Mug of Sunshine

Urgh.. Such a human trait. Sure, there are some that are so naturally self assured that you can't help but admire them.There are also those that are so unjustifiably naturally self assured that they can't help but grit your shit. But confronting the fact that something you strive to be good at receives accolades is.. well.. confronting! I thought that it was just because they were family or close friends, to be taken with a healthy dose of "that's really nice of you to say so.." regardless of how 'well read' they are, or how much you value their opinion on matters not directly concerned with yourself. But when peers and magazine editors start recommending your work to each other and their readers.... Fuck, that's a whole new level of confrontation.

This guy wrote a short story (Okay, my blog, my discretionary prerogative. The story was short, maybe 800 words, but it doesn't deserve that categorisation. It didn't end at the last full stop. How great is it when that happens?) It was an attractive English 'backpackerette', it was love lost, but was it? It was in White Horses and it inspired me to write 'Julian'. 'Julian' was published in the next issue of the magazine and along side it was another contribution by the above author. I love it's rhythm, I love it's colloquialisms, I love it's cursing and I hate/love that I can directly identify with it.

Anyway... he wrote to me and told me how much he enjoyed my latest submission and could he publish it on his blog. He posted a link on his facebook page and in the comments box the magazine editor sang praise and gave directions to my other writing... I'm uncomfortably basking (It's taken 3 Coopers and the best part of a bottle of Shiraz for me to get here).

He is Matt Webber, this is his website and the following, by permission, is awesome.

For my non Antipodean readers

'Pokies' = one arm bandits/fruit machine/slot machine.
'Chook' = chicken
'Clubbie' = surf lifesaver
'cunjie' = type of seaweed

The Rock

Sea breathes in. Sea breathes out.

Prick’s perched up there like a billygoat on The Rock and making like the director of a show, one of the grandest magnitude, one where the ocean’s the fuckin’ stage and we’re but players fighting it out for a cash-in-hand extra’s slot. He barks his charges in with a machine gun staccato.

Yup. Yup. Nup. Nup. Yup.

Like black or red on the fuckin’ pokies.

The bloke out front levers himself to the spot. He’s a most unsurferly wisp, this fella. Sunken smoker’s chest. Cheap smudgy tatt on his pale left shoulder. He get’s a yup. Doesn’t fuck about. Plunges boardlong into the keyhole’s boiling mush.

Sea breathes in.

Sea breathes out.

And Wispy’s exhaled out the rear, back arched, chook arms chuggin’.

Bird’s up next, the languid one who you see down here. Turns heads with her Diaz legs and that blue and white striped mal. Can surf, this one. Nimble. Graceful. Lean. Her old man’s here a bit, too. Clingin’ to that saggin’ ex-clubbie frame, the old fella. Cranky lookin’ point-hog, all sunspots and seen-it-all machismo. That snarl’s foolin’ no one. He knows what they’re thinkin’, these blokes who ogle his baby. He was one of ‘em back in the day. It’s killin’ him.

She leaps, his girl.

Sea breathes in.

Sea breathes out.

Feet skyward, she hardly seems to stroke before she’s sucked around the corner and gone, hair still dry as bone.

My turn now. Billygoat’s all earnest instructiveness.

Hold on. Wait. Hold on.

Then he baulks, sits bolt upright.

YUP. GO. GO. GO.

I dive into the brine.

Sea breathes in.

Sea holds it fuckin’ breath.

World pauses.

I battle for the corner, but I’m retarded by a numbskull current that can’t get its shit together.

By the time I’m around, it’s a steamin’ gurglin’ wall of fuckin’ white.

I bail.

What else?

I’m clamberin’ downwards but there’s no grip in this kind airy green stew. Bubbles of nothin’. Just like the chocolate. Board gets caught and tugs at me like a shopping centre mum would her wayward toddler. No fuckin’ idea where I’m goin’. Hug my arms to my head. Save the noggin. Guessed it wrong. Shoulda thought of my ribs. How the ages shaped that rock. How they moulded it and cajoled it. How the tides sharpened it just so. And how the water carries the thud as I introduce myself to its evolution. I clutch for the pain and as I do drag my elbow on stone. Skin rips. Salt bites at a new wound.

Sea breathes out.

Dumps me on barnacles and whatever other godforsaken fuckin’ gremlins grow on that stone. Board’s in two bits, both bobbing, the smaller piece still attached to my ankle, stringers, all three of ‘em, frayed.

There’s a fuckin’ rockhopper standin’ there. Frozen solid, he is. Bucket and rod and just gawkin’ like American Gothic oceanside. Useless, he is. I know the feeling. There’s red seeping from a hole in my side like the one the fuckin’ Romans gave to bloody Jesus. The one that didn’t even bleed. The one that told ‘em the time was nigh. The death prod. They teach you that at school. They don’t teach you to jump The Rock. Note to fuckin’ educators everywhere – get your shit in order.

Sea breathes in.

I rise with it and cling to the cunjie too fucked to go further, too scared to let go.

I shimmy my way around and cop the cut feet and the grazed gut just to get free. Safe, I reel in my board’s lower half. Some kid hands me its torso. Blood’s in rivulets down my shins, dripping off my fingertips. Elbow’s aflame. Rashy’s been got at by Freddie Krueger.

“Fuck,” the kid says. That’s all he can manage.

And up against a clear sky sits The Rock, a fuckin’ great proud slab of conqueror.

Billygoat’s bailed now, too. Well he fuckin’ might.

Car park can’t come soon enough.

I ignore the stares and trudgin’.

Below is the first piece of writing I got paid for. It was published in White Horses magazine. If you like this I can guarantee you won't be dissapointed with the mag, it's a blinder.

I’m struggling a bit with the word ‘journey’. It’s one of those words that seems to have been slightly hijacked. You know, like ‘surfing’ the internet. It would seem to have turned into more of a spiritual thing; ‘One man’s journey from rags to riches’ or ‘a child’s journey of discovery’, you see what I mean? Its original definition is ‘The act of traveling from one place to another’ but it has another now ‘A process or course likened to traveling’. I reckon if you looked hard enough you could probably find a Buddhist or Hindu word that matches the new definition or why not even make one up?

I’m ruminating (see what I did there) over this because my wife and I have recently completed a journey. It was an act of traveling from one place to another; we left the South West of England and arrived 2 years later on the Sunshine Coast in Australia. We did it, as much as possible, by car. The thing is that we also experienced a process or course that could be likened to travelling. A bloody journey.

It began late summer in a Thai restaurant in Taunton, England shortly after we had been granted permanent resident visas for Australia. Our house was sold and we were winding up our businesses, we had had nothing concrete planned for our arrival in Australia but knew from previous visits that we fancied the Sunny coast. I’d heard on the news that day a story about a company in London selling tickets for a bus to Sydney. It was to take three months and would carry nineteen passengers. I told Kym about it and the discussion that followed resulted in two definites: We couldn’t travel with the same nineteen people for three months and why don’t we just do it ourselves.

We journeyed through eighteen countries; we drove on the lowest road on Earth and the highest. We drove through deserts, crossed plateaus, breached mountain ranges and sweated in jungles while howler monkeys laughed at us. We crossed the equator, climbed volcanoes, followed in the footsteps of Richard the Lion Heart and his Knights of the Crusade. We explored Nabatean temples in Syria and whistled the theme to Raiders of the lost Ark as we walked into Petra. We sat on Lawrence of Arabia’s bar stool while drinking a cold beer in his favourite hotel. Agatha Christie wrote ‘murder on the Orient express’ in the same hotel (she was a surfer, true story).

We fought bureaucracy in India for days on end; we raised our hands above our head after driving into a military exercise in Syria... at night. A wheel fell off in Java; a lorry hit us in India. We had flat batteries in Mumbai and got a jump off a Tuk Tuk. We only had two punctures. We helped repair the outboard on the only ferry that could get our car across a river in Aceh. We span out from altitude sickness at five thousand metres in the Himalayas. We trashed some banana trees getting stuck in the mud trying to find a wave. We never once paid bribes to further our cause, seriously, not once. We got robbed by the mechanics in a Toyota garage in Hyderabad though. Really robbed, not just normal mechanic robbed. Jeans, sunglasses an umbrella and a hatchet.

We called in to see a friend in the Alps and went snowboarding. We visited my Mum on her small Greek island. We spent three weeks travelling with a French family through the Middle East. Mum, Dad and three kids in a Landrover with two roof tents on top. We popped in to Singapore to pick up a couple of boards from a friend where I’d left them on the way back from Indo sometime. Shared beers in a Muslim enclave with two Dutch cyclists who were following the old Silk Road. Rescued a lovesick French boy from the frustration and tedium of the Iranian consulate in Turkey and took him on a two day holiday.

We stayed at Lena’s house in Southern Sumatra and she took us to see the elephant rescue centre. We rented a house on Bali and all our European friends came and visited. Adi and Linda refused to let us pay for food at their sarong shop on Lombok after we’d promised that we’d be back two years before. The diminutive security guard at the abandoned resort on Sumbawa let us stay there and use the showers and toilet. An Italian girl, newly arrived on Bali was having an issue with a taxi driver, we helped her out. She worked for the UN and was currently based in Timor Leste, of course we could stay!

I surfed. I surfed in Syria. Syria has sixty four point eight kilometres of coastline. India has a lot more and I surfed there as well. I surfed from Banda Aceh to Dili mostly alone, occasionally throwing sticks in to see how strong the sweep was or paddling from the middle of the bay out to the point to give myself a better feel for the setup. I got scared often, usually paddling across deep blue water but also by water so clear the bottom looked inches away. Sometimes just the isolation scared me. I surfed rivermouths, beaches, points and reefs. I can’t tell you all their names, not because I don’t want to, well there is that too, but because I have no idea if most of them had a name. They are all little crosses on a map.

Occasionally waves led to altercations. One time it was because Kym doesn’t surf. That’s not what the argument was about, that was the cause. Through the binoculars I’d spotted a long left point. The closest I could get the car was about a kilometre away; I pulled up grabbed my board and went to lock the doors. But hang on; a bag had to be prepared… water, sunscreen, something to sit on, a towel, a book, maybe a snack. I lost it. But there was little to be gained from arguing so in general we didn’t. For the most part we only had each other, and when you’re spending large chunks of time in areas where no one else speaks your language it helps if the only person that does is still speaking to you.

It wasn’t a chore. We have always been strong, we have shared joy, which is great, and we have shared tragedy, which while certainly not great is definitely a more powerful lesson. We came through it. We’d also had practice, a year backpacking on a round-the-world ticket five years earlier highlighted how much we relied on each other. Neither one of us could have done this alone, we have become a team, a loving, living team each completely mindful of the other.

You learn so many things. Important things like: mechanics, languages, map reading, trust (instincts), rationing, names of medicines and what they do. And also not so essential but equally as rewarding things, like: geography, history, architecture, beauty, tolerance, frugality and sustainability, recycling and repairing! We had culture shocks along the way, no more so than in India but probably the most thought provoking happened on our first day in Australia. We’d separated in a supermarket to shop quicker and when Kym still hadn’t arrived at the checkout ten minutes later I went looking for her. I found her stood in front of a six metre long display of nothing but milk sobbing her heart out. She had no idea which one to choose.

The journey came to an end at our little slice of paradise here on the Sunny Coast. A small Queenslander in a beautiful paddock surrounded by rainforest. The journey continues unabated.

Here's a whole buch of photos from along the way in no particular order. You can supersize them if you click on 'em.