Broome, WA
‘A Long Way from Home’
Luther Fox, the central character in Tim Winton’s 2001 novel – Dirt Music – turns up in Broome, WA, in the company of a decrepit pair of grey nomads, Horrie and Bess, who’re towing a rundown caravan behind a clapped out Nissan Patrol. A holiday destination for thousands, the peninsula town built on Roebuck Bay is anything but that for Luther. Bess has incurable bowel cancer and wants to go out with a bang by experiencing the raw power of Nature – a cyclone – on a run to the wire through the Kimberley Wet. The old boilers have adopted Luther but he’s had his fill. To top it off, their tinny tape-player is assaulting him with Prokofiev and Shostakovich when what he wants is dirt music – stuff that comes out of the ground and might be played on the back porch or around a campfire.
Dirt music is the natural expression of the Fox clan. Through it they express raw human emotion which disturbs the middle class preference for respectability and good mannered behaviour – the thin veneer of civilisation that covers visceral instinct, scrubbed surface, politeness which came of the polishing of coins passed from hand to hand in middle-class commerce such as that which lined the pockets of Shover McDougall and Jim Buckridge. Dirt music – deceptively simple songs as performed by Son House, Mississippi Fred MacDowell, Sleepy John Estes, Dock Boggs and countless other unpolished bluesmen – comes closest to the animal instinct about which Bess sought to engage Luther’s interest.
Bess and Horrie are atypical caravaners, the Nissan Patrol boiling over with fan belt trouble as did the Holdens of days gone by. Typical caravaners head south in 170 horsepower vehicles with a mobile holiday home in tow, pulling in for diesel (and to enquire whether or not their fellow travellers obtained near as good a fuel economy as them) at roadhouses on the Great Northern Highway. A young gold miner dressed to the nines in the standard corporate uniform (logo – de rigueur) with whom Luther Fox spoke thought the nomads pathetic superannuated road hogs following the leader around the coastal strip. Luther Fox’s motto is ‘neither a nomad nor a caravaner be’; he has to take up residence, engage in the routines of a place.
The disgruntled mine employee was describing the clockwise retiree. Those heading south at that truckstop were the anti-clockwise variety. Bess and Horrie were out of season clockwise travellers, kindred spirits with Luther Fox but out of sync, of another time – overtaken. Horrie regularly pulls off the bitumen in order for Bess to deal with the discomfort of a dysfunctional bowel. Fox feels trapped: her discomfit and his classical music are enough to drive a man to drink. So when Horrie put the hard word on him to hang out with them once they hit Broome Luther’s in a cleft stick situation: he needs the Nissan to transport him through the black night across the Roebuck Plain but the first glimmer of town lights is the signal to flee.
The lights had come with the shopping centres and houses when Broome had been dolled-up by property ‘developers’.
‘Dirt Music’
Crass traders had taken the place of Cable Beach hippies. Historic Chinatown had been expanded, ‘improved’, the pearl industry gentrified.
I walked through Chinatown (or ‘Japtown’ as it had been known) in 2017 and called to a Dampier Terrace pub. Somewhat out of place amongst the high-viz clientele I was struck by the degree to which the woman who pulled the beer was overdressed, even for a bar manager. Perhaps I should have noticed, sooner, that the bar staff were dressed in lingerie and exaggeratedly flouting their bums, tits and crotches in all manner of ludicrous ‘come-ons’? Burlesque, yes; but this was like being an extra in an excessively crude porn movie scene. Some of the women, those with cash tucked in their panties in the main, posed as if acting on instruction to be as silly as a wheel.
It turned out that I’d been in the Roebuck Bay Hotel where Willie Bachhuber had been taken aback by a priapic peacock in Peter Carey’s A Long Way from Home. The type of hotel Drysdale used paint, Willie thought, increasingly ill at ease under the gaze of other patrons. He walked out into an alley and was even more disturbed by the effect his approach had on the Orientals who were there. He couldn’t read the signs.
Did Carey book a room in Shibalane apartments near the Roebuck Bay Hotel? As for what Sheba Alley might have been in 1954 when Irene Bob’s forlorn navigator in the Redex trial wandered through, presumably it was where blokes went to find women like those who nowadays tuck cash in their panties?
Within an hour of the Nissan Patrol’s arrival in Broome, a cyclone from the Timor Sea touched land and the Roebuck Plain was flooded. Dirt from the Great Sandy Desert painted the town red and was swept down through the mangroves to wash over the shore.
HMS Roebuck was the name of the leaky ship in which William Dampier explored the Western Australian coast in 1699.
From Chapter 21 (Willare to Carnarvon, WA) of the ebook.
