How to Catch Flathead

By Peter Michal

This year would be different! UK travel writer Pete would head for the land of three and four and seven mile beaches, the land Down Under. He would travel from Sydney down the east coast to Melbourne, before turning west and then north-west. By the Australian autumn, he planned to be in the red centre of the country. He didn’t know what he would do then ... What follows is an education in life, lore, and law, and the brash, ballistic ways of local party politics, where too much money and too much time can never be too good!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Truth Serum Press / Bequem Publishing
• Release date: Feb 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781922427557

Book preview

Monday

Prologue

*

I come from West Yorkshire. Many do. Many more than choose to stay there.

It’s February that drives them away. No month does more to knock the human spirit right out of you. Running out of clean underwear is something that shouldn’t happen to a grown man outside of a warzone and yet it does, every February, when the washing from January hangs damp on the rack in the living room and it’s too frigid out to attempt anything as heroic as going to the shops to buy a new pack. The window sills turn black with mould from the condensation on the glass. The old carpet in the spare room turns two shades darker and starts smelling of mildew. All this wild yeast in the air yet the bread dough doesn’t rise.

The news from Australia comes on the telly — a nation-wide heat wave, people are sleeping on the beaches it’s so hot — and the despair is complete.

This year would be different, I promised myself. This year I would join the one flock of migratory species experiencing an increase in numbers, the boorish British tourist, and head for warmer southern climes, the land of three and four and seven mile beaches, the land Down Under.

My trip would not merely be for pleasure, to revive a hibernating human soul, but would include official Royal business. I was to carry news from the Queen to the touring English cricket team: they could come home; they needn’t play out their remaining matches.

The sorry sods had lost the Ashes 5-0 and had yet to scratch out a victory in the hit and giggle one-day series. Granted, they hadn’t resorted to blatant cheating like the locals; they were merely useless, not even managing to beat the PM’s XI side in a warm-up game. The Prime Minister of Australia hadn’t attended the fixture. He’d been back at Parliament, fulfilling his prime ministerial duty, by taking a knife in the back from one of his own. In any event, Her Majesty had decided it was time to bring the boys back home. What’s more, she had decided to send me, a travel writer of middling reputation and someone who only had a passing interest in the game, to break the news to the chaps. I was told I’d find them at the beach...

I had been to Sydney once before, on the pretence of attending a writers’ festival. Instead, I spent a week waddling from one tourist landmark (the Opera House) to another (Kings Cross and its brothels) and despite feeling utterly conspicuous, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself. By the last day, I had even stopped apologising to random strangers for being British.

This time round I had other, loosely-formed plans. I would travel from Sydney down the east coast to Melbourne, the southern capital, before turning west and then north-west. By the Australian autumn I planned to be in the red centre of the country. I didn’t know what I would do then.

All I really knew was that I wanted to stick to the back roads and the small towns as much as possible. This wasn’t so much out of some earnest but ultimately naive desire to discover the true heart and soul of the country, but rather as anyone who comes from England can relate to, it’s sometimes nice to go to places where there aren’t many people about. Plus, the beer is cheaper in country pubs. The conversation, usually in the form of advice about the cut of your jib, is always free.

The way I imagined it, I would lay out the map on my bed each morning, find an amusingly-named town or locality in the general direction of where I was headed, and go there. This way I might pass through Mooball on my way to Tittybong before finishing the day in Teddywaddy West. I planned to avoid Burrumbuttock because the road led to Cockburn via Mount Buggery. Given the choice, I would visit Eggs and Bacon Bay rather than Coffin Bay, although I’m sure Wineglass Bay was nice too, especially in the afternoon.

Without it becoming a silly rule the travel writer imposes upon himself to give his journey a point of difference from the same, unremarkable journey undertaken by countless people before him, I wanted to avoid as much as possible using my phone and the internet to plan the route. This may sound trivial, but it’s not — it’s impossible to say how many new places one doesn’t see and how many interesting encounters one doesn’t have because the reviews on TripAdvisor were mixed and so you didn’t bother going. You don’t even need to read the reviews, looking at the street view or searching for images of a place is enough to sway one’s mind. The younger generation would no doubt counter that the internet helps to plan more effectively to ensure you only have, like, the most awesome time ever, but what would they know, they’re stupid and vain. Or at the very least, some of them have little perspective and place too much importance on social media. My point stands: life’s experiences shouldn’t be curated like a museum exhibition. Instead, one ought to take the good with the bad. The pits of the world (the Greater Manchester metropolitan area) make the good places better, in the same way the ugly sister, in her mere presence, makes the pretty sisters prettier. The best bits of a trip are always unplanned.

And so, I would do it the old way, the way I did in my prime, when I hitchhiked across Europe to the Caucasus Mountains and Chechnya before I realised I had come too far and needed to go back. I would go internet-free and instead rely on the slurred words of locals I met in pubs in the wee small hours of the morning to guide me. It was less reliable than booking ahead but occasionally the locals revealed best-kept secrets, right before they fell off their bar stools. I only hoped that now, as in my prime, I could stay on my stool long enough.

There was one meeting I had planned via the internet and did very much intend to keep: visiting an old university chum and his family-in-law.

David was only in his forties but from all recent correspondences had been retired from gainful employment for going on five years. Twenty-some years ago, with little more under his belt than a major in mechanical engineering and practical experience in binge drinking, he had set out to Australia to grab his share of the country’s mining boom. Each Christmas I would receive a posted letter (remember those from another life?) with photos showing David in the bush, working in the open-cut mines of north Queensland. The letters were brief, less than half a page of scribbled lines. I never learnt what the work entailed — I gathered David was involved in the engineering side of things rather than driving the lorries — but the landscape he captured in those grainy photos was truly enlightening. It was otherworldly, at least to someone sitting in front of a fire on a cold day in December in dreary England. The single most striking feature of the landscape was the soil, which in some photos was crimson, the colour of liquorice. It covered the ground and everything above it, David’s smiling face and his clothes included. The openness and true vastness of ‘the Outback’ were all too stark. My desire to visit it now can be traced back to those correspondences from a bygone era.

I lost contact with David for the better part of a decade and when we re-established a link via Facebook, the ubiquitous correspondence/stalking/fake news tool of the present era, he had married and moved to a small town on the coast of New South Wales. I knew nothing about this place I was headed to now other than what David had told me: it was located three hour’s drive south of Sydney and the fishing was good. Still, its name, Berks Head, did not ring in the ear like the names of the neighbouring towns — Mollymook, Ulladulla, and, most delightfully, Narrawallee — did. Sitting in the living room of my damp house, next to the rack of damp washing, I resisted the urge to take a virtual stroll down the main streets of these places on my phone. I didn’t want to spoil it for myself.

David had married an Australian girl, Cindy, and the couple lived in Berks Head with her elderly parents. David owned a boat and went fishing. He grew vegetables in his garden and played with radios. Cindy occupied herself with looking after her parents and local politics. Life went on, without children, without fuss, without worry, in paradise-by-the-sea.

It seemed too good to be true. It was rather unfair for the rest of us if it was true. I resolved to find out and get to the bottom of many other preconceptions I had about the charmed country and its people. I was excited about my trip, enough so to brave the cold and pop out to the shops to buy a pack of underpants.

Saturday

*

The plane touched down and I gave a whimper of sweet relief in my seat. It was nearly over.

I may be too young to have experienced the golden age of air travel, but I am old enough to remember when the whole affair was more dignified and undertaken with much less fuss and carry on. At Heathrow I was prodded with a paddle for explosives, received a full-body x-ray scan, had my bags rummaged through, before being spoken to by a gruff and disbelieving customs official, who offered a complimentary prostate check-up with his service. He was disbelieving both that a writer could afford to travel abroad and that I didn’t want the prostate check-up right there on the spot, in front of everyone, but would call back for an appointment. In Dubai we landed on a strip of tarmac on the edge of the desert. At first, I thought Carlos the Jackal had broken out of his French prison cell and was back in the business of hijacking planes. Later, after a wait, I discovered that the pilot had merely parked in the middle of nowhere so that the passengers could be transferred to buses for a half-hour ride to the airport proper.

The bus had no seats — everyone stood holding on to the straphangers, smelling each other’s armpits. There’s nothing like dry desert air and BO to clear the sinuses after a longish flight. 

Inside the terminal, we were funnelled in another security checkpoint, at which everyone was made to take off their shoes, belts and jackets. My bottle of water was confiscated. I wanted to argue the point, but I was holding on to my trousers at the time, trying to prevent them from falling down around my ankles. As a general rule, you are unlikely to win any argument when you are holding on to your trousers and the person you are having the argument with, is not.

After tucking in my shirt and belting up, I had just enough time to buy another bottle of water before racing through the two-mile long shopping mall that is Dubai International Airport to my gate, at which there was yet another bag search. They took the fucking water again.

Luckily, the fourteen-hour flight to Sydney was a doddle.

The guy in the window seat next to me spent most of the flight not wearing any trousers. It had nothing to do with him forgetting his belt at security — this was a premeditated act of deviancy. It started after dinner service when he spread the blanket over himself and went to sleep. Or so I thought. Coming back from the toilet I caught him writhing like an eel under that blanket, trying to slip out of his slacks. He slept soundly after that, as any man would. He only woke before breakfast, some eight hours later, at which point there was more suspicious squirming under the blanket.

I have flown on domestic routes in Russia, and not modern, present-day Russia, but Russia east of the Ural Mountains in the lawless 1990s. This is to say I am no stranger to poor behaviour on board an aircraft. I’ve seen things, the worst in human nature, the common selfishness and arrogance of people. But this incident took the cake. The thought that this old geezer may have even slipped out of his boxers under that thin blanket to attain a further level of comfort is haunting.

It was sweet relief then when the plane landed. I was dehydrated but bloated and windy and, thanks to the naked sleeper in the seat over, all shaken up. I kept my head down and avoided eye contact as we disembarked.

At customs I had an important choice to make: line up behind a scruffy-looking surfer dude, the newlyweds from Ireland out on their honeymoon, or a Chinese grandma from the Beijing flight. There was little to separate the three customs officers. They looked like customs officers the world over look: like they could take a bribe.

They didn’t, not really. But they all could’ve done with a bit of cheering up, for sure.

I knew the couple were from Ireland because, well, these people are not difficult to spot in a crowd to the trained eye. (The guy was also wearing a funny Guinness T-shirt, which had been purchased over the internet — ‘My blood type is dry stout’, that sort of funny.)

I knew the couple from Ireland were newlyweds because, as newlyweds do, they couldn’t stop talking about their wedding. Sitting at the gate in Dubai, still fuming about the bottled water, I couldn’t help but overhear them. They were gushing to anyone who would listen about the wedding reception, which they had decided to hold in a converted barn at the back of an old pub, ‘just to be different, aye.’

Oh, feck it.

These people may have been young and in love and, as such, a little affected in the head, but surely they knew which country they were living in. Surely, they knew, as I did, that thanks to a near uninterrupted 500-year run of oppression, famine and frost, the Irish countryside now had few other types of buildings than ruined abbeys, converted barns and old pubs, and that every second wedding reception was held in one of the two latter. But let it be so. Let the young people have the sense of uniqueness and the social media gratification they so desperately crave.

They were, in fact, a lovely couple and I wished them well. I simply had no intention of getting stuck behind them. I didn’t trust the Irish not to use their innate knack for conversation to strike up one with the customs lady and hold up the queue. This left a choice between the surfer dude and the Chinese grandma.

I bet on the surfer. The chance of him carrying drugs was high but lower than the chance of Grandma Ming carrying dried mushrooms or unlisted medicinal herbs.

My hunch proved incorrect and I lamented my racial prejudice. Grandma Ming was let through while the surfer dude was held up as the last grain of Arabian Peninsula sand in his bag was shaken out and his musty-smelling clothes were taken away for burning.

At last, it was my turn. I approached the customs man timidly, wary of his reputation, which preceded him thanks to late-night screenings in the UK of Border Security: Australia’s Front Line. I had checked my declaration slip twice, umming and ahhing over whether to declare my leather belt as an animal product. I was sure I didn’t have any firearms or illicit drugs on me, but soil, or articles of clothing attached with soil, i.e. shoes — yes, quite possibly. No, I was sure I had shoes on. I had also visited a rural area in the last thirty days as I just happen to live in one, but I had not been in contact with farm animals, unless my teenage son counted as one. (Some days I wasn’t sure.)

Modern life is complicated and it’s often difficult to know how to do the right thing and not get in the way, and immigration forms, which ask all-encompassing questions, don’t help matters.

‘Whatcha got there, mate?’ the burly customs man asked, holding out his hand for my declaration slip.

‘I have chocolates,’ I said, lifting my backpack up on the inspection table. As far as declarations went, it was slight.

‘Yeah, some choccies, hey?’

‘Yes.’

‘Yeah, that’s fine.’

I waited for him to continue the inspection, or rather begin it, but instead he put my card away and nodded his head.

‘Yes, I have chocolates,’ I repeated.

‘Nah, you’re right, mate.’

‘I can go?’

‘Yeah, mate.’

How strange. I was nearly going to point out that he hadn’t opened my bag, not even for show, and that a supervisor may have been watching him at this moment, scrutinising his performance, but I didn’t. I said thank you and slung my backpack over my shoulder and sloped off.

Perhaps I wasn’t the right type? I seldom am in this life, not for pretty girls or employers looking to hire staff they could treat well and promote, at any rate. At least on this occasion, I didn’t begrudge the fact.

Getting through immigration without being reproached in some small way or worse, humiliated, counts as a win in my book. Buoyed by it, I headed straight down into the airport’s underground train station to catch the transfer to the city centre, which Australians call the Central Business District, just to make life harder for themselves. I checked my wristwatch. The time read 8.30pm. I checked my phone. 7am. Either way not much business was likely to be taking place in the CBD. I took off my watch and put the time forward. It was Saturday morning.

I had a plan. This is important when arriving in a new country after a long-haul flight. Unfortunately for the people I would come near during the day, this plan did not involve me staring up at the calcium-stained head of a hotel room shower. Instead, it involved me wandering around the city in a state of jet lag-induced delirium, seeing but not appreciating Sydney’s iconic sights, before catching the afternoon train south to as far as the line went. Then I would call David to come pick me up. Only that night would I step into a shower and wash the cumulative grime of two full days of travel off my body.

This is detail rarely given in travel books, and for good reason.

In the same vein, it takes twenty-two minutes to travel by (mostly) underground train from the international terminal to Circular Quay, which is where you want to get off if you want to see a large crowd of Chinese tourists standing on the steps of the Sydney Opera House taking selfies. Even before 8am they were at it, making the most of the soft early morning light, the self-portrait photographer’s best friend.

Don’t rush getting there. Take time to admire the view from the elevated station platform because as views from station platforms go, this one isn’t half bad. To one’s left, rising over the smokestacks of the mega cruise ship berthed in the international terminal, is the arch of the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. In the foreground, green and gold ferries come in to dock, sounding their horns as they do so, while others reverse out before going on their way. And finally to one’s right is the Opera House, its tiled white sails rising from the top of the brown concrete steps. It makes an impression, all of it. I stood ten minutes taking in this view of natural beauty, civil engineering and human activity.

At the steps, I stood back from the horde and enjoyed the air — it was warm and moist and didn’t smell at all polluted. So not like back home. The night before departing England, temperatures across the north had plummeted to minus 10oC, which was chilly but by no means a record. Then had come a thirty-hour period of breathing in recycled aeroplane and airport terminal air, which dries out the sinuses somewhat. So the fresh, moist stuff felt pleasant on my pasty face and in my respiratory tract. I didn’t stay long though — there is only so much jostling for prime photo positions and shouting in foreign languages one can bear before having had his morning coffee.

Across the quay from the opera house is The Rocks, an historic area named after the sandstone it and much of Sydney stands on. In a nod to natural heritage, the beautiful yellow-gold stone remains exposed in places not yet concreted or bricked over. Like every historic area of any modern city, the place was once a slum where fearsome gangs, the prostitutes they pimped out, and merchant sailors roamed free. And then people discovered they loved laneway cafés and bars and the neighbourhood was gentrified accordingly.

This was just as well otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to find one such establishment now to sit in and rest. The young bearded man in the denim apron could scarcely hide his contempt for me when I ordered the Americano off the chalk board menu. It was like I had deprived him of an opportunity to show off the one talent he had decided to dedicate the rest of his life to: making love heart shapes in frothed milk.

It may seem unbelievable to young urban elites now, but there was a time when people in offices and homes across the Western world drank instant coffee and enjoyed it. Or at least we thought we did — we certainly didn’t know any better. Because of the time and equipment needed to make it, percolated coffee was something special, the preserve of enthusiasts. The idea of freshly-ground coffee made by men in aprons was entirely foreign — such a thing only existed among the French and Italians, and they were complicated people we weren’t sure of. This was a time when Nescafé and Maxwell House still ran advertisements on national television to promote their brands. Now you could be forgiven for thinking instant coffee had gone the way of tobacco products and been banned from all forms of advertising.

The link is by no means tenuous. At the time of writing, the coffee giant Starbucks had lost the second of multiple legal rounds in a Californian court and was one step closer to being forced to put cancer warnings on every plastic-lined, non-recyclable cup of coffee they sold. The judge in the case ruled Starbucks and other retailers had failed to prove a chemical by-product of the roasting process, found in high levels in brewed coffee, posed no significant carcinogenic risk. The ruling, if not overturned on appeal, would only apply to the state of California. Still, I contemplated its significance at this time, sipping my double shot of cancer. The glazed doughnut I was eating, I knew from Michael Mosley documentaries on the telly, was exactly fifty per cent fat and fifty per cent sugar, the perfect killing ratio for humans.

I checked my watch again. 8.30am. Still too early for a nip of another Class A carcinogen, Scotch whisky. Bugger.

*

If in life, by accident or miscalculation, you ever find yourself in the following circumstances: forty-six years old, divorced, a bit overweight, somewhat cynical, in Sydney for the day, wanting to see some of the city but jet lagged and sluggish on your feet — then I offer my sympathies. I know how you feel. But I would also suggest you make the most of it and do what I did after some contemplation and another glazed doughnut and take the ferry to Manly.

One of the battered green and gold vessels departs Circular Quay every twenty minutes. On a Saturday morning, they pack them in two-thirds full. The mix is half locals, half tourists. And it’s impossible to count the number of nationalities represented.

The half-hour trip across the water provides stunning views of the city skyline and harbour-side mansions. If these ostentatious displays of wealth and vanity don’t make you want to throw up, then the swell going through Sydney Heads, the entrance to the harbour, sure will. Either way, in terms of bang for your lazy tourist buck, you can hardly do better.

The ferry doesn’t go under the Harbour Bridge, but it does chug its way past Taronga Zoo, where the animals live, and Kirribilli House, where perhaps the most threatened species of all, the Australian Prime Minister, lives. There are glorious sights on each side of the harbour to both capture the imagination and make you feel envious, so sitting or standing on either the bow or the stern of the boat is recommended, unless you suffer from sea sickness, in which case go hide in the engine room. There at least you won’t find yourself in the middle of polite yet determined jostling for position for the best photo opportunity.

Manly Beach, your desired destination, is on the ocean-facing side of a narrow peninsula from Manly Wharf, where the ferry berths. The street linking the two is called ‘The Corso’, which is Italian-Australian for ‘long shopping strip’. The side streets leading off the main thoroughfare are lined with medium-rise apartment buildings of the modern precast concrete vernacular. Painted grey and brown, they look cheerless and expensive. However, this is deceiving — in Sydney, every apartment, unit, house, ‘granny flat’, ‘tin shed’, and ‘dunny block’, new or old, cheerful or drab, structurally-sound or not, is expensive, still,