Travels with Bertha by Paul Martin

Author:Paul Martin [Paul Martin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781909718456
Publisher: Liberties Press
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

In the last few decades, tourism has made Alice Springs a wealthy town: walking its tidy streets early the following morning, I could see it was no longer the town Nevil Shute described in A Town Like Alice. As Tay did his laundry and Pirita slept, I strolled alone past the new shopping centres, the cappuccino cafés and tourist shops stocked with overpriced aboriginal artworks. In an open area outside one boutique shop, a group of Aborigines sat under the shade of a tree, already drunk and cursing each other at ten in the morning. One middle-aged Aboriginal woman tried to get to her feet, but already legless, she just toppled backwards and fell down heavily onto the grass. Like the other nearby tourists, I just walked on.

Glad to stretch my legs again after three days in a car, I spent most of the morning wandering. From on top of Anzac Hill I gazed at the world’s oldest mountain range, the 130 million-year-old MacDonnells, stretching out like a contoured spine east and west of town.

By early afternoon I reached the graveyard outside of town, and as the sun bore down I tried to decipher something of the town’s pioneer past by the cryptic clues on the headstones. Occasionally going down on my hunkers to make out an inscription, I wondered what had brought these men to this Hades in the forgotten years before the Second World War? Unsurprisingly, I found no answer.

I did find Albert Namatjira’s headstone, appropriately ornate, as the first Aborigine artist widely recognised outside Australia. But the graveyard’s most ostentatious headstone belonged to Lassiter, a local man, who claimed to have found a huge seam of gold when he was out in the bush, lost. He set out several times – sometimes accompanied, sometimes alone – in search of this El Dorado, before he finally vanished for good. But he didn’t completely disappear, because with his passing the term ‘Lassiter’s gold’, meaning a fool’s dream, came into the Australian lexicon.

But we hadn’t forgotten our appointment with Tim. We found him that afternoon sitting by a hostel pool, a drink on one side, a dark, attractive girl named Andrea on the other. ‘Chaps!’ he greeted us. ‘So where’ve you been? I’ve been frantic.’

Andrea, like Tay, was only half German. Her father, an engineer, had met her mother while working on a project in Indonesia – which explained her exotic looks. Whiling away the afternoon, Tim leaned across to us discreetly. ‘Lads, I was telling Andrea yesterday about our travel plans and was just wondering – do you think Bertha would be able to carry one more?’ After an hour in her company, we’d warmed to Andrea, and so another passenger came onboard.

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