One for the Road (8 page)

I calculate the possibilities. Mercenary. Gunrunner. Armed robber.

“What in?” I ask.

“Auto parts. A mate of mine in Katherine says he can set me up in sales.”

Hitchhiking, among its other virtues, forces you to converse with people you’d otherwise cross the street to avoid. And as we roll through the Queensland scrub, I realize that Steve, for all his martial appearance, is as gentle as the tiny bull terrier that scrambles over the seat and nestles in his lap. Steve strokes the pup’s chin and serenades it all the way out of Queensland with the country-and-western tunes of Slim Dusty.

“This song describes me exactly,” he says, loading the cassette deck with his only functional tape. Slim sings about “the black sheep of the family.” Steve waits a few beats then joins the mournful refrain: “the bigg-EST DIsappoint-MENT was me.”

Disappointed his parents (“ran away, see”), let down his parole officer (“breaking and entering”), and finally just split to try his luck on the open road. He flips the tape and lets Slim do the talking again.

Steve keeps up this syncopated rap—first Slim, then him, then the two of them together—all the way to the state border. He even has a song ready, disc jockey style, as we approach the last town in Queensland. “Now I know that love was won and lost in that little town of Camooweal.”

There isn’t much love lost for Camooweal itself. Overpriced beer and fuel are the town’s only visible means of support, and drivers have no choice but to pay the ransom and grumble onwards. “No petrol for 270 kilometers,” says a sign at the western edge of town, just in case you forgot to tank up.

The border sign that comes soon after is so covered in graffiti that it’s impossible to tell whether it says “Northern Territory Border,” “Leaving Queensland,” “Welcome to the Never Never,” or something altogether different. Then comes a cattle grid, then the bleached bones of cows that withered in the heat before making it across. It is a border with all the warmth and welcome of the Berlin Wall.

The only real change is in the road. Queensland’s narrow, bumpy bitumen becomes a two-lane highway as flat and smooth as a pool table.
Except that someone’s ripped the felt off on both sides, leaving a rocky and treeless semidesert for three hundred miles. Even properties disappear from the map. The only landmarks are dots labeled “microwave repeater station,” as if to remind the traveler that he is passing through an elongated inferno.

It is an unrewarding stretch of road under any circumstances. But in Steven’s armored wreck, at forty-five miles an hour, it is like being lowered slowly through the circles of hell. The midday sun blazes through the cracked sunroof and windscreen, scorching the black vinyl interior. We drape the seats with towels so they won’t burn the backs of our legs. The beer we bought in Camooweal has to be swilled within minutes of leaving the cooler; otherwise it turns too hot to swallow. And when I roll down the window to hang out my sweaty head, the desert air scorches my face like the first hot blast that greets a cook on opening an oven door.

Earlier explorers had more sense and turned around. The government began selling properties in the Northern Territory in the 1860s. Soon after, most of the buyers were demanding their money back. Australia later offered the governments of Japan and India free steerage to any immigrants willing to settle in the Territory. Both nations turned the offer down.

The main obstacle to farming—or just surviving, for that matter—is that there’s virtually no surface water in much of the Territory. This may explain why its scattered inhabitants irrigate themselves so heavily with beer. Territory drinking was once legendary. It is now a matter of statistical fact. Fifty-two gallons of beer per annum, per man and woman and child—enough to earn Territorians a listing in the
Guinness Book of Records
as the greatest beer drinkers in the world. A Society for the Prevention of Alcoholism in Darwin folded ten years ago for lack of interest.

Residents of Darwin, the Territory’s capital, don’t waste their beer tinnies either. Every June they beat the cans into tin boats and float them, like latter-day ironclads, into the Timor Sea. This ersatz America’s Cup is known as the Beer Can Regatta.

In the Territory, beer has also supplanted the metric system as a unit of measure. At Barkly Homestead, the first piss and petrol stop after Camooweal, I ask the barmaid how far we have to travel to the next dot of humanity.

“It’s about a carton to the roadhouse at Three Ways,” she says, “then another six-pack from there to Tennant Creek.”

I check the homestead’s map, dividing twenty-four beers into the number of miles between here and Three Ways. We will have to down a beer every eight minutes to reach the roadhouse on schedule. I question the barmaid’s arithmetic.

She laughs. “This is a good road, mate. On a dirt track it would be twice as much.”

The Territory has also floated the dollar.

“How much to fix up that tailpipe?” Steve asks the roadhouse mechanic.

“About a carton, I reckon. That’s if we don’t need parts.”

Steve doesn’t have that kind of money—or beer—so we drag the tailpipe out of Barkly and into another 125 miles of nothing. When Slim Dusty melts on his fiftieth tour of the tape deck, Steve stops singing and delivers a lecture instead. To survive in the Territory, he explains, the traveler must become fluent in drinking as a second language.

“Get the nouns straight and she’ll be jake,” he says. The principal rule here is that beer is identified by its markings, not its name. Hence Foster’s becomes a “blue can,” Victoria Bitter a “green can,” and so on through the spectrum. The one irregular noun is Castlemaine XXXX, a beer held in particular contempt by Territorians. If you must order it, don’t ask for a yellow can. Just say “barbed wire,” XXXX. Get it?

This color and picture coding may reflect a highly developed frontier aesthetic. But I suspect it’s simply a shred of common sense in an otherwise senseless place. After driving a carton or so along Territory roads, you can still lean over the bar and identify the color of the beer can, even if you can’t read the name on its label.

And if the colors blur, you can ask instead for “a tube” or “a snort” or “a charge.” They all mean tinnie in Territory-speak. The morning after, there’s always a “kicker over” to get you back on the road again.

I need a kicker over or two by the time Steve deposits me at Three Ways. Like Barkly, Three Ways is an artificial settlement, built around a camping ground, a petrol pump, a restaurant, and a pub. No one really lives here; it’s just a supply point for itinerant miners, oil field workers and Aborigines who wander in from neighboring camps or stations. When I arrive in late afternoon, all of the above are crowded at the bar.

The first thing I notice is that the Aborigines are much darker-skinned than the toffee-colored blacks I met in New South Wales and Queensland. And they don’t seem to speak English, at least not as a first language. A group of fifteen huddles by the dart board, chatting rapidly in a swift singsong that doesn’t sound like anything I’ve ever heard.

The miners at the bar speak English, but their faces are so smeared with black dust that it’s hard to tell the two races apart. Pale-faced, and obviously a blow-through, I feel uncomfortably conspicuous—and unnerved enough to forget everything Steve has just taught me.

“Stubbie of Foster’s,” I say to the barmaid, realizing instantly that I should have said “snort of blue.” But she cuts in before I have a chance to correct myself.

“Darwin Stubbie?”

I nod. Apparently, my error has gone unnoticed and I’ve stumbled onto a local brew. Judging from the raised eyebrows of the miner beside me, this Darwin beer is serious stuff.

A moment later, the barmaid returns with a Foster’s bottle the size and shape of a NASA rocket. In the Byzantine lingo of Territory drinking, Darwin refers to the quantity of the beer, not the make. And it seems five quarts is the going rate for a snort at Australia’s Top End.

There is no room—in me, or in my pack—for this oversized bottle of beer. So I sheepishly ask for a snort of blue instead. The miner gives me a sympathetic nod.

“It’s only a six-pack to the next pub, mate,” he says. “One ride and you’re there.”

      
T
here is a pause between beers and in that pause a glimpse of something altogether different.

The break comes in Tennant Creek, one of the few black dots between Darwin and Alice Springs that deserves the appellation of “town.” A gold rush in the 1930s turned the quiet telegraph station into a sprawling miners’ camp; it was the last place in Australia where a man could just peg out a claim and start digging with a hammer and tap. Then most of the mineral wealth played out, leaving Tennant Creek with the raw, ugly face of a boom town gone sour. The low-slung façades of empty stores and takeaway restaurants line the main street. Abandoned shafts and Aboriginal humpies dot the fringes. And the stench of blood from a horse-killing abattoir is the first landmark that greets motorists descending from Darwin.

When I arrive at sunset, Tennant appears dark and forbidding, except for a bonfire glowing at the northern edge of town. Predictably, I’m dropped off at a pub. This time it’s a rough-and-ready, stand-up saloon called the Miners Bar. Waiting for a beer, I find myself standing beside a black man who has a hook where his hand should be. Not knowing what else to say, I ask him about the flames I saw licking into the evening sky.

“Ceremonial business at the Waramungu camp,” he says, in clipped and accented English. In the nonmaterialistic world of black Australia, it
is traditional ceremony, not commerce, that is the community’s “business.” The blacks of this region have held on to their rituals more tightly than Aborigines “back East.”

The hook man introduces me to a drinker who has kin among the Waramungu people. He is happy to take me to the camp and introduce me to an elder, or, as he says, “one of the senior men.”

The Waramungu camp is a collection of dilapidated concrete buildings scattered through the scrub. Children ride bicycles along the dusty paths between buildings, and women chat quietly, seated in circles on the ground. There are no men in sight, but a chorus of male voices is singing in the distance, by the bonfire.

My companion speaks with an old woman then heads off toward the fire. It is pitch black now, and I walk closely behind him so as not to tear my leg on the prickly scrub. My guide seems to know his way along the narrow path without the aid of light.

A hundred or so men are gathered in a wide circle around the bonfire, stamping their feet and singing. One of the senior men greets us at the edge of the circle. I explain that I’m traveling through and ask if it’s okay to watch the ceremony.

“That’s fine, mate,” he says, smiling. “Can you hold a tune?”

I can’t, but he takes my arm anyway and leads me to the circle’s inner ring. Between songs, he explains what is going on.

The business at hand is an annual initiation of Waramungu men. Or rather, men is what they shall become after a long night of song and dance, ending at dawn with circumcision. The delicate operation will be performed by one of the senior men, using a well-sharpened pocket knife.

As a Jew, I have a passing acquaintance with that sort of tribal business. It isn’t something I think of as a jolly event, at least not for the young male at center stage. But the scene I stumble on in Tennant Creek is as raucous and joyful as a wedding party. Except that there’s no alcohol, and no women. Just a dozen dancers and an audience of other men, their faces lit by the bonfire, shouting in pidgin English or their own Aboriginal tongues.

“He can move it, eh?”

“Dance! Dance!”

“Shake it some more, man. Shake!”

The ceremony is a curious mix of the primitive and the twentieth century.
Traditionally, the dancers decorated themselves with turkey feathers and elaborate handmade headdresses. Now the feathers are fashioned from cotton diapers, the headdresses from cardboard beer cartons. Only the boughs of bloodwood trees, wrapped around the dancers’ ankles, remain of the original costume.

The boughs swish the ground like skirt hems as each dancer stamps quickly at a designated spot before the flames. Their movements—a sort of rapid running in place, all legs and no arms—are set to the music of six senior men, arrayed behind the fire like background singers in a Motown band. They bang boomerangs together, stamp their feet, and urge the dancers on to faster contortions. “Move it, man, move!” “Shake!” Or a playful “That’s no good, man. Go back to the end of the line.”

The dance is designed to ease the pain of four adolescents who will be circumcised at dawn. The boys are painted in ochre and feathered like the rest, sitting quietly behind the fire with blankets slung in their laps. It is this night, and alone in the bush afterward, that they will “get man.”

Boomerangs. Bloodwood boughs. Two hundred feet stamping. The sounds are hypnotic, and for several hours I am drawn into the music, watching one man after another repeat his dance before the flames. During the brief pauses between dancers, men approach me and ask if I have cigarettes. But otherwise, no one seems to pay me any special attention.

In the early morning hours, there is an unexplained intermission and I decide to leave. I am still a stranger to this culture and unfamiliar with its etiquette. Something in me senses that it is more appropriate for the final drama to be played out in privacy from white eyes.

But no one tells me to go. Here, as in Cunnamulla, Aboriginal society is open wide. For the Waramungu, an expression of interest and respect is all that is necessary for me to share the intimacies of their ritual, their man business.

When I return the following day, the men are flaked out across the camp like battle-weary soldiers, sound asleep in the burning heat. I think of myself groping toward a motel air-conditioner in the night and envy them their ease.