Ten Pound Pom (9 page)

After Canberra, the Snowy Mountains and Cooma. Yarrangobilly Caves, which they explore. Dripping icicles of rock
and underground lakes and a cool darkness and a creeping sense of panic outshone, just, by marvel at the place’s
strangeness.
He likes these caves, the boy. They overnight at Tumut, in a cabin. Outside of this small town a flock of parrots bursts out of the bush and flies in front of the car and one of them bounces off the bonnet and over the vehicle and the children look behind to see the broken bird rolling and bouncing on the road, small colourful tattered bundle, shrinking, still and gone.

This
is the capital city? It’s like a dead zone. Apparently, the Australian government couldn’t decide between Sydney and Melbourne as a capital so to stop the bickering they built a new city, from scratch, and indeed a new state. Designed by a lunatic, evidently, some foam-headed architect obsessed with concentric circles. ’Tis a bizarre place.

We drive around it on circular roads sunken between high grass embankments, every now and again catching a quick glimpse of a building and, once, a brief sighting of what looks to be a shopping mall, completely emptied of life. This is the world after the apocalypse. This is the world post-virus, when human life has ended, all of it’s workings falling into first desuetude and then dry decay, reclaimed only by bindweed and hornets. Empty bags and fast-food wrappers blow like sterile tumbleweeds through the whistling streets. Not that I see any streets.

We reach the Military History Museum with twenty minutes to spare till closing, so only get to see both world wars. ‘Mephisto’ is now in storage, and if the Cu Chi exhibition is still there we don’t get to see it because the doors are about
to close. Outside, in an enclosed courtyard under a reddening sky criss-crossed by flocks of shrieking cockatoos, a lone bugler plays the Last Post. Happens every night, apparently, and is very moving. I admire this about Australia, the way it honours and reveres its dead. This is something to do with a young country constructing its heroes and mythology, for sure, but it’s no less stirring and laudable for that.

Sun sets. We consider spending the night in a motel in Canberra but the thought of that makes me shudder so we head on. Such a strange place. Pass through Yass, back on the Hume. Coolac and Gundagai and then Tumut. Darkness when we arrive, full night-time. Hungry. Park up, go to a fried chicken shack.
Stuart Little 2
on the wall-mounted TV. Order fried chicken and gravy and roast potatoes and Tony asks if there’s any vegetables besides pumpkin.

–Poys, the guy says. –Oi could do you boys some poys.

Peas it is. I enjoy the food. I’m hungry. After we’ve eaten we find a layby outside the town and park up. We’re right on the edge of a busy main road in a scruffy part of the town and we don’t really want to sleep here so Tony consults the map and recommends that we get on to Talbingo Lake.

–What’s that?

–Don’t you remember? Where we saw the fox chasing the rabbit?

–Oh I remember that. That’s close, is it?

–Not far at all.

–Alright. Let’s do that.

Onto the Snowy Mountains Highway, into the Kosciuszko National Park, across the Bogong Mountains. Can’t see a thing except for a metallic glint of water under moonlight through trees so we park up by that glint and I get out of the van for a piss and it’s freezing, I’m shivering, my teeth are actually
chattering. I get back into the van and brush my teeth and put a woolly hat on and wriggle into my sleeping bag and soon I’m drifting off. Thirty years. This distance, this time. Last year when I was a boy.

–Quick, little bunny! Run for your life! Get away!

The boy’s pulse is racing. They are standing at the top of a sloping meadow which rushes down to the lake, and on the banks of that lake across a dip in the field races a rabbit only a single paw-swipe in front of a sprinting fox. The animals aren’t close but the boy can see the rabbit’s frantically bouncing tail and the erect brush of the fox and the redness of his fur. Any minute now. Snap that fox will go, any second.

–Oh God, the boy’s mother says. –He’s going to get eaten.

The children are aghast, stricken, shouting:

–Run! Run, little rabbit! Get away!

The rabbit quick-darts at right angles but the fox mirrors every move, his body leaning sideways, his ribs close to the ground. This is it. He’ll catch the rabbit. There will be mutilation and screaming and agonised death any second now.

–Quick! QUICK!

And then the rabbit vanishes. Just disappears into the ground and the dad says that he’s found his burrow and everyone cheers. The fox paws and sniffs at the ground for a while then skulks away down to the lake’s edge and is swallowed up in the rushes.

The boy’s heart slows. He can actually feel his blood decelerating. The spectacle thrilled him completely, shook him
with emotions that he can’t quite name. His palms went wet and his mouth went dry and he felt a kind of heaviness in his bum and legs and all of his skin went tight and tingly. He’s glad that the rabbit got away but he wonders now what the fox will eat. Wonders if the fox has got babies and if they’ll now starve.

Later that day they stop at Blowering Trout Farm. Many circular chest-high tanks filled with fish, the water thrashing and boiling with the muscular bodies of trout. Many fish have jumped out of their tanks and are flapping and gasping and twitching in the mud, and the boy wants to put them back in the water but there are hundreds of them, all dying, drowning in the air. The boy wonders why they can’t be fed to the hungry fox. Thinks that there is waste here.

I wake up and go outside and now in the daylight I can see where I am and in my memory this is always, exactly, how it has looked; the narrow dingle, the dip, the solitary tree, the lake behind it, and the thickly-wooded hill over that lake. All of this corresponds precisely to my memory. This is the exact spot, I’m sure of it. The running rabbit and the ravening fox. The sounds of shouting scared children. All of that happened here. Early exposure to the world’s indifference, nature’s violence. I’ve gone back in time as I slept. This is the exact spot.

Sunday morning. Cold. We drive on, needing a hot drink and food. A wash, too, but that’ll have to wait; at least we’ve got some baby wipes. Essential items, if you’re spending any time away from a shower or a bath; they at least give you the sensation of being clean. Blowering Trout Farm is still here but
is closed, and there’s no way of getting beyond the padlocked gates or over or under the chainlink fence, which is disappointing. The Yarrangobilly Caves are open, though, and after some tea and cake in the caff we go down into the vast yawning gob of their entrance, past a pink gala fast asleep on a railing. Can’t say that I remember a great deal about these caves, beyond shiny spikes of rock and a feeling of low-level panic, and no memories gush back, apart from a vague one of an underground pond lit up like a night-time city seen from an aeroplane by the fairy-lights threaded through the stalactites above it, but that might’ve been a different cave system altogether. I ask Tony about it because he came here in 2005, with an ex-wife, but he’s never heard of it. Ah well. That miniature underground city. It’s somewhere in the world. Wish I could remember where, though.

More tea and a chat with the lady in the caff at the Visitor Centre, next to which are some houses which can be rented out and I go off, again, into a reverie about spending a winter there, writing, walking, sleeping, drinking. I’d love that. I think. Full of these reveries, I am. Don’t know why; I’m perfectly happy with my home life. But kind of addicted to dreaming.

Later, we pass through Holbrook, with a sign on its outskirts declaring that it is ‘Australia’s Submarine Town’, and sure enough it is; there’s a huge sub half-buried in the ground. It’s massive. What on earth? We stop, get out, look around and yes, that’s exactly what it is; a huge sub half-buried in the ground. I’m reminded of the same thing at Wallasey, on the Wirral, the rusting hulk on the dockside still with its ack-ack guns on the deck, but that’s a shipyard; Holbrook is hundreds of miles from the sea. What’s it doing here? I ask a passerby and he says: –Don’t know, ey?

Ah well. Fair enough. ‘Australia’s Submarine Town’; doesn’t need any reason to be that, really. If it wants to have a huge
U-boat
half-buried in its centre, then let it. Curious. But a word about that ‘ey’; Aussies tend to put it at the end of every sentence, whether inquisitive or declamatory. It’s just a verbal tic, of course, and means less than when affected Brits do it, because they’ve consciously adopted it, but it’s like the ornithological observation that the beauty of a bird’s song in Oz is in direct proportion to the blandness of its plumage; the more lovely the song, the drabber the bird that makes it. Pretty-looking birds just squeal and screech. As if they know, somehow, that humans must be pleased and propitiated in some way, if not through the eye, then through the ear. They must make themselves useful, in some way, to humans. What’s this got to do with the Australian ‘ey’? Fuck it, I don’t know. I’m rambling, ey?

Anyway, onward. Albury, Wodanga, Barnawartha. A tiny place called Everton. Beechworth and Glenrowan, Ned Kelly country. Poor old Ned.

There’s something about Ned Kelly that provokes an emotion in the boy which he can only equate with liking something. He’s been told that Kelly was ‘a crook, a killer, a thief, a bushranger’, but there are things about him… the armour, the last words, the last stand, the bullets pinging off his helmet, even the internally-rhyming name… the boy finds a part of him being drawn to all this, slowly, like a houseplant towards a window. He’s heard the Fonz use the word ‘cool’ on
Happy Days
and he
thinks that that word, in the way in which Fonzie uses it, might be applicable to Ned. He
thinks
. He’s very young.

They stop in Beechworth to see the courthouse where Ned was incarcerated and sentenced to death. Dark wood and velvet clothes and coats-of-arms and plaques and everything else designed to impose and intimidate. Not much available info about Ned or his exploits, really, and the boy wants to know more so he asks his dad and his dad tells him what he knows but the boy wants more. Ned Kelly should be looming in his imagination like a bogeyman, with that blank helmet and those guns, clanking robotically out of the bush, but he’s not and the boy is puzzled as to why. Wants to know more. He thinks he should but he doesn’t have bad dreams about Ned. Wants to know why.

Back at the car, the dad discovers that he’s locked the keys inside. He swears. The boy thinks that if Ned were here, he’d use his skills to break into the car and retrieve the keys and save them all but he’s not here because he was hung at the age of twenty-four all this way from his home in Ireland and when he was asked if he had any last words he said ‘such is life’ and then they hung him and it’s
their
fault that the boy’s now locked out of his little moving house.

–How did we get back in the car? D’you remember?

Tony thinks. –I don’t, no. Probably called the AA or whatever they had over here in those days. Got back in
somehow
.

Beechworth is like Deadwood in a beating sun, a frontier
town with covered arcades lining the dusty streets and wooden boardwalks and a New Orleans-style jazz band playing. It’s very busy. Easy, here, to imagine sheriffs and shoot-outs and rearing horses and post-office robberies and stick-ups of stagecoaches. Almost unchanged from a century ago, it seems. There’s a Scottish shop, oddly. A caff from where I buy a Ned Kelly Pie, which is a grin in a pastry crust; meat and gravy topped by an egg and cheese then baked. It’s brilliant. When I return to Britain, I’ll have my blood tested and it will show high levels of triglycerides, which will worry my doctor. I blame Australia’s pies.

I visit the courthouse. Got to, really. How could I not? I’m alone inside it, and fascinated. I stand in the dock. I stand at the bench. When I go into the holding cells, a motion-activated recording clicks into operation and a croaky disembodied voice says:
Awroight, mate. You got a smowk?
The furniture and fittings are all original, including the dock and Ned’s cell, over 140 years old. I buy a load of stuff from the souvenir shop; posters, booklets, copies of journalistic articles from the time of the Kelly Gang trial. WANTED posters, Ned’s ‘certificate of execution’, which reads: ‘I, Andrew Shields, being the medical officer on attendance on the execution of Edward Kelly, at the Gaol of Melbourne, do hereby certify and declare that I have this day witnessed the execution of the said Edward Kelly at the said gaol, and I further certify and declare that the said Edward Kelly was, in pursuance of the sentence of the Central Criminal Court, hanged by the neck until his body was dead.’ All those bloody ‘said’s. Why do they have to do that, in legalese? I explore the town, guided by the ‘Ned Kelly Touring Route’ pamphlets which declare that Beechworth is ‘Australia’s Best Preserved Ned Kelly Town’. The Burke Museum houses Ned’s death mask and a suit
of Chinese armour that, apparently, ‘sowed the seed for the Kelly Gang armour’. The Imperial Hotel, where Ned had a
bare-knuckle
fight with Isaiah ‘Wild’ Wright, and pummelled him.

All interesting stuff, as is the entire story of the Kelly Gang, and the position it’s now assumed in the Oz collective psyche. One of the booklets says: ‘Ned Kelly has never faded from our national consciousness. Indeed the passing years have seemed to build [his] legendary stature. Why? Perhaps because he had so many qualities ordinary Australians admire. He was a larrikin. Loyal to his family and ready to sacrifice himself for his mates. Represented the struggling classes. Thumbed his nose at the establishment. And he was fearless.’ How different this is to the figure of national shame and embarrassment that Kelly was when I was last here, all those years ago. A thug, he was then; a killer of policemen; a street-brawler; a disgrace. As was his mother, Ellen, tinker-Irish, bred like a rabbit, Mick harridan carting her clatter of snot-nosed kids up to be thieves and rustlers. Now, according to a leaflet written by Noelene Allen, she’s a ‘woman of spirit and courage’, who, when a child in Antrim, used to love ‘exploring the beautiful rolling hills around her home searching for wild berries, bird’s nests and flowers’, who ‘loved to sing and dance… A free spirit with a strong rebellious streak’. She came to Oz aged nine; her father wanted to emigrate to ‘improve their position’. At eighteen, she met and married John ‘Red’ Kelly, from Tipperary, who’d been transported to Tasmania for stealing two pigs. Her parents disapproved of the union, so Ellen and John eloped to Melbourne and got hitched there. Their first child died at six weeks, but three more were born at their home in Beveridge, including Ned, in 1854. At the age of eleven, in Avenel, Ned saved a seven-year-old boy from drowning in the
creek and became something of a local celebrity, whereas John began to drink heavily, dying from dropsy in 1866, widowing Ellen at thirty-three, with seven children. Ellen began to become known to the local constabulary and courthouses. She sold poítín from her house in Wangaratta and became pregnant, again, to a man called Bill Frost, who was court-ordered to pay maintenance, which he did until the baby died ‘from diarrhoea’ at fourteen months old.