The Great Work: March 2011

Last night I put vinyl cleaner on my motorbike seat and then a bit on the tyres. Apparently the stuff makes tyres totally lose grip. Dad says it’s like riding around on ones own personal skid-pan. That is the sort of information that it is good to have before setting off.

So this afternoon I left my parents’ house to ride to Hobart. Mum always worries when I make a long trip on a motorbike and even though it is only 2.5 hours, Mum & Dad worry the whole time until I telephone to say that I have made it alive.

It is hot and as I am getting ready to go, Mum asks me if I really need to wear the thick leather jacket when I’m on my bike. I make a flippant remark that I only need it when I fall off. As I mount the bike, I am vaguely aware the vinyl seat is slippery. I think no more about it.

They are standing in the garden waving to me as I set off. At the first roundabout, no more than 50 meters from their driveway, I steer left to enter it and the front wheel slides out from under me. I go down hard on my left elbow and I can feel a scraping pain on my forearm. It is exactly where I have a scar that I got in 1983, the day I bought my first bike.

As I hit the ground I can hear Mum scream. From 50 meters away, through the helmet, through the scraping, grinding sound, my mum screaming pierces everything.

I banged my elbow, I winded myself, cracked a rib and my bike slid at least 10 meters into the roundabout, but that scream was the worst part by far. It is a scream of profound horror. The kind of scream someone makes when they are seeing something that they have imagined a hundred times, but try not to think about.

By the time I got my bike up and back to the driveway, mum was crying and shaking, her face was red and wet, screwed up like a damp, used tissue.

She was sobbing and saying that she thought she was seeing me die. I know that she is afraid of the bike and has dreams of me coming off and being killed by a truck and so I promised to sell my motorbike. It wasn’t a half promise, like ‘I promise to mow the lawn’, it was a real promise, a binding promise that a person with integrity has to keep.

I’m OK with selling it. I’m a different person to the one who, aged 18 decided that Mum & Dad will just have to suck-it-up and deal with it because what I want is more important than the ice cold knife in their guts every time I ride.

I have had friends die since then. I have seen the train wrecks that are their families.

If I got mashed onto the road it would destroy my family. Their happy lives in their lovely home, the animals that they love and the peace that they have earned would be ruined forever and that outweighs the insignificant fun that I have on my motor bike.

Later that day I drove to Hobart … in Mum’s car.
At Campbell town I got pulled over and given a ticket because it had run out of rego 3 days before.

When I got back to my flat, I immediately locked the door.

I was born in Staffordshire, England, on the 29th of May, 1965, not far from the Wedgewood pottery factories. My people supply Britain with its porcelain toilets.

When I was four my parents, my older sister and I emigrated to Australia aboard the cruise ship ‘Fairstar’. It took six weeks and was the first time I ever saw the ocean.

My father, the eldest of three boys, was at the time a newspaper sub-editor in Manchester. Journalists were in demand back then, so dad was soon working at the Melbourne Age.

But the itchy feet which brought us across the world soon had us moving across to Western Australia. I can still remember the trip through the desert on the Indian/Pacific. Everything was rusty red – the sand, the train, the sky. When we passed a group of men, black as burnt sticks and all standing on one leg, my mother dragged us over to the window to look. I had never seen an aborigine before. We found it all extremely exotic and were feeling very adventurous in a smugly intrepid sort of way.

We had bought a new car in Melbourne, (an EH Holden), that we put on the train, but when we arrived in Perth our new car was no longer on the train. It was recovered a month later from somewhere in the desert, full of empty beer bottles with no tyres. Suddenly aborigines no longer seemed all that ‘exotic’ and we got over our smugness.

Perth was nice.

We moved back to the U.K. in 1975 for a year and then we moved back. Between the ages of ten and fifteen we moved back and forth seven times, each time we would leave our house, our car(s), our bikes, our toys and our friends.

We would set up in a different place and unpack our seven tea-chests – the same seven tea-chests – buy houses, cars, bikes and toys. We tried to make friends but it didn’t really matter if we didn’t, since we would soon be going back again.

Once we even sent the tea-chests back mid-transit. I soon found myself looking forward to the moving. Any conflict with people would soon be gone if I could just avoid dealing with it until we left.

In Australia we were foreigners, in England we were not quite the genuine item either, but in transit I was in my natural element. It was as a newcomer that I felt most comfortable.

By 1980 we were leaving Melbourne again and moving to the Gold Coast. Here, despite a short spell living in a small corner shop in Cornwall, we stayed for eight years.

My first job was in 1982 as a copy-runner at the Gold Coast Bulletin, a local newspaper in south-east Queensland. My dad was a sub-editor there and so arranged an interview for me. After doing the menial stuff for a year I was offered an apprenticeship in Composition, and so got to do skilled menial stuff for the next four years.

The day I completed my apprenticeship I handed in my resignation.

The next three years saw me doing everything except work in printing. I lived in the Gold Coast Hinterland and installed slow combustion fires, I worked at a marina scraping off the barnacles that yachts had travelled the world collecting, I delivered the mail on a postie-bike, lead horse trail rides and grew and sold marijuana.

For a while I worked at Sea World driving the roller-coaster and pirate ship, until I made some smart-arse sick by turning off the timer (as he insisted that he could ‘take it’) and ‘let it ride’ until he had had enough. The vision of a superbly fit surfer/lifesaver type vomiting at his girl-friend’s feet, tears streaming from his eyes still brings a smile to my face.

In 1989 I moved to Sydney where I shared a flat with my sister in Mosman on the north shore and worked on a building site.

By February 1990 we had both saved enough to travel for a year through India, Egypt, Greece, Italy, France and finally England.

Despite the number of times I had lived there, this was the first time I was old enough to travel around England. I was however broke. My sister still had enough to buy a camper-van, but I had had enough of her for a while.

For seven months, I back-packed around Wales and Cornwall, visiting the little village where our shop used to be.

Apart from it no longer being a shop, the whole village was utterly identical to how it had been ten (and probably 100) years ago.

As the English winter set in, the knights, dragons, Celtic heroes and fairies all seemed to vanish in a bank of fog and it was just cold and miserable.

My dad offered to lend me the airfare home and, not being the kind of person to miss out on a 30 hour flight, I was soon back in Sydney.

Almost immediately, I stumbled into the best job I have ever had. A temping agency offered me two weeks work at SBS television in North Sydney. I was a ‘video-tape librarian’ for over a year, doing a bit of everything from digging through archives to being an extra, to editing promos to driving George Negus to the airport. But every four weeks I was offered a four week extension to my temporary position.

One day on a spur I just said ‘no’. A week later I was on the Gold Coast with all my worldlies strapped to the tank of a 1975 Honda CB-550 motorcycle – no cash, no fuel and nowhere to sleep.

I managed to ‘accidentally’ bump into an old school friend who was house-sitting with his pals at his girlfriend’s mother’s house. They said I could have the spare bed in the garage under the house and so I did for six months until the mother came home and threw us all out.

We moved into a share house in Brisbane and I went back to college to get a second trade in printing, as a Graphic Reproductionist. For four months I attended TAFE and learned all about negatives and plate-making, colour theory and how light works. I found it stimulating but I still didn’t want to work in printing. The friendship was souring, money, booze, sexual tension and drugs were causing all of us to cease communicating.

When the course was finished I moved for a while to Grafton, then back to Sydney where I did work at a printer’s – as the supervisor. My qualifications looked great on paper, despite the fact that I could not produce a single reference since I had left the Gold Coast Bulletin six years before.

In 1994 I visited my parents in Tasmania, where they had moved to from Sydney the previous year. We spent Christmas eating, camping, bush-walking and it seemed the days went on forever. It was of course, Summer.

Dad suggested that while I was there, I could give my CV to the local paper where he worked, ‘The Launceston Examiner’, which I did and then promptly forgot about.

From late 1993 until 1995 I ran the offset printing department of Aristocrat Leisure Industries, which makes poker/gaming machines. I hated it.

I handed in my notice one day. No real reason, I just did it. A week later I was in Grafton with a car loaded to the ceiling with the junk I had accumulated in just two years.

I joined the dole, I found a flatmate and we found a house to rent. The day we were to move in, half an hour before the lease was to be signed, my dad telephoned to say that there was work waiting for me in Launceston – The Examiner had finally decided to give me a job.

I had to start in five days. So I had to leave there and then. My new flatmate was not impressed.

I was thirty years old and I had always wanted a yacht. It was one of my many plans which had been sent to the back-burner many times.

Now with the offer of a job in Tasmania, I could see that if I didn’t take it, the boat would be lost to me forever.

This was the gist of what I told her, but the truth was that I just wanted to live in Tasmania for a while.

A week later I was working at The Examiner, northern Tasmania’s favourite chip wrapping.

I got a flat, bought furniture, a motor-bike, a boat, fell in love several times and in just over a year, saved about $13,000.

Then in 1997 there was a series of retrenchments. I was the last person to be employed and so was the first to be let go. I had intended to leave within a few months anyway and travel to Nepal and Europe, so a sudden, unexpected cheque for $7000 and a sympathetic handshake was like winning the lottery.

I had already (quietly) sold my car, my sixteen foot sailboat and moved out of my flat. Now I found myself with $20,000, a motorbike (an XJ-650 named ‘Seth’) and three months until the end of the monsoon season in South East Asia, so Seth and I took off for Cairns with a tent and camp-stove.

By the time I returned, my superannuation was cashed-in and despite having spent about $1000, now had $22,000.

My trip took six months and involved Thailand, Malaysia, Nepal, India and France. Once back in the UK, I bought an old transit van and spent another five months living in it and travelling around England, Wales, Ireland, Scotland and Cornwall (the Cornish don’t really like to think that they are part of England). I had by then run out of money and so took work as a bar-tender in an Irish themed pub, a building labourer, an interior decorator and some freelance artwork – all while on the dole, of course.

I lived in Plymouth for two years with my cousin Luke, a musician. I was his roadie and he bought me beers.

In May 2000 I returned to Australia to attend my friend’s wedding on the Gold Coast and then came back to Tasmania. I moved in with my sister, got a dog called ‘Max’ and a motorbike I named ‘The Dark Horse’, (I name dogs, boats and motorbikes, but not cars, vans or children). Until mid 2002 I studied for a Diploma of Art in Graphic Design at TAFE.

Then at the start of 2003, I began a three year degree in Contemporary Art.

From ‘03 to ‘05 I was a uni-student, a sculptor (specialising in metal casting/welding) and a kombi driving, pot-head hippy with a bi-polar girlfriend. I knew I was a stereotype, but I loved it.

At the end of 2005 I got to wear a funny gown and cap and my mum cried. My dad almost burst with pride and for a while I wasn't the family ‘fuck-up’.

Then I was unemployed for a year.

There were a few jobs, none that lasted. I was a (junior) co-ordinator for a youth festival, a volunteer mentor to intellectually disabled artists, I acted in a play and I worked sporadically on a pop-culture magazine that one of my TAFE friends started, I delivered the mail by motorbike and for a while I even had a ‘real’ job as a graphic designer.

I had a few exhibitions of my work, but by the end of 2006 the artist cliché had pretty well run out of steam.

By mid 2007 I had had enough of this, and so began an online TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) course to become an English teacher overseas (didn't care where).

I got into travelling mode:- passports, visas, backpacks and jabs (ouch!!).

I found a position in Thailand and flew out in October 2007.

From October ‘07 to May ‘08 I taught English to the phonetically challenged in Rayong, an oil refinery town in central Thailand.

Then in mid-May I went on to Spain where my sister was living – in a 10^th century fortified town in Andalucia called ‘Vejer de la Frontera’.

I screwed Spanish girls, drank sangria and hung out at the beach for most of the time, developing a deep mahogany tan which was described to me as being ‘a bit shit-coloured’. Nice.

I taught English for a few weeks and when I had saved enough to afford an airfare, I decided to head back to Oz and go to uni again.

In September I flew back to Tassie where I languished in unemployed bliss for a while, and I enrolled in philosophy, ancient history and journalism at the University of Hobart.

I did a bit of advertising sales for my mate with the magazine, then in early December 2009 I moved to Hobart, about 100m from the university.

Then the government said that they would not financially support me to study for another B.A. I could do a ‘Masters of Fine Art’, but I was sort of over the whole ‘art’ thing for now.

I realised that there was nothing for it – I had to GET A JOB. The gilded cage beckoned.

I applied to everywhere in Hobart that interested me and got a job at the Wrest Point Casino as a surveillance officer. Channel surfing over 500 cameras looking for cheats and sinners.

I stuck it out for two years and I really hated it. In October 2010 I bought a Land Rover Defender, a big tent and a lot of camping gear and then quit.
Unfortunately, the gearbox on 'The Drover' also chose that moment to quit, so I had to dig deep into my savings to buy a new gearbox from England. With a new transfer case, clutch and rear axle, I dropped $6,000 from the kitty. My healthy budget of $18,000 now looked more like $12,000.
I headed back to Launceston in March and got a job driving the local Metro buses. I stayed for just over 3 months and managed to save about $2,500.

In May 2011 I headed for the Big Island and spent the next 4 months driving anti-clockwise around the Australian coast.
I got as far as Cape York before I needed new shocks, I needed new tyres in Darwin, new Starter Motor in Broome, new Alternator in Kalgoorlie and by the time I got back to Tasmania in mid September, I had no handbrake and almost everything had rattled loose. I had left with $14K and returned owing just over $1,000. It was an AWESOME trip.

I went back to Metro to grovel for my job and after some overt contrition was re-instated.
As I left the building, looking forward to resuming my old life and saving for the next adventure, I bumped into an old 'friend' with whom I had lost contact.
We decided to go for a pint or two and catch up.
Four hours and MANY pints of Guiness later, I was sitting in my truck, looking at flashing police lights in my rear-view mirror.

I managed to delay my inevitable loss of license for over 4 months, during which time I kept working for Metro and didn't let on that I would soon be unemployable as a bus driver.
Two days before I was due to appear in court, I quit my job and booked a flight to South East Asia.
I reject the concept of being punished, so half a year lazing on a tropical beach sounded better than half a year sulking in unemployment in Tasmania. I would NOT be put in my place, even when I was obviously in the wrong.

I was fined $500 and disqualified from driving for 6 months. It took me a while to sell the Drover, which gave me just over $10K and so in February 2012, I flew to Bali, then Thailand, Malaysia, Thailand again, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, back to Thailand and then back to Bali. In 6 months I spent $7K including the flights and so I returned with $3,000.

I got my license back within a week of returning and after I bought a car, I had a little over $1,000 left to my name - I was desperate to find work.
Thanks to my uncanny luck, I got a job driving a mini-bus for a tour company.
They do tours to Cradle Mountain, Freycinet and other wilderness areas and I am hoping that the plumb jobs will come my way soon, but so far it has been school runs and the odd charter job.

It is now the start of 2013.