Daniel Clay: The Australia Diaries, part three

If you happen to be staying in Sydney and married to someone who wants to visit her uncle who lives ‘just outside of Sydney’, be prepared to drive for somewhere between twenty-eight hours and six-and-a-half weeks before you get there.

Also, if you have a mother-in-law who once went to Australia and your wife has an urge to spend three thousand dollars on a mobile-phone-call to ask for directions rather than one dollar for a few minutes in an internet cafe on Roadmap.au.com, and your mother-in-law says, oh, it takes about an hour to get to Uncle Kenny’s from Sydney, wrestle the phone off your wife and ask your mother-in-law if A) she travelled to Uncle Kenny’s in a Ford Corolla with a top speed of fifty-six kilometres an hour or B) on a very fast train.Also, if your wife has insisted you spend a further fortune hiring Sat-Nav, and you’re about to drive from Sydney to a small place called Picton, check at least two things before you set off:

1: The little radial next to Avoid All Massively Expensive Toll-roads is checked.

2: The little radial next to Avoid All Major Highways and only direct me along un-surfaced B roads roamed by serial-killers and dingoes is unchecked.

For reasons that should now be obvious, things between Alison and I were a bit frosty by the time we got out of Sydney and got to grips with the Sat-Nav. Thank the Lord, then, for Australian radio. And, most importantly, the adverts.

In case you’ve never experienced the pleasure of an Australian radio advert, they all seem to be about how to maintain a longer and sturdier erection (for him), and how to achieve a deeper and sultrier orgasm (for her (or, perhaps, for him and for her; they were a bit vague on that one)). Thanks to the fact we were too busy listening to the radio to shout at each other, we were still just about on speaking terms by the time we sorted out the Sat-Nav, bounced back onto the tarmac, and began to make steady if unspectacular progress towards Picton, and Alison’s Uncle Kenny.

This was our first experience of driving in Australia, and, Sat-Nav aside, it was slightly surreal: Just like us, the Australians drive on the left, yet, obviously totally unlike us, they measure their speed in kilometres, which meant it constantly felt as if we were going too slow and yet looked as if we were going too fast (as Alison screamed at me each time she glanced at the speedo).

Another strange thing is that when they lose a lane – three lanes down to two, two lanes down to one, etc. – it’s the inside lane that disappears, which totally threw us every time it happened, and also seemed to give all the little old ladies we were forced to undertake an extra excuse to drive in the middle lane of the motorway even though the inside lane was totally free (nice to know little old ladies are the same the world over, though).

Road-signs are very un-English as well: YOU’VE GONE THE WRONG WAY, GO BACK, seemed essentially Australian to us, as did the anti-speeding bill-board that featured an attractive blonde holding up her little finger with the strap line, NO ONE THINKS YOU’RE BIG WHEN YOU’RE SPEEDING underneath her image.

There is one serious difference, though, but I can’t quite remember what it was. One of our guides told us later on in the trip, but we’d all been drinking, so it’s gone a bit hazy and vague – something about Australians only needing to insure themselves for third party damage to vehicles; i.e., not for any damage they do to you if they ever drive into you. It was either that or they don’t actually need to take a driving test before letting themselves loose on the roads. Or maybe it was both. I’m sorry. I can’t remember. And Virgin Internet is going too slow for me to Google it and find out at the moment. Whatever it was, though, once we’d been told, we always insured ourselves to the max and only ever went driving at night.*

When our Sat-Nav finally delivered us to our destination, Picton looked like a really nice town. At the risk of upsetting Pictish people the world over, I’m not sure it’s worth going out of your way to see it unless you’ve got a particular reason for going there – it’s a bit short on opera houses, Great Barrier Reefs, huge orange rock formations, etc., (I did do a Google search to try and find an interesting fact to give you on Picton, but all I could find was an entry that said Picton is a rural town in New South Wales, Australia: It has a railway station) – but it was really good to visit somewhere that doesn’t exist solely for tourists to wander around taking pictures: You know, a place where ‘real Australian people’ live.

Being honest, it was a bit like being back in Hedge End.

Not that Alison’s Uncle Kenny is Australian. He’s from Cardiff, originally, and he and his wife, Lorraine, and their two sons, Wayne and Shane (named long before they decided to emigrate, believe it or not) set out for Australia on the £10 assisted fares programme back in the early seventies, which was the last time Alison saw them. Thirty-five years on, Kenny’s a widower now, sadly, but still living in the same house Alison can remember getting phone-calls from each Christmas day as a child.

This was the first time I’d ever met him, but we soon discovered we shared a dislike of not knowing whether a bar served pint-glasses, schooners, midis or pots, and, I think, mutually warmed to each other once we worked out I wasn’t after his home-brew and he wasn’t after the lager I’d picked on from a bottle-shop on the way out.

Before the proper drinking could start, though, we decided to pop out to visit one of Kenny’s sons, who lives in a village just outside of Picton. Twelve days later, we arrived.

Wayne, like most working-class Australians who don’t live in cities, lives in a house with a back-garden twice the size of Hampshire. As soon as we got there he and Alison did the, ‘you were this big last time I saw you’ thing that all people who can’t remember the last time they saw each other do, then he and his wife and daughter did the thing all Australians love to do when they’re introduced to English people who haven’t been in their country for more than a week – tell us about all the things in Australia that can kill you. Alison’s Uncle Kenny, the woman who gave us our hire-car, and the receptionist at the hostel we’d stayed in, had already run through this list with us several times, but Wayne and his wife and daughter took it to a whole new different level, all three chipping in with examples at the same time: Sharks. Spiders. Snakes. Dingoes. Crocks. Stingers. Floods. People in the Outback. People in the cities. Swine-flu (virtually unheard of at that time (we thought they were making it up)). Rabid kangaroos. Wild Boar. Bar Bores. Getting your foot stuck in the cattle-grid over the male-toilets and slowly dying of thirst (think of the alternative – you’d rather die, wouldn’t you?). Drought. Forest fires. Little old ladies driving in the middle-lanes of motorways and refusing to let you over when your lane disappears without warning. Poison frogs. Killer toads. Rip-tides. Backpackers. Tour guides. Being temporarily blinded by the flash-gun on a Chinese person’s digital camera and stepping in front of a train because you can’t see where you’re going, various combinations of all of the above, all in different orders, not to mention quicksand, lightning, taking a wrong turn on a walk in the Blue Mountains, depression, diphtheria, scorpions, and the bloke playing a didgeridoo near Sydney Harbour (he won’t kill you, but after two hours of listening to him, you’ll want to do yourself in).

Seriously, if the English discovered Australia today, Social Services would have to burn the whole place to the ground before they could pass it fit for human inhabitation.

And that’s without the danger posed by possums.

I’ve got to admit, I thought a possum was a catch-phrase invented by Dame Edna Everage, but apparently, they really do exist. They look like oversized domestic cats, or, to English people who’ve been drinking, Koala Bears; i.e., very adorable and cuddly and extremely pettable. Despite this cute and harmless appearance, though, possums have a little known defence mechanism – if a possum is spooked or feels threatened it lollops for the nearest tree and climbs it. The sight of a possum in a tree then attracts people towards the tree, where, invariably, they stand around pointing up at the possum going, look, it’s a possum, in a tree, who’d have thought it? This attracts even more people towards the tree. Which is when the possum invokes its little-known defence mechanism and sends jets of foul smelling urine down upon all those beneath it.

And, apparently, the reek of possum pee is almost impossible to get out of your clothes.

Which, when you’re backpacking, and only have one change of clothes to last you three months, is a bit of a disaster.

So be warned: If you ever see a possum in a tree, or if you ever hear someone shouting, Look, it’s a possum, in a tree, who’d have thought it? Don’t go running over. It’s only going to end in tears.

As we would discover later on in our journey.

*Alison thinks the thing with the driving is that there’s no obligation for Australians to take out any motor insurance at all. The very nice German who sorted out our hire-car for us in Cairns told us this, laughing, as we pulled off the forecourt. We have no idea if this information is true but I would like to retract the statement about us both being drunk at the time we were told.

Daniel Clay is the author of Broken – an utterly original, totally compelling debut novel, written in a fresh and distinctively British voice. Called ‘bold, prescient, engaging, and oddly touching’ by the Guardian, Broken was published to critical acclaim. The Harper Perennial paperback edition appeared earlier this year.