Australia Page 4
From crispyneurons
Sydney | Brisbane | Airlie, Whitsundays | Queensland Adventure | Townsville, Maggie | Cairns, Cape Trib | Return to Syndey
[edit] 9/19/99 10:25 AM, Harry's Corner, Airlie Beach (cont)
So off we went. His truck is a beat-up 20-year-old Toyota. All of the plastic panelling on the dashboard is smashed, if you touch the doors you get rusty, gritty dust on your hand, and the vinyl has cracks big enough that Craig stuck a feather into one. It has oversize wheels and smells like an old shoe dipped into gasoline. It was perfect for our road trip. This is the right way to bound through Australia, in a shitheap old truck. So we piled in and left Airlie Beach in this clattery, noisy old hulk.
We explored rural Queensland all day. We found a 2km trail to a secluded coral beach. We found highways that became reddish dirt roads. We found a herd of cows crossing the 'highway.' We found a dead brown snake, ran over by someone else. But maybe the best part was when we got to Proserpine. In Queensland, sugar cane is a major crop. In passing we spotted a bunch of people harvesting cane with hand tools, while a crowd under a tent watched. We pulled over for a closer look.
It turns out that Proserpine has a sugar cane farming cooperative. And today was some kind of festival, kind of like a country fair. When we arrived there was a cane harvesting competition in progress. Armed only with an implement that seemed to be designed along the principles of a machete or scythe, the goal was to cut down as much cane as you could in the alotted time. The contestants were all big brawny farmer types. Their arms were coated in some black substance (ash, from a previous field burning?), and they were obviously exhausted from the intensive manual labor. It sounds insane but watching these guys fight the clock with brute force and the will to power was spellbinding. Their harvesting technique reminded me of an archaeological trip I took as a high school student to Kampsville, Illinois. One of the tasks was to repair a thatch hut using only Middle Archaic technology. So the roof was made of thatch, and we had to harvest the thatch ourselves and build the roof. As an experiment, one student was given a scythe while the other ten used their bare hands to harvest the thatch. We found that the student with the scythe was as productive as the other ten combined. Now these Queensland farmers usually use mechanized harvesting machines that cost A$500,000 each. The profound productivity gains available with industrialization are pretty obvious.
The four of us found lunch under the big tent and look around. These people are so different from the young travellers in bathing suits and sandals at Airlie Beach, only 30km away from Proserpine. Hardly any Australians are to be seen in Airlie, but Proserpine's another story. This is a little farm town with no visible tourism and the glamor of a haystack. But it had it's own gritty authenticity that places like Airlie Beach totally lack. I took a picture of these two farmers, sweaty and covered with black dust. The guys wanted me to tell the farmers I was a photographer for the National Geographic, which seemed funny but also cruel. Later on there was a cane-stripping contest in which you grab a shoot of sugar cane by the end and strip off all the chaff with your bare hands. Some of those guys didn't bother with gloves and were only protected by their calluses.
So we departed and raced through the bush, hot wind blasting our faces. The tape player was roaring blues. It felt good. The next stop was Dingo Beach, which I thought was remarkably unremarkable. A local woman and her small daughter played on the shore. In a moment of weird clarity, all the historical vectors leading to their existence on this beach appeared in my mind's eye. Thirty thousand years ago, I'll bet an Aboriginal woman played with her daughter on this same beach. How many sad stories have never been told. I wish I knew them.
Julian was itching to get back into town before six, so we left. When we got in we split up but planned to get back together at Beaches around 6:30. But before that, I went back to the cabin. The cabin was full of this group of Americans studying marine biology in Townsville. They had come down for a week of partying mostly. I had briefly chatted with them all (there were 5 total, 3 guys, 2 girls) the night before, and we hit it off quickly. This night they invited me to hang out and have a beer with them, but as I had prior plans I had to beg off. I told them I'd be back after 7PM, after I'd had one last quiet beer with the guys before Julian left. Which I did. After that I came back to the cabin.
And I found them all still there, sitting on the porch. They offered me a beer and we talked. A possum showed up and we fed it food. They are amazingly tame and will eat food right from your hand. Then a cat came to get some free food. Then two geckos appeared. It was like some kind of Disney animation, all the cute woodland creatures came to play. We feed them beetroot, pizza, even beer. We found the possum could comsume beer out of a bottle cap pretty enthusiastically. After a while we got tired of feeding them so they all left. Then this 3 1/2 year old Italian kid named Andrea showed up. He was really hard to understand. He kept talking about monsters and sharks and he would giggle suddenly. No one could understand what the hell he was talking about but he was a riot, a little maniac. I'm not sure if he was precocious or what, but he kept finding really good excuses for dragging the girls back into the cabin with him. We taught him to fetch us beers from the fridge. He can pick up girls and knows about beer, so he's all set for college now.
Around that time these four Austrian girls joined the litte party. The others had met them the night before and they lived in the next door cabin. They were all really cute but one of them the one who sat next to me on the porch, was stunning. We talked for a while but she only knew a little English. She was blonde and tanned and wore these cute little gold-rim glasses.
Around 10 PM our whole group headed (at my suggestion) to Charlie's to go dancing. It was the same cover band as last night, probably the same band as every night. But that's OK because even if the songs were the same, they knew how to get the crowd to dance. We danced and danced, wildly. My hips are still sore today as I write this, my ears are still ringing too. At first it was fun. A bachelorette party showed up, all these girls in costumes, each carrying a dildo or something comparable. Nice touch. But as time passed I began to notice that the Austrian girls tended to dance more with each other than with the guys. Maybe they are shy? They other problem was this drunk guy near us who was dancing like an elephant. He crashed into me a dozen times. After a while I got pissed off enough to give him a hard shove away from me, but it had no effect. He just bounced back and crashed into me again. So I sat down for a drink. Then I got bored and left. I headed back to the cabin to sleep off the booze.
Which brings me to today. I've decided to depart for Magnetic Island tomorrow morning. That leaves me one last full day here. I've had a great week here. I've met a lot of great people and done some excellent partying. The beaches and sailing were so much fun. But it's time to move on. After a few days on Magenetic Island, I'll head to Cairns, and after that, back to Sydney to come home. I won't be going to Darwin. People tell me the weather is bad, and the city is packed full of the military and refugees from Timor. It would be wise to skip it, even though it might be interesting. But that's all in the future.
By the way: (AU) "Hundreds and Thousands" = (US) "Sprinkles."
Next page: Townsville and Magnetic Island...
