As part of the much acclaimed, Bulldust Diaries, our roving litterateur, Peter Burleigh, with more literary decorations than the Rockefeller Centre Christmas tree has fairy lights , in his inimitable philosophical style, penned this article , below, while in the dusty north. It raises questions about the hordes of Grey Nomads touring the country and mirages encountered along the way.
CALL ME A SILVER ITINERANT, NOT A GREY NOMAD
Grey Nomads, fearlessly pioneering in their portable suburbs , will next year drink our grog and eat all the Christmas cake for nix.( Illustration drawn by Peter Burleigh while furtively roasting a squatter's jumbuck during his outback tour. After writing this brave article,acting on our advice, Burleigh joined the French Foreign Legion to avoid angry Grey Nomads, daggers drawn, foaming at the mouth, screaming for his blood . Already he and an imported NT racing camel from the Finke have won leading parts in a desert reshoot of Lawrence of Arabia.)
Don’t get me wrong – it is ugly out here, but it gets its hooks into you. Australian desolation has shrugged off most of the efforts of men to convert it into something else. It won’t be converted. The roadside tells a story of a thousand ideas gone bad: citrus in Bourke, irrigation for berries, failed dams, big prawns and big oysters and other farcical tourism magnets...the list goes on.
The land reverberates with their crumbling echoes; the errors and the foundered dreams were repeated over and over again along this road and I guess many other roads. Images stay with you, as if the land wears its skeleton on the outside. An abandoned railway line, symbolic of an earlier prosperity, catches my eye. A wooden bridge has rotted away completely, leaving only the unsupported steel rails to span a dry creekbed. Only the ghost of an earlier time remains. From midday onward scudding cloud turns day into a matinee of twilight, and an inappropriate feverish yellow light suffuses the land.
And so to the demands of reality. Choosing a site in a caravan park is fraught with problems. People are watching you. Your rig and your camping skills are being evaluated. Your credentials, and by this I mean your manhood, is on the line. To make maximum money each site is as small as possible. If you drive a Matchbox toy you’ll fit OK. I learned to ask not for “a site” but for a “drive-through site”. If I can drive my camper-trailer rig through it I don’t have to reverse the damn thing. My insurance company’s bottom line is very healthy, solely due to my lousy reversing skills. Earlier today I stopped to help a guy who’d got himself into trouble by ploughing into the mud on the wrong side of the road. My tow strap pulled him out without much effort.
“How’d you get on this side of the road, mate?”
“Because that’s the way I’m goin’. Lost me concentration for a moment.”
“But…” What business is it of mine if he is facing the wrong way and on the wrong side of the road? He climbs into his ute and starts off in reverse, passing me. He stops; he thinks he owes me an explanation. He knows reversing along the road might raise the eyebrow of a city slicker like me.
“Thanks,” he says. “Me gearbox is rooted. All I got is reverse gear.”
“But...”
“The mechanics’s up the road.” He detects my disbelief. “No problem,” he says. “It’s only fifteen K’s.” That’s reversing.
