They were awakened the following morning by the sound of large surf and rushed down the sandy track through the Littoral Rainforest to the fine-soft-white-sand beach which squeaked loudly underfoot. The swell was up, from the north, and the wind was blowing lightly from the west.
“Let’s not get tangled up in the crowd at the Pass. Let’s go down to Broken, instead,” Mick suggested.
They drove south a few kilometres to Broken Head and discovered clean four-foot bluish-green airbrushed waves reeling down the seemingly endless surf break. The backlit refraction of light in the vertical walls displayed the edge of the yellow sand bank below, a supernatural compass, pointing the way ahead, due north. There were only six other guys out: three of them females. Perfection.
“Woohoo!” Mick cheered.
“Not too big for you, is it, Drew?” Phil asked, and Drew smiled and shook his head.
Back at the car, Drew put on another song – The Best Thing by Boom Crash Opera. Like an overexcited and badly choreographed clumsy dance troupe, tripping all over the place, they desperately wrapped towels around their waists, pulled off their pants and yanked on their boardshorts. They waxed their surfboards and ran down to the water’s edge in the southern rocky corner of the beach. They were on fire.
I put my spacesuit on
And count back ten to one
The gravitation pull gets stronger
My skin it pulls away
My brains are on a plate
The weightless feeling here is bliss
This is the best thing that has ever happened to me
These are the colours that I’ve always wanted to see
And although I’ve never said it before
I love you, I need you, I need it, I love you.
The song echoed in their minds throughout the once in a lifetime surfing session. All three men came into their own that surf. Mick, weaving down the line on a crystal-clear wall of divinely shaped water, stylishly high-fived Phil as he surfed by him. On his last wave, Drew ducked down knock-kneed, disappeared inside the tube, and re-emerged. In an uncharacteristic display of unbridled gratitude, he fist-pumped when he saw both his friends watching from shore.
The wind picked up, and the surf was blown out by the time they were showering off back in the carpark. At the nearby French Patisserie, super-jazzed from their surf together, Mick once again created a scene.
“Is that fresh cream?” He asked, pointing at a cream bun.
“Of course it is,” the Australian wife of the French baker answered, defensively.
“And those jam doughnuts, do you jam them up yourself or get someone else to jam them up for you?” Mick tried not to laugh at his own joke.
“Frankie, we have a smart arse out here,” she called to her husband out the back in the kitchen.
“What’s the problem?” Frankie, a big lug of a Frenchman filled the doorway.
“Well, to be frank, Frank, if I can call you Frank, I’m skint old son,” Mick admitted.
“You got no money?” Frankie asked gruffly.
“Not a zack, not a brass razoo, not a single Franc, Frank.”
“Then you should leave. Please leave,” he said, pointing to the door.
“You don’t have a spare pie, for you know, helping you out during the war?”
“No! Please go,” his accent became more pronounced.
“I hear they make a great frog’s leg pie here,” Mick joked to Phil as he left. “Six toes per pie.”
Phil bought bread rolls from the bakery and back at the campsite cooked egg and bacon rolls, which were washed down with multiple cups of tea. All three men contributed to packing up the campsite. They were finally working as a team.
“Jenny wants me to take you to Nimbin, Drew, to see your Uncle Stephen,” Phil informed Drew.
“I’ll hang out in Nimbin while you visit your uncle,” Mick confirmed.
Drew took the booklet of portraits from his little memorabilia box and leafed through it until he found a photo of his Uncle Stephen. The description read: Uncle Stephen. A Christian minister, leader of the True Vine revival of the 1970s. Always very kind. The picture was of a balding preacher with a Bible in one hand and the other pointing a finger to heaven.
They decided to drive through Byron Bay township for old time’s sake. The road in looked like the passage to Woodstock in 1969. Hipsters in banged up vintage cars picked up hitchhikers on their rite of passage journey into the past. They were on their way to Blue’s Fest, which started the next week. Drew had just the song to go with the scene. Living in the Seventies by Skyhooks.
I feel a little crazy
I feel a little strange
Like I’m in a pay phone
Without any change
I feel a little edgy
I feel a little weird
I feel like a schoolboy
thats’s grown a beard
I’m livin’ in the 70’s
Eatin’ fake food under plastic trees
My face gets dirty just walkin’ around
I need another pill to calm me down.
As they got deeper into the thick of it, they saw how the village was transforming from the hippy-haven streetscape of grubby Rastafarians into something more aspirational, like the new Noosa Heads. The park by the Railway Hotel, which once accommodated a seemingly endless cavalcade of homeless vagabonds, was sparkling clean with a relocatable coffee trailer serving short blacks to business-suited real estate executives. Upmarket cafes, restaurants and boutiques spread the length of Butler Street. The Great Northern Hotel was a reminder of times past; Oldtimers sipping middies of Resch’s Beer in the open windows, looking out onto the fast-changing world. It was a three-way collision between the eras of the Silent generation, the Baby Boomers and the Millennials; the latter happily impersonating the former. The carpark at the beach was spilling over with a diverse cast of performers enjoying their freedom, hiding from the sun in their V.W. Kombi vans, and sitting on the bonnets of their beat up old bombs.
“Lots of girl surfers. Isn’t it great?” Phil commented upon seeing a gaggle of young bikini clad female surfers walking onto the sand with mals under their arms.
“Yeah, tops Phil,” Mick nodded, licking his lips creepily.
“Not for that reason, you pervert.”
“What reason? Don’t make assumptions, Phil. I like girl surfers. But to be honest, they should surf topless if they want to attract an audience.”
“And what about the high standard of women’s surfing now? Some of them surf better than you.” Phil quizzed him.
“I watch women’s surfing in the same charitable way I watch the Paralympics. Good on ‘em, I say. It’s admirable, trying to compete with such obvious…disadvantages,” he held his hands up like he had two balloon sized bosoms.
While they watched the girls elegantly hotdogging on their longboards Drew played a song to stop the two in the front bickering. Miss Free Love by The Hoodoo Gurus.
I bet you think I’m kinky, right?
You can’t take me anywhere
I’ll strip down to my underwear
If you give me half a chance
Hippy free love, outta sight
I’m gonna turn off every light
And hold a private dance
It started out one afternoon
Hot saké in my living room
Among some special friends
Soon some others dropped around
And we all started gettin’ down
And you know how these things end
Miss Freelove, Miss Freelove
Come back sometime, Miss Freelove
Miss Freelove, Miss Freelove of ’69
Miss Freelove.
As they drove west toward Lismore, Mick hissed at the new property developments. Bulldozers and backhoes scraped back the lush green surface of the once pristine landscape, which unearthed the fertile black soil the area’s primary industries had been built on. The farmland interior was being subdivided into whole new suburbs, some of which included high density housing. Upon the recent arrival of the many actors and influencers in Byron, land and house prices had skyrocketed and now everyone wanted in on the action.
When they got to Lismore, they discovered it hadn’t changed nearly as much as Byron, and the drive inland along Nimbin Road was the same as it had always been; a Lord of the Rings-like journey up into the cloud-cloaked mountain range, alongside the gurgling Goolmangar Creek. Mick rolled and smoked a joint, smiling as he tilted his head back. Let the good times roll.
Fifteen minutes later Phil dropped Mick off outside the old Nimbin Museum. “I’ll pick you up in about an hour.” Unfortunately, the museum had been shut down, but the atmosphere in Nimbin was the same as Mick remembered it; rebellious and revolutionary. A barefooted young girl in denim hotpants wearing a rainbow headband busked in the garishly muraled plaza next door to the old museum. She seemed clichéd until Mick heard her impassioned rendition of Bob Dylan’s Masters of War. He recognised it immediately for what it was, a still highly relevant protest song. As Mick ambled around the colourful little town, he wondered what it had been like before it became the centre of the universe for potheads. It was the middle of the day, and the sun was high in the sky. It reminded Mick of a cowboy town. “High noon,” he squinted, as if preparing for a shootout.
The further inland you went from the coast, the further back in time you travelled. Fifty kilometres in was like 1974. Mick loved Nimbin’s colourfully painted shopfront boardings, which created a theatrical atmosphere. He fantasised he was an actor in a late ‘60s Hollywood movie about the hippy revolution. But Nimbin didn’t feel inauthentic; it was the real thing. He was leaving the bong shop when a guy who looked like one of the Furry Freak Brothers propositioned heroin. “Smack?” His eyebrows raised. “Be rude not to,” Mick snickered.
Meanwhile, Phil and Drew were greeted by Uncle Stephen outside the church he had shepherded for that entire half century. He was as usual, all smiles, handshakes, and bear-hugs. Drew was holding his cardboard box and let his uncle smother him.
“Come in, come in; I’m so pleased you made the effort to come by.”
Uncle Stephen guided them to the community room at the rear of the church, which had a spectacular view out over a green valley with a stream running through the heart of it.
“What a blessing, and how’s my beautiful nephew?”
Drew, who was holding his box of memorabilia, shrugged.
“Wow! It looks like a painting!” Phil exclaimed, transfixed by the vista.
“I have always been overwhelmed by God’s creation,” Uncle Stephen admitted, gratefully.
“So have I!” Phil concurred.
“So, tell me, Drew. How are you? Inside yourself, I mean.”
Drew once again shrugged as if he didn’t know.
“That’s alright, you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to. I understand.”
Phil saw a large, framed poster on the wall. It was an aerial photograph of an outdoor congregation of thousands of people in a meadow, listening to Stephen preaching on a stage, surrounded by rolling hills. It looked like a photograph of a music festival.
“That was at the height of the revival in 1974. Half a century ago.”
“Do you ever think something like that could ever happen again?” Phil inquired, thoughtfully.
“Possibly, but we’d have to take the good with the bad.”
“What do you mean?”
“You might be too young to remember, but there were terrible cyclones and floods in ’74.”
Uncle Stephen gave Drew a photo album to leaf through. It was an old family album from when Drew had visited him with his family in the early 70s. Drew didn’t recognise anyone but connected with some of the names under some of the photos.
Just before they left, Uncle Stephen took Drew aside.
“Drew, would you like to spend eternity in heaven with Jesus? I’m hoping you will pray for forgiveness and ask the Lord to be your Saviour.”
Phil was deeply moved as Drew mumbled the sinner’s prayer with his uncle. After Drew returned to the car, carrying his cardboard box, Phil said goodbye to Uncle Stephen.
“I can’t believe it. That’s the most he’s said in a week.”
“Well, if that’s all he ever said, it’s the most important thing.”
“I think he remembers more than he’s letting on. I suspect he’s, I don’t know, sulking,” Phil suggested.
“He’s not sulking, Phil; he’s grieving.”
After they had left, Uncle Stephen discovered the little red Bible he had given Drew for his tenth birthday. He read the inscription. Presented to – Andrew Campion. Date 14/8/78. He placed it on top of another big study-bible on his desk and patted it affectionately.
Phil and Drew picked up Mick from where they had left him, he was in the land of nod on a park bench. Phil had to toot his horn to rouse him. In the car on their way to the Gold Coast, Drew played the first song that Mick slept through. It was Almost with You by the Church.
See the chains which bind the men
Can you taste their lonely arrogance? Oh-oh-oh
It’s always too late and your face is so cold
Let’s struggle for this opulence
See the suns which blind the men
Burnt away so long before our time, oh-oh-oh
Now their warmth is forgotten and gone
Pretty maids not far behind
Who you trying to get in touch with?
Who you trying to get in touch with?
Who you trying to get in touch with?
I’m almost with you
I can sense it, wait for me
I’m almost with you
Is this the taste of victory?
I’m almost with you.
Mick woke as they crossed the Queensland border. The landscape changed dramatically, from forests and countryside to densely populated suburbia, business signs, and industrial estates. Phil turned off the freeway and drove straight to Duranbar to check the surf. Good waves were breaking up and down the beach, but the surf was packed. The smell of sunscreen filled the air as a mother smeared white cream on her daughter’s face alongside the car. A flock of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos screeched psychotically as they swooped in formation, landing en-masse in a tall Norfolk Pine.
All along the coast sunburned surfers were scattered about like an infestation of brown backed cockroaches. Many were enjoying the long Indian summer that the north coast was experiencing, while many more saw it as a sign of climate change. They drove past Snapper Rocks and Rainbow Bay down to Kirra. The sights and scenes differed greatly from the previous week of country car travel. Sun-kissed young pleasure seekers, clad in little more than swimwear, were sprinkled all along the suburban footpaths of Coolangatta. They were living out their fortunate lives before of a backdrop of endless blue fast-running right-handers. It was less like Byron Bay, imitating the ‘70s, and more like Bondi mimicking Muscle Beach. Neck tattooed bodybuilders strode boldly, arm in arm with a new subspecies of cosmetically enhanced females. Drew chose a song befitting the visual smorgasbord. Girls on the Avenue by Richard Clapton.
Girls on the avenue
They’re tryin’ to get you in
Strollin’ by with their rosebud smiles
They’re all dressed up to kill
Lean on the window sill
Lookin’ your way with eyes of fire
But don’t you slip
Don’t you slip
In love with the girls on the avenue.
The wind was eddying about, and they were concerned it might swing onshore. Mick mumbled something about Kirra not breaking and how it separated the men from the boys. They turned left and drove to the Kirra Tourist Park, which was not far from the beach. The camping ground was far more crowded than the others had been on their trip thus far. Phil felt claustrophobic, cramped in, and the three men decided to go for a surf before setting up the tent. While they were changing, Drew played an appropriate song to carry them through the bittersweet experience of surfing the long, perfect, but overcrowded waves off Snapper Rocks through to Greenmount Point. Bittersweet by the Hoodoo Gurus.
You are my sword
Your love is its own reward
My heart, I have found
Gets carved surely by the pound
God knows I tried
Tried to hold you with all my might
But time has won
And I could never be that strong
Don’t cry, I couldn’t be that strong
Don’t cry, that used to be my favourite song
Don’t cry, tears so bittersweet
Don’t cry, fill my eyes whenever we meet
It’s always bittersweet.
After a four-hour surf, in which they only got a few waves each, Phil returned to the campsite with Drew, and they set up the tent. When Mick arrived back from his surf, during which he caught dozens of waves and dropped in on hundreds of poor surfers, he found Phil was sound asleep. Mick imagined Phil would sleep all night, so he snuck his car keys from inside the tent and quietly ushered Drew into the car.
“Let’s go down to Surfers Paradise, get some takeaway Chinese food, and surprise Phil with it.”
“Did your money go in?” Drew asked.
“Yep, payday.”
In the car, Mick asked Drew to put on a song. Drew picked the iconic Choirboys song Run to Paradise. While Mick sang along to the music, Drew joined in, mouthing the words to the song.
Baby
You were always gonna be the one
You only ever did it just for fun
But you run to paradise
Jenny
I’ll meet you at the grocery store
You don’t need a friend when you can score
You run to paradise
Ooh!
Johnny
We were always best of friends
Stick together and defend
But you run to paradise
And Momma
Now don’t you worry about me anymore
When I see you crying at the door
When I run to paradise
That’s right, they had it all worked out
You were young and blonde, and you could never do wrong
That’s right, they were so surprised
Opened their eyes up, opened their eyes up
Opened their eyes up.
Rather than going to a Chinese restaurant, Mick drove to Jupiters Casino. Inside, Mick went directly to an ATM and pulled out all his money. He sat Drew down at a poker machine wearing his headphones and put twenty dollars in it. As Mick walked away Drew felt lost and alone.
“Just keep pressing one’s and I’ll get you a drink,” Mick encouraged Drew, as he marched off.
Mick bought himself a beer and Drew a Coca-Cola. Then Mick bought one hundred dollars’ worth of chips and sat at the Roulette wheel. Mick bet only on number nine, and while he lost more often than he won, the little white ball landed twice on number nine. Mick kept ordering drinks from the waitress, who delivered beers to Mick and Coca-Cola to Drew.
Mick was in full flight, his addictions on display for everyone to see. Drew could see him from where he was sitting. Jenny rang, but Drew didn’t take the call because he didn’t want to get into trouble. After a while Drew had to go to the toilet. But he was unable to find it and got lost and wet himself. He stood outside Jupitors in the cool night air in his urine-soaked jeans, listening to a song by Billy Fields on his headphones, You Weren’t in Love with Me.
Standing on the outside, I don’t know where I’m going to
But I do know just one thing, that it’s over with you
I’ve been very lonely, I did not think I could go on
I was caught in memories and dreams I should have won
Blind Freddy knew that, a blind man could see
I was in love with you, but you weren’t in love with me.
After collecting his winnings, Mick went to the Gents’, and while he was leaning against the wall at the urinal, a guy asked him if he wanted to buy some cocaine.
“How do you feel about Uncle Charlie?”
“Damn, he’s my favourite.”
Mick bought a gram of coke with his last three hundred dollars, then racked up and snorted a big line in one of the cubicles. When he returned to where he had left Drew, he was gone. He rushed outside to find Drew walking down the street with his headphones on. He corralled him and took him back to the car, where Mick racked up another big line of cocaine, and then drove madly through the suburbs of Surfers Paradise. Mick was grinding his teeth like a camel as he hunched over the steering wheel. Drew wondered who it was his old friend had transformed into and played a song for the moment on his portable speaker. Take a Long Line by the Angels.
This is it folks, over the top
He was selling postcards from a paper stand
A whisky bottle in his withered hand
Put his finger on a photo from an old magazine
Saw himself in the shadow of his dream
They found him with his head inside a tin-pot crown
Told him his feet stank and took him downtown
Called him agitator, spy and thief
Shut him up in solitary third degree
Take a long line
Take a long line
Take a long line
Reel him in.
A policeman driving the other way glimpsed the mad look in Mick’s eyes as he was singing along to the song. He turned around and followed him. Mick was triggered by the cop slowly tracking him and decided to lose him. He knew the area well and turned off into a little side street. When the blue lights flashed and the siren wailed, he pushed down on the accelerator. Mick turned into a monster, a maniac, Dr Jekyll’s Mr Hyde. He swerved about, skidding all over the place, and a multi-car chase ensued. The dogs of the suburb joined in to the chorus of howling sirens. Mick only just avoided capture by swinging hard into an open single garage at the front of a house. He jumped out of the car and closed the roller door.
Mick knew they couldn’t be seen driving in Phil’s car again, so after waiting a while, he re-parked it in the street, and they caught a taxi back to the camping ground. Back at Kirra Tourist Park, Drew fell into bed, sleeping in his wet pants. Mick stayed up on his own, snorting lines of cocaine mixed with heroin. Just before dawn he caught a cab back to where he’d left Phil’s car and drove back to the campsite.
Chapter Five of Highway One – The Mix Tape Reunion, will be available next week:
For $25, including postage. Just DM me on Facebook or email me at [email protected]
