Boonga the Surf Tour Scammer
It only took the slightest bit of skin colour for Alby ‘Boonga’ Thomson to get away with pretending he was Aboriginal and starting up his ‘Sacred Sites Surf Tours’ operation. It all started when he was trying to hook up one night at the local backpackers and convinced a few Scandinavian chicks to take a surf lesson with him the next day.
The bullshit began when he picked up a little old stone off the beach and gave it to one of the girls telling her it was an old Aboriginal arrow-head. After he got to bang that chick that night he knew he was onto something good and in no time was planting “arrow heads” and “cutting stones” everywhere, and even pointing out supposed middens, which were little more than a few old shells or broken beer bottles half exposed by erosion somewhere on the beach front.
He divided up the groups on occasion, as the guys would probably have sussed out his intentions, no matter what language they were in. This just meant tailoring each performance, gender-specifically. So, almost silently, “in respect of the dead” this meant taking the boys surfing to “Men-only sites” (for $25 a head) and the girls to “Secret women’s sites” (also $25 each) – where he explained the consumption of a “local spirit potion” (watered down Malibu) and the dirty dancing he tried to instigate, as “an ancient fertility rite”.
It was amazing to witness the appetite those tourists had for Boonga’s bullshit. The boys turned up at the pub after an arvo with Boonga looking like a victorious band of noble savages, fresh from battle, while the girls came in all hot and bothered and ready to root just about anyone with a wide nose or a deep tan after Boonga’s evening “porno dance” (as we called it) down at the “rock circle” he built behind the old dunnies down at Back Beach.
I thought his act had peaked when he started painting himself and others with the wet clay he found at the beach. It was hilarious to see him mixing different coloured mud and body painting those entranced tourists before making up some crap about the history of place. “Ah yes, this is where my ancestors used to come to lose their virginity” he would tell the girls, as he moved in close, swaying from side to side while doing his “Dance of the Brolga” thing.
He had all these crazy moves and fake Aboriginal sayings he used, to try to appear more authentic. He would twist around from side to side and place his hand to his ear like it was “story time” when he was ready to start crapping on, and occasionally picked up a feather or flower and place it behind the ear of the girl he wanted to plough, before jabbering something incomprehensible in his make-believe dialect as a way of winning them over.
If that was all he had done he might have gotten away with it. But soon enough he was selling fake Aboriginal art and weapons he had bodgied up, and I think this is what got the actual local Aboriginals pissed off. He even set up a studio where he painted old bits of driftwood and strips of Pandanus bark, dot style, and made up all sorts of stories to go with them.
In fact he made up so many different stories about the local area and its history and geography, a few of his fabrications even made it into the local papers and tourist pamphlets as gospel. But nothing has entered into the local folklore like the story of what a couple of local young Kooris did to knock some sense back into him.
By the time they caught up with him, old Boonga was taking groups down into the National Park for $50 a head for overnight stays, where he had built a series of “humpies” out the driftwood that came down river in the last big flood. He always went down on his own before taking the others in and set up a whole lot of fake animal tracks and various supplies he pretended to forage from the bush.
Had it been a different clan than the local Yaegl people, anything might have happened to Boonga. But luck was on his side when he set up in this district as the Yaegl are well-known for their sense of humour. So after a Pommy backpacker spilt the beans to a young Aboriginal guy about all the crap that was going on down there, they finally decided to put him out of business once and for all.
The Pom took the Koori guy in and showed him all the places Boonga went, from the cave with the giant curled up snake track and the “Crocodile Pond”, to the actual scrubs he pulled “bush fruit” from. So when it came time for Boonga to show off his amazing bush skills, it was all set up for him to get a bit of “a surprise”.
First up the young guys caught a big hungry carpet snake and put it in the cave so that when poor Boonga crouched down to point out the coiled snake track he came face-to-face with a surly diamond python. Next up they tied a big goanna by the leg to the base of a tree he told his crocodile story in the shade of, and also found the stashed “bush tucker” Boonga had hidden and covered it with a local chilli plant so that everyone who ate it would burn the shit out of their mouths.
After the python snapped at him, the goanna attacked him and he poisoned the tourists with the chilli plant, a few Kooris waited till Boonga was telling his fireside scary story about the “ghost spirits” – which always guaranteed at least one of the girls stuck very close to him over night.
First the young Kooris started by making distant wild animal noises, but slowly came closer and closer. Then, having painted each other in full body skeletons with fluro zinc, they pretended, under the full moon, to be angry spear waving “spirits” calling from different directions in the darkness, “Why you tell lies about being a black man?”
Chased right out of the National Park, Boonga and those poor backpackers were so scratched up by the time they fought their way through the bush tracks back to civilisation with only moonlight to illuminate their way as they grappled along the old boundary fence the cops were called in and Boonga was questioned about what was going on and finally busted for imitating an Aboriginal and taking groups into the National Park without a permit.
By the time the spear-marks in Boonga’s back had been checked by a doctor, a journalist had arrived to write the whole fiasco up for the local paper. He even got a quote from one of the young Koori kids who scared the hell out of them down in the National Park that night. When asked if they had used any “ancient methods” for terrifying Boonga and the group he was quoted as saying,”Naa, it was more just like a mix between Blair Witch and Abo Proof Fence, Hahaha!”
For more short stories from Monty buy a copy of Tripping Yarns for $25 including postage within Australia.
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