On the Road Again

On the Road Again
Since this was written, we have moved from Eucla (four years ago) to Kalgoorlie and, sadly, Mr P has passed away. But I return to Eucla often for visits and have recently had a book published on the history of Eucla (since 1940). Mr P’s daughter, Rasa, now runs the roadhouse…and the West Coast Eagles had a wonderful season this year.

We were driving on the Eyre Highway, somewhere on the Straight (90 miles of it, says the sign, even though they measure distance in kilometres now), and I had all sorts of mixed feelings. I wasn’t past the amazement of having just sold, given away, thrown out or abandoned most of my worldly goods and moved to the other side of the planet. I was thrilled, but I couldn’t grasp that it had actually happened.

I find myself walking down the Southern Ocean’s shore or slogging up a sand dune, watching whales basking in the Bight, or a mob of kangaroos hopping across the scrub, or a flock of emus curiously eyeing my camera in the relentless wind out here, and this little voice in my head exclaims, “I live in Australia!”

But I’m in fast forward. Let me rewind and get back to where I was, riding down the Eyre Highway in The Ratbag’s little blue Toyota Starlet (riding because I was too afraid to drive and he was too smart to let me). We spent a week in Perth, where he’d driven to meet me when I flew—moved—here. Little Rock to Dallas to Los Angeles to Auckland to Melbourne to Perth, and only nine hours late. But that’s another story. We stayed with his mother, in her house up in Gooseberry Hill, and I enjoyed that view as much as I could. I looked upon our move to Eucla with trepidation. How well would we get along? How would working at the roadhouse go? How well would I fit in?

Not long before I left the US, I read Janette Turner Hospital’s novel, Oyster. It takes place in this little bitty dusty spot in the road, somewhere up in Queensland if I recall correctly, and the powers that be (such as they are) prevent anyone or anything from leaving, including the mail (because they’re keeping secret a rather prosperous opal mining concern). I wondered how that was possible, as I was reading the novel. I mean, the mail. They were also very suspicious of strangers, and strangers (one of whom is a father come looking for his missing son) feel their suspicion. Was this what awaited me in Eucla? I didn’t think so. I was there for a few days, just seven months before, and everyone seemed friendly. Of course, I was just passing through, The Ratbag's guest, and probably something of a novelty. This time, I was moving there, semi-permanently, as a resident, neighbour and co-worker.

While Eucla is smaller than that fictional town in Queensland, I see now how a few could manipulate almost anything in a small bush settlement, particularly when there aren’t any police (as was the case in Hospital’s book). It would be a bit more difficult to get away with here in Eucla, with seven police officers. But the mail comes and goes in mailbags. Greyhound buses pick them up and drop them off in the dark of night. The closest post office is more than 500 kilometres away, in Ceduna, South Australia. In Western Australia, it’s Norseman, more than 700 kilometres away. The mailbags that come and go at the police station (provided you have seven honest cops, of course) are safe. But the mailbags at the roadhouse are another story.

Long-time roadhouse owner, “Mr P,” a septuagenarian Lithuanian, closes the bags up at night. Any mail that tourists or locals want posted is placed on a shelf in the kitchen. Sometime before he retires upstairs (to the Eagle’s Nest), he places all the mail in the mailbags. There are two, and mail is put in its respective bag, depending if it’s going east or west. He places a padlock on each bag, and the bartender puts the bags in the mail barrels in front of the police station after he or she closes up at 22:00.

The next morning, the guy who’s rostered on for the service station (unless it’s Stewy, who. Mr P probably doesn’t trust to pick up the mail bags, and who usually can’t get up early enough to both pick up the mail bags and open the service station on time) picks up the roadhouse mailbags (if the bus has left any; sometimes they forget, or the bus is cancelled, and mail is delivered only five days a week when there are no federal holidays) at the police station barrels and puts them in the staff room for Mr P to open. When I first arrived, only Mr P could open the bags. Once, Yvonne got ‘special permission’ to open a bag because Mr. P was out of town. However, lately ‘Buddha’—sometimes called ‘Big Daddy’ (mostly by Mr P), has been opening the bags because Mr P gets up around 3:00 or 4:00, does his tills and books, gives the servo guy and the 6 o’clock girl any messages or duties, and he goes back to bed for a couple hours. Anyway, you see how he could control the mail, if he wanted to.

But I keep leaving the highway to reveal things I didn’t even know enough about to worry over. As The Ratbag drove down the road at a speed intended to cover the 1400 kilometres to Eucla in the shortest possible time, I was sorry to be leaving Perth. Perth is a great city. At least that’s my brief impression of it, given my two Oz holidays (Ozventure 1 and 2) and the week’s post-immigration breather. I love King’s Park, and the Swan Valley, the wineries and the birds...the Swan River and the colour of the sky, the smell of the eucalypts at The Ratbag’s mother’s, particularly after a rain...the old, colonial buildings sitting side-by-side with the modern skyscrapers in the CBD...the zoo and Northbridge, the restaurants and the bars, the music on the radio and the West Coast Eagles (even though their 2000 and 2001 seasons sucked out loud), the look of the Burswood Casino and resort (even though I ‘d never been there), our favourite Chinese restaurant in Morley, Xanthorrhea Nursery, never having to go to the airport to say goodbye again, if I didn’t want to.

I’d been to Eucla. I knew where I was going. No shops. No theatres. No restaurants, except for the roadhouse dining room and another roadhouse 12 kilometres to the east. No Hungry Jacks (aka Burger King), no McDonalds, no pizza, no grocery stores, no banks, no doctors or dentists or pharmacies. Nada. Just the roadhouse, with its swimming pool, service station, caravan park and motel, the Meteorological Station, the Silver Chain Nursing Clinic, the Eucla Combined Emergency Services shed (with their very own ambulance, fire truck and State Emergency Services truck), the Quarantine Checkpoint (really 12 kilometres to the east, across from the Border Village, another roadhouse not quite as nice as the Eucla Motor Hotel), the constant hum of a generator (for electricity), the two desalinisation plants (one for the town and one for the roadhouse) and a few houses. Oh yeah, and the Eucla International Airport, with its dirt runways. That’s it. Well, there’s the old townsite’s ruins, the old telegraph station (which isn’t really the telegraph station but the postmaster’s house) being all that one can usually see, the scenery, the jetty ruins, and the Eucla Golf Course, Shooting Club and nearby rubbish tip.

What if I fell incredibly ill? What if I were bitten by a dugite or a death adder? Or fell tramping over the dunes or the escarpment? What if I was burned at work? What about my chronic cough?

Still, my thoughts were remarkably calm. All I was thinking was, somewhat selfishly, that when neither of us was working, I’d have The Ratbag virtually all to myself. He’d not be dividing himself among his daughter, Munchkin, his friends, me, ignoring his mother when she decided he needed to lose weight or drink less, the errands that had to be run before his return to Eucla, the ‘Happy Families’ get-togethers his mother might be planning, etc., etc. Aside from work, his missing Munchkin, which he does acutely, Eyre Highway Community business, the desal plant, and the minutiae of daily life, I’d have a chance to get to know him. I was looking forward to that. We could see if we really were best mates or not. It was difficult to be happy about leaving Perth (because I wasn’t) and be anxious about moving to Eucla (which I definitely was) and still look forward to the coming weeks and months.

The highway, stretching out before us, seemed appropriate for the moment. It went on and on, and I couldn’t see our destination. No matter how much progress we made, it continued straight ahead. And I knew there were curves up ahead, but they couldn’t be anticipated, having never travelled this way (at least eastward) before. The road became narrower and narrower, until it seemed unpassable, but as we moved on, it opened up for us, the narrow bit continually moving on, too. And the curves were put there on purpose, so drivers wouldn’t become too bored or complacent about their trip.

I was, by the grace of the Australian immigration department and an unwillingness to be a coward, a new resident of a country I loved, travelling somewhere unknown with my best friend. It was the best place I’d been in for many, many years.