinkum.
I once wrote my Mum a postcard from a shoot in Jamaica where I was lying on a beach watching a director film my commercial. In the postcard I said the Careers Advisory Board at Leeds University had never said it would be like this. Imagine my joy this time to find myself on board a 747 streaking across the Indian Ocean with my art director Tony and his girlfriend Carol, also an art director on the business, drinking unlimited champagne in the First Class cabin. This is presumably how David Frost felt every day.
Part 1. Fair.
Arriving in Australia is a very odd experience. It seems quite like England in a way. The roads look similar. They all drive on the left in Morris Oxfords and the like with a sprinkling of large American cars and the people speak the same language, sort of. We checked into a massive hotel in downtown Sydney and went to our rooms. Mind you, to confuse the long distance traveller even more, it was odd to see John Cleese checking out as we checked in. It was very tempting to do what a friend of mine did when first arriving in London from Grimsby. She didn't know anyone and was walking down Portland Place when she saw a familiar face. "Hello Des," she said eagerly. Des O'Connor looked on in polite amazement. I think he said hello back again. But seeing John Cleese in Australia made it somehow all seem that little bit more familiar. It's always deceptive when they speak the same language. It would be so helpful if Americans spoke Portuguese, say. Then at least you'd recognise they were foreigners.
This easy familiarity with life back home continued for the next two days as it turned out that Qantas wanted us to attend meeting after meeting to put us in the picture of what the airline operation was really like. It seemed to us rather a waste of time to have flown twelve thousand miles to learn at first hand what could have been picked up by skimming through a few documents on our return. We asked permission to skip the lectures and be allowed to drive around a bit to see what Australia was like, as we would have to be selling the place to our potential customers. Show us the sizzle not the sausage, as it were. They let us off the leash.
Seven o'clock the next morning saw us cruising through Sydney's western suburbs in a massive hired American Ford Falcon. The idea was to get as much of the flavour of this sub-Californian lifestyle as possible. You see, over the first few days our initial impressions of an England on the other side of the world had shifted from Morris Cowley England to seeing the place stuck in the sixties time warp of Beach Boys California. Yet still comfortingly with a dash of England in the fifties. Woolworth wasn't 'Woolworth' but the product of some smart postwar operator's legal shenanigans, having gained the rights to the name and exact logo style when he discovered that the real Woolworth didn't extend their corporate rights to the Antipodes. It looks like Woollies used to look when I was a kid back home in York- shire. Rows of brown wooden counters burst with sweets. Ladies in long patterned dresses meander about looking for ice trays and barbecue forks. There was none of that abrasive hard sell that we had come to know Woolworth's for. In the seventies, Peter Marsh and his advertising agency had successfully managed to knock the woolliness out of them and concentrate heavily on the worth end of things.
California was made manifest in the rows and rows and rows ... and rows of used car lots along the Parramatta Road. It was along this hymn to commercialism that we found ourselves that first liberated morning driving like escaped convicts in the opposite direction to the Sydney rush hour. And hymn by the by is no inappropriate word here, as Holden once sold their cars with a priest saying he believed there was no better deal. It was rumoured that Ford of Australia were after the Pope to challenge that claim in another ad. He wasn't available for comment. No, the Parramatta Road made Warren Street in London look like Binns Road, Liverpool, the home of Dinky Toys. Twenty miles of used car lots all screaming for your attention on the way to Australia's own Liverpool, capital of the western suburbs. Where every dream home is a heartache. Every house in Liverpool stands in its own garden. There are no terraces, no backyards, no outside toilets. Just bungalows. Rows and rows of them too. If you're rich, it's made of stone. If you're poor, chipboard. It seems everyone is allocated the same amount of land and it's up to your bank account what you make of it.
Three hours later we were cruising up into the Blue Mountains. This is the settlers defence line against the Bush. When you look at a map of Australia and realise they have only civilised the very edge of one corner of it, this land takes on another character all together. The thin facade of culture that is the Sydney Opera House where you're more likely to hear Bert Kaempfert than Otto Klemperer becomes totally transparent. No wonder they hate the aborigines. They have been making their lifestyle work for centuries. Unlike Ayers Rock and the Great Barrier Reef, the Aussies built their two national monuments side by side. Yes the Opera House is slap bang next to the Harbour Bridge, as if for comfort and reassurance. With all that space to go at, you would think they could have spread them out a bit.
The Blue Mountains on the other hand are a natural marvel that is truly something to behold. There is a feeling of Wagnerian awe as you climb up into this place where heaven and earth meet. The light is blue and green. The clouds seem to hang below you in the valleys. When Peter Weir chose panpipe music for Picnic at Hanging Rock, he had obviously been up here and heard it first hand. There is something about this mountain range that comes like a warning. It says, "I am here to protect you. Don't ask why, just go back." Cecil B DeMille could have had Charlton Heston ambling down these slopes with his tablets of stone. As if to add to the sense of closeness to heaven, on the roadside near Katoomba at the top is an old folk's retirement home and spa The Majestic Hydro. Truly God's waiting room.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZoCslHUh1E
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We drove in to have a drink and a wander. The entrance lobby was full. Literally packed, not with people but with plastic armchairs all facing a massive stone fireplace that could have come straight from Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu. It was as if we had entered a chamber where every evening two hundred mountain sages would gather to re-state the glories of their own lives and consider the wrong doings of those below on the bare-bottomed coast. None of these sages however were in view at this time apart from one gentleman, supported between two tired looking nurses, being assisted in his snail like progress along the threadbare carpet down one of the long uneven corridors that fanned out from the lobby. We had a beer at the bar, which was decorated like a Greyhound coach in gold fluting. Through from the bar was a huge ballroom with the most repulsive lights I had ever seen. Massive orange glass cones hung suspended from black wrought iron brackets with gypsy dancers entwined within the flex. Red tassels and pompoms graced the nether reaches of these constructions. What on earth had persuaded someone to lug these monstrosities all the way up here? Or had they been created by the tenants themselves on the long winter evenings? In summer, did the old couples slowly shuffle round the floor as a ghostly jazz band played In The Mood in an easily accommodated waltz time? We would never see it. There was no action today. We climbed back in the Falcon and began the descent into the vast orange desert away from the hills.
We were making for some of the old gold mining towns beyond Bathurst, places with romantic names like Sofala and Hill End. Carol had managed to get the address of a farm from an art director in Sydney as a place he had once stayed in an attempt to get away from a particularly draining bout with a soap powder client. He had advised us to watch out for the mine shafts along the roadside. Apparently no one had bothered to cover them over and the warning signs had long since dropped off and blown away. What apparently could seem like an overgrown depression could turn out to be a four hundred foot drop straight down. When told about this in a bar in Sydney we had stood in open-mouthed amazement and thought perhaps he was having a little fun with us Poms. But no. There they were, perhaps a little more visible than he'd explained, but we were now actively on the look out for these holes that lead to a death that no one would ever hear about.
The road had deteriorated into a dust track with occasional stretches of pave laid in two tracks for the wheels. We were making our way up the side of a series of gentle arid hillsides where the road was cut into the hill and the drop below was guarded against by rope slung between wooden poles hammered into the ground. The Falcon was beginning to make heavy weather of it and the driving necessitated a careful eye kept on the water gauge. The afternoon sun was baking the cloud of dust we were throwing up onto the back of the car. It was impossible to see anything out of the rear window. We had the air conditioning on full blast just to breathe. Once we stopped to get a rag out to wipe the dust off the window and it was almost like a form of torture getting into the searing heat outside from the icebox temperature inside. After a while we left the back window dusted up.
On one long flat strip of dust, a pickup truck roared by and sped off into the distance driving on the wrong side of the road. He must have been doing over sixty and soon disappeared in a yellow cloud. I began to think a dust wiper on the screen would help. In fact why didn't some enterprising Aussie invent one? The windscreen wipers applied by mistake had turned the windscreen into a streaky mess that only gave visibility through the semi circle underneath their path. I was driving now with my right shoulder against the door to get a good look in the rear view door mirror and also to peer underneath the smears on the screen. In this unprepared condition, we arrived in Sofala.
Imagine a Wild West town with boardwalks and canopies in front of them, then knock it all down, leaving the saloon and a couple of shops and you have Sofala. In the Gold Rush in the 1890's this must have been one of the boomtowns. Saturday night in Sofala in 1892 must have been one hell of a great night out. Drunks staggering on through the doors, brandishing giant yellow nuggets only to be knocked on the head and thrown out in the street by the saloon keepers. There is still a tradition in Australian pubs of the Swill Out where a landlord who doubtless needed to keep his pub clear of all manner of rubbish turns a hose on the clientele at closing time. The pub in Sofala is The Royal Hotel. They're all called hotels by the way, and some long-lost patriotic fervour probably named most of them The Royal. This one was empty except for a pool table and two surly men in shorts and vests banging the balls about with as much talent as Eddie Charlton in his cot. We had a beer each, little realising that this would do little for us but make us thirstier for the next one. In a beer-drinking nation like Australia I would have expected them to drink it in pints at least, litres more likely. But no. It comes in sherry schooner type glasses. The regular drinker keeps the barman occupied all the time filling his glass. No wonder most bar men have muscles like Lou Ferrigno.
No one spoke to us in the bar. We might as well have been from outer space. They certainly looked at us as if we were. Carol's see-through cotton dress came in for a lot of long hard lip-wetting stares though. Maybe they were just waiting to finish their game of pool to drag her out the back of the bar. As we drove away I could swear I heard them yell "Pommy bastards" from the front porch. They stood and watched as we took the road to Hill End.
By now the sun was on its way to the horizon. The grey gum trees were beginning to cast long shadows across the road. One particularly dark shadow slithered off into the tall dusty grass on the side of the road. Of course. There would be snakes out here, probably poisonous too. I think it was round about this time that we began to feel that this junket out into the Bush was perhaps not as well prepared for as it might have been. The car was up near boiling again. The windows were caked a quarter of an inch thick with dust and the light was slowly beginning to be less intense. The desert off beyond the gum trees was beginning to glow with fantastic oranges and reds sparkling in the sand. We began to climb again, the road now a simple dirt track cut into the hillside without even the protection afforded by the rope linking. At the top of the hill was appropriately enough, Hill End.
Apparently in the gold rush, this had been an even bigger town than Sofala. It had boasted a Chinese laundry, stables, blacksmiths, two whorehouses and several hotels. Now all there was was another Royal Hotel and a general store with a petrol pump and some distant shacks. We decided we'd buy some food in the store and barbecue it at the farm, which the storekeeper told us, was three miles out of town up a dirt road. We also filled up the car with petrol. Three miles down the road we found Mrs. Miller's farm. It had a billabong, which is a stagnant, and brackish man made lake, a farmhouse with a corral out the back and a bunkhouse. That is, a house, full of bunks. It had been made from sections of corrugated iron, hastily nailed over an inner structure of chipboard. The toilet was a wooden shed next to it. There was a rusting old cold-water tank next to it and a warning from Mrs. Miller about snakes and spiders. Apparently there are two sorts of snakes out there. The Aussies with typical avuncularity call them the Black Snake and the Brown Snake. Oddly enough though they speak of them with a certain fond familiarity. The Millers' two youngest - incredibly two year old twins - conceived for the comfort of Mr. Miller's old age, he being seventy-two and riddled with cancer, had both been bitten by the Black Snake. "That blighter is only vicious if riled. He'll bite yer, but if you lie still and help comes, you'll be all right. Watch out for the brown feller though. He'll go for yer and I'm afraid one bite and you're finished." One of the worst things you can do it seems is drive over one. It flicks them up under the car and they twirl themselves round the chassis members. Sometimes they hang on for hours, which is why one woman was bitten and dropped dead in the middle of Bathurst one afternoon after she had hit one in her Holden Ute.
Stepping cautiously round patches of grass we began to collect logs to make our barbecue. Tony stripped to the waist and began chopping them up. Gum tree is, hardly surprisingly, tough and rubbery to chop. After an hour though, we had enough for the fire. Except we'd come over all thirsty again. It was decided that a trip back down to Hill End was called for. Get a few beers down us and perhaps bring some Australian wine back for dinner. We all got back in the car and set off down the dirt road back to Hill End.
Going this way, the road ran through gum trees along a ridge with a hill to our left and a ditch beside the built up road. On the other side, the hill sloped away leading to a valley several hundred feet below. Gum trees sprouted from the ground all over. The sun was chasing us behind them flickering golden orange as in a cloud of dust we pulled up outside The Royal Hotel. Another veranda, another wrought iron balcony another bar room tiled from dado rail to floor in serviceable easily hosed green tiling. And more schooners of beer.
Part 2. Dinkum
After a while the locals began to loosen up. One lad on a clapped out motorbike held together with baling wire decided to show off for Carol's benefit no doubt doing wheelies up and down the road outside. His companions were too young to drink, but it seemed as if they already had the habit of hanging around bars and it was only a matter of time before they were inside too. After one spectacular display our Evel Knievel fell off his machine and dragged its twisted handlebars back to the veranda to straighten them out with more wire. It was the night of Ali's fifteen round pummeling with Leon Spinks in Las Vegas and two blokes in their thirties who turned out to be twins wearing matching shorts and sawn-off sleeve sweat shirts towered over us and inquired whether we would like to "come back home and watch the fight on TV with Ma." Politely we declined as we said we were having a barbie with Mrs. Miller. Tony changed the subject and asked if they had seen any Kangaroos round there. Silly question really. Like asking a Londoner is he'd seen any Beefeaters walking down the street. But as luck would have it one of the bike rider's young mates told us that he's just seen a group of 'roos and some Joeys' up the street and if we went up the road now we'd see them. Great. Kangaroos at last. We'd not seen a single one yet. Not even in the Melbourne zoo where we were told that they all been clubbed to death a week before by some young thugs who climbed the fence one night with baseball bats. Before we left I bought a couple of bottles of red wine and had the corks drawn as we didn't have a bottle opener.
Carol took the wheel of the car as she thought that by now Tony and I had probably had enough to drink. She reversed into the street and was trying to put the gearshift into drive. Down the street some way a pickup truck approached. Carol wrestled with the gearshift. The truck kept on coming. I thought it's going to hit us. Surely it will stop. Then in slow motion Carol got the car into gear and - I don't believe this, he really is going to hit us - the truck slammed into us, doing about fifteen miles an hour. There was an almighty crunching noise, which brought all the locals out of The Royal Hotel. Dazed I got out of the back of the Falcon and inspected the damage. Not very much actually, a puckered front wing and a popped open bonnet. I walked over to the pickup truck and opened the door. The driver fell out into the road and lay on the ground dead drunk. Well this is where you learn it's a bad idea being a stranger in a strange land. We of course were in the wrong. Very soon you could hear voices in the crowd all round us muttering things like "They were blocking the road". "Eddie drives down here every night at this time". "People should know better". I looked at Eddie's truck which was impossible to tell whether had been damaged recently and said. "Are you all right Eddie? Good. I'm sorry we were blocking the road. "Blocking the road the Pommy bastards, were" was all he said. Suddenly all our chums from the bar, even Evel seemed evil. There were snarls and cries of "Good riddance. Get back to where you come from."
Carol was shaken by the episode and I, now clear eyed and feeling sober, took the wheel again. I whisked us back up the three-mile perilous dirt road to the farm in no time as it seemed. "Let's get on with the barbie then" Carol said. I said I'd get the wine from the car. And there it was, all over the floor. The jolt or the journey had dislodged the corks and it had all emptied out into the carpet. Great. "OK", I said, "I'll go back and get some more." So I got back in the car and swung it round in the gloom in a cloud of dust. "Hang on", said Carol. "I'll just get the bags out of the boot. She got her bag and Tony's out and slammed the boot shut. I roared off down the dirt road again; keen to make up for lost time.
Well I was beginning to feel as if I were in a film. The sun was down behind the gum trees and the car was drifting easily round the bends in the road that I felt so familiar with by now. I imagined the barbecue well alight and I also thought of the locals in the Royal Hotel. Was anybody there still? Was the Ali fight underway and had they all adjourned back to Ma's? Then it happened. I was travelling way too fast when I dabbed the brakes coming up to a right hand turn and ...nothing happened. The car carried straight on and left the road. Next thing I knew I was staring down the length of the bonnet with the car nose down in the ditch between the hillside and the road. I was held in pace by my seat belt - clunk click every trip. Oh dear. I've come off the road, I said to myself. I'll start the engine up and back it up. Rrrrrr, rrrrr, rrr, r.... r...r, .... went the engine getting slower and deeper sounding with each turn of the ignition key. Then nothing. Just the ticking of hot metal. In a car full of petrol. Jesus Christ. This could blow up. I struggled with my seat belt - you do in emergencies. You can snap it off a thousand times when it doesn't matter, but when it does matter the damn thing sticks and you fumble. I swing open the door and rolled into the road. I sprang to my feet and ran a hundred yards down the road waiting for the explosion. Nothing. Just the ticking of hot metal and the chirrup of grasshoppers. The gum trees cast long shadows across the road. The full moon had come out and it seemed strangely like daylight, the wrecked car oddly out of place in this natural wilderness. And what a wreck it was. The whole front end had been pushed in by the impact with the ditch. The rrrrr... rrrrr... sounds had been the fan boring a hole into the rear of the radiator which had been shoved up against the engine block. Well what am I going to do now, I mused? Better get back to the farm and sort it out from there. I set off back up the road. After a hundred yards I thought...cameras. My camera was in the car. I returned and got it out of the glove box. Entering the car afresh from the warm evening air, the smell hit me. The wine in the carpet made it smell as if there had been a party going on in there. And all over the car were packets of biscuits we had been nibbling all day, adding to the scene of debauchery. I grabbed the biscuits and like a man in a strange full moon ritual threw them as far from the car as I could into the trees in all directions. I set off again, and then remembered my bag in the boot. I retrieved it and set off back up the track.
I must have driven further than I thought because at every rise I expected to look down into the valley where the farm lay. But no, every rise led to another, then to another bend and all along the dirt road there were shadows and every one could have started to slither away. It was in a very heightened sense of awareness that I finally crested the valley of Mrs. Miller's farm, where there was no sign of a barbecue. Tony and Carol had eaten and gone to bed. I dropped my bag in the entrance and Tony looked out of the window. "Do you want the good news or the bad news?" I said. "The good news is I'm alive. The bad news is the car is a right off".
It was a fitful night's sleep that followed. Tony had eaten my steak thinking I'd gone to the pub for a drink and eaten there. It had taken that long to walk back. In the middle of the night I thought I heard an intruder and leapt from my bunk only to confront Carol stark naked in the hallway. Unable to sleep, we both expected the bunkhouse to be under siege from baseball bat toting locals determined to beat some sense into the Pommy Bastards for messing with Eddie and his truck. Eventually and noisily dawn broke. Mrs. Miller's cockerel letting us know of its coming some hours in advance. I dressed and told Mrs. Miller what had happened. She laughed about it. "It's a tricky bend that, on the road. I know where you came off. Listen I know Bill the local copper pretty well. We'll straighten it out dearie." We all three got in Mrs. Miller's Holden estate and drove down to the wreck. Tony and I tried to pull the fan off but it was no use. Tony stayed with the car in case the police came there first and Mrs. Miller drove me to the police station in Hill End. Tony had an interesting wait. For the next few hours he kept finding biscuits in the trees all around the car. At least he got breakfast. Bill the copper was at the station. He said he'd already seen the car. He looked me in the eye and spoke to me in the clear tones people use when addressing a child, foreigner or other imbecile. "So I'm putting in the report that you hit the brakes and the car slid into the ditch. You were doing no more than thirty... all right?" "Well that's what actually did happen." "Listen son... I've seen enough accidents and I can tell when a car's being driven too fast and what with that smell in there I could imagine all kinds of things.... so I'll say this one last time... you hit the brakes and nothing happened. All right?" "That's right officer." "Good. That'll be the end of it then." "How are we going to get back to Sydney?" "That's none of my business. Just one thing son, come over here." He took me over to the window. His face was inches from mine. "You don't want any of that malarkey with Eddie's truck to come out do you? Just don't come back here. Ever." Gosh. Run out of town by the sheriff. It was just like the Wild West.
We drove back, collected Tony at the car and I waited all morning by Mrs. Millers' wind-up handle phone for Avis to call back. Mr. Miller sat in his chair by the window the sunlight etching his lined ruddy face. He started to speak without my asking and told me in one long monologue how he had won the farm in a poker game, then added to it over the years buying out small holdings here and running off rogue sheepherders there. It was a wonderful tale and if I had been more alert I would have written it down. I don't know if he had told it before but I felt privileged to hear it. He knew the end was near and he had no one to hand it on to. His children were too young, his wife too tired and his other child had been killed in the war in the Australian navy. It must have seemed as if all his efforts had been in vain.
At three in the afternoon the Avis tow truck appeared across the other side of the billabong where we had passed a large part of the day. It was like the relief of Mafeking. He towed the car out of the ditch, disconnected the transmission and slung the car from a hook on the back of the truck. We all got in the cab and bumped back down through Hill End and Sofala to Bathurst. At the Avis office there were a few questions and some forms to fill in, then they gave us an identical Ford Falcon to play with. Well no, it was beige instead of green. This time we quietly trundled over the Blue Mountains and tiptoed down the Parramatta Road back into Sydney where I sank into a bath and counted my blessings. Another hundred yards along that road I would have gone off the other side and down the hill. Bumpety bumpety boom. I can see the car exploding every time I shut my eyes.
Coda.
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Before setting off from our luxurious hotel into the outback, we thought we should leave our account director a small gift. So, we ordered everything on the Room Service Menu for him to enjoy at 6 a.m. We had a good laugh about what we imagined was happening back there as we cruised the Parramatta Road. Apparently, he refused it when it came to the door and the hotel manager called up to say why wasn't he enjoying his full Australian breakfast which his staff had been obliged to come in an hour early to make for him? Many years later we met the account director in another agency when we came in for a job interview. "Did you order that breakfast, in Australia?" He was clearly still angry. We denied all knowledge of it of course.