Text: Roma to Charleville with Nick Cave
So here's my recommendation for Day 4 of a steam train writer's tour: the night before, order from Room Service a massive plate of steamed green vegetables with just a little salt and pepper and some melted butter. I slept like a baby and today I feel a hundred years younger. Which is a good thing, because today's the longest we'll spend on the steam train - 10am to 5.30pm - and our schedule dictates that we go straight from the train to the gig.
Kim's lovely young son is doing his maths homework.
'What's the word for a shape with 12 edges?' asks Kim.
'Dodecahedron,' says Kate. 'We're in Muckadilla. Bongo shortly.'
'When we stopped at Mungallala 19 years ago,' says Nick, 'we were met by a woman with a perfectly coiffed hairdo who ran the local hotel. She took us to see it, it was a themed B & B. There was a bridal suite, a Barbie room.'
Apart from a sorry lack of cake, we had a fantastic time at the Roma reading last night. My wonderful colleagues smile in their seats from behind the table at the front of the room, as if it's the first time they've heard my poem 'Soundcheck' and my Viggo story. They chuckle and smile. Nick ramps it up by pulling out a couple of completely new stories, and his story of the young twins who followed their every gig on the original writer's train in 1990 took a sensational twist when one of the twins turned up to hear the reading.
This morning on the platform there was a gentile white marquee set up under which two women stood giving away homebaking. I said giving away, people. I grabbed - or rather, gently accepted - a superb and sizeable piece of chocolate slice that rivalled my mother's. It had mint essence! I also gently accepted two pikelets and a cup of complementary instant coffee. By the time I'd boarded the train I was feeling extremely well-hosted.
In fact, as Kate and I were saying this morning, there's such massive goodwill for this train that whenever we arrive somewhere I feel deeply and utterly loved.
'Wa-hey! Welcome!' the spectators shout as we pull into the platform, their children hoisted on their shoulders or hips, flags a blur of red, gold and blue.
'This is what the Queen must feel like,' says Kate.
The landscape out the windows is changing the trees are getting sparser, giving way to more scrub and black soil patches. Today my partner Christine arrives in Brisbane - she'll be waiting for me when I get back to the city tomorrow. It'll be superb to see her. Tonight's our last reading in Charleville. It's so strange to think that it'll only take me a couple of hours in the air to travel a distance that's taken us four days on this train, stops notwithstanding.
*
'Did you hear about what one of the women on the train was saying?' said Prue, our stalwart Q150 supporter who, along with Sarah, has been driving ahead of the train through the whole journey meeting us at every stop to make sure all is well.
'She leaned over to me at the platform as she was getting on and said "Did you hear Nick Cave's on the train?" Ha ha!!' We all threw our heads back and laughed - I can't really think of anyone less like Nick Cave than the actual Nick we do have on the train, Nick Earls.
'Perhaps hijacking the train...' I said.
Reading through the notes I made on the train yesterday is quite the challenge, as it was one of the bumpier rides. Certain words and phrases stand out from the surrounding red scrawl:
add galloping to the horse
escapes on this bridge are not points of safety
where weed seeds can hide
noise cancelling headphones
The guy sitting in the opposite seating bay to me is talking about how twenty years ago he and his mates used to ride the goods trains out west.
'They'd add a coupla red rattlers on the back for ya,' he says. 'You'd just jump on, drink rum the whole way, it'd take at least 10 hours to get anywhere. When we arrived it was so hot we'd strip all our clothes off and they had those huge water tanks. The locals'd never seen a naked body before, obviously.'
The last gig at Charleville couldn't have gone better. Huge crowd of smiling locals who fed us beautifully (check out Nick Earl's infamous 'Cheeseball Blog') and laughed at all our jokes (they, unlike us and our fellow panelists, had never heard them before).
A highlight this morning was the Mayor, Mark O'Brien, visiting us while we waited out a few hours at the local library. As well as being the local robe-wearing boss guy, Mark is a songwriter - he's released several cd's as a soloist and toured with a band to Ireland a couple of times. He still plays with a local bush band. He arrived at the library with a sheet of paper on which he'd printed out a poem he'd written - it's a really good poem, about a recent trip to New York.
Apart from Invercargill, I don't think I've heard of another place with such a well-credentialled mayor.
We're flying back to Brisbane in a matter of hours. Christine will be waiting for me at the Judith Wright Centre, and it'll be really fantastic to see her. Two months is a long time away from her. Tonight won't be about reunions however, it'll be about me flying in the door and into my soundcheck, heading upstairs to get changed and eat something and then going onstage to open the Queensland Poetry Festival. It's so odd to think that this morning, I wandered about among the black soil and the sand, waving at a local wallaby, and tonight I'll be sampling into a digital looping pedal and pressing the flesh.
All in the name of poetry.
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4 comments
26.08.09 — Hinemoana Baker
Hi GB! Yeh, it was slow but it didn't feel too slow, if you know what I mean. It kinda felt like the fastest you'd want a train that old to go, ha! QPF was a total blast, I must say. Sorry to miss you there, but thanks heaps for your interest and for reading the blog.
21.08.09 — Waynes Word on Web
While not trying to be pedantic, I thought you might like to know, a dodecahedron is a twelve side solid with thirty edges. A cube has six sides or faces and twelve edges, just in case it's important,to the boy. Other than that, keep up the good work.
WWW
21.08.09 — Andrew Davies
Hi Hineomoana,
Loved this! A big thankyou for sharing some of your journey with us on Pool. Sounds like you've had a great trip.
Andrew, Pool Team
21.08.09 — GB
Gee that train must go slow. Sounds like you enjoyed the trip - though it must be very tiring. Rural people are very generous with their time and also great cake/slice makers (well most of them). What a hoot about Nick Cave - no, Nick Earls is certainly no Nick Cave (no offense Nick - both of you). Enjoy the poetry festival (I would have loved to have gone but live too far away and someone has to feed the children).