Stories of the road…
Vignettes of the life on the road
Vignettes are brief pieces, just a few paragraphs about an incident, a place, a person or a passing thought. We live our lives in scenes and vignettes are like those scenes, just brief moments. Based on observation, on what you see, they capture a tiny slice of time. They have no deep revelation, no climax.
WHAT’S GOING on? There’s a ruckus in the next campsite. The guy is yelling at his kids and his wife. Every few words is a f-word. It has been like this for the two nights we camped next to the family, before we moved to another campsite. Drama in the van park.
The guy was reserved but friendly enough to nod a greeting yesterday. He’s quite a bit older than his partner. She’s a quiet young woman, although repressed might be a better description. One of the van park residents says he beats her. She says that she has seen blood on her face. One day when I saw her walking past our van she was crying. I was told that, when the camper on the other side said something to the alledged offender about his behaviour, he responded with “do you know who I am?” and threatened him with violence. No, I don’t know who he is and nor do I care.
He isn’t present when the police come. He is hiding in the toilet. Later, the police came back and take the family away. They returned some time later and next day they start to move their stuff in their car and trailer, ordered out by the van park manager. My partner thinks they are homeless. That is a situation I find with a few of the others camped here.
People see and hear
People see and hear things in a van park. The only private space is your van or tent, but even there privacy is at best minimal because life in a caravan park is a kind of communal living. Word gets around among long term residents. That is how I heard the man had lost his wife not too long ago and that his young companion was the kid’s stepmother. Was it true or simply repeated misinformation? No way to know that.
It might earn him some sympathy if true, however people can do little about the reasons behind someone’s behaviour. How do they react? With fear or sympathy? It’s hard to know and any attempt at well-meaning intervention in this situation is likely to be met with a mind-your-own-business response and hostility, violence perhaps. People have to deal with the behaviour itself. To ask more of people is to ask too much.
We can only speculate about why this guy behaves as he does. My speculation is that the family is homeless, as my partner suggests. They are not homeless in the sense of people voluntarily living on the road, people whose van or camping trailer is their mobile home. That is not homelessness. It is houselessness and it is a chosen lifestle. I think they are homeless in the sense of having lost their rental property and not being able to secure another. Perhaps they, like one or two others in this van park, are victims of Tasmania’s rental housing shortage and excessively high rents.
On our nine month toad trip we have witnessed only two incidents involving police. We have seen no cases of hostile behaviour other than this one in this van park. We have never been subject to hostility.
FIRST PUBLISHED: April 2020.
The gardener and the camper
I HEAR his voice. Beyond the row of white agapanthus Paul is talking with Annette over by the van park’s vegetable garden. He’s dressed in his usual shorts, Tshirt, boots and broad-brimmed hat.
Paul’s voice has become familiar these past months that we’ve been coming and going from the van park. He is the friendly, talkative type. Somewhere in his late sixties, perhaps, not tall by any means, his tanned face bearded, he has a background in diesel mechanics and once worked in the Pilbara. Like many of his generation Paul was a conscript in the sixties. He now lives on a pension. His teenage daughter, with whom he shares a small three person car camping tent, attends school online.
He and his daughter are here because they were evicted from their rental house some time after his relationship ended. Living on a pension he cannot find accommodation that is affordable in Tasmania’s housing shortage and escalating rents. He is far from alone in this.
I usually encounter Paul in the camp kitchen. It is more than a kitchen. It is where people light the wood heater and sit around talking, a social space. The core of longer-term residents are the establishing presence in the kitchen. Short term visitors come and go around them. Some are travellers taking a few days break in a cheap and basic caravan park close to the sea. Others are awaiting their flight out of Tasmania, as the airport is just out of town. A few are itinerant fruit pickers here on working visas, young Europeans.
I don’t know how long Annette has been living here in her caravan and tent annex over by the fence that separates the van park from the pine forest. She works as the gardener and maintains the van park’s community vegetable garden. She tells me that she once worked for Diggers Seeds, the heritage seed company near Melbourne. Like another woman, who is the cleaner, Annette is one of the residents who took on work in the caravan park.
She turns on the hose to give the garden some water. Annette is planning to buy a home. She talks of a shipping container house, saying they can be bought already refitted as a dwelling with just power and plumbing to connect. I am concerned that she is leaving her home purchase a little late. Driven by a shortage of cheaper homes for sale, prices are rising rapidly. A woman who works in banking told me prices rose by 24 percent over the past year in this coastal area. Statewide, they are reported to have increased by a little over 15 percent.
Annette tells us that Paul mentioned free camping when he and his daughter leave the van park. That is a temporary fix. What Paul and his daughter needs is somewhere secure and permanent to live. Despite this, he maintains a positive outlook.
We arrived in this small town on the southeast coast of Tasmania in the late spring of 2020, after visiting other places in Tasmania following months on the road on the mainland. We have come and gone but we always come back here. It has become a base for our travels while we look for a home to buy, somewhere on the southeast beaches. As summer turns to autumn we find a place in a small town a little further out. Annette’s search for a home comes to an end, too, when she buys a house in town.
On the day we say our goodbyes and drive out the gate for the last time I look over to the tent camping area and see Paul and his daughter by their tent. I feel uneasy over the uncertainty they live with day-to-day, never knowing how long they will be here in this caravan park, neven knowing what their future will bring.
FIRST PUBLISHED: May 2020.
Family on the road
THERE IS SOMETHING FAMILIAR in the air in the camp kitchen, something I have smelled before.
“Its eucalyptus and tea tree”, Jenny explains as she swabs the bench. “I use natural cleaning products like this blend I’m cleaning the kitchen with. We had a small cleaning business in Byron Bay”, she tells me. “And we used all-natural products”.
Jenny is a French woman in her late thirties, I guess she would be. She was offered the cleaner’s job at the caravan park after husband Nathan finished his temporary job a few weeks ago. Now he looks after Louie, their pre-school-age child.
The job suits Jenny not only because it is temporary but because she doesn’t have to travel to it. The family are residents of this small, backwater caravan park on the edge of Seven Mile Beach on Tasmania’s southeast coast. They will be gone in a couple weeks to continue their journey, their life on the road.
The day comes. When we come back from the beach we find them packing their stuff into their camper trailer and the Mitsubishi 4WD that pulls it.
“We’ll stay in a cabin tonight, Jenny says. “We want to pack now because rain is expected tomorrow. So is snow in the mountains. We’ll come and say goodbye in the morning.” They are happy to be leaving. “Been in one place too long”, Nathan tells me. We leave them to get on with their packing.
The road is home to this nomadic family. Next stop, Nathan says, is southern Tasmania. Then it’s on to the west coast, then over to the mainland. After that they plan to spend some time in New Caledonia before returning to Australia. Their life on the road is open ended, no end in sight.
Morning dawns grey here in the caravan park. It rained during the night and water lies puddled in sheets that reflect the grey of the low, scudding clouds. The wind carries a chill even though it is summer.
It is still early when the family comes by in their Mitsubishi. They say their farewells to others along the puddle-pocked road then stop by our van. They hitch their camper trailer and head off, south bound.
Jenny, Nathan and Louie. They’ve been a constant presence at the caravan park as we have come and gone since last November. Now they have more roads to travel, and across Bass Strait there’s a big continent to roam in. I watch them drive out of the caravan park that cold grey day in January 2020 on the nest stage of their mobile adventure.
Then, Covid hits. Their journey ends. The state goes into lockdown. They find a place over on the east coast to set up camp. There are worse places to sit out a pandemic.
Time passes without word from the family. The virus rampages. Tasmania shuts its borders to eradicate it. That succeeds and the state becomes virus-free. Tasmanians can move about their state but not leave it. Conditions on the mainland eventually start to improve and people begin moving about again.
It has been months since the last word from the family. Summer fades into autumn and autumn into winter. Now, the days are lengthening with the coming of spring. I wonder where the family is now? Are they still in Tasmania?
Then, an Instagram post, a coastal scene from South Australia. it is from the family. Once again, they are on the road. Their freewheeling life continues.
FIRST PUBLISHED: July 2020.
The allure
IT STANDS by the kerb as testament to the durability of its engineering. It stands, too, as testament to how a vehicle becomes a symbol of freedom, possibility and exploratory movement across the land.
The T1 and T2 VW Kombi, in production from the 1950s to the end of the 1970s or thereabouts, are the much-restored symbols of an automotive subculture. Its members spend thousands restoring the clunky old vehicles with their chugging, air-cooled engines, into shining examples of what they once were.
the Kombi carries the allure of free living, of possibility, of the serendipity of the road…
What contributes to the enduring attraction of these basic vehicles? Nostalgia, for sure. The nostalgia of those who travelled in their Kombi back in its day. People, like my partner Fiona in her dingy white commercial model T2. Nostalgia might explain the meaning of the Kombi to those of the baby boom generation, but why do the vehicles appeal to later generations?
The big contributor, I think, lies not in nostalgia but in symbolism. Linked in people’s minds with surfers scouring our coasts in search of the translucent green tube or itinerant hippies travelling the land, the Kombi carries the allure of free living, of possibility, of the serendipity of the road. We invest things with meaning that is reinforced by the pop culture images of the film and advertising industries. That is the story of the Kombi and the notion of free living associated with it.
The freedom those old Kombi’s symbolise is now the property of those who have seen modern life for the illusion it is and who have taken to a life on the road, temporarily or permanently. While they might choose a modern van as their escape vehicle they acknowledge the Kombi as the first of its kind, the pregenitor.
A van cannot give freedom, however it can suggest it. Deciding to live a life as free of society’s cloying attractions and as free as possible of the sticky tentacles of government, the Kombi suggests the means of seeking that freedom irrespective of make or model.
Driving to the Tweed
A story from 2001
IF YOU WERE here now I would say how good it was to drive with you in your old Kombi all the way to the farm in the Tweed Valley. I took up the offer to go with you because there is something about you that attracts me like an insect is attracted to carnivorous flowers. I think it’s your free spirit, your independence, your optimistic approach to life. But, like those insects, the attraction cannot lead to any kind of fulfilment.
We talk, we share a table at dinner, however with so many others around we never get to talk about personal things. I’ve known you these past six or so years but our only meetings have been at conferences or at the homes of friends when we happen to be up north here at the same time. I look at you but you do not notice. I see your round face, suntanned by years of outdoors life. I see your blonde hair as it wraps around your shoulders. And your sparkling blue eyes. It is not only these things. It is your approach to life. All that you own fits into your Kombi. You can pack up and move to some new place so easily. A vibe of freedom surrounds you.
The drive to the Tweed was good as we got to discuss stuff about our lives. It was also why I liken our friendship to those insects for which attraction has no resolution. No resolution, because that is how our too-infrequent meetings are to end the moment you step into that aeroplane and fly to Brazil.
Just parking
OKAY. Bring it in. That’s Colin, as he signals Sharon to drive forward.
No. You’re not Level. Take it out again.
Sharon carefully reverses and edges the Coaster closer to the drop off where, Yvonne tells me, someone once drove over. It’s not a high drop off, just steep enough to make extracting a vehicle difficult.
Alright. Bring it in again… closer to the upper side. Colin again.
Scraaaape!
It’s alright, Colin calls to Sharon reassuringly. Just the rear bar grounding on the bump. The same bump she scraped across on the first attempt to park.
Sharon revs the engine, the clumsy red Coaster edges over the bump and, finally, comes to rest in the parking bay between the loquat, pear and apple trees.
Well, we got it done. Time for a glass of wine. Yeah, bit of a microadventure, parking Sharon’s rusty red (the colour, not the oxide) beast. Reminds me of something that mountaineer and expedition leader John Amatt said: “Adventure isn’t hanging on a rope off the side of a mountain. Adventure is an attitude that we must apply to the day to day obstacles of life.”
Sharon was again visiting our southern island, another stop in her peripatetic life. She is a translator and works from her Starlink-connected Coaster, one of those people who have made vanlife a reality and a success. It is always good to see her again when her and my visits to this northern city coincide. She is cheery and optimistic and I’ve never seen her fazed. As Jack Kerouac put it: “Live, travel, adventure, bless, and don’t be sorry.”
The photo of the three of us? That’s Yvonne and Sharon… and me feeling grateful for all the adventurous, capable and fearless women in my life.
In Deloraine
SPRING CAME suddenly, hesitated as winter decided on a brief re-run, rushed back, retreated for a week then finally reasserted its presence.
It was in that indeterminate time that I was up north. I was with my partner and we had been visiting friends who live in one of those towns strung along the Bass Strait coast like beads on a string. We were Launceston-bound when hunger got the better of us and forced a turn into Deloraine.
Deloraine. It’s a town on a hill. It was once a favourite of an arty, alternative-living cohort. I don’t know what happened to them. Are they still here? Did they leave? Their presence used to be marked by the number of art and craft shops in town. These are now fewer, as, seemingly, are the artisans. Towns change I guess. New people come in and dilute the old ambience. New businesses come and go. I think businesses selling real needs are the best placed to survive in this town. Maybe a small art and craft shop could survive the sparse, largely tourist-free and low-sales months of winter. A bakery, a cafe or two, an accommodation house… that sort of thing is what I think would survive here, but maybe not a bookshop.
Artisans. One of their shops is on the corner at the bottom of the hill which the town’s main street ascends. It is in an old, white-painted building from the Art Deco period. My friend wanted to check out what was in there. She likes doing that but never buys anything, well, maybe she has once or twice over the years. She usually says she would like some new earrings, usually because she has lost one of those she already has, but she looks and never buys. Yeah, I know, it’s strange behaviour. But then I walk into camera stores and look but never buy. Different things, same behaviour. So I follow her distractedly as she checks-out the earring rack and the other stuff in the shop, stuff that lcoal artisans have made that we would never buy.
We are walking out when a petite blonde woman walks up.
“Don’t you remember me?”, she says, her blue eyes wide and an expression clearly anticipating a response.
“It’s Jill. I was driving past and saw you in here.”
Sure, I remember Jill. We had been friends. She was the illicit and some-time girlfriend of a bushwalking/climbing/caver friend I used to head out with, a fact unknown to her husband. Their relationship went through a couple flare-ups before its final inglorious descent into oblivion.
She disappeared from my life before I called it quits in this state and headed north to a new life in the big city. I didn’t know what happend to her. She was there and then she wasn’t in the way that some people come into your life, stay there for a time and then disappear forever. I did think of her occasionally because I liked her, however her liaison was with my friend and, anyway, she had a husband and children. So I filed her away in that people-I-once-knew folder in my brain. Didn’t even have a photo of her.
The folder. It is the one that on quiet days when I am chilling out with a glass of fruity white wine — my feet up on the railing as I watch the rippling waters out on the bay and ask yourself why I am not out there in my kayak or on my SUP — that opens itself and those-people-I-once-knew walk out of it. Every so often over the years she would be one of those people, and I would ask that all-too-oft-asked-question: I wonder where she is now and what is she doing in life?
It has been… what?… 35 years since I last saw her? I assumed — one of those assumptions you make without thinking about it — that she had gone back to her husband and her family after her dalliance with my friend came crashing down.
She stayed there in that folder over all those years, only to briefly emerge before going back and closing the cover. But now I know. I know what happened to her. She went back to husband and family? No. Well, not permanently, anyway. I don’t know the details. But what I do know is that she is in a stable relationship and living in one of those coastal towns, one of those beads strung out along the asphalt string that traverses the Bass Strait coastline.
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