Welcome back! When we left off yesterday – a cliffhanger moment if ever there was one – your faithful correspondent was just about to set foot on Aussie soil for the first time in the sun-baked conurbation of Brisbane.
My cousin and her two daughters picked me up; I was in a haze of jetlag but it was an emotional reunion. It had been a long time since we’d seen each other and much had happened since then. In the evenings, over a couple of beers before dinner, I’d chat to her husband; during the day I’d take the train into town to explore and return after a beer or two by the river.
Among other things, I learned that Brissie was the home of Castlemaine XXXX, an inoffensive lager which had been inexplicably available on tap in the Devon pub where I’d worked in 1992 on arriving in the UK. To my memory, no-one ever drank it, but it was the subject of much conversation as to why it was there.
You’d think the logical next step would be to head to Port Macquarie, which was closest, but no, my mate – let’s call him Ian – was hanging out in Melbourne, so on leaving Brisvegas (to paraphrase Cheryl Crow), that’s where I went. Melbs was pretty cool – we spent some time checking out the coffee culture before sampling the local brew, Victoria Bitter (VB) by the sunny seaside with fish ‘n chips.
Then we hired a car for a road trip down the Great Ocean Road, bickering about keeping the aircon running when the temperature was a cool 14 degrees. It was great – wonderful scenery, funky hamlets, places to stop for food and beers. Sunday night found us in a motel with nothing to eat and no shops or restaurants open – we microwaved a couple of meat pies from the local servo in our room and opened a few tinnies. It made two inhabitants of east London feel almost sophisticated.
It was a short jump to Sydney and a Victorian B&B in King’s Cross. The first morning, I went for a run past Woolloomooloo and into the Botanic Gardens, watching the vista of Sydney Harbour with the Opera House and Harbour Bridge unfold as I sweated and shuffled along. It was everything I’d heard it would be – one of the world’s great city spectacles. That night, over beers, we decided on our next moves.
As young(ish) single men with decent disposable income, we booked some touristy things to do: a jetboat ride in the harbour and a floatplane flight from Rose Bay. We also took a monorail to Darling Harbour at night – it’s gone now and two of the carriages have been bought by (who else?) Google to use as meeting rooms.
Meeting our old buddy – I’m going to call him Dave – in Port Macquarie was another happy reunion, and over beers that night we reminisced about our bachelor nights in Ealing and the flat Ian and Dave shared in a converted Victorian mental asylum.
We also indulged our obsession with flight by going for a ride in a Tiger Moth – an eye-popping introduction to air travel as it was in the 1930s. The open-air part was great; the possibility of plummetting earthward at every turn despite the stout canvas waist belt was less appealing. We needed a few beers afterwards to steady our nerves.
My path then took me to Canberra – an indirect route made more complex by the fact that it happened on the day of the Melbourne Cup. As our small plane droned down to Sydney, I asked the flight attendant if I’d have enough time to catch the Canberra flight. She looked dubious. “You’ll need to collect your bags and then check in again – it’ll be close. Don’t follow the signs through the terminal – take a short-cut through the parking lot – it’ll save you a lot of time.”
It started raining as I dodged across the parking area; as I hustled through the terminal, it seemed that everything had come to a stop. No-one was at the check-in counters, the security barrier, or apparently anywhere else. The main event in Melbourne was under way and the country had ground to a halt . With minutes to spare, I found someone to check me in and dashed to board my flight. And it was the same plane, with the same crew, as I’d left some 40 fraught minutes before. I ordered a beer and settled in for the flight.
But the drama didn’t end there. We encountered a massive wall of thunderstorms en route to the nation’s capital and had to turn back. Neither I nor my old uni buddy had a mobile phone so it wasn’t certain he’d still be at the airport when I finally touched down on a cramped commuter jet stuffed with businesspeople and civil servants a few hours later. Not even a couple of beers en route could allay the stress.
It was a measure of Canberra’s seriousness as the bush capital that my old friend – I’m going to call him Sean – served red wine with dinner. Beer just didn’t seem to cut it. This was another reunion: we hadn’t seen each other since his wedding in South Africa fifteen years before, where I had served as Best Man.
We toured Old Parliament House, the National Gallery, the National Museum, and the War Memorial. Canberra was really not the dull backwater people like to believe; in a funny way, it reminded me of the wide streets, low-rise buildings and big skies of my hometown, Bulawayo. Even the weather was similar – hot and dry, driving a thirst for beer.
Arriving back in London in late November was a shock to the system. From blue skies to grey; wide streets to narrow; warm beer instead of chilled. Most of all, Australia had been a series of reunions: paradoxically, that new British passport enabled me to catch up with key people from the past – and a whole lot of beer.