Tampa Gold Pt. 03

-Author's Note- The next part of the story is a little dry but it explains how Jeremy got himself into another expected adventure. We are building up to huge climax if you have the time to follow along for the journey.

Chapter 3.

Canberra - 1 August 2001

I was twiddling my thumbs in the PM's outer office when she walked by. The cute young woman with the black bob and the tailored suits. I had promised to keep my hands off my work mates but looking hurt no one. If I ever broke that rule, it would have been with her.

His secretary granted me my audience with the PM in the early evening. The sun had gone down at 5pm and the chill of another Canberra winter night was upon us. I loved my city, but this time of year when the days were short and the wind blew like ice, just depressed me. Not enough time outside during the day to recharge my batteries. Not enough time away from my desk to get a fresh perspective.

When I entered the office, the PM greeted me as warmly as ever. When I broke the news that I was leaving, the atmosphere was no less hospitable.

"I will be sorry to see you leave Major Holland. You have been a pleasure to work with."

"The pleasure has been all mine Prime Minister." I said. "I can't thank you enough for giving me such a wonderful opportunity."

"Not at all. Not at all. You were most helpful to my government last year. It was the least I could do to repay you."

"Thank you, sir."

"Oh, just one more thing, Jeremy," he said.

"Yes, sir?"

"Please call me John."

________________________________________

There was no one thing that compelled me to leave Canberra that winter. It was mainly a feeling that it was time to go. I'd always loved my hometown, but in 2001 there was only one thing still holding me there.

I had been working for Prime Minister Howard for more than a year. While there were many perks working in that office, there was a downside too. The biggest problem was that my job was completely ceremonial. Turn up to work, look pretty, say some inspirational things and get paid. While that seemed like the greatest gig on Earth when I started, after the novelty wore off, I found myself bored beyond belief. I had a naturally short attention span which helped me to zone out. But when forced to play the same tune over and over, I could feel my patience wearing thin and my contempt of my fellow man growing by the day. Politics is full of sycophants and two-faced bastards and playing nice with either had never been my strongest suit.

My second problem was with the army. As a newly promoted war hero who had the Prime Minister's confidence, you might be mistaken for thinking that would have made me popular with the green machine. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. First, I was a reservist and the regular army hated the reserves. And since the PM had awarded me a medal, none of them would ever attain and operating out of his office while rubbing shoulders with the higher ups, the generals and most other regulars detested me. I was a usurper in their eyes. Someone that the misguided fool of a Prime Minister had given favours I didn't deserve.

The worst part about my situation was that they were right. Not only did they make me feel like a fraud most of the time; I knew I was. My honours and promotion were entirely without merit and I knew it. For all of my excesses in Timor two years earlier, I had been lucky in the extreme not to have ended up dead or in prison. But to profit from my ill-gotten good fortune also rubbed the noses of the men who had been toadying all their lives in their failure even more. Every opportunity they got to make me feel unwelcome or to pull rank, they did so with glee.

So it was with little regret that I parted ways with the PM in the winter of 2001. My job wasn't meant to last forever, so it was probably a relief for everyone involved when I left rather than being pushed out later.

But I wasn't the only one leaving. PM Howard had won a crushing victory back in 1996 and despite having a string of political and international victories to his credit, he had squandered it all on a crazy-brave crusade to reform the nation's taxation system. You'll be happy to read that I don't intend to delve into the depths of macroeconomic reform as part of this story, but just to say that the nation's taxation system needed it. However, it was also political suicide.

After narrowly winning re-election in '98, the government passed the reforms but then faced the expected teething problems. Every hiccup got magnified by a gleeful opposition and biased media. By 2001, the supporters and detractors of the government could see the writing on the wall and, as there was an election due that year, everyone started planning for a change of management.

I say that I was happy to go, but in all honestly I felt a pang of regret when I told the PM of my intention to leave. He was good to work for and a decent man through and through.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but getting a warm handshake from the man himself when you have told him you are abandoning him in his hour of need was the God's honest truth of the matter. There are true believers in life and politics, and they are fanatics. Those people have their uses, but you don't go far in politics without being a pragmatist. Whether he honestly knew his time was up and was determined to go out with his dignity intact and wished me well or, he was a politician and knew better than to make enemies with anyone that one day may prove useful, I will never know. But he told me that his door would always be open to me if ever I needed him and by the end I almost regretted leaving. Almost.

But after the events of the previous few years, I needed some time to myself to get my head straight. There had been some very high highs and some equally low lows. I felt I was being tossed from one crisis to another, never having the time to pause or take stock of what I needed to do next in life. And as I had now passed my thirtieth year with nothing concrete to show for it, I needed to get away from everything and think.

I always do my best thinking when I am alone. Really alone. Not in the quiet hours when my head hits the pillow and not on the floor when I've had half a bottle of gin. No, away from all distractions. Wine, women and the world. And there was no better way to get away from all of those in my experience than driving. But where to?

Australia is a great place to live, but it has a distinct lack of the spectacular. The island continent has no mountains. I remember the first time that I saw both the Himalayas and Andes, and being mesmerised by their dramatic immensity. Australia's highest mountain is literally a morning's walk from a car park. No mountains mean no snow caped peaks, glaciers, escarpments or powerful, majestic rivers. We have deserts and farmland. Our deserts are dune-less scrub land and many of our farms are not much better. And as for the fantastical wildlife, once you've seen a million kangaroos, it fell into one of two categories: roadkill or insurance claims.

I could have visited another city; the roads were good enough. The two closest cities in Australia-Canberra and Sydney-were 300km door-to-door in those days. About three hours' drive without a break. A simple morning's drive with the possibility of getting back to your origin on the same day if you were motivated.

The next closest was Melbourne from Canberra at seven hours. The road was harder till you hit the Victorian border when it opened up onto what could be best named the Aussiebahn. After that, it was Melbourne to Adelaide, and then all bets were off. Brisbane was over 12 hours from Sydney and then nothing. Hobart was on an island; Darwin was almost in Asia and Perth, well...

What about Perth? When I thought about it, I remember that there was something about Perth that was important. Something that I had once read. It had me lying awake for a few nights trying to remember what. It was on the third morning while I was eating breakfast and idly listening to the radio news report that I remembered.

For some reason that I could never fathom, all Australian news services follow the same script: news; finance; sport and weather. News, sport and weather make sense, but the finance part always struck me as odd. Australians like money as much as the next nationality but to set aside good sport reporting time to list the value of the Australian Dollar next to Pounds, the spot gold price and the level of the Nikki Index must have been pointless to 99% of the listeners. And yet the same reports get filed every hour on about every station. But that day, the finance report became the catalyst for all that followed. And, after being lost in thought for what seemed like forever, I suddenly declared, "I'm driving to Perth!"

Chapter 4

Southern Australia - 7-12 August 2001

A friend once told me that every Australian should cross the Nullarbor at least once. Once and only once, and make sure you are driving east. Well, I've done it twice. The first time out of curiosity and the second out of necessity, and I will never do it again.

"Crossing the Nullarbor" is a euphemism for driving across the continent of Australia. Why the Nullarbor and not another arbitrary place on the map? Well, unless you own a 4WD and a lot of fuel or you are prepared to drive all the way to Darwin and then circle back around to the south, crossing the Nullarbor Plain is literally the only way to get from one side of the country to the other.

Interestingly, the Nullarbor takes its name from the Latin: nulla "no", and arbor, "tree" and not from some local aboriginal name, as you might expect. This was probably because any local aborigines were too smart to venture there or any who did died and never returned to give it a name.

The Nullarbor is part of the area of a flat, almost treeless, arid or semi-arid country, on the Great Australian Bight coast bounded by the Great Victoria Desert to its north. It is the world's largest single exposure of limestone bedrock and occupies an area of about 200,000 square kilometres. At its widest point, it stretches about 1,100 kilometres from east to west across the border between states of South and Western Australia.

But that was all in my future. For now, I still had to traverse the relatively benign 1300km from Canberra in the east to Port Augusta in South Australia. I loaded up with what I thought I would need, bid my farewells, and set off at the crack of dawn, heading north to Yass. My 82 BMW 325i pocket panzer had seen better days and if it hadn't been winter, I never would have dared drive it all that way. The air-conditioning was shot to hell, but I just had the driver's seat resprung, so I figured a long winter drive would be comfortable enough. The duco was cracked from the sun, the muffler rusted, and it was so small you couldn't take any back seat passengers. But I always loved it and the engine purred like a kitten.

My first stop was Mildura in Victoria's far northwest. I am sure that there was some point to Mildura's existence-it sat astride the confluence of Australia's two greatest rivers-but after almost nine hours driving, including the white line nightmare inducing Hay Plain, it was an oasis in an increasingly bleak and scrubby landscape. The people of Mildura might take offence, but I grew up in the hilly and lush surroundings of the National Capital. And while Canberra cannot compare to the verdant views of northern European or North American capitals that we Australians foolishly continuously compare ourselves, next to Mildura, Canberra might well be in the Amazon.

After a night's rest in a surprisingly comfy motel, I continued my way more or less directly west, following the line of the Murray River. It wasn't till much later that I reflected that at 30,000 people, Mildura was the biggest town I saw until I reached Perth, some 3000km away.

Near Renmark in South Australia, I had to pause at a border crossing point and throw out all my fruit and nuts. It may seem crazy, to the outsider, that in a liberal democracy like Australia, customs officials could pull your car apart in order to find an apple. But Australia's wealth is largely derived from agriculture, and we take quarantine and pests seriously in our various food bowls. These custom officials were not the submachine gun wielding paramilitaries you find in many other places around the globe, but rather glorified public servants in jackboots.

I had to decide then whether I followed the main highway and veered to the south toward Adelaide and civilization. Adelaide cops a lot of teasing from the rest of Australia. It has neither the size nor attractions of the other capital cities, nor the far away mystic of Perth or Darwin. It is a sort of nothing city. But some of the world's finest vineyards surrounded it, so I don't think the city's inhabitants cared much about what the rest of the country thought about them.

The other option was to follow the line north of the Murray and head directly towards Port Augusta. It was a more rural route on lessor roads but the time I would save by-passing Adelaide was enormous. In my younger years, I rarely took the time to see the sights, always focusing on my destination. I would get to where I wanted to go fast, but I missed many opportunities as well.

I headed across mostly pastoral land for several hours until I finally came down toward the coastal plain on the Spencer Gulf at Port Pirie. I pulled in to the town to refuel and buy a late lunch. Taking in the sights, I swore to myself that if fate ever landed me in Port Pirie permanently, the smartest thing to do would be to end my life. An industrial wasteland on a flat and dry coastline, the city's major employer, was the lead smelter. The discovery of rich ore bearing silver, lead and zinc at Broken Hill, lead to building a railway from Port Pirie in 1888. In 1889, they built a lead smelter to treat the Broken Hill ore. And nothing much has changed since.

The best part of reaching the coast, however, was that I was now back on the main highway, A1, Australia's highway number one. The improved road meant that it was less than one hour to my rest spot that night in Port Augusta. While still not halfway, Port Augusta was the literal crossroad of the country. From there, the road stretched as far east or west as you could drive on the mainland. As well, it was the only point where you could also drive straight north to Ayers Rock and on to Darwin via the dead heart of the continent.

The next day, I had a shorter five-hour drive through the wheat belt of the south and on to Ceduna. The landscape appeared cropped, but one could feel the weight of the deserts to the north pressing down upon them. Cropland would sporadically break into semi-desert and emus and kangaroos seemed to hide behind every bush. I say hide, but they didn't really, they just stood and stared. While an emu has an actual bird brain, they seemed to be much smarter than your average roo. Kangaroos have a propensity to leap into oncoming traffic for no reason and with no warning. Most cars not fitted with a bullbar usually lose to such an encounter.

At Ceduna, I rested for the night. After three days driving I had come 1800km on mostly rural roads. The car was still going strong, but my back was aching, bum numb, leg cramped, and I was tired of listening to the same CDs over and over. Behind me was 95% of the nation's population and almost of the all the infrastructure and roads. But the true horror before me was that I was not yet halfway to Perth. I could have turned back, but that meant that I would have wasted six days of my life and have nothing to show for it.

Ceduna was the last population centre of note for the next 1200km. Ahead of me was Norseman in far-off Western Australia and finally, between them both, the Nullarbor.

It might sound like the Nullarbor Plain is something to be feared, like a Hollywood dystopian wasteland beset with mohawked marauders intent on stealing your gasoline and hubcaps. If I was walking it in summer, then the crossing may have been perilous, but I was driving a car on a tarmacked road at speeds that would have gotten me thrown in gaol in most parts of the world. There may have been 12 hours of hard driving to Norseman ahead, but there were pockets of civilization all along that route. They consisted mostly of roadhouses. In Australia, roadhouses were typically rest areas for both truckers and the average traveller to refuel (both their vehicles and themselves) before continuing on their way. Depending on how remote the area was, some roadhouses also included accommodation after a fashion.

But I wasn't interested in stopping if I could at all help it. Now that I was at the halfway point, every mile I could cover was one less I had to do later. I calculated that I would have to stop at least twice, given the distance and the size of my fuel tank, but any more than that, and I would count my day as a failure.

So at 6 am on the fourth day with the sun not yet up, I pulled out of my motel park and drove. Early morning drives are not without their charm, but in outback Australia they have their dangers too. The first of which are the aforementioned kangaroos. They have an inclination to gather near the edge of roads at dawn and dusk, then leap onto the road at the last minute. If they are not doing that, then they enjoy lying down on the heated tarmac overnight, especially in the winter months. The other danger was livestock doing the same. Fences in the more remote parts of Australia are often non-existent and a collision with a cow at high speed will end you and your world.

Luckily for me, I encountered neither that day, though I got some sideways glances from some evil-looking roos as the sun rose. The next greatest danger on outback highways were the legendary road trains; extra-long semi-trailer trucks often towing two or more additional trailers. Getting stuck behind one could frustrate and also stink if it was carrying cattle.

But the real danger was in overtaking. The roads were straight as an arrow, but the extra length of a train meant that overtaking took more time and keen eyes on the road ahead. Most truck drivers would signal you when they thought it was safe for you to pass, but if they didn't know were behind and you pulled out into the right-hand lane, you were on your own. Mostly this was ok, but because of the high speeds on the open roads oncoming traffic would be on you in a heartbeat, with the road train's length blocking all shelter, you had to pray that both parties braked in time. Personally, I like to overtake trucks while pretending that I was a WWII German fighter pilot strafing a B-17, so crashing into an oncoming car was a genuine chance. But I have keen eyes and a lead foot so who dares wins was my creedo.

Despite a brief break near the Western Australia border to look at the 90 metre cliffs plunging down to the Great Australian Bight, the rest of the journey that day was a monotonous hell. The only thing that kept me going other than the realisation that it was now further back home than it was to my destination was the discovery of how to drive long distances comfortably. With my back aching and my arms tired from holding the wheel after the fourth hour on the fourth day, I longed for a co-driver and a lie down. With neither possible, I reclined my chair as far back as I could and still see the road. Next, I slid my chair forward to where I could still reach the wheel. With my head cradled on the rest behind me, I was more or less fully supported, my back now mostly at rest. I couldn't turn my head, so I used my mirrors to look for danger. Though I had limited vision, no one was likely to overtake me at the speed I was going. I then had a comfy position and as long as my foot stayed on the pedal, the car almost drove itself. But even that wasn't enough to save me from reality and by the time I pulled into Norseman at 7pm that night; wreaked.