the country life. “Whether it was the Home Hill era of years ago or Longreach today,” says Colin without preamble, “you just can’t get people out of the cities, I don’t know why. Why would people want to cram themselves into a city when they could have the wide-open spaces, I’ll never bloody know. I know we’re 13 hours from Brisbane and eight hours from Rockhampton and we’re remote, but I just love it out here. The friendliness of Longreach is incredible.”
I ask him how he ended up here. “Well my father pulled me out of school at 13, so I’ve been working for 58 years. In July last year I thought I’d retire but I soon got incredibly bored. All I was doing was putting my suit on and going out for lunch with my old Army mates. Then a mate phoned me up and asked if I’d like to come to Longreach, all-expenses-paid for a couple of weeks.” He takes another pull on his beer and wipes the froth off his top lip. “I came here originally as a reliever, as the editor was on sick leave.”
I get more beers in and Colin digresses. “What about those grey nomads. Some of them are shocking drivers! I saw one pull out of a camp site just down the highway without looking and a Landcruiser drove straight through the caravan which of course wasn’t insured.”
“Was that a story in your paper?” I ask. “No, I missed that one. Trouble is out here you hear about these things too late. I’ve got such a vast area to cover.” The bar manager wanders by and Colin collars him, “is it stew tonight or are you still calling it a ‘roast’?” he wants to know. The bar manager smiles, accustomed to the ribbing.
I get Colin back on topic. “So, I wrote for lots of magazines after I left the MTAQ. With the Blues and Outback magazines people would ring me and say, you’ve got to come to our festival, and I’d be expected to go to every one. Out here, the one to go to is in Winton Outback Festival, it’s a ripper. It’s just a typical festival where people come together and have a great time. So, I often visited this area and I grew to love it.” Another mate wanders in and exchanges a few words with him. It’s obvious Colin is well liked at his local.
“I can park anywhere,” he continues, “I walk down here in ten minutes and have two or three beers. I can come in here, people know where I sit, they come and talk to me and I find out what I need to know. I hear some things I can’t print and some things I can save up.”
Colin loves books and is still waiting for his library to arrive from Brisbane, which he had left in a hurry last year. He’s an author in his own right, having penned, A Centenary of Road Transport in Australia – 1900 to 2010, and a book he says he enjoyed writing immensely, The Life and Times of The Nullarbor Kid.
“I laughed the whole time, writing that because I could relate to the stories. This old truckie (the Nullarbor Kid) used to drive between Perth and Sydney way back when it was just a track,” he says. “He wore a side-arm, a Colt .45 too. Nothing small, something that’s going to stop you. He got stuck in the middle of nowhere for three months once. He had to wait for another truck coming through to take a part to Sydney, and then wait for one going west to drop the new part off.”
I’d forgotten about the custom in Australian RSLs of playing the Last Post every night. We all stand in silence for a couple of minutes as the TV screens flash images of war zones. ‘At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember. Lest we forget,’ a voice intones as the bugle trumpets. The screen nearest to us has stubbornly continued playing a rock video and Colin isn’t impressed. “This is when you need a Colt .45,” he says to the barmaid, “to shoot that screen out.”
I steer him back on to the Longreach Leader. Colin reckons the paper was on its last legs when he took over but he just applied proper newspaper principles to it and he thinks it’s recovering. He regards himself as a servant of the locals, saying, “I was having coffee with the State Premier recently and I told her, ‘I’m a representative of the people too.’ So many people have shown me things and befriended me, I just feel I need to give back.”
He says that he took up his new post, the paper was at such a low ebb, he doubts if it would have survived the financial year. “When I arrived, I said to the staff of five women, ‘these are your parameters, and this is the job I’d like you to do.’ But they’re all good and I love them. They just wanted a bit of direction. So, I’ve been giving them a bit of training and it’s just overwhelming how well they’re doing.”
He’s not a big fan of political correctness, preferring to ‘say it like it is.’ He thinks that a country paper can get away with things that a city paper couldn’t. “Nobody’s going to complain out here!” he says.
Colin tries to work with the Outback Tourism Association as much as possible. “Wherever they go, we’ll give them 500 papers, say 100 of the last five issues and they’ll put a heap on every bar in places like Windorah and Birdsville, where there are no newsagents.” All they ask is a gold coin donation in the tin for the Royal Flying Doctor Service for each newspaper.
“Because they’re worshipped out here George,” he says, “you may have seen the designated strips of highway for them to land on,” and I nod, then ask him if he plans to stay in Longreach.
“Look, I love the place I’m from, Home Hill, but I also love this place. It’s full of characters. Genuine, generous people. So, I don’t think I’ll ever leave. I’d love to have someone of around 45 or 50 to take over and bring the paper forward. So, my message is, if you want to do something with a sense of achievement, if you’re sociable and want to get to know the people, then come out here and you’ll have a ball!”
Out of Longreach the land is as flat as still water – open ranchland, punctuated with stands of bush and scrub. Large sections of highway, which is now named Matilda, are un-fenced, so my wildlife radar is on high alert. Cattle stations are ridiculously huge. The largest in Queensland is Davenport Downs which is over 15,000 square kilometres or 3,730,000 acres in size – about the same size as East Timor.
If approaching Longreach was like Texas then this stretch reminds me of Botswana or Namibia, minus of course, colourful Africans, zebra and antelope. Every 50ks or so there is a rest area, with shaded picnic table and toilets. I sit at one after a while and finish reading Heaven’s Prisoners, once again in awe of James Lee Burkes writing. Sometimes it seems that reading these days is a guilty pleasure, a bit like smoking. I still get the odd speculative glance when people see me reading in a coffee shop or pub on my own. Maybe it’s becoming a counter-culture? It’s always been a very private act for me. A chance to disappear for an hour into another world. Reading a novel often confirms that implicit in us all is a universe of possibilities. There’s no feeling like immersing yourself in the comfortable cotton wool of your favourite author’s world.
I’m in no hurry, as I only plan to ride 200ks today. With a sigh I close my book and leave the muggy, wet bayou country of Louisiana. I clunk the Kawasaki into gear, let out the clutch and enter the dry outback again. Kilometre after kilometre. The outback, an entity all to itself, seemingly indifferent to the world’s goings-on. A huge road train towing four trailers buffets me, sucking hot air along with it as it heads east.
The long economic boom in Australia has seen a sharp increase in freight traffic and a subsequent increase in accidents involving heavy goods vehicles. Since the last recession way back in 1991 (and I remember it well as we’d recently signed on the dotted, for our first mortgage, with a 17.25% interest
