Benemma

(24-30 Jan)

SUNSET ON STRADBROKE ISLAND

Our off-roading jaunt to Fraser Island was behind us so it was strange to find ourselves out the next morning with Steve, Millie and their three youngest, Justin, Kaleb and Madison, once more bouncing over fallen branches and revving up hills. Such was our entertainment en-route to an afternoon jaunt at a nearby mountain resort called O’Reilly’s. I was passenger this time, while Emma and Madison opted to observe from an air-conditioned distance in Millie’s car. Steve had the wheel beside me and showed us what can be done in four-wheel drive after a reckless young life in Queensland. The track led us to O’Reilly’s, a pleasant hideaway with birds to feed, tree-top ropeways to traverse, and misty blue vistas over the hillsides, through which columns of bushfire smoke were slowly marching.

KALEB AND BEN EXPLORING O'REILLY'S MOUNTAIN

For the next two days the whole country found itself curiously unable to make it to the office because Australia Day had arrived. Steve ferried us out to a small island just off the coast in his little tin speedboat. We set-up camp, spreading our tents out to reserve a good patch on the beach. Like Fraser Island before, the Stradbroke Islands, and all the rest nearby, are beach-rimmed, low lying, you couldn’t ask for more. We set crab pots at several points in the water, cracked open the booze and served up a curry Millie had cooked for the festivities.

For two days on the island the air was 32˚C, the water 29. The boys took straight to casting their fishing net in the abundant shallows. Madison couldn’t keep herself out of the water, only making rare trips onto land to engage in something that would get her covered in sand before returning to more swimming. Emma, Millie, Steve and I made pains to do as little as possible beyond sitting and drinking.

The boys called us excitedly to come and view their catch. We assumed it was just more small fish, of which they’d already hauled in many. They had landed a stingray. It had a body perhaps 30cms across (a young one) and was gasping in a puddle on the beach, thrashing it’s tail at anyone approaching it and bearing two long stinger spikes. Our camp was also invaded by some kind of marsupial or rodent which may been a bush rat. It showed virtually no fear of us as it raided the leftover curry with it’s prominent snout. But the best encounter came later. It was dark and we heard Kaleb before we saw him running to fetch us. He led us onto an empty section of beach and searched the sand with his torch. There was a quiet fizzing noise near the waterline and we could make out a pale patch of ground there, a couple of metres across. As we approached it the pale area shifted slowly away, then, up close and in the torchlight, we could make it out at last. Soldier crabs, tiny blue buttons of shell and legs perhaps two centimetres in diameter, were on the march. So densely were they packed together and so desperate was their desire to run from us that they were piled three deep in places, scrabbling over each other to escape. We followed the largest group (regiment?) of the crabs as it moved as one higher up the beach to the soft sand. Then it disappeared. What was a carpet of live animals one moment suddenly didn’t exist. We then saw that the sand was full of two-centimetre holes. And I mean full – tens of thousands of them riddling a large area of beach, each one home to a little soldier of its own.

THE BOYS OFF FISHING IN THE SHALLOW SEAS AROUND STRADBROKE

On Australia Day itself we gained some insight into Ozzy holidays. Boats buzzed over from the mainland and moored wherever a spot was still available, until the channel we were in was filled by hundreds of them. People kicked balls about, ran fishing lines, played music and, universally, drank in the sunshine. The Ship Shop, a houseboat converted into a floating liquor and general store, paid everyone a visit. We cooked up the boys’ best catches – some tiger prawns, a bream and a sand crab. Set amidst mangrove and sand, all wallowing in clear warm water, it was, well I’ve said this kind of thing before but what the hell? You know what, it was just one of those moments.

BEN AND MADISON PLAYING ON AUSTRALIA DAY

After Australia Day we were running out of time on the east coast but managed to get a bit more exploration in. Margaret and Derek took us out to their local bowls club for dinner with friends. It was a big place, with a dining area serving a differently entitled and priced yet oddly similar buffet each day, a bar area with dance-floor, and two TAB gambling rooms. The TVs constantly display the Keno lottery results. There were a few gravel-voiced old geezers in there, mixed with the younger ones, and a compère providing both live music and a prize draw. Derek and his friend, the other Derek, gave a fascinating explanation of why we had seen so many gambling machines in Aussie bars. I found the answer a bit weird and distressing. I had assumed that TAB was a gambling company like our Ladbrokes or William Hill and that the company owned some bars and liquor shops. But TAB is government-owned and has the monopoly, as does Keno on the lottery side. The government owns the liquor shops, too. The boys said that they couldn’t think of a bar in Australia without any pokies (the Oz version of fruit machines). The other Derek even took me through $5-worth of play on one of the pokies in the club. It was unbelievably untaxing to play, we just picked how much of our cash to lay down on each round, from a few cents to the maximum bet of $5, and pressed Go. Other than that, the exciting bonus game involved nothing besides randomly picking one of five characters to back, then waiting for the results. That’s it, that’s all there is to the unfathomable sums of money going back into the government purse. The bars get a small cut that may still run into tens of thousands of dollars per month for an average size establishment. With such popularity how could a bar not host a gambling room? I find this kind of low culture, both from the brainwashed gamblers and the pilfering government, saddening. The hypocrisy of it all was illustrated neatly in a free leaflet by the door, issued by the government, giving advice to gambling addicts.

Still, we took $22 away with us. Might try that again, could be a good earner.

Now, guess what the weather was like the next day… Yep, perfect. We hadn’t gone all that way to Australia only not to have a surf so that was how we enjoyed our last day out in Queensland. We took Millie’s board and drove just over the New South Wales border to the infamous Byron Bay. Well, infamous if you’re a surf lover, which I kinda still am.

Like so many great places, Byron was put on the map by travellers and hippies, you know the sort of people who don’t try to get put on maps. Then the place flew. Unlike many others, however, Byron didn’t feel ruined by its subsequent development. The town has its share of spoiled kids crawling around in open-topped Jeeps but it also has a healthy supply of beards and tattoos. The streets are full of independent shops and eateries, all very organised and pleasing. The beach is gorgeous, to boot. Golden sand stretches a long way from a lighthouse-topped headland. Dozens of fish and, for a short time, a huge ray, were flitting about in the clear waters while steady, perfectly neat waves were queuing up to throw themselves onto the shore.

Unfortunately for our surfing efforts those perfect waves rarely got above about a foot in height. Oh well, we had fun anyway. Em found her balance paddling the board around and I sort of stood up for a couple of brief moments of delayed sinking.

On our last day in Queensland we got all our admin done and went out in the evening to see an old friend of Emma’s in Brisbane. From the brief drive-through, Brisbane resembled other Aussie cities: a cluster of cubist white and grey tower-blocks at the centre and a clean, sparkling and quite charmless city stretching away from there. One section of the river in the city centre bears a bizarre resemblance to Hungerford and Waterloo bridges and the surrounding South Bank, in London, just in case you wanted to know that.

After visiting the city we made it to bed late. This is customary on a final day in any place. It is customary, too, to have to rise early, tired, as we did the next morning, at 05:00. Derek took us to the airport but Margaret stayed. She said that she does the pick-ups but never the drop-offs, it’s too sad. Both of them gave quick farewells in their own, quiet ways.

We took the long slide over Australia from east to west. At first the landscape below is one of big fields and patches of forest but it soon becomes the huge dead expanse that makes up most of the country. The ground there is red or dirty orange, with some areas rippled like an amber sea, and some sand-blown patches that are the colour of parched bones. The coast curled into view out of the port windows, nearly there? No. The coast curled away again and the desert crawled ever past. Central Australia is an unimaginably sprawling wasteland, an abyss in the developed world. Finally we saw disparate scratches of tracks in the orange earth, leading to abandoned quarries now filled by rain which must rarely come.

We touched down in Perth and I waited at the luggage carousel while Emma disappeared for a few minutes. A polystyrene box came onto the carousel, wrapped in parcel tape and sporting a sign written in marker pen stating, “LIVE MUD CRAB”. A sniffer dog was brought over to inspect the arriving luggage. The dog reached the crab box and gave a look that said, “Yes! Jackpot!” Then the realisation overcame the poor animal that he had a job to do. He then sniffed me and moved on without fuss. It was fitting that an animal should have checked us into that wild, rare corner of the largest, most thinly populated island on the planet. More animals were to greet us yet.