A cautionary tale

Years ago, as a young feller, I'd have the occasional puff of a joint. Marijuana, in those days, was stuff you'd go and pick from shrubs on the banks of the Hunter River near Newcastle, where I lived. It was there because, in the nineteenth century, hemp was an important part of any economy. It was a versatile fibre used for making rope, fabric and even paper. When the hemp industry fell into disrepute thanks to the propaganda of the emergent plastics industry in the 1930s, all that survived were wild stands of the stuff skirting the river systems. By the time I came along, of course, it was an illegal "drug", and was considered by the establishment to be the cause of a myriad of evils, including mental retardation and abandoned licentiousness. I don't know about the first, but it always produced an effect that made me think of sex as a decidedly bizarre affair.

Thus disabused of the idea that my parents' generation had the faintest notion of what they were talking about, my friends and I happily puffed away on our pickings for a number of years. Eventually, though, my interest in it waned to the point where a joint or two per year was about as big a drug habit as I had (discounting the copious amounts of Tooheys Old that I'd begun to consume. But alcohol is a good drug that had the establishment's seal of approval, of course.)

I hadn't even had a puff for several years. It was about 1990, and I was playing in a fairly large ensemble whose raison d'etre was to make as much money as possible for all concerned. It was a very well-organised band whose methodology was described to me by Phil, the band leader, as "play the thirty most famous and popular rock songs ever released." Which is what we did. It was a cornucopia, an alphabet of pop: we did everything from Abba to ZZ Top, cranking out note-perfect renditions of all of the greats. My job was to learn, and play, exact replicas of all the famous guitar solos, perfectly, night after night.

Now, the interesting thing about this band is that it was all about the vocals. We had three very good female singers, a great male lead vocalist, and the other four blokes in the band able to hold a tune. And, without being immodest, we were pretty fucking good at it. As well, we had a synthesiser system triggered by a computer, so on top of the guitar, keyboards, bass and drums, we had all sorts of other sounds - more keyboards, horn sections, strings, percussion, and the like - belting through a gigantic, and very beautifully mixed, sound system. The computerisation of the band meant that we all had to wear little "in-ear" monitoring systems which would give us the click track from the computer so we could start the songs at the right moment and remain in time with the synthesised sounds. This is an almost universal phenomenon with professional bands these days, but in 1990 it was a technology still in its infancy.

We were doing one show at a very big club in Sydney. Just our regular set, which we'd played hundreds of times before, and which had got to be so robotic as to be like any other production line work. We really had to be conscious of making a performance out of it - once you've played the solo to "Stairway to Heaven" exactly the same way a hundred times, you're over it.

On this night, we had a new sound engineer. He was a very competent operator, and our sound-check had gone smoothly. We'd played our first set of two to an audience of about five hundred people. We had a twenty minute break, and the sound guy came over to me in the dressing room and said "Hey Laurie - you look like a bloke that might enjoy a smoke."

Without thinking - probably bored senseless - I replied "Sure, let's go." We went out to his car, where he proceeded to get out a bag of pot, and load it into an evil-looking bong. I'd never had much of an association with these devices, and had always considered them slightly anti-social, but what the heck - I was just getting stoned.

"This is really good stuff," he informed me. "Durban Poison - I grew it myself; it'll get you nicely stoned, mate."

He offered me the thing, and I sucked as hard as I could on it while he lit it up. It nearly killed me going down, I can tell you. "Thanks," I said at the end of it, spluttering and gasping for air. "Your turn, mate."

"Oh no," he said, "if I have one of these I'll be ratshit. I just thought you might enjoy playing after one."  Oh fuck, I thought to myself, what have I done?

We walked back into the club. It was time to go on stage again, so I walked on, strapped my guitar on, checked my tuning, turned around to face the audience, and thought I was going to die. I had, suddenly and completely, entered a world of trouble with a capital T, short for tetra-hydro-cannabinol. I was fucked. I had walked into paranoia city, and had the instantaneous fear that I wasn't walking out of it in a hurry.

I looked down at the set-list gaffer-taped to the floor, and saw that we were about to launch into the Doobie Brothers' Long Train Runnin'. I'd played this song hundreds of times; I could play it in my sleep, but I had an almost overpowering urge to throw my guitar away and run like buggery.

I didn't, though, because I heard the count-in in my earpiece, and it was me who had to start the song: da-da-da, da-da-da-do, da-da-da, and so-on. I was playing it, and it seemed OK. The bass was next to come in, and, as he did, I realised that he was a semi-tone away from the key I was playing in. The drums rolled, the keyboards played a riff, and I very quickly changed to the key that the song was now in (F sharp minor, to be precise). I kept playing as the intro unfolded, but then I started thinking "Hang on, this is in G minor - it has to be; we've always played it in G. The computer doesn't change; the synthesiser should be in G, but it's not - it's in F sharp! But that's impossible. Oh, no - maybe it has always been in F sharp. No - couldn't be; I've always played it in G. Aaaaaaaaahhhh - I'm going mad; what the fuck is happening???"

I kept playing; I had no choice. We got to the solo section, where I had to play a harmonica solo. I whipped the harp out of its pouch on my guitar strap, and there on the top of the harp was the key for the instrument engraved on it : "B flat". I was right! It was in G minor! But - I couldn't play my solo, because the song was now in a different key. I had the very morbid feeling that the establishment had actually got it right - marijuana does, indeed, cause brain damage. I looked around at the other band members, who seemed to be happily and unconcernedly playing away. The harmonica was useless, so I played the solo on guitar in the new key - becoming increasingly aware that the guitar strings had taken on an appearance like furry spider legs, and the sound coming from my amp had ceased to resemble a Stratocaster and had taken on the characteristics of Chip n Dale having an orgy.

I played through the rest of the set, trying to overcome a bizarre feeling of sinking into the stage. I had to keep lifting my feet, one after the other, to keep on top of the quicksand the stage had become. And as for singing - forget it; I was afraid that any sound that issued from my mouth would just be a throttled scream.

The last song of the night was the abominable Hotel California, wherein it was my duty to play the solo that everyone knows by heart. I started with the right notes, but it quickly devolved into Chip n Dale having a Sorcerer's Apprentice battle. I felt like Harding in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - "I'm talking about form, I'm talking about content, God, the Devil, Heaven, Hell.." Folks, I was seriously off the planet.

Mercifully, the gig ended. I let my guitar slide off me and crash into its stand, and bolted for the dressing-room, where I sat in a cold sweat wondering if I might eventually come down, say before I was eighty. 

Phil and the rest of the band all marched into the dressing-room, giggling and pointing at me. The paranoia meter went completely off the scale. Phil came over and said

"Man, you played some seriously weird shit out there." And then he winked at me and said "It was good, though, it was damn good. I'll keep you in mind as the guitarist in any experimental music bands I want to put together." 

"Oh, and sorry about Long Train. I took it down a semi-tone - I forgot to tell ya."

Drugs are bad, 'kay?

Here comes Santa's claws

Graham the Barbarian and his lovely wife Maria are our closest neighbours. They live in a rather large house which I helped to build. It wasn't so large when they first moved in; "shoe-box" comes to mind. They'd invited us for Christmas lunch; the turkey would be at their place, then we'd all (two couples and five kids) repair to our place, about a mile down the road and into the bush, for dessert and an afternoon by the pool. A peaceful and comfortable way to spend Christmas Day.

Maria and Graham had laid on a feast fit for a king: in Australia, more and more, Christmas dinner is a salad affair. Prawns, cold meats and lots of good things from our combined vegetable gardens went down superbly with a couple of beers each for Graham and I, and some bubbly for the girls. A warm westerly breeze was blowing.

We were all preparing to come back to my place, and as Graham and I were loading his kids' brand-new bikes in the back of his ute, he asked "Do you smell that, Loz?"

The breeze had become a fairly stiff wind, and on it I could detect the unmistakeable, and quite pleasant, aroma of eucalyptus burning. We wandered around to his gate, and, looking westward, saw a haze of blue-grey smoke drifting over the escarpment, the series of hills that identify the most easterly throes of the Great Divide, about ten kilometres away.

"Not good, Graham. I think we'd better go for a drive."

Heading out along the ridge, into a clearer vantage point, we could see that a fire was burning way off on the top of the escarpment. We decided to go to the fire shed, and, when we arrived, a flurry of activity was happening. I could see a neighbour, Eric, who was captain of the volunteer service, barking orders at groups of guys busy with their fire-trucks, reels of hose and a few water-tankers that had just driven in. I jumped out of the ute.

"What do you reckon, Eric?", I asked.

"Could be crook, Laurie - we've got a real bad weather report comin' in - forty degrees and 100k westerlies. We're going out along Cedar Ridge, cause it looks like if that fire comes over the hill, it'll blow straight through here. I'd get home and start gettin' ready, if I were you."

"OK mate - what about your place?" He just looked at me with the glum determination of a bloke who knows that, while he's out saving other people's homes, his own might just be burning down.

"If you get a chance, you know what to do, Loz."

"Sure thing." But we both knew that, if it did get bad, it could get very bad for all of us.

We got back to Graham's and decided to get his place as ready as possible, then head down to mine. Graham was in the reasonably fortunate position that there was plenty of cleared area around his house - especially towards the west from where the fire would inevitably come. The idea would be that we would get my place secure, wait for the fire and deal with it, then get back up to his to do the same. (As things turned out, our plans were totally demolished by the speed and severity of the fire when it did come.)

The lot of us drove to my place. Chris got on the phone to another mate, Greg, to get him to bring his pump and hoses over. (Out here, everyone has this sort of gear - you're mad if you don't.) Greg's place was in a relatively safe suburban area, and he was under no threat, really, so he got some things together and was on his way.

Now, my place is in a lovely little valley surrounded by ridges on three sides and about two hundred acres of virgin bushland. Tall eucalypts are abundant, and our house is in the middle of this green oasis of forest. Idyllic, except on a forty degree day with huge, hot winds. And they were really starting to blow.

From the house we could now see, beyond the western ridge, a massive and growing pall of smoke, extending about two thousand metres into the sky. It was action time.

The kids got every bucket and container they could find and filled them, placing them around the outside of the house. The bath was filled; I plugged the gutters and ran the sprinkler on top of the roof to fill them. Graham and Miles, my son, ran firehoses to various points, and made sure that they were all working from the five thousand gallon tank on top of the hill. Greg and his eighteen year old son Matt arrived, and immediately got his pump on the swimming pool, trailing hoses along the front side of the house. Izzy, my daughter, insisted that her horse be led up from the paddock to the shelter of the house.

The plan was to meet the fire at the interface of the clearing with the bush, about forty metres from the house, and divert it around the house and yard. In a previous fire, we'd done just that pretty successfully. But we had no idea that what we were about to face was going to make that blaze look like a sparkler at a kid's birthday party.

It was three o'clock in the afternoon, and by this stage the wind was beginning to blow ferociously. Graham took off back up the ridge to get some bearings, and arrived back, breathlessly, a few minutes later.

"It's comin', mate - and it's real fast. We ought to get things wetted down."

We began throwing great quantities of water all over everything we could. The house was drenched, as were the gardens and the shed that holds our generators and solar-electricity set-up. But the wind was so hot and strong that the water was evaporating nearly as quickly as it was delivered.

I heard a noise, and looked up. The fire was coming over the ridge-line, directly towards us, and it was in the crowns of the trees. I shuddered.

Crown-fire: the worst kind of bushfire. The last fire had, more or less, gently come down over the hill at scrub level, and, even though there was some fairly energetic activity for an hour or so, it had been reasonably easy to draw it away from the house, and pretty safe, as well.

This was different. I had to make a split-second decision. I ran into the house, and screamed at Chris and Maria to get the three little kids and take off out the back way and get back to the ridge and relative safety. They scrambled, and within a minute were gone, with hugs and some frightened tears all round. They knew we were putting ourselves in some real danger by staying, but Graham, Greg and I were buggered if we were going to lay down without a fight. I'm not saying this out of bravado; I and my mates were just too obstinate to see twenty years' work (Greg and Graham had had a big hand in building my place) go up in flames.

I told Izzy to get her horse "inside the house - now!". For months afterwards the story of her putting a horse in the downstairs lounge-room was told, with great hilarity, all over the neighbourhood.

We all lined up on the perimeter with our hoses going full-pelt. The huge gums along the hillside glowed white, and then, one by one, exploded into flame. Limbs of trees as thick as an arm came hurling through the air like incendiary bombs, often crashing onto the roof of the house. I hoped like hell the sprinkler up there was still working, but we had no time to go back as the fire came storming back up the rise towards the house with the most unforgettable sound I've ever heard: a roar like a hundred express-trains.

Miles and I were standing beside each other when the sound of an enormous explosion came from the top of the hill. The concrete water tank had simply exploded from the heat of the fire. Suddenly, the pressure in our hoses dropped to nothing. Graham and Greg were still pumping from the swimming pool, but we were left with no defence at all.

"Run," I screamed at Miles. We got around to the eastern, lee-side of the house and lay on the ground as the fireball exploded over and around us. Sheets of blue flame whistled past us where the vapor-laden air was igniting. We jumped inside through Miles' bed-room window, and raced up the stairs, where we were greeted with the sight of huge flames belting down both verandahs, melting the fly screens, frames and all, on the windows. The heat was intense and suffocating, but the adrenalin was coursing through us so voluminously that we were both shaking with energy. It was time to do some bucket work.

For the next half an hour we ran around with buckets, re-filling from the pool and throwing them on the parts of the house that had caught alight. Greg and Graham continued to blast away at the northern side of the house, standing in the middle of the yard with flames singeing their overalls. I've never seen anything as brave. 

At one stage I was running down the stairs into the lounge room. There was Izzy, holding the bridle of her horse, which was unconcernedly chomping away at its nose-bag. Tears were streaming down her face.

"Are we going to be all right, Dad?" she cried, with a look of abject terror.

At that point I should have stopped, given her a cuddle, and reassured her.

Instead, I yelled (you had to; the noise of the fire was still deafening) "We might be if you let that fucking horse go and grab a bucket!"

She and Matt took the upstairs south verandah; by this time the firefront was past, and it was a little safer to venture out. I don't know who, if anyone, could have been given the most credit for saving the house. One thing I'm fairly sure of is that if we'd been only five, instead of six, we might have lost the house, and possibly our lives, as well.

After about an hour's more work, I was assured that the house was in no danger. (Well, technically, it was, because the air was still full of burning embers.) But Greg and the kids could look after that, so Graham and I jumped in his ute (it and Greg's car were the only vehicles that hadn't been burnt to the ground) and left for his place.

We couldn't get out the top road, as several trees had come down over it, so we doubled back and fought our way through the bottom track with the aid of a chain-saw onto the ridge road. Even so, it took a good half an hour to navigate our way to his place. 

We drove in, under some power lines that were swinging precariously on burnt-out poles, looked at the house, and both cracked up. It was absolutely untouched. It must have been the adrenalin come-down, but we sat their for a few minutes just giggling. Then reality hit. Graham looked over at his tool-shed - a forty foot shipping container that held all the tools of his trade - tools that were not only valuable in money terms, but that had acquired a significance in the life of this professional tradesman; any tradesperson will understand what I'm saying. There was smoke coming from it. By the time we ran over to it, we could tell that the inside was not going to be pretty.

Graham got the door open; a huge cloud of black, toxic smoke billowed from the container. It was obvious that everything inside was gone. We hung our heads.

Then Graham said something that I'm not likely to forget in a hurry. He smiled at me and said "Loz - it's just stuff. Just things. Our homes are here; we're here. That's all I need."

The fire claimed twenty homes in our area, countless sheds, out-buildings, fences, tractors and other vehicles. Everyone in the community pitched in and fought it for a week. Eric's house was safe. I got a wonderful Christmas present: one of the best friends a bloke could ever have.

In the beginning, and in the ending

18 million or so tears ago, a dirty great shield volcano aggressively splattered a large area of northern New South Wales, in the days when the eastern coast of Australia was going through a spasm and trying to swallow New Zealand. Some have argued that it's a pity it didn't, but that's not for me to say.

This is around the time (give or take a bit) Adam was discovering Eve, who you'll remember went around starkers in those days, and Adam was getting accustomed to the enormous burden of being permanently priapic, so we can understand why he wasn't interested in arcane matters such as geology. Any decent biblical education leaves one well aware of the acres of difference in the relative values of intelligence, power, majesty and moral rectitude between God and his creation. At least God was into geology; I mean, he invented the stuff.

As I was saying, since then the effect of erosion on this mixture of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rock includes fabulous and immense outcrops - and other features that simply stick up, on a grand scale, from the floors of valleys magnificent in their dense and voluptuous eucalypt forests. Blue gums, enormous in girth, build a cushion of cumulus-like foliage; the tops of the trees, viewed from above, look like nothing so much as a dense, bubbling cloud of green.

"Hey man," mumbled Leigh as we trudged along an uphill trail that threatened to, at any moment, collapse into the deep green gorges below us, "this acid is really good shit."

OK, OK, I just made that up. In fact, we were having a particularly pleasant time. Over the past twenty-five days, we had walked probably a hundred and fifty or more kilometres, and we had become pretty fit. We weren't going all the way to the Breadknife, but were climbing up to a good vantage-point to give the thing a good, close-up scrute. A mere fifteen-or-so kilometre round-trip. Tall ferns of various species gave way to ridge scrub as we climbed higher, until we were scrabbling over scree and fairly tumble-down rock platforms. 

This sort of thing convinces me further that God, if he really is around, is a bit of a shoddy tradesman. Lord, if you really care for us, you'll put in, at the very least, gentle slopes with nicely delineated pathways incorporating escalators up the more challenging stretches. When Adam was having a yarn with a couple of cherubim at the gates, Eve was being chatted up by a creature that was to become the ancestor of used-car salesmen and Republicans, unaware that her nascent concupiscence would result in thorns, childbirth and great fucking boulders that like to take your head off when you're half way up a mountain.

As always, the effort was worth it.  The Breadknife, and a couple of other ineffable gargantuans, peered across at us, rusty old fellers having their last say about the place, before wind, water and sun eventually took them down to be replaced by adolescents, emerging from their mother earth's aprons. The Breadknife could just as easily have been called "Old Silverback".

I thought of the serpent as we walked back towards camp, and, of course, we came upon a pretty little red-bellied black sunning itself by the path. Nicely coiled, with its head resting on its body like a little dog on your lounge pillow, it appeared for all the world to be blissing out.

We squatted near it and had a good look for a while, until we heard two walkers coming up the track. We said our goodays, and it was obvious they were English.

"Nice little feller we found here," said Leigh amicably, pointing to our friend by the track. The woman took one look at Blacky and hid her face in her hands, whimpering with a kind of rapid asthmatic pulmonary spasm. We looked at each other with some consternation.

"It's OK, he's just having a snooze. He's not interested in you at all." Leigh was being more than reasonable, I thought; little blackies, although poisonous, are very timid. Chris and I once had

a big feller who would park himself on the concrete doorstep on a Spring morning. We used to have to step over him to go to work.

She was disconsolate. When her husband tried to calm her by suggesting that it wouldn't hurt if she actually opened her eyes and had a look at it, she backed down the track, then turned as if to run.

"For Christ's sake, don't turn your back on it!"  I yelled.

Have you ever seen one of those ninja movies where the guys run up vertical walls? Think it's impossible? Think again. The woman got about forty yards up the track-side cliff inside three seconds. Perched on a tiny ledge, she collapsed sobbing.

Leigh realised she needed his help. "There's more of 'em up there in those caves next to you," he kindly encouraged.

We realised we could have fun like this all day, but food - and a really big telescope - called, so we bid fond adieus and left our new friend contemplating the unabashed generosity and good-will of the average Aussie bloke, and the ubiquity of Pseudechus porphyriacus in the Wide Brown Land.

Apropos of nothing at all: According to perhaps apocryphal tales, a particular species of parasitic worm, Dracunculiasis (formerly referred to as Dracontiasis), was once a fearsome killer, and the only remedy was to extract it from its host by means of a stick, previously steeped in water. The stick would be inserted into the abscess on the patient's leg where the worm made its window on the world. (Fuck, I bet that little procedure brought tears to the eyes.) Shortly, the worm would detect the moisture in the stick, gradually emerging from the body and wrapping its way around it, right to the top. This ancient treatment became embodied in the universal symbol for medicine. (The parallels with our verbillaceous mate in the Garden of Eden are unmistakeable.)

Next stop was the Siding Springs Observatory, perched atop a mountain some few miles to our east. Now, the bloke in charge of this place is a feller by the name of Fred Watson, and a heartier, more rambunctious person you'd not likely meet. As well as knowing things your granny forgot about astronomy, he plays a mean guitar. We were hoping to meet him at the Anglo-Australian Telescope for a jam; although, as he keeps musician's hours, and it was only two in the afternoon, we thought the chances might be slim.

We alighted at the car-park, and with a fierce and cold breeze blowing straight at us, climbed up to the telescope on foot. A lift took us up three flights until we emerged at the viewing platform.

I suppose there are plenty of people who would look on that thing and simply dismiss it as a vast combobulation of steel, glass, and wire. But of course, it is actually a sports apparatus - a tool for the exercise of the imagination. It is the Age of Reason wed to Romanticism.

... I always wanted to say that.

Whatever it was, it was special. Even the kids on the viewing platform sensed the imaginative power of its part in the great project. One little bloke said to his mum "But what's it for?" His mother leaned over and said "It's for learning, mate, learning about the universe."

And with that, we drove back to our camp, to spend the last night of our trip across this often inscrutable, ever bewildering but stunning country, underneath a star-studded sky, thinking about all of those things that contribute to what is our world.

Opals

Here is the link to a recording I made of the Sydney Guitar Quartet playing Philip Houghton's Opals suite: Black, Water, White. It was recorded at my studio last year, and I am thoroughly proud to say that my son, Miles, is one of the quartet's members. Enjoy.

Mind you, it's only an MP3. Sounds way better in glorious 24-bit 96Khz. For those with a technical bent, it was recorded using a pair of Rode NT2-A large diaphragm condensor microphones positioned directly in front of the quartet, and a pair of AKG C451 B condensors as overhead ambients, direct to Tascam 16 track tape (well, why not?) It was then mixed (no EQ), gently reverberated with an old Lexicon a mate lent me, and sent to Wavelab for a touch-up.

Just like baking a cake!

A brief musical interlude

A shining example of the wisdom of Frank Zappa, for all those who thought religion might have something really going for it. Televangelists need not press play.

Taxidermy

We limped into Gulargambone, in the early evening, looking for a place to rest our weary heads. It had been an eventful day; it's not every day that a bloke's navigator nearly has his head taken off by a kangaroo at high speed. Gulargambone was a sleepy little village lying on the plains just west of the Great Dividing Range, that long spine of mountains that separates the coast of eastern Australia from the unliveable part. We were in the unliveable part. The Volvo creaked its way into the parking lot of the town's only hotel/motel; we thankfully emerged, and without looking too carefully at the horrendous damage to our trusty steed, wandered into the bar.

We were in Gulargambone for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we intended to visit the Warrumbungle National Park, the site of some mighty fine pieces of geology. Secondly, a visit to the Siding Springs Observatory, home of the Anglo-Australian Telescope, had been a mission of mine for some years. But for now, we needed anaesthetic.

It turned out that the Gulargambone hotel/motel was the social centre for the town's inhabitants, and the hosts, Rob and Sue, a couple in their thirties, did an excellent job in food, beverage and company. I was talking to Sue, a vivacious blond, and one of the best multi-taskers I've ever seen - she was simultaneously cooking food for about twenty people, serving drinks, showing us around, and looking after two young kids and a baby - and mentioned that I was originally from Newcastle.

"Oh, me too," she replied. "Whereabouts?"

"Kotara. Grinsell Street, to be precise."

"Bugger me!" she exclaimed, "I lived in Grinsell Street until I was eighteen!"

Of course, that sealed the deal. We were immediately fast friends, and chatted away merrily with each other, while Leigh sat at another table, regaling the locals with outrageous stories (creatively embellished, of course) of our travels around the country. Every ten seconds or so, a great roar of laughter would erupt from the table. Leigh has this effect on everyone.

Apparently it was movie night at the pub. There being no cinema for a couple of hundred kilometres in any direction, mine hosts had taken it upon themselves to be the local culture vendors, and had set up a pretty nifty mini-theater in the back room. Rob and Sue were screening There Will be Blood on this occasion, so, after a great meal of swordfish cutlets, and with Sue sitting beside me, constantly replenishing my glass of red, we watched Daniel Day Lewis cover himself in oil and glory.

By about the eleventy-millionth glass, the screen was no longer in focus, so I bid all goodnight, and with a chorus of Good nights and Nice-meeting-yous ringing in my ears, I stumbled off to my room. What a great crew of people these dirt-poor, struggling farmers were. And the pub had become a lifeline (in some cases, I suspect, quite emphatically so) for a whole community ravaged by drought.

We left early the following morning, before anyone was up. We passed through a place that had nothing to distinguish itself whatsoever except for the sign that told you its name: Gummin Gummin'.  Note the apostrophe? We stopped, and spent several useless minutes pondering the virtue of putting an apostrophe on the end of a double-barrelled place name, out in the middle of nowhere. It must have been a mistake, we thought, but when we checked our map, there was that cute little thing sticking out of Gummin Gummin''s name. More bizarre than crop circles, if you ask me.

We pulled into the National Parks Centre at the Warrumbungles, and went into the main office to register. A large group of tourists from Europe accompanied us. We got to the front door, and found that someone had creatively placed there a dirty big, perfectly taxidermified western grey kangaroo as some kind of ossified doorman. I took one look, and pounced on it.

I had the thing by the throat, and was giving it a good kicking to its nether regions, all the while yelling, in syncopation with the lethal blows to its protruding scrotum, "You - dir - ty - fuck - ing - cunt - of - a - thing!" This went on for some ten seconds or so, with the stuffed object rocking back and forth in time with my blows, before Leigh quite intelligently intervened.

"Ah, Loz," he said trepidatiously, putting a soothing hand on my arm, "it's already dead, mate."

I stopped, turned around, and found about twenty foreigners standing there, rather shell-shocked, and giving me the kind of look that I imagine those derelicts in the city who urinate in public litter receptacles get from passers-by.

I straightened up, threw my shoulders back and attempted to rescue my dignity. "Well, they are cunts of things. You might think they're all cute and adorable, but just wait until one of them decides to destroy your Volvo!"

I spun on my heels and marched up to the reception desk, and, I must say, was somewhat taken aback when I was unceremoniously thrown straight back out the door by a bloke who was probably three sizes too large for his shirt. What is it with people who wear epaulets? 

Don't talk to me about kangaroos

Leigh was driving. I'd done all the driving up until now, twenty-five days in a row. Not that I minded - driving, to me, is about as taxing as reading a book. Leigh was a superb navigator - the only time we'd been lost was in the Strezlecki desert, which is probably not a good place in which to get yourself lost, come to think of it.

We were on our way from Wilcannia to the Warrumbungle mountains in the mid-west of the state. We'd already covered two hundred kilometres, and had another five hundred or so to go, so I thought a little respite, on this day, would be in order.

The Barrier Highway was unremitting; we just drove forever into that endless horizon, with some stretches that were gun-barrel straight for thirty or forty klicks at a time. But we began to notice, by about half-way through this stretch, something we hadn't seen for two weeks: green grass. It was an epiphany; we even stopped to photograph a little patch of green on the side of the road, as if it had assumed some majestic importance to be back in a place where water had finally fallen from the sky.

We stopped at Cobar, a prosperous little town built on mining; a place that was so unlike Wilcannia, 260 k behind us, as to be unimaginable. But it was just a quick stop for food, and we were on our way.

I was driving again; the next town would be Nyngan, a further 130 k up the road. The Volvo was eating up the miles; Leigh was studying the map to determine the best route through to the lyrically-named Gulargambone. I was doing 110 k.p.h. on cruise control; we came over a railway bridge that curved gently up and back down again.

I caught a glimpse of something out of my left eye, close to the car. I had the sudden realisation that it was the head of a kangaroo. And then I hit it.

Now, hitting a 'roo at 110 can be a chancy business. Depending on a number of factors, including various vectors of velocity, direction, and mass, you can either live or die. Many people have been killed by collisions with kangaroos in Australia, either through losing control of the vehicle, or having the thing come straight through the windscreen and taking every one of the occupants' heads off. Roos are flighty buggers; they can, for no other reason than sheer caprice, take off at great speed and decide that leaping across a major highway at full gallop is a pretty cool thing to do. Which is exactly what our bastard decided.

There was an almighty bang, as the car took the body of the thing on the left front corner. Leigh, who'd been looking at his map, yelled "Fuck, Loz!"; he told me a little later he thought I'd come off the road and hit a post or a tree. The car pitched and swerved as the mudguard collapsed onto the front wheel; I wrestled the steering wheel, got back on course, and gently applied a little brake - not too hard, because I was unsure of the extent of the damage. But the screeching and scraping of tyre on metal told me plenty.

We came to a stop about two hundred metres down the road. I sat there, cursing our bad luck. For six thousand kilometres we'd been careful to avoid driving at dusk, or at night, when 'roos are around; to hit one in broad daylight two days before home seemed a vicious irony.

Leigh got out of the car. It was difficult - his door didn't want to open, as the 'roo had, in its dying throes, evidently decided to give the side of the car a good kicking as it scraped along it. Leigh came around to my window and said "That must have been a really big kangaroo, Loz - the car's fucked."

There was nothing to do but inspect the damage and see if we could get the thing driveable. The bonnet, headlights, front mudguard and both left hand doors were destroyed; the mudguard was just a tangled mass of steel with bits of 'roo flesh and fur adhered to it, all crumpled on top of the left front wheel.

But first, of course, we had to see whether the 'roo itself was still alive. We walked back to the site of the collision, and there was the poor thing, dead as a doornail, about twenty metres off the road. At least we were spared the prospect of clubbing it to death, as I'd had to do on two or three occasions in the past. Leigh estimated it at between fifty and sixty kilograms - a big one, indeed. It was horribly damaged. Irrepressibly, Leigh turned to me with a bit of a grin and said "Well, at least we should cut its legs off - waste not, want not, Loz."

At that point I wished it would just get up so I'd have the pleasure of killing it again. I had had to plead with my ever-lovin' to borrow her car for the trip, against her better judgement, which included admonishments like "But what if you have an accident, or hit a kangaroo?" I had assured her that none of these things would happen. It was going to be an uncomfortable phone call.

We found an old star-picket post by the side of the road, and did some serious panel-beating with it. We got the mudguard off the tyre, and gave the car a test-drive. Like all serious Swedish technology, the Volvo shook off this slight inconvenience, and trundled on as if nothing had happened. It was only a couple of weeks later that the damage assessment came in at twelve thousand dollars.

We were lucky; had I been a fraction of a second later, the thing might have come straight through the windscreen, and who knows what the cleaner's bill would have been for that.