“That’s as bad as back of Bourke. That’s as bad as back of Bourke”, the diseased fellow passenger murmured as he beat his head on the cabin table en route for Australia in a small pacific merchantman/coaster.
It transpired that he considered Bourke to be the back of beyond - outback at its worst. So I decided that’s where I wanted to go when ashore.
On a sheet of cardboard I wrote Bourke in large letters and, having landed in Brisbane stood at the roadside with my sign. No road signs mentioned Bourke and no-one stopped to pick me up. At least I knew that I was pointing west.
So I walked west to a dirt road and was given a lift by a youth who had failed to find work in Brisbane and was on his way home in a car that had no brakes or reverse gear. I was the reverse gear after we bumped into something. We didn’t go far before he left the road, thank goodness.
The countryside was bleak yet in many ways interesting. Practically no-one failed to stop for me (there were very few cars). The people in them were full of character, interest and friendliness. A doctor stopped with some special medicine on his way to meet another doctor. A farmer with thousands of acres stopped and took me some distance. He generated all his own power for air conditioning and deep freezing and created a lake to be filled in the rainy season. Masses of birds were attracted to it and I would have loved to have accepted his invitation to stay. But funds were getting low and there was a certain anxiety in the back of my mind. A gambler stopped. He ran a brothel in Brisbane and was on his way to Goondiwindi to take money from its inhabitants in various ways.
He had stopped once in “nowhere” where two tramplike-men were brewing tea in a billy can. He owed money to the older of the two but knew it would be refused as the younger one would have stolen it.
All helped me westwards, though no-one understood why I wanted to go to Bourke.
Some nights I had only the kookaburra’s call for company, but the weather was comfortably mild. Had it rained, all vehicles on the dirt road would have sunk into the mud axel deep and drivers would have to find accomodation and wait for the surface to solidify before proceeding.
I had yet to see a kangeroo and told two building workers so. When we saw one they stopped and found a gun among their tools and did their best to shoot the animal dead so that I could see it.
After a spell with sheep-shearers, where the aboriginals were the best, I continued toward my target. (no-one could grasp how I managed to draw moving figures).
Bourke was worth the hitchhike, being once a far inland port now on a dry river that was once deep enough for the transportation of sheep and wool to the coast.
Ghostly, old, and deralict ships displayed its past. Now it was a rather delightful outback relic.
The fellow passenger on that coaster to Brisbane was I’m sure quite right. Back of Bourke was their “beyond”, but I now had to travel south to Sydney and home.
I was on my way again (much easier as there was some motor traffic on a tarmac road).
I met up with people in Sydney to whom I had introductions (they were smart and I was scruffy), and now with my hitchhiking over, I boarded a liner, the Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (later to sink), in which I headed across the Pacific, via New Zealand and Tahiti, the Panama canal and thence to Fort Lauderdale in the State of Florida, USA.
Then, with minimal residual funds, and a Greyhound bus trip north, I was flown back to England in a Bristol Britannia prop-jet. The new jet (707), being much quicker, then commanded a premium fare.
This travelling by hitchhiking had made a fine contribution to my book: “Harbours, Girls and a Slumbering World” (ISBN 0 9530517 4 9) and had also contributed much to my one-man exhibition of the drawings in London’s Cork Street and Osaka, Japan.
In roughly a year away I had experienced and drawn far more than I had ever expected to, and at a time when international travel was far easier in a world at peace.
