A protestor’s dream

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Strapped to the Sports Desk, my fingers jangling on keys, I become aware of the latent possibility that I am averse to sport. A nice game of Russian roulette is certain to pass the time, and I consider myself a surfing legend of the sofa variety, while the only attraction to a sweaty-thighed rampage through deep mud chasing a ball is the half-time oranges and full-time man bath.

Yet I find myself here, an Australian protestors’ version of the Mint 400, living the desert dream, knee-deep in dust, the roar of the race ragged in my ears, the whump whump of the sound systems a metronome to this unreal existence. And dammit I will win this race…

Alberrie Creek Station,  Arabunna Country

This is the Great Australian Protest Race, a race to the a bitter end, the inevitable headlong tilt, critical mass, the power of both the individual and the mob to affect change.

This is Arabunna country, home to the drive for Indigenous cultural recognition, justice and land rights for Aboriginal people, numerous campaigns against uranium mining at Olympic Dam and the exploitation of water from the Great Artesian Basin, as well as official recognition of native title over Lake Eyre, awarded in May this year after a 14 year wait. This is Uncle Kev’s home: an amazing man, Uncle Kev is an Aboriginal elder who has campaigned widely for cultural recognition, justice and land rights for Aboriginal people. He has a softness, a peace that belies his incorrigible strength, and his unswerving devotion to the protection of country, culture and spirit.

Salty shore of Lake Eyre

This is the dusty heart of Australia, remote, mercurial and wildly beautiful. There is a rich seam of authenticity, a visceral realism, and out here the genetic code that unlocks our survival mechanism is jammed ON.

Mutonia, the Madder-than-Max sculpture park at Alberrie Creek Station.

The mob has gathered at Alberrie Creek Station to dance. Protestors, environmentalists, tangled ferals, travellers, families, loners, lords and the local mob have come to stamp their feet in the dust, to connect with this land and each other.

It is a postscript to the Lizards Revenge,  a music and arts festival held at the gates of the Olympic Dam uranium mine at Roxby Downs, in response to BHP Billiton’s proposed expansion of the mine.

This is our playground, a place where thumping handmade sound systems and flaming timber spaceships are considered commonplace. In a surreal competition for “most unusual” a giant fur egg competes with the man with a celery stick ‘rudder’ up his bum and a clutch of balloons set to propel him into the sky, while a 70s muscle-ute sprays fire from the jet burner mounted on its tray. Cake baked in a solar oven, a washing tub with bent-bike propulsion, an armada of Jolly Rogers snatched taut in the wind and stiff gins at sundown mark our deliciously strange space.

Camp ovens smart and burble on fires that never go out, Tin Lids find ever ingenious playthings in a playpen of dirt and thistle, and adults lounge, half an eye on their offspring, the other on the construction that clambers up around them. The sandy creek is transformed into a kid’s birthday party, complete with balloons, fresh damper and Uncle Kev’s whispered knowledge as he teaches the kids how to mimic tracks in the sand with their hands.

It is our home away from home, where allegiances are formed, arguments fought, bread is baked and kids are lulled to sleep beneath inky skies studded with stars. Canvas cracks and writhes at its enforced tenure, willy-willys scour and rip at everything in their path and the clink clink of tent poles being hammered deeper into the dry dirt dissects every conversation. Caked in red dirt, sweat and wonder the tribe quickly becomes one with the land, the shanty town surges alongside the track and “adventure tourists” slow to 70 clicks to gawp and stare from shiny air-conditioned 4WDs.

The seductive the savage and the strange stroll hand in hand through the desert, dragging chipped heels and fairy wings, clinking tin cups full of moonshine and laughing till dawn. Scorched roo meat greases the air, a dingo and her pups watch warily from the Lake and a gaggle of hippies convince a tanker driver that the sacred fire they are lighting next to the servo is OK because it has sage in it.

And the main event? Perfectly normal, just a routine space mission for a timber spaceship and the illustrious Warwick Afterburner Smith III, sent skyward in the great burnout, a pagan celebration of life in all its guises.

Nothing to see here folks…

POSTSCRIPT: Shortly after the celebrations at Alberrie Creek, BHP Billiton announced  plans to consult with the Government on adopting an alternative, less capital-intensive design for the open pit expansion that would involve the use of technologies to substantially improve the economics of the project.

In layman’s terms it means the project is on hold. Indefinitely. And while I am not foolish enough to believe this is the result of anything other than fiscal conservatism, the spotlight of social pressure shone a bright and ugly light onto the company, highlighting the harsh profile of environmental degradation and political and financial dissoluteness.

And I don’t doubt that this sacred place, with its protestors’ shawl of devotion, had a hand to play in what happened.

I’ve rediscovered my inner winger, intent on bringing down the opposition and scoring against the odds. Bring on the next round…

There’s sand in my sushi…

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The Marree pub

The outback resonates, a pulse of rawness that scours through this soft urban heart, teaching it how to love anew. This heart that flirts with readily available technology, that preens itself coquettishly in front of the non-stop headlong tilt of the cosmopolitan schedule, that pounds lasciviously at the mere premise of tethering – this heart? She is learning…

Bright dirt, the colour of blood  sifts through everything, a miasma choking us with the harsh reality of life back o’Bourke. Staining us with its rusty reminder, the environment slams us with its all-consuming power. Swathed in blankets, smoked by eucalypt fires, numb toes, scorched hair, peeling lips and lost to the world of wi-fi, we exist in an alternate reality. The light is our clock, the sun and fire our heat, Black Mary our beast of burden and cold beer sweet relief.

Ice-cold, boiled alive, caked in dirt, tangled, tired and torn, I have never felt so alive.

Locals

The Bogan Shire

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What’s Rangoon to you is Grafton to Me is a 45 minute psychedelic gonzo radio rant from 1978, courtesy of Russell Guy. It is gold. Solid gold. And it is my companion this strange winter’s night in the Bogan Shire:

“I was just waking up when the front tyre went; at the same time a horse appeared and the headlights went and the horizon came through the windscreen. I said goodbye to Eartha Kitt and left the road like a jumbo jet diving into a swamp. Some time later I regained a level of consciousness less ugly than the one I left. I’d seen some strange movies on the inside of my eyelids…

This is appropriate listening. Hyped up on sour coffee and tepid meat pies the white lines quiver, the tar bends and writhes like a stick of licorice melting in the sun. The roadside blurs, McDonalds wrappers flicked into the updraft perform delicately and coke cans sparkle like rubies in the long paddock, once the domain of the drovers’ mob.

The swan song of the asphalt is a grunting howl, hot tyres on worn tar, a screeching fan belt, the whump whump of the road trains as they slam past and Black Mary’s strange symphonic whir thump as her weight slews behind her.

XXXX assists map reading

Tonight, however, we have slowed to a wheezing stop. Time to taste this world.

We are parked on the edge of the Bogan River, deep in outback NSW. The Bogan Shire has little to do with its colloquial cousin – not an Ugg boot in sight here, though there has been a sighting of a feral flanno. The river glides lazily through the town, swollen and sated, gulping at the sandy banks, sucking a the roots of the gums. Even the whine of tinnies, ferrying salty men clutching coldies and bright-faced smiles, softens to a vague hum in this peaceful place.

Right up until the rednecks arrive shouldering their very particular brand of enjoyment. This bit happens to involve a small shouty child, a knackered canoe, a dog lead and some laconic hollering.

In this languid place so far removed from the scoured, bleached harshness of the desert, the perspective of this trip comes into sharp focus. After a journey depicted in love and laughter, in the Tin Lid’s rapacious appetite for life, his exponential appreciation of the raw marrow of life, and in wine slurped from tin cups beneath an ocean of stars, the sloth-like waters of Nyngan and an intermittent wi-fi signal forge a rose-tinted hindsight.

This is another country, far from the urban sprawl, where the call of the road is a V8 snarl, where stoicism is considered a blood sport and a no-frills-can-do attitude is essential. There is a raw honesty here, a beauty that exists in the sparse utility. There is a dark romance and a hard-edged lust for life.

This is the heart of Australia in all its rich fetid glory:

A lesson in bush mechanics

The Marree pub. Nirvana

Call of the road

 

The ultimate hero. And his cattle dog

Self-explanatory

 

 

 

On the road

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Port Wakefield is perhaps named after Wakefield in the north of England, an insalubrious joint known for its maximum security penitentiary and garlanded by small towns with didactic names: Horbury, Ossett, Wrenthorpe, Stanley and Altofts, Pontefract, Knottingley, Featherstone.

According to Google, that paragon of veracity;

Port Wakefield is known mostly for its roadhouses and trucking stops, including Shell, United, Tucker Time and, the recently upgraded BP. The BP is open 24/7, providing dine in (sic) and takeaway foods, and freshly ground coffee.

To which I can mostly attest, though I dare not sample the coffee.

In a bid to educate the Tin Lid into the wider cuisines of the world we have embarked on a diner tour of the outback, starting with Port Wakefield’s Tucker Time, “known for it’s food”:

Wild Horse Plains far behind us, this is a skidmark of a town, smeared in the dank misery of the road, dilapidated diners and greasy motels, the cry “steak sanga with the lot mate, yeah… yeah, heavy on the old root eh!” clanking through the air. The motels seem to breed like mongrels, while the road signs are few and far between;

These are my favourites;

But the Tin Lid is fed, Black Mary is fuelled up and the grease from the sanga drips disconsolately down my arm…

Life on the road is good.

 

Walkabout

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Fellow athletes I have news. With the call of the road rattling in my ears like a 10c coin in a fist-squished VB can, rusted at the edges, I am off walkabout. Gone. Awol, headed to the heart of the abyss with nothing more than a Tin Lid and a cowboy… four dozen bottles of ginger beer, a slew of liquor, 63kg of tools, 90L of water, 150L of unleaded, eight tyres, $30 worth of citrus, 2kg of butter, 6ft of cured meat, 8 ears of corn complete with furry coat, a voodoo bunny, 47 party balloons, half a goat, bubble bath, enough milk powder to make ASIO suspicious and an indecent amount of licorice.

Leaving our urban enclave behind seems easy, the weeks of op-shop scouring, list-writing, motor-tweaking, booze-stashing frenzy relegated to a rose-tinted memory. The city spews traffic from every artery, purging herself of the frenetic whorl of endeavour, the non-stop-9-5-deadline-looming-fuck-I-need-another-short-black.

So we are gone. Already far from a wholly disposable life. The beeps and clicks of technology are silenced, the clamour of obligation stills and the poisoned spur of stress that infects us daily is withdrawn into the maw of the mistress, though her fetid breath lingers far to the south.

The road spills beneath Black Mary’s tyres, growling with heady anticipation, the lines stretching taught into the distance, the horizon gossamer thin.

The sense of space is exquisite, I can taste the freedom, the exhilaration, the heady objectivity of being in the bush. Suddenly those fears and threats and weighing dilemmas are dissolved, dissipated beneath the steady solidity of this other world, a world where intermittent wi-fi, gridlock and not-strong-enough-double-flat-white-with-two is largely irrelevant.

We’re a long way from Kansas Toto…

 

Black Mary

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Newsflash!

The indomitable Black Betty, she of the bam-a-lam, hot chicks and a roaring V8, has been reborn as Black Mary, in memory of Captain Thunderbolt’s Aboriginal wife, who stole through the night, swam the dark waters of the harbour, scaled the heights of Cockatoo Island Gaol and slipped her lover a file… he met her not long after at Glebe Point where she was waiting with horses, and they fled to Tenterfield to live lives now immortalised in bushranger lore.

Black Mary is still chock-full of bam-a-lam, hot chicks and a roaring V8.

Rollin’ Stock

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My attorney advised me not to get sick. She patted my fevered brow and told me to lay off the synonyms, put down the allegory and retreat from this cataloguing of quirk.

Ignoring her advice, as one is wont to do in the face of a rampaging word habit, my verbal strength failed me. I found myself surfing a wordless wasteland, devoid of Australiana, though certainly not culture-less: I discovered hot purple lint beneath the bed, a significant crack in my favourite liquor jug and a preoccupation with gossip of the lewdest nature. The Tin Lid and the Cowboy learnt to approach bestowing Who magazines and gin, with caution flickering in the whites of their eyes. And we have run out of cheese.

But fear not. The search is back on, laced with vim and promising Australiana in spades.  The Secretary is braced for intrepid retrieval; she has purchased new pointy pencils for her scribblings and is wearing double band aids on her potential bunion blisters. My attorney is relaxing on a beach with a molotov cocktail, grooming herself with a small Spanish man.

All is good in the world.

I have found a dinosaur, kitted out in kitten heels, a behemoth whose wears its continued relevance as a shiny badge of pride on the latest Prada sleeve.

Straddling the criss-cross of tracks at Redfern Station, Carriageworks to the north, loco yards to the south, Eveleigh is a flirting anachronism that melds past, present and future.

The Eveleigh Locomotive Workshop is decked out in pop-bright flags that herald Innovation, Heritage, Sustainability, and Community, the tenets of a modern reincarnation. Once the powerhouse of a vibrant steam industry, Eveleigh has evolved into a paradox; it is an industrial museum, threaded with memory and steeped with the souls of the past, while at the same time a bright-eyed bustle of innovation, the Australian Technology Centre, chock full of businesses with names like elcom; ac3; and thoughtweb.

The Tin Lid taking it all in

The most recent arrivals are flouncing fashionistas and doe-eyed interns who traipse across a landscape once reserved for hardened men, in teetering heels attached to smartphones. The media has arrived…

Built in 1887, Eveleigh championed the power of steam, forging, stamping, pressing and bolting metal into the rolling stock that powered the halcyon days of Victorian industrial development.

Rows of pounding machine shops lined up to be fed from the fires of the foundry, the hammer and press of the forge clamouring long into the dark. It was a place of fire and pain, steel and sorrow.

Remembered in black and white, courtesy of our perspective on the past and the pitch of the coal that coated everything, the characters that brought Eveleigh to life are long lost to our modern world. Cloaked in navvies humour and clad in flat caps, steel boots and itchy wool, these men embodied the grind and grist of non-automated workforce. They were the face of the headlong hurtle to the six o’clock swill, a flutter on the nags and a meat pie ‘n’ sauce on a Sunday.

It’s a long way from iPad-clutching cashmere suits and dolly-birds in vermillion sipping double-shot-skinny-soy-caramel-lattes (“hold the sugar, I’m watching my weight”).

Contemporary buildings peer out suspiciously at the heritage-listed loco shops from behind fortified slatted fronts, their eyes narrowed in distrust..

Or is it envy? The incidental architecture jars painfully, with sharp lines that jut, a scope that is stingy, and a lack of wildlife in the lobby. The arches at Eveleigh are vast, arcing high above me, the space filled with sound and memory, scrabbling birds and thick cobwebs.

In the blacksmiths bay a working smith, thick dreads snaking down his back, is busy striking metal into shards of russet and gold before thrusting molten steel into icy water and disappearing behind a curtain of steam. The Tin Lid is most impressed, casting his Charlie and Lola book onto the ground over and over in sheer admiration of this worthy skill.

This is a place where three worlds overlay each other, a shadowy resonance beneath a glossy facade stapled onto an arresting history. Naturally that includes CCTV…

The dross of over a hundred years of operation has been carefully scraped away to reveal a sterile, staid beauty, yet still present within the glossy corporate facade are elements of the past, a reminder of a previous life, though ATMs crouch expectantly in corners once reserved for the gaffer’s office:

Vast bolted pieces of the obsolete sit redundant in the windows, as if gazing curiously into the present. The trundling beep of cherry pickers and scissor lifts, the clink of a teaspoon and the sharp bite of Ajax serves to remind me of the prosaic nature of Eveleigh now. The cranes and hydraulics lie idle, the tracks no longer lead anywhere, and there is a eerie calm, interspersed with busy cutlery and whirring cash machines…

The strict Victorian austerity of this era is smoothed out, softened by the buildings’ evolution, but in places the past peeps through, a stark reminder of the brutality of Eveleigh’s history:

In memory of the fallen

As you wander further away from Innovation Plaza, an air of desolation and dereliction lingers, somnolent workshops lie empty and dark, their windows smashed, the small information signs have become extinct and there is barbed wire to deter.

It is here that the past is closest to the surface. Here you can smell and taste another world and best understand the proud history of Eveleigh and then men who worked here.

The path from past to future is never easy. Eveleigh manages to maintain a sense of pride and purpose and though the innovative adaptive reuse program is far from the gristly origins of the loco yards, it is also a long way from any further encroachment by the developers and the concrete crawl that typifies them.

My Brother’s Keeper

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Gristled surfers, ink-garlanded muscles and snap-thin-bone bodies guard the beach in Maroubra, all intent on getting their share.  The waves boom and crash in this Aboriginal place of thunder, then hiss and crinkle as they meet land, easing to welcome sand-soft toes and a toddler’s giggles.

Strung out between Coogee to the north and Malabar to the south, Maroubra curls beneath the brow of of Long Bay, home to the notorious Correctional Centre and the Anzac Rifle Range. Beneath this insidious gaze Maroubra shines as an example of beach life with white sands in a cursive swoop, legendary surf breaks, open space, chock-full milk bars and a proud working class narrative.

Here the dog days of summer never fade, wolfishly roaring deep into the night. Thongs and shorts, skimpy bikinis, nanna one-pieces, striped towels, floppy hats and flesh are the uniform of the day. Sandy hands clutch hot chips and rainbow-flavoured drinks, beads of chill dripping into the sand while gulls whirl and collide above, savagely bent on their target.

Families flock to the beach with guttural joy,

“I’ve told ya’s before ya little buggers! Youse gotta wear’em.  Yeah darlin’, that lady’s got boobies… Nah mate, nah. Leave it on yer head… JAYDEN! WILL YOU BLOODY LISTEN! COME BACK HERE NOW… Ah, sodjus”

spilling across the sands. Mums corral slippery kids into bathers and out of picnic baskets, an old couple take the air, long-limbed teens flop lazily in front of each other and a tradie stands solemnly, watching the surf. There’s a retro family feel, people piling out of battered station wagons to escape hot seats, nippers racing into the waves, corned beef sarnies wrapped in white paper and past-their-prime gumball machines:

Back from the sweep of sand the Maroubra Seals sports club stands over the front with an imposing gesture, a mechanic, a hotel and a Thai joint it’s only companions on a strip that should be bustling with business:

There is a palpable sense of space. To the south of the beach Magic Point is an unexpected swathe of bushy camouflage, the towers of Long Bay looming in the distance; to the north, apartment blocks line the front in an orderly if dated line. It sparks a rare thought: where is everything? Expansive beach? Check. Surf club, sports club, RSL club? Check. A sprinkling of diners and caffs? Check. Pub? Check. Thai? Check.

That’s it. That’s all there seems to be. Where are the shops? Where are the cars? Where is the sterile anonymity of the local supermarket with its Argentinian garlic and Brazilian mangos? Too-small-for-you and made of nylon clothes? Red Rooster?

Nope. Not here.

Tiny McKeon Street leads away from the ocean and is dotted with a hamburger joint, a posh neo-European-Australian fusion place, an organic caff and a milk bar. The secretary opts for fish, chips and hot tea [I can always rely on her when tempted to guzzle cold beer and smoke Cubans] and settling down beneath a shady gum we watch as life strolls blithely past. The secretary comments that she finds Maroubra vaguely sparse, that there is an emptiness she cannot put her finger on. I remind her all her fingers are attached to hot chips and she agrees, maybe it’s nothing.

She is right though. There is a shrouded sense of something else, and the scent of a counter culture lingers. Though it is lacking the coastal ostentation of its more northerly sisters, Maroubra is not without pretence. It’s no secret that for all the recent gentrification (of which I find little evidence beyond boarded up work sites, wet concrete and the noise of hidden machines), the suburb is tattooed. It belongs.

Raw with pride, the Bra Boys are Maroubra’s infamously territorial surf mob, known for their clashes with authority, fierce loyalty to each other and an autobiographical doco entitled Bra Boys: Blood is Thicker Than Water that lifted the lid on the darker side of the suburb.

The surfing brotherhood with the flesh-inscribed motto My Brother’s Keeper, worn as an inky lei, is a fierce reminder of the poverty and social dislocation in the area, of the rite of passage from boy to man and then on to the testosterone-fueled angst that lolls on car bonnets, struts the front and owns the sand.

Koby Abberton
Image courtesy of Newsphoto

As a term, surf culture tastes vanilla and invokes frangipani-patterened boardies and Hawaiian Tropic, bleach blonde hair and the smell of salt and sex wax. In Maroubra a darkness lurks behind the stereotype, shadowed with controversy, hard stares and the sense of solidarity ingrained within an estranged extended family.

Image courtesy of Newsphoto

At the My Brother’s Keeper concept store you can buy surfwear emblazoned with slogans and gaze at walls tiled with faded photographs that tell the story of the tribe. There is a message that reads:

My Brothers Keeper is not a Gang, it’s not a Fashion Label it is a Way of Life. It is a belief that nothing comes before your Friends & Family. It is for all Races. Whether you are Australian, Asian, American, African, Middle Eastern, European or from Fucking Mars…

Amidst the clamour of distaste for the Bra Boys, the veiled taints of racism and a pervading fear, it is clear that this is a family and it protects its own. Though the angst sweats uncomfortably in some of the creases of Maroubra, the tribe are part of what gives this place its unconventional, retro beauty.

The early years

Born to surf

[Images courtesy of Newsphoto]

In a forest of houso blocks just metres from the front, the sun shines gently through mature trees, sofas stand sentinel in front yards strewn with life, and kids hang off the gates. There is a vibrancy, of life lived despite its hardships.

Steeped in rank seawater and rust, Maroubra has been described as a ghetto. While it is a hard-edged city surf beach that has a visceral realism, a rare find in a plastic fantastic world and the natural beauty is undeniable, this is a long way from the ghetto.

The pounding waves define not only the bay but the life its people lead. The ocean slamming into the rocks is the inveterate battle of the elements, the shaping-up of the forces of nature. It conjures a sense of perpetual change, of expectation and escape and there is no denying the serpentine break born of this conflict is at the wild heart of this gritty suburb.

A Midnight Star

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I have a memory, floodlight with nostalgia, of an achingly cold building lost in the suburbs. Yet though her eyes were blind and haunted, dark slots in a weathered face crumbling with decay, the heart of this one-time beauty still pounded.

Her glory days were over, but that night a mob milled beneath guttering street lights out the front, the bell was pressed, the side door opened and we were ushered deep into the guts of a swirling, pulsing riot of sight and sound.

The year was 2002, the heart belonged to the Midnight Star, a derelict deco theatre left to waste on Parramatta Road in Homebush, and the celebration was a wild night of bright lights, big sound and thudding escapism.

Time I went back to see what this slice of Sydney looks like now.

With the secretary in tow we cruised the strip, neglected, decrepit and dank. This main artery west emits a sense of morose despair, of having fought and lost. Clinging to the asphalt the boarded windows clutter shoulder to shoulder,  their purpose lost to a more prosperous time.

Glancing up at the boarded-up front of the Midnight Star, once the epitome of elegance in a working class suburb, it’s hard not to shudder at her demise, the sad culmination of time marching by.

Once the audience’s muse, who can claim to love this place now?

Built as the Homebush Theatre in 1925, in its heyday the Midnight Star encouraged crowds that snaked around the block, flickering flights of fancy the taste of the future. Renamed the Vogue Cinema this place had a palpable sense of owership, of belonging. Yet in 1959 the reels stopped rolling and the Star became an ice rink, before being refitted again and turned into the Niterider Theatre Restaurant, promising the world:

The old girl’s last incarnation was as the Midnight Star Reception Centre, which clung on until 1996 before the site slumped into derelict resignation. And that was when it was loved, briefly; as nature ripped at the seems and the cold closed in, the building became the heart of a community again. Coined “a theatre for the dispossessed” the Star was embraced by the Social Centre Autonomous Network, (‘squatting activists who occupy and organise around squatted buildings’) and in 2002 the Midnight Star Social Centre was born, an experiment in autonomous direct action. It was a non-residential space focused on creating a space outside the control of the state and market, a reclamation of public space that ‘no longer exists under capitalism’.

Featuring a pirate cinema that screened unusual and rare films, including Hindi films for the local Indian community, the lobby became home to a phalanx of hard rubbish computers, sparked-up and ready to surf, the downstairs bar a clamouring meeting space for activist groups and the cavernous ballroom – soaring ceilings lit by vast chandeliers and ruby-red velvet drapes – a venue for gigs and thumping sound and dancing tribes.

The halcyon days of this new life were short-lived, but for 10 months the Star thrummed with activity again. Inevitably, in the post-Olympic security frenzy and in the face of fractured WTO protest, the media wrongly identified the space as a nerve centre for anarchists and violent and politically motivated dissent. By December 2002 SCAN were forcibly evicted and the theatre left empty again, echoing sadly.

Today the Midnight Star shines inwardly and only to herself, a translucent memory of a happier time. The stutter of her heartbeat is barely audible and could be mistaken for pigeons in the roof.

Across the road the deliciously insalubrious Horse and Jockey pub squats ungainly on the corner. It’s an old-timers joint, tiles slick with age and Friday arvo teetering totty, collecting glasses and tips in their knickers.

But it is a place to meet in a strip that sags tiredly, beset by the clang and hiss of never-ending traffic.

The name Homebush is thought to refer to the pastures that drovers would camp in en route to the saleyards, located in what is now Flemington Markets. Reaching the end of their journey through the bush the drovers would settle in the lee of the yards and adopted the name ‘home bush’. Today there is little that speaks of home here but a kind word from a random stranger,

“Are you looking for something? Oh. Homebush? There’s more over there, the other side of the tracks.”

piques our interest and we scuttle away from the screaming road towards the other Homebush, shaded beneath vast gums far from this dust-choked despair.

It is a tidy town, huddled quietly along a street at right angles to the train tracks. While not entirely integrated Homebush is far from discordant. It is a quirky mix of blue-rinse perfection in a timely fashion and the scented glory of an ingrained Indian and Sri Lankan Hindu community, ripe with the spices of another life and happy to share.

From a neatly ordered line-up of Federation and inter-war fronts, tidy shops spill onto tidy pavements where passers-by step aside for the tin lid and his trolley. Tidy front yards display prize-winning blooms and the scent of cardamom spins my head in search of its source. We stop for a sticky-sweet cup of chai and glance around at a world from the past. It is peaceful here, a calm systematic amalgamation of very different worlds. The houses have a simple elegance, muted, functional and conservative:

Perhaps the shy, staid elegance on show here is thanks to the suburb being shaded by Sydney’s white elephant, the echoing Olympic Park. Vital for the Olympics, no-one seems to know what its purpose is now. Aside from creating a shadow. And spawning a rash of boxy housing developments that lack not only character but increasingly tenants. But this little suburb, once the writhing, bellowing stock pen for Sydney’s meat market, benefits from its relative anonymity next to the elephant. From here Homebush can continue its leisurely stroll into the future.

If the Midnight Star had been located here she might still shine as gloriously as she once did, protected and cherished as the heart of the community.

The Most Polluted Beach in Sydney

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Boat Harbour squats at the end of a great sweeping curve of golden sand that flexes along the coastline from Cronulla. The shoreline stretches past sand mines and jagged 4WD tracks that scar Wanda Beach, on to the oil refinery that sits on the finger of the Kurnell Peninsula like a gaudy bauble. Amidst this, Boat Harbour has the less than salubrious distinction of being the most polluted beach in Sydney, yet I can barely contain my childish excitement to be back, cowboy and tin lid in tow.

Pockmarked and weatherbeaten, Kurnell is an a solitary place. As the truck trundles past hurricane fencing topped with gnarled barbed wire on one side, shady groves that hide pools of water on the other, the sand track smells of the ocean and leads us ever seaward.

This scarred environment hosts a horde of parasites, from sand mines and chemical companies to the ghosts of feature film landscapes and a gangster’s silence. They say the dunes are littered with bodies and that ‘bits’ of Sydney’s underworld are turned up by curious dogs, metal detectors and the ghoulish.

Aside from the Wanda Beach Murders, tragically long unsolved, the legacy of a gangsters’ world merely adds to a desert land already immortalised as the sandy apocalyptic vista of Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome and the war-ravaged location of The Rats of Tobruk.

But it’s not all sand. Boat Harbour has a proud population who live in a straggle of shacks, shanties and listing caravans that curl like a cheap plastic necklace around the bay.

Love a sandy track

Love a sandy track

Shanty town

But the ocean sings its siren song and we bypass the dunes and her inhabitants, intent on the shore,

where we meet the ranger, Southern Cross flying proud. He doesn’t like us. Something to do with a sound system and a mob of dancers ten years ago…

A N Y W A Y

My attorney advised me not to talk about that.

Heading east along Wanda Beach

Having negotiated the ranger we slip-slide along the water’s edge before turning back to Boat Harbour…

A 150m curve of south-facing beach formed behind a 50m wide break in the sandstone rocks, and sheltered by the low-slung rock platform of the Merries Reef, the harbour is protected from the biting southerlies that lay waste to the coast. While the Voodoo Express churns past, an infamous surf break that shunts surfers from Cronulla to Voodoo Point, the bay is calm and glassy. The roar of 4WDs and the sting of flying sand fades, an insipid sun now beats hot and the essence of this wild southern beach is gone. A swag of bare-chested locals sits on plastic pub chairs in the lee of a caravan, downing cold stubbies and watching the waves. Their fists clink around the tins, heavy with tarnished silver, skulls jostling for position with peace signs, and their contented insouciance is palpable, lulling almost.

Established after the first world war, the shanty town began as a fishing spot, an escape from the vagaries of a crumpled world.  Amid the rusted tin and fibro mansions there is a simple beauty, and while the onshore wind disturbs the scent of diesel it brings with it the fresh tang of oxygen and seaweed. Munching on a bushy’s lunch of hard-boiled eggs, bread and hot, sweet tea, we gaze at this alternative wonderland, a place that gazes back square-on, a sandy outpost crouched  in an over-industrialised wasteland.

The world’s greatest fibreglass sheep

Most beautiful is the one-eared fibreglass sheep the tin lid found…

The beach that stretches between Boat Harbour and Cronulla is in rehab; now that the 4WD park is closed, nature is beginning to reclaim what the petrol-heads churned beneath flat sand tyres. At the farthest end of the beach Cronulla, capital of the Shire, is a series of oblong shapes, a kid’s block set aged grey. The distance between the two places grows ever further as the fresh grasses grow higher.