Read Mug Shots for Free Online Page B

Wangaratta and then Dubbo, and between Cobar and Wilcannia I had an experience (later to be inflicted on Newsweekly readers). Slim, the surly Cobar mailman, conveyed to us in the pub in a series of ­monosyllables that he wasn’t allowed to carry passengers, but if we waited at 4 am at a spot ‘a coupla miles outa town’ he’d take us on to Wilcannia, for a fiver apiece.
    We walked out of the copper-hard town at sunset, rolled out our sleeping bags and tried to get some sleep. I lay there unsleeping, while my friend snored, and looked up at the stars. The roof of the universe seemed to have been suddenly lowered, and looked brilliantly and tantalisingly close. As I confided to my readers: I felt a strange doubleness. I was as near as I’d ever be to the mystery of things, two miles out of a town on the edge of the world. Overpowering centrality and marginality at the same time.
    At Wilcannia we were stuck for two days on the side of the road. The town had more crows per hectare of sky than anywhere we’d ever known. We were picked up by two men who’d spent all day in the hotel arguing over a woman, and who were comatose with drink. The driver kept falling asleep over the steering wheel, and we’d start to veer off the road. Desmond and I took turns leaning over from the back seat and doing the steering. We tacked all the way to Broken Hill.
    At Quorn we gave up and caught the Ghan, which at the time took forty-eight hours to get to Alice Springs. There were first and second class and rough class, reserved for Aboriginal people and drifters like ourselves. At every stop there was a stampede over the sand to the pub. Men came back with hessian bags stuffed with bottles of beer and settled down to drink themselves insensible. Before he reached that stage, a lonely Finn went mad and came at us with a knife. We calmed him down, but after two sleepless nights on the jolting floor of the carriage I knew how he must have felt.
    At Alice Springs we hitched another illegal ride on top of a truck, shielding ourselves from the fierce December sun with our groundsheets and hats. Hundreds of miles later, somewhere past Daly Waters (where were the waters?) my hat blew off, and when I got down from the truck at Mataranka I fell to the ground raving. (‘You were babbling about golden arrows going into your head,’ said Desmond. ‘Literary, even in delirium.’)
    After much grumbling about city idiots from the south, I was driven to Katherine by a tough guy in crocodile-skin boots who lit one cigarette off the butt of the one before. It took him a packet of Army Club to get me to hospital, where I was put in a ward with a ringer whose pride was the turn-the-matchflame-blue-with-a-fart trick. There was also an old prospector who refused to be washed. He had to be forcibly squirted with water, which set him yelling that the river was coming up and the crocs were going to get him.
    SO THIS IS DARWIN trumpeted the Newsweekly headline, but it wasn’t. I never got there. Desmond went on, noted what he saw, collected me on the way back, and with a little help from him and a few adjectives, I made Darwin up.

    Deeply constipated on a round-Australia hitchhike, 1954.
    After further adventures, we found ourselves in central Queensland as Christmas approached. Near Biloela we managed to thumb down a train, and as we rattled through the outback we had an argument about the Symbolist Movement in French poetry. When we got off, constipated, sleepless and sick of one another, we squatted by the side of the road about a cricket pitch apart. I declared myself to be at the bowler’s end, and reinforced my argument about Symbolism by pitching small stones at him. Desmond walked up from the batsman’s end and started kicking me round the legs. While he kicked and I punched, a group of railway fettlers resting on a nearby fence shouted encouragement. ‘What’s up with youse blokes?’ I