From a moving car - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 9: Up North
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Meera Atkinson
WE ENTER QUEENSLAND AND PICK UP TWO HITCHHIKERS, Frank and Danny, and their two small dogs. I'm already weary with play-acting at having a proper relationship and I'm grateful for new blood. Frank's Aboriginal, from the Riverland, on the rebound from a bitter break-up, and Danny's a light-hearted larrikin.
The four of us have longwinded sing-a-longs as we barrel down the highway. Jeremy likes to sing sacred songs (his favourite is Nearer, My God, to Thee). I listen to the rise and fall of his voice as he belts out the hymns, and watch his carolling profile with permanent bed-hair. Less Godly favourites are Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. We smoke rollies and survive on a diet of flagon wine, middies of beer, fast food and soup-kitchen slops. On cheque days we enjoy our most substantial meal: a pub counter lunch. These are the halcyon days of social security: we have no fixed address and simply transfer from town to town picking up "counter cheques". When times are tight we beg on the street, pick through the car ashtray for decent butts, and syphon petrol out of parked cars in the dead of night, which has the added bonus of a rushy, headachy high. Personal hygiene is maintained in service-station bathrooms.
I feel an odd sensation when begging on the street or plucking butts from the EK's ashtray, but I'm not aware that this feeling is shame. I'm not aware that shame is so woven into me that I no longer feel it as separate and notable. It is a way of being that is normal. I am oblivious to it. I've reversed it into a point of pride. I romanticise poverty, suffering, dispossession and scavenging. So do my companions. Perversely, we feel that it makes us better than everyone else. We watch the plebs shuffle to work and back in their waking sleep, living their small conservative lives and feel in contrast to them we are truly alive.
QUEENSLAND WAS JOH BJELKE-PETERSEN'S TURF BACK THEN. I was intrigued by the lines up the middle of Brisbane's footpaths: those walking one way filed down one side, those going the other way up the other. It felt trapped in the 1950s: women in house dresses baking lamingtons and men in Akubra hats working outdoors.
The further north we went in the Sunshine State the surer the menace in the air. There were places we were unwelcome. Between Brisbane and Townsville we'd often sleep out on beaches and evenings were passed in parks drinking with local Aborigines. Once the police descended on such a gathering, Jeremy, Frank, Danny and I were told to move on. We moved. The next day we were told that two of the women were taken off to the cells and raped. In Queensland in 1979 we were ready to believe such things.
WE REACH TOWNSVILLE AND FERRY OVER TO MAGNETIC ISLAND. We park the wagon in the car park of the pub down by the wharf and spend the night drinking at the bar with a local man in shorts. I pass the evening in a blacked-out blur. I wake the next morning on the ground of the car park beside the others. The man in shorts is poised above me with a pair of scissors. He has sliced my dress open with a clean cut up the middle. He runs off when I wake and the others sit up stunned and hung over.
I am shaken to the core. For the first time I acknowledge the danger in what I'm doing. I allow myself to feel – for a split second at least – how vulnerable and young I am, how alien the people I'm meeting. I have the bone-chilling realisation that men can be as threatening in my shining new adult life as they were in my childhood, that the power I thought I had over them can, in an instant, be turned on its head. As the heat of the day gathers, I stand in a phone booth by the beach, crying down the line to my mother as the waves lap the shore. I don't say what has happened, or how scared and lonely I feel. I tell her only that I miss her and love her. She begs me to come home, her voice pitched between pain and panic. I refuse. I long to go home – to my mother, to comfort, to familiarity – but I tell myself I cannot. I have not yet reached my goal – have not yet made it to Darwin. Going home would mean accepting defeat, admitting that I'm a child and can't cut it in the world of adults. I won't give up, whatever the risks on the road.
DESPITE THIS CHILLING INTRODUCTION TO THE ISLAND, we stayed on, exploring its gorgeous nooks and sublime crannies; enjoying sun-soaked days lolling around on idyllic beaches with crystalline water in the perfect heat of a tropical winter.
I was not particularly attracted to Frank but once again he fitted the critical criteria: he was there. So we began an affair. Danny turned a blind eye, but when Jeremy made the inevitable discovery our little foursome turned suddenly sour. When I think back to this time I can't help but wonder why Jeremy took me seriously enough to be as affected as he was, given my obvious incapacity for real emotional connection or loyalty. But I tend to forget that despite his grand persona and impressive ramblings, he was little more than a boy himself.
Nevertheless we continued as a quartet, careening out of Townsville for the long, arduous trek north-west to Darwin with a furious, suicidal Jeremy at the wheel, flying down the numbing highway with only semis for company and the odd tin shed in the dirt with a cattle dog out front.
The border between Queensland and the Northern Territory is crossed on an incessantly dusty road, and nothing seemed to change, except it did. If Queensland felt oppressive and stuck in time, the Northern Territory felt exposed and forgotten by time. If in Queensland the heat of the law was your biggest threat, in the Territory being left to your own devices could do you the greatest harm.
By the time we reached Darwin I was exhausted. I was tired of being dirty, tired of being hungry, tired of the wagon and tired of Jeremy, Frank and Danny. I needed to recuperate. I checked into the local women's refuge the way most people check into a hotel. I spun some "he done me wrong" line to the well-meaning women workers to pique the sympathies of the sisterhood and justify my consumption of their favours. With no awareness that my own story was justification enough – I was, after all, a 15-year-old girl 3000 kilometres from home fleeing trauma in the company of adult men – I lied. By then, scamming had become habitual and I no longer knew where my real needs and story ended and my manufactured needs and story began.
I RECOVER AT THE REFUGE FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS, listening to the constant stream of Joan Armatrading that pipes out of the speakers, eating regular, healthy meals and enjoying such strange normalities as watching television, taking regular showers and sleeping in a properly made bed. I hide from the men and the emotional complexities between us I don't understand or know how to deal with. But once rejuvenated, I grow bored. I remember why I've come to Darwin and I'm seized by the urge to penetrate the mysterious band of drifters I've heard so much about. So I leave the refuge with a wave and a thank you and go in search of the men. They aren't hard to find. The Vic Hotel, with its big overhead fans and balcony overlooking the mall, is a favourite of the itinerants, as is the Animal Bar on the Esplanade, and the Workers' Club. We live for the day, for the minute. I rarely know where my next meal is coming from or where I'll sleep. I tell myself this is freedom and that I like it.
LAMEROO BEACH HAD LONG BEEN AN ESTABLISHED CAMP, testifying to the roots of the nomadic network: the hippie trail to Asia. It filled up year after year in the dry with cliques of ganja-smoking, guitar-strumming youth, and tree houses remained as evidence of their initiative. There were mutterings about the nomads who, camped there on the night Tracey hit, were blown away and never counted as missing – to be counted as missing one had to belong in the first place. (But this is likely an urban myth. As Jeremy now points out, the fierce mosquitoes alone would prohibit camping there in the wet.) Even in 1979, Lameroo was a permanent party, and there was something notable about the drifter parties: there were hardly any women, and those who were there tended to be tough and working class.
THE WOMEN VIEW ME WITH DISDAIN AND TREAT ME like the middle-class princess I'm desperately trying not to be. I am dismissed because of my age and told more than once to "go home". It's delivered with condescending scorn and it only makes me more determined to prove myself by staying. The rejection, and not being taken seriously because of my age, is a source of disgrace. I want friendship and approval but have no clue how to win it. I focus on gathering allies where and how I can by flirting shamelessly with the men. I can't match my adult comrades in terms of wit and opinion, so I learn to observe. I pass long hours at their feet, watching, listening, drinking. Taking it all in.
NOBODY ENDS UP IN NEW YORK BY ACCIDENT and no one really cares where you come from or how you came to be there; being there says it all. Similarly, nobody ends up in the far north by accident and in the1970s no one was interested in personal history. Being there marked you. Though my age stamped me as different, I was not alone in trying to outrun bad memories and the past. We were united in our commitment to denial and bravado and we supported each other in a lifestyle fuelled by alcohol and financed by handouts and crime. This fuzzily defined kinship had a generous spirit: sharing resources detached from time. When one person's dole cheque arrived it was for all. When cash ran dry, a meal, cigarette or middy would appear. The EK became communal property. Jeremy never hesitated to lend it out whether he'd known the person for minutes or years. It might come back in two hours or two days. Amazingly, it always came back.
DARWIN ITSELF IS NOT PARTICULARLY PRETTY. It's a sprawling, relentlessly flat landscape, a town still recovering from disaster. I'm not disillusioned because it wasn't a pretty picture that had been painted. What did I come here hoping to find? I came for new horizons and because I want to belong, and I've found some of what I'm looking for: company passing afternoons fumbling with men on sagging single beds in run-down rooms; the joie de vivre of gatecrashing the locked-up YMCA pool in the small hours and splashing around the candescent pool; a glimpse of transcendence listening to Patti Smith's Horses for the first time in the windowless office of the boarding house on Knuckey Street while sharing a joint with the manager. It is, just as Jeremy promised, a town claimed by outsiders for outsiders: the outsider capital of Australia.
I'VE LONG LOST CONTACT WITH THOSE OUTSIDERS. I remember them, and the days and nights I shared with them, as if the film of this entire period is ruined and only select scenes or frames have been saved. The only one I've stayed in touch with over the years is Jeremy, now a social worker in the Red Centre.
After a short stay in Darwin I headed back to Sydney, then flew back to Darwin with an old school friend. For half a year I rushed around the country, picking up and discarding companions en route. The harder it was to outrun myself the faster I ran. I dashed back and forth between Darwin, Cairns, Sydney, Byron Bay, the Gold Coast, Canberra, Adelaide, Perth and Broome. I travelled by bus, train, thumb and plane, occasionally with Jeremy, mostly with other men or on my own. I explored a pre-tourist beach in Cairns in a throbbing, tripping grass haze and enjoyed an excursion inland to pick gold tops and swim in a cool watering hole surrounded by the saturated reds and greens of wild tropical growth, but despite tranquil surrounds like these I was not at peace. The denial and bravado slipped, and I began to feel fear, or to acknowledge the fear I'd felt all along. There were interminable stretches rolling down isolated, pitch-black highways in the cabins of speed-freaked truckies. I watched for signs that suggested a psychotic serial killer, as if picking up on some signal would have helped me out there anyhow. I spent long hours on the side of the road waiting for rides, singing to myself, talking when I had a companion, sitting on my bag under the relentless sun. I slept overnight in the houses of locals who grew weirder by the hour. I relied on the kindness of strangers and was relieved when their kindness was uncomplicated.
Six months or so after Jeremy and I set out, I left for London, aged 16, with a suitcase of summer clothes and a few hundred dollars. I think back to that girl who left Sydney in the puce-pink EK station wagon and marvel. I marvel at her strength and will, at her foolhardiness, I marvel that no one stopped her doing what she did. And I marvel that she survived.♦