A man called Hope...

Our campervan escapades continued as we headed north on the Steve Irwin Highway. Huge hoardings advertising his ‘Australia Zoo’ bore 20 foot tall images of a wide-eyed Irwin, a mock-shock expression on his face, grappling with a largely disinterested looking crocodile, accompanied by his signature exclamation ‘Crikey!’. Irwin was to David Attenborough what our Wicked camper van is to a Rolls Royce, crass, colourful and comedic but utterly devoid of class. His heart was in the right place though…and I shall avoid making a tasteless Stingray joke here.

We took a rainforest walk as the Kookaburras cackled among the trees like a bunch of coked up PR bunnies in a Soho ‘style’ bar. Other birds made a ‘Peeow-Peeow’ calling noise, like a cheap sci-fi laser battle in the branches above. Strangler figs in various stages of development squeezed the life out of their unfortunate hosts, thickening roots enveloping the helpless tree beneath. The process almost inexorable from the moment the first tentative tendril descends from the seed lodged in the host’s branches. When the host is dead and rotted its demise fertilises the surrounding soil and leaves a hollow ghost-like chamber inside the successful fig.

In the forest we met Geoff a grizzled, grey and just retired museum worker (‘I’m only officially retired’) who was merrily dousing Araucaria trees with insecticide to collect weevils. Geoff explained that they lay their eggs on the male cones of the tree and their grubs gorge on the nutritious pollen when the cones open up. ‘The female cones are big enough to brain you if you stand underneath the trees at the wrong time of year’ warned Geoff as our eyes involuntarily scanned nervously upwards. We left him shaking the blue plastic sheets he’d arranged around the trees, collecting the culled invertebrates into a specimen jar. ‘Happy hunting!’ I cheered. ‘Oh yes’ Geoff replied ‘Great fun…killing things’.

‘One thing I promise is not to get stuck in the sand’ I said to Fi later as we drove along the Inskip Peninsula to camp by the beach in the Great Sandy National Park. Ten minutes later I had the van’s back wheels firmly wedged in the soft surface. As I grubbed around in the sand digging out the van in the morning a voice called out ‘Need a hand with that?’. Richard Hope had spotted our difficulties whilst patrolling the beach campsite with a metal detector. ‘I’m looking for gold!’ he roared gleefully as the machine bleeped at my feet and he triumphantly dug up an inch long piece of rusty cable.

Beneath his battered leather hat sat a pair of twinkling blue eyes and a nose expressively wrinkled by sunshine and booze. He was the epitome of a good old Aussie bloke, all larrikin charm and bonhomie. ‘I’ve got sixteen grandchildren’ he enthused ‘All female! If I lived another hundred years we’d take over this country’. He was deeply proud of his multi-ethnic brood. ‘My wife’s been in heaven ten years, she was Indonesian and when we got married in the fifties it was hard, Australia was a racist country then. But I was tough in those days and could handle the trouble. Now I’ve got the whole world in my family’ he grinned ruefully as he listed the various nationalities and ethnicities his offspring had married ‘Isn’t that marvellous? Multicultural Australia? I started it!’

He’d not left the country his entire life ‘I meet everyone here, even though I’ve never been out of Australia, never will now. After the war I wondered what I’d do when I met a German. Then I met one and I was like ‘Shit! He’s just like me!’’. After lending his still impressive septuagenarian strength to helping shift the van we said our farewells. ‘Enjoy your life!’ Richard called as we pulled away. He clearly had.