Read Ten Pound Pom for Free Online Page B

bring a jacket any time of year. With an average per year of 131 days with some rain, it is wise to bring a raincoat or umbrella’ ( sic throughout).
    I wouldn’t mind staying in this area for longer, really; the mountain towns with their restaurants and bars seem interesting, and I like Surfer’s Paradise being at this distance, all those miles over there on the horizon. How wee it looks, at this remove. How puny.
THEN
    A school trip to Early Street Pioneer Village – wells and log cabins and people wearing Victorian attire. How the settlers lived. Being led around the village the boy notices some large movement in a tangled bush and he crawls in there, no thought of spiders or snakes, no regard for the thorns that rip his skin. A dragon is hiding in the leaves. Small dinosaur, a spiked ridge of flesh on its back and a green wattle at its throat. Its claws curl like nail parings and its yellow eyes turn to the boy and a pulse beats lightly in its throat and a heavier one beats in the boy and he slowly removes an Opal Fruit from his packet and offers it to the lizard. Ridged nostrils sniff. A tongue flickers out. Rubber lips open and close and teeth bite. The boy is absolutely absorbed, completely rapt. There is no thought in his thudding skull other than the assimilation of what he’s doing, what is entering his eyes, this lizard chewing on the sweet, and the boy takes in the tiny chasms between every scale and the fine mesh of the skin and the silvery claws and the sickle-shaped shadows that mackerel the back and flanks and he wants nothing more in the world, just this.
    –GRIFFITHS! Is that you, boy?
    The teacher, glimpsed through leaves, jigsawed by twigs. Round red face and a muzzy and shorts and a shirt a bit too tight.
    –Geraht of there now! That’s a bearded dragon! Yer mad, lad! Take yer bladdy fingers off!
    The teacher’s bellow has set the lizard scarpering. No point, now, in remaining here, in these thorny bushes.
NOW
    Saturday night in O’Malley’s, the only pub worthy of that name on the Sunshine Coast. Mock-Oirish place in a shopping centre, all dark wood and green upholstery. Caffrey’s on tap. Chris, a friend of Tony’s from home, who is yearing-out in Oz and has arranged to meet us here, stands six foot eight tall, and I crick my neck talking to him. His girlfriend, Nickie. Another feller called Paul, from Sheffield, with a shaven head and arms so heavily tattooed that they look like colourful sleeves, a decent and friendly bloke whose appearance nevertheless riles the Aussie uniforms. Last week, he tells me, he was returning home with a bag of shopping, two guys grabbed him, one arm each, lifted him off the ground and ran him towards another guy who was holding a dog. Sniff him! Go on, good boy, sniff him! The dog sniffed Paul, turned away, the guys dropped him and walked off. No apology, no explanation, nothing. Plain-clothes policemen and ignorant bastards.
    –It’s crap, Paul tells me as we get drunker. –This part of Australia… wish I’d never come. It’s all clean and sterile. All of it’s to do with health and wealth but there’s no fucking pubs, no fucking music scene, no little bars to discover down dark alleys. Wish I’d never bothered. But I’ve got kids. It’s a safe place to bring up kids, I’ll say that for it. Nowt bloody else, tho.
    We’re introduced to a gang of locals who someone – Nickie, I think – is acquainted with and they do the usual enthusing thing; lovely to meet you, what d’you think of Oz, etc., except for one stocky little feller who shakes our hands half-heartedly and says ‘yeh yeh, nice to meet ya, yer all cunts’, which makes me laugh, because I think he’s joking, and it’s a funny joke, in the context. Later, however, smoking outside with Chris, thegroup pass us and say goodbye as they do so. Shortarse swaggers up to Chris, the point of his bullet head level with Chris’s navel, stabs a finger up at his face and says:
    –You. I’ve