WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE

Tara, Neutral Junction Station
They still call me Max at Neutral Junction even now. If I’m in polite company I say I named myself after my childhood hero – the protagonist in ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ but really, Max is short for Maximum Penetration.
I couldn’t call myself Dave you see, because a fella called Dave had just died. Tara is a traditional Aboriginal community, so during the mourning period, you can’t use his name. The house where he died had to be deserted and smoked out, all images of him removed. They’re serious about it too. We blotted out Dave’s name with Nikko pen on all our lists, and I changed my name from Dave to Max, after my childhood hero.

We stayed in workers’ quarters, on the station. John, the ringer, was spending a lot of time in the community store because his mother-in-law was visiting: “She keeps cleaning! She’s vacuuming the fuckin’ nails out of the floorboards ! She walks into the laundry, and the washing machine starts backin’ into the corner.”
A black fulla walked in. John wrinkled his nose: “Did you step in something mate?”
The Countryman shyly shook his head, and John sprayed him down with Glen 20. I couldn’t really argue with John though – he smelt of curdled sweat that stings your eyes. They call soap ‘Sunday’ round here apparently.

Tara is a tiny place of ten or twelve houses, on Neutral Junction Station. Maybe fourteen houses. The last white fellas who came to Tara were kidnapping their children. Like a desert storm is heralded by a massive dust cloud, our arrival was heralded by Aboriginal families fleeing into the desert, or up the secret tracks to Utopia – that heat-blasted area to the north. We had to find these people.

Stage One was clockwork. There’s nothing lures a black fulla out of his home like the smell of sausages and onions. We fired up the barbeque. First came the camp dogs, many of them leatherbacks, hairless and slumped. Those people that hadn’t fled to Utopia, mostly men, soon followed. We had our meeting, and signed the agreements with them, while Nelly, cut-snake, stormed around, lashing at the leatherbacks with a cane.

We discussed with John the problem of the mothers having fled into the desert.
“Haha ! It’s simple. They can live out there, hunting, for weeks on end, shooting wallabies and chasin’ goannas up trees in their four wheel drives. But there’s one thing they can’t go without. Beer.”
So that was that, the three of us, we encamped around the Barrow Creek pub, like lions stalking a waterhole.
And when the 12pm bell rang, the ladies appeared like goannas from their holes, and we pounced on them with our laptops and our agreements.

The Erldunda Roadhouse
I opened the car door, and a crushed Victoria Bitter can clattered to the ground. There were some emus behind a fence. An aboriginal kid was hittin’ one with a stick, while the parents sat nearby sharing a tin of bully beef. Who’s to say actually if they were the parents – you never can tell with black fullas. I thought Sam was going to say something to the family, but she didn’t. In the pie-warmer in the back of the roadhouse they had a few limp pies that looked like they’d been bashed and robbed. A bit of steak-and-kidney gravy had squirted free from one, and dried to the outside like a scab.
Honest Dave: “I’ll get one o’ these triceratops pies thanks.”
Samantha Yeates: “What do you mean triceratops pies?”
Dave: “Well they look like they’ve been around since back then.”
Sam: “That’s true.”
Dave: “I’ll get a pterodactyl chicken wing as well.”
Sam: “And I’ll get a dodecahedron pasty.”
Girl-behind-counter: “Well listen, if you don’t like them, you can cross the road to the cow paddock, and help yourself to one of Paddy’s Pies – they’re free.”
Dave: “They’re no doubt fresher – That sounds like a well-practised line – not the first time people have complained about your produce?” I handed over the money.
Girl: “You payin’ for all this yourself?”
Dave: “Sure am – no pie is too good for my sheila. What about beers?”
Girl: “The Ringers Bar’s round the back.”
I walked into the cozy little place. Corrugated iron. Crappy aboriginal dot-paintings festooned the walls along with other vital outback commodities like furry kanagaroos and those koalas that clip on the front of your shirt.
“Sixpack a VB thanks.”
“Sure, there you go.”
Sam: “What ‘dja get VB for ? What about Coopers?”
Dave: “Coopers Gay Ale? If you closed your eyes, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.”
Sam: “Hundred bucks says I would.”
Dave: “Hundred bucks? That would almost cover the price of this sixer. Fuckin’ Territory.”
Sam: “Yeah, well it’s the…”
Dave: “…I know I know, the freight. If I had a dollar for every time a Territorian told me that, I could almost afford this six-pack.”
Sam bought herself Coopers and we headed back to the car. I made some space for my feet among the ankle-deep jingling carpet of brown stubbies and greencans on the car floor. Sam mentioned that I should be throwing the cans out the window as we drove, in case the cops pull us over. It’s the Territorian way.
Sam: “VB is fuckin’ foul. I won’t drink the shit. Well, not until I’ve finished my Coopers anyway.”
Dave: “Such restraint is an inspiration.”

. . . . . .

Magela Creek, Kakadu
I sat down by the river, and shared my Barbeque Shapes with an Aboriginal woman. She smelled pretty strongly, such that it was making me sneeze, and making my eyes itch. So when I say I was sharing my Shapes, once her hand had penetrated the box, I pretty much left her to the rest. Her family was upstream casting nets and handlines, the children were leaping from the ¬‘DANGER – CROCODILES’ sign, into the water.
The woman laughed, “Crocs don’t have good eyes. They can’t see our black skin. But you white fullas shouldn’t go in the water. You glow like lightbulbs. And we have women’s business where we slap on the water’s surface – this annoys the crocs, and they go away.”
I asked her to show me this dubious science of ‘women’s business’ to which they trusted the connectedness of their limbs, but she looked to the ground and fell silent, and her hand, which up to then had been relentlessly shoveling Shapes into her mouth, dropped to her lap. I apologised, and moved the subject, as always, to fishing.
“Black fullas’ lazy,” she said. “Everyone knows that. If you want to know the easiest way, ask a black fulla. When you are fishing it’s not just you and the fish. The insects and birds can help you fish if you ask. All of the world acts on all other parts of the world, all the time. Always be thinking of how it does.”
A sea eagle alighted on a high branch. “To find a fishing spot, watch for the sea eagle. He sits in the top of the tree, watching the water for fish. Sea eagle, he’s a good fisherman. So we look for the him. When we find him, we sit under his tree. Here, we throw in a handline. No sweat. And when you catch a fish, throw the sea eagle a piece of it, thank him, and he will help you next time.
“That plant there, white fellas call it the billygoat plum – when the flowers blossom, the barramundi and turtles are fat, so we fish for them. In the month when the plum is ripe, we stop fishing, and eat the plum instead – easier. In the Dry, when the creeks stop flowing, we crush the bark of the billygoat plum and soak it in the still pools – it poisons the water a bit, and the barra float to the top. Easy.
“Paperbark tree, best tree in Kakadu. See that bulge at the side, it’s full of clean fresh water, drill a hole, take a sip, and plug it back up with bark. The paperbark tree can help us fish too. Go down the river at evening time, just before the mozzies come, you know? Peel off a bit a bark, and wrap it up into a candle. Stick it by the water’s edge, and light it. Go away for a walk for a while, maybe go check the traps. When you get back, the mozzies and insects, they come for the light and smoke – and they fly round like crazy. Sometimes the insects hit the water and die. So then, the little fish come for them and eat them. Then the big fish come, and they eat the smaller fish. And soon the barra will come. Throw in a line, and haul out one a dem big barras. No sweat.”

The Mackenzie Country, New Zealand
The winds off Antarctica scour the Mackenize Country bare. The high country is primal, spindly, mighty and barren. A tremendous silence echoes from the mountains. Massive hydro plants link the lakes – it seems that New Zealand has learned to harness power from the country’s very stillness, her peace, her eternity.
Stags, and Himalayan thar rove the mountains. American trophy hunters prize them – the stags for their antlers, the thar for their magnificent manes. Sensibly, due to the region’s scorching cold, safari season tends to be in the summer.
What the postcards don’t tell the tourists, though, is that in the mildness of summer, the thar have no need of their precious manes, and shed them.

This is where Spinner comes in. Friends say that Spinner earned his nickname from all the bullshit he spins when he is pissed. Spinner insists it comes from his prowess on the cricket pitch. There’s no denying that he’s a great cricketer, but strangely, he’s a pace bowler. When his parents went back home to England he had to quit school, and joined a shearers’ gang. He did this for decades. The problem was: “It’d happen too often: I’d be shearing, and the fuckin’ sheep would kick me in the shin, or in the balls, or across the jaw when I’m on the long blow. And I would hate that cunt of a sheep. And I’d grab it. And I’d hold shut its nose and mouth and try and suffocate it. But while it’s thrashing round in my grip, I’d kind of… realise it’s my job to get that sheep down that chute, shorn. And while it’d probably take me, I dunno, two or three minutes to suffocate it… well, it’d only take me a minute and a half to shear it. So I would.
“I realised I had to give it away. I started to come to hate the sheep. I hated them for being fucking stupid sheep. The smell of them made me hate. One winter I went up into the mountains – started killing thar. I spend every winter up there now. I shoot ‘em, scalp ‘em, and sell the manes to the taxidermist. Then when those tourists come on safari, when they have the heads of their kills mounted on the wall, they attach my manes to their kill. Cos they always come in the summer when the thar don’t have their manes any more, dickheads.”

In the summertime, when he’s back in town, if you want to kill something, or have something killed, you talk to Spinner. Need to have a lamb slaughtered? Possums in the roof? Neighbour’s dog keeping you up at night? Speak to Spinner.
Well, me and Dad wanted to kill some trout. So we spoke to Spinner. Spinner took us up, high up, through the farms, into that desolate Mackenzie Basin – every stream, every valley, every paddock, held a memory for Spinner of something that he’d killed.

We were bobbing in the tinnie in Lake Benmore, lines cast, the slap of the water the only sound. As always while fishing, the conversation went from espousing the beauty of a sunset, or birdsong, or a river’s bend, to catching fish, to shooting pigs. But I just couldn’t relax – he was wearing the tiniest pair of denim shorts – there seemed the constant danger that one of his testicles was going to sproing out the side, every time he shifted in his seat. I was beset by a teetering worry, like when your kids are playing by the highway, or when you are drunk around your great aunt Madge, and you know at any moment a swear word is going to fall, unsolicited, from your lips.
He was elaborating a story (which was further impressing on me that I want to be on his side when the revolution comes) when a black shag alighted on a branch to clean her feathers. Spinner snatched into a new tale:
“We were fishing for brown trout this day. Nothing. We weren’t getting a bite, nothing. All fuckin’ day we sat there. The sun was setting and we were getting hungry, and it was pissing us off. But those black shags were all around us all day dive-dombing the water and pulling up trout. Those black shags would eat their own weight in trout every day, and they didn’t even have to pay for fishing licenses.
“So, bein’ a bit cheeky, I picked off one a the shags with me rifle. Then me mate did. It was fun, and I reckon we killed about 20 or 25 or something that night. Thing is, after we stopped and that crack of rifle fire stopped echoing off the mountains, we heard this insane squawking coming from everywhere. Yeah we soon realised it was coming from the shags’ nests. It was their babies, their chicks poor buggers. There was nothing for it – they were orphans now, wouldn’t survive, so we took to the nests with shotguns until all the squawking stopped.”

He sat back, one wrinkly bullock about to erupt from his shorts like a spudgun: “Next day but, when we went out in the tinnies, let me tell you, no sweat, we caught some fucking trout.”

. . . . .

Gunbalanya, Arnhem Land
The pilot’s descent toward the airstrip seemed far too vigorous for my comfort. When he saw my concerned gulp, he pointed down, shouted above the engine noise, “Brumbies. Here yesterday too. Hiding from the fires.”
Wild horses littered the runway. The airstrip fence was only on three sides. When Gunbalanya Council applied for the government grant for the fence, they miscalculated the length required, so it doesn’t completely surround the airstrip. Our pilot buzzed the runway, the brumbies scattered, he banked.
Across Arnhem Land, a half-dozen craters of fire unfurled stalks of smoke that mushroomed across the sky. The whistling kites, known as firebirds, swarmed these great towers in a bustling explosion of dive-bombing, as they hunt for small marsupials and reptiles and insects escaping the flame. When the fire gets hot enough that the prey are dying rather than escaping it, the whistling kites collect flaming twigs and drop them elsewhere to start their own smaller fires. I shit you not.

That’s the Territory right there, death coming at you from all angles. Sitting on your back porch in the dry season, there’s six enormous fires stalking the eucalypt forest out there in the darkness. Your house and fence are made out of kindling and match-heads, and you’re wondering if one of those conflagrations is gonna come your way, wondering if this is going to be the last night of your life. And it’s just you and your brother-in-law and the hose, shovel, shotgun and esky.
The hose puts out spot fires from the raining embers.
The esky keeps the beer cold. Der.
The shovel takes out the snakes that are fleeing the fire and onto your property.
And the shotgun takes out those fucking whistling kites that keep dropping flaming fucking twigs into the yard !

The pilot landed the plane hard enough that it put my back out.

The top end of the Northern Territory has, of course, three seasons.
The Build-up – you virtually need gills to breathe during this time. Clouds, like great continents, march toward you over the Arafura Sea, formed from the moisture the sun is sucking from your very cells. Any attempt at perfume or deodorant is futile as torrents of sweat just flush it away. A piece of A4 paper will go limp like cloth. Sometimes you’ll do a toilet stop for no other reason except to wipe.
The Wet – those clouds finally break, and the lowlands flood. Hills become islands, and most places are cut off except by plane. Accompanying the rising floodwaters are the crocodiles, who rule the Top End during the Wet.
The Dry – what was underwater during the Wet, burns during the dry. This time of year there are mountains of smoke on the horizons. On the highway you’ll drive past a bushfire whose heat you can feel through the walls of the car. Fire is a season in the Top End. The Dry and the Wet may as well be called the Fire and the Flood.

Spinifex grass secretes a flammable gum. The Central Australian desert is rife with the stuff. Any spark, and that spinifex whips it into a frenzy of flame, and lashes it across the desert like gossip across a beauty salon. The fire acts as an agent of destruction, by razing the scrub and small trees to ash, but also as a medium for rebirth. The hot wind and smoke carry with them a freight of spinifex seeds, that plant themselves in that ash.

Black fullas understood fire. As the boys become men, as part of their men’s business, first trick they learn is to make a fire from rubbing sticks together. Only a man may start a fire, only a woman may transport it. The women store the coals in hollowed out roots, like didgeridoos, where they smolder slowly when moving between camps.

They have always burned off land to prevent a dangerous build up of tinder, and that’s still the policy today – those fires you see out your car window were mostly started on purpose.
The Aborigines would also use the same trick as the whistling kites, and start a fire to flush out the kangaroos, which they’d ambush with boomerangs and spears.

That night in the beer garden of the Gunbalanya Sports and Social Club, one of Australia’s great pubs, my back still twinged. Keith Urban on the telly, I was speaking with the Council about the agreements. The Club was girt by orchards of flame. The speargrass was brown, and the fire was roaring its crackling and pitiless applause. No-one else in the pub, the local fellas, the road crew guys, seemed concerned, so I drowned my apprehension with beer. In fact it seemed to them no more worthy of interest than the sound of traffic, or a distant car alarm. But while my right hand was on my beer, my left was in my pocket on my car keys, key to the driver’s side door at the ready.
By the meatworks, a pandanus palm was shriveling to an arthritic claw as the fire guttled it. The setting sun glared red onto the heat and dry haze and smoke and dragonflies and hayfever.

As night arrived, so did the mozzies and the cane toads. While the white fellas sprayed on insect repellant everyone at the table put their hands over their beers, as subconscious and practised a motion as scratching your stubble or biting a hangnail. The floodlights came on so the people gathered around them, not for the light so much, but for the entertainment. The lights quickly attracted thousands of insects which would cyclone around the illumination in a great whirling funnel off into the darkness. As they spiraled spastically some would strike the lights themselves and their fried remains drop to the grass below, food for one of the dozen cane toads sitting in wait – it would flick out its tongue and reverse-vomit the insect.
But the cane toads’ free buffet was not without its cost. Although one of the kids had a cricket bat, the others were just using planks of wood to smash and kill the toads. This would remind me every time of that golf club I have back at my apartment – I never use it, I should give it to one of these kids to use.
At 7pm the curfew siren blew, so those kids, and the violent drunks (identifiable by their brawl-scarred faces) filed out with slung shoulders.
Out there, the scene was hellish, the fire cast menacing spears of shadow through the night.

I said to Isaac, I said, “What’s with all the fire? Are people hunting?”
“Nah,” said Isaac. “I think someone dropped a cigarette.”

Darwin, Northern Territory capital
The most powerful truths (and thus, the most dangerous) are those that, once revealed, seem self-evident.

In the late eighteen hundreds, Darwin’s theory of evolution was inflaming the imaginations of white men. Religion was dead, but no longer needed. Galileo had given religion the first bullet by showing that we weren’t cupped in the Lord’s palm with Heaven above and Hell below; but were rather a speck spiraling and wobbling out of control in an endless and unknowable void. Charles Darwin gave religion the coup de grace by teaching that we come, not from Eden, but from monkeys.
So, on encountering the Aboriginal people, the Europeans, their thoughts enslaved by Darwin’s newfound science, figured it went like this – amoeba to tadpoles to fish to dinosaurs to monkeys to gorillas to black fullas to white fullas. At best, Europeans considered Aboriginal people primitive, degraded and abject – a situation from which to be rescued. At worst, they considered them proto-human, or the ‘missing link’.
The scientists’ understanding of the truth of evolution was malformed and foetal, and they wielded it dangerously. In fact humans are not evolved from monkeys. Monkeys and humans, blacks and whites alike, are evolved from the same ancient creature, one that no longer exists. Never, through the momentum of evolution, was man ever a monkey.

Meanwhile, Darwinism itself was evolving. Rulers, throughout time, had used religion as a goad to send people off to war – Pope Urban promised eternal life to the Crusaders who fell against the Muslims. The Conquistadors, the Inquisition both used religion as an excuse for their acts. Islam flew from the Arabian Peninsula across the world on wings of war and violence.
Since no-one believed in God any more the kings and queens needed a new doctrine to coerce their subjects to kill.

Social Darwinism became the newest creed to justify violence and colonialism. Social Darwinism says that human beings are part of nature, and the exigencies of nature’s laws govern our behavior. Struggle and competition are inevitable and are, in fact, vital for our progress. Conflict is irrepressible, inexorable. It’s not war, not racism, it’s survival-of-the-fittest.
So sharpen your bayonets boys, and stoke your muskets. If they can’t stand up for themselves, it is our civilisation’s right, our duty, to wipe them out, to purge the weaker part to preserve the strength of our species as a whole.

The Aboriginal people of Australia didn’t hold up well against these ideologies, and were slaughtered. To be honest though, ideologies shmideologies – these were just so that the soldier would sleep better at night – the truth is the blacks were on territory the British wanted. All the Aborigines who lived on land considered valuable or fertile were butchered. The high-water mark of blood is Far North Queensland, Western Australia, and the Northern Territory, whose landscapes of swamp and flood and desert and crocodile and heat and fire and snake are so vast, rugged and unrewarding, that by the time Europeans had secured dominion over it, conscience had overtaken our bayonets, and those black fullas who lived here were able, to a degree, to hang on.

Darwin is the name of the Northern Territory’s capital, which shows the reverence which those early colonialists felt toward the man. These days, if you google ‘Darwin’ and ‘Aboriginal’ to discover the consequences of his discoveries on their people, you get links to a heap of backpacker tours to Aboriginal sites heading out of the capital, and stores that sell boomerang key-chains and stubbie coolers emblazoned with dot paintings.

. . . . .

Cahills Crossing, East Alligator River
The East Alligator River is tidal, so the currents and water levels are ever-changing and treacherous. We were taught, before fording a river in your vehicle, to first cross it on foot to test the depth. Well, the East Alligator River is called that for a reason – and I ain’t risking getting torn apart by crocodiles for my twenty-five bucks an hour plus travel allowance. So in reality, in the Top End, how one negotiates a river crossing is to wait for someone else to drive across it first.
And while you wait, you fish. The East Alligator defines the border of Arnhem Land, Aboriginal land. So the western bank is crowded with white guys, the eastern with a few black families (known as bininj in this region), while the sea eagles appraise the scene from the treetops. It’s not enough just to hook a barramundi – once you’ve landed it, you gotta fight the sea eagles for the damn thing.
It was only last week that I’d seen two crocodiles having a fight out in that river, just a few metres out. And today, there are tourists waist deep, confident in their fisherman’s waders; and Aboriginal kids down in the shallows casting nets and handlines. Wouldn’t catch me down there – I’m standing so far back from the river’s edge, that half of my casts don’t even reach the water.

It was only a few minutes before an Aboriginal family drove across the river in their rusty and bouncing Falcon. We all piled into our 90 thousand dollar Landcruiser, and followed in their wake, into Arnhem Land.

Arnhem Land
Like all good Aussie signs, the Welcome to Arnhem Land sign has been taken to with a shotgun.
Until I came here, I didn’t even know Arnhem Land was a real place. I just thought it was that fairy-tale land where kangaroos got their tails, where the crows got their black feathers, and where Tiddalik the frog vomited up all the rivers and the billabongs.
The Australian government has returned the whole enormous slab of Arnhem Land to the Aboriginal people, the traditional owners. I always thought this a wonderful thing – that this country, this Arnhem Land, would forever be kept in its pristine state, preserved by its hereditary custodians. Thing is, in the end, the black fullas do what you and I would do with a heap of resource-rich land – they lease it out to the mining companies, squabble over the royalties, and spend their share on beer.

Our mission this time was to hit the outstations, impossibly remote communities of a half-dozen or so families. Thing is though, we didn’t account for the secret men’s business – the gunapipi – that had just started. Just our luck, it was the first in a decade or more. Men’s business is a ritual coming-of-age, where the men take the boys off across the countryside, teach them where to hunt, how to hunt, how to make weapons, how to make fire. They teach them the songs, the stories, the dances. Gunapipi is some kind of sea monster earth-goddess, who swallows the boys, and when she regurgitates them, or the sea eagle slits open her belly, the boys emerge as men.

The thing about secret men’s business is, it’s secret. No one who ain’t involved is allowed to see it. If someone sees men’s business, they get payback. And whatever the crime, there is only one punishment in the Aboriginal culture – to stand there while everyone chucks spears at you.
Only one dusty road crosses this part of Arnhem Land, like a rusty and mostly healed catscratch across the desolation. With secret men’s business on, that road got closed just in case (God forbid) we should catch a glimpse of the men performing their ceremonies.
So that was it for us, with that road being closed, we’d just kick back in Gunbalanya, do some fishing, or hang with road crew, and still get paid our twenty-five bucks an hour plus travel allowance. I am most certainly the motherfucker for that job.

Balanda Road, Gunbalanya, Arnhem Land
I sat in Steve and Charlie’s yard on Balanda Road – White Fella Road – drinking a boot-legged can of VB, gaping at the view. Part of the sell to get a white fella to work in Gunbalanya is this view. The whistle of the kite and the twist of the pandanus palms frame the reflection of the sacred escarpment Injalak in the sweeping billabong. The heat is your constant companion – it softens your bones and roars in your ears and smothers your motivation, and the first sip of a cold beer runs like silver across your tongue.

Steve’s beard and gut were truly prodigious, so you knew he was someone important. He worked out at the Ranger Uranium mine. “Yeah,” he confided, “I’m head chef out there. Worst job in the place – you know, soon as a bloke isn’t content with his lot, what does he start whingeing about? The food.”

His missus, Charlie, pulled up in an ambulance: “The bininj have blocked off the road with their men’s business, so I couldn’t get back til now. I mean, I’m a doctor ! They won’t even let us through ! They’re makin’ us fly everywhere. Insane the shit we let ‘em get away with.”

“And for what?” Steve commiserated. “You know what those gunapipis, those ceremonies, are about don’t you? They’re out there in the bush, wearing loincloths fuckin’ ritual scarring and circumcising each other with oyster shells. I kid you fuckin’ not,” he turns to me. “Just be glad we’re in the Top End near the estuaries – in the Central Desert there aren’t no oysters. They’re mutilating each other’s genitalia with sharpened flint, or bone shards or some shit like that. “

Charlie was getting her boots off, tripping over herself in her eagerness to get at a can of that ice cold contraband, “Well, I mean the clinic offered to help them out with it, but they wouldn’t have it. Which I’m not unhappy about – I’ve never had to do a circumcision. The parents don’t get it done any more. I mean white parents don’t – Aboriginal families are still doing it – and not when they’re babies either – those kids out there right now are, like, thirteen or something.”

“Fuck, darl, sorry, I always forget, I shoulda gone grab you one when I heard the car,” but Steve’s chair sat low, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Charlie, with a grunt, got the last bit of boot off, “But while you’re in there, can you grab me and Max one? I digress. White kids nowadays, if you tell them that when we were young the doctor used to cut the ends of all our penises off, the kids wouldn’t believe us. At school when we used to play sport, we’d divide the teams up into whether you were circumcised or not – skins or helmets. Hey, it was boarding school, so everyone knew. And the numbers were pretty much fifty fifty. These days there’d be no helmets team at all!”
Charlie arrived, brandishing fresh beers, “So was either group ever embarrassed? Like, were you ashamed of being a skin or a helmet if there were girls around or something?”
“Well, you were only ever as good as your last game.”

Charlie had brought out two beers for herself. Cracked one, guzzled it, then took out the insect repellant. Mine and Steve’s hands screened the mouths of our beercans while she sprayed the toxin over her skin. She cracked the second, sat down, “Steve is quick to slag off at the bininj traditions – circumcision, scarification, moiety, the stories, the dances.”
I piped up, “I always thought that circumcision was just some weird Jewish tradition, but here, as far from Jerusalem as you can be and the black fellas, the bininj (I said awkwardly), are doing it as well. And I mean they do it as far away as Africa – fuck in Africa they even take the scalpel to the women don’t they? What is it with the entire human race hacking at each other’s privates?”

Charlie wiped her mouth with her sleeve, “They say that back in the day, circumcision was useful to prevent infection. These days, as long as you give your old fella a wash in the shower each morning, it’s not really necessary. Although I still think un-circumcised ones look a bit stupid – they remind me of Beaker off the Muppets. But you gotta remember that Aboriginal people never had science. Before a people develop science, they rely on their routines, their traditions, for their survival. In ancient times, customs and religions became successful if they preached good habits, good hygiene. Judaism taught monogamy and dietary laws. Islam taught ritual hand-washing. Hinduism preached purity of the body, mind and spirit. Hinduism even teaches not to share a cup, and to use different utensils to prepare different types of food, though they didn’t even know about germs back then.

“So when a bout of syphilis struck town, the monogamous Jews weren’t affected. When some intestinal worm from the pork was killing everyone, again, the Jews were sweet. Cholera swept through Arabia, but the Muslims who washed their hands each day, lived through. Salmonella was making everyone sick in India, but the Hindus, who chopped the veges over here and the chicken over there, were less susceptible.

“And as those civilisations endured and bred, their culture and those life-saving traditions passed down through the generations, and began to dominate. The positive customs were rewarded by their survival. The people didn’t understand science, they didn’t know about infection or bacteria, they felt that their rituals pleased God, who allowed them to survive. For every religion that has survived, who knows how many have been weeded out. For every mob of Aborigines out there, a hundred have died out, a thousand maybe, through starvation, or thirst, or wild animal attacks or inbreeding or war, flooding, fire. For every religion that taught you to wash your hands, a thousand that taught harmful or pointless practices, like, I don’t know, human sacrifice or medicinal bloodletting, have been weeded out. This Aboriginal mob we’re looking at now, their customs of diet, travelling, hunting, moiety, age of consent, their punitive measures, their taboos, their health, their hunting and foraging sites are truly sacred, more sacred than anything we Eurpoeans can understand. They have helped them to survive the generations in some of the fiercest environments in Australia. But ask them why, and they won’t have an answer that we white fellas will understand.”

A weighty wetness slapped on the corrugated iron roof. As one unit, Charlie and Steve heaved themselves to their feet. Charlie fired up the barbeque, Steve grabbed the umbrella and the ladder. When I returned from the kitchen with beers and alfoil, Steve was up on the ladder fending off an eagle with his umbrella, fighting over some prize on the roof.

A sea eagle had snatched a fish from the billabong, but it’d proved too big for him midflight, so he’d dropped the thing on the roof. Steve climbed down, triumphant, carrying a fat barramundi, which got unceremoniously wrapped in alfoil and dropped on the barbeque. “Welcome to Balanda Road.”

While we waited for the barramundi that was wriggling on the barbeque to cook, Charlie continued on the topic, “When you ask a white guy, a balanda, why do you cook fish before you eat it, or boil river water before you drink it, he’ll tell you that’s it’s to kill harmful bacteria or parasites.
“Ask an Aboriginal woman why she does it – and keep in mind that a bininj wouldn’t ask why – she’ll say it’s either because if I don’t they’ll chuck spears at me, or because it’s what the ancestors have taught us in their stories and songs. Or, because it’s what my mother and grandmother and all my ancestors did, and they survived. And this third answer is the most important of all. Balanda proof, our reasons, exist in science. Bininj proof exists in the fact that hundreds of other tribes have died out, but ours has survived. The reasons aren’t important. If we continue in this manner, we too will survive. Evidence is the white fullas’ teacher. The past is the black fullas’. Innovation is not only pointless to them, but dangerous.”

Gumarrirnbang Outstation
After a few days, the council gave us permission to use the road to Gumarrirnbang. The outstation was built by the state government, so it looks vaguely like a primary school, except all kicked in and smashed and scorched and covered in poorly-spelled graffiti. The people loll around in the heat. The camp dogs swish their bodies and dig craters in the dust to keep cool.
The word ‘aborigine’ comes from the latin ab origine, ‘from the beginnings’ or ‘from the source’ – it’s like when the world was formed, when the first piece of slop slithered from the primeval muck, when God chased Adam out of Eden, the Aborigines were already here, checking the crabpots and carving didgeridoos. I found Mrs Maralngurra, my contact and interpreter. She was sitting in her front yard. The women all sat in a circle in their bright floral dresses, chatting, gossiping, picking nits out of each other’s hair. They looked so perfect, so primeval and epochal in their environment. They looked eternal, like the rivers and the trees and the rocks and the stars, so aboriginal.
I sat with them, and chatted for a while, I handled their enquiries, and got them to sign the agreements. One lady wanted to know where the pension money she got every fortnight actually came from. Another wanted to know the dates of birth of her children, so she knew when to get them birthday cake.
Mrs Maralngurra was ancient. Aboriginal people have the lowest life expectancy of any group in the country, and yet some seem to linger forever. To me, this township looked fetid and awful, but Mrs Maralngurra spoke with pride of their football team, and of her boy in school in Darwin, and of the rock band that practises all afternoon, keeping everyone awake.

I said to her, “You know these days you can just get shampoo to kill lice, and it’ll get their eggs too so they won’t come back – you don’t have to sit there picking them out with your hands.” The silence hung with the unspoken phrase, “like fuckin’ monkeys”.
Mrs Maralngurra was rare, in that she would be confrontational, which is one thing that made her useful as a guide. But still, she was uncomfortable. Her hands grasped together, and she looked to her lap, “I watched my boy do school play in Darwin. There was lots of scenery, they made trees and mountains and rocks from cardboard, and at the end of each scene they moved them around. That’s how white fellas think. All of the nature is a stage, and you move it around how you want. Kill this what you don’t want. Farm this what you want more of. We bininj don’t think like this – when we do a play or a dance, one person plays the hero, one the goanna, one plays the tree, one the mountain.”

She moved up close, her breath smelt like guts: “I remember when the first supply plane came from white fellas’ government it was like a miracle for our people. Older people used to say this was Jesus bringing us food and they would say prayers for the planes to come. And the plane came every two weeks. Later, government introduced the dole money, the sit-down money, for us mob. So then a second plane, the mail plane would come and drop us off our dole cheques, and then the supply plane would come the next week, and take our dole cheques and swap it for food. But the people didn’t understand what the dole cheques were, so we’d lose them. And then when the supply plane came, they wouldn’t give us the food because we didn’t have the cheque. So where before there was one plane that kept everyone fed, now there were two planes, only feeding half the people.

“We try and keep stuff pure out here. It’s hard, specially when government keeps handing us free stuff all the time, free money. I seen so many kids in front of their Nintendos, too shy and afraid to come outside any more. I seen utes full of people drive into trees, drunk men destroying their families, and their selves. We’ve sat in these circles under these trees, right here, in this Arnhem Land, picking the lice out of each other’s hair and crushing them between our fingernails, for a thousand generations. We Aboriginal people, who live out here in the outstations, we try to keep our simple lives, and try to remember the lessons taught by our ancestors. We know that one day those supply planes and that sit-down money are going to stop coming. And we have to be ready.

“A thousand generations us mob been here. 60,000 years they reckon. I wonder if you balanda, even with your remote controls and your panadols, even with your lice shampoo and your cash registers, I wonder if you can last in this country even half so long.”

. . . . .

honest dave

I hate it when your mate’s kid hates you.

I hate it when you have found a seat on the morning Tokyo commuter train, and are sound asleep, and a loathsome Aussie woman who has been up all night getting her tits out to her workmates in a karaoke booth, vomits on you while you sleep, and you don’t wake up, so you lie there asleep all the way to your station, covered in chuck, and everyone is too polite to wake you.

I hate that there is a tablet for absolutely every single goddam fuckin’ thing.

I hate Europeans, who don’t wait until the water from the tap is hot before they start washing the dishes with it.

I hate it when you have cocaine just at parties, and then end up partying every night just to have cocaine.

I hate it when you decide to only smoke when you drink, and then crack open a beer first thing every morning.

I hate it when you have sex with a girl, not realising at the time that this is the last time you will ever do it.

I hate Australians, who don’t rinse the soap suds off the cleaned dishes.

I hate it when an old bird has her cleavage out, and it’s not that great, but you still can’t stop looking at it.

I hate it when you you’re drunk, and you roll a car, killing the passenger.

I hate it when you get busted by your flatmate’s friend having a flog.

I hate writers who think that that makes it ok for them to behave like pricks.

I hate new mothers who think everyone gives a shit about their kid.

I hate Poms, who wash their dishes in a plastic bucket in the sink.

I hate that every mall, every suburb, every town just looks the same.

I hate it when you’ve quit smoking, and you have a smoke.

I hate newly returned backpackers who think anyone gives a shit about their trip.

I hate it when you are surfing for porn, and then a sheila you’re trying impress sends you an msn, or a Facebook instant message, and it snatches the cursor off the URL line or the Google search field, but you don’t notice, and you end up sending this sheila you’re trying to impress an instant message which says www.chickswithdicks.com or midget porn amputee anal cunt.

I hate that there are still sheilas out there I am trying to impress.

I hate that writing crap like this is not going to help the cause.

I hate cyclists in the Middle East, always poring over their maps, thinking that they are the only ones truly experiencing the Middle East, even though that bikeride that just took them two days of excruciating pain being neutered by the bikeseat, only took me an hour and a half on the bus and cost me three bucks twenty.

I hate pregnant women who think they are the focal point of the universe.

I hate artists and musos, whose stuff you have to pretend to like.

I hate it when you find out that all your flatmates have spent the last six months sniggering about you behind your back for a blob of cum that someone found in the shower and that everyone blames on you, even though everyone in the house is sharing a room except you, and so you would have less recourse to need the public space to masturbate in, and when it was quite feasibly just a blob of shampoo anyway.

I hate that as soon as you buy land you chop down all the trees and put a fence around it.

I hate it when someone’s telling you a joke and you’ve already heard it, but for some reason you pretend you haven’t.

I hate it when you break something that’s not yours.

I hate having blood in my stool.

I hate kiwis in the dole queue.

I hate it when your ex empties the urn full of your son’s ashes out the front window, and then, when you go to beat the fuck out of her, she slams the glass door in your face, and you punch through it and then your ex grabs your arm and forces it down onto a spike of glass, piercing the plump blue vein in that soft spot behind your elbow, causing you to lose 2.8 litres of blood and to die twice, once in the ambulance and once on the operating table.

I hate that the road less travelled doesn’t have any fuckin’ service stations.

I hate it when you buy a sheila a drink and then she won’t go home with you.

I hate cane toads, that hop away after they’ve been driven over by a car.

I hate cabbies who drive like maniacs when they don’t have a fare, and like old women when they do.

I hate that we have to rely on rednecks to grow our food.

I hate it when you’re depressed at work, so you quit, and you go to the doctor, and he says that you have depression, and you get another job, which sucks even more, and then you realise that your earlier job was actually pretty good, and it was just that you had depression which made you think it was shit, and now you have a crappier job, which makes you even more depressed.

I hate it when you go limp in a girl’s mouth.

I hate it when someone doesn’t put the toilet paper roll the right way round.

I hate it when someone pisses on the toilet floor and you walk in it in your socks.

I hate it when the Paris streets are jammed with parked cars, and someone hasn’t quite parked theirs close to the car in front, leaving a space, so all the housewives use that spot to toilet their dogs, and then, being a naive and freshly arrived immigrant, you use that gap between the cars to cross the road and slip up and fall in the enormous pile, and get your denim jacket covered in the shit from thirty terriers, on your way to a dinner-date that you’ve been nervous about all week.

I hate human trafficking and war and and that stuff about the environment.

I hate it when something really awful happens to you, so terrible that you live that moment for the rest of your life.

I hate it when you’re playing pool, and you just can’t ever seem to quite be able to manage to sink a fucking ball.

I hate it when a girl goes round telling everyone you’ve got a small cock, just because you had sex with her and now she hates you.

I hate it when a bloke is really into football, and he goes on and on about it, and even though you tell him you never watch it, it doesn’t register with him, and he keeps going on and on, and you’ve got no idea who these people are he’s talking about.

I hate it when you don’t realise you’re pregnant til you’re, like, six or seven months gone.

I hate when you tell a Jew joke and there’s a Jew in in the room – I think they should always wear those little caps so we know.

I hate it when you have an abortion and then really regret it later.

I hate cliffhangers, and stories that end in a question.

What do you hate?

honest dave

The Scouts versus the Venturers. The Venturers were older, stronger; we Scouts, more plentiful.
The setting was a plot of bushland. The hysterics of the kookaburra at dawn, the choir of stars, the occasional wallaby or sugar-glider. But no pleasure in Australia comes without price. Crisp, crackling, with prickles and biting blowflies and mosquitoes and crushing heat that burns your lungs. The dryness of the bush yearns for both healing water and cleansing fire, in equal measures. The bush loves little more than being reduced to grey ash.

The game went for forty-eight hours, and Ace explained the rules, after the flag raising. Ace was a Venturer with some kind of deformity – his face sagged to the left a little and he dragged his leg. Ace was short for Ace-metrical. “The rules,” he boomed, “are thus: each side has a camp about a kilometre-and-a-half from the other. All are armed with waterpistols. If one of us Venturers, say, squirts a Scout, then the Scout is imprisoned in the Venturer camp. The other Scouts can free him by tagging him, if they can avoid being squirted. The team able to imprison the entire other team, wins.”

The Venturers were older, more wily. Immediately after the starting bugle, they claimed the rainwater tank, the stagnant swimming pool, and the goat-tracks down to the creek. Suddenly we Scouts couldn’t resupply water pistol ammunition.
Proudly, we weren’t without our own cockroach cunning. After three hours of my arrival in that place, I was pissing into my waterpistol. After six hours, I didn’t even care if I got some on my hands.

The initial Venturer charge had claimed some of our troops. So we let our opponents know, full-well, that our pistols were full of urine. Even if they shot us first, imprisoning us, we squirted them with our piss out of spite. This knowledge made them very reluctant to break cover, and we easily re-claimed our prisoners of war.

The night passed with the Venturers claiming some more of us stalwart Scouts, due to their hold on the ammo dumps. Eventually they surrendered their claim on the watertank, to stop our dependence on piss-warfare. We’d still use piss, though, when we could, and so would they. They also had access to great quantities of slime from the swimming pool. So you would never know exactly with what you were being squirted – but by then, 18 hours in, you didn’t really care.

My recollection of little Johnny Nugus, after 24 hours at camp, hunkered down, shitting into a plastic bag and missing with some of it, is less one of horror and disgust, and more one of high comedy. I remember it being the colour of English mustard.

We charged a squad of Venturers.
Little Johnny Nugus, wreathed in a crawling halo of flies, stepped out from behind the silver gum. He let fly with the plastic bag. As it tipped, end over end, it broke into fragments and slammed into Ace.
Ace’s grunt, on impact, had a quizzical timbre.

On completion of our mission, we turned, we fled.

I wonder today, whether it was the smell of the shit, or its texture, which conveyed to Ace knowledge of its true substance. However it occurred, this realisation was followed with a bowel-loosening scream. It rang out among silhouettes of tree branches against the sky, and we bolted through the slashing lantana.
And it didn’t stop. He just kept screaming and screaming, until his howls staggered and collapsed over ragged vocal chords into cries, then sobs. What the sobs lacked in volume, they made up for in duration. Occasionally the sobs, emboldened by hatred, would swell again into cracked and wracked screams of rage and vengeance.

Ace’s scream tore apart any sense of fairness. That wail brought on the first true expression of barbarity, of anarchy. The scream was such that the imprisoned Scouts, against all rules of the game, broke rank. They fled the Venturers’ camp without having been tagged.

Little Johnny Nugus was like Cain, having introduced an act into the realm, for which there could be no forgiveness.
So we did what anyone would do. We started shitting in earnest. We shat into any vessel we could, cups and tupperware, plastic bags and purpose-built envelopes folded from porno mags. I remember Damien Bougore laying one out on Corn Flakes box, like a jeweller presenting a Rolex on his counter, to a prospective buyer. Fat Pat slashed the pucker of his sphincter on the torn aluminium half of a Coke can which he was trying to fill with diarhoea. We laid a few nuggets around the campsite, too, as landmines, and as a lure for blowflies. Tom fashioned a woomera, for extra range.
And we entrenched, awaiting the hearkening of Vengeance. We knew it wouldn’t be beneath the Venturers’ dignity to respond to like with like. There would be no mercy, no trust.
And no court in the country would convict them.

Night fell, on fear.
Fear smells, of course, like human shit wrapped up in plastic bags and newspaper. You had to keep your own turd close, not only for protection, but to overpower the scent of your neighbour’s.
Fear feels like a thousand biting and crawling insects, drawn to the cornucopia of excrement. Fear is dark – the fire made one too exposed, none would approach it. It burned out – fear tastes like cold tins of baked beans, and crispy biscuits of two-minute noodles.
Fear grows fat and paranoid on sound. Alert and coiled, our fear was, for the cadences of human voice, or for some rhythm in the constant sound of the bush which may mean footsteps. The ears created illusions for the delight of our fear, which cavorted.

At first the fear swirled in the sloppy recesses of my colon, like a lump in gravy. But the undulations of time acted on it, dulling it, making it sullen and hunched. We became rutted in our bolt-holes, and started to turn our fear into something we could use – hatred. And a lot of the hatred was directed at little Johnny Nugus, the harbinger of this new age.
The protractions of the night acted differently on him. He knew, we all knew, that if it came down to it, we would hand him over. This knowledge acted on his fear, like fire under a pot of water. He became manic, unsettled. He tried to convince us to raid the Venturers, deriding our cowardice. He became more and more alone, striking further and further afield, until he stopped even returning to our camp.

It was in that milky grey and blue hour, just before dawn, that hour claimed by kookaburras, sparrows’ farts and frightened worms, old people and joggers, and home-bound clubbers, that we heard commotion. Our arseholes cinched tight.
Little Johnny Nugus, shouted the password before belting into our camp. We brandished our turds, prepared for the inevitable.
“They ran,” he was victorious. “Soon as they saw me, they turned and ran.”
“What about you Johhny?” I could see that he was still armed with his three turd-bombs.
“I ran too – there were two of them. Let’s go back and get ‘em – they’re gay.”
“We’re not going to get them Johnny.” Nothing, not pride, not the petulant joy of throwing faeces at someone, was worth the risk of getting hit yourself.
And Johnny had just shown us that the Venturers felt no differently. We knew then, that they were afraid, they weren’t going to come. And it was thanks to little Johnny Nugus, our shithouse rat Messiah.

Over time we came back out of our tents and trenches. We even got the fire going again. When I heated up my pea and ham soup, what a joyous time. We always kept our turds close at hand out of instinct, and there were times, during gathering of firewood that we almost came in contact with our enemies, but both sides were careful, and stayed well away. And we all settled into our routines.

It was at War Camp that I learned something about peace.

honest dave

Not all of this story is true. But the part that you’d hope isn’t – ie, young kids flinging shite at one another – is.

Thanks to Gizmo for the recollection, and the inspiration, such as it was.

Now there are some blessed guys who can just walk into a room and fuck any sheila they see. And usually it isn’t based on anything more than winsome good looks, and a decent body.
And, really, whats to be learned about the art of seduction from these chaps ? They’ll just tell you that you just have to be confident, and that girls aren’t interested in money or good looks and blah blah blah all that fuckin’ bullshit.

Others get roots by their tenacity, and their concrete ego that is completely resistant to denials and turn-downs. There are men for whom the words ‘no’, and ‘get fucked’, mean absolutely nothing.

And on the flip-side, other guys, even good-looking rich ones, who just don’t seem to have the ability to completely self-efface and degrade themselves, which obviously is required when you want to convince some sheila to engage in primitive one-off sexual rituals.

So I am going to pass on what I have discovered. I am offensive to more than one sense, I lack any semblance of decorum, I am too lazy to even bother holding in my farts. No money. No idea of fashion. In fact I have, at first glance, absolutely nothing that a pretty lass might desire.
So it’s tough. I have had to slough away all the fluff and find the essence of it all. What is it all about ? How do us blokes find ourselves a half-decent sheila to root on a Friday night?

Seduction is that simplest of all relationships, that of killer whale and seal, eagle and hare. One person is the dingo, the other the baby; one the spider, with Armani and Rolex web, the other the fly; one the cobra, hypnotising with seductive moves and sultry smile, the other the chicken.

This is it. One chases, and one flees. Remember this always. And be conscious of which of the two you are. Because if you chase her, she will run. But if you give her a taste of something she likes, and back off, then she will chase you. So many interactions in this world are simply the echoes of anthropological archetypal roles. Knowing this allows you to better objectively view the situation.

And don’t allow yourself to become angry, or frustrated. Just remember lads – if you were a girl, would you let some hairy oaf such as yourself, penetrate your body with a sweaty and unwashed member?

The Chat-Up Line

I don’t fuckin’ know about this. All I can suggest is this: be in a foreign country when chatting up chicks. The old cowboy hat with corks swinging from it and the limp rolly dripping from my lips with a Hi I’m Dave from Australia can I buy you a drink just doesn’t seem to work so well in the Royal Hotel in Toowoomba.

In bars in America : ‘ Excuse me darling, I can never remember which one of the coins is the nickel and which is the dime.’ I mean it doesn’t matter what you fuckin’ say, they just gotta hear the accent, and you’re immediately one step ahead of all the other punters.
Her ears prick: ‘This one’s, like, the nickel, and like, this one’s the dime.’
‘Oh right, but it’s all fucked up, I mean this one is bigger than that one, but it’s worth less.’
And her face lights up when she realises how difficult it must be for me. ‘Yeah you’re right, I’d, like, never really thought about it ! So which part of England are you from ?’
A question !! Lions ask questions, deer answer them. The rule of thumb: if you’ve asked five questions, and she’s asked none, give up. Find another hunting patch.

If you absolutely have to be in your own country when chatting up girls, or in a country where your accent is reviled, then it immediately becomes a lot harder.
You could try this one: ‘Don’t you hate it that it’s the year 2007, but we still don’t have flying cars ?’
Witty as this is, it never works, apart from to mingers who would probably react well to you saying that the hormones you’ve been taking have really been making your haemorrhoids itch.

I met this Irish dude, who always appraoches women by telling them that he knows they’ve been building up the confidence to come over and chat to him, but that he thought he’d save them the anguish and come and join them himself.
He’s turning the tables. He is trying to make himself the deer, thus making them the lions. This is the goal. If they become the lion, if you just see a flash of the lion in their eyes then it is all on.
This is the juice, that ancient courtship of death and love-making.

The Approach

Little by little. Learn by the panther. He watches for their movements, he learns from them during the approach.

It’s all about two things, rhythm and momentum.
It’s gotta be reminiscent of what is to come, that being the rhythmic tattoo of your balls slapping against her arsehole, and the swelling momentum toward the kind of spine-shuddering climax that leaves her in a neck-brace.
Even if you have never given a girl a screaming spine-shuddering climax in your life, they aren’t to know. Everything about you should indicate these two things, rhythm and momentum.
NEVER PUT YOURSELF DOWN. Although feel free to leave yourself open so that she can do it ; because if she puts you down, this is the lion doing it, and you want to bring out the lion in her, so that she will want to chase you down and devour you.
So. Small steps. How do you go from not even knowing a girl, to being inside her body in the course of one evening when you are a minging bastard who doesn’t wear deodorant.
(not wearing deodorant is useful, don’t get me wrong – if you don’t manage to pick up, you can always blame that. Great for protecting the ego.)

The age-old ritual of gift exchange. Gifts are vital, especially if you don’t share a common language. If she accepts a gift, even if it’s only a peanut or some chips or a drink, this is a great sign. She has accepted something of yours, psychologically a part of you. Don’t buy off those motherfucker Iranians that wander round trying to pressure you into buying roses, don’t encourage them. And don’t kiss a chick’s hand. I used to do that gallant shit back when I had long hair, and smoked too much grass and never got laid. And it never fuckin’ works.

Get them to touch you or hit you. This is the lion that hits you. Walk around with one side of your collar upturned, it drives Virgos fuckin’ crazy, and they will accost you and fix it up. Say something rude and out of order, so they slap your arm.

Make sure the conversation is always building toward something. And make sure that it is emotional. What emotion doesn’t matter. Make sure that they can feel the chemicals burning in their blood.
You don’t remember the conversation in a night, you remember the emotion. ‘I don’t remember what I had in that restaurant, but I remember that the waiter was an arsehole.’
Make her laugh, embarrass her, annoy her, offend her, praise her (though not too much or you’ll show too much of the lion and she’ll run away), make her feel some emotion. Make shit up. Fantasise. DO NOT, AFTER A PREGNANT PAUSE, ASK HER WHAT SHE DOES FOR A LIVING. This is admission of failure on your part, a lack of imagination. Ask her what job she dreams of. Ask her what name she would like to have, and call her that all night.
And always build toward something. Keep the momentum.
Conversation is not an exchange of ideas, but an exchange of emotion, of juices.

And obviously, keep her drinking. Vital. I mean what sober woman would want some drunk munter doing that to them !

Always have your mates (preferably female if you can manage that) nearby. If this girl can see that you have friends, she can see that you are not some serial killing freak.
Same applies when hitch-hiking, if you have a chick with you you’ll get a ride that much easier.
If the girl is out with a friend, find her a guy to talk to. If you don’t there is absolutely no way this friend of hers is going to let your girl go home with you. Girls suck like that.

GET HER TO DRINK OUT OF YOUR GLASS, OR GET A WAY TO DRINK OUT OF HERS.
‘Um, Esmeralda, does this drink taste alright to you ?’
or….
‘What are you drinking ? Really, a vodka and lemonade, I’ve never tried that, do you mind… ?’

If she drinks out of your glass or lets you drink out of hers, this little mix of saliva is a definite bond, and you are that much closer. Now I am not saying that if she drinks out of your glass she will definitely fuck you, but I am saying that if she doesn’t, she won’t.

Now one definite bridge between the act of not having sex with a girl, and having sex with a girl is dancing. This, for me, is absolutely vital. I mean if you leave my conversation to it’s own devices for more than 30 minutes we are guaranteed to be talking about how as I get older my farts are starting to sound more and more like my old man’s farts, presumable because my sphincter is getting more and more slack, like the elastic on an old pair of jocks. And no girl wants to hear that.
When you’re dancing, you don’t have to talk, and this is where we can show off our rhythm ; our control, our understanding of her needs, we can hold her, all the stuff that chicks want when she is in the sack. She is transferring everything you do on the dancefloor to what you will be doing in bed.
Well I am only guessing thats what she’s doing, because that’s what I am doing.
If you can’t dance, learn. And think of all those birds you’ll meet while you’re learning.
And if the dancing goes well, the pounce is non-existent, if she’s drunk, and you’re a decent dancer, slowly she will be completely within your embrace, and not kissing her would suddenly seem wrong.

The Pounce

This is really where you really throw caution to the wind.

Watch a cat stalk a magpie. It is done in slow steps. Piece by tiny piece. Slowly, imperceptibly forward. And there is always the pounce, the hardest damn thing apart from possibly approaching her, or maintaining an interesting conversation while drunk… ok so it’s all hard. But the sad fact of the matter is, there is always the pounce, where you let out all stops, and invite her back to yours, or go in for the kiss, or whatever, where you open yourself, and wait for her to either stab you right in the ego with a shake of the head and a collecting of the handbag, or whether she gives up her pollen.
But just watch that cat. If he pounces to early, the bird will fly. If he creeps forward, slowly forward, so that the bird doesn’t even see the approach, it becomes simple mathematics.

How to know if she is willing to accept your tongue in her mouth? Is she touching you? When she goes away to the toilet, does she actually come back and sit with you? When you are slow-dancing with you, does she not recoil at your half-mongrel nestled in her groin?
Is there a mirror behind the bar – when you stand up and walk away, check to see if she is checking out your arse as you walk away.

Your inhibition is your worst enemy here.

So crush your inhibition with drugs, and strong drink. And crush hers as well with cocktails. Long Island Iced Teas are deceptively potent.

A Few Inspiring Sentences

Pray for rain, or cold weather so the two of you can huddle beneath umbrellas, or jackets.

I think first kisses have been made more in train stations than any other place, so hang around train stations.

Apparently the chemicals that induce love and lust are the same that are generated after a hot curry, or a horror movie, so keep that in mind when considering a place to go for a date.

We want distance and cool-ness in our demeanour, not the panicked desperation for sex induced by having balls filled to the brim with sperm. So have a wank before going out. Although the sex later won’t feel as gratifying, this is hardly the point.

I hope this is useful chaps. And good luck out there.

This particular morning I had, under my armpits, huge sopping sweatstains forming replicating self-similar fractal paisleys. A waxy secretion seeped from my pores, like maggots squirming from maggot-holes attracted to carrion. My skin was lacquered – when I washed my face after class, the water beaded and raced around, like mercury.
It was while washing my face – after class, mind you, when it was too late – that I first saw my reflection that day. My teeth were all grapestained from red wine. It looked like I’d been down on my hands and knees eating the loam of gravesoil before class. My teeth were lines of half decayed tombstones.
There we were. Like a swamp. I was hot and mucky, it was damp. My teeth felt like they were falling out, loose and rattling in their gum-sockets. My scalp felt tight like the skin of a drum.
Eyes were lolling in my head and I don’t think they were mine. I was beaming on automatic, above on a flying fox.
—————————–
I could anticipate the coming fart like the way a sailor can anticipate a storm by the anvil-shaped clouds.
A stream of lumpy silver bubbles that started at the base of my throat or somewhere deep in my chest coursed through my body, exiting through my arsehole. My sphincter, slack from the amount of booze wasn’t tight enough to vibrate, it just wobbled soundlessly.
And this fart just poured out all juicy and loose. The hackles on the back of my neck started to rise, and the barometer on the piano twitched to life. The blu-tac got all moist and the posters starting peeling and sliding off the walls. A fly dropped off the ceiling.
As the putrid fetor slowly engulfed the room, the kids started going nutty, their irises reduced to pinpricks. It wasn’t as though the fart was sending them crazy, but as though it’d awakened the insanity inside them. Much as a glass of wine awakens your tastebuds in preparation for a mouthful of chocolate mousse, or masturbation enlivens your sense of hearing.
And that fart kept pouring out, foaming, frothing out, like when spring tears apart winters iron grip, and the glaciers deliquesce into streams behind the ice which pour into rivulets into tiny waterfalls into rivers carrying great cracked pieces of iceberg.
I know I am using a lot of moist-sounding words to describe this fart, but it was mostly dry. Although I was only to find this out for sure when I got home.
Actually I tell a lie, I couldn’t carry the burden of suspicion with me all the way home, and I checked my jocks after class in Daiei’s toilet.
Given the buoyancy of flatulence, it being warm air, I could slowly feel weight soaking back into my body. As the fart was freed from its confinement, I felt gravity tightening. It caressed my entire being like a sedative, with it’s soothing numbness, an old friends welcome home. I slid back into my Dave-shaped hollow in the world, like a peach pit being replaced into its perfect snug fit, into its cosy crater at the centre of the peach.
And the unholy stink. Forgive me father, a pestilential quagmire it was. It’s miasma stuck to me like chewing gum. It clung, like an unpleasant rumour, an unwanted nickname. A yeasty phantom, unable to leave the site of its death. The rank stench was so beyond that of a mortal fart that it wasn’t even recognisable as one, anymore than a baby would see it’s own potential in spilled semen. It’s smell had so eclipsed foul that I smelled it with more than one of my five senses. My tongue got hairy, and white spots splashed in my vision.
The other teacher was in fact my employer. Her name was Hiromi. She was a forty-year old Japanese woman. I tried to look everywhere save at her. “It’s a tiger! Grrrrr! It’s a cat! Meow!” But a quizzical look gathered about her brow, like clouds collecting on mountain peaks. She was on the other side of the room, far from Ground Zero.
Away from the epicentre, the stink had, no doubt, dissipated, and it probably just smelled like a fat man had defecated after eating a tin of dog food. She stood up. Suspicious. She approached. Closer. And closer. My tongue was fat and bloated with guilt. This is the end. I have nothing to my name, not a rag of decency.
The kids were going berserk, clawing at, and inserting things into one another.
Blindly, fiercely ignoring my boss, I continued handing out the cards: “It’s a motorcycle!” “It’s a rocket! That’s it Natsuki!” Hiromi entered the circle. The bunch of grapes that was my heart shriveled and shrank into a kid-size pack of sultanas.
Then she did something, which filled me with a new emotion.
It was an exquisite mélange, of equal parts humiliation and acquittal. Of base muck-dwelling shame, and relief bordering on white-light spirituality.
She reached down for Natuski, picked her up, and checked the back of her nappy. And then she did the same to the next kid, and the next. To find out which one of the dirty, filthy, unhousetrained little savages it was who had shat ‘emselves.

It’s not you it’s me – I’m not ready for a serious relationship.
Honestly you don’t want me, I’m crap.
You were kind of a rebound thing. I’m leaving town in a month anyway.
Listen I’m really sorry, I’m gay. I’m not a relationship kinda guy.

Christ.
It’s because you can’t dance, alright ?
You’ve got a lisp. You’ve got acne. Your left nipple is, like, three times as big as your right one.
I don’t like your fashion sense. You smell funny. You’ve got that strange kind of mutated ear thing going on. You bullshit on about crap when you’re drunk. You get jealous when I am out with my friends.
My mates wouldn’t like you. You listen to Celine Dion. You’ve got a crap job. You’ve got a flabby stomach. You’ve got big hams, big flanks. You flare your nostrils.
I can’t make you come. Your hands are bigger than mine.
You shave off your eyebrows and then draw them back on with black pen.
You don’t shave your eyebrows.
You get all gooey whenever you see kids, and then everyone realises that I am holding you back from your dream of wanting kids, and they think I’m a fuckhead.
You have an annoying accent. You watch breakfast TV. Your teeth aren’t white enough.
You chew your nails. You steal the covers. You snort when you laugh.
Is that what you wanna hear ?

So anyway the following long drawn out email dates
back to one day when I was wandering the teeming
medieval streets of Islamic Cairo…

A sound rose above the shouting and the haggling. A
shrieking. A wailing that seemed to slash at my heart
and steal my strength. Another wrenching, sobbing
banshee siren, and I almost fainted. I looked around
and immediately saw where the stream of human traffic
was being disrupted. There was a flock of
black-swathed women, heads back, keening at the
heavens, the sound seeming to echo from a void of
absolute loss and emptiness. Their black kohl
eyemakeup in rivulets down their cheeks. Two held each
other; one was on her knees in the mud; one was raking
her knuckles a bloody trail down a wall; while another
tore at her clothes her nails seeming to dig into her
flesh as she did so. I bowed my head in empathy with
their sorrow. I caught Amin’s eye, and he looked at
me, his shoulders slumped in aquiescence.
Within earshot of this baleful dirge there was only
sadness. All brightness and joy was leached out of the
air by that mournful cry. A tear seemed to glisten at
the corner of everyone’s eye; a prayer, more for
themselves than for the deceased seemed to play on
everyone’s lips; all heads looked down; two cats,
their hair up on end hissed at one another; and a
donkey fought against it’s owner. None spoke. All
thought about their own mortality.

Death is everywhere in Cairo. The ghosts of the
executed still linger around the great gate of Bab
Zuweila. You can imagine the unseen eyes of the women
in their harems, looking down at the victims from
behind their screens.

Beggars are dying, in front of your eyes, on the
street.

The City of the Dead; mile upon mile of ancient
encrusted tombs and mausoleums, but with clothes
strung on washing lines and children playing amongst
them. People, too poor to afford houses, have had to
move into the very tombs of their ancestors. What a
step that must be, to be forced to take your children,
and move into a cemetery. I wanted to explore this
place, but was too ashamed to be treating their
poverty as a tourists attraction. America has it’s
trailer trash, Cairo has tomb trash. (Now I know that
little joke ruined the flavour of this morbid email,
but I couldn’t resist…).

Out near Farafra, there’s a site of ancient Roman
tombs. The week previous to our visit, a group of
young kids had been playing soccer, with a human
skull!! A shard of bone or a tooth would chip off, and
the hilarity of it would be too much for the children
to cope with. Tears straming; having to even hold each
other up. Imagine seeing your child out trying to kick
a human skull into a goal. Not a sight you would ever
witness in the Western World.

Then there’s the butcher’s shops. The meat isn’t
nicely packaged as it is in, say, Australia. You can
easily forget that a rump steak comes from a cow’s
arse. Not in Cairo – Cairo doesn’t ever let you forget
your place, not for a second. The first thing you are
greeted by is the decapitated head of the camel that
you are about to eat, dangling from a rope, flies
crawling in and out of it’s gaping mouth, and it’s
uncaring jelly eyes. You order your meat, and the
butcher, his apron covered in brown stains, and fat
and gristle, brings out the carcass, and lays it on
the flyblown chopping table; blood soaked into it an
inch thick. Wit hhis massive cleaver he chops off the
desired amount, weighs it, wraps it up, and hands it
over.

Even the mosques remind me of death. The slender
minarets, topped by the crescent moon gaze gently at
the heavens. And the great interiors, cool and open
and quiet, an oasis from the raging multitudes
outside; just as death is the final soft silence from
the clamour of life.

Ferrets drag off bits of meat bigger than themselves
in the dead of night; the ubiquitous pigeon is rarely
seen, except on menus; and people drag chickens down
the street by their legs while they ruffle and thrash
around, trying to stay on their feet.

The vendors seem to be pennies away from starvation as
they argue over a pittance. The lawlessness on the
roads means that you are on the brink of oblivion
every second you are on them. People get on and off
moving buses, stepping right into traffic – old
ladies, pregant women and families.

And lets not forget about the Pyramids that loom over
the city – they themsevles are the biggest, oldest,
most epic tombstones known to mankind. They are
eternal reminders of man’s mortality. They make you
proud and humble, just by their proximity.

But, ironically, there is vitality and laughter in the
air, more than in any other city I’ve seen. Maybe this
comes from constantly staring at death, and accepting
it unfearingly. Maybe this is also why religion, why
Islam plays such a proiminent role, given that
religion and death seem intertwined – religion being
the answer to the question that death begs of us. We
in the West, hide death inside cling wrap, polystyrene
and black hearses; we shut it behind hospital doors
and censorship, and under 6 feet of soil; we
romanticise it and divorce oursleves from its reality
with euphemism and poetry. Maybe as we shut away Death
we shut away God as well.

He looked straight past me – like the tourists in the Mona Lisa room look straight past the other paintings – and went to get himself a beer. I mean, the man had been hit pretty hard in the head by a truck that didn’t give way, but you don’t need your presence to be the catalyst that brings back this memory, this knowledge that the old brain isn’t what it once was.

And I didn’t recognise my own brother. It was only the questioning expectation in the eyes behind that black beard that made me realise that apparently I knew this guy.
A strange family dinner that night, let me tell ya.
I felt like a monster.

I don’t want to be unrecognisable again. I don’t want to scare people.

So I try to keep myself centred. I try not to dissolve into the various cultures I live among. I want to keep a familiar part of Honest Dave alive. My nationality helps this. It bolsters my sense of self.
There are times when I am lost in other places other continents and I can’t find my core. But I can find an approximation of myself through my Australian-ness. People let me be rude and irreverant, because that is how Australians are; they let me be a drunk because Australians are drunks.
So I carry a wall around me. A wall of my habits, opinions, and my language, impenetrable. I take pride in that now, in still being recognisable on my return home.

And Australian cliches are a good way to do that. It is like surrounding yourself with FHM posters so that you won’t catch gay. My great cracked-and-baked-and-burned continent is my companion wherever I go. But it doesn’t matter how much beer I drink. Nor how often I say sheila or dunny or doona or thongs or poofter, or scratch my balls or re-use a dirty pair of underpants or wear mis-matched socks, all to maintain either my nationality or my individuality. Countries and cultures and cities always turn out to be bigger than me.

They always manage to soak through even my most bigoted defenses.

To celebrate the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan, the Bedouins had earlier been down at the beach, and each group of them had ritually butchered one of their herd for the feast.
And they left the heads there, right there, on the beach. One after another after another evenly spaced into the haze, the eyes, the eyes. Gazing emptily int othe middle distance toward the Saudi coast. Camels and goats mainly. I think they were goats.
And so what does cute Swedish bird do, (who as I’ve mentioned is a vegetarian), but burps up a mouthful of chuck all on herself.

And so much for my date.

They don’t usually chuck till much later.

We were in a hostel above Talaat Harb in Cairo, and I had managed to entice her out onto the balcony away from all the filthy mongrels that were trying to get into her panties. We’d had a good day together, and to be honest, I thought I deserved a root.
But then we saw him, sent by Allah to stop me getting laid, goddammit, I never used to get laid back then.
Far down he was, on the streets below, shambling asymetrically. I thought at first he was a dwarf. Let’s be clear: I didn’t give a fuck who he was – Linda was the cutest damn thing I’d ever seen. But she always is the one to shed a tear for the crippled masses – that’s one thing I loved about her – and she leaned on the curling banister, her eyes all foggey, to find what was distressingly wrong with this guy.

As he approached it became clear that he actually had no legs. There were just two stumps, with pillows tied onto the ends with filthy rags. And using these two once-were-limbs, and his arms and hands, he heaved and dragged his piteous self down the street. The crumbly sick-white balustrade slowly crumbled behind us. Ferrets dragged meat off down alleys. The Nile pulled foreverness down its course. Time around us set hard like iron. Speaking was a trap. This poor malformed man blossomed thoughts from normally unused brain-coils from deep in the fathoms of my mind.
And I was suddenly and physically incapable to even attempt to try it on with Linda. I mean, I didn’t even really want to any more. Such swollen emotion of sorrow, and gratitude.

And Egypt’s steeped and sacred profanity defeated me once again. My fresh and shiny Tom-and-Jerry shallowness was as meaningless as digging a sandpit in the Sahara. There is the inexorable momentum of 7000 hallowed years of culture. And there’s me in my Aussie-flag boxer shorts thinking I can impress the eternal creeping of a sand dune with my wit and a few sharp dance moves.

You can’t beat Egypt.
Don’t even try.

Chopsticks are so civilized. Long, slender, wooden. These days I find it wrong when people eat with spoons and forks ; those pieces of metal jangling and rattling about in their mouths, clanking and grinding vulgarly against their teeth. It’s like chewing down on a piece of aluminium foil.

Paris. I went down to the municipal pool to go for a swim, build up my muscles, that sort of thing. But did you know that in Paris’s municipal pools they won’t let you swim in boxer shorts. You have to wear dick togs. Meat hangers ! Cock hammocks !
So if you were to go down to the Piscine Blomet on a Sunday morning, you might see someone you recognised. Familiar, but for the fact that he is wearing goggles, a swimming bonnet, and lycra dick togs.

And then, after a while, I started to wear the damn things by choice.
I’ve gone all strange.

This is my conflict. It is me against the world. The sugar fighting against being dissolved in the hot coffee. I am not afraid of change, but I do want to be recognisable on my return home. My oldies are pushing along a little, and I don’t want to frighten them.

This is the struggle which is turning me unusual. Do I accept change with grace, do I deliquesce into the new culture, do I drink a white wine with my lunch, do I slurp my noodles.

Or do I hang on to what I know, to what I am, do I mention after I gently remove a sliver of foie gras and inhale as it slowly dissolves it my mouth that it ain’t bad, but that it’s got nothing on a T-Bone, chips and gravy from the Spotted Cow.

I worked in a Parisian English school. People I met in there I didn’t know if they were teachers or if they were students or if they spoke English or Spanish or French or Arabic or Japanese.
I didn’t know whether to shake hands when I met someone. I didn’t know whether to nod, offer a hug, bow, kiss one time, two times, four times, start with the left cheek, the right, or just flick my head back Maori-style. I mean none of the options come naturally to me any more.
So I wait for the other to initiate the greeting.
And I wait, ready to accept the pass. And I stutter and stumble and blunder and grope my way through it, thus presenting a first impression of this weak-mannered ill-fitting weirdo.
Which I then counter by not caring what they think, and expecting them to find for themselves my hidden depths, without any help from me.

I mean, fuck.

Sometimes it is easier just to stride in with a « Gday mate, » and a firm slap between the shoulder blades. Cause that’s what all Aussies do after all, this is what I understand.

So forgive me. I have decided. If you think that I overuse works like dunny and root and sheila ; if I sound a bit much, a bit forced and overdone, just remember that I am sticking to what I know – scratching my balls in public, blowing scotchies, and wearing the same undies for days on end.
It has served me well up to now.
And it’s what Mum and Dad will recognise.

honest dave

Theresa told me once that I had ‘impulse-gratification’ issues. This was obviously some expression she’d picked up off Oprah, but she did have a point. I mean it doesn’t occur to me, even if I’m on a date, to hold in my farts. I just let it gush out, and then take deep breaths to try and inhale all the stink before it spreads. Denying your urges, restraint, this is what causes cancer.

I don’t know what the Japanese teachers (that is the real teachers) thought of me, this 187cm gorilla that strides in for an hour every Monday morning and can’t communicate with anyone, and strides out, having done nothing, taught nothing, and achieved nothing, and yet is probably getting paid double what the real teachers who spend all day wiping toddlers arses are getting.

But after another all night karaoke binge for no discernible reason, this particular Monday morning was something special. I dragged my hungover carcass to the kindergarten. I was hunched over double. My saggy muscles could barely haul my bulk up the stairs and over the baby-gate.

As usual the kids screamed in terror at my arrival, and scattered like pigeons. And I sat down among the shitty, snotty, slimy little creatures.

Natsuki was the only one who would ever come near me. She only did this because she enjoyed excavating bits of snot out of her nose and putting them in my mouth, or my ear. I would hold up the flashcards. « Its an apple ! It’s a banana ! That’s it ! Good on ya Natsuki. » I’d give her the card as a reward. She would go and tear it up, or hide it, or use it to intefere with her little playmates, who were hiding in fear in different corners of the classroom.

Let me iterate: I taught these kids NOTHING.

This particular morning I had huge sopping sweatstains forming replicating self-similar fractal paisleys under my armpits. A waxy secretion seeped from my pores, like maggots squirming from maggot-holes attracted to carrion. My skin was lacquered with a secretion – when I washed my face after class, the water immediately beaded and raced around, like mercury.

It was while washing my face – after class, mind you, when it was too late – that I first saw my reflection that day. My teeth were all grapestained from red wine. It looked like I’d been down on my hands and knees eating the loam of gravesoil before class. My teeth were lines of half decayed tombstones.

There we were. Like a swamp. I was hot and mucky, it was damp. My teeth felt like they were falling out, loose and rattling in their gum-sockets. My scalp felt tight like the skin of a drum.

Eyes were lolling in my head and I don’t think they were mine. I was beaming on automatic, above on a flying fox.

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