Coming Up For Air at Picnic Bay: Legs

Roma St. Station, Brisbane

Melbourne to Brisbane: Easy but EARLY!

The flight to Brisbane was at 8 a.m. That meant getting to the airport between 7.00 and 7.30 for a domestic shuttle. That meant getting a Skybus to the port between 6.00 and 6.30 and that meant being ready for a tram between 5.00 and 5.30 to make sure everything kind of joined. So that's a 4.30 to 5.00 a.m. wake up with everything packed and ready for the tram/bus/plane.

And there's something else. It's still spring in Melbourne which can mean that it's either warm in the morning or Antarctic. Today it's Antarctic. But I'm going to spend a day in Brisbane and then the better part of two more in the even hotter north. There will be no luggage room for jackets. So a shirt over a T-shirt will have to get me through the 9 degree morning to Tullamarine.

I'm organised. Everything joins. Before I can yawn I'm putting my densely packed case on the Skybus rack and going to the top deck to doze to a podcast. Advantage: early morning sounds tough but the tram was almost empty and the typical mass of people to stop movement at the Southern Cross Station stop was a trickle. No suitcase blues for this merry trekker. The Skybus, also, was only about half full and the roads were not jammed. It was a record sprint for the ol' double decker. I got to the terminal and headed air-side with my luggage as carry-on.

Like a twit I'd packed my laptop in the case when experience should have warned me to keep it exposed through security. But apart from a slight protest bother from the staff (blameless, really) I got through and found my gate without drama. Eat on the plane. There was an announcement at the gate about the plane being burdened with carry-on luggage so I surrendered mine to be stowed to Brisbane without a qualm, making a note to check it in for the return double flight.

Took my aisle and was pleased to find that there would  be a gap of a seat between me and my fellow in the row (young woman in business kit). I turned on a cruddy horror flick and waited for Brisbane.

Friend and sometime collaborator Noel turned up at Brisbane airport after a few sloppy attempts by me to start a video blog of my travels and we caught up in a long and enjoyable drive and stroll through inner Brisbane. Brisbane is leafy in the middle (well, leafier than it used to be) and the barramundi 'n' chips 'n' salad at the Breafast Creek is a treat, washed down with original (or "heavy") XXXX.







Brisbane to Townsville: FAMILIAR BUT SPOOOOKY

The Spirit of Queensland replaced the old Sunlander between Brisbane and Cairns. It took ages and now takes ages minus a few hours.

Anyway, I wanted this to slow me down. Flying straight to Townsville would have been too much of a shock. I needed to de-pressurise, the same way I'd go from a busy student life in Brisbane back to Townsville for the holidays. You cannot rush anything on a train.

No more sleeper cabins in the trains o' today so I booked a railbed which is like the cryogenic pods that business class passengers get on Qantas. Very comfy with table service and a kind of steampunk transformation at bedtime.

This is mine in its pyjamas. For most of the day it's more like an extended seat with a hood. If interested, the usb slot won't charge anything higher than an old Motorola so you'll have to use the three-prong in the other chair arm. Do I really have to keep everything charged to 100% all the time? No, but Queensland Rail measure everything north of Rockhampton in light years so you might want to work out your battery usage or just charge things when you can.


Nevertheless, this made for pleasant travel and slumber was not a problem. Mostly. At one point my phone slipped out of my hand and fell between the wall and the arm of the chair. There was no light and it was about 2 a.m. so I wasn't going to bluster around with peacefully sleeping people across the aisle and in the seat in front. So, I tried to reason that I'd be able to get it by the light o' the morning and, with nothing to be done about it now, that I should just lie back and try to dream. But I kept thinking up ideas about how to get it back.




Eventually .... I realised I could use the light of my laptop to work out where the phone had fallen. Some further delirious reasoning allowed me to try the laminated menu to push the thing to a reachable position and there. I was once again among the living and effective of the world.

The first I took on getting the phone back was this shed just outside of the northern town of Paget. That's the first time I've typed it and only knew of it when I checked the exif data on my phone.

Bundaberg  Station. As we passed through I texted my Brother Greg who moved there. He was shocked to discover I was going back to Townsville and warned me about the street crime. In my pre-dawn unslept wooze I googled the issue and almost cancelled my plans to swing by the old house. A brief nap cleared that and I resolved to proceed but with wile. (Details next post.)

 Dawn outside Paget.

My phone camera scruples not to shut its eyes where looking at the sun. Here, then, is the sun rising o'er what always appears to be one single canefield thousands of kilometres long. This is outside Myrtlevale.

Not a classic Queenslander but a style of house I enjoy seeing. Non-Queensland or international readers might need to know that the twin purpose of building houses on stilts in the Sunshine State is against flooding and to promote airflow. Whether either reason applies the design can bee seen from The NSW border to the tip of Cape York (actually, I don't know that that's true it just sounds mighty when I imagine being spoken in an old filler documentary form the 1960s). Still, love seeing houses and yards like this. This is, of course, nostalgia which is my foe for this project but this instance no more gets in the way than the singular odour of Bundy rum and cola. Anyway...



But until I could take those, while I was still drifting between sleep and panic, I lay back in an attempted nap and experienced something long forgotten.

Trains scream. They scream with a quiet persistence. They whisper scuttlebutt like workers overdrawn and raving. They growl beneath the breath of the air con, the real message to these bloated and uncaring things that command their work. They shriek beneath the cooling breath we sleepers gratefully ignore. None of this is noticeable when beams of sunlight course through the windows. It only sounds when those of us like me who can never sleep soundly in unknown beds are forced to. And once you have heard it, the scream of the train, awake when all around you are silenced by unconsciousness, dreaming, exhausted and blank or sleeping off the chaos of the club car, once you understand the pain of the long distance locomotive you too bear it, you too walk in the acoustic shadow of its scream.

The stress of metal under weight at speed and the big black night beyond came into my head like it was 1981 all over again and I was hurtling exhausted back home from exams to lazy afternoons, gin and tonic, and the refreshment of fine new faces. Well that last bit wasn't going to happen but it was pleasant to hear as I bumped my skull on the overhead compartment the gent across the aisle say in sympathy: "I felt that." I smiled back and said, "so did I."

That guy puzzled me, too. In the railbed beside him was a woman in her thirties at the latest and he was easily in his sixties. She read, mostly or isolated herself with earbuds. Whatever hold he had on her was strong: if she got up for a leg stretch or a loo break she always came back. I had to admit, as I imagined her standing at the carriage door and gazing out the window,  that jumping from trains only happened in movies. Later, when the staff came through to convert the seats into their bed form and put all the sheets 'n' stuff on. She darted in front of him, held her phone at arm's length, aiming it for composition and took a selfie with a serious expression.

He was on the train at the insistence of his daughter (all the clear evidence of my eyes and reason could not trump my goofy, unfounded fancy) who pointed out that this was a line he hadn't yet been on. He enjoyed train travel and this trek was being done in honour of a late friend who had taken many journeys with him when they were both soldiers. It was a warming story (better than the bullshit one I'd come up with) and he was clearly glad to be pulled from retirement drudgery in Sydney to chugulug through the thickening tropics.

We were to come in handy for each other. The guy in the seat behind them, a frizzy ginger mountain who sat in one of the pair of railbeds he'd booked while he took the other over with gadgetry. Most of the time we heard little more out of his than a few squeaks and farty rattles from the video game he was playing. He came back from the Club Car agitated, ranting to himself about how whingeing poms had nothing on whingeing Australians. He talked in circles but they got wider as more spokes were added to the wheel and the looping tale went spinning.

I think he'd gone to the Club Car and kept playing his video games loudly (partial deafness) on his tablet and when asked to turn it down or off refused. I say refused but what I think it was was more like recoiled in anger. He kept coming back to the staff member who'd insisted he comply and it was there that the escalation took force and swelled to critical mass. He had seen the woman before take a negative interest in him on other trips. It was because ... well, he had other issues as well but I've violated his privacy enough. I'll just stick to what I know.

Storming back to his railbed, he started his rant. HIs accent was a broadened northern but his diction was clipped and his phrasing precise. However much he harangued the light and air around him he didn't swear once (which is more than I could say for myself faced with the same humiliation) At no time, however loud and punchy his ranting got, did he threaten anyone around him.

I remember these points particularly because when he was evicted from the train at the next town the local cops came and asked us about it and we (me and the father/daughter team) witnessed his ranting but made sure they knew he wasn't an on-rail security procedure. The police were fine. They even seemed a little embarrassed at the vehemence of the train staffer who'd called them and quite happily joined in a discussion that somehow arose from this about Italian families in the north. I volunteered that my paternal grans had been cane farmers around Ingham which was by now pretty much an Italian town. The cops went on their way after taking our details and were never heard of again. Well, they would have been but they didn't need to follow anything up so I'm assuming it worked out. Perhaps I should say "hoping".



At that point we were approaching Townsville. The glare was already mighty at 8 a.m. and the heat almost penetrated the double windows.

The purpose of this leg was to see if it sparked memories and what might they be. Did this feel like coming home after a year at uni? No. I enjoyed the general experience, the slowdown of travel, the sounds and the refreshed landscape speeding past my window but at no time did I mistake this for the same journey made decades ago. The train was new and faster but it still felt like a long ride. I was temporarily escaping being busy (work rather than study but still). But there was no finale to it. My parents have both gone for around a decade and even if they were alive, they sold the Aitkenvale place in the '90s to move to Brisbane. I had no intention of seeking out anyone I knew from the time. I was heading for a city I only knew as a younger person with a head and nervous system alive with different sensations and values. The city I would find might have some physical familiarity but it might as well be like going somewhere I had never been. Truly, perhaps, this was walking in my past free of nostalgia.

The station has been moved from Flinders Street to the place in the photo. Made no difference to my plans but I do miss the old colonial era architecture of the original station. Townsville has no domestic rail services, just industrial or government/commerical like the train in the pic; as far as the rail is concerned it's a longer than usual stop on the way to Cairns. Shrugging at that, and waving off my unplanned travel companions I made my way from the station (with enough 50+ sunscreen to look pornographic) and found a bus route that would take me to both my old home and the ferry to the Island. Felt good.

And how did it go? Next time on ... Coming Up for Air  ... at Picnic Bay...