I turned up on Bill Richard’s forecourt at the same time he did. He climbed out of a white Bentley, looking dry and jaunty. I was on foot, apprehensive, wet, and Anzac-haunted. Perfect firing-line fodder, in short, for Bill Richards’ machine-gun conversation. I sat at his desk and let him spatter me with opinion. ‘First law of outback motoring – don’t stop for Aborigines. If they’ve run out of petrol it’s because they’ve drunk it. If you stop they’ll ask you for beer money. They’ll steal from you. They won’t do you any harm, and even if they threaten you they’ll be so drunk you can blow ’em over. But they’re a bloody nuisance. Punctures, of course, are your responsibility. If you drive over a bottle – even if it’s in an Abo’s mouth – that’s your fault. I’m not a racist. I admire Aborigines – full bloods that is. They’re good-looking, strong, and reliable. It’s the half-castes that cause the trouble. I know we’re to blame, but it’s too late for us to do anything about it now. They’re just pissants. Did you know that some of ’em get social security money for two wives? It’s true anyway. We subsidize bigamy in this country. Mind you, I don’t know how anyone can marry even one of them myself.’

He was a short, round teddy bear of a man, innocuous and bristlingly aggressive all at once, a wag, a pedant, an incorrigible joker, but shrewd, shrewd, his eyes wanted you to believe. ‘I might have sold this business before you get to Alice,’ he told me. ‘I’ve got a bloke very interested. We kissed and got into bed, but then he shied at my price.’

‘No way to behave,’ I said. I was surprised by the sound of my own voice.

‘Too right. But I think I can tickle him up a bit more. Have a good trip. Remember what I told you about the Abos. Mind the bulldust holes.’

I thought about those bulldust holes as I drove back to Glenelg to pick up Ros and the provisions for the trip. I knew the word bulldust as an Australian alternative – at once more polite and more dismissive – to bullshit. It had never before occurred to me that there actually was such a thing, that it disguised craters in the road which could break your axle if you drove through them. All along I’d been apprehensive about this leg of our journey, but only now did I understand the enormity of what we were undertaking. Real bulldust! We were going to the very source of the nation’s mythology, utterly unprepared and unprotected we were heading for the white hot forge of Australian metaphor itself.

Stiffen the bloody lizards!

13 Wher. Edna. Laide. Me

Thirteen
 
Wher. Edna. Laide. Me