“ I was 24, but times were different then. I was a man at that age. The master of a large plantation just south of New Orleans.” - Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt), Interview with a Vampire (1994).
As they were in the steaming, cultural hotpot of slave-era Louisiana circa 1792, times were different in the land of Australia in 2008. It was a time when glossy sports magazines roamed the earth, when a footloose freelance journalist could pitch an idea to the editor of a national golf magazine with words to the effect of: I want to drive a full lap of Australia. I want to play golf every day. I want you to pay me to do it.
Blessedly, perhaps inconceivably, the editor of the glossy golf journal digested (you might see what we did there) this terrible affront against the gods of labour and emailed back: Top idea! I’d once thought about doing it myself before I had children and was forced to be an adult. You go do it and come back with 12 months of stories and let our readers live vicariously through you.
Well … winner, chicken dinner, right? Too right. Though it would get better. Subaru loaned me a new Liberty GT Spec.B station wagon. Many golf courses, motels and resorts offered dear sweet contra. And when said editor, a former associate editor of this crackerjack journal, the great Stephen R. Keipert, offered to pay for all the yarns in advance, friend, we were on and gone like Donkey Kong.
The clubs were stowed in the back of the flash new wagon, my girlfriend was pashed within an inch of her life, and with $15,000 of News Ltd’s coin in the bank account, off we choofed … in the diametrically wrong direction, as it turned out, but what the hey.
And so, our red freedom wagon careened down the M1 and into the fog of the Southern Highlands where we played with the trainee pro and a TV cook called Geoff Jansz. We played , and in Canberra where I’d learned to play the game with my old
