CYCLING TO JUPITER

I am eating mangos hot off the tree, and huge Shark Bay prawns so fresh they'll make a pass at you. Safari Bob, true to his word, has delivered me to the Gascoyne delta. Mission accomplished, he has turned his truck around and headed for home. He leaves me resolutely searching the plantations for a place i can call home. On my old single speed Raleigh i pedal the South River Road, looking for a shack. I find two old empty homesteads. Lovely corrugated tin and timber, high vented roofs. One is on Santa Rosa, the other is on Jupiter.

Jupiter is only 10km from Carnarvon. Santa Rosa is about 12. The plantations here have beautiful names. Calypso. Margaritaville. Hacienda. Emerald. Desert Bloom. Poinciana. Clearwater. And, of course, Bumbaks. They all have their own logo on their banana boxes, or mango cases, as the case may be. I reckon the banana boxes are a kind of folk art. Someone needs to do a photoessay on these plantations. And i think that someone is me.

The farmers pump their water up from underneath the river bed. When not in flood, the rivers here flow upside down. Sand on top, water underneath. It's wack. But when the Gascoyne does flows above its sandy riverbed, it tends to move a lot of water. 5,520 cubic metres is a lot of water, isn't it? Particularly when it's going past every second.

Suddenly my second story holiday apartment is completely flooded. I am lying on the couch with the aircon running and the TV on, watching Tais Toi on SBS, that French movie with Gerard Depardieu and Jean Reno. I am figuratively pissing myself laughing, mainly because of the humour, when suddenly my laughter turns to shrieks of horror. I have left the kitchen sink running on the far side of the apartment, with the plug in, and the couch has now become a kind of surf mat. The whole of the kitchen and carpeted loungeroom is under about two inches of Carnarvon scheme water, which, as all the locals know, will rot anything.

The NorthWest is subject to this terrible and random flooding, apparently.

CRAWLING THROUGH THE TROPICS

I awake, horribly flungover. Which is like hungover, only a bit further over. Safari Bob, pictured here trompe l'oeil style at the Gascoyne Hotel, drags me about on a pub crawl through the windy streets of Carnarvon. We start at the Gassy, carry on to the Troppy, and wind up at the Sandy, somehow bypassing the Carny. At the Gassy the waitress mislays our meals: Safari Bob's reef'n'beef and my seafood chowder fail to arrive, probably because we are only ones eating, or at least hoping to eat, outside. Our choice of seating utterly confuses the staff, who apologise. "You got blown off," says the waitress. A quaint piece of the vernacular that i am still struggling to comprehend. Blown off? Something to do with these unrelenting winds? Perhaps a common fate for deckies out here working the tugs and the trawlers?

Whatever. Upon realising their error, the hotel staff ply us with free scotch and dry. Thus begins an epic tale of beverage consumption that ultimately leads us out to the boondocks, to face the double cranberry vodkas of the Sandhurst Tavern. Which, when mispronounced 'The Sand Hurts!' to the taxi driver, strikes us as overwhelmingly funny.

It is here we meet Belynda. I am struck dumb by her beauty. Did you know "Balinda" means "white woman" in one of the languages of Arnhem land? And she is predominantly Causcasian-looking, but has obviously had a bit of the native in her lineage at one time or another. As she pours me another drink, a smile briefly curls the corners of her perfect mouth, then she shakes her blonde hair with a haughty toss of her head, and departs to the other end of the bar, her slender body springing lightly across the beer-soaked rubber mat. I watch, mesmerised, over the clinking ice of my cranberry vodka. Meanwhile, the bar has grown slowly higher. I turn to face a large orange hibiscus that blooms next to me. "Sheez boowdiful," i mumble to Safari Bob's shirt. The tropical heat, the slowly circling ceiling fans, the alcohol coursing through my veins ... and those jungle drums! It is all conspiring to send me slightly troppo. Like one of the early colonialists of Rangoon, i believe i am going native.

But, as Kipling knew, gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful' and sitting in the shade. Enough of the wanton waste and decadence of these bars. To the plantations!

GETTING INK DONE

I get an email from Donny Wooolagoodja and his partner Sahyma about my Wandjina tattoo. (See Cultural Inappropriation, The Nerve, December 11 2006). Donny's Wandjina artwork was featured in the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony. I thought i had better ask his permission, as one of the Elders and custodians of the Wandjina, before getting ink done.

Donny Woolagoodja was born in 1947 at Kunmunya Mission, in Worora territory. His father Sam Woolagoodja was a Worora man, born in the early 1900s when the wadjelas, or whitefellas, were starting to colonize his homeland. As a child, Sam lived the traditional life, hunting and fishing along the Kimberley coast. Sam followed the laws and customs given to the Worora. With other elders, Sam retouched the sacred Wandjina, who had left their images as paintings at rock shelters in the Kimberleys. The Worora believe if men keep these Wandjina paintings 'fresh', the rains will continue to fall, plants and animals will reproduce, and people's child spirits will remain abundant in whirlpools and waterholes throughout the Kimberley. "In the old days, only very special men could paint the Wandjina, but now we are the only ones left to paint him to keep his spirit alive," says Donny. "It's his last and only chance."

But these days it is not only the "special men" who paint the Wandjina. See Paige Taylor's article Graffiti Wandjinas risky, but in the right spirit (The Australian, January 5 2007) about Wandjina graffiti appearing around my old stomping grounds of Mount Lawley and Highgate.

Donny, the Chairman of the Mowanjum Artists Spirit of the Wandjina Aboriginal Corporation, has given me the thumbs-up to get a tattoo of one of his Wandjinas. "Donny has no objection as it's for personal use," the email reads. "Thank you very much for asking permission , that is the proper way to go about it." Which is just as well, because painting the Wandjina without permission can result in severe tribal punishment such as a spearing. Oops-a-daisy. I hope the phantom grafitti artist has some betadine and bandages.

While on the subject, i got another rather interesting piece of correspondence, inciting me to get inked with one of the phantom graffiti artist's urban Wandjinas. A connection with connections offered to put me in touch with this phantom artist.

Decisions, decisions.

AN ART DIRECTOR AND MAYHEM FILM

Don't forget! The Maestro screens January 21 at Banks Reserve, Joel Terrace, Mount Lawley. Meanwhile, Art Director and Mayhem Films are currently seeking investors for two new productions:

• Taxidermist, a horror-soapumentary starring Prince Leonard, Princess the Leopard, and Mayhem
• Dash, a documentary on the Gascoyne Dash, a 485km desert race along a dry riverbed. The major sponsor is Strange Drilling. Mayhem and yours truly the Art Director intend compete on a Vincent Black Shadow. Safari Bob will drive us out to the desert in a hired a red convertible, and Fred, my lawyer from the Solomon Islands, will be in charge of logistics.

Go on. Give us your money.

SUITED TO SAFARI

007 arrives in style. The ABC radio announcer counts down to midnight on the radio inside the cab. Safari Bob stops the truck, and we break out the single malt scotch, lying on the still-warm bitumen of the North West Coastal Highway. We estimate we are a couple of clicks south of the mighty Murchison. It's pretty quiet out here. I have seen no headlights, other than our own, for over an hour. And the stars! I gaze upwards in wonder. There must be hundreds of them, i think.

Safari Bob goes easy on the scotch before we climb back on board and cover the few remaining kilometres to the Murchison bridge, our overnight stop by the river. Bob is a changed man since the Donstar castigated him for turning up drunk at her house one time last year. He comes back to Jo19's in Harley Street, his tail between his legs, figuratively speaking. "She told me off for being drunk and irresponsible," he says. Yeah, well, you looked pretty pissed when you left here earlier, i say. He lifts his bleary head. "I was here earlier?"

But all this changes overnight. The DTs pass, and Safari Bob becomes the clean-shaven, immaculately presented, fine upstanding pillar of the community you see before you today in the freshly-pressed polyester suit. I believe it was the ukelele that finally saved him. It was a lifeline. His salvation. The ukelele, and Jesus. Bob just needed to reach out for help, and he finally reached for that red ukelele and the spiritual song book.

Oh Lordy, pick a bale of cotton.

Safari Bob's hands are now so steady, he will sweep all before him at the Shark Bay Pistol Club. Meanwhile, we press on through the stifling, relentless heat. Safari Bob's self-proclaimed mission is to deliver me, my bicycle, and my red suitcase to the Gascoyne River delta.

And it is there, amongst the dusty red floodwaters of the delta, that i will be reborn.

O Lordy, pick a bale a day.

JESUS WALKS INTO A BAR

and throws a handful of nails down onto the counter.
"Can you put me up for the night," he says.

Well, let me tell you, being nailed to a couple of boards is nothin' compared with the struggles and humiliations we suffer in Kalbarri, digging out the bogged truck, surrounded by idiots, in a town literally crawling with drugged and drunken New Year's Eve revellers. Literally crawling. And i don't mean "literally" in the sense in which it is usually deployed, i.e. figuratively. I mean -
"I've got a good feeling about Kalbarri." Safari Bob interrupts my thoughts with a brief parody of our earlier optimism, as we dig out the back wheels of the truck with planks of wood. Yeah, yeah, i say.

The day begins with such promise. Safari Bob's ukelele playing steadily improves. Then he clears up the mystery bugging me since Lake Indoon: how do those big fish get into those freshwater lakes in the middle of nowhere? "Birds," he explains. "Birds fly them in from the sea and drop them. It's what's known in biology as a symbiotic relationship." Who would have thought? We throw together a makeshift lunch overlooking the mouth of the Irwin at Dongara, and it's the best thing since sliced bread. In fact, it's so good, it incorporates sliced bread. We drive up the Nangetty-Walkaway road, right through the centre of the wind farm. Flower power writ large. Very large. You know the tips of those blades travel at 220km/h? Wind farms are much like those fish farms the birds set up, i'm thinking. Fish need birds like the wind needs a clothesline ...

A swim at Ellendale Pool washes away the road grime and sordid filth of Knobby Head. Climbing the cliff face, i ask a man floating on an inner tube, decked out in sunglasses, suncream, and baseball cap, if the water is deep enough for diving. "You find the bottom and you'd be the first," he proclaims. "It's bottomless." Bottomless? "Yep. Goes down forever. They've tried to find the bottom with rope and weights, but they can't." I stand on the warm ledge, struggling to comprehend. Bottomless. This pretty, but otherwise fairly innocuous rock pool east of Geraldton, is actually infinitely deep? My goodness. Break out the Discovery Channel! Just imagine. One could sink an infinite number of Ford Galaxies end-to-end into its chill waters, and still never plumb its mysterious depths. I raise my hands slowly to a point above my head, as if trying to draw out these conceptual difficulties. Its almost ... unfathomable, i think, and leap off the ledge into the infinite.

Red ukeleles. Birds and fish, working together to populate beautiful lakes. Clean, green, limitless energy. Lazy, bottomless rock pools. Endless beer at the Geraldton Hotel, watching pretty girls blow up inflatable toys in the beer garden. Ah, isn't life grand? A supplies run to Utakarra, beer and veal schnitzel, then it's on, on, up past Port Gregory, past the Hutt River Province, a cheery wave to the loyal, wooly subjects of Prince Leonard, a race along the spectacular cliffs to Kalbarri, scooting along ahead of the weather.

Those were the days, i think, as i try reversing the truck out of another fine mess we've gotten ourselves into. Once again the wheels grip momentarily before spinning and digging another hole on the opposite side to the last. We take up our planks to continue our sorrowful labour. Rain appears to be coming up in the increasing gale. We have no accomodation. There are police roadblocks along the foreshore. We are beset by hunger, thirst, blisters, and, God forbid, clothes with dirt on them. "Yep, I got a good feeling about this place," mutters Safari Bob, as he drags a heavy piece of chain into place underneath one of the truck wheels.