Writer on the Road, Blog # 3

Time seems to always be against us when we are in our regular routines; there is never enough time to talk to strangers, to sleep in, or to simply sit down and watch the world wander by. Why do we torture ourselves like this? As modern day martyrs we believe that sacrificing pleasures for organisational measures is the right way to live. It is the sensible way whereby we will be eventually rewarded with the rest we deserve.

Is this not naive?

I have realised that whilst living out of a van I have more than enough to get by (except a toilet). I have realised that we surround ourselves with such excesses that we cannot see above or around them. We are missing out on the amazing view that is sitting around the corner, in our own garden! Even The Beatles discovered the octopus in their garden!

But, luckily, I didn’t disover an octopus amongst the beauty of the seventy-four Whitsunday Islands…

It was early Monday morning in the final week of our roadie that we boarded The Voyager, which sounds more like a convict ship from the First Fleet than a relaxing day-cruiser. Thanks to a friendly bloke at Airlie Beach Tribal Travel, we had found a last minute deal. By water we were transported to another world, where everything was so fresh, so white and so blue with a few eccentric tinges of green. The ocean was incredibly clear- so clear in fact that it seemed as if your whole life would suddenly become cleaner if you just jumped in.

I was living the dream, which is apparently what you do at Daydream Island. I collected romantically shaped coral and George almost waded into a public pool that had a three-finned shark leisurely gliding through it. We met a mermaid made of stone and a janitor, who advised us to take the ‘stairway to heaven’, which turned out to be a steep climb through some muddy rainforest that just happened to be next to a Chapel. Classic janitor.

Hook Island offered fish-feeding and a glass-bottom boat, which gave us the opportunity to meet a massive, blue-lipped cod fish that dwarfed its surroundings. A backward waddle into the water began our snorkelling session into a world of muffled snorting, heavy breathing and finger pointing (no innuendo intended). We could hold our breath and dive down a metre or two where the brain coral and angel hair appeared, fish flirting in between and sliding past our skin. It took my breath away, so much so that I had to resurface and gasp for more. We spent the afternoon on Whitehaven Beach ; silica white sand leading into pure ocean; looked like a clean slice of melon. A slice of paradise. What an exhilarating feeling I had at that moment- to be a visitor on one of the worlds few uninhabited beaches. In my naivety I wished that the day wouldn’t end and prayed that we could stay and spend time at the other seventy-one islands. Before I had even reached Amen, we were trudging back to the van, ready for the road.

We drove as much as we could into the night until eventually stopping for sleep beside another Jucy van at a lonely petrol station somewhere in between Airlie Beach and Rockhampton.

***

This length of the trip has helped me honour the fact that nothing is beautiful without a price. Behind the fancy mask of a model lays hours of effort. A neatly trimmed hedge makes a green sting on the gardener’s knees. No idyllic destination sits there waiting for its guests to arrive and remains the same once they have left. Rather it takes a lot of dedicated conservationists and volunteers to maintain the prestige of sites such as Australia’s Whitsunday Islands, and I can only say that it is a shame that the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef is out of their control.

***

The stig within slid on its helmet and slammed on the accelerator taking us over 1000 kms in a single day. We needed to make up some miles south and the Jucy van was up for it. On the way, the Dreamtime Centre at Rockhampton offered an interesting window of insight into indigenous culture. I learnt more about Torres Strait Islanders on the tour than I ever did at school and the guides seemed genuinely passionate about their culture. George witnessed his first live didgeridoo performance and I misaimed a boomerang into a tree.

Our inner engine shut down at Maryborough for the night beside a football field.

The ball started rolling quite early the following morning, as we wanted to visit Eumundi Markets- one of the best in Oz. It was a glorified gathering of all inland artisans and eccentrics. We met an Australian man who told us stories of his years spent in Arnham Land, up north with the Aborigines, and an Irish man who thought it a good idea that George and I buy rings. Our travelling taste buds ate free samples of macadamias, popcorn and banana smoothie as we tried to comprehend the size of the markets and locate the exit.

Further south in the coastal suburb of Maroochydore we cooked a steak stir-fry on the public park bbqs and were joined by two chunky dogs, who wanted their share. Two friendly ‘outdoor men’ swigged happily from their silver bladder and cooed for the dogs.

***

Day 18 started with a wedgie. White Water World on the Gold Coast was calling for attention. Australians love getting wet and this visit must be considered as research into…the local leisure culture. Yes, that sounds legitimate. After driving for days it felt right to don our cozzies and get splashing. Whilst still dry and excited, we had climbed the stairs to the first ride, THE WEDGIE, it read. I remember wondering curiously whether this name was at all literal. I made George step into the pod first. He stood there behind the closed door, vertical, staring into my eyes helplessly through the glass as the ride counted down…3..2..1…and the trapdoor floor released him onto the slide. I stepped in for my turn, trying to comprehend how a human body can drop onto a water slide without injury and then in 10 seconds it was all over. My swimmers were up my ass and I was wet. What a ride.

At 230 metres above sea level, my Queensland family, George and myself viewed the city of Surfers Paradise from the tallest building in Australia- QDeck. By night it looked like a colourful blanket of fairy lights had fallen on the coast. We later visited an Irish Pub off Caville Avenue and witnessed the young, weekend drinking population slowly emerge.

***

We followed the windy inland roads to Nimbin, past Mt Warning, whose jagged peak was disappearing into the clouds, past precariously placed rock towers, past a crossing echidna (luckily not over it) until arriving in early evening smog. In Nimbin, it was the dreadlocked population that emerged, from age sixteen to sixty. The annual Mardi Grass festival had gone off with a bong and offered live reggae music, bonfires and quirky stalls galore all weekend. The festival seemed to represent a joint effort at peacefully campaigning for the legalization of hemp. It was pot luck that we arrived during such celebrations…

The epic north trip was then trickling to a stop – on our last day we began in Bellingen, a humble country town that hosts monthly markets, which we missed. We did manage to locate coffee and cake though before driving onwards to Urunga. We visited a massive bee hive that sold honey wine but no honeycomb and to our horror we discovered a dolls museum out the back…the sort of dolls that follow you with their eyes and probably know Chucky on a first name basis.

Rolling into Nambucca Heads, armed with acrylic paints, we picked a random rock on the V Wall and painted it glorious green. This was our way of commemorating the road trip at this point, a sort of tiny piece of time and space that will last long after the ignition turns off.

***

The Two Lucys travel blogs will follow her journey even further down under…coming soon!

As you all know this month’s theme is ‘Are you Alone?’ We’ve been receiving some great submissions for our second Quarterly Anthology, so keep them coming. For those of you waiting with baited breath for our first Quarterly Anthology, I can let you all know that I managed to get a sneak peak today and it looks amazing—I hope you’re all excited!

Portal would also like to congratulate our May Contributor of the Month, Dora Hawk. We hope you’ll all read some of Dora’s many great contributions and leave her your comments in the weeks to come. We want these monthly features to give our young Portal contributors the exposure and recognition they deserve, and we’re currently deliberating over who should be our feature contributor for June. So if you’re working on something provocative and inspiring, now is the time to submit!

Just as Portal exists to promote the interests and professional development of young writers, so too does the Emerging Writers Festival, which is currently in full swing in Melbourne. Regrettably—being as our office is located in Sydney—no one in the Vibewire team has been lucky enough to attend (although we’re loving TwitterFEST). So if you have we’d love to hear about it. Write us a review of an event/s you attended or profile the festival as a whole and send it to editor@vibewire.org

Speaking of reviews, have you been to see a great movie lately? Have you been to an awesome gig or read an inspiring book? Does it relate to this month’s theme? Well if you have and if it does, why not review it and send it in to us. If we like what we read, and if the rest of our Vibewire community do too, we just might ask you to be one of our resident reviewers. As one of our resident reviewers, you will be the first port of call should any exciting new books, CDs, or tickets fall into our hot little Portal hands.

If it’s free stuff you’re after, entries are still open for our Sydney Film Festival Competition. To celebrate the 57th annual Sydney Film Festival, Vibewire is offering contributors the chance to win one of five double passes to a marathon screening of this year’s finalists in the Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films on Sunday the 13th June. All you have to do is send us a short (less than 200 words) review of your favourite film. It’s that easy! Send your submissions to editor@vibewire.org using the subject line: SFF Competition – Your Name

Not a movie buff? Is sport more your scene? Well if you’ve been waiting for an opportunity to combine your love for cricket and talent for poetry, this competition could be for you. Run in conjunction with the Cricket Art Prize, the Cricket Poetry Award is currently inviting poets who are 18 years old or over to submit a poem celebrating aspects of life in and around the game and sport of cricket. The judges will be looking for poems that “use cricket as the vehicle to unsettle preconceptions, generate new ideas and consider our contemporary culture.” The award promises the winning poet $2000, and the top twenty poems international exposure.

Hopefully I have used this editorial as a vehicle to consider the importance of transitions in contemporary writing. Whether you’re a creative or journalistic writer, clean transitions are important for pace, cohesion and to flag connections between ideas (unless of course you’re avoiding transitions to purposefully create a disjointed, fragmented effect). For editors and writers alike, transitional sentences can be a source of much frustration, but when you get them right they give the work a fluidity and rhythm that will put yours above the rest.

How did I do?

Main page image November Autumn Leaf courtesy of yago1.com @ Flickr.com

Writer on the Road,  Blog # 2

The Queensland state border was in sight. After one week of travel we were about to cross into a different world; a world where u-turns are legal, parking attendants wear gold bikinis and cane toads litter the road…

***

The Jucy campervan, that George and myself are living out of, boasts window views of every kind – park, city, beach, forest, lake and sea – enough to make the ordinary house-dweller green with envy.  At the end of our first week driving up the east coast, we found ourselves eating gnocchi at Tweed Heads lookout, admiring the jagged cityscape that sat smugly before us on the horizon. It was the Gold Coast, teasing us to come closer.

It was within Queensland’s Dreamworld that I reunited with my inner child. The Claw, Tower of Terror, Cyclone and Giant Drop are now names synonymous with fun in my mind.

George however discovered The Wipeout offers free, post-ride, dry-retching sessions. The Bengal tigers of the park climbed modestly sized trees, whilst I climbed well above the canopy of the surrounding bushland and free fell 120 metres in a few seconds. The journey back to my kid years ended with a trip to Brisbane’s Southbank.

Whilst warming our corn soup on a public barbeque, we were greeted by two large antennae that suddenly poked out. I continued to stir the soup, which I was increasingly losing my appetite for, as George lured out the creature and beheaded it. In such classy surroundings, with boutique shops and cafés, an artificial lagoon, jasmine climber plants and a brilliant view of night-time Brisbane, it seemed ironic that we were watching a headless cockroach run around while forcing ourselves to eat half-heated, chunky soup. A tasty chapter in our life outdoors.

As a bug-related side note, the Queensland Museum offers an amazing exhibit on the Butterfly Man of Kuranda, Frederick Parkhurst Dodd. He found a unique way to fuse art and science through his intricate displays of insects, including the incredible sausage moth.

The next day our feet traveled into the CBD where we were rained on in the Botanical Gardens, led to believe we were in Mary MacKillop’s mausoleum and discovered a Sushi shop with a lunchtime line over 100 metres long. Brisbane was indeed a flavoursome city, marking the half way point on our northern drive.

The sleepy inland town of Nambour became our pillow-stop for the night. We sheltered from the sudden downpour by staying in the warmth and safety of the Jucy van, which was almost camouflaged in the green surroundings of Nambour National Park. Overnight a white-rapid river and a waterfall formed nearby our van. This was another moment on my trip when I was reminded of the amazing journey that I was on, with a gushing waterfall as my alarm clock! The Nambour downpour had broken the shy river’s boundaries, an illustration of the breathtaking brilliance of my own backyard!

The van rolled us past the Big Pineapple, where we embarrassingly realized that pineapples grow out of the ground and not off trees. Has anyone else always had that impression?!

The Australian Nougat Company provided us with a bag of fresh off-cuts for a price that would make retailers blush.

Noosa then brought us back to the coast. It was posh and pretty and offered the legend of Betty- a woman who once sold $1 burgers from her trailer. A planned kayak session created a chance meeting between myself and Betty, who has since retired but still lives locally. It has been just over a year since I knocked my knee out kayaking in Scotland, so it was time to face the pointy boat of pain.

Paddling through Noosa National Park exposed us to wild eagles, sting rays, heron, crabs, mangrove tunnels and flying fish. George almost lost his leg in a sink hole and after five hours on the go I almost lost my will to paddle. Seeing the country by river rather than road was exhaustingly awesome.

Most of us are familiar with Bundaberg rum, sugar and ginger beer. But what about their birthplace? We visited Bundaberg, a church-crowded country town whose architecture is somewhat Romanesque with a scattered modern vibe. The place to go for curious minds is the BRAG, which offered a sand pit filled with sugar, a transparent mop and an embroidered quilt commemorating Sydney, or condemning it, I can’t decide which. 

Further north we found Agnes Water and the Town of Seventeen Seventy. Yes, this is an actual place, which was the second spot that Captain Cook came ashore before Australian settlement! There are no waves at 1770, only quiet shores and hundreds of flirtatious butterflies. Watching the sun set along Bustard Bay at 1770 was almost as delicious as the fresh fish fillets we fried in the park for dinner. And for dessert? We appropriately enjoyed a Bundy and coke at the local pub.

We heard rumours of the ‘death road’ that follows on north after Rockhampton, but dismissed this title as childish and an obvious exaggeration. But the rumours were confirmed by a local Rocky tourist guide, who told us terrible tales of the length of the road and how it sometimes seems like it will never end. We took her warning with a grain of salt (and a Rockhampton steak) and hit the road for a six hour drive to Airlie Beach . . .

The only deaths that occurred on that drive were the hundreds of cane toads that popped beneath the wrath of our wheels. The toads seem to be able to outlast any potential predators in this country but still haven’t learnt to not hop on the road. There literally was nothing in sight for hours. Just the thin, white streaks in the middle of the road and the dreary drone of the radio.

Trees, truck, toad. Trees. Truck . . . truck. . . toad.

A few hundred toads later, we arrived at Airlie Beach in the AM. The Jucy van had covered over 800 kilometres in a day and needed a rest just as much as we did. In the humidity and silence of the seaside we slept, knowing that we had now reached our most northerly destination- the portal to the Whitsunday Islands.

This achievement was short-lived as my next adventure sprung to mind.

I wanted my dream of exploring the Great Barrier Reef to become a reality. I wanted to see the World Heritage site, an endangered area said to become extinct in just under a decade. But I was traveling on a limited budget, and with only one week to go before we had to be back in Sydney, would there be enough time?

To find out whether Whitney & George swam with fish or missed out on a coral dip,

      jump to the next Writer on the Road blog, available NOW!

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Sophie said love didn’t exist. She said people were machines with mechanical reflexes, that everyone was only driven by genetic predispositions, and that life was a chronic joke told by an old white guy with blurry glasses. I told her she was a fool. Life wasn’t the same as baking. There was no recipe.

Sophie would sit by the window with her knees to her chest. She sipped tea from a teapot that I bought. Staring at the outline of the tea factory on the other side of the bay, she sketched the people as they ran past with their dogs. I trudged into the room, my boots crushing the crumpled paper scattered on redwood floor. She hummed a tune, not turning around as she said, “There’s a new show on at the theatre tomorrow.”

On Sophie’s wall, were cut-outs from magazines, photographs of people that she’d never met, bits of material that she thought would look nice if she hanged them. She was about pretty things. A coat stand in a corner of her room, a bird cage hanging from the ceiling, books on the floor, books that threatened to spill from the tops of wardrobes and shelves, and books that peeked out from under her bed. Old things, broken things, furnished with the new, crisp, colourful, ostentatious and luxuriant, these were things she found beautiful.

“We should watch it.” I dropped down to the floor, beside an open copy of The Zurau Aphorisms. “When did you start reading Kafka?”

She turned around with an open tooth smile.

I held the book in my hand, 138 pages in length, and flipped through it, reading the little notes she made besides the aphorisms. “There is a destination,” I read aloud, “but no way there; what we refer to as way is hesitation.” She watched me read. And I read it all. Not the words that Kafka had written. Not the words that she had written, but the curls that ended each letter, the dots after each sentence, the commas that preceded each pause. I continued, “To suppress nature, to keep a deep longing at the bottom of your heart at the expense of your own happiness to guarantee another’s happiness, to suppress what is natural in order to uphold the real, is to live in death.” I raised a brow at her.

She smiled, “From a certain point on, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.”

“Why don’t you write about happy things? Like bunnies.”

“I like bunnies. They’re cute. I like things that happen naturally. Like when you cut a cake in equal parts and there’s enough for everyone.”

“There’s nothing natural about your obsession with death.”

Sophie clapped her hands as she threw her head back in laughter. Her orange hair sat in a high ponytail. Her blue eyes rimmed with thick black eyeliner and bright purple eyeshadow. Her fingers red from the hot water she used to wash her hands. Her fingernails cut too close to the skin. Her lithe figure hid in an oversized purple cardigan that she stole from her grandmother’s attic.

“Death is what gives life meaning.”

“Where do you get these from?” I threw the book over my shoulder. “All you do is sit in front of that window everyday with your blanket.”

“Just think how many thoughts a blanket smothers while one lies alone in bed, and how many unhappy dreams it keeps warm.”

“You know just because you read one book, on aphorisms, of all things”, I rose to my feet, “doesn’t make you Kafka.”

“Is that my jacket you’re wearing?”

I look down at the leather jacket, “Maybe,” I reply.

“Who’s the lucky guy?”

“Who said there’s a guy?”

“You’re going on a date, aren’t you?” She made her way towards me, a lace flower in her hand. She was unsteady on her feet. The quilt I made of Beatrix Potter’s little critters fell to the floor. I rushed forward, cradling her in my arms.

“Let me go.”

I refused.

“Let go Abby.” Her voice stern, her back stiff.

I reluctantly let her go. She tucked the lace flower behind my ear. I felt a gentle slap on my cheek, her version of a punishment.

“You can tell me all about him tonight.” She fell back onto the chair. Her hands clawed at the blanket, covering her bruised legs. “And I want juicy stories. No romantic diatribes. It’s just a date. You’re not marrying the guy.”

“And what if I am?”

“Don’t marry someone because you think you can’t live without him.”

“Because love is just a chemical reaction that my somatic functions produce when my neurosis recognises another with similar patterns?”

“No,” she beamed, “because you don’t need someone else to make you feel complete. There’s still hope-”

“-But not for us. You’ll die. You’ll leave me. And even if I never learn to love him. I’ll learn to want him. And I’d rather have and not need than need and not have. I’m late. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I kissed her on the forehead.

“Sure.”

I didn’t hear the maybe under her breath.

When they lowered the box into the ground, Sophie’s mum fell to the same soil that would cover her daughter’s remains. Her tears mixed with mascara and powder and snot. Hideous, I thought. Her daughter would have been ashamed. At least wear waterproof, I scoffed. Sophie always said, don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly. She was only quoting Kafka. She only repeated what she had read, but she believed in it. Her obsession, her regrets, her dreams, each one had been beautiful. She understood life, because she knew but never feared that one day we all have to stop.

As a child of autumn,

Brothers raining muck from the rooves,

He’d skitter along the tiles,

Sorting through loamy darkness,

For the prettiest gum-leaves.

Long sickles of buried lucre,

Flashes of sunset, lime, rose and gold,

These he’d pile or pocket when the wind blew,

Forget them and find them again ;

They lay in wait for him like ribbons –

Won then lost and won again.

At sixty-six,

Both brothers buried,

He’d retained that love and grown another;

They’d lain together forty years that autumn.

As the sun slid over the eves one evening,

She’ d found him,

Crumpled at the bottom rung,

Smiling not breathing,

Clutching the four coloured ribbons he’d won for her that day.