LOOKING FOR AUSTRALIA Part 3

 I

I'm now heading east in my planned curcuit of the south eastern Australian mainland back in the coastal belt where the great majority of Australians live and it's obvious why they've never wanted to leave it. The scenery I'm seeing through my visor is a 3D artistic rendering as though by a god. It's the most spectacular I've seen since a visit to New Zealand some years previously. (The Kiwis have to have something going for them beside the All Blacks.)

Y

I slow down and lift my bug-spattered visor to get a better look. An extensive paint box has been used in the production: the fawn, grassy hills contrasting against hills coated in dark green foliage while the bright, spinach green of agricultural fields in the lowlands drink in the sun. To my right the the sapphire blue Indian Ocean glistens with bouncing sunlight. Between rocky outcrops almost as old as the planet itself, slivers of golden beaches try to hide. In this kind of environment it's common for me to be lured into a kind of mind-game in which I try to comprehend time spans in which  waves pound against timeless rock ad infinitum, and just as commonly this time, I feel it doing my head in.
I hug the coast all the way down Fleurieu Peninsula to Cape Jervis. There I descend to the terminal where cars are parked, waiting for the Sealink ferry that will transport them and their drivers and passengers to Kangaroo Island which I've already spotted draped almost mirage-like along the horizon. I've only learned recently it is much bigger than I imagined - around 170 kilometers in length.

Although mine is one of the first vehicles in the three lines waiting to board, after the Ferry has arrived, swung around, backed in and dropped its huge rear door, I'm about the last to get the signal to ride aboard. It hasn't been all that comfortable waiting under a merciless sun but I understand the need for a well organised, almost choreographed vehicular loading I'm finally rewarded with a private niche where my bike is secured by ropes to the handlebars.

It's not long after casting off that I fully appreciate the need to secure my bike against falling over. The three quarter hour crossing is as rough as guts. I try not to grin while watching fellow passengers  moving about the rear deck as laughably as comedians impersonating drunks and girls impersonating Marilyn Monroe trying to keep their dresses from blowing up around their heads in the brisk sea breeze.

At the the terminal at other end of the short trip, the first thing that strikes me is the colour of the water in the bay of the tiny town of Penneshaw where we dock. It's coloured an almost impossible turquoise. It's the same startling gem colour I will see again in most the bays around the island. The hills of the mainland rising out of the sea cause an odd feeling for a landlubber like myself looking back at my country without actually leaving it.

After the morning's ride, waiting in the sun and the sea voyage, however brief, I don't feel like going any further today so ride into the yard of a small hostel I've been told is good value - in other words, cheap. Being a habitual Scrooge regarding spending on accommodation, this appeals to me. Curiously, at the very bottom of Australia, I find two Chinese girls in charge. They both have the smiley, doll-like quality I'm often disarmed by in Asian girls. When I ask which one is the boss they both giggle and tell me the boss, the man who owns the place, is not here at the moment. It turns out the girls are in Australia on student visas and are working for accommodation in lieu of pay. I compliment them both on their English. They both giggle again and tell me that English is their major and that they are here to improve it.

They tell me I can sleep in the dorm for a modest tariff or in a private room not much bigger than a bed for ten dollars extra. For me, privacy trumps confined space so it's an easy decision to make and I begin filling the room up with some of my gear.

I've plenty of afternoon left so I begin exploring the small town on foot. Fortuitously, I discover the Penneshaw Maritime and Folk Museum which is only open from two till five. It's located in what was once the Hog Bay (former name of Peneshaw) Public School which operated from 1869 till 1967. The yard outside is littered with rusting machinery. There's nobody inside except the man who runs the place and his daughter who I can hear before I see her taking part in a spelling lesson given by her father. I hadn't expected to stay long but the man takes me under his wing and provides me with a guided tour. His obvious passion for the history of the island is infectious and I'm still in the place a half hour after closing time notwithstanding the impish daughter's not so subtle hints about
locking up and going home for "tea".

  

I'm surprised to learn that the island was inhabited by whites even before Adelaide or the South Australian colony was even thought of, the Aborigines mysteriously abandoning the place some five thousand years earlier.  Females of the race only come back somewhat unwillingly as the mistresses of the wild white men, apparently including such no-frill types as sealers, whalers, escaped convicts, maniacs and assorted oddballs. Marx's former mate Bakunin, if he had known about it, would no doubt have been enraptured with the pure anarchy of the place. When it was decided by the bigwigs back in the old dart to found a colony on the south coast of the continent, it was on Kangaroo Island that the pioneering organisers planned their strategy and from where they launched their ships towards where Adelaide would materialise. To be a fly on the wall to observe how these upper crust Englishmen gentlemen interacted with the locals would have been a rare treat.

Another surprise for me is the number of ships coming to grief on the island - sixty since 1847, and some with tragically high loss of life. It's a reminder of how dangerous life could be (before our own safe-space era with rubber matting instead of naked earth in children's playgrounds) especially aboard ships

Y

Bright and early the next morning I'm off to explore the rest of the island. Tastefully blended into the environment with good, clean facilities are camping areas thoughtfully placed around the island. My plan, if it can be called that, is to simply camp wherever takes my fancy. It's not long before this happens. It's one of the turquoise bays, this one named Vivonne Bay where an extra long jetty jutting out into the sea gives a clue about the radiant colour of the water. It must have something to do with the extended shallowness of the shoals. From high above where I am on the bitumen road, a red brown, gravel-strewn dirt road leads down to the jetty and assorted seaside paraphernalia. As I expected, my bike is skittish, sometimes causing heart in mouth reactions all the way down. I seriously do not want to drop the bike. From personal experience, there is probably more than a fifty per cent chance of damage ensuing, usually only slight such as a busted brake or clutch lever or removed gear shift but enough to render the bike unfit for duty and in such a location it's highly improbable that spare parts are readily available.

THE JETTY AT VIVONNE BAY

I've only just whacked in the last tent peg when a man looking to be retiree age walks over to me to talk motor bikes evidently with memories bubbling up from a long time ago. I can see a woman who I assume to be his wife in the background cooking on the barbecue in the open sided dining room. She's beaming at me, perhaps grateful for the break from her husband.

Throughout my journey so far, wherever I've been I've tried to tease out from people their views on mass immigration and multiculturalism. It's sometimes a delicate operation as people have learnt well by now their freedom of expression goes only so far. I usually unlock this verbal log-jam by hinting at my own views on the subjects. Once it's realised they are on safe ground, that we are sympatico, there's hardly any stopping them. Without exception, they are angry, upset, stunned, saddened by what is happening to their country. One feels the pain involved in their struggle to understand why.
However sometimes, as with my new acquaintance, the process is sharply abridged by his simply shifting his attention from my bike to asking where I'm from. When I tell him Sydney, that's all it takes. He feels sympathy for me. Lived there once himself - couldn't take it. Got tired of playing "spot the Aussie". He's really gathering a head of steam. "It's the politicians. They should all be burnt at the stake." When I suggest this might be going a tad too far he doesn't think so. However, he's much happier since he got the hell out of there.

This to me, is a huge problem. And it's common. Australians living outside of Sydney and Melbourne, the new Sodom and Gomorrah, appear to think that the problems defined so well in those cities will be contained therein, that as long as they distance themselves from those fallen metropolises, their lives will remain untouched, that the cancer will not spread, that it is not their problem. They seem incapable of conceiving that, just like the inexorable march of the cane toads from Queensland, it comes for them also - eventually and inevitably.

Back on the road again, I'm beginning to sort out my impressions of the island. The main impression is one of long roads through drab bush punctuated by scenes of hard-hitting beauty. I'm trying to resist the thought that the island may just be a fraction overrated. If it is, it's understandable as apart from tourism, it has no way of making money. However, there's no arguing with the fact that for one fascinated by exotic wildlife, this would be fauna fiesta. But me? Well, let's just say my policy has always been that if you leave the wildlife alone, it will leave you alone. I have to admit though that seeing seals frolicking in a natural habitat was worth seeing.


 For me, the value of the island is something more intangible. It has its own rhythm and ambience and engenders a sense of semi isolation - understandable of course. I suppose cops exist on the island but I haven't seen one. It could be my imagination, but I think I detect a lingering of the anarchic ways of the original wild men. And naturally the added bonus is, apart from foreign tourists and girls on student visas, I feel, even though they are strangers, I'm among my own kind - just like outside of the cities on the mainland.

My next  camp is at a place named American River, so named because it was where American whalers once based themselves and they thought it was a river, rather than, as closer inspection would have revealed, an inlet. Remarkably, these resourceful men built their own schooner from what was at hand and, not so remarkably, named it Independence. On the way I pass through Kingscote which just pips Penneshaw as being most like a town, even boasting a luxury hotel on the seafront. All the other settlements I've seen would barely rate as villages but quaint and relaxed.

Y

Back in Penneshaw I succeed in securing once again my monk's cell at the hostel. A soft bed however makes everthing right with the world. In the morning when I'm about to ride down to the ferry terminal for the return trip, after all the care taken on treacherous roads, I blow it. The bike's stalled at the hostel entrance. I pull the choke out and hit the starter again - thinking the bike's in neutral. It's not. It leaps forward and hurls me sideways into hedge. I'm like a surgeon in a war-zone, checking for damage lightening fast. Thank Christ! I've caught a break. There is none. It's only then that I become aware of a warm wetness in my left sock. I pull my jeans up a few inches to see that it is soaked with blood. I've managed to strip a few inches of skin from my shin.

The one and only pharmacy doesn't open till ten - typically anarchic - so I buy bandage and tape from the local IAG, doctor myself and then ride slowly to where I was going before being so rudely interrupted - mentally kicking myself in the arse, but at the same time relieved I've been spared a worse outcome.

To be continued