The Morning of The Earth farmhouse, circa 2000. Photo: Barlo
“WE COULD begin with desertorum, common name Hooked Mallee. Its leaf tapers into a slender hook, and is normally found in semi-arid parts of the interior. But desertorum (to begin with) is only one of several hundred eucalypts; there is no precise number. And anyway the very word, desert-or-um, harks back to a stale version of the national landscape and from there in a more or less straight line onto the national character, all those linings of the soul and the larynx, which have their origins in the bush, so it is said, the poetic virtues (can you believe it?) of being belted about by droughts, bushfires, smelly sheep and so on; and let’s not forget the isolation, the exhausted shapeless women, the crude language, the always wide horizon, and the flies.”
—Murray Bail, Eucalyptus
Driving out of Yamba the next morning, using a crude but detailed map drawn on the back of a Yamba Bowls Club beer coaster, I tracked down Baddy’s old canefield farmhouse. Baddy, one of the stars of Morning of the Earth, was shown on the back porch of the house sanding out his new board, sans mask, before tackling an perfect empty day at Angourie in 1970.
The film, released shortly after John Severson’s opus, “Pacific Vibrations” had a profound influence on my surfing life, which is to say, my life. Falzon’s idyllic look at the surfing life, as naïve and illusory as it probably was, set the hook deep in me when I saw the film for the first time in the late 1970s. The shots of Nat and Baddy and Stephen Cooney down on the farm, feeding the chickens, smoking pot, eating organic and surfing tons of empty warm green point waves, was heartbreaking to a young seppo kook raised on crowded cold urban beaches of Southern California.
Last night in the bowls club, Baddy, who lives with walking distance of Angourie these days, reminisced about his time on the farm. He rented for next to nothing and was able to make a bit of coin fishing when the waves were down. One of his roommates was dealing a lot of mul at the time and the NSW drug squad decided to make a big bust one night. Baddy had been tipped off, so by the time a small army of flashing cop Holdens rolled up the long dirt track Baddy and the rest of the house were out in the canefields giggling as the police stood around scratching their asses.
I turned the corner and there it was: a small two-bedroom plantation house, probably built for the workers, painted white with a graceful molded red-tin roof that capped it like a mushroom.
But as walked up the track I could see it sagged like an old broken mule. It had been condemned and looked ready to fall in on itself. The verandah was busted up and strewn about; the pale green door torn off its rusty hinges and lying flat in the debris-cluttered hall. Most of the small windows were victims of a vandal’s bored stone throwing. Ferals had reportedly been crashing there but today there was no sign of anybody about. A mattress, Tooheys cans, a pile of sodden clothes, a crumbling brick fireplace.
But to me seeing this sad broken little house was like making a pilgrimage the log cabin Abe Lincoln was born in. I paused a minute, walked on same floorboards that Baddy and Albe had trod over 30 years ago.
A haunted little wind made the canefields sigh and tugged like a child’s ghost at my sleeve. Ghost of a small dream.
The highway is under heavy construction, with frequent delays due to the road duplication from the Queensland border to Sydney. Tearing up a lot of gumtree forest to do it by the looks of it.
Yesterday I drove through the Clarence River floodplain—land of milk and honey. Fields of corn, cows, sorghum, sugar and truck farms of all sizes selling fresh tomatoes and apple bananas. The highway roughly traced the contours of the Clarence river on its meandering cruise to the Pacific. I stopped at Oldie’s cafe in Ulmurra for lunch. Fish and chips with a steak and mushroom pie for the road. The fish was good—freshly caught hake lightly battered and served sizzling hot with homemade chips fried in the same grease.
Went through Grafton—a sizeable country burg sporting a large array of multinational gulp and blows—BP, MacDonalds, Mobil, Cal Tex. Passed many rivers, cane fields and tin-roofed plantation houses. Cows everywhere; a soft sultry landscape reminiscent of Indonesia.
I slept last night in a thin-mattress motel in Sawtelle. Pulled into town at sunset and drove out the headland overlooking Sawtelle beach. There was this headland left wedging off the rocks and dumping hard over a sandbar that had built up on the inside beach. A crew of bodyboarders attacked it.
This morning I’m headed south again. Getting antsy to put some kilometers under me and get to Sydney soon. Been almost three weeks now. A highway sign exhorts me not to get bored and sleepy on the long treks down to Sydney. “Stop…Revive…Survive.” There’s a shot of a gravestone with the caption: “There’s no such thing as safe speeding.”
I know there’s an ocean over there, possibly some decent surf, but the gum-tree forest along this stretch seems enigmatic and hostile. I read somewhere there were over 500 varieties of eucalypti. Amazing. There are gum trees here so old and massive that the aboriginals worship them as ancient beings. In California we use them for cheap landscaping. When lit, they explode like Roman candles and when their large brittle limbs break off and kill a tourist there’s always a call to uproot the aggressive botanical invaders once and for all. But I’ve always loved their shade and antiseptic smell.
Note: Just saw an aging go-go bondage queen in a blue minidress and black leather calf boots swagger across the highway. An Australian eucalypt elf perhaps?
Old faded road sign reads: “Woolgoolga–the missing piece of paradise…”
David "Baddy" Trealor, Yamba farmhouse, Circa 1970. Photo: Barlo
