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Excerpt from Buntine Chapter

Bongos and Drongos

 

The first two trips with No.1 were Co-Ord freight to Darwin. A fair bit had to happen before I could load, beginning with removing the cattle crate with the yard crane. Next was a short drive up the hill to Centralian Industries’ quarry – our ballast provider – for their loader to scrape the four tons of ballast from the deck. After hosing off the cleared deck, I spent a couple of hours scrubbing three years of accumulated grime from the back of the sleeper. Finally ready to go, I headed down to the railyard to load various containers and motor vehicles for onward transport to Darwin. All this was achieved with considerable assistance and much valuable advice from Ian (Bully) Ashwood, longtime Buntine man and Territory Legend in his own right.

 

On the return leg of the second trip, at about 1am, I was about halfway between Katherine and Mataranka. As I crested a rise and my lights came down to the road again, I saw what appeared to be a large dead kangaroo right in the middle of the road, about 30 metres in front of me. At the same time as I spotted the ‘roo, the damned thing started to stand up! Only it wasn’t a ‘roo, but a scruffy, and most likely drunk, blackfella.

 

Meanwhile, I’m hurtling forward at 75kph. From the driver’s seat of an R model, you can’t see anything closer than 6m from the bull bar. Bloke disappears! At the same instant I wrench the wheel around to the right. (One of the first things you should know about road trains is you don’t go around swerving to avoid objects lying on the road; it can end badly.) I’m down in the righthand water table, with dust, rocks and two empty 40ft dog trailers flying around; I take a quick look out the lefthand window, wondering what’s become of the small vehicle that had been following me. There it is, a little due east of the water table, amongst the scrub and termite mounds, leaping and bucking like a wild bull. We both stop, one in each spoon drain, both a bit dazed.

The other vehicle turned out to be a Mazda ‘Bongo’ van, occupied by a lone Yugoslav male. Both he and (surprisingly) the Bongo were unharmed. Through his shock the driver managed to tell me the man had staggered off into the scrub, thus avoiding being run over twice in quick succession. We had a quick look around and, finding no trace of the bloke, went on our respective ways.

With the adrenalin slowly subsiding and time to speculate, I wondered whether the bloke had been making a nuisance of himself in the Mataranka Pub, prompting the coppers to ‘give him a lift’ the 40km from town. A common scenario back then, the world-weary police reasoned that by the time such miscreants walked back to town they’d have sobered up a bit, and a lot of paperwork and aggravation would be avoided. The other possibility that came to mind was he could have fallen (or been pushed) from the back of whatever overcrowded vehicle he was hitching a ride on - another common occurrence back in the bad old good old days.

 

I didn’t sleep again for the remaining 18 hours (including breaks) of the trip , arriving in Alice at 7pm.

 

 

End of Buntine Excerpt