I HAVE to be asked twice to dance to ‘Crimson & Clover’ in the middle of the night, in the middle of a country road.
On night one I plead fatigue. On night two, I mentally run through excuses ranging from hysteria to a twisted ankle, then agree. We jump up onto the hood of the ute and dance in the moonlight – snickering possums and grumbling ute bonnets be blowed.
Keeper: Yes.
AS many of you will know, I’m already a published author (oof!), but now I am also an illustrator. I coloured in this flag for Matt Zurbo’s next children’s book. Let me know what sort of cut you think I am due and I will put it quietly to his agent.
Another of Zurbo’s suggested missions: become a bit-part character in a comic.
Keeper? Soon to be immortalised forever!
AFTER 35 years of being a pedestrian myself, I now want to mow each one of them down like rabbits and mount their heads on my lounge-room wall, the hateful bastards.
Quick poll: Who knew you had to give way to jaywalkers when the jaywalkers haven’t even started crossing yet, but are having a good long dither about it on the median strip?
I shit you not. According to my VicRoads tester – let’s call her Vicky – that’s the law, and so I am failed for the third time. And this after my instructor has loudly told me outside her office that she is a soft touch who has a crush on him.
My instructor also warned me beforehand not to point out my prowess with four-wheel drives and V8-style donuts, so I sit sniffling stoically in the passenger seat while he argues the toss with Vicky. The more he roundly patronises her in disbelief, the more she resolutely scribbles damning stuff like “failed to give way to pedestrians” on a form.
Can you believe it, though? I can’t. Quad bike disasters aside, I’m not a bad driver, and that test was smooth as butter. My last instructor kept valiums in his pocket for occasions like this (and for the tests themselves, actually) but there is no such comfort forthcoming today, so I just have to pacify myself with the fact that tests are a lot harder these days. If you could similarly bear that in mind, that would be great.
Keeper? I’m keeping VicRoads in Tim Tams and tea bags, yes.
Here’s a picture of a riderless quad bike. I refused to pose on my one.
THE downside of trying something new every day is that whatever you try you’re going to be shit at it. So basically, every day, you’re shit.
This ignites an impotent rage after a while; the sort of rage serial killers develop when women laugh at them in bed.
For four days now I’ve been doing the most ace, fun missions in ridiculously good-looking company, but I’ve been floundering about like a panda trying to play a ukulele while wearing water wings. You can only laugh gamely for so long.
Throughout my trip to the Otways I’ve been raring to have a go on the quad bike on the property I’m staying at, and there’s a good hilly terrain to take it out on. I’m told how to start it up, brake, change gear, yada yada yada… but somehow the bit about reversing fails to sink in.
I believe we only have so much space in our heads for instructions. The rest is taken up with thinking about amusing comebacks, rooting, what to eat next, and admiring scenery.
Over the past few days I’ve been taught how to operate a manual, a four-wheel drive, a bulldozer, a milking machine and a chainsaw, but rerouting my neural pathways has produced more of a series of pissling streams than a mighty Shenandoah. I’m starting to lose confidence in myself before I even crank up the quad bike.
I manage to fang around the property with a few near misses (have you tried steering one of these things?), before I wedge one wheel into a bush and then can’t figure out how to reverse back out again. I’ll be buggered if I’m going to trek off for half an hour to ask for help; I’m all out of sheepish grins.
Getting off the bike, I try to manually heave it free, but it won’t budge and just deposits a few more leeches on my legs. There comes an ominous thunderclap – that’s me officially cracking the shits.
I won’t describe in full the following scene, as it is a scene, but needless to say it involves leaving the quad bike in the bush for someone else to deal with and stomping off back to the house – which is quite a long stomp, as I’ve crashed it right at the top of a hill.
Keeper? I’ll be back. Just as soon as I find my smokes.
THE bush pirate agrees with me that chicks look hotter driving stick, yet I can only drive automatic and that’s without a licence. Something needs to be done about this urgently.
It’s a shithouse day up here in the Otway Ranges, which seem to have their own weather system. A couple of times our 2WD ute nearly gets bogged down in the bush pirate’s expert hands, so when it’s my turn he yells out gear changes, trying not to instinctively slap his head and pull his hair when I crunch, stall and get shirty. Looking hotter by the minute, though.
Next up we swap the 2WD for a 4WD. How fortuitous that I’d put Cinderella’s classic ‘Shake Me’ on the mix CD – it’d been sticking out like a sore thumb up till this point, but now it captures the essence of the moment. We’re shaking so much, in fact, that the knackered tray door comes unhooked without us noticing and we lose various bits of fishing paraphernalia and petrol cans all along the track.
I finish off with some hooning down grassy hills, through deep puddles and up mud slicks. I don’t know if I’m looking hotter, but I’m feeling pretty flushed.
Keeper? Yes.
Dangerous place to stand and sulk.
THINK you get shat upon at work? Don’t talk to me about it – I’ve just been in a shit deluge.
‘Relief milking’, which I’ve got up at 5.15 to do, doesn’t mean you’re ‘relieving’ cows, it’s the milking of cows when someone else doesn’t want to do it – which is completely understandable, as it turns out.
When I first arrive at Graham’s farm, though, I’m blissfully ignorant, and as I explain to the bush pirate, there’s no excuse not to apply lipstick and brighten everyone’s day just because you’re getting down to a bit of hard graft.
My job here today is to herd in 110 cows in groups of 10, pour in feed, hook ’em up to the milking machine by hoovering up their udders with suction cups, unhook them, hook up the opposite 10 cows, spray disinfectant on the first 10 and then herd them out with the aid of a big stick and some plaintive yelling.
My perception of gaily a-milking in clogs and pigtails dissipates in a stream of steaming urine (which smells pleasingly like porridge, I have to say). As I flounder around in the shit pit, dodging downpours, I try futilely to rinse fecal matter off my hands with a hose, and the high-pressure jet propels it into my face instead.
“Eeh scary!” Graham mimics of my little yelp.
Sparkling clean Graham.
“Does it hurt them?” I change the subject, tugging cups off teats while dodging indignant hooves.
“Don’t hurt me,” he shrugs.
Suck it and see.
An hour and a half later I’m well and truly splattered with poo and done for the day. The bush pirate asks Graham politely if he can borrow a towel for me to sit on: “It’s my dad’s car, you see.” Smirks all round. I feel like a child that’s just soiled itself.
Keeper? Ho no.
I FIRST meet Stevo down the logger’s pub, where he turns up at five on the dot every day, or else. With the lube of VB, he’s easily persuaded to give me a go on his bulldozer, so the next day I locate him and his machine halfway down a muddy mountain of tree stumps. It’s like the Orcs have been through and destroyed everything.
Stevo’s a man of few words, but he teaches me well and I soon get this thing shifting a wall of mud from one spot to another. It’s got seven levers, but I only have to shift gears from neutral to first/reverse, wave the digger around, work the decelerator and brake, and use two more levers to steer left and right. Easy.
“Woman drivers, eh, mate?” Stevo yells out to the bush pirate, but thankfully then falls silent again.
Keeper? Sure – great fun!
Whee.
It wasn't like this.
BY rights, this should be an incredibly hot scenario. This should be me straddling a tree root, brandishing a chainsaw and spraying chips until a trunk comes screaming down in supplication. In the middle of a goddamn forest!
Unfortch, my chainsaw has all the traction of a butter knife with my technique and weighs a sodding ton. And then there’s the hard hat and chaps I’m being forced to wear. And not Xtina Aguilera-style chaps, either.
I keep hacking away at my tree, trying to get the angle right, but the saw’s so heavy that I can’t hold my spindly wrist straight. By the time I step back and survey my handiwork, it just looks like the tree’s been self-harming.
Don't hold it like this.
The lumberjack (I notice HE’S not wearing hard hat and chaps) steps in to make a wedge for me so that I can finish it off with a deft slice to the back, but my blade seems to only tickle the trunk, and whenever I pull it out in a huff it stalls. Jeez, it’s always awkward cracking the shits in front of someone you don’t know very well yet, isn’t it? Still, can’t be helped…
In the end we leave the big trees be and I fell a mighty sapling.
No worries.
“Some assignments are an A, some are a B-minus,” the lumberjack says generously as I order a latte in the logger’s pub. And that’s a D-minus for the availability of the latte.
Keeper? Well, I’m supposed to be going for my licence, so I’d better persevere.
“I’LL just let the boys know you’re not comfortable shooting roos,” the bush pirate says, as I try and tell him an actual hunting trip’s out of the question without sounding like a big wuss. “I’m sure they’ll compromise with some foxes and rabbits or something.” Eep.
By the time we get to the campsite it’s around 11pm and the rum is in full flow. I can’t understand any of the conversations around me as they’ve become 90% more vowelly than the usual country talk, thanks to Sir Bundy. Nod, smile. Nod, smile.
One bloke keeps spraying a can of Aerogard into the fire for an interesting pyro effect, while another, upon seeing us, grabs a giant surf-style fishing rod and takes us yomping off down to the black river to set it up, tripping over various dogs as we go. The second his back’s turned he gets a bite and reels in an eel, which gets chucked back in after a bit of yahooing.
We’re here to fire his rifle though, so we all pile on the quad bike and take off to a bit of paddock away from sleeping children and cows. I’ve fired guns before, but this one’s got a sniper’s sight, for that extra “holy shit!” factor. It’s the heaviest I’ve held, as well. It lets off a mighty kaboom, and I let off a shriek, and then we’re hurtling back to the camp again for a Bundy update.
Keeper? If I find myself in this situation again, sure.
Screaming next to the abyss.
“YOU get used to that,” the bush pirate says, every time I nearly break my neck, impale myself on a tree or have to grip on to some death-ute or other. “That’s what we do in the country.”
Today we’re doing some rainforest regeneration. This gully used to be a scramble of blackberry bushes, but now it’s home to tree ferns, ground ferns, myrtle beeches and satin boxes, with eucalypts on the ridges and spurs. And it’s ringing with urgent profanities.
“You start digging some holes down there,” the bush pirate points to a sheer drop with a stream audible somewhere at the bottom. I head off down it with my spade, and my boots send rocks tumbling endlessly down to the water, where there’s a distant splash. There are no discernable footholds and I keep sliding down the ravine, reaching out to grab handfuls of handy nettles and thistles. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!
This must be some kind of rookie-nobbling joke, surely?
I manage to anchor myself long enough to plant six saplings, sit down to have a fag and spot the bloodthirsty leech sitting atop my fly. Nice.
My first leech.
Keeper? I’ll think about it.
Australia 2012. It's okay, we're friends.
Hey man, now you're really living 
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