By Any Means: His Brand New Adventure From Wicklow to Wollongong (45 page)

It wasn’t difficult to drive, though it did have a tendency to drift into the middle of the road. You started the engine by pressing a green button and the throttle was a dial fixed in the middle of the go-kart-style steering wheel. It was actually capable of 120 kph, which wasn’t half bad, and had a power output of 1.1 kilowatts. At full chat it sounded a bit like a motorbike.

I was a bit nervous to be driving it - this was the team’s pride and joy, after all, and a really important invention. Their inventions had implications for all kinds of solar power, and there I was beetling along the open road in the middle of South Australia. But once I was over the nerves I really enjoyed it, and began to wonder if - with the price of oil being so high - the solar car might not be the way forward, at least in some countries.

The days were skipping by now and the next morning, 18 July, we were back in the Nissan pickups we’d rented in Alice. These were as much a part of Australia today as the Holden had been in the 1950s - the 4x4 ute being the vehicle of choice for a hell of a lot of Australians. Ours had carried us from the Northern Territories, across the deserts of central Australia and into colder and muddier country down south.

It was five hundred kilometres to Khancoban, where we would pick up some horses to carry us into the Snowy Mountains. I was looking forward to that - we’d yet to ride horses on this trip and, of course, more people have used horses to get around than any other mode of transport in history.

Along the way we stopped on the outskirts of a blink-and-miss-it town - I think it was called Griffith. There were no signs, just a couple of houses, a petrol station and what looked like some kind of ironworks.

Wandering over, Russ realised it wasn’t an ironworks but a steel artworks gallery. The closer we looked the more we could see and some of the work was amazing. Famous faces, movie stars and rock singers, political heroes - all shaped from steel plate. There were full-size sculptures too that looked 3D but were actually flat, and Russ spotted an amazing piece.

‘Charley, you’ve got to look at this,’ he said. ‘It’s incredible.’

It was a motorbike racer from bygone days. Cut from a piece of steel, maybe six feet by four, it was standing upright, rusting in the breeze.

‘We have to see if we can find the bloke that runs this place,’ Russ said. ‘See if that bike racer is for sale.’

The sign above the gate indicated the owner was called Ron Clarke, but there didn’t seem to be anyone around. Russ tried calling a number he found on the fence while I took a wander round the back. The place was all locked up but as I was standing there a little old guy in a battered Akubra hat came shuffling across the yard. I asked if he was Ron and he said that he was. Then I asked if the motorbike racer was for sale.

‘That old piece? Fuck, I made that back in the fuckin’ day.’ Ron swore a lot. About every other word. We went round the front where I introduced him to Russ and Mungo and he squinted at each of us in turn.

‘Must be fifteen fuckin’ years, now I think about it. This fella wandered in one day and asked me to make something to honour his brother. He’d been a motorbike racer, one of the best in Australia the fella reckoned, eight times Aussie champion or something. Anyway he got himself killed somewhere round here in a semi.’

‘His brother asked you to make it?’ I said.

‘Yeah, showed up here asking what the fuck I charged and I told him about thirty-five dollars a yard. Is that all? he said. Fuck, I could have something for under two fuckin’ grand then. Course you fuckin’ could, I told him. But I can’t make it for you, mate, because I’ve got the mafia swarming all over me and they’d want a fuckin’ piece.’ He looked puzzled suddenly, as if something was bothering him. ‘Don’t I know you?’ he said to me. ‘I’ve seen you some fuckin’ place before. You look like that joker on the TV -
Top Gear
or something.’

‘
Long Way Round
,’ I suggested. ‘I made a show called
Long Way Round
which was shown here.’

‘
Long Way Round
, that’s it. But you didn’t come round this way, did you - not to this fuckin’ penal colony?’

‘Is it still like that?’ Russ asked him.

‘Fuck, yeah. The way the coppers treat you. This is the crime capital of Australia.’ He pointed to the empty road. ‘I had some joker in just the other day wanting to take the fuckin’ place over. I told him. You’re trying to press-gang me into your fuckin’ workshop. You can’t do that - take over a little fuckin’ Pommie. It’s just not on, you fuckin’ idiot. We invented it.’

‘You’re from England?’

‘Of course, I’m a cockney. Came over here when my dad lost his job. We were heading for the opal mines but ran out of fuckin’ money.’

‘You don’t sound like a cockney,’ Russ said.

Ron looked sideways at him. ‘That’s because I’ve been here for fuckin’
ever
.’

‘Do you want to sell the motorbike racer?’

He thought about that.

‘Why is it still here?’ I asked him.

‘Because the fella never found anywhere for it. No bastard would let him put it up.’

Russ told him we could display it in our warehouse, but we didn’t have enough Australian dollars in cash. We did have US dollars though, and offered five hundred.

‘US?’ he snorted. ‘What the fuck do I want with US? They’re not worth fuck all.’

‘They’re worth about the same as an Aussie dollar,’ Russ said quietly.

I wasn’t sure about this. The piece, brilliant though it was, had been specially commissioned by the man’s brother and there was something about us buying it that didn’t seem right. Having said that, it had been here fifteen years already and it was pretty rusty. If we didn’t buy it then who would?

We kicked the idea around for a while, taking a look at Ron’s workshop. He was an incredible artist, drawing the pattern on steel plate and then cutting it with the acetylene torches. As well as the portraits, he’d created a life-size coach with a team of four horses and a massive Caterpillar truck like the ones those guys had been driving in Marree. Nothing was too big or too complicated. He told us he’d been in newspapers all over the world and had a full page in
Live to Ride
but he was paranoid - absolutely convinced everyone was out to get him. Even with Mungo filming and talking about the TV and
Long Way Round
, he still didn’t seem to get who we were. Every now and then he’d peek out from under the brim of his sweat-streaked hat and ask if we were Catholics or Mormons. The Catholics were gathering in Sydney, apparently, and the Mormons had been trying to take him over for years.

Finally, disappearing into his workshop, he came out with a framed photograph of a guy called Johnny Shields riding a BSA 350. This was the guy he’d used as a template - in 1956 he’d been both senior and junior Australian road racing champion. Ron said there was no way the brother would be coming back for him, not after all this time, so we upped our offer to $1000 and loaded Johnny into the back of the Nissan.

That night I spoke to Olly, who told me that Doone had had an accident. She’d been sailing, and moving from the dinghy to the motor boat she got her hand trapped. The doctors thought that she’d either damaged the scaphoid (which is what I’d done on the Dakar) or torn a tendon, but they wouldn’t be able to tell for sure without doing a CAT scan. The earliest they could do that was on Monday but by then Doone would be in Australia, so they put a split cast on her hand and suggested we get it looked at over here. Apart from that mishap everything at home was fine. Olly was yet to do any packing but she told me the girls were beside themselves with excitement.

All I had to do now was get to Wollongong. On Saturday 19 July I woke up feeling pretty chirpy. We were heading for the Snowy - one of the major rivers in Australia. It’s fed by snow melt from the Snowy Mountains in New South Wales and the main trunk runs from Mt Kosciuszko, the highest mountain in the country. Three rivers converge here: the Thredbo (which used to be called the Crackenback), the Snowy and the Eucumbene. The confluence is at a place called Jindabyne and from there they travel as one, three hundred and fifty kilometres to the sea in Victoria.

This is the place where Banjo Paterson wrote his famous poem, ‘The Man from Snowy River’. His real name was Andrew-Barton Paterson, but he had a favourite horse called Banjo, and he took its name as a pseudonym. The poem is about a group of stockmen who try to recapture the colt of a famous race horse that escaped its paddock and is living wild with a herd of Australian brumbies.

I’d ridden quite a bit as a kid back in Ireland: my dad’s house had stables and we kept a few horses. I rode in
Excalibur
, of course, but my passion had dimmed when I heard Tommy Rochford tearing through the woods on his Enduro. Before long I worked out that you didn’t need to groom or muck out a motorbike, so horses were suddenly relegated to second place in my affections.

We’d arranged to meet a sixty-year-old trail guide named Peter Cochran and a stockman called Barry Paton, a tall, rangy guy who’d been mustering in this area for almost as long as he’d been walking. With his thick moustache and his hat worn low, he looked every inch the Australian cowboy. He was the genuine article, complete with a stock whip which he let me have a go at cracking. It’s nowhere near as easy as you’d think and every time I flicked it out it recoiled to sting me. Barry had been using one forever, of course, and after a couple of demonstrations from him I got the hang of it.

Being a stockman isn’t a job, it’s a way of life and some of the stations the guys work on are enormous. Like cowboys in the US, stockmen use working dogs - kelpies - to help with the cattle. They have rodeos and outback polo matches and their gear, particularly the saddle, is very specific. Originally they used ‘park’ saddles, which were pretty much the same as English ones, but over the years various types of ‘stockman’ saddles evolved. Some have pommel horns like Western saddles, but they’re distinctive mostly because of high knee rolls and a cantle that shapes to the small of your back.

So far we’d been travelling south-south-east from Darwin, but from Khancoban it was east all the way. I was so glad we would be riding a few miles on horseback. This was beautiful country and perfect for riding; serene-looking valleys where cattle grazed and kangaroos fed their young, the hillsides mottled with trees.

We met up with Peter Cochran, a sixty-year-old trail guide, and a stockman called Barry Paton, a tall, rangy guy who’d been mustering in this area for almost as long as he’d been walking. Peter led a palomino Arab down from the truck.

‘This one’s called Hellfire,’ he said, ‘and there’s good news. He’s not bucked anyone off for a week.’

‘That’s because he’s not been ridden for a week,’ I called back.

Actually his name was Basil and he was a very nice horse. As I swung up into the saddle, I was conscious that I’d not done much riding lately. I’d practised a bit in London before we left, but prior to that I hadn’t been on a horse since Ewan and I rode in Kazakhstan during Long Way Round. The saddle Peter had given me was more comfortable than the one I’d had then, thankfully - a really well-sprung rig called a ‘half breed’ that had been designed specifically for hill country. I walked Basil up and down the trail, backing him up and trotting him in a circle so we could get used to each other before we set out. A horse wants you to be in charge, and it’s really important that they have confidence in you. They can feel whether or not you can ride properly, and years ago I learned that the first thing you do with a new horse is let him know that you know what you’re doing.

At this time of year the horses weren’t shod - the ground was soft so there was really no need. Peter explained that you can tell a brumby from a domestic horse at a distance because of the way it walks. The nerve endings in a horse’s hoof are all in the middle pad and over the years unshod wild horses have developed a way of walking where their foot is slightly crimped.

With Barry as trail boss, we followed a grassy track into the woods, heading for a place called Keeble’s Hut, which had been built in 1942 as a fishing lodge. It was a bright, chilly morning - the first really cold day we’d experienced in a couple of months and a reminder that it was winter in Australia. The weather had started warming up when we got to Turkey and it had been hot ever since until we reached the Australian winter.

Riding side by side, Barry and I chatted away like old friends. I realised that cowboys and dirt-bike riders share similar injuries. We tend to ride in the same kind of country and take the same kind of falls, and the two of us spent much of the morning swapping pain stories.

He told me that with the ongoing drought, the amount of guys like him still working had fallen rapidly. Also, the larger stations, such as the one we’d crossed further north, tended to use small planes and choppers to muster the stock. Back in the days of Banjo Paterson (who also wrote ‘Waltzing Matilda’), this whole area was thick with sheep and cattle - real stockmen country. The interior of the country had been opened up in 1813, when a group of men on horseback first crossed the Blue Mountains from Sydney. In World War Two, stockmen from New South Wales took their horses to Palestine to fight with ‘The Australian Light Horse’. Unfortunately the British wouldn’t ship the horses back again, and they ended up in the UK, nicknamed ‘Walers’.

I was learning so much more about Australia than I’d imagined I would. As you get closer to the end of these expeditions things tend to get a little rushed, but we were covering three thousand miles on this continent - one sixth of the entire journey. Originally, reaching Darwin safely had been my main goal. But since then we’d crossed right through the outback, and now here we were in the heart of the mountains.

Around mid morning we stopped for a breather at a small hut in a clearing where the horses could eat. We were close to a place called Scammell’s Lookout, the place where a soldier named Clews began surveying the area after World War Two. Since then, fourteen dams and seven hydro-electric power stations have been constructed. The hut was known as Geehi, and it was used by bush walkers and stockmen. Barry said there were a few here and there along the trail. After stretching our legs for a while we were back in the saddle. We crossed and recrossed the river, fording shallow streams and using small bridges designed for hoofs not wheels. It was wonderful to be trotting along in the open air, travelling on horseback just as the settlers had done in the days of Banjo Paterson.