Second Chance Tortoise 2

Following the Totem to a New Home

How did I get here? Did I find paradise by simply watching the days go by and letting the water hold me? Did I find this little valley (where my young sons giggle and enjoy each other’s company outside as they walk up the steep hill to the wooden pentagon) by accident? Apparently not.

I’d driven past this little nook amid many crannies many times in the 1970s, while visiting the Rainbow Region of far eastern Oz. The inspiring sights, wondrous climate and uniquely caring and sharing hippies of the land between
Byron Bay and Nimbin have been a magnet for many adventurous young people over the decaying decades, and I was no exception.

In the southern summer of early 1981 I was lighting a few bands, operating equipment which would later become the nucleus of The Illuminati Lightshow Company. It was very difficult to legally register the name; no reason was ever provided for the fact that I couldn’t have the name ‘Illuminati’, but I objected and made a nuisance of myself until the government’s beurocrats allowed me to register ‘The Illuminati’ instead.

I was aware that my mother had come from northern New South Wales, but as she had been killed by a medical error while I was in my teens and (as far as I knew) the rest of her family had already passed away, I had little idea of the details of her early life. While touring through the subtropical northern country with various bands I’d tune into the passing landscape – the narrow lush green strip between the Great Dividing Range and the Pacific Ocean – and try to get some glimmer, just an inkling, of the area where my mother had grown up.

It may seem like a naive idea to many, but there was little reason for me to doubt that such clairvoyance – or sheer serendipity – was possible; finding a clue to my mother and her family line even seemed probable, given the level of determination I felt. Against all the apparent odds of most mundane materialists’ imaginings, the truth proved possible to discern after all, emerging from the unknown caverns of history by a slightly roundabout route.

When you run your own lighting company you can choose who to work for – and the musicians have to be pretty good if you’re going to listen to the same songs and sets over and over for umpteen repetitive times. One of the groups I’d been lighting was called ‘Magic Pudding’ – a truly huge and interesting band named after a famous Oz children’s story (centred round the tales of an endless pudding that never ran out – but often ran away). The band had up to sixteen members, including Claice Pearce (a famous electric viola player) and Greg Sheehan (an equally notable percussionist). They had a brass section that boasted a huge bass clarinet with a brassy horn affixed to its end, and their music was indescribably divine.

The band progressed up the touristy coast and detoured into the hippy settlements of the hinterlands, playing in small rural halls and larger theatres in towns which were carefully selected for their high proportion of alternative-minded locals. We met many wonderful people, and even such a huge band as Magic Pudding was offered innumerable free places to stay by appreciative free-spirited locals.

The tour was dogged by the subtropical rains that La Nina-induced weather systems occasionally bring to easterly Oz. At one point Guy Madigan (the tour’s promoter and a well-known musician in his own right) and I had to leap from the Kombi van – which carried the sound system, lights and projectors and some of the instruments, including an irreplaceable Celtic harp, among other things – and jump into a swollen stream. Floods were closing off many of the towns and villages on our route and Guy had taken the only road leading into the town of Lismore that was still supposedly open.

When we saw the cars, vans and utes banked up on either side of a flooded bridge we checked the time; we only had a couple of hours until the gig was due to commence and there was no other way to rendezvous with the band but to ford the rushing creek. “It’ll be okay,” Guy said as he prepared to take the Kombi across. “Just lean out your window and watch the white line on the side of the road – if it gets too deep you can give me a yell.”

He entered the water slowly while the other drivers milled about and watched our progress with interest, encouragement or derisive laughter. “How is it?” he asked through gritted teeth.

“Looks okay,” I replied, watching the white line submerge beneath the rippling muddy water. “Still okay,” I said as the painted line slowly faded into the murk. As we approached the bridge everything seemed all right and it looked like there’d be no problem at all making it across. When we reached the place where the bridge was supposed to be the white line abruptly disappeared, and as I yelled “Stop!” the Kombi lurched to one side and began to float down the river – the bridge had been completely washed away.

Guy’s eyes were as wide as mine when we glanced at each other. His hands were still on the steering wheel; the stereo was still playing and we were both frozen in our comfortable seats, listening to some folk music from Bolivia as waves splashed around us. We were aware that – unlike most other vehicles – Kombi vans had been designed to float, but we had no idea how long the vehicle would remain floodworthy. A small geyser was erupting through the hole where the clutch pedal passed through the otherwise waterproof floor and the van was slowly filling with water.

Within a few seconds we were slowly spinning around and around in the current, moving downstream at an accelerating rate. “We’ll have to jump out and try to push the Kombi onto the bank” Guy yelled over the tumult with a note of desperation in his voice. “Make sure you shut the door after you’re out!” I looked from his bearded face to the river churning a couple of feet below the passenger window. It didn’t seem too deep, but I filled my lungs with air before opening the door just in case – and breasted the wave that poured into the vehicle as I threw myself into the turbulent creek.

I landed in the swirling mud at the bottom of the flow and quickly slammed the door as the water reached my chest. Holding the heavy van back against the far heavier wall of water pushing against the far side proved impossible, but I managed to arrest the van’s spin and speed by walking slowly backward downstream with my shoulder pushing against the side door. In a few moments Guy had swum around to my side and was helping as best he could – but the situation seemed hopeless. We couldn’t manage to push the Kombi across to the bank – which was pretty steep in any case – and were forced to walk slowly backwards as we visualised the instruments, microphones, lights and sound system slowly sinking into the muddy water. Don’t try this at home!

We were already thirty yards from the bridge and could see a gaggle of car owners pointing and yelling at us when the miracle happened; an old wooden rowboat suddenly appeared upstream, rushing down the torrent towards us. In less than a minute four burly blokes were helping us push the Kombi ashore – and on the right side of the river, too! A short while later Guy was handing out beers while I removed spark plugs from the liquid-filled engine. The water had risen to within an inch of the irreplaceable equipment in the back – which was sitting on a couple of wooden pallets – and nothing had been damaged except the carpets.

When Guy kicked the engine over the exhaust looked like it was attached to a washing machine; a torrent of fluid gushed from the pipe for ages. But we made it to the gig and managed to set up just in time. The show must go on!

A few days later I was driving another van that the band had hired, touring back down the highway alone to return it to the Emerald City, a few hundred miles to the south. I decided to take a higher, drier inland route called the Summerland Way, and listened to the wide range of cassettes Guy had lent me while I contemplated the undulating scenery.

I was trying to tune into the landscape, searching for a hint that might lead me to the place of my mother’s origins. There was very little traffic and I had plenty of time to survey the hills and valleys, vibing in on the unknown home she’d left to move to the city, way back half a century earlier in the Great Depression.

Something on the road attracted my distracted attention at the last possible moment and I hit the brakes. The van slewed to one side before I regained control and stopped in the centre of the highway. I hurriedly reversed to see what it was I’d hopefully missed and leapt from the driver’s door, only to see a tortoise spinning slowly on its back on the bitumen. The bony reptile stopped spinning as I knelt to examine it.

The shell seemed intact, and when I turned it over the tortoise blinked at me; the eastern long-necked tortoise wrapped its head sidewise between the layers of its shell, unable to withdraw its elongated neck into its protective plates, as was its normal practice. I could see no damage – save for a small hole which had been drilled into the rear flange of the creature’s upper carapace.

My mother Bonnie had kept identical tortoises as a child, and had showed me how to care for them when I was a young lad. Her words came back to me as I stared at the small hole, standing on the side of the endless highway; “People put chains through those holes,” she’d told me, “to stop their pet tortoises getting away in winter. They burrow deep underground, and their keepers don’t want to lose them. They pull them back through their burrows by their chains.” She never chained our tortoises up, and every spring we searched the surrounding backyards in the Emerald City for our revivified reptiles, which would always emerge from the earth in a different place to last year. We usually found them before a neighbourhood dog crunched them to death between its jaws, chewing on the shell like a flat round bone.

I stared into the distance, trying to discern where the tortoise had come from or where it was headed. There was no sign of any inhabitation - not even a cultivated field or cow paddock - and we were miles from the nearest water. I looked at the tortoise, trying to decide what to do. Leaving it to continue plodding down the road wasn’t an option.

Then I remembered a place that was full of similar eastern long-necked tortoises – a pristine pool where a hippy friend lived, only a couple of hundred miles south along my route. The runaway pet gave me the perfect excuse to visit Ricco, who was always glad to receive friendly visitors; it also provided me with a reason to visit Cathy, his next door neighbour. I’d met Ricco – a lanky American with a strong Chicago accent – through Cathy, when I’d ended up on her doorstep a few months earlier (I’d had to leap onto a wharf on the coast, not far from the place where she lived - jumping from a triple-masted eighty-foot wooden schooner as police and the coast guard surrounded the vessel; but that’s another story for another time).

I made sure the tortoise was comfortably ensconced in a box on the passenger seat while the van trundled south. A couple of hours later I pulled into Cathy’s driveway on a long gravel road, and her young daughter Karri hung on her skirt as she greeted me – and invited me to stay for the night. It was still mid afternoon, and she and Karri were happy to accompany me next door to Ricco’s, only a few hundred yards distant. Ricco was equally welcoming to me and my reptilian companion, and more than happy to give the escapee a home with the other tortoises in the ancient platypus pool that glittered in front of his little wooden cabin.

He painted a large white ‘x’ on its back with house paint, and we adults shared tales and a few smokes while we watched the paint dry, and Karri tried to feed leaves to the recalcitrant meat-eating tortoise. As the sun began to sink into the west we took the creature to meet its new family, and watched it dart off among the other tortoises in the crystal clear water.

For the next few years I had a good reason to visit the little valley – even after Cathy had stopped inviting me into her bed. Ricco and I kept going down to the river to see the tortoise with the cross painted on its back, and were usually rewarded with a sighting of the elusive critter. I never thought Ricco would sell the place, but in 1989 I ended up buying the land from him and moving into his shack – along with all the equipment necessary to continue to publish NEXUS New Times magazine. The turtle was still swimming around, happy as Larry.

In 1999 I found my long-lost Auntie Dolly– my mother Bonnie’s eldest sister. She was in her early nineties, living in a nursing home on the edge of the nation’s capital. I went to visit her with my five year-old daughter, and she was astonished to see me – and the niece she didn’t know she had - after so long. It had been her impromptu personalised tales of koalas and possums, kangaroos and cockatoos that had first inspired my interest in the bush when I was still in my infancy. I’d lie in her spare bed and listen to the stories she invented while she gave my parents a break from their boisterous boy child. She’d moved away from the Emerald City after my mother died.

“So where are you living?” she asked. “Still in the big smoke?” When I told her the name of the town that was nearest to my rainforest home, her eyes goggled at me as she covered her surviving yellow teeth with her bony hand. “What are you doing there? She cried. “Don’t you know that’s where we came from?”

It didn’t take long to discover that the place where I lived was in the very centre of the view she’d shared with my mother when Bonnie was a young child, back in the 1920s. “We’d always be sitting on the verandah and staring out there,” she said. “Back then everyone called it ‘the gorge country’ I always wanted to go and see what it was like – so did your mother.”

Thanks, mum. Thanks, Dolly. And thanks to the totemic tortoise.

I’ve been here for almost twenty years now, living in the little shack beside the pristine permanent pool.Many things have improved in that time, but the forests, soil and water have steadily gone downhill – often literally, eroding into the rivers and the ocean - stolen from everyone by a few corporations and the ignorant rednecks who work themselves into early graves on their behalf. I guess many people with too much time on their hands are so unimaginative and boring that they need to fill it all up with making money – at everyone else’s expense.

Byron Bayis now a hideous tourist trap and much of the Rainbow Region is now inaccessible to any but the wealthy few. They’re even trying to raise the property values in the hippy haven of Nimbin – by driving out the locals and anyone who’s a tiny bit interesting, just as they did in Byron. This place is as far as you can get from a capital city in Oz - and still enjoy a great climate. It’s still uneconomical for most exploitative types to move here, just as I’d hoped.

This evening fireflies flit outside the window while I type; today I saw kangaroos, wallabies, land mullets (giant black skinks), Wompoo pigeons, rainbow lorikeets, a giant goanna, a red-bellied black snake, a pair of possums, yellow-tailed black cockatoos, an emerald catbird, rosellas, catfish, silver perch, golden bass - and a bevy of eastern long-necked tortoises. As it says in the Desiderata, it’s still a beautiful world. Be happy – and save whatever you can from the Earth rapists and financiers who employ them to destroy the planet.

Aw, dang! So into the story I missed this week’s Garrison Keeler!

Life appears to flow on…

- R.A.

Images – author’s

See Second Chance Tortoise Part 1

NEXUS New Times magazine

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a small donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From the rainforest home of the Her(m)etic Hermit – http://hermetic.blog.com