I mount my metal steed, leave the multicultural zoo, otherwise known as Sydney and go looking for Australia (respectful nod to Easy Rider).
It's just after sunrise, my naive thinking being that I can avoid the punishing peak-hour rush but it seems I get caught in the rush to beat the rush. It's almost an hour of accelerating and braking before I reach the freeway leading west out of the city. Here at last I can open the Bonneville out and get acquainted to what will be the soundtrack of the trip: the howl of the engine being drowned out by the hiss and roar of the gale-force wind I'm creating by slashing through the atmosphere. The buffeting I'm getting from the turbulence will be my constant companion. (Note to self: get windshield.)
With the sun at my back, I'm soon climbing into the Blue Mountains. Although it's early summer, the wind-chill is combining with the cooler altitude to having me thinking I've ridden back into winter. I'm wishing I'd brought along something more substantial than the thin cashmere jumper I'm wearing under my jacket.
The huge Carrington Hotel dominates Katoomba. It's a time-capsule from the century before last when it was a summer retreat for members of the more affluent classes wanting to escape the sultriness of Sydney. I don't stop here though. I haven't gone far enough. I feel I haven't yet escaped the gravitational pull of the great city behind me. I'm unsure of how many people now live in the mountains and commute to the city but I suspect it must be in the thousands. In an effort to beat the system, they've bought real estate here, the equivalent of which in Sydney is every day more unaffordable, they however spend probably as much as they've saved in toll charges and fuel bills or crippling rail fares, not to mention the countless hours lost in mind-numbing travel. Back and forth they go like the drones in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. This is the new working poor but they will one day own their own homes - and pay off the interests on their loans. That is, if they don't stumble along the way and have their bank foreclose on them.
I spur my machine onwards. It's warmer now on the plains on the other side of the mountains but loosening up my hands from their bunched positions is like prying open a death-grip. Towns I've been in before - Lithgow, Bathurst, Dubbo - for which I slow down to the required speed limit and consequently feel as though I'm hardly moving, I don't dally in. Except for fuel and coffee I keep moving. The pace of my departure has been like an escape, which in a way it is.
When my body and mind tells me I've done enough riding for the day I'm in the town of Nyngan. For me, this is virgin territory. Nyngan, Cobar, Wilcannia are just names I've heard in weather reports. Nyngan is dry enough for me to know I'm on the edge of the outback. It's a small town, neat but tired looking and I can imagine it lying prostrate in the full blast of summer.
A local tells me I should think twice about trying to reach Broken Hill in one hit but I'm still eager as a pup and I just want to move. Besides, I've just recently seen a woeful remake of the film Wake in Fright whose only redeeming quality was the locale in which it was shot, which is Broken Hill. Peculiarly, I'm keen to be alone in that kind of scorched, despair inducing landscape.
I'm grateful for daylight saving because I roll into Broken Hill with sunlight to spare. I'm now well and truly into the scrub. On this leg of the trip, the geography has changed markedly as it would on most other legs. From patches of green grass giving way to a uniform, dried out fawn colour and decent sized gums providing splashes of shade becoming sparser until they bid me farewell, tough looking stunted excuses for trees stood in their stead until they too gave out leaving only mean, low lying scrub. This also became sparser still till equalled in surface area by baked, naked dirt. I'd entered red sand, Mad Max country. I wonder if this ever would have become white men's country if it hadn't been for the fabulous wealth waiting to be dug out of the ground. I marvel at how Aborigines would have been able to not only subsist but do quite well in this kind of country. I've been reading Geoffrey Blayney's Triumph of the Nomads and have developed a new appreciation of the ingenuity and logic of Aboriginal hunter and gatherer tribal life. It is truly sad that it has been trampled under the march of time but if any villain of the piece can be truly identified it would have to be historical inevitability.
For most parts the Barrier Highway had been rifle barrel straight with only gentle undulations providing the only variety. The stench of decomposing road kill has been so constant I imagine I can still smell it as though my clothing has absorbed it. So much death. I'd been scared of causing even more of it. Hitting a kangaroo on a bike travelling at high speed can't end well - either for the kangaroo or the bike rider. The consternation however never lasted long and spurred along by a featureless landscape engendering the surreal feeling of riding furiously on a treadmill and going nowhere fast, I would soon be gunning the bike again toward somewhere.
Belting in the pegs, I pitch my tent on hard but sandy dirt that almost immediately begins finding its way inside like some living thing seeking shelter, then I begin my introductory exploration of Broken Hill at the foot of a blazing sunset. I've travelled one thousand kilometres through space but decades through time to an Australia I knew when I was young - an Australia, oddly enough, consisting of Australians, before it was decided we were a "country of immigrants". Each time I visit the country from the uncaring city I have to adjust to its natural friendliness. So again, I'm taken aback by being greeted by complete strangers. But reorientation doesn't take long and I quickly begin to feel comfortable. It's almost like being amongst family - people I instinctively understand and who understand me. We are bound together by so much: history, heritage, values, language, accent, sense of humour, basic trust, view of the world and, most of all, by the thin red thread.
The next day my exploration is more complete. This is a solid, upstanding community, an isolated island of civilization surrounded by a vast desert but hardly lacking in mod cons. I'm in fact so taken in by its modernity that in the evening I will exhibit my city slickness by asking in a cinema how many theatres it holds. "Only one," is the dour reply that brings me straight back down to earth. Some confusion then arises about the starting time of the one film. It's here that I find I'm now on South Australian time. Makes sense but seems somehow disloyal to the home state.
Looking for the tourist information office, I pass an ornate, seemingly freshly painted building solid enough to be a fortress. Across arched entrances, right across the front of the building are painted the words, TRADES HALL. This is a reminder of the power the working class once held in this country, of a time when Australia was known as the "working man's paradise". The building I stand in front of represents the peak of power and unity attained by class warriors before apathy and complacency set in, enterprise bargaining, by which trading off rights took the place of winning new ones, was agreed to and the long, slow slide back into the maw of laissez faire capitalism began, its worst stench coming from union leaders doing deals with employers behind the backs of the rank and file. (Not mentioning any names here Bill.) The building is still owned by a combination of unions but is now little more than a hollow shell.
Not long after, I'm stopped in my tracks by a similarly ornate building, the bronze plaque on its cornerstone advertising that it was opened by Sir Henry Parkes, a man who if alive today would tower over our present Lilliputians in parliament like a political Gulliver. Here was a man amongst similarly extraordinary men who wrestled with issue no less great than the birth of a nation. The great issue of our time? Homosexual marriage.
To be continued
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