Sydney (Chapter 10 - Canberra to Sydney)

Being water conscious-even in the fertile south--compels nearly all motorists to carry a canvas water bag slung from the front bumper of their vehicles. The water keeps cool by evaporation and the loss is negligible. Heartily sick of drinking tepid water, we threw out our standard water bottles and bought a water bag in Canberra. Of course I should have known that a water bag is no good until it has mellowed. For the first two days the thing leaked like a sieve, and as the only practical place to hang it was from the scooter bulkhead between my knees, I rode the next forty-eight hours with saturated feet. We carried our drinking water in a beer bottle while the canvas bag was being broken in, but after three days the bag magically sealed itself and from then on we had deliciously cool, completely untainted water; and a gallon of it to boot. Thus our water supply was assured when the time came to tackle the vast, arid north.

Out of the Federal State and into New South Wales, we ran into another problem: fire. On either side of the road, still-smouldering patches made their grey-black scars on the landscape and filled the air with ash particles and the acrid smell of smoke. We passed not acres of burnt fields but square miles of ruined cattle fodder, gutted gum trees, and burnt fences. Once we ran through a two-mile stretch with flames, dense smoke, and an ominously loud crackling on either side of the bitumen. It wasn't exactly dangerous, but it was almighty hot.

I pulled into a little wayside garage to fill up and give our overheated tyres a rest. From the lubritorium (Australian/ American word for grease-bay) ambled a well-built character wearing a huge straw hat, jeans, and a look of mild surprise at his customers.

'What'll it be, mate?'

We got into the usual confusion regarding the amount of oil to put into the two petrol tanks, which became more complex whenever there was any fuel left in the reserve tank, as there was then.

'Just over half a pint of oil in the tank, please, because it holds one and a half gallons of petrol, and just under a pint in the reserve can because it holds two gallons of petrol, but there is still some left in the bottom.'

The rural garage owner paused with the oil bottle and turned his head slowly towards me.

'Y'mean to say you came all the way from Britain goin' through this palaver every time you wanted to tank up?'

'S'right,' I replied, watching anxiously lest he pour too little or too much lubricant into the fuel, 'but I only have to do it once every three hundred miles.'

'That's not much mileage here in Aussie though, is it?' he grinned.

'No, but at least we speak the same language which makes life easier,' explained Nita.

'Well,' said the bronzed garage man, 'you must be a couple of battlers and no mistake.' His gaze wandered incredulously over the travel-stained and somewhat sunbleached Prima. 'You stopping in Sydney?'

'No, we're heading for the Northern Territory and the aborigines. '

'The Territory! On that! Heck, the bull dust is a foot thick up there, you'll be drowned in dust. And how are you goin' to carry fuel and water supplies? There's hundreds of.miles of nothing but mulga and spinifex.'

'It can't be any worse than Persia, or Afghanistan,' I said lightly, 'we'll make out well enough.'

'Best of luck, sports, anyway,' said the garage owner, as we pulled out from the shade of a giant Coca-Cola hoarding. And as a parting shot, 'Why don't you put a little sidecar on it? Three wheels'll be better'n two in the bull dust. . . .'

We had reason to bless that fellow, later on, for sowing the seeds of an idea.

Joining the Hume Highway at a biggish town called Goulburn, we found that, outside the cities, Australia is very much like Britain on Sundays. Everything stops at midnight on Saturday and the only signs of life in the townships were around milk bars and paper shops, most of which were run by enterprising Greeks or Italians, or other European migrants, known throughout the length and breadth of the land as 'New Australians'.

But if the town of Goulburn was deserted on that somewhat chilly and overcast Sunday, the highway was teeming with life. All Australians are extremely car conscious. Motoring, in fact, forms one of the major pastimes of the nation, and the Hume Highway between Goulburn and Sydney resembled the Brighton road on August Bank Holiday.

The only difference was in the great number of semi-articulated trucks, grinding their way backwards and forwards between capitals. Enormous land trains, crewed by a driver and an 'offsider', they carry all kinds of merchandise from Brisbane to Sydney and from Sydney to Adelaide; some of them even make the marathon journey between Melbourne and Darwin-a journey of something like two months on the road (or track) for the driver and his mate. We gave these monsters-driven hard to keep within time schedules-a wide berth. Long-distance road haulage is one of the most arduous jobs in Australia, and the men who drive along the endless roads are tough; tough, but friendly, devil-may-care fellows, as are lorry drivers the world over.

There are frequent accidents, particularly at night, when an overtired' truckie' dosed with' wideawake' pills relaxes vigilance for a moment. Once out of control, the diesel giants can be lethal. We passed a smash-up just outside Goulburn. A sixty-foot trailer hauling refrigerators had taken its double-banked load straight through the side of a house and knocked the brick-and-wood structure down like a pack of cards. Miraculously no one was killed although a whole family had been sleeping in the bungalow.

As it was, the police, who swarmed on the scene and kept the usual crowd of onlookers at a respectful distance, told us that the cost of the demolished house and the whole load of refrigerators (not to mention the ten-thousand-pound truck itself) was somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand pounds. One of the police officers said that the Government were trying to enforce compulsory rest stops for drivers on the interstate runs, but of course the sooner they got to their destinations the quicker they could take on another load, and the more money they made. I don't know how true that may be, but it seemed a bitter twist of fate for the driver, who had come from Adelaide and was heading for Sydney, to write off his load-and probably his livelihood-so near home.

The last hundred-odd miles into the capital went very quickly, with more and more townships breaking the vast agricultural plains. We saw far less sheep and cattle than we had expected. I had visualized this part of Australia as teeming with sheep. There were flocks grazing here and there, of course, but not on the scale one would expect from the amount of Australian labels one sees in the British butchers' shops.

Still there was the mixture of strange and familiar place names: Moss Vale, Mittagong, Camden, Liverpool, Parramatta; all new, clean, and modem, although Parramatta has certain historical connections for it was, at one time in the early days of settlement, a prison town for so-called wrongdoers. Its history (as a prison) is black indeed and sometimes when I read the books of Australia's early life I am almost ashamed of my nationality. The tortures and privations we inflicted on our own people, when Australia was the dumping ground for banished Britons, were almost unbelievable. Britain should be extremely proud of these cousins who could so easily (and at one time almost did) break away into complete independence.