Australia Hates Athletes

Australia hates athletes. Apparently.

I don’t care about sport, so I don’t care about the Olympics, beyond viewing them as a sort of vague historical milestone that rolls around once every four years. The Leading Media Story of this first week has been a bitter divide over Australia’s success and failure: one side furious with our athletes for failing to win gold, the other side telling them to the shut the fuck up and take a chill pill. I cannot begin to imagine the kind of psychopath that would pen a piece like this:

I have zero interest in hearing some tearydeary tell me that she had nothing left in the tank. Or, worse: “I don’t know what went wrong.”

That’s the job. Coaches. Athletes. Officials.

Stop whining. Start winning. Or find another job.

I’m surprised this latest furore is what it took for some voices to call for restraint. Even before the Olympics started, I was noticing, for the first time, the strangely passive-aggressive manner in which we treat our Olympic athletes. It started with the ludicrous “scandal” of Nick D’Arcy and Kendrick Monck posting jovial photos of themselves on Facebook, holding pistols and a shotgun, in a licensed gun store, in the United States. There were outraged calls for them to be penalised for undertaking such perfectly legal behaviour, and they have in fact been sent home after competing. (The Australian Olympic shooting team, strangely, suffered no such penalties.)

There was John Steffensen’s allegations of racial abuse, to which he was told “put your head down and your bum up and you just concentrate on your job.” There were the photos of Liesel Jones that led the media, completely unfounded, to spark rumours that coaches were concerned about her weight. Then there was the sleeping pill thing. I can’t even remember what that was about, but here’s how the Herald Sun spun it:

This is the same tone the Herald Sun uses for convicted felons, welfare cheats and unruly kids – a bold, stern warning from an authority figure, reassuring the law-abiding mums and dads of the mortgage belt that Something Is Being Done about the latest Threat To Civility. Only in this case, the line-up in Villain’s Row are the athletes that we allegedly admire, adore and respect. Apparently they’re only worthy of that if they “deliver” us gold, like couriers, or indentured servants hacking away at a rock face deep underground.

I must have missed a couple of steps along the way. First of all, why do we – the Australian public – need gold so badly? Is Treasury bankrupt? Is the fiat currency system about to fail? Are we constructing some kind of diabolical war machine fuelled by smolten Olympic medals and greased with the tears of our swimmers? Ah, the gold is a metaphor for sporting success. I see. My confusion remains. How does the athletic prowess of another Australian in any way impact the life of Davo Dickhead in his McMansion in the western suburbs?

The other thing I don’t understand is this: even if we, the people, have an insatiable lust for gold, how is it that the Australian athletes owe it to us? I don’t think it’s the taxpayer funding. I’ve barely seen that mentioned at all. Many Australians seem to feel on a deep and visceral level that the athletes personally owe them gold, whether they have a monetary stake in the battle or not.

I was going to write this before the Games started, during all the creepy outrage about the gun photo and the sleeping pills and Liesel Jones’ weight. The reaction of the press and the public to our lack of immediate, effortless dominance has only confirmed the uneasy feelings I had about the whole affair. It reminds me of nothing so much as an overbearing parent pushing their child into sport – not caring about why they might fail, not caring about how good the opposition is, not caring about them, really – just demanding success so they can live vicariously through them. The pushy, demanding parent at junior teeball may be a stereotype and a myth, but apparently the fickle Australian public isn’t.

Maybe, since I don’t care about sport, I don’t get to have an opinion on this weird, unedifying barrage of criticism. But I’m still puzzled by the ferocity of attacks aimed at world-class athletes by people sitting on their couches at home. What have you accomplished?

Afghanistan

The Prime Minister has outlined the Government’s plan for an early troop withdrawal from Afghanistan which could see the majority of Australian soldiers return by the end of 2013.

The Government had been working towards bringing Australian soldiers home by the end of 2014, the date set down by the NATO-led international forces.

But Julia Gillard says security has improved in Afghanistan and it is likely the majority of Australian troops will leave next year.

“This is a war with a purpose, this is a war with an end. We have a strategy, a mission and a timeframe for achieving it,” she said in an address to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

“PM confirms expedited Afghan exit,” ABC News, 17 April 2012

The national discourse surrounding this announcement – surrounding this whole war – pisses me off. First is the assumption that anybody in Washington or London or Berlin or Kabul gives a flying fuck whether Australia’s meagre token force is there or not. The Taliban will see it as a symbolic victory, the ISAF as a symbolic loss. Australians should be questioning the fact that their contribution is considered merely ‘symbolic.’

Second is the Prime Minister’s rhetoric-laden speech about how this isn’t a defeat or a withdrawal, but rather a transfer of responsibility to Afghan forces, who will maintain the current status quo of peace, prosperity and stability for which Afghanistan is renowned across the globe. (Imagine what it will be like if they lose any further control.) But nah, I’m sure it’s fine, we’ve been training these guys for nearly a decade. They must be nearly ready now, right?

Third is the ludicrous notion that this is all according to plan, all going swimmingly, a perfectly reasonable and logical step in the itinerary. A five-year-old child born years after 9/11 could point out to our Prime Minister that this is actually a frustrated and hasty political manoeuvre, part of a grander tapestry of hubristic defeat for Western forces. Put quite simply: we are losing this war. Our aims are vague, our forces huddle inside fortified compounds, and our mission has gone from rooting out al-Qaeda to creating a stable democracy to withdrawal by 2014 no matter what the cost. Since Australia’s stake extends no further than supporting US foreign policy as part of the ANZUS alliance – no matter how fucking stupid, badly-planned and frankly naive American wars might be – it’s in our political interest to be the first to leave the party. I mean, hey, we did stick around for eleven years, which is pretty late. But, you know, we’ve got work in the morning, so we’d better get going. Nice seeing you, though!

Countless left-wing commentators will talk about how the military-industrial complex controls this (and every) war, and how it’s not supposed to have clear goals or resolutions, but exists merely to make money for certain sections of Western society. I have no doubt that the relationship between military manufacturers and the interior of the Beltway has been a prominent geopolitical force over the last decade, but right here, right now, in Afghanistan? Their calls are clearly no longer a priority. Our mission in that country has morphed into nothing more sophisticated than a frantic dash for the exit. There is no more damning indictment against our alleged noble purpose than hearing Julia Gillard, David Cameron and Barack Obama talk over and over and over again about how we will be sticking to our scheduled departure date of 2014, apparently with the iron-clad certainty that the security situation will improve by then. How do you think it makes Afghans feel to know that we’re bailing in two years, no matter what? How do you think it makes the Taliban feel?

Here is the plain truth. The public has grown weary of this war, the military has grown weary of this war, politicians have grown weary of this war, and it’s evident to everyone that if we stick around in this static misery we will be in precisely the same situation in 2022 – an endless baton relay, the Afghan runner sprinting ever further ahead of us, never willing or able to take the flame. We went into a foreign country with zero understanding of its culture, background or context, and we are paying the price of our own arrogance. Or, rather, the Afghans are paying the price, and will continue to pay the price. Western leaders never once cared about the people of Afghanistan. For John Howard, Tony Blair and George Bush, Afghanistan was an irritating nest of terrorists to be exterminated; for Julia Gillard, David Cameron and Barack Obama it’s an irritating geopolitical swamp to extricate our armies from. There’s a common viewpoint which says that national leaders care about nothing but getting re-elected, but even the most altruistic of national leaders observe the world through the prism of their own nation’s interests. Never ever forget that when you’re watching Gillard or Cameron or Obama banging on about “the people of Afghanistan.”

So, here’s what’s going to happen in Afghanistan. We’re going to hang out for two more years, get a bunch of Afghans killed, get a lot of our own soldiers killed, waste a lot of money, and leave with the South Vietnamese Army Afghan National Army being judged capable of handling its own security. Within the next 1-3 years, the government will be overthrown and the Taliban will be in control again, which will be an appropriate amount of time for the West to save face and argue that it was the Afghans’ fault. For however long the fall of the government goes on – likely no more than two or three weeks – it will feature between page 5 and page 10 of the newspapers, and receive third billing in the 6pm news bulletins.

Every soldier who died in Afghanistan – American, Australian, Dutch, Canadian, any of them – died for nothing. Don’t get on my case about that. Don’t accuse me of disrespecting the troops, who sacrifice their lives for our countries. It’s exactly because the troops sacrifice their lives for our countries that they deserve honesty. They deserve to know precisely why they’re sacrificing their lives, and what that sacrifice will accomplish. They deserve to know why we’re going to war, whether we’ve thought it through properly, and what difference it’s going to make. They don’t deserve to be treated like chess pawns, maneuvered throughout Central Asia in a 21st century reboot of the Great Game, paid off with the sickeningly childish refrain of “this is a war with a purpose, and a war with an end.”

Julia Gillard is making the right decision for the wrong reason. Whatever. We lost this war a long time ago. Bring our troops home, because they sure as fuck aren’t making a difference there. And if you really want to help Afghans, and save Afghan women from the brutal rule of the Taliban? Increase the refugee intake.

Book Review: The Lucky Country

The Lucky Country by Donald Horne (1964) 256 p.

“The lucky country” is a phrase any Australian is familiar with, one often applied with beaming happiness to things like Vegemite advertisements or Australia Day speeches. Yet few Australians would be able to quote the sentence it originally appeared in: “Australia is a lucky country, run mainly by second-rate people who share its luck.”

Donald Horne wrote The Lucky Country in the early 1960s as a stark assessment of a nation he felt had lost its way. Australia possessed fabulous natural resources and enjoyed one of the highest standards of living in the world; yet, unlike other advanced nations, he felt it had done little to earn its success. It rested on its luck and was unimaginative, uninspired and unexceptional. It was almost a dependency, looking to Britain and the United States to tell it what to do and unable to shake the feeling that it was an unimportant backwater, albeit a pleasant one. It reminded me of an assessment by Ted Simon in Jupiter’s Travels, when he visited Australia in the early 1970s:

Like most people everywhere they spent most of their time just getting by, but there was no collective dream or mythology that told them what it was they were supposed to be doing.

Now, The Lucky Country was written half a century ago and much of it is irrelevant today – the influence of the Australian Communist Party, the White Australia Policy, and the tension between Catholics and Protestants, to name a few things. But a larger portion of the book is surprisingly relevant. The most striking thing to a modern reader is how little has changed. Horne knew Australia was at a tipping point in the 1960s, like much of the world, and that if it was ever going to seize its own destiny, that was the time. And indeed, the 1970s saw the election of Gough Whitlam, a prime minister who stood up to Washington, engaged with Asia, introduced universal healthcare and began the process of recognising Aboriginal land rights. But he was dismissed after only a few short years, and Australia sank back into a swamp of lazy complacency. And now here we are in 2012: still not a republic, still looking to America and Europe for guidance in cultural, political and economic matters, and still relying entirely on our natural resources to maintain our economy. Australia was renowned in 2008 for being the only OECD country which did not enter recession, but virtually the only reason this was so was because our economy is centred around selling ore to China. How lucky.

And our current leaders hardly inspire confidence – indeed, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott regularly poll in the 30% range as preferred prime ministers, among the lowest ratings of all time. Say what you will about John Howard and Kevin Rudd, but they were both titanic figures who led with vision (my vision of hell, in the case of Howard, but vision nonetheless) and imposed themselves mightily upon the Australian psyche. Gillard and Abbott, on the other hand, feel like understudies thrust into the spotlight. They might make able politicians, but in the grand narrative of history, they will never go down as great leaders.

So the Australia of today is strikingly similar to the Australia of The Lucky Country. It reminded me of what Nick Bryant, the BBC’s Sydney correspondent for many years, wrote upon leaving the job in 2011:

The anger and hostility [in Australian politics] is currently being compared with the mood in 1975 during the Gough Whitlam dismissal crisis. But it also has a late-60s feel – a post-Menzies, pre-Whitlam interlude when the country appeared to be treading water, and waiting for something to happen.

The curious thing when reading The Lucky Country is that Horne seemed to be optimistic, to believe that change really was around the corner, that the next generation – John Howard’s generation – would prove to be far less stagnant and conservative than their predecessors and lead Australia into a bold new future. (He seemed particularly convinced that a republic would happen any year now.) That didn’t happen. And while I myself am optimistic that Australia might grow up a little in the coming decades, in an era of global connectivity and an emerging Asia and a rising Green Party, I can’t help but feel that perhaps we’ll just see a repeat of the last 50 years.

The question is whether this time our luck will run out.

Some Thoughts On Modern Architecture

Melbourne was recently voted the most liveable city in the world by the Economist, whose liveability rankings have long been a joke because they obviously equate liveability with speaking English (there is no fucking way Perth is the seventh most liveable city in the world.) Monocle’s more opened-minded survey ranks it #5, and last year Mercer ranked it #18. So clearly it is a pretty neat city – as long as you don’t go more than ten kilometres from the CBD, beyond which it becomes the same bland Aussie suburbia that can be found from Bunbury to Bundaberg.

The Age recently conducted its own survey to see which is the most liveable suburb in “the world’s most liveable city.” Of 318 suburbs examined, my suburb of Sunshine West comes in at 233. Crime, lack of trees, poor public transport, distance from the CBD and the bay, and lack of shops and restaurants all hurt it.

There are two factors the survey didn’t take into account, which Sunshine West would rank poorly in anyway, but which I think were serious omissions. The first is pollution. Sunshine West sits at the edge of the largest industrial estate in the metropolitan area, and the smell is quite often “noticeable” (if we’re being polite). There is a pollution measurement station on my street, aerials and instruments humming away, which is kind of like seeing regular police patrols in your neighbourhood. It’s good that the authorities are concerned for your welfare, but the fact that they need to be is worrying.

The second is architectural aesthetics. By the standards of the study, an old-established suburb that has existed for hundreds of years has no benefits over one in which every structure was erected in 2010. Apart from trees, topography and distance to the city and bay, the study makes no allowance for things unrelated to infrastructure. Although it admits that “liveability” is a nebulous notion, it seems to argue that a vibrant city and a liveable neighbourhood could be scientifically designed and built.

Compare Southbank and Docklands to South Yarra and Collingwood. Compare Canary Wharf to Bloomsbury. Compare Atlantic Yards to Greenwich Village. Which of these areas are indisputably the heart and soul of their respective cities? Which of them, on the other hand, feel like generic committee-designed redevelopment projects where everything, even the roads and footpaths, was built from scratch and is unsettlingly new? A Ballardian landscape of skin-crawlingly clean modern architecture?

Architecture is something I’ve been thinking more and more about in the past few years. It’s a field in which I have no education or experience, merely a bundle of deep-seated feelings I find difficult to express. I instinctively lash out against brand new apartment buildings and McMansions, with their maroon-and-purple colouring and interior design dominated by straight lines and white space. It’s boring and ugly. I see more beauty in a run-down brick factory with graffitti stencils and broken windows than I do in a white Mirvac Fini apartment building in Docklands with a thousand identical balconies.

Why is this? Are new things objectively less beautiful? Buildings in bygone eras – Victorian, Edwardian, whatever – had a tendency to add decoration. The spires of the Forum Theatre, the brick pyramids atop each storefront along Sydney Road, the splendour of Flinders Street Station, the cornices and cupolas that adorn the buildings of the central city. Modern structures seem to be built with cost in mind – ease (and therefore cheapness) of assembly, of maintenance, of cleaning. The walls of Southbank’s towering structures are lined with plain white slabs; they remind me of China’s grown-overnight white-tiled cities. But surely capitalism was no less entrenched in the Victorian and Edwardian eras? Have we entered hyper-capitalism? Has the almighty dollar become even more vital than it was in times gone by? This is the intersection of two completely different sciences, neither of which I know much about.

Roger Ebert, in an article on the decline of architecture far more articulate than mine, seems to agree that finance is the one and only factor these days:

I walk around Chicago, and look up at buildings of variety and charm. I walk into lobbies of untold beauty. I ascend in elevators fit for the gods. Then I walk outside again and see the street defaced by the cruel storefronts of bank branches and mall chains, scornful of beauty. Here I squat! they declare. I am Chase! I am Citibank! I am Payless Shoe Source! I don’t speak to my neighbors. I have no interest in pleasing those who walk by. I occupy square footage at the lowest possible cost. My fixtures can be moved out overnight. I am capital.

Eureka Tower obviously shows some more thought and imagination than the rest of Southbank – perhaps a concession that, as the tallest building in the country, it was going to draw the eye, so they should at least put in some effort – and it’s not outright awful. But does it compare to an Empire State Building – or even a Rialto, or a 120 Collins Street? Stylistically it’s in line with Federation Square or those jutting sticks on the north-south Citylink. Modern architecture, when it does try to show flair or individuality rather than the cheapest available option, seems to embrace whatever looks the most garish or unnatural.

Yet I can’t help but feel that perhaps I’m biased, and in one hundred years’ time people will be doing their damndest to preserve the buildings I hate now, and decrying whatever monstrosities the architects of the day are putting up. Is it the newness itself that causes my dislike for these buildings and places? When the Age interviewed Robyn Annear for the liveable suburbs coverage, she had this to say:

If I were adding indicators, it would be something intangible about the past and a sense of what happened in a place before, and being able to see that authentically, not through plaques. There are still some really old, left-alone things among the multi-storey townhouses, some weird gargoyles, places that offer evidence that there was something quirky going on in the minds of the people who built them. There are these layers that speak to me about what the place was once like.

This reminded me of something William Gibson once said, regarding Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner vision of a realistic future city:

The simplest and most radical thing that Ridley Scott did in Blade Runner was to put urban archaeology in every frame. It hadn’t been obvious to mainstream American science fiction that cities are like compost heaps — just layers and layers of stuff. In cities, the past and the present and the future can all be totally adjacent. In Europe, that’s just life — it’s not science fiction, it’s not fantasy. But in American science fiction, the city in the future was always brand-new, every square inch of it.

Southbank and Docklands may be rich and desirable neighbourhoods, but there’s a certain stigma to them for their newness. More judgemental Melburnians look at them as they do Sydney – being all about glitz and money, lacking some certain vital aspect that makes old neighbourhoods like Carlton and Fitzroy more appealing. I can’t speak for everyone, but if I had a choice between a townhouse in Fitzroy or an apartment in Southbank, I know what I’d choose. Some places lack stories, legends, a past. They’re designed by committee, funded by private investors out to make as much money as possible or government bodies trying to “re-develop” areas to get re-elected. They are neighbourhoods created from scratch, by people who should not be in the business of creating neighbourhoods. Perhaps because nobody should, or can, be in that business. Neighbourhoods should create themselves.

Gentrification is an inevitable and not entirely negative process. But it bothers me when developers move into an old neighbourhood and demolish old structures. In Footscray they are tearing down factories and warehouses from the 1930s to make way for ugly, identical, brand new apartment blocks (you can have your choice of white, grey or maroon). In Fitzroy I once visited a warehouse apartment, with brick walls and catwalk balconies. It’s not necessary to throw away the past to repurpose the present. It can be preserved, and it is better to do so. Maybe not cheaper, but better.

I think the disconnect I feel with modern architecture is a combination of both factors. I think modern architectural design is objectively ugly. Even when something is clean and neat and not particularly offensive, it’s boring. White cubes are boring. Big glass windows, if they only give a view of a hundred identical Mirvac Fini apartment towers, are boring. Clean blank space is boring. And a neighbourhood in which absolutely everything was built a few years ago – no matter how well designed, no matter how many cafes and restaurants and bookstores it has – will always feel a bit too much like a hospital or a government office. Utilitarian, sterile, lacking that vital connection to what came before it.

And I am surely not the only one who thinks that. I’ve quoted from several above, and the existence of preservation groups and the price of 19th century townhouses in Melbourne must be evidence that this opinion is, if not majority, at least widespread. Why can we not build old buildings that look like new buildings? I see the refurbishments and conversions of old, dilapidated buildings into new apartment blocks, which is good, but when something is built from scratch it’s either a McMansion or a glass and steel Southbank rectangle. Where has the vision gone? Have we lost our ability to design beautiful things? Or do we just not care?

On the climate change “debate”

Given the recent national hysteria about the carbon tax, which is going to cost people earning less then $100,000 a year a devastating +20 cents, I thought I might mention a few things about climate change. You may have heard of this. It’s been big in the media in the last few years. The media is also big on talking about the climate change “debate,” which does not exist. 97% of people qualified to hold an opinion on the matter concur that it is happening, which is why it grinds my gears when the Prime Minister has to say on national television that she “believes” in man-made climate change.

I don’t. I can’t “believe” in climate change any more than I can “believe” in my scarf or my laptop or my nose. It exists. It is happening. We caused it, and the only question now is whether we’re going to take action to reverse it, or whether we’re going to collapse into a tangle of squabbling idiots while the atmosphere is ruined around us. Smart money is on the latter.

Yet you’ll see a lot of talk in the media about the “debate” on climate change, which they’ll usually express as giving equal airtime between an esteemed climate scientist and an English aristocrat with an undiagnosed mental disorder, or between a representative of the Commonwealth’s official scientific agency and a representative of the mining industry. It’s utter bullshit and I am going to appeal against it based not on empiricism but on rationalism.

The ironic thing about the climate change debate is that it is, by and large, a subject of faith. Like most people, I can only grasp the fundamentals of any given scientific issue, and that includes climate change. I take the scientific community at their word, because I cannot personally verify their information. It’s all out there, and you or I could go look it up. I could even reproduce it here. I’m not going to, because graphs and charts and scientific studies exist beyond the realm of my attention span, and I have neither the time nor the inclination to try to understand them. Few people do. So it comes down to trust, and whom you choose to place it in.

On the one hand we have our elected Prime Minister, CSIRO, and 97% of the world’s climate scientists. On the other hand we have Lord Monckton, Andrew Bolt, Alan Jones and – the man behind the curtain – various lobby groups and alliances associated with the mining industry.

Which of those sides stands to benefit from the status quo?

It didn’t take long after the government announced its carbon tax policy for an ad campaign to be released by the Australian Trade & Industry Alliance, producing a series of misleading “facts” objecting to the government’s decision. The ATI did not exist prior to the carbon tax hysteria. It was formed solely to combat it, and one needs only click on their “about us” section to get an inkling of what this alliance consists of. The Australian Coal Association. The Mineral Council of Australia. The Australian Steel Institute.

Is a lobby group of polluting industries, formed during the announcement of a tax on polluting industries, really the organisation you want to listen to for unbiased information?

There is absolutely nothing unusual about huge corporations distorting the truth and pouring millions into propaganda in order to preserve their own profit margins. Unethical, yes, but not surprising. Corporations exist to make money. (They can even claim that they must distort the truth and create propaganda, because they have an ethical duty to give their shareholders a return; to keep their promises.) The climate change debate is a struggle between the national interest and the vested interest; the interest of a few powerful people who meet at the intersection of polluting industry, politics and media. It is completely unremarkable that such people would exploit their influence to deny climate change and protect their wealth.

What is remarkable is that ordinary Australians – people who stand to lose from climate change, who gain nothing from corporate profits – believe them. Andrew Bolt’s column is the most widely read in Australia. One only need skim the comments on any given article there, or on The Australian or news.com.au or The Drum, to wonder if wilfully blind climate skeptics comprise a majority of our population.

Some of them are diehard partisans who will criticise anything the Labor Party does. Some of them are diehard tribalists who will believe anything Andrew Bolt writes. Some of them are simply naive, and believe that because mining corporations provide us with jobs, they must love us and have our best interests at heart.

Yet I think most climate skeptics – and this includes many people I know in real life – believe climate change isn’t happening because it’s easier that way. It would be so nice, wouldn’t it, if we could go on the way we are? Chugging along in our cars, using our coal power plants, not having to change one tiny whit of our lifestyle. Say what you will about Al Gore, but the title of his film could not have been more perfect. Climate change is inconvenient, and when Australians suffer inconvenience they squeal like stuck pigs.

To return to the faith comparison, this is similar to the reason I think many people believe in God and an afterlife: it’s easy. It’s nice. It’s comforting. They shut out the evidence and the facts and their own nagging doubts, and embrace the myth, because it makes life so much easier.

And so we have this ludicrous “debate:” our elected officials, national science agency and leading researchers vs. shock-jocks, right-wing journalists and mining companies who stand to lose money if we take action on climate change. All because Australians are self-centred skinflints who are happy to let our planet slide into environmental ruin because they don’t want the price of groceries to go up a few dollars.

It’s all really depressing. I’m not the kind of person who looks back on “the good old days” or “the greatest generation” with misty-eyed fondness – the 1940s were, after all, a time when women couldn’t hold real jobs and Aboriginals couldn’t vote – but the last time an Australian generation had to face down a dire threat, they were asked to sacrifice a lot more than a few extra bucks a week. Some might think it specious to compare war with climate change. I almost think it myself. That’s because our brains are still, fundamentally, primate brains. They react to sudden, shocking things like bombs and gunfire, and are complacent about gradual threats like climate change – which will ruin us, financially and physically, more than any war could.

So, as usual, the problem isn’t the media or the government or even big corporations. It’s us. It’s the fact that most of us haven’t learned to critically assess claims, to scrutinise the motives of the person making them. Most of us suffer from normalcy bias, which means we’ll gladly listen to anyone who tells us it’s not really happening, so we can go back to driving our 4WDs and watching The Biggest Loser on our plasma flat-screens. Most of us, even if we do believe in climate change, will scrounge around for reasons why we don’t need to do anything – because it’s not happening as fast as they say it is, or because our contribution wouldn’t make a difference, or because Juliar’s Great Big New Tax won’t immediately solve the whole problem. The Herald-Sun has a higher circulation than the Age not because Rupert Murdoch is an evil Sith Lord who exerts eerie powers over the populace, but because most people are happier to read an oversimplified, sensationalist story that stokes their anger than they are to read in-depth, unbiased, fact-based journalism. It’s not stupidity or even ignorance – it’s just laziness, and an unwillingness to think laterally about how and why people tell you things.

Stop doing that. You don’t need to bury yourself in the last ten years of scientific journals, spend all your free time examining the different carbon pricing schemes in countries across the globe, or fly to Antarctica and take your own ice core samples. Just think for a moment about who Andrew Bolt’s largest patron is, and why mining industries are opposed to the carbon tax, and whether CSIRO is a more reputable source on scientific matters than News Ltd and Lord Monckton.

But I know that any climate skeptic or Boltite who reads this isn’t going to do that. They’ll dismiss it as leftist-warmist-Nazi-fascist crap, and go on listening to their propaganda, and claiming that the real propaganda is the scientific evidence, and 150 years from now our planet will have warmed, our arable land will have been decimated, our economy will be in ruins, we will be wracked by drought and bushfires, and the descendants of today’s climate skeptics will be howling with indignant rage that the government of today didn’t do anything to stop it.

Australian freedom of speech

Terry Lane has an article in the recent Australian Book Review about freedom of speech in this country, which is something I’ve been thinking about lately.

There is no guarantee of freedom of speech in our constitution. In some cases the High Court has found an implied protection, ruling that as the constitution envisages the nation as a democracy, and as democracy cannot function if political argument is impeded, then the drafters of the constitution must have taken freedom of speech for granted. This is convenient eyewash.

The Australian constitution is derived, in part, from that of the United States. The American constitution says, in its first amendment, adopted in 1791, that: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’ Our constitution includes the prohibition of the establishment of a religion, so why did the drafting convention not take the first amendment in its entirety? Clearly they thought it was a revolutionary concept best left out.

Australia is, I am fairly certain, alone amongst Western nations in not having a bill of rights that outlines basic rights such as freedom of speech. Explaining this to foreigners is not just embarassing, like explaining why the Union Jack is on our flag – it’s downright dangerous. Lane outlines several minor but disturbing incidents:

Zanny Begg, an artist, had her outdoor exhibition Checkpoint for Weapons of Mass Distraction (2004), hosted by the University of Western Sydney and the Blacktown Arts Centre, shut down because some zealous minor council official, backed by the mayor, took exception to her anti-war message. This was much like the removal of the burned and tattered flag created by Melbourne artist Azlan McLennan, which he exhibited with the label Proudly UnAustralian (2006). When an unknown person complained, the police removed the offending item from the gallery.

And the most frustrating part is the attitude of most Australians about the issue. On the subject of flag-burning:

Jennifer says: ‘They should be stopped from doing it in a public place with children around … and have their own little flag-burning ceremonies [in] backyards. If it was to happen in a public place then they should be charged and made to apologise to the people they have offended … ’ There is something profoundly, obsequiously, stupidly Australian in that single sentence. You can say whatever you like about anything you like as long as no one can hear you and you don’t block the traffic. I am grateful to Gelber for confirming what I have long suspected.

Beyond that is the idea held by many Australians that it really doesn’t matter – that as long as the government isn’t hauling you off the street in a black van, that as long as we’re better than China or North Korea, then you shouldn’t be whining about having your art installation removed from a gallery. This is related to a wider apathy about all things political (“why should I care if it doesn’t affect me?”) which annoys me immensely. The same people who say this would be outraged if it did affect them, and even more outraged if nobody else cared. Freedom is generally an abstract concept to people until they are deprived of it, no matter how minor that deprivation may be.

Glenn Greenwald explains why freedom of speech is important better than I can:

The whole point of the First Amendment is that one is free to express the most marginalized, repellent, provocative and offensive ideas. Those are the views that are always targeted for suppression. Mainstream orthodoxies, harmless ideas, and inoffensive platitudes require no protection as they are not, by definition, vulnerable to censorship. But as has been repeatedly seen in history, ideas that are despised and marginalized are often proven right, while ideas that enjoy the status of orthodoxy prove to be deeply erroneous or even evil. That’s why no rational person trusts the state — or even themselves — to create lists of Prohibited Ideas. And those who endorse the notion that ideas they hate should be forcibly suppressed inevitably — and deservedly — will have their own ideas eventually targeted by the same repressive instruments.

If you don’t believe in freedom of speech – if you believe that the government should be permitted and even encouraged to stifle views that you find offensive – then you don’t believe in freedom at all. Criminalising the expression of viewpoints is, morally, equivalent to criminalising thoughts and ideas. And the reason that many Australians don’t particularly care is reason enough to have this right encoded in law, rather than relying upon convention.

Marvellous Melbourne, or so they call it in the papers

(Credit Will Watt)

I’ve been in Melbourne for about six weeks now. When we first arrived we stayed a few nights at Jamie’s temporary place of residence – a lovely old colonial cottage in Brunswick that was completely refurbished on the inside. It was a one million dollar piece of property belonging to his former boss, who was on vacation in the Philippines until March 9th – serendipitously the same date Kristie and Susie’s rental in Essendon became available. Unfortunately, Jamie’s host said he wasn’t comfortable with us sleeping on his couches until then, so we had to find somewhere else to stay for the two weeks until we could freeload off Kristie and Susie. It was quite a blow – I can of course totally understand somone not being comfortable with strangers staying in their house for two weeks, but after just a few days, we’d grown quite accustomed to a certain standard of living, similar to our Beijing days.

(Credit Chaddles)

I jokingly pointed out to Chris that it would be cheaper for us to fly back to Perth on a budget airline for a few hundred dollars and stay with our families than it would be for us to stay in Melbourrne for that time. He promptly went ahead and did that. I, on the other hand, didn’t just make a big symbolic ride across the country only to fly right back for fiscal convenience.

(Credit Andrew Robinson)

Fortunately Kristie and Susie also needed to find short term accommodation, since they were arriving in a few days, and we ended up splitting a cheap triple room at a shitty hotel in the city centre. Even after backpacking across Asia this was probably the worst value place I have ever stayed, run by a couple of deadbeats who answered questions with surly grunts and half-replies. I wrote a bad review on Tripadvisor after we left, and a few days later realised I’d left behind my motocycle road atlas and rang up to see if they had it. After telling them my name and room number, the manager identified me as the writer of the review and reacted angrily. I hung up in surprise, and a few moments later my phone rang again. Kristie urged me to answer it, saying he probably just had my atlas, but I told her not to bother because thirty seconds of speaking to him had made it clear that he was not a reasonable man. She answered it instead, and I was right – he spent about twenty minutes raving about lies and defamation, claiming that one of the conditions of staying there was that you wouldn’t write a bad review, insulting me, threatening to take money out of my account with my credit card details etc. It boggles my mind how ill-equipped this man was to simply function in normal society and interact with other human beings, let alone run a fucking hotel. He was like Basil Fawlty mixed with Scrooge.

(Credit mfield)

Anyway, we’re in a nice two-bedroom place in Essendon now. I was only supposed to be here for a few days, since Jamie’s house was supposed to be available on the 13th of March. Instead it was delayed… and then delayed again… and then delayed again. Now, buying a house is a very complicated process involving a real estate agent, the former owner, and something called a “conveyancer.” I have no idea what a conveyancer does, but it is this figure that has been holding Jamie up at every turn, giving him wrong dates, avoiding his calls, and even lying to him and saying that the owner was in Europe when Jamie had in fact seen him at the house just yesterday. Eventually Jamie called him a cunt and got a new one, but it’s now March 30 and we’re still waiting to see when we can move in – two possible dates of April 15 or March 22.

Jamie feels like he’s overstaying his welcome at his former boss’ house and is keen to move in ASAP, and Chris is still stewing away in Perth with no job and no vehicle – which makes transport impossible on that wretched suburban steppe. I, meanwhile, am OK with hanging out in Essendon a while longer. Since my parents divorced I spent eight years living with my mothering Mum, then seven years living with my neat and tidy Dad, then when Chris and I were in Berlin we were living with two girls, and I’m now again living with two girls who keep a well-ordered house and cook dinner most nights. I expect moving into a pure bachelor pad to be a shock to the senses. Jamie seems to survive on beer and cigarettes alone.

(Credit mugley)

It’s also out in the suburb of Sunshine, which we might, if we were being very polite, call “socio-economically disadvantaged.” A few weeks ago I was on the phone to Jamie and he said “Hey, have you read the paper today?”

“No.”

“Good. Don’t.”

I’m going to do what my father does and invest in a nice baseball bat to keep by the bed.

The other downfall of Sunshine is that it’s about as far away from the city centre as the place I was living in Perth was. Of course, I came to Melbourne because I wasn’t ready to move to London alone. I’d rather be living in suburbia with friends than in a city centre alone.

(Credit Toshihiro Oshima)

And Melbourne accomplishes suburban living slightly better than Perth does. I’m in Essendon right now, for example, which is about eight k’s out of the city centre, but still has shops and trams and nightlife and medium-density housing. In Perth, travelling eight k’s out of the city centre will very easily plant you in featureless dormitory suburbs with nothing but houses, and maybe a shopping centre or two. (Which, mind you, is probably what Sunshine is like.)

It is, of course, still quite suburban and still unmistakeably Australian. I was discussing cities with Jamie the other night, who said that Sydney is more like New York and Melbourne is more like a European city. “Yeah…” I said, “But Sydney isn’t quite as good as New York and Melbourne isn’t quite as good as a European city.”

(Credit Mugley)

I don’t think Australia is ultimately for me. Melbourne is a good place to be for a few years, I think, as I begin – um, I mean finish – the transition from helpless child to responsible adult, build up a resume, save my money again etc. But there’s still travelling I want to do, and I’d still like to live in the USA or Canada for a while, and I’m fairly resolved to live in Europe eventually.

None of which is to say that Melbourne is not a fine city. Despite being younger than Perth it’s retained far more of its heritage buildings, which Perth would prefer to bulldoze to make way for monstrous McMansions, and a walk around the city centre is very pleasing to the eye. There are more cathedrals, and parks, and old theatres, and so on. Trams are awesome, although not really that useful except for short journeys. There are cool places like Sydney Road or Brunswick Road that are lined from beginning to end with shops and bars and cafes. Bats flap around at night. The weather is colder, by which I mean “not brutally hot.” It’s overcast a lot of days, like in Europe, which makes you appreciate the days of fine weather so much more.

(Credit Dean-Melbourne)

Melbourne also has the best juxtaposition in the entire world between the best and the worst architecture humans are capable of. It takes place at the intersection of Flinders Street and St. Kilda Road, which could fairly be nominated as the very centre of Melbourne. On one side of St. Kilda Road, we have Flinders Street Station – a beautiful building in the French Renaissance style.

(Credit Michael Grant)

On the other side of St. Kilda Road, we have Federation Square, a horrific fractal nightmare. It looks like a photograph of a gigantic geometry set taken half a second after it started to explode.

(Credit Edwin Lee)

It’s hilarious. I challenge anybody to find me a single square kilometre of the planet’s surface which contains a greater architectural contrast than this one right here.

Melbourne also has somewhat confusing traffic, at least for a provincial lad like me. Near Kristie’s house is Essendon’s central roundabout, the bane of my existence: an utterly horrendous six-street valve which also features a tram stop, pedestrian crossings, and traffic lights. Even after escaping this deathtrap every morning on my way to work, I have to contend with the panoply of lines and lights and signs and markings that I simply don’t understand. On our first full day here Jamie took me and Chris for a bike ride through the CBD and I had no idea what the fuck was going on. I still get honked at a lot, and generally assume it’s my fault.

(Credit Toby Corkindale)

I have a job again, for the first time in nearly a year. After applying for several marketing and writing positions, I also applied for a bookstore job which I easily received. I already sort of feel like I’m wasting my time, still working in retail at 22, but I needed money and there are far worse jobs I could have during this transitionary period. I’ve always wanted to work in a bookstore, and it has proved to be pretty neat. Occasionally I get sent up to man the newsagency kiosk in the business lounge, where I can read TIME and the New Yorker and National Geographic cover to cover, and meet (read: serve) celebrities – so far Tom Gleeson, Andy Lee, Bert Newton and Chopper Read. I also walked past Charley Boorman, one of my personal idols, as he was exiting the terminal and I was entering. I wish I’d said something to him, but when you see a famous person it always takes at least five seconds for your brain to recover, and by then he was gone. Hopefully before long I’ll meet Sam Neill, which has become an obsession of mine since everyone else I know seems to have met him.

So on the whole this job is pretty neat, apart from the occasional 5 am starts. Which aren’t really that bad – getting up at 5.30 am is awful, but getting up at 3.30 am is so far beyond the pale that my brain can’t actually comprehend what’s going on, so it passes by fairly quickly and I have the afternoon off, even if I do feel like shit and fall asleep again when I get home. The worst part is riding down the Tullamarine Freeway before dawn when it’s 11 degrees – and it’s only autumn, and so far I haven’t even been rained on. Come winter I may have to invest in a cheap car.

(Credit Dean-Melbourne)

Speaking of transport and motorbikes, Chris’ was stolen about a week or two ago. He posted it online because he intended to sell it, and left it with Jamie when he flew back to Perth. Jamie rang me one evening after returning home from work and asked if I’d come and taken Chris’ bike, to which I replied, “No, why would I?” and he said “Shit.” He’s going to lose a thousand dollars on excess, which sucks. Also just the general frustration of having something stolen. I like my bike well enough – I wouldn’t say I love it – but it’s still my fucking bike and if someone stole it from me I’d be well pissed, insurance regardless. I was furious enough when I thought someone had nabbed $400 from my bank account last year.

I’ve hung out with my old work friend Alex a few times, who moved here last year after returning from Russia. She and all her friends are from Perth; when I went to a party she threw last week with Kristie and Jamie, one of her housemates turned out to know Jamie. All of Jamie’s other friends are from Perth, as are Kristie’s, which of course makes sense – it’s a snowball effect, and one of the reasons I’m here myself – but when even random people I flag down on the street for directions say they were originally from Perth, it starts to feel like I’m in a city full of Western Australian refugees.

Which reminds me that I should be appreciating Melbourne more. I wrote this up and adorned it with swiped Flickr photos after leafing through some Melbourne travel books at work today, and remembering that I have in fact moved to a new city, one far more vibrant than my last. I should get out and explore it some more.

(Credit Dean-Melbourne)

Perth To Melbourne: Part 3

Previously:
Perth to Melbourne, Part 1
Perth to Melbourne, Part 2

February 16th
Wudinna to Adelaide – 562 km

We woke late as usual, and went to a roadhouse for an unappetising breakfast before setting off east. The Eyre Peninsula was, I was beginning to realise, not much different from the Nullarbor. Certainly there were now wheat fields and fences and other greatly stimulating things to look at, but we were still riding along a flat, straight stretch of road for hours at a time, ducking underneath the rush of trucks’ air every fifteen minutes. The most interesting thing was a few sections of road that were under construction, where we had to ride at the edge of the road to avoid warm tar.

South Australia, unlike Western Australia, has strong concerns about the welfare of its drivers. Every two or three kilometres – all the way from the border – we’d seen billboards featuring weary eyes propped up by matchsticks, and grim words urging us: DON’T DRIVE TIRED. If the South Australian government had its way, we’d all be asleep all the time, an entire state of snoozing Rip van Winkles.

As we drew closer to Port Augusta, the landscape slipped away from farmlands and back into desert. I hadn’t expected that at all. With a hot sun, red soil, spinifex to the horizon, and low hills and mesas, it actually felt more like the Outback than the Nullarbor had.

We stopped for lunch in Port Augusta, and since we now had phone reception for the first time since Esperance, we called a few bike shops in Adelaide to see if we could have tyres fitted the next day. Our off-road tyres were now almost bald, and for the last few days I’d been gripped by a low-key fear of having one suddenly burst at 110. This had happened to Chris in Vietnam, which had sent him swerving into the oncoming lane (mercifully empty at the time). He’d described it as “the most terrifying moment of the trip,” but he has good reflexes and reacts well to such things. I don’t.

Leaving Port Augusta, we followed the eastern shores of the Spencer Gulf south, with only 300 k’s to Adelaide. The farmlands still hadn’t returned; the landscape around us was dry scrubland and salt lake. “We’ve now travelled further than we ever have on any land-based vehicle,” Chris said to me at a fuel stop, “and there’s been next to no change.”

“I know,” I said. “You could pick up any town around here and plonk it down in WA and they probably wouldn’t notice for a few days.”

“I don’t mean the towns, just… the landscape. There are huge parts of this country that we could pretty much just do without.”

“Yeah, that too. I’m lusting for mountains.”

We followed a dull highway into Adelaide and entered the outer suburbs at sunset, the glare making it quite difficult to read street signs. We promptly got lost in Adelaide’s park-girt CBD (that’s the first time the word “girt” has ever been used outside of the Australian national anthem or discussions of the Australian national anthem), and spent about half an hour trying to navigate one-way streets and confusing turns. I fucking hate driving in city centres. But it was quite satisfying to be in a city again, especially since it marked the hardest and most boring part of the journey being over.

We were staying at yet another nickel and dime YHA hostel, although, being in a proper city, it was large and clean and well-run. Our room had a balcony, which was nice. After unpacking and showering, we headed out into the city to find dinner, at about 8.30.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of Adelaide – it’s smaller than Perth, yet it’s located in the eastern states (i.e. civilisation). Turns out it’s like Perth. Every single restaurant, diner, eatery and general hospitality outlet had shut down for the night, even the fucking fast food joints. We criss-crossed the empty CBD wracked with hunger pains for half an hour, until I finally glimpsed a middle-aged couple emerging from an innocuous door. We opened the door and went down the stairs to find ourselves in a busy, bustling, upscale Indian restaurant. It was like two dying refugees in a desert stumbling upon Las Vegas. In the battle between frugality and food, our stomachs won, and we took a table. We deserved a nice meal after crossing the Nullarbor anyway.

After ordering, as we slowly began to unwind from a stressful day with a Little Creatures and a gin and tonic, it slowly began to dawn on me where we were. After more than a week of small towns and petrol stations and shitty roadhouse food and rough camping, we were in a fine restaurant in a civilised city, surrounded by men in suits and and women in dresses.

“Look at all these well-dressed people,” I breathed.

“Look at this rosewood finish,” Chris whispered, rubbing the surface of the table.

The bill came to $91.

February 17th
Adelaide – 0 km

We rose at 9 am, checked out, and stowed our gear in a precarious jumble inside of the compartments in the hostel’s luggage store.

We both had separate appointments with different mechanics, and were hoping to get done by early afternoon and be on our way, avoiding another night in expensive Adelaide. As we were checking out, the German desk clerk told Chris about a great mechanic who was “a real Aussie bloke,” and could fit tyres as long as he wasn’t “drinking beer all day.” Chris switched allegiances, but I preferred to stay with a licensed Kawasaki dealer, and took off for the western suburbs. I dropped my bike off, was told that they would ring me when it was ready, and walked back into the city centre.

I spent some time wondering which was the better city, Adelaide or Perth. They’re both small, dull places, of course, but one must be marginally superior to the other. I can’t really say, since I spent 21 years in Perth and only 36 hours in Adelaide, but Adelaide does seem to be the better designed city, and has more stuff in its CBD than Perth does. There are an awful lot of traffic lights, though, and not a lot of small cafes or eateries, which is what I was hunting for when I returned from the mechanic’s. Ultimately I suppose neither of them are particularly good cities, which is of course why I am moving to Melbourne and not Adelaide. All Australian cities are pretty much the same except in scale, though.

I did notice a difference in drivers during our time there, though. Perth is generally agreed to have the worst drivers in Australia; Adelaide, in my opinion, must have the most authoritarian. The slightest infringement of the rules results in a cacophony of honking from other motorists; even ignoring gentle guidelines (stay left unless overtaking) was met with an arm out a window violently motioning for us to get in the left lane. This came from a car that was already in the left lane, on an otherwise deserted highway. Chill out, guys.

And while I’m comparing Australian cities, what’s with this silly idea we have that anything other than Sydney or Melbourne is just a “big country town?” I hear it about Perth all the time, a guy near Mt. Gambier said the same of Adelaide, and I’ve seen Brisbane called that in a goddamn newspaper (“The Queensland floods have now devastated Australia’s third-largest city, even if it is one that feels like a big country town.”) Merredin is a big country town. Kalgoorlie is a big country town. Perth is not a big country town. Country towns don’t have skyscrapers and endless suburbs and metro systems and freeways and a population of over a million. I may call Perth a shit city at every opportunity I have, but it is still undeniably a city, as are Brisbane and Adelaide. And this silly axiom is in stark contrast to official government designations, which slap the label “city” on any LGA with a population of more than twenty thousand or so.

After musing over these weighty topics on my long walk, I went back to the hostel to start looking up shortleases in Melbourne. Jamie had gained apporoval on his house, but we couldn’t move in until the 13th of March, which was much later than our estimated arrival date. I made a few fruitless phone calls, including one to a bizarre woman named Judy who spoke with the speed of a glacier and revealed that the room she was advertising was to share with her. “Alright, I might give you a ring when we get to Melbourne,” I said, as I crossed her off the list in my notebook.

I went for another wander around the city, and found myself in Rundle Mall, which was indistinguishable from Hay Street Mall. (I later revisited it with Chris, who said: “Are we in Perth?”) Then I trudged back across the city and the deserted parks to pick up my bike for an agonising $463. Chris’ mechanic, by the way, turned out to be totally on the level. Chris said he was the best mechanic he’d ever met, and he got new tyres for half the price of mine. Apparently getting anything done at an official dealership is a bad idea.

By now it was four o’clock. Since we had daylight savings on our side, I was keen to push on, but Chris didn’t want to drive in rush hour and eventually I relented and agreed to stay in Adelaide another night.

We split up to check out nearby hostels, since the YHA was booked out, and eventually found one on Wakefield Street on the eastern side of the city. Not only did this mean we had to strap all our stuff to the bikes for a measly one kilometre ride, it also took us twenty minutes, because we were sitting in bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic. If there’s one thing worse than navigating a CBD, it’s navigating it during rush hour.

We had dinner at a Thai restaurant. “There are a lot of Asians in Adelaide,” Chris said.

“We’re in Chinatown.”

“Oh.”

February 18th
Adelaide to Mt. Gambier – 437 km

The brief respite of clear blue skies and warm weather that we had enjoyed for the last three days was over. I woke up at 9 am to the sound of rain and said “Fuck.”

“What?” Chris murmured.

“It’s pissing.”

We went downstairs for the hostel’s free breakfast, and over my soggy cereal I read in The Advertiser that today was expected to bring the biggest February rain that South Australia had seen in 40 years. I trusted BOM more than I did a paper that went to press the previous night, but the website confirmed it: a huge, swirling mess of blue and yellow over the entire radar map.

It wasn’t going to change, so we decided to just grit our teeth and get underway. According to BOM, Mt. Gambier had clear skies, so with any luck we might be able to escape it and dry off later in the day.

We were soaked before we even left the CBD, constantly held up at traffic lights (“City of Lights” is not necessarily a compliment). My visor was fogging, I was freezing cold, and I’d forgotten to zip up the waterproof lining in my jacket.

One of Mike’s friends from Adelaide told me he was impressed by Perth because Adelaide has no freeway; he was wrong, but for some reason, rather than connecting the suburbs to the city centre, Adelaide’s lone freeway begins in the eastern suburbs and then heads southeast, shooting out into farmland and terminating at an irrelevant country town. What the fuck?

In any case, it’s much nicer than Perth’s freeway, snaking up through the eastern hills. I would have actually been enjoying it if it wasn’t such an awful day. It was a cruel and bitter irony that the first remotely interesting road we’d seen in two thousand kilometres came upon us on a day when I just wanted a nice, safe, flat stretch. Wet corners, low visibility, high speed roads and brand new tyres are not a good mix.

Along the way I saw a familiar yellow Animal Crossing sign, yet this one featured the sillhouette of a koala. That was quite a surprise – I hadn’t known they spent much time on the ground.

The freeway eventually rose above the hills onto a plateau, dragging us forward in the mist-obscured haze. We crossed a bridge over the mighty Murray River, and when we arrived at our first fuel stop we were bedraggled, freezing wrecks. Chris’ open motocross helmet was hell on his exposed skin; my own kept fogging up and obscuring my visibility.

The rest of the day faded into dismal repetition: soggy vinyards, wet fields and dark pine forests, stopping at a town every fifty k’s or so to warm ourselves up and begin the process of freezing to death all over again. At one point the rain grew so heavy I thought it was hailing. It showed no sign of letting up as we drew nearer to Mt. Gambier, and every petrol station attendent – after making a crack about how it was “a nice day for a ride” – confirmed that according to the weather reports, the storm was moving south-east. “You boys are keen,” commented one storeowner in the wine-growing town of Pandthaway. I have never been less keen in my life, I thought. My boots were filled with water up to my ankles, my jeans were drenched, and my hands were beyond wrinkled.

We finally rolled into Mt. Gambier – as miserably overcast and raining as everywhere else we’d been all day – and went to a motel. (Our plans to camp had been discarded as soon as we’d seen the weather report that morning.) As soon as we had the room key we began the process of emptying our bags, spreading out our wet things, and stringing up occy straps to create a crude indoor clothesline.

This is my shirt after spending the day in my supposedly “waterproof” jacket.

A hot shower was pure bliss. I turned the TV on just in time for the weather report; the map of Australia depicted a vast cloud belt covering everything from the Bass Strait to the Nullarbor. We waited for tomorrow’s forecast with desperate anticipation, and when it showed the rainfall moving east and clearing even Melbourne by noon, Chris said “Fuck yes,” and held out his fist for a bump.

After one of the most miserable, awful, horrible, shitty days of riding I ever had, the evening was quite pleasant, simply because it wasn’t miserable, awful, horrible and shitty. A hot shower, dry clothes and warm bed are all nice enough, but it takes eight solid hours of being in pouring rain to truly appreciate them. From my written journal:

Everything is drying; I am showered, clean, dry and warm; dinner is coming; I have a glass of wine and a comfortingly nostalgic WWII documentary on SBS. It’s still raining, dark and bleak outside, but I am inside. At this moment, I am content.

February 19th
Mt. Gambier to MELBOOOOOOOURNE! – 553 km

The next day was still overcast and gloomy, but without any suggestion of rain. We quickly packed our bags and put our gear on before checking out. The motel manager was the most incessantly overhelpful man I have ever met in customer service. “Is there a petrol station on the road out of town?” Chris asked.

The manager strode out from behind his desk and started pointing at the map on the wall. “Yes, there is, I think if you just follow the highway out here, you get to the edge of town, there’s a Harvey Norman here somewhere, and the petrol station should be just on the other side of that, sort of right at the edge of town, I don’t know what brand it is…”

“Okay… yep… okay, great.” Jesus, just let us go.

We had an atrocious breakfast at a petrol station, before mounting our bikes again and quickly covering the scant few kilometres of pine forest between Mt. Gambier and the Victorian border. The welcome sign was quite small, and I wouldn’t even have noticed it if Chris hadn’t pointed at it as he rode past, because it was hidden amongst the dozens of other signs from both state governments shouting about the dangers of driving tired. Victoria’s were even more ridiculous than South Australia’s: “FEEING TIRED? POWERNAP NOW.”

There were a few uncomfortable spells of drizzle, but nothing like the torrential rain we’d had to put up with yesterday. Victoria was lovely and green, a landscape of wet forests and lush fields and bridges over bubbling creeks. We passed through the town of Warrnambool, and then I saw my first ever wild koala… smeared across the road.

I thought it was a wombat at first, but as we drew closer I saw the trademark bushy ears and cute button nose, next to a long red streak of blood and viscera. Chris clapped his hand against the side of his helmet in mock horror. It was one of those things that’s so horrible it’s funny. The koala is cuteness personified; as a Western Australian who’d never seen one before, it hadn’t really occurred to me that they’re also wild animals existing in nature, which is red in tooth and claw.

“What was a koala even doing on the road?” I groaned at the next fuel stop. “I didn’t know they even went down on the ground.”

“How did you think they got between trees?” Chris asked.

“I dunno… I thought they just went from branch to branch, like monkeys.”

Chris laughed. “What, swinging?”

As we headed south towards the coast, the cross-winds began to pick up, but there were a lot of right angled roads – so a dangerous and irritating cross-wind would suddenly become a pleasant tail-wind. We soon arrived at the first of the coasts’s attractions, the stacks and London Bridge.

London Bridge doesn’t look very bridge-like anymore, since the first arch collapsed about twenty years ago – stranding a pair of very lucky tourists, who had to be lifted out by helicopter.

We had lunch in Campbell Bay, missing out on the lunch hours at a pub with a lovely view because we’d forgotten to wind our watches forward half an hour when we crossed the state border. After that we visited Lord Arch Gorge…

…and the Twelve Apostles. The Apostles are easily the most impressive of the coast’s formations, but after seeing all the others were were pretty much done with them. Kind of like in Vietnam, where it was karsts all the way up the country and Ha Long Bay did nothing for us.

Both attractions were swarming with tourists. We admired them very briefly and then got back on the bikes, eager to ride the Great Ocean Road.

I’m not sure where the Great Ocean Road officially begins and ends, but the stretch between the Twelve Apostles and Apollo Bay was surprisingly more mountain than ocean, switchbacking up and across the Otway Ranges through wet temperate rainforest. I was enjoying it too much to stop and take any photos, so here’s some from flickr, which don’t capture the switchbacking but are better than nothing:

(Credit OneEighteen)

(Credit alecto_23)

A fantastic bike road, and just what we needed after four thousand kilometres of mind-numbing flatness. I would have enjoyed it a little more if it wasn’t wet and covered in leaf litter and on new tyres, though. At the peak of the ranges is the tiny town of Lavers Hill, where we found ourselves enveloped in cloud, a thick white mist that reduced visibility to twenty metres. We slowed down, passed through the town, and soon descended the ranges on the other side.

On a map Australia is, for a landmass, pleasingly symmetrical, but the eastern half extends surprisingly further south than its western counterpart. Somewhere on this winding, hilly road is the southernmost I’ve ever been. The easternmost is a beach north-east of Sydney (the one where they film Home and Away); the westernmost is somewhere around Bath, England; and the northernmost is somewhere on a flight path between Ulaan Baatar and Moscow. Or, if you only include feet on the ground, somewhere in Berlin. I’m sure this is of interest to nobody but myself.

The next stop was Apollo Bay, a pretty little town of pastel-coloured beach houses. More importantly, it’s the starting point (or ending point, depending on your direction) of what people traditionally think of as the Great Ocean Road: the curving, winding road that clings to the cliffsides for about 75 kilometres. The kind of place where you’d film an advertisement for a red convertible.

One drove past us almost immediately after I said that, and we both cracked up laughing.

Beautifully, the clouds were finally parting. After an entire continent of bleak weather and flat landscapes, we’d earned this.

Immediately after we took this photo Chris cracked up, saying that in my bike jacket I looked like a bulky space marine from Starcraft or Gears of War. I think he looks pretty bulky too.

An absolutely spectacular road. It ended around Anglesea, and we took a highway to Geelong that soon funneled us onto a freeway stretching up the western shore of Port Philip Bay, just as the sun went down.

This was it – the final stretch. A pastel twilight sky with a few peachy clouds, and the city lights beginning to sparkle on the horizon. Soon we caught a glimpse of the distant skyscrapers, and as they grew, a fat yellow full moon rose above them. Visually speaking, it was a very auspicious arrival.

We crossed the West Gate Bridge, went through an impressively long tunnel, and ended up heading east on a sunken freeway. Jamie had told us to turn left on “City Link,” but I was pretty sure we’d overshot it, and I needed fuel anyway, so we exited the freeway and found a service station.

The friendly attendent told us Brunswick, where Jamie was staying, was north of the city, while we were east of the city in a suburb called Glen Iris. He lent us a street directory, and we plotted out a circuitous path through the northern suburbs to avoid tram lines and thus the dreaded hook turn. Then we returned to the freeway, took the correct exit, drove through Brunswick, and found ourself outside Jamie’s temporary residence: a very fine house on Aberdeen Street. Success!

All in all: 11 days of riding, 13 days in total, covering 4588 kilometres. 6 of those days were under grey, gloomy skies – very odd for Australia in February. I’m not sure how much it cost, other than “a lot more than we expected.” Chris kept nearly all the fuel receipts, but has yet to tally them up.

Overall, as I said earlier, it was something that was very satisfying to do – to have done – but not a ride I’m interested in repeating. Australia is a wonderful country and I love it dearly, but, as Chris pointed out, a good chunk of it consists of absolutely nothing.

But whatever, we made it to Melbourne.

(Credit Dean-Melbourne)

Perth to Melbourne: Part 2

Previously: Perth to Melbourne, Part 1

February 12th
Esperance – 0km

At South Coast Motorcycles a mullet-haired mechanic expressed barely restrained contempt for our decision to ride 250s across the country, before inspecting Chris’ chain and declaring that it was fucked because it hadn’t been sufficiently lubricated. “You need to lube ‘em every three hundred k’s,” he said.

“I thought every thousand k’s,” Chris said.

Snort. “Nup. Three hundred. You got any tools?”

“No.”

Another snort. “You’re crossing the Nullarbor without any tools?”

We could have told him that there was no point in having tools because we wouldn’t know what to do with them, but we felt we’d been derided enough for one morning. He tightened Chris’ chain and sold us some lubricant, but told us it needed replacing, which he couldn’t do because he was booked solid.

We went down the road to Esperance’s other motorcycle shop to seek a second opinion, where we were again greeted with a generally condescending air. “Mechanics are always assholes and I don’t understand why,” Chris said later. “They think you’re an idiot for not knowing what they know. Like, ‘what are you going to do if your bike breaks down?’ What the fuck? I’ll bring it to you and pay you to fix it. That’s your fucking job. It’s like if you went to a book signing and the author said, ‘What do you want to read my book for? Why don’t you write your own?’”

The mechanics at the second store had the time to replace Chris’ chain, but didn’t have a new sprocket, so I had to ride back to the first store and buy one. During the transaction the female cashier – doubtless our mulleted friend’s wife – said “Yeah, you just got to keep those chains lubed. You can’t just treat them like that and not expect them to break. And what’s your fuel mileage? You know on the Nullarbor there’s about 250 k’s between…”

“We’re carrying jerries,” I said. “Longest stretch is 182 k’s.” I asked for a sprocket, not a lecture.

In defence of the mechanics who so despise their clients, the bikes do, upon closer inspection, instruct us to lube the chains every 300 k’s. It’s written right there on the chain guard. I’m not sure where we picked up the 1000km figure from.

While waiting for the chain to be replaced we went to a cafe for breakfast, but it was hideously overpriced, so we went to IGA and bought some hideously overpriced ingredients to cook back at the hostel. WA’s cost of living is quite unreasonable, but in remote areas like Esperance it borders on ridiculous. After breakfast we went for a walk, even though it was still overcast and howling with wind.

Another long jetty, although this once had a sea lion dozing underneath it.

Apparently he’s a semi-tame town local called Sammy. Brett lied to us and told us he’d been murdered, just like somebody murdered the dolphins at Underwater World. You lied, Brett! The sea lion is alive and well. We thought he was dead for a bit, but eventually he stirred ever so slightly in his sleep.

Here’s a stupid billboard:

Skylab did indeed make landfall across the south-east of WA, and the Shire of Esperance really did fine NASA for littering. This is the kind of story that’s quite amusing, until you put it on a tourism billboard with the calculated intent of portraying yourselves as a bunch of witty Aussie larrikins.

Later that afternoon, after retrieving Chris’ bike ($250, ka-ching) we did an oil changes on our bikes… or at least, on my bike. Chris was quite frustrated to find that his sump bolt – plus all the other nuts and bolts on his gearbox – were fitted so tightly that his most vigourous attempts to remove them simply wore down the angles of of the bolt’s head. After half an hour of fruitless prying he flung his Yamaha spanner into the bushes. “It’s useless!” he yelled. “I can’t take it apart without destroying it!”

The entire time we were keeping up a conversation with a babbling Tasmanian man, who was attending to a stray puppy he claimed to have found wandering in the street. He never shut up, and being alone with him for even a few moments was a sentence to being drawn into some long anecdote about how he’d gone to Thailand to learn kickboxing and had then taught it to Aboriginals on a station he’d been working on up north. “Yeah, I been up there about eighteen months, pretty much on my own,” he said.

“No wonder you’re fucking batshit,” Chris muttered later on.

February 13th
Esperance to Caiguna – 441 km

The crazy bastard robbed us! Come morning, the Tasmanian was gone, along with the tool kit from the back of my Kawasaki and nearly every earthly possession belonging to the European backpacker who’d been sharing his dorm. “I wonder if he really just ‘found’ that dog?” I said.

It was still fucking grey and fucking windy. I know it’s the south coast, and that it has to spend every day of its windswept existence facing down Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, but Jesus Christ. It’s meant to be summer. It’s meant to be an Australian summer. I’ve seen photos of perfectly still days in Esperance, you know the ones, one the brochures with the crystal white sand and turquoise water and kangaroos fucking lazing about on the beach. It must be like that sometimes, and if not February, when?

East of Esperance is an unsealed road that runs all the way up to the Eyre Highway, connecting with it just east of Balladonia. It would save us a hell of a lot of time and distance if we took this rather than the typical Norseman route, and since it was about 200 k’s, it was perfectly possible to do with the jerries. It would also save some wear and tear on our off-road tyres, which were starting to look a little bald after more than a thousand k’s on tarmac.

So we headed east out of town, on a little-travelled road leading to the town of Condingup, a tiny hamlet hidden in low scrubland.

This was another service station (well, actually just some pumps outside the pub) where the attendant came out to fill our tanks up for us, as though Robert Menzies were still in the Lodge. I guess it’s a country thing. We queried him about the condition of the off-road track, and he said it wasn’t bad at all – actually tarmac for the first forty k’s, and in pretty good condition until you got to the half owned by the Shire of Norseman, which didn’t bother to maintain it. It was quite corrugated on that half, he said. Chris knew what he meant, and I pretended I did too.

He knew what he was talking about – even got the distance right. After forty k’s, asphalt ran out, and we were in Hardcore Offroad Country.

Not really. It was good solid ground, not sand, and most of it was even graded. Still a bit bumpy, but about as close to an actual road as off-roading can be. We passed a bearded farmer who resembled Santa Claus driving along on his quad, and as we passed him he turned to look at us with an incredulous yet delighted expression.

After about 120 k’s we stopped to refuel. Something had happened to my bike, but I didn’t notice until much later.

We passed a gate covered in people’s underwear, a curious rural ritual which we saw repeated all over the country.

Further on the road was no longer graded, and I discovered what corrugated meant. The loose sand that blew along the surface had formed into tiny little dunes, no more than a centimetre high, making it similar to corrugated tin. As you might imagine, this is difficult and unpleasant to ride on. “It actually gets better if you can get up to about 80 or 90 k’s,” Chris said. “Which is intimidating, but trust me, it’s a lot better.”

I did sometimes manage it, but then potholes or patches of gravel would come along and I’d slow down again. For the most part I managed 70, which was still quite nerve-wracking. At one point I hit a gravel-soaked part of the road, and ended up in a long tyre-gulch, which funneled me to the left. I have a fear (reasonable or not, I have no idea) of turning even slightly when I’m on gravel at any kind of speed, and so I tried to brake rather than steering out of it. I’d developed the speed wobbles and the trees were looming up on my left and I was gripped with the same kind of looming helplessness as when we’d beached the speedboat on the last night of Collie, only a few weeks ago. “Oh no,” I said. “Oh no.” Fortunately I managed to slow down in time and the worst that happened was some branches scraping my left arm. But it was a close thing.

After four hours of off-roading we finally hit the Eyre Highway,and both of us were glad to see it.

We swung left to fuel up at the Balladonia Roadhouse, where we encountered our first stingingly high Nullarbor prices ($1.90 for premium). The weather was worsening and it was getting late in the day, so we agreed to lube the chains, scarf down a quick lunch and then be on our way.

The roadhouse was staffed by a charming young Irishman, who asked us a lot of questions about “dem boikes,” and also checked up on us while we were eating about every 30 seconds: “Are you aright der, boiyes? You aright?”

“He was very nice,” Chris said later, “but also very… there.”

“My Nana does that too,” I said. “Just randomly asks ‘Are you alright, Mitchell?’ Maybe back in Ireland you had to check on people every five minutes to make sure they weren’t dead.”

The roadhouse also had a modest museum, which contained what is probably not a real piece of Skylab.

After shoving down coffee and sandwiches prepared for us by the Asian chef, we prepared to head off, with less than two hours before sunset, and more than two hundred kilometres between our target of Cocklebiddy. “You take care of dem boikes, boiyes,” the Irishman said. “Don’t rush, just take yer toime.”

This was it. The Nullarbor Plain. Two thousand kilometres of absolutely nothing stretching ahead of us, the largest settlement containing no more than fifty people. Flat and featureless and remote – and yet holding the major artery between Australia’s east and west, so that a vehicle passes you every ten or fifteen minutes. This was the stretch of the journey that all our friends and relatives had been wringing their hands about. I still recall the words of an ex-girlfriend of mine who, when I had proposed a hypothetical roadtrip to the eastern states to see a concert that never ended up eventuating, had said: “Mitch, people die on the Nullarbor!” (This made me and Chris laugh for many months to come.)

I didn’t expect it to be anything worse than boring. And yet it was also something I wanted – had always wanted – to do. In what other country can you drive along a major highway for two or three days and see literally nothing?

Of course, I’d always imagined I’d be in a car when I did it. Not a motorbike. Bikers like corners, because they’re more interesting. Long straight stretches of road, not so much.

Oh.

At least we can say we’ve done it. (It’s listed among Australia’s top 200 bike rides in the Australian Motorcycle Atlas purely for that reason). I believe this was formerly the longest straight road in the entire world, before one was built to one of the king’s remote desert palaces in Saudi Arabia. At least we still have the longest straight stretch of railway line in the world, which is also across the Nullarbor, about two or three hundred k’s to the north of here. Why the railway doesn’t run alongside the road, I don’t know.

It was, as one might expect, quite dull. It was also freezing and cold – quite ironic, given that one of the major concerns people had about the Nullarbor was that I would literally bake to death. Instead I was keeping an eye on the clouds and hoping we could make Cocklebiddy before it started raining.

We stopped to refuel from the jerries, and took a moment to appreciate the sheer emptiness around us.

Fifty k’s out of Caiguna, the sun went down and we were soon plunged into darkness. I was still wearing my sunglasses, but couldn’t be bothered pulling over to take them off. I was constantly keeping my eyes on the bushes on either side of the road, worried that a kangaroo would suddenly leap out and end my life in a heartbeat. We’d heard regular warnings about kangaroos, which often bound out onto rural roads at twilight and into the path of vehicles, to the detriment of both. Trucks don’t notice them, cars can be severely damaged, and on a motorbike you may as well be hitting an atomic bomb. Yet we’d seen nothing but crows so far, and very little kangaroo roadkill. It occurred to me that the same people who had warned me about kangaroos had been the same people who thought crossing the Nullarbor was akin to crossing the Sahara.

When we pulled into the roadhouse at Caiguna, it was well and truly nighttime. We asked the proprietor if it was true that kangaroos were a serious danger at dusk, and she said they absolutely were. “Had a bloke come through on a bike last week who said one came out right in front of him and he missed it by that much,” she said, holding her hands apart about a foot.

“Alright,” I said. “Guess we’ll stay here.”

“Right, that’ll be twenty bucks,” she said, at which Chris’ eyebrows shot up, “and I’ll need your names and license plate numbers.”

“I’ll go check what they are and call them out to you,” I said to Chris. I went back out to the petrol pump and discovered I couldn’t, because my license plate had fallen off.

“What the fuck. What the fuck!“

It was pretty funny and we cracked up laughing for a bit, but it did leave me nonplussed as to what to do. I couldn’t exactly get a new license plate out in the middle of nowhere, especially since we’d be entering South Australia tomorrow. The fact that I planned to have the bike re-registered in Victoria just added further hassles. I rang Dad from a Telstra phone booth (no reception out there) so he could check my rego papers and tell me what my license plate number was. He suggested making a new one out of cardboard in the interim, and said as long as I could tell cops what the number was I should be OK.

We set our tent up in the dark, and had showers at the reassuringly clean facilities. The sign warning us to keep the door shut to keep poisonous snakes out didn’t fill me with confidence, though.

February 14th
Caiguna to Nullarbor Roadhouse – 531 km

That night’s sleep in our miniature tent wasn’t nearly as bad as the night in Pemberton, because we’d been absolutely exhausted. We rose around 9 am and packed the tent up.

Breakfast was toast and jam for the ludicrous price of $6. An emerging theme at every breakfast was the discussion of dreams, which we were both having a lot of. I suspect it’s because on a bike trip, you do a lot more imagining and thinking and daydreaming than usual, due to the huge stretches of the day where you don’t have much to do except look at the road.

I was still worried about my license plate, convinced that if police pulled me over they would have every right to make me remain here until a new license plate could be mailed out. “Don’t worry about it,” Chris said. “You’ll be out of WA before they catch you… shit, that was a bad thing to say as someone walked past.”

It was sixty k’s to Cocklebiddy, which was a very desolate roadhouse – only about two buildings and no sign of a caravan park. Quite glad we’d ended up sleeping in Caiguna instead.

Another 91 k’s until Madura. At this point the novelty had worn off and I was tired of being on the Nullarbor. I found myself swaying back and forth along the road from sheer boredom. The skies were still grey, and it was still chilly and windy. At Cocklebiddy I had decided I couldn’t take it anymore and put my iPod in, shoving the earbuds up my helmet (with great pain) and spending a good fifteen minutes wiggling them about until they fit in my ears. Music provided slight stimulation in an otherwise sterile landscape.

Madura was situated on an unexpected ridge – I’d thought the Nullarbor was flat from beginning to end. I neglected to take a photo, so here’s one I swiped from flickr.

(Credit Les Kay)

After Madura was Mundrabilla, and after that, Eucla. I was naturally looking forward to seeing Eucla, but realised almost immediately that the real Eucla bears no resemblence to the wholly fictional Eucla of my writing, so I didn’t bother looking around or taking any photos – except the mandatory petrol fill-up.

Even the Nullarbor itself bore no resemblence to the Nullarbor of my imagination, which involved, oh, I don’t know, nullus arbor. There were trees all over the goddamn place.

We had a quick lunch here and pushed on to the Border Village, where we crossed over into South Australia under the shadow of some huge wind turbines. This felt quite good. In a country with only six enormous states, crossing into another one is always a small accomplishment, even if they’re all pretty much the same.

This was the longest stretch we had to cover without fuel – 182 kilometres. The trees actually started to thin out a bit here. I later found out that “Nullarbor” originally just meant a relatively small region in South Australia, but was later expanded to include the whole empty wasteland between Norseman and Ceduna, even though much of it has trees.

This stretch of the Eyre Highway is the one that comes closest to the coast. We took advantage of the first side road we saw and headed south, parking the bikes and approaching the ocean with the expectation of dramatic cliffs.

We were disappointed; the plateau merely sloped down to an ordinary beach.

Fifty k’s ahead, we tried again, and this time were rewarded.

Photos don’t quite capture the dramatic majesty of these cliffs – a thousand kilometres of desert suddenly pitching straight down into an equally desolate ocean, which stretches all the way to Antarctica. If you were to fall off these cliffs, it wouldn’t really matter whether you survived or not; the nearest helicopter is in Ceduna, some five hundred kilometres away. There is absolutely no way back up.

If I ever get diagnosed with a terminal disease and a fairly accurate timeframe, I know how I want to go out: riding a muscle car off these cliffs, playing “Immigrant Song” by Led Zeppelin.

As we mounted the bikes and drove back to the highway, we saw a light plane flying eastward, very low, only about two hundred metres above the road. I assumed it was the RFDS, although it had no markings. I couldn’t imagine who else would be out here. We’d passed about three or four emergency RFDS landing strips – just sections of the highway itself where the scrub had been cleared out on either side, to provide space to turn around and take off again.

When we stopped to crack open the jerry cans, the sun was setting behind us.

We plunged on into the dusk, and when some tosser drove past in the gathering gloom with his high beams on, I conceded defeat and pulled over to remove my sunglasses. This improved my visibility, for about five minutes before the darkness descended even further.

This part of the Nullarbor was rabbit territory. There were dozens of them visible at any one time, darting about at the edge of the road, their eyes glinting in the headlights. They would quite often choose the exact moment we flew past to make a dash to the other side of the road; I braked to avoid hitting one, and another later zoomed right between me and an oncoming road train, adjusting his direction at the very last second. I think he made it… I think.

It’s amazing how bright lights can be when there’s absolutely nothing else around. I spent a good twenty minutes staring ahead at bright blue truck headlights light visible just beyond the horizon, blinkered by the curvature of the earth. The lights of the Nullarbor Roadhouse were visible a good half hour before we reached it.

I presume that this roadhouse, out of the dozens of roadhouses on the Eyre Highway, gets the privilege of calling itself the “Nullarbor Roadhouse” because it’s in the only part of the plain that actually has no trees. We bought an outrageously priced $30 patch of dirt from the one-armed proprietor, and then went to buy dinner. I was informed of the price and called out to Chris, who was inspecting a rack of bumper stickers.

“Dude, do you have six bucks?”

“You have a fifty dollar note.”

“Yeah. Do you have six bucks?”

I get that it costs money to transport food out there, but Jesus Christ.

While we were eating dinner we chatted to a pair of young men who asked us about our bikes, and how much ground we could cover in one day. One said they’d started the day in Kalgoorlie, which I thought was an impressive feat, until he said “we’re flying, though.” I thought he meant they’d been speeding all day, until I twigged that they were the owners (or leasers) of the light plane we’d seen at the cliffs. They were students from a flight school in Melbourne, trying to clock up hours so they could get their commercial licenses, and were doing a long loop via Uluru. “We’ll hit Adelaide for fuel tomorrow, then be in Melbourne tomorrow night,” one of them said. “When are you planning to get to Melbourne?”

Chris and I glanced at each other. “About another week.”

The clocks in both the petrol station and the roadhouse both had a typed note plastered next to them that read “YES, THIS IS THE CORRECT TIME,” and another that read, “YES, THIS SIGN IS CORRECT.” Personally I think they could have had a sign that explained why there was such a huge discrepancy instead of two signs that are snarky to confused Western Australians. South Australia is on GMT + 9.30, because most of the population lives in the far eastern half of the state; furthermore, South Australia observes daylight savings whereas Western Australia does not. So while our bodies thought it was 7.45 pm, it was actually 10.15 – a disconcerting jump of two and a half hours.

This made getting to sleep in our coffin even more difficult than usual. More irritating was the fact that the showers were coin-operated, and since everything had shut up shop right after we had dinner, there was nobody to change our notes into coins. We went to bed tired and unwashed and with empty wallets. Fuck the Nullarbor Roadhouse.

February 15th
Nullarbor Roadhouse to Wudinna – 513 km

When I rose in the morning, under daylight, I saw something I hadn’t noticed the previous night.

It reminds me of Ray Winstone in The Proposition: “I will civilise this land.” More importantly, though, was the fact that there was actually daylight. The clouds had mostly parted, and we were witnessing blue sky for the first time since Pemberton, some two thousand kilometres behind us.

We went to the roadhouse for breakfast, at either 8.30 or 11.00. Stupid timezones. Behind the counter was a girl from the UK, who explained how she and the Irishman had ended up out here: it’s a good way for backpackers to save money and experience the “real” Australia. We talked to a married couple from Melbourne who were heading back east after visiting Perth. Inflicting the dreary eternity of the Nullarbor on yourself more than once, and in such close succession, takes a determined mind. “It’s the kind of thing you want to do once, to have done, and then never do again,” I said.

At least it was a much nicer day. Not only were the clouds gone, but there was absolutely no wind, which made riding a dream. I was getting up to 130k’s with no problems, whereas I’d been previously struggling to hit 110. I spent a lot of my time staring up at the huge, wide, open blue sky. How I missed you, blue sky.

About a hundred k’s east of the roadhouse we found ourselves driving through bushland and trees. So the Nullarbor is basically 10% Nullarbor, 90% forest. We were now in Yalata Aboriginal Land, where you need a permit to stray off the highway. Are there Aboriginals out there, living traditionally? The very last Aboriginal tribe that had never had contact with white man was discovered mind-bogglingly recently, in 1984. Of course, it’s a catch-22: every tribe is the “last” one until we discover a new one. Although we probably are done now.

I’d always thought Ceduna marked the end of the Nullarbor – it certainly marks the first place where you have the option of more than one road to take – but east of a place called Nundroo we found ourselves in tin windmill country again, surrounded by golden acres of wheat and corrugated water tanks and miles of fencing. We stopped for lunch in Ceduna, a place the Gullottis and Hills had both warned us was “a hole,” presumably because it has a significant Aboriginal population. I thought it was OK. While we had lunch I bought some zip-ties from a hardware store and scribbled myself a new license plate, on cardboard I cut out of a box of Shapes.

Good as new!

It blew off in the wind enroute to our next stop, and I didn’t bother replacing it again. We left the Eyre Highway on a reccomended detour south, which was about as boring and even longer. On the plus side we visited the pleasant little town of Smoky Bay.

We’d been planning to take a ferry across the Spencer Gulf, which would have saved us hundreds of kilometres and provided a pleasant break from riding, but we’d found out in Ceduna that it was discontinued several years ago. This meant we’d have to get to Adelaide via Port Augusta after all, but there was no chance of making it there that night, so we stopped at a wheat-farming town called Wudinna which had a strange obsession with granite, featuring several granite-related attractions that I’m sure as many as five or six people visit each year.

After two nights in the tent we were quite ready to shell out the money for a twin room at a motel. Dinner was better and more reasonably priced than it had been on the Nullarbor, and also featured James Boags (for some reason the pubs at both Caiguna and the Nullarbor Roadhouse shut very early). “I am so glad,” I said, “that we’re out of that expensive desert.” Having a bed again, of course, was the greatest luxury of all.

For some reason the motel room TV only picked up Northern Territory stations, which was weird, but provided a fascinating glimpse into a frontier world. “Vote to introduce the bottle refund scheme in the Territ’ry!” a PSA urged us. “The scheme works in South Australia and it will work in the Territ’ry! It hasn’t increased the cost of living in South Australia, and it won’t in the Territ’ry!”

“TerriTORY!” Chris shouted at the TV.

A poltical advertisement featured a middle-aged white man in business clothes walking around Alice Springs and speaking earnestly to the camera. “We’re all sick of it – drunkenness, graffitti, littering, anti-social behaviour. Vote for me, and let’s clean up Alice Springs!” You all know who I’m talking about, I imagined him saying.

“I’ve had the best idea,” Chris said. “When we get to a sign that says “WELCOME TO MELBOURNE,” we should take a photo of both of us sitting in our bikes in front of it giving the camera the finger, and mail it to that mechanic in Esperance.”

Both Caiguna and the Nullarbor Roadhouse had noisy generators running all night, but as I went to sleep in that motel, it was in absolute silence. Or it would have been, but in my head I could still hear the screaming of my bike’s engine and the sound of the wind hammering against my helmet.

Next: Perth To Melbourne, Part 3

Perth To Melbourne: Part 1

(Credit yoko_w)

It’s often said that Perth is the most isolated city in the world, which only works if you define a city as having a population of at least one million, and if you ignore Auckland. Yet there’s no denying that it’s still a long way from anywhere, a distant and lonely place on the far end of the Australian continent, separated from the eastern states by thousands of kilometres of desert. Growing up in Perth, I always saw the eastern states as a semi-mythical place beyond the horizon, the headquarters of a nation where all the important decisions were made, dispatched almost absent-mindedly to our remote outpost. Even Adelaide huddles down in the south-eastern corner of South Australia, close to the warmth of civilisation.

This is one of many reasons I want to spend my life anywhere but in Perth. My current decision was to move to Melbourne, and Perth’s staggering isolation is also one of the reasons I decided to do this overland. Rather than jumping on a $150 Jetstar flight, I thought it would be much more cathartic (not to mention interesting) to drive to the east coast, to cross the Nullarbor, to watch the odometer roll over and Perth get swallowed up in the trackless wastelands behind me. Even without the move factored in, a roadtrip across Australia has always been something I wanted to do.

At this point in my life, however, the vehicle I own is a 250cc Kawasaki KLX. There are those who say that a 250 is not an appropriate vehicle to cross a continent on. To those I say: please lobby the Western Australian Department of Infrastructure to lift engine capacity restrictions on first-year motorcycle licenses.

Pretty much everybody I talked to said it was a bad idea. On Christmas Day I had nearly every member of my maternal family trying to talk me out of it. I didn’t see what the big deal was. I rode a 125cc bike across Vietnam and I can guarantee that was a hell of a lot more dangerous than anything Australian roads could throw at me. The Nullarbor in particular had everybody fretting. At the time I was reading Jupiter’s Travels, and found this passage to be quite apt:

The Crossing of the Nullarbor was a legend that died hard. People had been trying to frighten me with it for months… Australians in cities love to shudder at the merciless hostility of their continent. I wondered whether it was a sort of apology for betraying the national ideal, an excuse for not being out there digging.

Chris was originally one of the legion of naysayers, before changing his mind and deciding to come along with me for the hell of it. Suddenly the choir of disagreeable voices was quieter. Whether because they thought it was safer in a pair or because they thought I wouldn’t have been able to do it without my perpetual caregiver is debatable. In any case, we did a dry run by riding the bikes down to our annual trip to Collie, where much laughter was enjoyed by all as my KLX’s crappy mileage meant I ran out of petrol on the side of the highway ten kilometres short of the first service station. 135 k’s, including reserve. No biggie. I’d just need to carry some jerry cans.

February 7th
Perth to Bunbury – 182 km

Ah, the first day of a voyage! We’d packed light – Chris was carrying his own two backpacks of clothes (one to wear and one to strap to the bike), as well as a sleeping bag, self-inflater and very compact two-man tent. I had two backpacks as well, plus a sleeping bag, self-inflater, and my Dad’s old saddlebags with a five-litre jerry can in each. I’d also borrowed my Dad’s old Rossi motorcycle boots, which he purchased circa 1980. Retro fashion!

We didn’t set off until about 3.30 pm, which was a slack start, but it really should have been just a quick ride down the freeway. Bunbury was a fairly modest target for the day, but I have relatives there we could stay with, and starting out a trip in comfort and familiarity is always a nice thing. My Dad opened the backyard gate for us, we pulled out into a road covered in schoolkids that had just let out, hit Reid Highway and were soon southbound on the freeway. The skyscrapers and the river came and went, a tiny slice of city separating the huge swathes of northern and southern suburbs. Goodbye to all that – snorkelling at the beach, swimming in the Hill’s pool, the cinemas at Innaloo, Karrinyup Shopping Centre, the shady patio out the back of Chris’ house, drinking at the Flying Scotsman with Sam, waking up at 5 am to the sound of Kristie’s dog screaming like an injured woman, driving along West Coast Highway on a sunny afternoon… a few days before we’d left, when I’d come home drunk from Terri and James’ engagement party at two in the morning, I’d stumbled across the road to my old high school. I walked across the oval and up the embankment, drawn by a demountable clasroom that had all its lights on for some reason. I stared in the window entranced by it for a while – I used to have Biology classes in that room, asking Mr. Hugo stupid questions like “can you drink lava?” or “do trees have souls?” More than twenty years of my life in this encapsulated suburban world, a thousand miles from anywhere, quiet and unimportant, the archetype of a generic city. Goodbye to all that.

After the ride to Collie and back I felt much more comfortable sitting on 100 k’s an hour. We stopped for our first refuel in Safety Bay, just outside Mandurah. “You be careful on those bikes,” a woman refueling her car said.

“Yeah, someone’s already flipped me off today,” Chris said.

“Really? What for?”

“I dunno. Riding a bike?”

In the same way that I took a photo of every bed I slept in when travelling around the world, I resolved to take a photo of every petrol bowser we filled up at.

As we pulled out of the servo I was cut off by a truck and didn’t see which direction Chris went in. I made a wrong guess, and ended up on Ellis Road. After some phone calls we eventually linked back up, but the traffic lights on Ellis Road and trying to find the right address in Bunbury (a larger town than many Perth residents assume) meant we didn’t arrive at the Gullottis’ house until sunset. I’d expected Uncle Tony to cook us SOME-AH SPICY MEAT-A-BALLAS, but instead he resisted satisfying our demands for a stereotype and gave us steak and some other exotic, highly delicious stuff. It’s always pleasant at Collie to drift over to the Gullotti camper around evening and smell what Tony’s cooking up.

After dinner we pored over some old maps and brochures of the South-West they had, to see if there were any decent free camping spots on our planned route. “Not that I think you guys haven’t prepared for this,” Tony said, “but isn’t this something you should have done earlier?”

“It’s kind of… hard to do, until you’re in the trip itself,” Chris said.

“Yeah,” I said. “You don’t really have the motivation for it until then. Or we don’t, anyway.”

Here is a photo of the Gullotti’s adorable puppy Indy. Chris and I spent quite some time trying to figure out what her goggly eyes reminded us of, before deciding that it was the humans in Half-Life 2, whose eyes would follow you around the room while barely turning their heads.

February 8th
Bunbury to Busselton – 53 KM

A weak ride, but Chris had family friends in Busselton we could stay with, and the prospect of two beds in a row was too good to pass up. We lazed around the Gullottis’ all morning with Brett, who is quite eagerly transitioning into the lazy life of a university student. Ah, how I envy him, with three years of rising at noon and drinking as much beer as he pleases ahead of him. We talked about how neither of us were really feeling the trip yet; it always takes a while to get into it. Eventually, after noon, we started packing our bags and putting our gear on. Chris and Brett both mocked me for strapping my Leatherman to my belt.

“You look lik a gay ranger,” Brett said.

“Yeah, with the tight jeans and the boots and all,” Chris said. “You look like Woody from Toy Story.”

They had a point.

After a gruelling forty minute ride down the highway to Busselton, we arrived at the quaint little home, well, their names escape me, but they were two old friends of Chris’ parents. We had the rest of the afternoon to kill, so we went and walked the length of Busselton’s jetty, which is the second-longest wooden-piled jetty in the southern hemisphere – a merit that contains slightly too many qualifiers to be impressive. It is quite long, though.

We visited the underwater observatory at the end, which was pretty neat, considering all the fish you see are wild animals.

Afterwards we went for a quick swim, despite the brisk weather, and lazed about on the beach for a while. It was a perfectly warm evening, and when we returned home, our host cooked us a steak dinner. Beds and steak two nights in a row was more than we had any right to expect on this trip.

The South-West is such a pleasant region. It’s the kind of place I can see myself retiring to, pottering around with a garden and some writing projects, with a loving wife and a cat and a dog and our kids off at university.

I spent the evening perusing the maps in our road atlas, and noticed, with a tinge of white guilt, that Tasmania has no Aboriginal town names. I wonder why? Obviously Tasmania is the only state where we completely wiped out the Aboriginal population, but they weren’t greatly loved in the others states either, and those are still full of Manjimups and Wollongongs and Ngangaras.

Also, guess how many sealed roads there are linking western Australia with eastern Australia? Go on, guess.

There are only two – the Eyre Highway across the Nullarbor in the south, and the Barkly Highway between the Northern Territory and Queensland in the north. That’s it. Well, okay, technically the Stuart Highway connects the two halves because it runs from the west of the beginning of the Barkly down to the east of the end of the Eyre, but that would be a pretty roundabout route, and in any case three sealed roads is still a stunningly low number. And these aren’t huge highways – they’re just two-lane blacktop. Imagine if the United States only had two or three bridges across the Mississippi River. Australia – what a country!

February 9th
Busselton to Pemberton – 232 km

This was our first proper ride, taking us off the highways in the Perth region and down into proper back-country roads. For some reason we decided that we needed to get up very early, which meant neither of us slept very well. I just can’t relax and sleep when I know I have to get up early, because I worry about oversleeping, and tense up every thirty seconds thinking “Did I fall asleep?! Did I oversleep?!”

We ended up leaving at a quarter to eleven, took a road past Dunsborough, and started the first ride we were actually looking forward to: the Caves Road, which hugs the coast from Cape Naturaliste in the north to Cape Leeuwin in the south. It’s a lovely little road, winding up and down hills, through karri forests, and past the snobby cultural sector of rural Western Australia – all wineries and craft stores and art galleries. We stopped for lunch at a hipster vegetarian cafe in Margaret River, and then experienced something I never thought I’d see this side of the 21st century: a service station with an actual attendant who came out and filled up our tanks for us. Very quaint, but wholly pointless – I can see why we don’t have them anymore.

South of Margaret River the road wound through pockets of karri forest. Is it karri or jarrah that we nearly wiped out? There seemed to be an awful lot of them.

East of Augusta, we headed inland on the Brockman Highway, and suddenly the lush karri forests became dry, scrubby banksias. Much less interesting. The road wound through this parched bushland for about 75 kilometres, featureless except for some lizard roadkill and a few lumber trucks. According to the road atlas it’s not national park, yet it doesn’t seem to be put to any use at all. I’m not sure what’s up with that.

Eventually the Brockman led us onto the Vasse Highway, and the scenery returned to karri forest again – with far more of it this time, the trees taller and greener. We were testing out the jerry cans for the first time, since there didn’t seem to be any petrol stations between Margaret River and Pemberton. My ass was sore and my head was hurting from wearing the helmet for so long, but I knew I only had to hold out to 135 k’s, when my bike would run out of fuel. The fickle bastard lasted until 150.

In Pemberton, we located a caravan park and were violently robbed at gunpoint, being charged $30 for the privilege of a patch of dirt on which to pitch our tent.

Once that was sorted, we jumped back on the bikes and set off to hunt down the Gloucester Tree.

The Gloucester Tree is a fire lookout at the top of a 61 metre karri tree, which is accessible to the public by ladder. I was too young to climb it when I first visited Pemberton at the tender age of two, but when we returned some years later, I was determined to conquer it. Unfortunately I was then only five, which was still a little too young to manage it, and I chickened out. But now I’m 22, by God, and there’s not a tree on this earth too tall for me to climb!

It is quite an impressive tree – as you can see, I couldn’t fit it into one photo.

Here we go. This one’s for you, five-year old Mitch.

Before seeing it Chris had been ambivalent about bothering to, because he’d never heard of it before and had assumed it was some tiny loser tree. “I didn’t think they’d just let people do something like this in Australia,” he said, as we started climbing, before adding, “This is well dangerous.”

I’m not frightened of heights, but there was definitely a low-key anxiety about climbing up there. Theoretically you can’t fall out because there are wires to your right, but you could certainly slip and fall down the rungs, smashing your body to bits along the way.

But we made it. After many years, I FINALLY CONQUERED THE GLOUCESTER TREE.

Some impressive views. According to the visitor’s centre it’s still a working fire lookout, but there was nobody up there, and I’m pretty sure we have planes and satellites for that kind of thing nowadays.

The tree was first climbed in 1947 by forester Jack Watson, using spiked boots and a belt. Another forester, George Reynolds, built the ladder and the original platform. The tree was named after Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, who was Australia’s Governor-General at the time, and who picnicked in the area, no doubt reclining on a tartan blanket and sipping tea while Jack and George took their shirts off and lopped branches off from a height of fifty metres, their sinewy muscles glistening with the sweat of honest labour. Under the quaint logic of British Australia, the Duke clearly contributed the most to the tree and thus deserved the naming honour.

I got it in my head as a child that the Gloucester Tree was the tallest lookout tree in the world, and was disappointed to discover that it’s actually only the second-tallest. Not only that, but the tallest, the Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree, is also located just outside Pemberton.

Well, whatever. Childhood goal accomplished.

We stopped off at IGA to buy some food to cook for dinner. Afterwards I had a shower, and then Chris and I fed some ducks for a while, since we had fuck all else to do.

“What time is it?” Chris asked, after we’d gone through half a loaf of bread.

“About 7.30.”

“So we have… four hours to kill.”

The sun set, and we went for a wander around town, which was as thoroughly deserted as if a government evacuation order had been issued. Never before had I encountered such eerie silence in an urban setting. There were faint stirrings of light and life around the local pub, and Chris and I had an argument about whether to go in there or not. I held the notion that country pubs are full of Akubra-wearing, beer-gutted truck drivers who would rapidly sniff out and eliminate any interlopers. Chris’ position that this was ludicrous held the field, and we went to the pub, which was also almost deserted. We played a few rounds of pool, then went back to the caravan park.

“Good God, I’m bored,” I said.

“It’s just that… we don’t really have anywhere to be,” Chris said. Our tent was a one-man swag, with a diamond shape that meant we could just barely get away with fitting in two sleepers lying perfectly still. It certainly wasn’t a place where we could hang out.

We retreated to the caravan park’s cooking area, where the lights meant we could at least read, and cracked open the bottle of wine we’d bought at the liquor store. This was a cunning plan to assist in sleep; since we had only thin self-inflating sleeping pads and inflatable pillows, we both knew we were in for a very difficult night. I’d been texting my girlfriend, and at 9.07 she mentioned “I’m going to see the Getaway Plan tonight and maybe join Mike at the Court after.”

“This bears emphasis,” I said. “While we’re counting down the minutes until our night is over, Kristie’s hasn’t even begun.”

The lights were automatically shut off at 10 pm, and we retreated to the tent. It could charitably be described as cosy. I didn’t fall asleep until after twelve. At about 4 am we were woken by pattering rain, and had to scramble to grab our bags and gear and bring them inside the tent. Now it was even cosier! It took hours to fall asleep again, and then a flock of kookaburras woke us up around dawn. I didn’t even know kookaburras went in flocks.

February 10th
Pemberton to Albany – 243 km

Tired and aching, we packed up camp just before ten and had a quick breakfast of toast and baked beans. Over coffee at the nearby café we reviewed our route: down the Vasse Highway and onto the Western, through Walpole and Denmark along the south coast, before arriving in Albany where we had a hostel room booked. A hostel room with sweet, juicy, delicious, actual beds waiting for us.

It was grey and overcast, and though it didn’t look likely to rain, it was quite cold. For some reason I’d left my jacket lining at the bottom of my clothes bag, which was now firmly occy strapped to the bike. The ride was as beautiful as it had been the day before, winding through more enormous karri trees, but I was too cold to enjoy it.

We stopped to fuel up in a town called Northcliffe, which I had never heard of before, before passing a sign that said “Welcome to Denmark.” This was confusing, since I was pretty sure Denmark was 150 kilometres away. Since I also had no recollection of making the turn-off onto the Vasse outside of Pemberton, I began to worry. Was I suffering from a mental problem that erased huge swathes of my memory? Had I just ridden 150 kilometres without realising it? (It turned out we were actually just being welcomed to the shire of Denmark.)

We stopped for lunch in Walpole, where I finally gave up and dug the jacket lining out of my bag. In the carpark we met a guy of indeterminate European nationality, who lived in Harvey and was just about to complete the final leg of a round-Australia trip on his V-Strom. Looking at his comfy, comfy seat made my ass insane with jealousy.

Outside of Walpole we stopped to visit the Treetop Walk. I’d seen it before, nine years ago on a family trip, but it was pleasant enough to visit again.

There’s also a land-based boardwalk nearby, and I insisted we walk along that too, to get our money’s worth. “I’m pretty done with trees, dude,” Chris said.

“You won’t be saying that on the Nullarbor.”

Eventually I was satisfied with the ratio of dollars spent per trees witnessed, and we returned to the carpark. Here I did something I’d been doing an awful lot of: while backing my bike out, and twisting the handlebars to turn it, I got directions mixed up in my head and instead of pressing down on the ignition button I pressed down on the horn. Not as embarassing as dropping it in the Video Ezy carpark the day before we left, but close. Chris laughed at me, and we left.

We fuelled up in Denmark, where the day’s grey cloud cover was finally threatening to turn into actual precipitation. The final 50 kilometre stretch into Albany was freezing and windy and spotted with rain, and we flew along the road at 115 k’s an hour. The whole day I’d been keen for the ride to be over, eyeing the odometer like I used to eye the clock at work. When we pulled into the Albany YHA I crawled up onto the top bunk and had myself a good, long lie down.

Dinner was a bleak roast dinner at the local pub, where a nearby group of yobbos were loudly discussing their bitches and hos. “When you’re overseas,” Chris commented, “you don’t understand the language, so you don’t really notice… class, or dignity.”

“Shhh,” I said.

Albany is also a place I haven’t been to for about nine years, since I was a young ‘un. It seems a pleasant enough town, with lots of 19th century buildings and blustery weather and a strong nautical tradition. Sort of like New England or Canada’s Maritime provinces. Yes, I did just compare a place I’ve been to before with places I’ve never been to.

February 11th
Albany to Esperance – 483 km

We set our alarms to wake us up at 7.30, but we both ignored them and slept another hour. Neither of us are naturally given to early starts. At 8.30 it began to rain. “Fuck,” I said, peering out the curtains.

“It’s days like these I wish we had a car,” Chris said.

We packed our bags and went about our morning routine in the hope that it might just be a brief spell, but it wasn’t. Shelled out a dollar to use the Internet and check BOM; both the Albany and Esperance radars were down, but the forecast for the south coast proclaimed shitty weather for the rest of the day. We decided there was nothing for it but to grit our teeth and wrap all our stuff in plastic bags.

We had breakfast at a nice little restaurant called Dillons, which had a vintage bike up on the staircase.

Half an hour later we were on the road out of town, stuck behind a piece of earthmoving equipment trundling along at 10 k’s an hour. How I loathe riding in such blustery, grey, bleak, overcast, miserable, drizzly weather. My legs were shivering and my visor was perpetually fogging up. At least the rain had lightened up a little, down to a light sprinkling.

From here on there were no more forests – just scrubland and a few farms, the southern fringe of the Wheatbelt, where sheep farmers eked out a meagre living at the edge of the continent. The first service station we came to, a speck on the map called Wellstead, had a sign announcing “Ammunition Sold Here,” which signalled to me that we were now well out in the country.

It also had a strange mural.

The roads were long and straight and featureless, and it was beginning to dawn on me that the boring stretches of this grand cross-continental ride would consist of much more than just the Nullarbor.

Worst of all were the cross-winds, requiring us to lean ten degrees to the right, and occasionally making a rapid shift which would unbalance me – an unnerving experience. Sometimes they’d force me quite close to the gravel shoulder, and I was forced to ride essentially right down the dotted line in the middle of the road. We were also encountering our first road trains, which would rush past us in the oncoming lane with a whoosh of displaced air. The trick was to slow down and duck your head down low, so the wind went right over you. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be; certainly not as bad as the detractors of this trip had made it out to be, who seemed to imagine rural Australian truck drivers as being identical to the antagonist in Duel.

The headwind meant I ran out of fuel earlier than usual, at 115 k’s, just two hundred metres shy of Ravensthorpe’s petrol station. The jerries were full, so it was no huge hassle, but Chris and I had an argument about his conviction that I must be riding the bike wrong, rather than the fact that it’s simply a dirtbike with low fuel mileage, and a 110 k’s down straight roads into a headwind will use a lot more fuel than lower speeds along a windy highway near Pemberton on a still day. I always find it frustrating to explain to Chris (or to anyone) the problems and issues I face while riding, because so much of it is just feeling, that’s hard to articulate.

The final stretch into Esperance was very difficult on the ass and soul, with the wind still going strong and the skies as grey as ever. We caught a brief glimpse of blue skies when we stopped to fill up from the jerries.

We finally reached the town at dusk after 488 kilometres of leaning to the right, sore and weary. We’d booked another hostel, which was less flash but more expensive than the one in Albany. We’d originally planned to have a day off in Esperance, which supposedly has the best beaches in WA, but it was still cold and windy and showed no sign of letting up. Behold the wonderful beaches out the front of our hostel:

Unfortunately, it looked like we’d have to spend a day there for another reason – Chris’ chain had started sagging, and he’d need to visit a mechanic. Just like Vietnam all over again!

We had Red Rooster for dinner, and played some pool and chess. Some Danish backpackers were discussing the Internet with an English backpacker, who was using one of those satellite USB thingies in his laptop. “In Europe there is free wifi at all hostels,” the Danish guy said, “and we thought would be the same here, but always just computers and $1 for 15 minutes…”

“Oh, they’re backwards, mate, so backwards,” the Englishman said.

No arguments from me. I recall hearing a maxim that Australia is ten years behind the rest of the world, and WA is ten years behind the rest of Australia. So that would put us in 1991. Of course, Tony Abbott is right, we can’t build the NBN because it’s a great big fat waste of taxpayer money that could instead go towards a new detention centre for refugees surrounded by razor wire and patrolled by crocodiles.

Next:
Perth to Melbourne, Part 2
Perth to Melbourne, Part 3