Steve’s Stories - Issue IV: Dreams Of A Shithead and Nicky’s Bickys
The days are starting to blur and time's moving fast.
In the last two weeks, we’ve gone back to Melbourne to watch the Chilli Peppers, toured the Great Ocean Road, crossed the South Australian border, drove on the beach at Robe, sweated in 40 degrees in Adelaide, spent a night under the stars in Swan's Reach and froze our asses off on Kangaroo Island.
We're now somehow back in Adelaide enjoying some "indoor life" as we have come to call it - hot showers, laundry and toilets.
So much happens each day that my diary is almost full. It's actually taking fifteen to twenty minutes every morning to try record all the stories and characters I'm meeting. But there's a few that stand out above the rest.
And so I give you “Dreams Of A Shithead and Nicky’s Bickys”…
Just across the South Australian border we found a sinkhole called Little Blue Lake (creative). It's a fifty metre deep swimming hole, plonked in the middle of miles of grassy farmland - it’s like something you would make in The SIMS. For anyone who loves the water - and jumping off stuff into that water - it’s pretty magical.
It reminded me of a place we would visit as kids in South Wexford called Forth Mountain. Some of the best days of my life were at Forth Mountain, spending long days swimming and jumping and messing around. It was fun to relive one of these days as a twenty eight year old.
We started off jumping off the pontoon (30cm) and quickly graduated to the small ledge beside the pontoon (2m). Then, we saw people jumping off the big edge of the sinkhole (6m). It looked high. And when something looks high from the bottom, you know it's gonna look very fucking high from the top. We wandered around and were surprised to meet three young girls standing on the edge about to jump in. They were about ten and local and had names for every single ledge from which you could jump;
"That one's called "Shoulder", cos it looks like a shoulder… and that one's called "Branch" cos there's a big branch… and that one over there is called "Suicide"….
I stood on the edge and peered over. The water looked impossibly far below. And it was at this moment that I found out there are few things more emasculating than a three foot tall, ten year old girl yelling at you with impatience; "just jump already! It's not even that high!".
The peer pressure worked and I jumped and we had a tonne of fun for hours. The girls were hilarious. The smallest one, Xavier, was on different juice - she had been charged up to 110% and did not stop - she jumped in, climbed back out and jumped again. I soon realised she also had one the foulest mouths I've ever heard of. At one point, she wanted me to pass her the ball I was holding so politely yelled; "Oi SHITHEAD! Pass me the damn ball!". Jesus.
I started to feel nostalgic as I overheard some of their conversations.
"Hey, wanna stay here til the sun goes down? Like we did yesterday?"
"Yeah, definitely!"
It was 2pm…
They were focused purely on playing, on having fun, on making up new games, finding new places to jump off. They laughed loud and pure and slagged each other ruthlessly. It reminded me so much of my own childhood and I realised that that sense of play and joy is something I want to have in my life as an adult.
At one point I heard one of them say; "when I grow up, I want to get my scuba licence so I can dive to the bottom and see what’s down there."
“When I grow up...” I hadn’t heard that in a long time and it really hit me. I'd forgotten what it was like to say those words, to have all those possibilities and dreams in front of you. I mean, I know that I still do have so much in front of me. I'm only 28, I still have lots of years to "grow up". But it hasn't always felt like that. So that's another thing I’m taking away with me from The Little Blue Lake, to always have a "when I grow up attitude" , to approach today and the future with the dream-fueled energy of a ten year old kid playing with her friends.
"Warnambool" - the name of town I still can’t pronounce, but which the locals call "The Bool". This town is big enough for two supermarkets and a Bunnings and is perched just north of The Great Ocean.
Thanks to a good pool table and a generous barman in Port Campbell, we arrived in The Bool a bit hungover. I needed a beer to take the edge off so we found a hole to hide out in and watch some cricket. A 3pm cure turned into a 5pm schnitzel, which then turned in to a 6pm "just one more" and a 7pm (profitable) trip to the pokies. At 8pm we needed to call it quits before our search for a cure turned into the mere postponement of a hangover until the following day.
We walked out of our hole and crossed the road, setting our direction for our campsite. As we stepped onto the footpath however, we looked up and saw a large sign above our heads "An Seanachai -Irish Pub. Open 6pm - 3am". "Shur we may take a look.”
An Seanachai was a long, cavernous pub with Irish memorabilia that was just the right side of diddly-aye. Two girls were quietly playing pool down the back and another two guys were sitting at the end of the bar - they looked like they worked there. Apart from them, the place was completely empty. We were about to leave when we noticed how good looking the barstaff were, so we unanimously agreed we’d have to at least sample the Guinness.
"Jeez, that's actually not bad".
We were on a verrrrry slipper slopy at this point. We put a dollar down for the pool table and played a couple frames. The two girls who were previously occupying it, Emma and Katie (from Sheffield) soon joined us and we played doubles.
Then came "The Bool Boys". "Oh The Bool Boys". Six fellas, aged between twenty and thirty five swaggered into the pub, their matching moustaches leading the way. They sat on high stools near the pool table and soon our two groups were merged, consolidated by mutual inebriation.
Before we knew it, we are deep in back to back doubles pool. Typical drunken pool banter ensues; Matt (the drunkest of The Bool Boys) has his shirt open and and is perching himself on the corner of the pool table, trying to use a seductive pose as a distraction.. .
My team gets down to the black, and yup, there's Matt putting his tongue in the corner pocket. Matt then disappears for a few minutes before he reappears under the arms of two bouncers, being escorted from the venue... apparently he got sick all over the women's bathroom and it was NOT pretty.
Nicky was the leader of The Bool Boys and he held his drink a bit better than his mate Matt. Nicky had a fresh haircut and a button up shirt tucked into his slim jeans with all the eagerness of a guy who lived in a small town and was out on a Friday night. We were sitting down in between frames when Nicky approached us;
“Hey, you guys want some bickys?"
I assumed this was some “Bool” language for a form of drugs. But then I realised his hands were outstretched in front of us. And in those hands were with five individual biscuits, neatly wrapped in plastic packaging.
"ehhhh, sure Nicky. I’ll have a bicky".
Nicky’s bickys were an Australian version of a jammy dodger, still warm from being in his picket for the last couple of hours... Nicky told us he'd lost a lot of money on the pokies but then they had given him these bickys so "really, I'm actually winning". God bless Nicky, his bickys and his misplaced optimism for his gambling habit.
It turns out An Seanachai is the place to go on a Friday night and it was soon packed. The Bool Boys obviously knew this and were in their element. They reminded me of nights out at home with my closest friends - mad for fun, generally sweet, and definitely a little bit cracked. We traded rounds, played pool, gave pep talks and held DMCs.
Of course, they all gradually got thrown out, not for anything bad just general rowdiness and drunkenness.
And so, when all The Bool Boys were gone, Katie dropped us back to our campsite, both of us content with a belly full of bickys.
That hangover I was trying to avoid? Yeah, that arrived the next day with a bang, proudly sponsored by An Seanachai Irish Pub….
This trip is doing it's best to turn me into an extrovert. I've had more conversations with randoms in the last six weeks, than I’d had in the previous six months. I'm fighting the good fight to hold on to my introverted tendencies but it isn't going to be easy. Campsites, rig chats and lads like The Bool Boys are going to make it hard to get any peace and quiet...
That’s all for now. If you enjoyed it, drop your email below and I’ll email you each new issue.
See ya next week,
Steve
Notable mentions:
Port Campbell Beach; this beach knew we needed it. It was warm, calm and close to our campsite. We spent hours on the grass and having a dip to cool down.
Swan Reach Conservation Park; this is in the middle of the Murray River Dark Sky conservation area and the stargazing is increidble. We kepy saying things like "you can actually SEE the Mily Way". There's a free campsite here that was completely empty when we were there. Was a bit eery but really fucking cool
Port Campbell Hotel; Small town pubs hold a special place in my heart (and probably in my liver too). This place has surprisingly good food, great beers, a nice pool table and all the charachters you need to keep you entertained for an evening.
Robe Beach; this was a special day. We drove for miles on the beach, surfed, swam, sunbathed and ate. When I set off on this trip around Australia, this was exactly what I was dreaming of.
Drift (Robe): The soft morning light on the wood interior was enough to make me stay here in this coffee shop for hours. The quality of the coffee, food and service was a welcome bonus.
Cactus (Kingscote, Kangaroo Island): Kingscote is not the kind of place you expect to fin a coffee shop of this standard. And yet here it is.
The Fold (Burwood): The Fold has damn good banana bread and owner who can sign the Irish national anthem. What more could you ask for.
Kangaroo Island Spirits: (Cygnet River, Kangaroo Island); their claim to fame is their gin, but the real reason to visit is their Flammkuchen - german flatbreads they serve from a food truck that are some of the tastiest things I've had on this trip.
The Rockpool Cafe (Stoke's Bay, Kangaroo Island): I can't imagine you can make money running a cafe in a place this remote... but it was a blessing to be able to get a cold beer looking over the beach. We didn't eat there but the seafood looked and smelled delicious.
Koroit: believe it or not, there is a small town in Victoria that is essentially Irish. Irish settled there in the 1840s and it;s maintained many charachteristics of an Irish town - including a huge amount of potato farms. There's an Irish festival there each year which is supposed to be a blast!
Trip Stats:
Days on the road: 42
Distance covered: 4,761km
Time spent driving: 91hours
Camps: 22
Snakes encountered: 1