Monday, 19 May 2008

The Going gets Tougher (Chapter 11 - Sydney to Brisbane)

At first it was easy: absurdly easy, with our newly fixed sidecar carrying Nita and all our belongings (including the weighty film) with perfect ease. The bitumen was smooth, the weather glorious, and the coastal road north running through green, fertile country: Wyong, Swansea, Newcastle. And we made our first night stop just outside Newcastle under a cluster of friendly gum trees.

In the south they had warned us of the mosquitoes, but we had taken the warnings lightly-too lightly-and in consequence were both severely bitten, although we stayed awake most of the night trying to swat the' Giant Greys'. I should think that the mosquitoes around Newcastle, New South \Vales, hold the record for size. Indeed, they are not called' Giant Greys' without good reason, and their intake is proportionate to the large banded body, the size of a house fly's. Voracious hordes invaded our tent ceaselessly throughout the night and we swatted and smote each attacker with vicious satisfaction, and endured streaming eyes from a smoke fire just outside the entrance that seemed to attract rather than discourage our tormentors. And in the chill grey light of dawn, haggard from lack of sleep, we reviewed our tent which almost resembled a battlefield, with dark bodies and blood smears (our blood) liberally spattered over the tent walls and our sleepingbags.

With the first warm rays of the sun, the night raiders-more like vampires than mosquitoes-droned away, heavy and replete. Grateful at least that they were not as yet malarial, we drank tea, broke camp and got on to the road again, determined to stop at the first hardware store for a length of netting to sew into the tent opening. There should be no repetition of such torture. For the rest of the seven hundred miles run from Sydney to Brisbane, our nights were blissful and uninterrupted. Indeed, outside the net the angry frustrated whine, which in concert sounded rather like a smooth turbine engine, actually lulled us to sleep.

The days were warm and gradually, noticeably, getting hotter. The scooter, with its new lease on life from the hands of Jack Crawford in Sydney, ran perfectly. And the country became more vast. In Australia it is necessary to drive much farther than anywhere else before something happens; before there is a change of scenery and one of those clean, low wooden stereotyped townships appears on the horizon and another fleeting glimpse is seen of canopied shops, angle-parked cars, and glittering silver rainwater butts. As a rule one drives straight through, knowing the sequence will be roughly the same. Farming country to either side, full and blooming, yet rarely does one see signs of human interference. I wondered how or when they tend the vast acres. Then the square signboards: Tarree, Kempsey, Macksville (or whatever the name happens to be), and the highway widens momentarily to become a high street which shimmers in steep perspective as one automatically peers ahead through the heat-haze to see where the straight line of this latest human community ends.

In two or three minutes the last weatherboard bungalow is left behind, the reverse side of the name-board is there (as one knows it will be) on the opposite side of the road, and once more the silent pastures take over and the traveller is alone again with the infinite, sweeping arable plains. If the average focal length of an Englishman's view is fifty
feet, an Australian's is two hundred yards. In England we speak of 'a mile up the road'. In Australia it is ten miles. Nita and I caught on very quickly and would talk quite seriously of a place being only three hundred and eighty miles up the road.

We were following the Pacific Highway and although the sea was only a few miles east of us, we saw nothing of it until we reached a delightful and decidedly unstereotyped township called Coff's Harbour. Here was a town with a difference. The streets twisted a bit, there was variety in the shops, including one or two bookshops, gunsmiths, and an espresso coffee bar, together with throngs of people in holiday mood who had obviously chosen this colourful and pretty harbour as a holiday resort.

The sea was only a stone's throwaway and many of the inhabitants and visitors were strolling about in beach-suits or shorts. We met a holiday-maker from Perth who had driven right across the continent just to spend a week in this, his former home. I agreed it was nice, but I didn't think it was that attractive.

Another potpourri of nationalities in names: Grafton, Casino, Coolangatta, and we purred on over the border into Queensland. After Brisbane, we were told, the going would get tougher, but it is better on a journey such as ours to live for the day and we did not worry about what might lie ahead, enjoying the quiet, uneventful run from the capital of New South Wales to the capital of Queensland in much of a holiday spirit. For after our working spell in Sydney, those seven hundred miles with good roads and frequent towns through fertile, coastal country were very much in the nature of a holiday. It was therefore in a buoyant mood that we arrived in Brisbane. Buoyant, but without any sense of achievement, because what we had just done was, comparatively, routine. Had we known what lay ahead on the next lap we would have undoubtedly felt more grateful for such a comfortable stretch of our marathon journey.