As I travelled I recorded, sitting in the back of a camper van or in a motel room every night, writing down everything I’d seen and heard. Where possible I took public transport. You don’t learn much about a place by flying over it. My most vivid memory is of sitting in buses for days at a time, stopping at roadhouses from which I never expected to escape alive, listening to one driver after another enunciate his philosophy of manliness and mateship, encountering Australians of every age and with every reason for being on the road themselves, watching the eagles glide and the earth turn red. There is no more variously beautiful country. This book is a record of the near anguish I felt the whole time I was there. The only way I can describe that briefly is to say it stabs the heart.

Howard Jacobson, April 2011

Contents

Contents

Preface to the New Edition

Map

1 On Wings of Poesy

2 Shiklone Troicee and After

3 Bungle Bungle

4 Arse-End Charlie

5 Umpie Bong

6 Neither an Ong nor a Mo

7 Et in Arcadia Nos

8 Lost Orisons

9 Granny Apples

10 The Town with a of Gold

11 A Roomette with a View

12 Ich Hatt’ Einst Ein Schön’ Vaterland

13 Wher. Edna. Laide. Me

14 ‘An Interesting Place With Lots of Sandhills’

15 Mintja

16 Ghostbusting

17 The Townsville Hoist

18 Gone Troppo

19 The Expulsion From Paradise

20 Found! – The Spangled Drongo

About the Author

By the Same Author

Map

1 On Wings of Poesy

One
 
On Wings of Poesy

We knew where we were going. We knew how and even when we were going. The only thing we weren’t entirely sure about was why we were going.

We were loaded down with resolution; what we lacked was a reason. A publisher’s advance could not be called a reason. It was not elemental enough. And as for this being a double anniversary – twenty-one years exactly since I’d first gone to Australia, twelve years exactly since my wife had first left it; a total of thirty-three years almost all of them misspent – well, that was elemental to excess.

A course between expedience and sentiment somehow eluded us.