Twenty seven hours on the Aussie dog
From Townsville to Alice Springs, by Greyhound
(There are videos of the scenery at end of piece, if you want to get a sense of what Australia looks like from the back of a bus. My prior two pieces on Australia: First impressions of Sydney, Sydney the suburban paradise.)
I met Gloria in Mount Isa where she was waiting for our bus. She was sitting on a bench, surrounded by bags, heading to Katherine to visit her grandmother who she hadn't seen in over five years. Her grandmother was the one who had raised her when her own mother went off for spells to work down in Alice Springs.
Mount Isa was a one hour meal stop, our second in ten hours, and half the riders' final destination, including Sondra, who introduced me to Gloria. Sondra had been my bus buddy up until then, a lifelong friend of Gloria, and the introduction felt a bit like the passing of the baton of my local guide.
I’d met Sondra at 5:30 a.m. that morning, waiting at the Townsville depot with about twenty others, including a family of six who were making their way back to Cloncurry from visiting relatives in Fiji, as well as a few Aboriginal men with vouchers from the prison system, heading home after incarceration. I'd been warned by everyone who had heard about my plans that I would be surrounded by problems, but within a few minutes I knew that wasn't the case, at all, because despite the early hour, everyone was cheerful, friendly, and helpful, with the single exception of a stoic German backpacker whose stereotypical aloofness I found funny, since it contrasted so jarringly with a pat-on-your-back friendliness of all the other riders. I kept thinking of a road trip comedy movie, Hans Gets a Lift, or some similar title, about a dour German who is grudgingly taught to laugh, love, and finally see the true meaning of life, from a two-day trip across the outback with a bus load of locals. I'm sure Hollywood would handle that with the utmost sensitivity, and not offend anyone, especially the Aboriginals.
Sondra had been in Townsville to care for a sick son (all better now), and was glad to be going back in Mount Isa, although she wasn't overly romantic about it. "Do I like it? Well I really don't have a choice, it's where I was raised and have lived the last sixty years."
Her story, or what I could make of it given how strong her accent was, included considerable suffering, pain, and injustice. She introduced herself as part of the Stolen Generation, forcibly removed from Alice Springs and raised in Mount Isa by parents, including a Chinese (step?) father, whom she absolutely adored and gushed over whenever she had a chance. Her past was heavily documented, in a webpage she showed me, including extensive family trees with many entries only question marks. There also seemed to be a lot of ugly couplings, including a mother or grandmother that was raped, and if I was a better journalist I could list more details, but I can't since the exact circumstances of injustice matter far less to me than that a lot of wrong was done in the past, and the present is often a reflection of that, although not in any way a guarantee for a similarly painful life.
As for Gloria, I know less about her backstory, since she wasn’t one to talk about herself much. Everyone in Mount Isa seemed to know her, and for the hour I sat waiting with her to get back on the bus, almost everyone who passed by came to talk to her, or in one case, pray with her for a safe return in a few months.
Sondra didn’t exactly tell me to keep an eye on Gloria, but it seemed the natural thing to do, given her especially sweet disposition, a calming innocence, and the trove of bags about her. Not that she needed my help, because she seemed immune to whatever anxiety comes with this sort of trip, in this case seven hours to Tennant Creek, then changing buses to ride another nine hours north. That wasn’t a big deal to her, or for that matter to any of the other riders, all facing rides well over ten hours.
Long journeys, through empty, stark, and desolate land are a necessity if you live in Australia, especially in any part other than the small banana shaped wedge of Victoria and New South Wales where almost the entire country of twenty-five million citizens cluster. Especially if you can’t fly, because of money, health, or simply because there are no flights, or if you were given a voucher by the state. The last seemed to be a majority of those on the bus.
Kevin, eighty-four, had the longest ride. He boarded in Julia Creek, a town of less than two hundred people, and was headed to Adelaide, a forty-eight hour ride, complete with two bus changes. He didn't seem fazed by it at all, putting my own "oh look at me, I'm taking a twenty-seven hour trip" pride in perspective.