07/26/2024
Even if many of my collected writings have never yet found a publisher, I'm glad I've documented all my adventures years shortly after they took place, because when I need to recall the stories now I find there's a lot of wonderful fine detail l've forgotten. My life as a student turned radical in Australia in 1986 was a wild year of transformation and adventures, and I somewhat marvel at the casual way my 20 year old self breezed through every bit of adversity. Reminded of this because 38 years later we're on the verge of selling the land described in this passage. My father sighed wistfully when I told him our Aussie realtor had a great cash offer - "it'll be sad to see it go" - and I laughed and replied "we've only both set foot on the land once in our lives, it won't be that sad." From my unpublished Aussie travelogue "Red Seppo in the 'Gong":
"The hospitality of Maurie and the rest of the household made Brisbane my favorite city of those I’d encountered in my Socialist’s Guide to Aussie Tourism. The branch proved to be yet another haven, as Sydney was, for gorgeous teenagers dedicated to higher socialist ideals than were ordinarily found in the local high schools. (The Trotskyists are the hotskyists.) Good music seemed to be everywhere. I ventured over to Easts Leagues Club one night to see former Velvet Underground member and legendary piano impresario John Cale put on a manic solo show. Man Friday also came to town, a great Caribbean-style horn band I had seen in Melbourne.
The Man Friday show involved a journey to an obscene and giant disco in a distant outer suburb, and then a battle to get me in the door. We were all on the guest list, though I was taking the place of someone named Sharif. Somehow I was supposed to overcome the misleading appearance of newly dyed screaming red hair and matching smoking jacket to convince the doorman I was Middle Eastern. That part didn’t turn out to be a problem, but then they tripped me up on the dress code. I didn’t have a collared shirt, but negotiation ensued and finally I got in on the basis of the smoking jacket having something of a collar. I was amused by the comment of Man Friday’s guitarist after the show, who thought I was a famous American rock star the whole time.
Though I’d been hoping to spend longer up north, my return to Wollongong was hastened by the self-destruction of my Renault somewhere between Noosa Heads and Bundaberg on my birthday. On a wild hair, I had scoured the real estate ads of southern Queensland and visited an area of bushland north of Bundaberg and secured 40 acres of scrubby gum trees with a power line access bisecting it for my father for a princely sum of $16,000. Having let the realtor strong arm me into getting my father on the phone in Florida and closing the deal on the spot, I was heading back to Brisbane when the Renault breathed its last. I was picked from the roadside in pouring rain by a young bearded guy in a beat-up old Holden, who took me to a small-town pub and had a few drinks before we went back to his trailer. It was set up in the middle of a field on a hillside. When he found I was from Florida, he confessed that he had always wanted to visit the Florida Keys, and he was the only Australian Jimmy Buffett fan that I ever met. We talked into the night about Florida, Australia, and life in general and I went to bed glad that I had met him.
When I awoke, the sun was radiating across the hills and it was my first chance to get a good look at my surroundings by the light of day. It was absolutely beautiful, waves of green grass shimmering in the sunlight and undulating across the slopes. The field seemed a rather nice place to wake up to each morning. He brewed up some coffee and showed me around the outside a bit where he was building an outdoor dunny. Then he took me back out to the highway. I got my car towed to a junkyard, got $40 for it, unloaded all my belongings and started hitching back to Brisbane. If there is anywhere that Queensland resembles in mentality, it is Texas. As I hitched ride after another along the highway, I passed by a series of “big” landmarks that included the Big Pelican, the Big Pineapple, and the Big Cow. All of these were twenty foot high renditions of their respective themes, and I was glad I hadn’t encountered them two years before on my mind-losing odyssey through coastal Virginia."
(The final sentence references a colorful episode of sleep deprivation when I drove 25 hours relatively non-stop and finally parked on a coastal Virginia roadside after the worst of my hallucinations had cropped up, a 25' lobster claw blocking the entire road in front of me. I then proceeded to wake up a short time later in an altered state and personality, and went walking around the roadside at 3am convinced I was an 17 year old black youth from a nearby Virginia city.)
