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Australia –CairnsBrisbaneSydneyB.T. Wilderbourne

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Darwin to Cairns- My Australian mate Dave is a salesman. He sells everything. He’ll sell you the dinner he’s eating right now, he even sells things he doesn’t actually own, like Darwin. He sold it to me when he said “Mate, Darwin’s the place to be in Winter. The sky’s always blue, the temperature’s always 30 degrees and the women are some of the best lookin’ in Australia”. “Piss sinkin weather, mate, piss sinkin weather”. Dave’s a wonderful Australian bastard. Anyway, he was right about the weather and the women but after about two months I was fired from my job in the dockyard and I decided to go eastward to Cairns. It’s a long hot trip from Darwin to Cairns and there’s not much in between except the oldest rocks in the world. I got a lift to Cairns in a golden range rover. The trip took eight days, it was hot, there was no air-conditioning and the seats were leather, Jesus, I can’t believe I knew that at the time and went anyway. The driver was a Dutchman who years previous had been the victim of an accident whereby the part of his brain responsible for humour, irony and a sense of casual relaxedness had been completely destroyed. His girlfriend was an Irish weasel with the genetics of a Galway gypsy circa 1973. I’m not a Nazi, if you met her you’d definitely agree that this is the most fitting one line description. I actually enjoyed the

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conversations we had because as soon as I realised that an occasional ‘yep’ and ‘no way’ was all that was required on my part. I could revert into fantasy land where I come up with ideas like the one for the laser beam measuring tape which I think has already been invented. The only other time I get to go there is when I see a really bad stage play with some fat guy bounding around the stage dressed as a Cossack and shouting ridiculous lines to no one in particular in a broad mid-Atlantic accent. I can shout in a broad mid-Atlantic accent, am I a stage actor? Also along for the ride was another Irishman who looked the way Tony Soprano would if he was born in Drimnagh and brought up on a diet of sausages and lard by an overbearing father with a quick temper and a massive knarled stick. Thank God he was there though, he was cool, had ‘Father Ted’ DVDs and a laptop and could do this hilarious thing with his knuckles. He was friends with the weasel but I believe we came to an unspoken arrangement that if anything went wrong she would be the first to die. However, in my mind ‘anything going wrong’ included mispronouncing several key words or running out of iced tea. Driving across that part of Australia is like driving across the moon on a really sunny day if it was brown.

Cairns- I spent about a month in Cairns. I stayed in a hostel named The Asylum.

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The Asylum is:Dirty,Run Down,Stinking,Cheap,Damp, Intended as an ironic name, but in fact not a misnomer as the underlying insanity exists not in the form wacky radio djs adhere to, rather in a more direct reference to the corrupted thought process of the people who decide to stay there. Owned and run by peculiars who may or may not be related, I never got to the bottom of that one. At best it’s one lady, her husband and his two brothers at worst it’s a psycho-sexual case study in incestual power play that would feature on an extremely depraved Belgian DVD, the likes of which your mum hopes she’ll never find under the space between your bottom drawer and the floor below.

If Darwin is a fat sunburned man in thongs and a wife beater vest holding a beer saying ‘nah fakkin warrys’ and staring off into the distance, then Cairns is a past-it old beer hag in a mini skirt trying to sell you a trip on ‘tha reef’ with a boatful of backpackers thinking this is what backpackers do and wondering how they spent all their money in six days.

It’s basically a big resort, that’s become very touristified in the last 10 - 15 years as far as I can gather. “Mate, I was

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here twelve years ago and you wouldn’t recognise...” one of my Australian mates started piping on. “look, we’re not doing that ‘I was here when..’ shit” I cut in before it was too late. I didn’t, but I have no regrets.

Having said that, the area surrounding the city is absolutely beautiful. The forty year old man who lives in my head and occasionally gets his way over the other four demanded that I go on a few rain forest walks and march around in the deep lush green vegetation surrounded by all sorts of magical birds and beasts who can’t believe they’re the biggest things there and they’ve got the run of the place. I also went north to cape tribulation that was well worth it too. He’s seldom wrong.

Soon after, I took a flight to Brisbane.Billy Connolly once said that if the world ever needs an enema Brisbane is where they’ll put the tube. I’ve personally had it to here with Billy, but I think he might have been on the money there. I didn’t know what to make of ‘Brizzy’. About the worst thing I could say about it was that it seemed pleasant and well maintained. I lasted four days and on the last day I saw a Chinese family having their photo taken in front of a Chinese restaurant by a Chinese woman in Chinatown , I was the only person who saw it and in a strange way it defied any definition. I’d had too much coffee and I decided that I’d seen everything I’d needed to see in Brisbane and left that night.

It was in Brisbane that I came closest to cracking and getting some work as a fruit picker. All backpackers

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consider it at least once and by all accounts it’s badly paid and miserable work. It is, however, considered a fantastic way to meet some of Australias most lethal spiders. It’s basically a trap that lures skint victims in with it’s promise of a honest days pay for an honest days hard work. It’s a fairly romantic notion. The reality requires the passage of approximately 10 years in order to vintage into a retrospective that makes it seem like it was an OK way to spend a month. Sydney - I knew I could get a job in Sydney and I had a few Aussie friends there so I returned and not long after got a job with the same company I worked for in Darwin . I worked in a place called Garden Island which is in the city and is where the naval boatyard is located. The boss seemed OK at first, when I started one of the first things he told me was “mate, I’m a cunt, the biggest cunt on the island, I have three rules; one don’t be late and two don’t bullshit me, look after me and I’ll look after you. The third one wasn’t so much a rule as a faux confidence building tool he’d learnt from an Anthony Robbins DVD because he’s too fucking lazy to read the book.

“The first time you fuck up - that’s OK”,The second time - ‘verbal warning’ I thought, “...that’s OK too” he says. The third time you make a mistake... ‘ you’re out on yer arse?’ I was sure, then he says “...that’s cool too, but after that you’re just getting sloppy and we

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need to talk”. He must have had some serious glue sniffers working there. The work itself can be tough especially in the heat of the Summer, about the best spin I could put on the really hard stuff is that it’s like being paid to do really hard exercise. Although sometimes ‘exercise’ is a stretch, one week I had to take a hammer and chisel into one of the rooms on the ship and spend the entire time chipping concrete off the floor, like a human fucking jackhammer. It was hot work and I was sweating like a pig, and not just any old pig, I was sweating like a particularly cocky ‘pig about town’ who’s suffering from a fever and who, in a confused state of delerium, has just accidentally wandered into his local butcher shop, the owner of which is quite low on stocks, very ruthless, very fast and possessed of a deep dislike of snooty pigs. You get the picture. I met some interesting types working in the naval yard. Every morning the boss would divide up the days work; some jobs were small enough to do alone and others were done by a team of two. Now, some days I would have to go and do a job with a fellow called Mitch, he was a nice guy, a bit old to be doing that sort of job in my opinion (he was in his his forties) but I suppose he was fit enough for it. He had some interesting stories as he’d worked in the merchant navy from an early age. As soon as I heard that I was instantly impressed. Many times, when reading the brief biographies of various authors whose books I did not subsequently read, I’d come across something like ‘the author had left home at the age of 16 to work on in the merchant navy...’ or ‘...joined the navy after both his parents were shot by retreating Italian troops’ or ‘ hunted in

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the Arctic before being torpedoed by the Germans in their first crack at world domination’. Jesus, the Germans tried TWICE, isn’t that something? If they try a third time they should be given a head start or something otherwise they’ll never get it. Anyway despite the fact that he produced his own body weight in sweat every day; Mitch was alright. Working alongside some of the other lads was often difficult as there was a permanent suspicion monitoring my every suggestion or idea. because they themselves often tried to get away with doing as little as possible they assumed everyone else did too.

So what developed was the insane situation where they wanted to do as little work as possible, passing the work onto others, while simultaneously appearing to do more than anyone else and at the same time being uncooperative for fear of someone else doing exactly what they were doing. The work was hard but the money was good and a month before Christmas I decided I needed a weeks holidays, unfortunately the boss isn’t the sort of person to give backpackers holidays so I invented a tale whereby I’m supposedly on a one week bender up along the coast in a fast car or something, anyway I said it to him in front of everyone and made it sound like the greatest road trip since the movie of the same name. He had no choice and told me I’d better bring him back a few pairs of girls knickers, as a trophy or something. I thought it was just

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serial rapists that did stuff like that but I said I would. He was sitting at his computer in his underwear looking up girls from the local brothel when he said it, I thought to myself ‘man, that’s got to be the low point of his day’.

Actually that ruse was probably unnecessarily detailed and as I left I wasn’t looking forward to the follow up lies; they’re the worst and I think he mentioned seeing some photos too. BT

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