This is a true story, and even the made-up parts deserve to be true.
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( At some stage , probably seeking relief from the frenetic London lifestyle, PETE STEEDMAN and JULIE REITER set out on an overland trip to Morocco with architect PETER BURLEIGH , who had drawn cartoons for Broadside magazine back in Melbourne. Burleigh, in the Mother Country intent on becoming as famous as Christopher Wren, who designed a church on just about every corner in ye olde London , provided this tour de force account of that death-defying Cook’s Tour . WARNING : Maiden aunts, people of delicate disposition, those with heart by-passes and wowsers should avert their eyes or prepare to rant at certain risqué , depraved and wildly humorous passages . Insomniacs who sit up watching endless reruns of the golden years of Hollywood will be struck by the similarity with the road movies of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, except they were wholesome, G- rated fractured flickers. Astute Little Darwin readers will notice a time discrepancy in this golden prose and outstanding Burleigh artwork , but then the travellers were warped/ bent at the time , and who cares what year it is when you are having fun?)
*********************************************************
In 1969 or thenabouts, Morocco was a brand of instant coffee. Even though I had travelled to London to make my fortune, I came to accept the world might be a bigger place than the triangle formed by the Holland Park pub, the supermarket in Portobello Road and my semi-basement flat. I needed to broaden my horizons.
My first mistake was deciding to travel in Continental Europe. My second was to seek advice from my behaviourally-challenged advisor on life matters, Pete Steedman. Pete had parachuted into London (about a year before ) and had disrupted my middle-class yearning for respectability. He worked for Oz Magazine and the young Time Out; both publications were foul-mouthed, deliberately outrageous and politically subversive like Pete himself. My third mistake was deciding to travel with him and his blond “personal assistant”, Julie Reiter.
I purchased a blue Bedford Van for 200 pounds. It was old. “She’ll last for years,” said the nice salesman, wreathed in hashish smoke. I trusted him immediately. The pop-up roof worked. Two people would have to sleep in stretchers under this roof and one lucky bugger (me, it was my van) would sleep on a bench seat down below. No matter that the Bedford was the worst van ever built by the human race, I gave the salesman my money and in turn he gave me the ignition key and a rudimentary road map cut from a packet of breakfast cereal. It showed most of Europe as Empire Pink and while this seemed a little out of date, how inaccurate could it be? He shrugged off a slight problem with the starter motor; you had to rock the van back and forth so its teeth engaged and the thing would start.“Don’t fret abaht it,” he grinned. “It’ll prob’ly fix itself.”
Equipped with basic items recommended in Kerouac’s book On The Road (wine, whiskey, selected aspirins and other drugs, plastic glasses, a certain herbal substance and a bad attitude), we rocked the van, engaged its teeth and drove to the Channel ferry.
The crossing took five hours instead of the customary two. The wind roared down the Channel from the North Sea. The weather the Germans had hoped for on D-Day had finally got here. Within 30 minutes of leaving all the glasses fell out of the on-board bars and smashed. Bits of bottles rolled about, breaking down into smaller pieces as they impacted on each other. The floor was slick with vomit and spilled beer. Passengers lay as good as dead on the floor, seats and benches, waxy-faced, pale as toilet paper. The ferry staff disappeared; perhaps they abandoned ship.
We drove southwards towards Spain through France, which we ignored. At some point we decided to cross the Mediterranean and go to Morocco. I don’t remember whose idea this was, but Steedman was known to be attracted to subversion wherever it could be found, whereas I was known mainly for making bad decisions. Julie seemed sweetly innocent despite her use of several four-letter words Pete had taught her. She’d give it a go.
The cancer in the starter motor got worse as we ate and drank our way through Barcelona, Valencia, Toledo, Madrid, Cordoba, Seville, Granada (but probably not in that order. Who knows?). A fascist country which could produce good beer, wine and food gave Steedman pause. He started asking awkward political questions in bars. Were there any ideas he could use back in Australia?
In the foothills of the wintry Sierra Moreno, mechanics in a bus workshop built parts for our starter motor by hand and wouldn’t accept payment, which was just as well because it had a serious relapse a couple of days later. From Algeciras we took a car ferry to Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave in Morocco. To the ignorant romantic who owned the van this was Casablanca territory and our first step onto the African continent. Neil Armstrong ate his heart out.
To celebrate our conquest of Europe, we chose a bar near the border crossing into Morocco. The Spanish-speaking locals amused themselves by buying drinks for us and by 11pm we were all seriously drunk. Pete, who couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, was haranguing our new friends about Australian politics. They were pouring what may have been locally-made Port down our throats. Some of them were looking analytically at Julie preparatory to making a financial offer.
The Port had shrunk my brain, which was cringing in a dark corner of my skull by the time Pete called me over to meet his newest buddies. He was excited. These Spaniards, who were raving about Austrians instead of Australians, insisted on taking us shooting in the hills the next morning. Even in its crippled state my brain recognised this as a fatally bad idea. Around midnight I staggered outside to the Bedford van (it was parked on a garbage-strewn street near the bar), put up the roof and inserted Julie into her stretcher. She was unconscious the moment her head hit the pillow.
I went back for Pete. It took a long time to find the bar again because I had forgotten that a straight line is the shortest distance. He was laughing crazily, listing against an off-duty Guardia Civil and insisting that the cop’s patent-leather hat was akin to the Australian Digger’s hat only worn arse-about. As I knew about rifles and hunting weapons he demanded that I clarify with our hosts just what armoury we could expect to use in the morning. Pete’s secret hope for the morning’s shooting may have been to take over Ceuta with a swift coup; you never knew with him. I had never seen him so pissed, and I never have since. He would not stop drinking the Port, although everyone else had. I had one for the road. He had five.
Outside the night was freezing. Getting Pete’s raving, drunken body into the other stretcher was a nightmare. Our laughter made us more helpless. A puppet with its strings cut, he too fell unconscious onto his sleeping bag. If he’d had any awareness left he’d have been satisfied with the shock and awe he’d created amongst the Spaniards in the bar.
Drunk people snore but usually can be woken long enough to get them to turn over or lie on their sides. Steedman’s corpse was having none of this until, after a sleepless couple of hours in which even Julie was woken, we pushed him outside the van and went to sleep. He was there a few hours later, when I stumbled out of the van to be sick. Somehow he’d got himself into his sleeping bag. It was closed over his head. Snoring came from inside. The whole bag was shivering - not surprising because the puddles on the street had frozen over and he was lying on the road itself. He could have frozen to death, been run over or removed with the rest of the garbage.
As I alone retained some tenuous consciousness, I had to take the responsibility of getting us to the border crossing and away from any rendezvous with our shooting comrades. I rocked the Bedford without help. I remember reversing into a wall at 20mph, but little else.
We got through the Spanish formalities without Steedman saying something offensive about Franco’s personal habits, but at the Moroccan side we were refused entry by a plain-clothes official, the kind of balding, puffy-faced, sweat-sheened villain we knew from Midnight Express. Julie and I wore respectful faces but the instant the man saw Pete his hackles rose.
“Come back tomorrow with hair cat,” he snarled. A U-turn took us away from there but I knew he wouldn’t forget my friend, who has a consistent talent for arousing hatred amongst bureaucrats.“What the fuck is a hair cat?” Steedman scowls.“He doesn’t like your pony tail.”
“He can fuck my hat if I’ll cut it off.” says Steedman . “In fact he was looking lustfully at your hat. You could be next.”
The next day Pete wore my polo neck sweater, his ponytail tucked inside, hat pulled down over it, coat with collar pulled up, and dark glasses. His plan was to be inconspicuous but he stood out like a naked man in a nunnery.
“You there!” It was the same official. He took off Pete’s hat, put Pete’s shades in it, and with infinite distaste used his forefinger to flick the ponytail into the open air. “Hair cat or you no go through.”He didn’t understood Pete’s foul mutterings, but he did recognise the huge flick knife which clicked open in front of him. Pete held his ponytail out and slashed it off his head with the knife.
Pete said, “Here you are, you cunt”, or something similarly sensitive. He handed it to the man. “You need this fucking hair more than I do.” Lucky not to be shot, we drove through the shocked silence into Morocco .
He and Julie suffered vicious hangovers for the next three days as I drove south through the dust. I couldn’t focus very well and didn’t see much, except the thousands of ragged children who came running whenever I stopped the van. They had the impression that I had boxes of free ballpoint pens, sacks of coins and air tickets to America to give away. If they’d only known what awaited them should they get inside the van. Pete’s new prejudices against Moroccans were approaching the genocidal.
To save money in Tangiers we parked under a street light for the night instead of a camping area. You’d do the same thing in Australia and you’d be OK, so what was wrong with that?
In the early hours came a mighty thumping on the van. Arabs. Would they rape the men and sell the women in the market? Julie lay in the stretcher above, a beautiful naked blonde, probably the target of evil slave traders. The bashing on the side of the van continued. They were shouting something. Pete and I didn’t know what to do, but getting dressed before we did anything was a good start. It sounded like the Bedford was being dismantled. The starter motor was no good, so we concluded we had to get out and fight.
We slid the door open and a tree branch whistled inside and hit Pete on the forearm, his back and chest. He took the brunt of the attack – we couldn’t get out of the van. Everyone was screaming. I remembered the French word for “money” and shouted “d’argent, d’argent”. They backed off with the branch, but kept shouting. The street light wasn’t much help with security. I crawled into the front seat, got a random sample of coins from several countries in one hand and threw it out the window, turned the key with the other - and the motor started first time.
A bored night porter at a hotel told us where to find a hospital. Pete’s bloodied and chewed-up body was bandaged by an amateur nurse; to the hospital the incident was insignificant. “That’s nothing,” said their attitude, “wait’ll you see the horrific things people do to goats in this country.” But they did call the Police Station. We had to go to them or they would come looking for us. Driving around the alien streets of Tangiers at 3am tested our panic level, but finally there was the police station – as grubby and rundown as any other building. We were made to wait in the lobby. There was no Muzak but there was the sound of heavy blows and screams coming from a distant room. There were spots of fresh blood on the lobby floor. A cop appeared wearing a camel-hair coat over his shirt. He was smooth and neutral. He spoke English. He drove us back to the street light in a police car. We pointed out the branch and retrieved one of Julie’s knee-length boots that I’d tried to use as a weapon. Now he knew what martyrdom was, Pete insisted that he’d saved my life twenty times over.
With a shrug to put any Frenchman to shame the cop told us there was nothing he could do and perhaps we would like to contact the Australian Embassy? That would be as productive as a Bandaid at a beheading - and there was a chance they’d heard of Steedman which would bring us even more trouble. Back at the Bedford the cop smiled and without irony wished us a pleasant holiday in Morocco.
Marrakes/ch, although spectacular, proved to be a pale imitation of this drama. Its huge marketplace seethed with criminals and innocents of all kinds. In the whirling movement of people and music, bowls of mysterious gruel were being eaten, camel shit was sold in lieu of firewood, orange peel dotted the walkways like confetti, dates were slipped on instead of banana skins, and local cops sold hash/kif to student travellers, especially Americans, then arrested them for a reward from the US Government. That was the current paranoid belief in the medina, anyway. This combined with our recently acquired anti-Arab prejudices meant we didn’t press on towards the Atlas Mountains and Fez.
On our return journey we ignored Morocco, Spain, Portugal and France. We crossed the channel like a Li-Lo crossing a warm bath, and enjoyed a full Customs search on our return to England. Something about Pete – perhaps his contempt for their authority – intensified their search, which included Julie’s knee-length boots, the roof lining and door panels of the Bedford, and the inside of our spare tyre.It took several years to work out that we’d had a good time, but we never could agree on exactly what had happened.*** Succumbing to the dreaded influence of Hollywood , Morocco recently removed this unusual cultural link with the Land Down Under.
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( At some stage , probably seeking relief from the frenetic London lifestyle, PETE STEEDMAN and JULIE REITER set out on an overland trip to Morocco with architect PETER BURLEIGH , who had drawn cartoons for Broadside magazine back in Melbourne. Burleigh, in the Mother Country intent on becoming as famous as Christopher Wren, who designed a church on just about every corner in ye olde London , provided this tour de force account of that death-defying Cook’s Tour . WARNING : Maiden aunts, people of delicate disposition, those with heart by-passes and wowsers should avert their eyes or prepare to rant at certain risqué , depraved and wildly humorous passages . Insomniacs who sit up watching endless reruns of the golden years of Hollywood will be struck by the similarity with the road movies of Bing Crosby, Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour, except they were wholesome, G- rated fractured flickers. Astute Little Darwin readers will notice a time discrepancy in this golden prose and outstanding Burleigh artwork , but then the travellers were warped/ bent at the time , and who cares what year it is when you are having fun?)
*********************************************************
In 1969 or thenabouts, Morocco was a brand of instant coffee. Even though I had travelled to London to make my fortune, I came to accept the world might be a bigger place than the triangle formed by the Holland Park pub, the supermarket in Portobello Road and my semi-basement flat. I needed to broaden my horizons.
My first mistake was deciding to travel in Continental Europe. My second was to seek advice from my behaviourally-challenged advisor on life matters, Pete Steedman. Pete had parachuted into London (about a year before ) and had disrupted my middle-class yearning for respectability. He worked for Oz Magazine and the young Time Out; both publications were foul-mouthed, deliberately outrageous and politically subversive like Pete himself. My third mistake was deciding to travel with him and his blond “personal assistant”, Julie Reiter.
I purchased a blue Bedford Van for 200 pounds. It was old. “She’ll last for years,” said the nice salesman, wreathed in hashish smoke. I trusted him immediately. The pop-up roof worked. Two people would have to sleep in stretchers under this roof and one lucky bugger (me, it was my van) would sleep on a bench seat down below. No matter that the Bedford was the worst van ever built by the human race, I gave the salesman my money and in turn he gave me the ignition key and a rudimentary road map cut from a packet of breakfast cereal. It showed most of Europe as Empire Pink and while this seemed a little out of date, how inaccurate could it be? He shrugged off a slight problem with the starter motor; you had to rock the van back and forth so its teeth engaged and the thing would start.“Don’t fret abaht it,” he grinned. “It’ll prob’ly fix itself.”
Equipped with basic items recommended in Kerouac’s book On The Road (wine, whiskey, selected aspirins and other drugs, plastic glasses, a certain herbal substance and a bad attitude), we rocked the van, engaged its teeth and drove to the Channel ferry.
The crossing took five hours instead of the customary two. The wind roared down the Channel from the North Sea. The weather the Germans had hoped for on D-Day had finally got here. Within 30 minutes of leaving all the glasses fell out of the on-board bars and smashed. Bits of bottles rolled about, breaking down into smaller pieces as they impacted on each other. The floor was slick with vomit and spilled beer. Passengers lay as good as dead on the floor, seats and benches, waxy-faced, pale as toilet paper. The ferry staff disappeared; perhaps they abandoned ship.
We drove southwards towards Spain through France, which we ignored. At some point we decided to cross the Mediterranean and go to Morocco. I don’t remember whose idea this was, but Steedman was known to be attracted to subversion wherever it could be found, whereas I was known mainly for making bad decisions. Julie seemed sweetly innocent despite her use of several four-letter words Pete had taught her. She’d give it a go.
The cancer in the starter motor got worse as we ate and drank our way through Barcelona, Valencia, Toledo, Madrid, Cordoba, Seville, Granada (but probably not in that order. Who knows?). A fascist country which could produce good beer, wine and food gave Steedman pause. He started asking awkward political questions in bars. Were there any ideas he could use back in Australia?
In the foothills of the wintry Sierra Moreno, mechanics in a bus workshop built parts for our starter motor by hand and wouldn’t accept payment, which was just as well because it had a serious relapse a couple of days later. From Algeciras we took a car ferry to Ceuta, a tiny Spanish enclave in Morocco. To the ignorant romantic who owned the van this was Casablanca territory and our first step onto the African continent. Neil Armstrong ate his heart out.
To celebrate our conquest of Europe, we chose a bar near the border crossing into Morocco. The Spanish-speaking locals amused themselves by buying drinks for us and by 11pm we were all seriously drunk. Pete, who couldn’t speak a word of Spanish, was haranguing our new friends about Australian politics. They were pouring what may have been locally-made Port down our throats. Some of them were looking analytically at Julie preparatory to making a financial offer.
The Port had shrunk my brain, which was cringing in a dark corner of my skull by the time Pete called me over to meet his newest buddies. He was excited. These Spaniards, who were raving about Austrians instead of Australians, insisted on taking us shooting in the hills the next morning. Even in its crippled state my brain recognised this as a fatally bad idea. Around midnight I staggered outside to the Bedford van (it was parked on a garbage-strewn street near the bar), put up the roof and inserted Julie into her stretcher. She was unconscious the moment her head hit the pillow.
I went back for Pete. It took a long time to find the bar again because I had forgotten that a straight line is the shortest distance. He was laughing crazily, listing against an off-duty Guardia Civil and insisting that the cop’s patent-leather hat was akin to the Australian Digger’s hat only worn arse-about. As I knew about rifles and hunting weapons he demanded that I clarify with our hosts just what armoury we could expect to use in the morning. Pete’s secret hope for the morning’s shooting may have been to take over Ceuta with a swift coup; you never knew with him. I had never seen him so pissed, and I never have since. He would not stop drinking the Port, although everyone else had. I had one for the road. He had five.
Outside the night was freezing. Getting Pete’s raving, drunken body into the other stretcher was a nightmare. Our laughter made us more helpless. A puppet with its strings cut, he too fell unconscious onto his sleeping bag. If he’d had any awareness left he’d have been satisfied with the shock and awe he’d created amongst the Spaniards in the bar.
Drunk people snore but usually can be woken long enough to get them to turn over or lie on their sides. Steedman’s corpse was having none of this until, after a sleepless couple of hours in which even Julie was woken, we pushed him outside the van and went to sleep. He was there a few hours later, when I stumbled out of the van to be sick. Somehow he’d got himself into his sleeping bag. It was closed over his head. Snoring came from inside. The whole bag was shivering - not surprising because the puddles on the street had frozen over and he was lying on the road itself. He could have frozen to death, been run over or removed with the rest of the garbage.
As I alone retained some tenuous consciousness, I had to take the responsibility of getting us to the border crossing and away from any rendezvous with our shooting comrades. I rocked the Bedford without help. I remember reversing into a wall at 20mph, but little else.
We got through the Spanish formalities without Steedman saying something offensive about Franco’s personal habits, but at the Moroccan side we were refused entry by a plain-clothes official, the kind of balding, puffy-faced, sweat-sheened villain we knew from Midnight Express. Julie and I wore respectful faces but the instant the man saw Pete his hackles rose.
“Come back tomorrow with hair cat,” he snarled. A U-turn took us away from there but I knew he wouldn’t forget my friend, who has a consistent talent for arousing hatred amongst bureaucrats.“What the fuck is a hair cat?” Steedman scowls.“He doesn’t like your pony tail.”
“He can fuck my hat if I’ll cut it off.” says Steedman . “In fact he was looking lustfully at your hat. You could be next.”
The next day Pete wore my polo neck sweater, his ponytail tucked inside, hat pulled down over it, coat with collar pulled up, and dark glasses. His plan was to be inconspicuous but he stood out like a naked man in a nunnery.
“You there!” It was the same official. He took off Pete’s hat, put Pete’s shades in it, and with infinite distaste used his forefinger to flick the ponytail into the open air. “Hair cat or you no go through.”He didn’t understood Pete’s foul mutterings, but he did recognise the huge flick knife which clicked open in front of him. Pete held his ponytail out and slashed it off his head with the knife.
Pete said, “Here you are, you cunt”, or something similarly sensitive. He handed it to the man. “You need this fucking hair more than I do.” Lucky not to be shot, we drove through the shocked silence into Morocco .
He and Julie suffered vicious hangovers for the next three days as I drove south through the dust. I couldn’t focus very well and didn’t see much, except the thousands of ragged children who came running whenever I stopped the van. They had the impression that I had boxes of free ballpoint pens, sacks of coins and air tickets to America to give away. If they’d only known what awaited them should they get inside the van. Pete’s new prejudices against Moroccans were approaching the genocidal.
To save money in Tangiers we parked under a street light for the night instead of a camping area. You’d do the same thing in Australia and you’d be OK, so what was wrong with that?
In the early hours came a mighty thumping on the van. Arabs. Would they rape the men and sell the women in the market? Julie lay in the stretcher above, a beautiful naked blonde, probably the target of evil slave traders. The bashing on the side of the van continued. They were shouting something. Pete and I didn’t know what to do, but getting dressed before we did anything was a good start. It sounded like the Bedford was being dismantled. The starter motor was no good, so we concluded we had to get out and fight.
We slid the door open and a tree branch whistled inside and hit Pete on the forearm, his back and chest. He took the brunt of the attack – we couldn’t get out of the van. Everyone was screaming. I remembered the French word for “money” and shouted “d’argent, d’argent”. They backed off with the branch, but kept shouting. The street light wasn’t much help with security. I crawled into the front seat, got a random sample of coins from several countries in one hand and threw it out the window, turned the key with the other - and the motor started first time.
A bored night porter at a hotel told us where to find a hospital. Pete’s bloodied and chewed-up body was bandaged by an amateur nurse; to the hospital the incident was insignificant. “That’s nothing,” said their attitude, “wait’ll you see the horrific things people do to goats in this country.” But they did call the Police Station. We had to go to them or they would come looking for us. Driving around the alien streets of Tangiers at 3am tested our panic level, but finally there was the police station – as grubby and rundown as any other building. We were made to wait in the lobby. There was no Muzak but there was the sound of heavy blows and screams coming from a distant room. There were spots of fresh blood on the lobby floor. A cop appeared wearing a camel-hair coat over his shirt. He was smooth and neutral. He spoke English. He drove us back to the street light in a police car. We pointed out the branch and retrieved one of Julie’s knee-length boots that I’d tried to use as a weapon. Now he knew what martyrdom was, Pete insisted that he’d saved my life twenty times over.
With a shrug to put any Frenchman to shame the cop told us there was nothing he could do and perhaps we would like to contact the Australian Embassy? That would be as productive as a Bandaid at a beheading - and there was a chance they’d heard of Steedman which would bring us even more trouble. Back at the Bedford the cop smiled and without irony wished us a pleasant holiday in Morocco.
Marrakes/ch, although spectacular, proved to be a pale imitation of this drama. Its huge marketplace seethed with criminals and innocents of all kinds. In the whirling movement of people and music, bowls of mysterious gruel were being eaten, camel shit was sold in lieu of firewood, orange peel dotted the walkways like confetti, dates were slipped on instead of banana skins, and local cops sold hash/kif to student travellers, especially Americans, then arrested them for a reward from the US Government. That was the current paranoid belief in the medina, anyway. This combined with our recently acquired anti-Arab prejudices meant we didn’t press on towards the Atlas Mountains and Fez.
On our return journey we ignored Morocco, Spain, Portugal and France. We crossed the channel like a Li-Lo crossing a warm bath, and enjoyed a full Customs search on our return to England. Something about Pete – perhaps his contempt for their authority – intensified their search, which included Julie’s knee-length boots, the roof lining and door panels of the Bedford, and the inside of our spare tyre.It took several years to work out that we’d had a good time, but we never could agree on exactly what had happened.*** Succumbing to the dreaded influence of Hollywood , Morocco recently removed this unusual cultural link with the Land Down Under.
