Lingering Legacies

The day before leaving for the trip North I had found a snail while clipping the edges of the lawn. I had brought it inside to see if I could get a nice time lapse video, but it wasn’t until night fell that the little guy finally came out of his shell and I was able to get some great shots.

Then the morning before we left, the neighbors cows had been put into my back paddock without permission and so I had promptly opened the gate and let them wander out. (The paddock gate would be left open as a rule afterward so as to discourage a second attempt by said neighbor). As a result, by mid morning the cows were happily munching grass on the front lawn, until their bumbling owner finally showed up and drove them back into their own paddock. I may one day write a post about this man. How do I even begin to explain him? Imagine if the the movie Deliverance had been sanitized and produced as an episode of Green Acres; this guy would’ve been one of the characters. The only thing missing is his making ‘Barney’ noises as he stumbles from one absurd mishap into the next.

But now let’s return to the Longreach trip, where we had just departed the Dinosaur Museum.

We journeyed into downtown Winton, population 875, to visit the Waltzing Matilda Center, even though we wouldn’t have time to actually go through. The most we got to do was poke our heads in for a few minutes before leaving. If you don’t know, “Waltzing Matilda” is one of Australia’s most beloved and iconic songs. It was written by a man named Banjo Patterson in 1895 and was based on an existing, but obscure melody. The song itself really deserves its own entry, because there are so many different stories relating to how it came to us in its current form, and so much terminology to decipher.

It’s peppered with a number of uniquely Australian words and expressions such as ‘jumbuck’ (sheep) and ‘billy’ (a can for boiling tea). ‘Waltzing’ is slang for traveling from place to place working and learning new trades, while a ‘matlida’ is a swag carried on one’s back. The song is, in short, about an itinerant worker who camps at a billabong and boils some tea before a jumbuck appears and he kills it to eat. The sheep’s owner and three policemen arrive, but the swagman drowns himself in the billabong to escape justice. His ghost thereafter haunts the spot. As morbid as the subject matter sounds, it’s actually quite a jaunty, fun song to sing along to. It’s very nearly the national anthem of the country and absolutely synonymous with it, so much so that Slim Dusty’s rendition of the song was actually broadcast from space during Space Shuttle Columbia’s fist mission in 1981 as the craft sailed over Australia.

Located on the main drag, the Waltzing Matilda Center was devoted to Banjo Patterson and his work. In the front of the building a statue of the man proudly presided over a stretch of sidewalk with the song’s lyrics etched into it. We ended up not going through, in part because they were soon to close and in part because I didn’t feel like paying the $32 entrance fee. (Work had grown scarce for me at that point in time and money had gotten to be a worry.) So we just poked in for a quick look around and then left. 

One of the theories for the origin of Waltzing Matilda was an incident that occurred during the Great Shearers Strike of 1891, where wool workers banded together to protest poor working conditions. This incident actually segues us nicely from the Matilda Center to another local landmark. During 1891 there was a particular tree that served as the meeting place for the strike leaders and it was at this tree that the Australian Labor Party was essentially born. It was called ‘The Tree of Knowledge’ because Aboriginal men had long gathered around the tree to exchange news, discuss vital issues, and make important decisions. As a result this Ghost Gum tree had great historical significance not just for locals, but also for many workers country-wide as the birthplace of organized labor. It had nobly sat at the center of town for many long decades.

Unfortunately some disgruntled person poisoned and killed the tree in 2006, and it was immediately decided that a fitting memorial was needed. So an architect got to work designing and building a structure that would incorporate the dead trunk into a sculpture that sought to evoke the grandeur of the old Gum while also recreating the leaf canopy. This may have been a fine sentiment in theory, the actual structure was, in actuality, extremely ugly and kind of an eye sore. While the inside was actually fairly interesting and has a unique kind of beauty to it, the outside did little to draw people in, and instead evoked a dystopian, Borg invasion more than anything.

Our final stop before leaving was to visit a small shack on the edge of town. It had once belonged to a Chinese man by the name of Willie Mar. He had sold fruits and vegetables here for as long as most locals could recall, but he had died in 2007. Peter and Carolyn had often called on him and tried their best to have studies and discussions with him despite his limited English. Willie had nonetheless shown interest, even though he never got baptized. Next to the ramshackle shed from which he had sold his wares was another which still contained his well known and antiquated ute. The town has since turned his former home into a heritage site for the purpose of preserving his memory. It was clear that Peter also held his memories of the man dear as he poked around the sheds for a few minutes reminiscing.

We then made the long trek back to Longreach. Along the way we passed a sign advertising ‘The Crocodile Dundee Pub’, actually The Walkabout Creek Hotel, though it was in fact used for the opening scenes of the movie when we first meet Mick. It looked like something worth checking out, but it would have been a further two hours North from where we were and we already had a two hour trip back to Longreach, so it was a logistical impossibility.

Honestly, the scale of things here is absurd. I used to complain about having to drive the forty five minutes to work in North Olmsted each day, but people here routinely drive two hours to go shopping and don’t bat an eye. I once had a friend drive an hour South to pick me up at the house, then drive us two hours North to see a movie, then drive two hours South again to drop me off, before finally driving another hour to go back home. All of this without a single complaint. But this also means that when a sign appears advertising an attraction that must surely be a mile or two away, it is in fact two hours away.

The evening concluded with yet another serving of fish and chips along with a side order of back-to-back episodes of Seinfeld. (I honestly forgot how much I missed watching that show).

The next day we were tentatively supposed to drive to a place called Captain Starlight’s Lookout to hopefully get a great shot from a high vantage point of the outback stretching off into the distance. It was the one picture I had been hoping to get on my trip to Australia and this was probably the only time I would be close enough to the outback to ever actually see it. However the fact that much of the road we would need to traverse was dirt, paired with the fact that there was rain reported in the area, meant that the chances of the road being passable were not very good. But I continued to hold out hope nonetheless.

All I could do was wait and hope for the best, so I cranked the a/c and went to bed. But in sleep, what dreams may come…