Diesel hikes won’t stop the annual exodus, but vengeance will be mine come September.
Old blokes are regreasing the points on their caravans and having their SUVs serviced and doing the coffee rounds saying goodbye to those of us who are young and indispensable and must stay behind. Winter’s threatening, and they’ll soon be pushing off up north to coastal towns like Yamba, Woombah and Iluka. Four months under the awning drinking mid-strength while reading the papers online as the missus plays cards with a crew of migratory grans heartily bullshitting about how gorgeous their grandkids are now that the little snakes are safely 1500 kilometres away and mercifully half-forgotten.
“Time to go. Diesel’s a killer this year. But the Balmain bugs won’t wait,” Larry tells me.
Once up there, the old folk mostly sit around gazing. A thing that can be best done at 28C. Gaze fondly at this and that … at the sea and at the scenes from the past that play out on its surface … and then at the weather forecast on their iPads, grinning fiendishly at Melbourne’s expected top of nine. The bugs are impossibly sweet when it’s nine in Melbourne, Larry says.
These days caravan makers name their various models as if Australia was the set of Mad Max: The Predator, The Invader, The Dominator, The Crusher, The Viper, Xtreme. A lot of old blokes refute this manufacturers’ braggadocio with jokey names in various handpainted fonts: The Loaf, Rosinante, Nellie, Wyona, Kia-Ora, H.M.A.S Glenys, Harry’s Folly, Neal’s Wheels, The Dream, Goin’ Norf.
Neither the leaves yellowing nor the days shortening get me down as much as when I see Larry inflating the tires of Goin’ Norf. It’s a dispiriting moment for those of us left behind, the flight of the rheumatic neighbour. I ease my sadness by reminding myself that while a caftaned Larry gnaws shellfish under a blue sky, I’ll be stealing the winter blooms from his garden and doling out bouquets to grateful receivers of stolen roses.
I’m not going anywhere this winter. Some friends cut down a stand of trees recently, so I have a large wood heap to heat the house. Though I never light the fire when I’m at home alone. I rarely even turn on a heater. It seems profligate to run a heater for one person – unnecessarily injurious to the planet. Put on a jumper, my dad would have said. I remember marvelling at his father’s cloudy breath as he said grace in his dining room in winter. No one travelled north back then.
The Victorian winter isn’t severe by global standards – it’s just cold enough to make you blasé and end up cold. It’s a sort of damn-I-should-have-brought-a-coat cold. In Canada there’s no choice but to acknowledge winter’s blaring reality. Winter offers rivers to skate on, snow to ski on, and air that’ll kill you in an hour. It’s a new existence. The invasion of the arctic transforms your neighbourhood into an exotic place. There, autumn’s a full-blown metamorphosis.
Here, Victoria merely droops sullenly and gets as stubbornly grey as a toddler holding its breath. Oh, no. Not again. Vicki’s in one of her moods, one of her low-pressure systems. This could take months. Day after day of dank and dreary half-light. An unending downer that gives her citizens a sense they’ve been left behind to cope.
While somewhere, elsewhere, sunshine is blasting through palm-lined neighbourhoods, ricocheting off wine glasses and Ray-Bans as people dab at their sweat-beaded brows with napkins, gazing around at the sky asking each other, “What about this for a day, eh? You wouldn’t be dead for quids.” Yes, somewhere north of here they’re living it up, on beaches and in town squares, dancing under starlight to melodies that ride on blood-warm zephyrs.
As you get old your heart’s cardiovascular empire begins to shrink, retreating from the outposts of the fingers and toes, surrendering them to reptilian poverty. Here in Victoria my fingers are numb from the second knuckle down from May to August these days. I write clumsily, in gloves, while, presuming Goin’ Norf hasn’t broken down, Larry is up at Yamba with his knobby digits deftly peeling the shell from some delicious crustacean.
Why did mankind ever wander out of the tropics? Are the Danes sorry? Are the Finns stupid? Why do the Tasmanians persist in their frosty circumstance?
I think I’ll go over to Larry’s place tomorrow and thrash his broad beans with a rake while hollering at them as if I’m ambushing sun-drunk pensioners. When a wantonly tanned Larry returns in spring, I’ll tell him the frost got to them.
Anson Cameron is a columnist for Spectrum in The Age and the author of several books, including Boyhoodlum and Neil Balme: A Tale of Two Men.