A Long Way From Home Page 13

  Ours was the country that had killed the white men who dared to cross it, poor Burke and Wills and Leichhardt. Now we would face the killer country. We would face roads with dust two feet deep. We would circle the whole of our murderous continent in the same car Joe Blow drove to work. We were not pleased to hear Bachhuber compare us to dogs marking out our territory with pee.

  We were front page in The Bacchus Marsh Express: Titch and me together with all the Holdens we had sold so far. It was a thrill, I admit it. I imagined that was fame. The Melbourne Argus telephoned me. They had a statement from a female competitor known as Granny Conway. ‘My motto is never touch the engine,’ she said. ‘You always strike trouble when you start lifting the bonnet.’

  So would I make a public comment on this nonsense?

  I refused and Titch was angry. He said, ‘Get real, Irene.’ We were in it for the business. I should be prepared for Sydney where there would be no denying I was a woman driver. In the business of being written up, of course, Titch was his father’s son, and when we finally left the Marsh for Sydney, he arranged for a convoy of new Holden owners to follow us out of town through the Avenue of Honour. He reckoned that might ‘make a story’.

  I wanted the kids to come with us for those first few miles. But then it seemed Edith and Alice Tudball were making Girl Guide uniforms, and Ronnie and his cousins could not be found. I did not let this spoil things. I was not offended that our navigator crawled into the back and studied the Redex rule book, as if reading would have us win.

  ‘You’ll get carsick,’ my husband said.

  ‘No I won’t,’ said Bachhuber.

  And in this dull way the Redex Trial began, as tame and ordinary as a Sunday drive. I did not know what Titch had been up to. We rose from our lovely fertile valley, and I could not know that I would soon become a wrong ’un. Ahead of us was the climb from the flat country up Pretty Sally, a dormant bald volcano, a radiator-boiler of a road with an accident ‘black spot’ due to a sharp turn near its crest. I was thrilled to feel the ‘go’ in our engine.

  There were no freeways, just the Hume Highway with yellow gravel verges, broken fanbelts, semitrailer skidmarks, a two- lane track with bridges too narrow for two vehicles to pass. The highway led us through streets of prosperous small towns, Euroa, Violet Town, Benalla, Glenrowan, Wangaratta. We arrived in Yass, in New South Wales, the road chock-full of all-night truckies’ cafes and spare-parts garages and panel shops.

  ‘See that,’ Bachhuber said at last.

  He indicated a signpost.

  We did not respond.

  ‘Sixty-three miles to Young. That’s Lambing Flat.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’

  I never knew about the so-called ‘riots’ at Lambing Flat. Why would I? They had occurred a century before, apparently. There had been thousands of Chinese miners just down the road at Lambing Flat.

  ‘Poor buggers,’ he called them with emotion in his voice. The nasty white miners had knocked apart the Chinese tents and stolen everything inside. There was gunfire and police sabre charges and one man was left dead.

  I thought, oh no. I squeezed my husband’s hand, but still he stopped the car.

  ‘Get out,’ Titch told our navigator. ‘Yes you. There’s something I want you to do for me.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Just walk around a bit. Tell me what you see.’

  I thought, he’s going to drive off. He’s going to leave Bachhuber in Yass.

  ‘No, don’t,’ I said.

  Titch was waiting behind the wheel.

  ‘Please?’ I asked.

  Meanwhile Bachhuber was on the footpath staring in the window of the baker’s. Then he was in the middle of the double lines with the traffic whizzing past each side.

  ‘Pretty town,’ he said when he came back.

  ‘So?’ Titch asked. ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Nice goldrush buildings,’ he began. ‘All the money in the courthouse and the pubs.’

  ‘Any Chinamen?’

  ‘Not a one.’ And he was grinning, his teeth very white in his tanned face.

  ‘Any blood?’

  ‘Not a drop, I’m pleased to say.’

  ‘You’re the navigator,’ Titch said. ‘You tell us what is happening now. I could not give a fuck about what happened a hundred years ago.’

  I was embarrassed. I smiled at our poor navigator so he knew I liked him.

  Titch pulled back into the traffic. ‘I was a chauffeur for a Chinese herbalist,’ he said. ‘My father sold him a Model A. Then I lived with the family in Little Bourke Street. Mr Goon, his name was.’

  I thought, here it is, one more torture he never told me.

  ‘He was a clever man, the herbalist,’ my husband said. ‘He had a little velvet cushion and he would lay the patient’s hand on it and touch it very gently. The Goons wanted me to go back to China with them. If my dad had not needed me, I would have gone. So when you tell me about all that business back there, you haven’t got a bloody clue what I think. I have never seen children treated so kindly in all my life.’

  And then I loved him, more than I ever knew I loved him. He had grown up with no mother, been raised by a cruel father. He was a wonder, wresting love from dung. And now he was in the Redex Trial. It was impossible. The road markings changed from white to yellow and we were in another world. We travelled together towards the start, along the rain-slicked narrow highway beneath clouds like greasy wool, through wide wet sodden winter farms, the unrelenting green of paddocks, the distant mountains of the Great Dividing Range.

  At Mittagong – seventy miles from Sydney – I saw sunstruck sandstone, gum trees with skin like elephants, I was in driver heaven. It was exactly at this point we first heard an engine roar. Not a truck, but something big. It sounded like a tractor doing a hundred miles an hour.

  It was then we saw him pass, the bastard, the devil, like a wasp from a mud nest. Dan Bobs, the enemy of my husband’s happiness. Behind him came a police car, blue light flashing. Bastard, bastard. I would have killed him if I could.

  2

  I had written away for my own copy of the Redex rule book and had also purchased an expensive Curta calculator to prepare for my role. The Bobbseys teased me about the book because they thought the rules so obvious, and as for the Curta calculator, they had never heard of such a thing.

  The Curta was beautiful in the way of a Zeiss lens and was a thing I would not normally have had any excuse to buy. Fortunately the Redex was a contest where average speeds were everything. As the officials kept saying, it was not a race but a gruelling test of machinery in the ‘outback conditions’.

  That is, we must prove our car reliable. If we arrived a minute early we lost points. Ditto if we came in late. The purpose of the Curta was to constantly recalculate the speed required to arrive on time. I entered the prescribed average speed, official mileage, odometer reading, corrected speed in miles per minute. No-one joked about it in the end.

  The rule book decreed that reliability was the only issue. There could be no major rebuilds of engine, transmission, chassis or suspension. Components were sprayed with a special paint visible under a mercury vapour lamp. There were scrutineers waiting for us everywhere, as annoying as policemen in their way.

  As for the police themselves, they hated us. They knew what the rule book would not admit, that the drivers were all maniacs, gathered to race, to burn each other off, to ‘do the ton’, to get ahead, to make up time, to sometimes create breathing space for adjustments and repairs but always, no matter what they said in interviews, to make the other fellow ‘eat my dust’.

  We entered Sydney at 30 mph.

  3

  Neither Titch nor I had ever been to Sydney. Don’t laugh. We’d never seen the Harbour, the Bridge, a Bondi tram, a ferry, never even bought a pound of prawns. As my husband told the street photographer, we were business maggots from Bacchus Marsh.

  We ate Oysters Kilpatrick for the first time. We almost forgot wha
t we had come for. It was a shock, in late afternoon, to roll into the Sydney Showground and see what we were up against: two hundred and sixty-seven hardened competitors, armoured with massive bull bars, done up in war paint, arranged on the dirt speedway ring inside the parade ground. Lex Davison, Jack Brabham. All the cracks had gathered to the fray. The press were there, camera flashes erupting in dense clusters like a battlefield. A cat could look at a king, we dropped in on Jack Davey’s crew. He said, ‘Hi ho, everybody,’ like he does on radio. Two cars over was a swarm of flashbulbs dying for the fame. It was Dan Bobs still in the race, with his false teeth and his false smile and his arm around two pretty girls, the Women’s Weekly crew.

  ‘Got to hand it to him,’ his son said. ‘He doesn’t give up.’

  Give up. Throw up. In the rubbish bin I found the morning’s newspapers:

  MAD DASH FOR STARTING LINE

  Mr Bobs had hit a stone and damaged the back plate on his differential which lost its oil. In Benalla he filled the diff with heavy oil and made a dash for Mittagong where a new differential was fitted. He made up lost time thanks to Sgt Coady and Constable Withers of the Highway Patrol who had escorted the former aviator to the showgrounds where he had admirers waiting to assist.

  Dan Bobs, I read, was ‘well known to the motoring fraternity’. I don’t think this was true. He was also a ‘wily prankster’, a joker, a character, suspected of playing pranks with gelignite in previous car trials, a habit which had him named Dangerous Dan.

  The reporter had learned of the existence of a second driver Mr Sullivan (‘my little Englishman’ according to Dan Bobs) and also revealed the former aviator had a daughter-in-law in Holden # 92.

  ‘Women can wear overalls all they like,’ Bobs said, ‘but they can’t teach their father-in-law to suck eggs.’ He reportedly had little patience for women ‘cluttering up the contest’.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ my husband said. ‘Forget it.’

  As usual he did not understand his father would destroy us any way he could.

  Bachhuber found a boarding house, ten minutes from the starting line. The landlord had had a stroke and would not give up his best chair by the wireless. As we could not hear the ABC news the landlady undertook to provide the papers in the morning for a shilling each. Likewise we were refused the use of her telephone and I was forced back into the showground where the red phone boxes were lined up by the toilets, offering a full view of the only person I did not wish to see.

  Dan, surrounded by his subjects, removed his hat and bowed to me.

  There were a mob of drivers crowded around the telephone boxes, rattling loose change in their pockets as if their private parts were made of silver. These same jokers thought it amusing I was wearing overalls. I did not care. I waited. It was only when I got to the phone I saw that my father-in-law was in the next door box, making a show of saluting me. I turned my back and heard Ronnie had gone down the shops to buy lemonade and Beverly was still at the hairdresser. Dan was now kneeling, tying up his boots, not caring about who might be waiting to call their wife. I ignored him in favour of Edith who needed help with the recipe for golden syrup dumplings. We were just mixing in the butter when there was an enormous bang.

  I did not know what world I was in.

  Dan’s phone box jumped in the air. It fell over on its side. I saw the receiver lying on the grass.

  My phone was dead. Poor Edith, I thought, poor little girl. I ran into a shower of flashbulbs blinding me. I was in tears when I got back to Titch.

  I told him his father tried to kill me.

  I was told to relax. Blowing up toilets was Dad’s favourite trick. Did he kill me? No he didn’t. If he had wanted to he would have.

  I lay awake for hours and hours, thinking my husband should stick up for me. I woke to find my photograph on the front page. An ugly woman in overalls, her mouth like a torn rag.

  REDEX STARTS WITH A BANG.

  I was Irene Bobs co-driver of Holden # 92. I was by ‘sheer coincidence’ the daughter-in-law of Dangerous Dan Bobs. At the time of yesterday’s explosion, Mr Dan Bobs had been in ‘serious conversation’ with Sergeant ‘Dick’ Worthington of the New South Wales police. The two men were some considerable distance from the telephone booths involved.

  The reporters had already used up all the male contestants. They went off to Granny Conway (Car # 28) who was very pleased to give her opinion of me. I should quit pranking. I should wear a skirt. I should drive carefully and then I wouldn’t need to copy all the men who raced ahead to make repairs before the checkpoint.

  The journos found me working on our vehicle. Would I comment?

  No I wouldn’t.

  My father-in-law had a low opinion of women drivers. What did I think of that?

  Seeing he tried to blow me up, I said, he must be a bit worried.

  Did I plan to beat him, they wished to know.

  I said I would destroy him. If I had been a footballer that would have been OK, but now I got us named the FEUDING BOBS.

  Titch, it seemed, heard none of this. He wanted to buy me a pretty dress for the photographers, but we had to attend a road safety lecture by the Road Safety Council, and the Police Traffic Branch. We checked air, tyres, water, oil, and tightened everything that might shake loose. I put on some lippy for the photographers who never came.

  The front seat must be adjusted to the driver’s legs, so the navigator must conform and Bachhuber’s knees were therefore bent and pushed against the dashboard where they would be locked in place for eighteen days. He was hard at work with a tricky gadget, calculating how to maintain the 22 mph average required.

  We departed at ordered intervals of one minute, after which we must suffer the hysteria of the New South Wales police. Being forced by law to crawl we were overtaken by Sunday drivers and hoons in lowered Holdens with three-quarter grind camshafts. Their younger brothers manipulated the crossing lights to make us stop and sign their autograph books.

  Bachhuber began updating instructions based on his Curta calculator. We saw the sea at Newcastle, and then were winding through the bush, overtaking semitrailers. Then the country changed and slow brown rivers looped and snaked across the gaudy green. There was heavy rain between Taree and Coffs Harbour then pineapples and bananas, like in a foreign country with bright green hills, the highway as muddy as a pig paddock. The locals turned peevish and changed the road signs, but credit where credit is due: the Curta was a beauty. Titch drove. I drove. The navigator was calm and level.

  I checked us into Brisbane, six hundred miles of Sunday driving. Titch had fortunately missed my comments to the Sydney press. That night I dreamed I had a baby which the court ruled must be taken from me. They would not say my crime.

  4

  This was the tropics and all that suggests. For hundreds of sweaty miles I had breathed Mrs Bobbsey ’s neck, her familiar sister skin. It was a cruel road of boulders, dry creeks, tidal creeks, ruts, deep holes, scrubby floodplain, a few hills, although the toughest obstacle was sorting out the confusion caused by two conflicting official maps. In this schemozzle, fifty cars were unfairly penalised, and their crews lost twelve hours of rest time while they appealed injustice and ineptitude. My two drivers, on the other hand, were free to find a boarding house and telephone their kids. The navigator gained great kudos.

  Now it was time to sleep chastely beneath the cooling car. No-one knew my dreams. With morning came the Bobbsey husband, smooth cheeked, fragrant with Old Spice and baby powder, his black hair flat across his perfect head. Did I sleep well? Like a madman, I did not say.

  ‘Good man,’ he said. Today the road would be a nightmare. He had no need of average speeds.

  ‘What about secret checkpoints?’

  ‘Eff the secret checkpoints,’ he cried, pulling on his yellow chamois gloves. Machinery would get murdered now, he said.

  The official map described the road as ‘undulating’ which meant it was a series of ramps which had the vehicle airborne half
the time. It ‘undulated’ its way through dreary subtropical brigalow, brownish grass, sleepy creeks whose murderous alter egos had previously ripped the banks apart and left jagged descents and rocky beds I would never have dared to drive across. I had the utmost confidence in Titch’s ability even though his eyes were only inches above the steering wheel. The map said WATER CROSSINGS and SUDDEN DROPS and I kept my head on my shoulders as we slid and drifted with the wheel sliding through the driver’s perfect yellow gloves.

  On a straight stretch of 2.5 miles we were overtaken by Frank Kleinig in a Peugeot 203, then the Humber Super Snipe works team who were nice enough to wave.

  Mrs Bobbsey forced a stop. She was concerned about a blowout due to increased tyre pressure in the heat. They released forty pounds, husband two tyres, wife the rest. We were overtaken by Ken Tubman’s team.

  Now Mrs Bobbsey was at the wheel. She had a lovely bump on her nose. She reported the ‘old bugger’ was on our tail.

  ‘Let him go.’

  But hers was not a nose to yield.

  ‘It is not a race,’ her husband said.

  We were in Tubman’s dust and Dan, the old grey shark, was charging at our rear. The road was narrow, bumpy, decorated with broken windscreen glass. It had spongy edges that I feared would roll us over. Titch was clutching the front seat with an eye peeled for kangaroos.

  Mrs Bobbsey’s eyes were watery with dust or domestic issues.

  Titch said let him pass, let him pass.

  ‘BEND INTO DEEP DRAIN,’ I said.

  She got it perfectly, sliding gracefully to the side so the grey Plymouth edged slowly by. Her high colour travelled all the way below her buttons. Who would have guessed it would feel just like a dance, even with the dust and danger and her husband breathing in my ear.

  ‘ROUGH ROAD. 9 MILES,’ I said.

  I thought, this is it. This is my life at last.