Ten Pound Pom Read online

  –That okay for ya, buddy?

  –Grand, I say, and think: Course it’s okay. It’s black and hot and no doubt tastes of coffee. It’s what I asked for. Why’s he showing me my drink? –Thanks.

  I sit with Higgy on a bench at Laguna Lookout. I came here too, as a child, but don’t remember it. Uncle Higgy, as he once was to me, was also a Ten Pound Pom, landed in Oz in 1974 at age twenty-four. Went back to the UK in ’76 but came back to Oz in ’85, to Melbourne, because his sister lived there. After eight years there, he moved again to Brisbane in 1993, ‘fell in love’ (his words) with the Sunshine Coast in 1994 and has been there, in Mooloolaba, since. He’s been a site manager for 14 years and makes a decent living; his brother, back in Auldum, a civil engineer, makes the same money as Higgy but ‘it goes a lot further in Oz’. He got Australian citizenship in 1989 but he’s ‘still a Pom and a Pom right through’, and if he had to – if he was forced to make the choice – he’d return to Britain. But he doesn’t have to make that choice so he’ll ‘die in Oz’. He left the UK in the first place simply because he had the opportunity to see other parts of the world for a tenner – ‘just adventurousness’.

  Ah, Uncle Higgy. Now just a mate. I remember him with a bubble perm.

  THEN

  Curtiss Falls on Tambourine Mountain. Rainforest. The boy and his mother and siblings stand on a flat rock across a stream and the father takes a photograph and then the boy’s mother starts to scream, terrible shrieks that set birds frantically exiting the trees and bounce back off the thick and stone-like trunks. The boy’s mother is kicking her flip-flopped feet in a loud panic and the father is exhorting her to keep still so he can ‘get it off’. The boy looks and sees the leech protruding from his mother’s toe, it appears to be half-sunk in her flesh and wriggling its way further in and it gleams blackly sleek like a seal and a deep disturbance begins to writhe in the boy that such things could exist and his father whacks the leech away with the side of his fist and holds his mother and comforts her, laughing softly, not unkindly, at her hysterical reaction. It’s just a leech, he tells her. Just a leech. It’s gone now.

  NOW

  Mount Tambourine is a hilltop settlement of huge houses with startling views across the plain below and out to sea miles away, the Surfer’s Paradise towers glittering in the far distance like upright shards of glass. Signs everywhere read DROUGHT AREA – SAVE EVERY DROP. Curtiss Falls is little more than a dribble, really, and not at all like the pacey mini-river I remember it as being, but that could be due to the drought. Still, I like the hanging hairy vines and the prehistoric ferns and the trees that loom huge and the bush turkeys and the humidity and the steam and the vivid flashes of lorikeets between the plate-leafed wrestling branches. And we find the flat stone on which we stood for the photograph and by which the leech attached itself to our mother’s toe. I stand on the stone, in roughly the same place I’m standing in the photograph. Still here; three decades of the world’s turning has not shifted that stone and has spun me around the globe back to it. Mighty magnet. I start to think about numenism, and how subjective that necessarily is, the impossibility of an unknowable localised ur-spirit when that very thing plays and wonders and worries like a younger self, how emotional attachment and investment must always mould the numen to one’s own shape, but these are the thoughts of a man of forty and one of the opportunities I need and want, very much, to exploit here in this steamy jungle is a re-acquainting of myself with the boy I once was so I pretend he’s standing by me, holding my hand, looking down into the clear and rolling water underfoot.

  We stop at a bar for some food, driving back. I take an information leaflet and a cigarette onto the decking outside. A hawk, nearby, hovers in a thermal. His feathers are white. ‘Tamborine Mountain Sanctuary’ the leaflet says (no ‘u’, I notice), ‘between the coast, the clouds and the country’. The Curtis Falls walk (no second ‘s’, I notice) is praised as having ‘an enormous strangler fig’ and a ‘causeway [that] takes you over the creek and little fishes are usually visible in the clear water’. The ‘Quick-Facts’ column tells me that Tamborine Mountain ‘is a remnant of deposits laid down by volcanic eruptions 225 million years ago… Bush Turkeys and their eggs, Wallabies, Yams, Tamarind and Macadamia nuts are just some of the abundant bush tucker sort by aboriginal peoples for thousands of years on Tamborine Moluntain… At 550 metres above sea level it can be 5 degrees cooler than adjacent lowlands. It pays bring a jacket any time of year. With an average per year of 131 days with some rain, it is wise to bring a raincoat or umbrella’ (sic throughout).

  I wouldn’t mind staying in this area for longer, really; the mountain towns with their restaurants and bars seem interesting, and I like Surfer’s Paradise being at this distance, all those miles over there on the horizon. How wee it looks, at this remove. How puny.

  THEN

  A school trip to Early Street Pioneer Village – wells and log cabins and people wearing Victorian attire. How the settlers lived. Being led around the village the boy notices some large movement in a tangled bush and he crawls in there, no thought of spiders or snakes, no regard for the thorns that rip his skin. A dragon is hiding in the leaves. Small dinosaur, a spiked ridge of flesh on its back and a green wattle at its throat. Its claws curl like nail parings and its yellow eyes turn to the boy and a pulse beats lightly in its throat and a heavier one beats in the boy and he slowly removes an Opal Fruit from his packet and offers it to the lizard. Ridged nostrils sniff. A tongue flickers out. Rubber lips open and close and teeth bite. The boy is absolutely absorbed, completely rapt. There is no thought in his thudding skull other than the assimilation of what he’s doing, what is entering his eyes, this lizard chewing on the sweet, and the boy takes in the tiny chasms between every scale and the fine mesh of the skin and the silvery claws and the sickle-shaped shadows that mackerel the back and flanks and he wants nothing more in the world, just this.

  –GRIFFITHS! Is that you, boy?

  The teacher, glimpsed through leaves, jigsawed by twigs. Round red face and a muzzy and shorts and a shirt a bit too tight.

  –Geraht of there now! That’s a bearded dragon! Yer mad, lad! Take yer bladdy fingers off!

  The teacher’s bellow has set the lizard scarpering. No point, now, in remaining here, in these thorny bushes.

  NOW

  Saturday night in O’Malley’s, the only pub worthy of that name on the Sunshine Coast. Mock-Oirish place in a shopping centre, all dark wood and green upholstery. Caffrey’s on tap. Chris, a friend of Tony’s from home, who is yearing-out in Oz and has arranged to meet us here, stands six foot eight tall, and I crick my neck talking to him. His girlfriend, Nickie. Another feller called Paul, from Sheffield, with a shaven head and arms so heavily tattooed that they look like colourful sleeves, a decent and friendly bloke whose appearance nevertheless riles the Aussie uniforms. Last week, he tells me, he was returning home with a bag of shopping, two guys grabbed him, one arm each, lifted him off the ground and ran him towards another guy who was holding a dog. Sniff him! Go on, good boy, sniff him! The dog sniffed Paul, turned away, the guys dropped him and walked off. No apology, no explanation, nothing. Plain-clothes policemen and ignorant bastards.

  –It’s crap, Paul tells me as we get drunker. –This part of Australia… wish I’d never come. It’s all clean and sterile. All of it’s to do with health and wealth but there’s no fucking pubs, no fucking music scene, no little bars to discover down dark alleys. Wish I’d never bothered. But I’ve got kids. It’s a safe place to bring up kids, I’ll say that for it. Nowt bloody else, tho.

  We’re introduced to a gang of locals who someone – Nickie, I think – is acquainted with and they do the usual enthusing thing; lovely to meet you, what d’you think of Oz, etc., except for one stocky little feller who shakes our hands half-heartedly and says ‘yeh yeh, nice to meet ya, yer all cunts’, which makes me laugh, because I think he’s joking, and it’s a funny joke, in the context. Later, however, smoking outside with Chris
, the group pass us and say goodbye as they do so. Shortarse swaggers up to Chris, the point of his bullet head level with Chris’s navel, stabs a finger up at his face and says:

  –You. I’ve just fucked your missus in the dunny.

  Shocked, Chris says: –Not bothered. So’s he, and points to me.

  –Yeh, I say. –And she told me that I was bigger and better than you.

  Shortarse mulls this over. Mutters to himself: –Bigger… better…

  I watch the ponderous thoughts porridge themselves through his echoing skull; Pom calls me small of dick and bad lover. Tall Pom is not biting. But shorter Pom has made insult. What I do? Smash Pom? Me not like be told him bigger and better than me as lover of ladies. Me not like him. Smash Pom? Smash Pom! MUST SMASH POM!

  –Come on.

  His girlfriend drags him away. Pugnacious little prick. Shortarsed fucking swaggerer, nobody’s fault that you were born to be small, deal with it. You’re not going to grow anymore. You’ll always be short. Cultivate some dignity and you’ll be a much happier man.

  Paul joins us. –Was he giving you trouble, that copper?

  –He’s a copper?

  –Aye yeh. I know him. He’s not one of the worst, either.

  Put a shorty with a hang-up about his height in a uniform and all you’re going to get is grief. Especially here, where whether you fit in or not is predicated on such narrow-mindedly tight criteria… I witness an arrest, later that night, not long after the episode with PC Shortarse; three big coppers pounce on a slight and dreadlocked young man, throw him to the ground so hard that he makes a thudding yelp, sit on him, scrape his face across the concrete, cuff him. Killing an ant with a bomb, this is. I have no idea what the young man had done; had too pale a skin colour, perhaps. Or coughed too loudly. But I doubt very much that it warranted such treatment.

  I get very drunk in O’Malley’s, because I must, and stop for a pie on the way back to my swag-bag and balcony. Eat it on a bench amongst pecking white ibises, facing the sea. This should be lovely. But it’s very far from it. Surfer’s fucking Paradise. This is a shite place. I can’t wait to leave it.

  THEN

  It’s a short boat ride to Coochie Mudloe island but the boy loves it. He loves travelling on water. He can’t swim, yet, and actually being in water scares him, but he feels an attraction to it, a powerful tug, that sits in him and which he likes to safely satisfy by being a passenger on boats. He thinks of the cold dark depths beneath the hull. He closes his eyes and envisions a vast blackness with a tiny boat on top of it and on that boat a tiny him. Giant sharks and squids and whales cutting across that unfathomable deep.

  The boy’s family set up a little camp on the island, in one of the wooden huts on the beach. Sandwiches and crisps and lemonade. From this base, the boy explores the beach; he clambers over the shed-sized bleached-white treetrunk that the tide has carried in, he bodysurfs the waves close to the beach on a small piece of polystyrene foam that he clutches to his chest, he and his siblings build castles of sand and dig holes at the tideline. Many different types of bird catch his attention. He bobs in the shallows on a rubber ring, spooks himself and his sister by pretending that a submerged rock with trailing weed attached is the severed head of a young woman. He searches for, and finds, crabs in the rockpools, and anemones and shrimps and small and colourful darting fish. When he’s alone in the hut, he pretends to be a shark-hunter, like the Quint character in Jaws, called to the hut by the island-folk who are trying to persuade him into killing the shark that has been eating them. It can detect our blood from two miles away, a worried villager says. Correction, says the great shark-hunter, chewing on a fishpaste sarnie, one foot up on the wooden bench: Five miles. The shark’s been terrorising the island for months; the islanders can’t swim, they can’t fish, even the supply-boat was attacked last week and overturned and all its crew eaten. So you’ve got a big problem, the great shark-hunter drawls. What’s in it for me?

  The boy loves Coochie Mudloe island. He misses it when he’s not on it. He has his photograph taken sitting on the beached treetrunk, big and warty and gnarly chunk of near-petrified wood, and when he looks at this image in later life he will recall the sharp tang of the sea and the crash of waves into his body and the happiness and promise of the island, all salty and sunbaked and secret, the constant joy of discovery.

  NOW

  I’m excited, again. I can see Coochie Mudloe getting closer to me, over the waves. Magical land, again, over the blue sea. A leaflet on the boat tells me that the island’s name means ‘red earth’ in the local aboriginal dialect; it was from there that the aborigines got the clay with which to paint their bodies during their mystical rituals, the equivalent of the Native American ghost-dance. There’s me, Tony, Chris, and Nickie. I feel that pleasant thrill in my chest that I get whenever I travel over water; I’ve had that feeling since I was a child, and it’s never left me. I’ve had that feeling for as long as I can remember.

  On the beach, we watch a fish eagle circle high over the breakers. Nickie, a wildife photographer, gets her camera out and snaps away. The bird soars, pivots on a wingtip, turns and circles, its eyes remaining locked to the water, spiralling down lower until it snaps into a dive and snatches its talons in the water and rises clutching a silvery-wriggling, violin-shaped fish. I am amazed. I’m breathless.

  I love this island. It’s remained with me for thirty years. The wooden huts on the beaches are no more, replaced by tables under a free-standing roof. We ask a man basking in his garden what happened to them and he tells us they were burnt down, ‘set alight by Briddish soccer hooligans’. We talk to him about the island, about holiday-house rents. He tells us that the water supply comes all the way from the Blackall Mountains, ‘best warda you’ll ever taste’, and he holds up an empty glass which his wife wordlessly takes into the house and comes back out carrying a tray with several glasses of water on it. The average Aussie male needs reconstructing, but the water is wonderful; ice-cold and clean and clear and it makes my head feel full of mint.

  The noise of a hairdryer comes up from the dusty street. A full-grown man putters past on a motorcycle the size of a child’s trike, his knees up to his ears. Chris, all six foot eight of him, watches him pass with a slow turning of his head. The confusion of scale here is brilliant. I laugh a lot. An old and chunky dog befriends us on the beach, follows us everywhere. I don’t recall much of this island – what I remember most vividly are the beach-huts, and they’re gone – but I love being on it, nevertheless. But then we return to the jetty and instead of turning left we turn right towards the Melaleuca Wetlands and it all comes back; the trees flanking and striping the dusty track, the sunken wooden steps down to the beach and the rocks and pools at the tideline and the small waves and, yes, the large piece of driftwood, the tree-trunk, still there, exactly the same, just a bit whiter with the sun and the salt. The me of thirty years ago, he’s everywhere here. I sit next to him on the tree-trunk, I overturn rocks with him and marvel at the scuttling life we reveal. I walk with him along the beach and we throw sticks for the old and friendly dog. I see a bar in the trees with tables outside and I want to take the young me over there and buy him a Coke and myself a beer and tell him what’s going to come, what heartbreaks and wonders and joys and pains to expect. I want to talk with him and be with him but I see the ferry coming in. Fuck it. Don’t want to go back to the mainland, even if it will be my last night in Queensland. Want to stay here, with me.

  * This is taken from a Guardian interview with the Brisbane band The Saints, written by Keith Cameron, called ‘Come the evolution’, printed in the edition of July 20th 2007. The Saints were a furious punk band who made a big impact in the late 70s with their singles ‘I’m Stranded’ and ‘This Perfect Day’.

  THEN

  The boy’s father is making alterations to the family car, a big, spacious, white Holden station wagon. The boy watches. His dad drills holes in the car’s superstructure, just above the windows, and threa
ds curtain-runners through them then clambers into the car and attaches curtains to the runners. He carefully cuts a large foam mattress to shape, lowers the back seats down, and slides the mattress in. Straps cases to the roof, full of clothes and utensils and personal effects. Stores food and medicines in the car. The effective space-management makes an impression on the boy.

  –Is it a long way, Dad?

  –A very long way. Miles and miles and miles. Across mountains and a great big desert.

  –How long will it take us?

  –About ten years.

  –Honest?

  –I’m messing. About ten days.

  The car has become a little house that can move. The tailgate is up and the boy can see inside and it looks cosy and secretive and snug with the mattress and the blankets and the toys. He’s excited, the boy, excited about the adventure ahead and the fact that he’s leaving Brisbane. He’s grown to dislike Brisbane. Wants to leave it behind. Maybe Perth will be better. And maybe on the journey between the two cities there’ll be kangaroos and koalas and fun and excitement.

  –Can we go to Currumbin before we go, Dad?

  –Haven’t got time, son. We’re leaving tomorrow.

  –Can we go on the way?