Escape to the Wilderness

When you remove the city of Darwin and its population from the equation, then the Northern Territory is left with around 120 000 citizens inhabiting an area almost twice the size of France. Which suggests people of a certain age must travel some distances to keep the gene pool fresh. However you might take the Bruce out of Humpty Doo, but could you ever take the Humpty Doo out of Bruce? I would advise you don’t try, if my experience of Saturday night downtown Darwin is anything to go by. The highly reactive mix of testosterone fuelled Outback adult males, 35C of heavy heat, unacclimatised backpackers of all genders, and beers with irresistible names such as Pirate Life and 150 Lashes, creates a powder keg on the popular Mitchell Street. The heat and humidity dehydrate by driving every millilitre of sweat out of your body and, for those not ‘dressed for Darwin’, into every square millimetre of unsuitable or unnecessary clothing. Bruce from Humpty Doo, on a ‘blow out’ night in the big city, routinely wears tee shirt, shorts and thongs. Bruce prefers to wear his thongs on his feet (I can see your puzzling visual right now), keep his stubby in an eskie, and on a weekend get his night up and running playing pokies.

On our own Saturday night visit to savour the Mitchell Street experience (and I know at my age I should have known better) I dressed as any self-regarding, albeit slightly deluded, Yorkshireman from the fashionista cool city of Leeds might. Polo shirt (with contrasting collar for that extra statement), light tan leather shoes, and of course the ubiquitous denim jeans worn just a teasingly tad tight. Some traits one never grows out of! For me the jean of choice has always been the workhorse Levi Strauss; I’m sure it’s a generation thing. Regardless of the weather, I could no more bring myself to walk down Call Lane on a Saturday night in tee shirt, shorts and ‘thongs’ than I could live in Lancashire. So after a couple of hours of self-inflicted sweating and dripping in the heaving, raucous bars of downtown Darwin, I found myself needing to pay a visit to the loo. As you may have anticipated, due to having previously excreted any available water through my pores, the need was not for a ‘number one’. At Darwin’s vibrant Stonehouse bar, the loos offered two options that were somewhat different to the norm. Not Gents and Ladies, but Urinals or ‘The other’. And trust me the urinals were not designed for access by the female tackle. Hence at Stonehouse, with only one precious seat provided for ‘The other’, ladies not only had to compete with one another, but additionally with those males who needed something more significant than a number one. And on this particular busy Saturday night, the latter group comprised a sole sweating and dripping Englishman on the wrong side of 60 years, who appeared to have taken an impromptu shower in polo shirt and shrink-fit Levi jeans. My seemingly inordinate time in the queue for the single facility was no doubt exaggerated by the distinctly uncomfortable coincidence of being a) the sole male, b) the single person over the age of 30 years, and c) the pool of body fluid gradually spreading in a neat circular form from a pair of (now somewhat darker) tan leather shoes.

After what seemed an age, my turn in the precious cubicle arrived. The difficulty I experienced in undressing sufficiently to do the job intended, was quite nothing compared to the frenzied struggle that followed once the deed had been done. My sweat-shrinked jeans simply refused to move back up above the knee, despite how much I pulled, tugged, jumped, hopped or bounced pogo style from wall to wall of the claustrophobic cubicle. Have you seen the episode of Friends – ‘The one with the New Years resolutions‘ – when Ross got himself stuck in a similar position with an over tight pair of leather trousers? Well imagine Ross in that excruciating scene, but on this occasion played by Mr Bean. That was me trying to get my jeans to say hello to my arse once more. My frantic and increasingly bizarre leaps and tugs not only served to raise my body temperature to a critical level, but also raise the attention of the growing queue of desperate (and increasingly suspicious) young females positioned just the other side of that single thin door. By the time I’d dressed sufficiently to exit, and in the process risked both double-hernia and thrombosis, a new and more pressing fear had taken root. I now had to open that thin door and present myself as the ‘lunatic in the loo’. How many would be in that justifiably furious and judgemental queue? More alarmingly, might the girl from the Terrible Ten be in that very line? Fate is inexorable.

As things turned out it wasn’t such a long queue, just about the same as watched Cersei Lannister endure her walk of shame.

Having recovered my composure sufficiently to return to my patient family group, I explained and apologised for my extraordinarily long absence. I’d apparently been drawn into conversation with some NT guys who claimed to have a friend in Shepherds Bush, did I know the place and “was it much like the bush in the Outback”? My tale seemed both plausible and acceptable. ‘Good creative recovery Ken’ I mused. Unfortunately it didn’t take long for Jacky to remark that a number of younger women appeared to be ‘hitting on me’ due to glances in our direction from various corners of the bar, and ill-disguised whispers into the ears of coyly giggling companions. I calmly and confidently advised her that she herself had done the very same some 36 years ago, and so shouldn’t be too hard on them. I also concluded it was time to move bars.

Despite being home to half the population of the entire NT, Darwin is still an uncomfortably small community. Small enough for great ‘night out’ anecdotes to spread like bushfire, fuelled by the oxygen of embellishment. Especially ‘ The one about – the over-dressed drug-fuelled pom of pensionable age who thought his toilet cubicle was the mosh pit at a Slipknot concert‘. It was therefore both timely and convenient that the very next morning we were to depart Darwin and impose ourselves on the other, far more dispersed 50% of the NT’s tiny population. We were going real Outback, beyond Darwin and to places that even the gene pool of Humpty Doo had yet to reach. We were venturing way out into the wilderness. To lands that the aborigine gods had created in the Dreamtime and where their spirits had assumed the form of rocks, rivers and ravines. Vast and seemingly endless lands in which the individual is at once at his most self-aware and his most vulnerable. We were setting out to Kakadu. The unicorn jockey, the croc whisperer and the free spirit. Plus fortunately, Sam the driver.

Tbc