How to warm an Australian

In South Australia there is a lot that is strange, but Christmas is perhaps the oddest time of year. It’s baking hot, rarely less than 30C as I recall in Port Lincoln. And further inland, where we were, the temperatures were enervating. The fire watch was almost constant, one learned to scan the horizon quickly for even a small puff of anything like smoke, and react very fast. This saved us once when Henry, the instigator of this gap year and brother of the wife of the farmer we lived with, decided he wanted to do some oxy-acetylene work in one of the back paddocks. I no longer recall what he wanted to do to what, but I do know I was despatched, as the least useful person there, to go and fill two 40 gallon water drums from the butt in the yard.

Now 40 gallons takes a time when the water is going through a normal garden hose and under its own pressure. The water butt was only on 6’ stilts and the 40 gallon tanks were in the back of the Ute, so there wasn’t a lot of pressure. I reckon I sat in the shade of the barn and probably smoked a cigarette or two while waiting to half fill the drums. I may even have drifted off into a heat-induced doze, so you can imagine my surprise when I was woken by the sound of a vehicle screaming into our yard. A car of any kind was a major event, but this one came round the corner, in through the gate and didn’t stop, just haring down the track. I turned off the tap and followed on to find our near neighbours Merv and his brother, who lived a mere 20 minutes or so away, pumping water from, yes you guessed, a full 40 gallon drum onto the surrounding grassland which was merrily burning.

Henry always knew best and so hadn't waited. He'd started his flamethrowing work, whatever it was, without any water to hand. And of course, the grass was dryer than anything Ray Mears ever finds on BBC2 these days. So when I finally got there, it was burning. And it was doing so in a rather fast and furious fashion, in a ring away from the centre. The further it got, the more of it there was to deal with. Luckily I had enough water to make a difference and so, under Merv’s guidance and with a lot of very panicky effort and sweat, within about half an hour we had the fire under control. The two brothers were spitting mad, and waited a good couple of hours with us to make sure it really was out. They made every minute of their time count. I was glad to go back and get more water, for their fury was something to behold. But it was like water off a ducks back to Henry. He had swallowed the propaganda about thick outback Aussies and felt that he, at 18 was superior to these two middle-aged and angry locals.

I think his arrogance made their fury even greater. It’s a splendid site an Aussie outbacker in full cry. Henry is very lucky these two were really bright, mild men. If they had lived up to the stereotype Henry carried, he would have been in hospital extracting his teeth from somewhere. I can't imagine the thought process that made him run the risk of working with fire without any precautions in the middle of a dry place at the driest time of year. It was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Luckily the perils of fire to local people meant they were on their toes, and the fact that Merv and his brother had a Ute loaded up with water and pressure sprayers at all times was testament to their readiness to do anything to avoid a national disaster like the one we very nearly started. I remain grateful to their vigilance to this day. Without it we could have set much of the Eyre Peninsular alight. And enjoyed prison food for Christmas. Although, this may have been an unexpected bonus.

Christmas Eve in Pt Lincoln was distinctly bizarre. It was the height of summer but all the shops had their windows painted out with fake snow, and pictures of Santa and his sleigh were everywhere. Santas were parading the streets with their collecting tins dressed in full red woolly top, but with shorts and sandals below. Their faces were puce: no make up required. And there were carols piped from every store onto the sidewalks. I remember thinking then that Aus was a bizarre mix of American and English. American style buildings and an almost but not quite English way of life. I know it has developed a full cultural identity since then, but in those distant days of the 70’s it was a place of borrowed references and little it could call its own.

The only thing really Australian that I found other than their bars and their beer was the appalling treatment of the Aborigines. The locals called them Bungs, an Aboriginal word that, chilling, means broken or dead. That was how many Aussies wanted the Aborigines in those dark days of the corrupt Labour government of Gough Whitlam. Not least of the problems was positive discrimination. It meant that on the dole an Aboriginal family could get more allowances than a white family in similar circumstances. This created a great deal of anger and the resentment simmered over into appalling reverse positive discrimination. The white Australian treated the indiginous black people abysmally, keeping them down-trodden and as low as they could. Apartheid was endemic, strong, and sometimes violently administered, in South Australia in those days.

But an Aboriginal native Australian was not allowed into the bars in his or her own country in those day, so that Christmas Eve my mind was not on the people who had more right to be there than any of us. No, it was on getting absolutely hammered. This was something I was very good at. And in that respect, if in no other, Australia took to me like a brother. Imagine a pub where you have only to out your empty glass down for it to be filled again by a man with a spigot on a hosepipe. This was nirvana to a boy of 18. And I indulged so fully that I have no idea to this day what happened for the remainder of Christmas Eve. Nor of how we negotiated the 40 minute drive home.



Just the one then.