Ten Pound Pom (11 page)

Fiona comes to pick us up with her husband and they take us out for Chinese food. The next day we get back in the van and head for Adelaide, and our uncle, our mother’s brother. The desert creeps ever closer.

They arrive in Adelaide at 2:30 in the afternoon and book into the Glenelg motel in what appears to be a posh part of the city, coastal resort kind of area. The clocks in South Australia have gone back an hour. Recently, there have been killings in Adelaide which have earned the city the soubriquet of ‘Australia’s Murder Capital’; the Beaumont children of ’63 will never be found, and, some years later, there will be the Snow Town murders – people killed as part of a social security fraud, wrapped in plastic and stored in bank vaults. The killers will earn $800 from this crime. Luckily, the boy is unaware of these details; he’s an imaginative child, given to anxious
fretting about and dwelling on the world’s lurking darkness.

On May 10th, they catch a tram into the city and feed ducks with bread. The boy asks whether they’ll be going to see Uncle Roy.
No
, says his mother.
He’s away.

On May 11th, they leave Adelaide and head for Kimba, on the edge of the great desert. The pass through a hamlet called Iron Knob.

–A man built a robot here, the boy says. –A man robot. But it went wrong and there was an explosion and it blew up into hundreds of little bits and all they could find of it was its iron knob.

His brother and sister laugh. The mum writes in her diary: ‘We have driven through some desolate places today and through miles and miles of nothing.’

Outside Kimba, they stop at a menagerie. There is an eagle in a cage, which seems to like the boy; it shuffles closer to him along its branch, cocks its huge head, makes clucking noises in its throat. There is a huge red kangaroo, taller than the adults, so tall it blocks out the sun. The chicken-wire of its enclosure bulges where it has leant back on its cable of a tail and kicked out with its hind legs. There is a fox skin drying on a wall, nailed to the wall. It is very hot and flies whine and cicadas provide a constant background shrillness. There is a crocodile too big for its pool. An American tourist wants his picture taken with the giant kangaroo so the zoo’s owner lets him into the pen and the ’roo picks him up and bounces off with him. He’s like a doll, the American, a small and screaming doll.

–So why couldn’t we see Uncle Roy?

–It was Doreen, his first wife. Remember her? She didn’t want us to visit.

–Why?

–Dunno. She was just like that. You remember what she was like.

I don’t, really, but I remember the disappointment at not going to see Uncle Roy when we were in Adelaide, the mother’s brother who lit out for Oz in 1966, the year I was born. I’d seen him since, in Britain, but we would see him again, in his adopted home city, at the other end of the Great Ocean Road, which is beautiful. We didn’t drive this way as kids but we do now, and see the Twelve Apostles, huge towers of red rock rising up out of the surf far below, and we pass through small and attractive coastal towns, one of which, Kingston, is declared by a sign to be ‘WINNER 2005 BEST
MEDIUM-SIZED
TOWN’. Bloody hell. That’s scraping the barrel till it bleeds. At Mount Gambier we spot a Hungry Jack’s, the burger joint in which I had my first ever experience of fast food, so we stop and go in. It’s pink and yellow and garishly overlit. The soundtrack to
Grease
is on the jukebox, too loud. The food is utter shite. Cardboardy-greasy-meaty flat grey thing in a dry bun. Fries like blades of straw. Rubbish. All it does is fill a hole and make me feel slightly queasy. I don’t often eat fast food, but I remember Hungry Jack’s from when I was a kid. Was it this bad then? I remember liking it. Why did I like it? Has it gotten worse since I was a kid?

We get to Adelaide. The Glenelg motel is still there, same address, looks the same. Rooms for $69 a night. The pool, the
low units. Hardly changed in thirty years. In the seventies, we caught the tram here, from Jetty Road, into the city. And we couldn’t see Roy, then. But we do now. I give him a call and he arranges to meet us by a school so we get there and wait for a bit and there he is. Looks the same, too. He’s been ill with cancer recently but he’s recovering and for a seventy-five
year-old
, doesn’t look at all bad. Hasn’t aged much. Seems, sometimes, as if the only thing that’s grown older is me.

Roy Mostyn, Ten Pound Pom. Was a policeman in Liverpool. He contacted the Oz police force for a transfer but they said he’d have to resign and then re-apply so that’s what he did. He was thirty-two, a bit too old for the State Police, but the Commonwealth Police said yes, provided he went to Darwin. No skills were needed, really, just a medical and an interview; ‘effortless’, he says. He didn’t really want to leave Britain, but followed his first wife to Oz – her siblings had emigrated and were loving their new lives. Roy remembers, though, looking over to Liverpool from New Brighton and seeing the city covered in a cold, grey smog; he was holding his daughter, Dawn, at the time, who was two years old, and it was that view that made up his mind to go. The boat journey took five weeks; ‘best holiday I’ve ever had’. The irreversible fact of his re-location only really hit him when he’d bought a house and car in Oz, which left him with $15 in his bank account. Why Adelaide? Because his wife’s sister was here. When he landed, it was raining, miserable, half ten at night. Arrival formalities at Outer Harbour, then herded onto a bus to the hostel. 1,800 people. The ship was full to capacity. Roy’s first job was selling insurance, then he was a security officer, then he spent twenty years in the catering section of an Oz airline. He split up with his first wife, and married Eileen, a
Ten Pound Pom too. He refuses to take out Australian citizenship, or even dual citizenship, because he doesn’t want to completely sever his ties with the UK. Does he feel Australian? ‘No; I feel like a Pom. I’m proud of my heritage.’ Which is of a piece with his innate loner nature. If he hadn’t’ve met Eileen, he’d be in a little remote cottage in Wales, he says. There are greater career opportunities in Oz, it’s got the best health system in the world (and he should know, having recently recovered from two primary cancers), money goes further, Oz war veterans are revered. Is there anything he misses? ‘The friendliness of people’, he says (he’d be shocked and disappointed, I reckon, at how rude Britain has become since he last visited, but I don’t tell him that). Anti-Pom attitudes are very conspicuous in the workforce, he says, and talks about the overt aggression of the average Oz male.

And, nutshelled, that’s my Uncle Roy. It’s lovely to see him, and Eileen. We go for a pie-and-pea floater (a brilliant invention) and fish and chips which, of course, come without vinegar. I go to the supermarket next door to the chippy but all they have is raspberry vinegar. No malt. My God, what have these people got against vinegar? I’m considering wringing my socks out over my chips. We go to a ‘pre-loved’ bookshop in the city which doesn’t have
The Diary of a Welsh Swagman
and while I’m in there the phone rings and the proprietor picks it up and listens for a moment and then says:

–Mate, you so don’t understand what kind of a bookshop this is. Never ring this number again.

I wonder what was going on there? Wonder what he was asked for? We stay in Adelaide for two days then head out, north, into fairly featureless flatland, green shading into red, long straight roads to the horizon. Road trains; huge,
monstrous things, three trailers long, you’d first see them as a dot miles away in front getting bigger and BIGGER and
BIGGER
and then they’d be on you with a massive blast of iron and backdraft that would set the van madly wobbling. Endless ribbons of tarmac ahead. A low bump is called Mount Remarkable, I think, but then we pass the low bump and I see the real Mount. Which is, yes, kind of remarkable.

The country starts to get emptier, harsher, hotter. Blasted, baked. Red sand. Scrub, desiccated. Leafless and scrawny trees.

Port Augusta. Pleasant, sleepy little town. Laid-back, relaxed air. High aboriginal population. We buy some supplies for the van; dried fruit and water and stuff. Leave. Into sudden, abrupt desert; red, endless desert. Quintessential Australia. Scrub and what grass there is a kind of bluey-grey colour, in sharp contrast to the red dust of the ground. Fine talcum. A dread desert, stretching ahead for a continent. Bit of apprehension creeps in. And now the sun roars in the sky. Flat blue of the sky. Vast and without mercy. I think of blistered, popping skin.

We’re on the Nullarbor, now, its eastern edge. I’ve seen enough of deserts of both sand and ice to know that they’re
not
barren, desolate places, and to believe so is to bow to a speciously inverted and unquestioningly received ‘knowledge’ that benefits only the aggressively colonialist mindset. Look closely, and listen to what their inhabitants – human and animal, vegetable and mineral – tell you and you’ll realise that deserts are jumping with abundant life. Not just that; they’re labyrinthine libraries of offered knowledge. But I’m daunted, to say the least, as the country’s fierce interior opens up around me and I see ahead of me what I suddenly remember very, very
clearly – approaching a distant crest in the road then going over it only to see another distant crest in the road and so on and so on and so on – and I’m filled with a deep admiration for what my mum and dad did, all those years ago, their bravery, three young children and another one on the way and all of them in a Holden car travelling across some of the emptiest, most hostile terrain on earth. Terra nullius. An extremely courageous thing to do.

–Tell yeh what, Tony says.

–What?

–I’m filling up with admiration for me Mum and Dad.

–I was just thinking the exact same thing.

An environment hostile to human life, unless, of course, that life has spent scores of millennia in the environment, patiently learning its moods and sensitivities, learning from it with painstaking care and attention. One lesson lasts centuries, spans generations. But for anyone else? Then this place can raise a red thumb and smudge a human life out against the blistered tarmac. Just more roadkill to be scavenged by the dingoes and crows and wedgies. Small bloody smears, not much bigger than the splats on our windshield.

I feel like a pioneer. Bit hungry, too; I feel like a pie in ’ere. Christ that’s not funny.

The slagheap that rises blackly above Iron Knob is still there, but a lot bigger. Things have a tendency to shrink as you get older, but not this; the hill of muck and sludge is three times the size it was. It’s now a range of hills in itself. Empty, empty place. We park up on the hard shoulder and get out and the silence hits me like the humidity did in Singapore; physically, and powerfully, like a hard slap across the face. Kimba still has its motel. I remember the town, like
something
out of a western, wooden walkways raised and railings. Another Oz Deadwood, seemingly unchanged, except the menagerie’s gone; the nice lady in the tourist information place tells us that it was in Cleve, south off the main highway. She remembers it; she’s lived in Kimba over forty years. I’m disappointed. And amused, very, by the sculpture of the galah (Kimba promotes itself as ‘The Home of the Big Galah’); a house-high pink model of a galah looking aloof and
constipated.
It’s rubbish. Makes me laugh. Tony’s in fits, drives around it in the van:

–Look at him there!

He can hardly drive for laughing. The van’s rocking with it.

Kimba opens out into immeasurably vast wheatfields, horizon to horizon, endless. Wales would fit several times into these fields. It’s a sea of green, young corn shoots, immense. Other cars pass us in the opposite direction, as they did thirty years ago, on the plain, and each driver salutes or raises a finger, just a small gesture of support and solidarity. Quite sweet, really. But evidently not for the police; we get pulled over for speeding just outside Minnipa. A big, fat, officious officer crooks his finger at Tony, who gets out to speak to him. I get out too, to lean against the hot bonnet and smoke and eavesdrop.

–What do ya do, back home?

–I’m a civil servant.

–Policeman?

–I
was
. Merseyside transport police.

I hear the unimpressed and utterly unmoved silence. Small ‘zip’ as a piece of paper is torn along a perforated edge. Then Tony’s voice, incredulous:

–Two hundred and seventy nine bucks?

Aw Jesus. I’m all for not paying the bleeding thing – I mean, they’re not going to chase us back to Wales – but my brother, he’s been thinking that he might want to come back soon; his Sydney poledancer. And they won’t let him in if there’s a warrant out for him for non-payment of a fine. So what can I do? We’re in this together. I suppose.

The sunsets have an intense beauty. They bounce redly off the leaves of roadside trees and look like a million fireflies. Such deep, glowing red. Past Wirrulla, we notice a car following us with its lights off. I think of
Wolf Creek.

–It’ll be another copper, Tony says. –That one who fined us will have radio’d on to his mate in Wirrulla and told him to watch out for two brother Poms in a Britz van. Bet yeh.

He overtakes, and sure enough, it’s a police car. He puts his lights on as he passes. So that’s not dangerous, driving at night-time with your lights off? For fuck’s sakes. At the sides of Oz roads are raised plinths bearing the mangled remains of cars; warnings to drive safely. The coppers, evidently, take no notice of them.

Red desert darkening, stars coming out. Ceduna, which is now a metropolis compared to what it was, to what I remember it as being. My dad bought a boomerang here, or rather, swapped twenty cigarettes for it off an old aborigine in a pub. It’s an amazing piece of work, decorated with intricate depictions of emus and ’roos. Which pub, I wonder? There are loads. And will the old aborigine still be around? I doubt it very much, judging by the state of the aborigines I see in Ceduna; they’re desperate, people, drunk, filthy, fighting each other. They’re heartbreaking to see. Facial features of natural nobility and strength, often now obliterated, robbed of all dignity and meaning by centuries of oppression, of conferred
non-status. Forgotten as people by those who took from them everything that made them people. Hideous, this. I offer ten dollars to an old lady sitting on the pavement and she takes it without a word, can’t even look up at my face. God, the shame in her. Coming off her in waves. I hope the money helps, in whatever way. Some time later, as I’m eating Chinese food, I hear a commotion outside the restaurant. There’s the old lady, fighting with a younger man. She’s screaming and scratching his face. He’s kicking her. A waiter dashes outside to shoo them away.