jakebraque-blog

[jakebraque-blog]

Drenched with enthusiasm.

​Well we've been up around darwin for oh, I dunno, a couple of months now? Time seems to do funny things in the wet. It sort of oozes on by in a gurgling, mildewey stream, seemingly without end; just a never ending, damp, mosquito infested slice of futile eternity. Once every while the sun comes out for a few days and it's like the electric company turned the water and power back on to your soul. Then the drizzle starts over and you get to watch the colour slowly fade out of the world again. It's like being stuck in that bloody torture device from The Princess Bride. Each successive storm cell grumbles on by all like: "I've just taken a year off your life. Tell me, how did it feel?"

Am being depressing? Sorry, I just had to chuck a batch of home-brewed ale out this morning. That sort of thing'll get to a bloke. 23 litres of delicious, cloudy pale ale and somehow it got colonised by the Demonic Mouldiforms from Dimension X. Ever wonder why Krang was such a miserable butthole? Try being positive when your groin's teeming with these horrible feckers. 

So yeah, the wet season can go hoover down a fresh, hot tubesteak, but aside from that, things aren't so bad here. Well, alright, Declan's been doing battle with his first set of molars, so sleep's not really a thing that's happening at the moment. And Shan's back seeking employment again, which sucks, because finding a job you can do while parenting is a right bastard. Being a daytime Nanny for 2 kids was handy, because she could take ours along with. And exhausting though it was, we did manage to work it so that the domestic load got shared between us. Plus when you put the man of the house in charge of cooking, he gets to figure out how many things can be cooked on a weberQ (The answer is everything, I could make a pho in that motherfucker, just you try me).

So yeah, that's bullshit and also, unsurprisingly, all down to some tedious fuckery with a local mining company that the woman who was employing her works for. None of which will be discussed further because, frankly, it's boring. If anybody does have the hot leads on employment for returning mums up here please, by all means, drop us a line.

My work carries on as usual and the one thing it aint is boring. I drive in each morning, having no bloody idea what it is I'll be doing that day. You can start out tinkering with a tractor or a forklift in the workshop and then one phone call will have you catapulted into the bush to hunt down strange and exotic mango farming machinery and right its wrongs, or lob into Darwin town to pull apart some eldritch, pneumatic doohickey on a sheet mill that you've never laid eyes on before. Days go by fast there.

Our campsite continues to develop in nuance and complexity. The shitty old tarps (one actually had duck poo on it, it happened in Katherine, ask Tom Curtain about it) have been disappeared and replaced with shiny new ones. Makes it feel a bit less favelahrey in here. When the wet packs its bindle and fucks off again, we'll be able to lift them all up a bit higher (you want a steep fall angle on your roof when 300mm of rain can come down in a day) and that'll give the place a light and airy feel. Not to mention let the bloody tropical mould dry out and die. The caravan exterior's got a date with a bucket of vinegar just as soon as the run off hits. I'll knock all the walls down as well, hang some shade cloth and we'll set up an outdoor lounge. The best thing about living in a van (aside from getting to change your backyard whenever you want) is that you basically live outside.

The weather certainly doesn't seem to faze the wildlife. The whole park is teeming with birds; geese, ducks and cockatoos, Declan loves toddling around after them on walks. There are also, of course, many fun puddles to splash in and lots of super-awesome mud to smear yourself with. We average about 3 changes of clothes a day. At night the Bandicoots come creeping in around the yard, seeking the bountiful harvest of fruit bits that he drops constantly in his wake. Each morning there isn't a speck to be found, the slab clean as a whistle once more.

Anyhow, that's enough bloody sentiment. It's getting all Macca-in-the-morningish up in here.

Fart, Boobies, etcetera.

That's better.

[jakebraque-blog]

Bless me so-and-so for I have etcetera.

​

It has been three months since my last confession.

We arrived in Darwin a while ago. Shan’s Mum was here for a bit. We all stayed in a tiny motel dog-box while the caravan had some repairs done (aircon freezing into regolith twice nightly, rather uncool, eh wot). Hey, that’s a pun. Everybody pretend like I meant to do that.

Declan turned One and had Happy Birthday sung to him by a swimming pool full of crane drivers who were coincidentally having their Christmas party at the motel. We as usual ran into somebody who’d done time in the mines around Kal and got talking about old projects we’d been on and gossiped about folk who’ve moved on out of the picture to somewhere or other. It’s a fun game to play, and given how few Aussies there are in the Industrial sector, our mobility and the fact that we all like a beer and a yarn, we get to play it often.

The first month whipped on by. We found the best fish and chip joint (shout out to La Beach! Whut whut!), house-sat for a few weeks (Netfliiiiiiix!) and both secured employment. Shan has a Nanny gig that she can take D along to, which when you add the two other kids in, officially makes her the hardest working partner in the marriage. Skinned knuckles and physical labour aint got shit on that mongrel jam.

I stepped into a job with a hydraulic specialist mob out in Humpty Doo, courtesy of an old mate from back in the day, who’s moved up here. It’s hard slog in this lovely Wet Season weather (first monsoonal trough just came through, somebody please shoot me), but fun, rewarding and above all else, basically the same fucken job I’ve been doing for seventeen years now anyway. Fucking it all up at this point would have to involve several deliberate acts of sabotage and a small meteorite strike. Everyone I work with is good folk and the days go by fast.

Is this the second act of the story? It is? Unleash the conflict!(note to self, remove stage directions before publishing)

Here comes something though, cos we lost our second house sit (record scraaaaaaatch). Shan had three lined up, that would have covered us until about March, rent free, except for looking after peoples dogs and such (which if you think about it, free house and you get to chill with a furry barking angel in the flesh, it’s like being paid twice). It’s kinda embarrassing to own mortgages, plural, and still be on the hook for rent. Like "Why do we have this giant, corporate branded, rusty steel dildo hanging over us like the Wang Of Damocles? Oh yeah, cos we decided to financially shoot ourselves in the foot with an early thirties caravan adventure, that’s why".

And that’s how we wound up back in the retirement ghetto. Fogie central. The fossil fields. Caravannicus macshilvannicus, goddammit, I thought I had another one.

Yeah, we found another caravan park. Several new tarpaulins were purchased. Along with 400 metres of telecom rope. And in order to keep out the monsoonal rains, something was erected about our long suffering caravan. A structure not dissimilar to the part of the Eastern European refugee camp where they sell the really dodgy moonshine. The one they ferment out of rats in a gumboot (stay tuned: guide to fermenting rats in a gumboot coming next week)

Thus far it is keeping the rain out though. It sprinkles overhead as we speak.

Well thats about it for now. Bet it took all of 3 minutes to read too. I really need to find a better way to write than on a bloody iPhone.

Till next quarter....

[jakebraque-blog]

Gettin Territorial up here.

​Life continues in Katherine. A certain smart little bugger is getting proper close to his first steps, sprouting teeth like crazy and making a lot of noises that sound damn close to words. He spends bulk hours crawling around the outdoor kitchen, chasing butcher birds around while they clean up the never ending food trail he leaves behind him.

The scenery has greened up a little bit, since that spot of rain we had. The last spot of rain that will be seen here for a while now. Because the Buildup has set in. Our time of direst suffering has begun. Yessir/maamee, it's nowt but boiling hot and humid days from here until the wet season comes to put us out of our misery. Which is saying something, considering the awful reputation the Wet has. It's like "Thank god they're taking all the Brazilian Wandering Spiders out of this box I'm locked in, from here on out it'll only be regular old Brown Scorpions for me. Huzzah!"

Which brings us to our next paragraph. Here it is. Actually no, I don't like this one. Let's skip ahead.

Hey! This one's way better. It's where I start writing about the old Mack truck I've been working on for the last couple of days. It's an R6, which is way crusty in age terms. 1986 model, so almost as old as me and in similar or slightly worse condition.

Cos your early thirties are about when Mother Nature suddenly remembers you exist, drops whatever she was doing in the Amazon with the Poison Arrow Tree Frog and rolls on over with her big bag of honkin-great physical ageing indicators. Like "Oh, shit, you're still alive? Yeah, let's not have your dusty old genes contaminating the species here. IIIII'm going to gooooo wiiith, nosehair. All of the nosehair. Some in the ears too aaand then wrinkles all over. Best of luck mating now fucknuckle." Bloody nature.

I will say, after a couple of days doing brakes, bearings, clutch and so forth on a prime mover, you really start to realise: "Thank fuck I don't do this regularly anymore." Because working on road trains for a living can go make love to a hoof rasp. Everything's exactly heavy enough to tempt you to lift it but then damage your back, the lifting and pulling tools are always broken and the underside of your average truck (ie: the part where a mechanic's job takes place) is covered in a fine layer of red dust and atomised kangaroo entrails. Trucks are bullshit. I want it written on my tombstone. Somebody note that down.

Well, I mean yachts are bullshit too. The whole job tales place in a space the size of your average washing machine, the charter companies flip their shit if you leave a single fingerprint behind (which is easy, cos this gig never involves getting oil or grease on yourself, cough cough SARCASM cough) and any spanner you lose your grip on for half a picosecond now belongs to Poseidon. Bloop.

But let's not beat up on the bareboat industry, because the ski resort industry aint no bed of roses either. Everything's cold and wet enough to give you pneumonia(check that off the ol' bucket list), a bunch of your coworkers are bent, hungover or don't speak fluent english and discolouring or putting holes in the snow is punishable by catapult.

But I don't wanna make it seem like the mining industry is some beautiful safe haven here either. I once worked in a transport workshop where the boss told staff to leave an injured worker screaming on the floor with bones poking out and a big bit of steel on top of him, rendering no first aid assistance nor calling the site ESOs until he'd photographed the scene as evidence. On another site we once found a petrified stick of powergel explosive nestled in the engine bay of a dumptruck during a service. On another site I was almost blown up in a charged stope because the firing lines had been crossed and mislabelled( fortunately my guardian angel sawed through a hydraulic hose in another section of the mine 5 minutes before the bombs went off under my feet and I only found out about it an hour later, having been getting the broken down drill running again at the time).

There's a moral to this story here. And as best I can tell it's: Fuck The Mining Industry. Huh. How 'bout that.

We could get into the agricultural industry here but, well. Ok, chaff in your undies. Always chaff in your undies. Everything has bulk redback spiders in it and 50% of cockies treat the common greasegun like it's made of fucken plutonium with some AIDS on top. You have to dismantle most things with a chisel and an oxy torch. While standing in dry, flammable wheat stubble up to your gentleman's area. Certain Case IH dealerships in certain towns where I certainly did my apprenticeship can certainly be certified as a pack of shitty, circular, circumcisers? I lost track of that one. Fuck Hutton and Northey though.

((Deep breaths))

The snow is good though. It's pretty, they give you a skidoo and nobody gives that many fucks what you're up to as long as the chairlifts are going. And the whitsunday bareboats are good too. You work in paradise and nobody's happier to hear that you've got a machine back in the rack than an ops manager with 4 families of snooty Sydneyites due to rock up and claim hire boats tomorrow or else launch yelp and facebook tirades. And the mines are, well, they pay you a lot.

And it's bloody good here too. Hot it may be and steamy it may be, but it's pretty, the people are the very best kind of people, some of them pay us money to do stuff that's kinda second nature by now(fixing things and cooking things and gardening and mowing lawns(which can be done with a beer in your hand, let's not forget)). Supposedly there's work waiting in Darwin, we'll see when we get there. It can wait.

I guess we've adjusted to Territory Time.

[jakebraque-blog]

Live and direct from the abyss of tiredness.

​Bear with me here, there’s been some shit on my mind for a couple of days.

So you know how that poor bloody cow gets hoicked into the velociraptor pen in Jurassic Park? It comes out on a crane or some shit like "bzzzrrrrt! Fachunk! Bzzzeerrrt!" and then gets its shit wrecked safely behind some foliage where little kids won’t see it and then look up disembowelling on wikipedia. They put it in a harness and everything.

Which begs a couple of questions. Do they custom make the cow harnesses? They’d have to be load rated, right? Cows weigh, uh, I dunno, lots? More than a sheep or a goat, certainly and I'm not lining up to have one of them dropped on me from twenty feet up. Are they just dropping every cow into the fucken murderdome inside a bunch of kevlar and stainless steel that costs fifty times said cow? Cos said ergonomic bovine assasination device looks mad futuristic and shit. There’s all shiny bits on it and they lift the cow over some people I think, so you’d hope it was engineered correctly and had like a working load limit and some quarterly inspections and stuff.

I guess they are in Costa Rica though. Regs are gunna be a wee bit lax down there. And if anyone does happen to get encowenated due to faulty lifting hardware, they’ll probably just lob em into the nearest carnivore enclosure and then tell the authorities they went jetskiing over the plesiosaur tank despite the dire warnings of their supervisor. With enough waivers, bribes and hastily applied warning signs, you’d imagine those Ingen fuckers could hush up all manner of workplace accidents.

But there’s another aspect to this business here. Raptors are clever right? Their (give us today our)daily cow is yoyoed in on a big metal cable every day and then the tenderised remains are yoinked back out. Seems like an obvious way to bypass the electric fence and access all the tasty morsels outside ye olde shady reptilian prison cell. Ingen are still about twenty years away from acquiring their Chris Pratt-based Pectoral Velociraptor Hypnosis Technology™, and are instead relying on a single surly Sarth Effrikan with abysmal peripheral vision and a stupid, impractical gun; who (ancient spoiler alert) is gunna immediately forget how not to get raptored as soon as it actually matters, despite that being the only thing in his job description. The raptor’s just gotta hang on to the harness, scale up the cable and then either run amok, break its mates out using its Hannibal Lecter intellect or whatever, maybe with some toothpicks or a stolen radio, or just chillax until the T-rex finishes wrecking everyone’s shit and John Hammond carks it from the death of a thousand mildly hallucinogenic Procompsognathus bites in that bit they cut out for the movie adaptation.

It’s at this point that our intrepid author reopens this file after a good nights sleep, peruses it with deepening horror and valiantly attempts to set this foundering wordship back on course. His efforts will, of course, be in vain. Because, you know, obviously.

Uh, we went to Darwin on the weekend. It’s nice there. Hot but nice. Good food. The old fuel tunnels are pretty sweet. No, I didn’t take any pictures. Yeah, I know.

Life in Katherine is good. The Wet’s still a couple months off, but we do have the joy of the Build Up to experience before we get there. It’s heating up already. The place we're staying is surrounded by lawns and palm trees. The kitchen and communal living area is an open sort of patio thing. No, I didn’t take any pictures of that either. Sorry, it’s dark.

Shan takes care of the cooking and cleaning and kid-tolerating out here all day. I throw spanners on a neighbouring property. Mostly at their cows. They’ve asked me to go away so many times.

Anyway, that’s all the coherence I can muster at the moment. Time to fall asleep watching Rick and Morty.

This deserves every award imaginable.  

[jakebraque-blog]

Correct use of wire toaster while free camping.

Place toaster on caravan stove, light stove.

Watch spouse remove toaster from stove and replace right-way-up.

Place bread on toaster bars.

Turn your back for 20 seconds to make a coffee.

Remove toast from toaster bars.

Open windows and disable smoke alarm.

Place second piece of bread on toaster bars. Watch like a hawk for next 15 seconds. Get distracted for half a second by your kid trying to climb into the fridge.

Remove toast from toaster bars.

Gather up fire blanket and place aside for cleaning and refolding after breakfast.

Secure child to high chair with ratchet and occy straps and place in corner.

Relight stove and place next piece of bread on toaster bars.

Turn toast over precisely at the 15.5 second mark. Wait a further 10.25 seconds exactly.

Finally collect one piece of golden brown toast.

Remove any visible metal and wire fragments from toast.

Butter toast and place a new piece of bread on the toaster bars.

Sit down and enjoy two bites of delicious toast.

Turn off stove.

Remove fire extinguisher from mounting bracket, hold upright and tug sharply on safety locking pin.

[jakebraque-blog]

I can see your house from up here.

​One tyre, one wheel bearing, one CV joint, one shattered engine cooling fan, ending in a slashed radiator core (which for unrelated reasons also copped a sheared off side mounting plate, that we then bodged up with tie wire). The bearings got an emergency patch up just North of Bramwell Station and thankfully made it to Weipa where we could sort it properly. The CV got ignored (we did most of the Overland Telegraph Track in HI-2, hoping it wouldn’t explode). The radiator got bogged up with Bars-leaks and the fan got cut back into a roughly balanced profile with a cordless angle grinder (and our fearless bush mechanic got a blob of superheated plastic melted into his foot). The tyre was only a simple pop-off and clean-out type job, just packed up with mud when we crossed Gunshot creek. Oh and there was a broken spotty we stuck back on with gaffer tape. It’s hardly worth mentioning really.

So yeah, we conquered the mighty cape. With a shitload of help from our 9 carloads of new friends. Props to them for towing us up out of Palm creek at the very start of the tele track. To Shan’s Dad for basically being our mobile daycare service whenever the camp was getting set up or packed up. To Scott for being on hand with the Bars-leaks when I looked under the car and saw green shit dripping out of our radiator at Elliot Falls. There was no way in hell we’d have made it without everyone else there.

And a trip worth doing, it certainly is. We started off with a 4 day stay at the Mount Carbine caravan park, where they’ll let you leave your van all pro bono publico and shit, so long as you stay a day before you leave to do the cape and a day when you get back (because the roads north of Cooktown will shake a caravan right out into its component molecules). Mount Carbine’s dry as some very dusty old balls, there being some kind of freaky weather thing happening there where the Great Dividing Range makes all the clouds go around it in a ten kay radius. Which is grouse if you’ve just driven up from the Whitsunday coast and haven’t packed your awning away dry in weeks due to this rainforesty bullshit everywhere. A full day of actual sunshine in their old converted mining camp will straight up scour all the tropical mould off your shit.

Once we’d spent what felt like weeks unpacking and repacking and forgetting to put the wheel bearing greaser in before we left, we parked the van up in a corner, locked and chocked her and headed for the coast. Our group was heading up toward the big rendezvous at Cooktown from down in Victoria and the first one we met was Shan’s Dad, in Wonga beach. Beers were cracked, greetings exchanged and much attention was lavished upon the grandchild while we made camp at the incredibly overpriced caravan park. Like, seriously, it’s 35 bucks for a tent site and the baby bath they provide is an open-air laundry sink with the hot tap removed and rendered unusable (unless you happen to have a Leatherman handy). I really must remember to post that shitty review on Wikicamps.

Onward from there, we hit the Bloomfield track and railed it all the way up to the Lion’s Den hotel. The Bloomfield’s a pretty way to travel, with some steep-arse hills (one of the camper trailer rigs had to get towed over one bit), but it’s not what you’d call four wheel driving. We passed a couple of backpackers doing it in a Hiace halfway up.

The Lion’s Den is one of the must-sees up around Cooktown. Huge camping area out the back with a river and all. And of course the pub its self is decorated in the timeless outback style of let-everyone-scribble-shit-on-the-walls-and-hang-kooky-stuff-in-the-rafters-if-they-feel-like.

Onward to Cooktown. Cooktown’s ok. If you like that sort of thing. Though based on our admittedly small sample size, the local butchers can’t cryovac shit to save their own arses from the horrible shark attack that would inevitably happen if you took one of their leaky-arse bags out on a boat somewhere. Thanks for all the blood in our engel fuckers. I guess the captain cook museum is pretty cool too.

Heading up from there, you have to track back inland along the road you would have taken in (if you were a huge puuuuussaaaayy!) until you get to Lakeland. From lakeland you head North to Laura and then the dust hole ridden, corrugated, vehicle-destructey fun begins as you hit the Peninsula Developmental road. Or, if you were everyone else in our group, you’d go the way that was apparently planned, up through the national forest. Though if you did that you’d miss out on seeing the Hann river roadhouse. They have a pet emu and sell beer. The emu is kind of vaguely threatening. I highly recommend the experience of watching it freak out your wife for a solid ten minutes, as it slowly stalks her around and around the car while staring at her with its big, googly eyes.

After a solid 2.5 hours of being shaken the shit out of, you’ll arrive at Musgrave. Which is also just a roadhouse/pub/campground. It was at this point that the sprout decided to flip his shit at the prospect of being strapped back into his carseat and forced us into camping for the night. A half hour later, our group arrived from the forest track, asked a bunch of questions about what drugs we were on and then headed for the actual planned stop at the Archer river roadhouse. Catching them up the next day would necessitate a 7:00am start on the road, but that doesn’t happen for a couple of paragraphs, so we can focus elsewhere for the moment.

Musgrave is actually pretty cool. I don’t think there’s such a thing as a powered site in their campground, you just pay your ten bucks or whatever and then go pitch your camp wherever you feel like out by the horseyards. They don’t give a fuck if you light a fire and at 5:30 every arvo the old bloke who runs the show chucks all of the meaty kitchen scraps into what you’ll be quite surprised to learn is a freshwater crocodile infested dam, right next to your campsite. Separated by the flimsiest of three-strand wire fences, that doesn’t even reach within oh, let’s say, freshwater crocodile height of the ground. They’re actually kind of cute. The turtles in there climb all over them to get at the scraps and they don’t even notice. Carnivorous turtles may be the biggest threat brewing in this dam.

Onward from Musgrave (after packing up your tent at sparrowfart) and the road stretches a good 3 hours of travel up to Archer river. This is the really shitty section. Some bits are good but as a rule, if you don’t keep your speed above 80 or so, the corrugations will strike down upon every fibre of your vehicle with great vengeance and furious anger instead of merely being very unpleasant. The regular bitumen overtaking sections are either (and depending on your mood at the time) oases in the desert of cartilage ablating vibrations that wrack your very skeleton, or cruelly placed pauses in your torment that serve to heighten you senses for the redoubled agony to follow. Much like how the Spanish Inquisition would have a breather mid-flogging to let their victims recuperate a bit and maybe tentatively stick their head back out of their power-animal cave for a sec, before starting up with the cat o'nine tails again. This is around about where the radiator mount broke off. I cannot stress enough how much you shouldn’t bring your Festiva up this road.

Next up was Bramwell Station. The northernmost cattle station in all of Australia. They have about 14 acres of campground, a big section you can store caravans and campers on (you know, so you can replace their entirely sheared off spring packs on account of you bringing them up that "road", you doofus) and of course, a pub. The promoter of the whole deal does a big spiel about the station and the land’s history every evening and the place is always jam packed with your fellow nomads and suchlike. Top joint. The lady who owns the station also has the roadhouse at the start of the tele track and the earthmoving company that handles the constant, uphill battle of keeping the road up to Bamaga in technically passable condition. Considering how it’s under water for a big chunk of the year, I’d say they’re doing alright.

So as I said just before (unless that bit got edited out), Brawell Junction roadhouse is where the fabled Overland Telegraph Track begins. A short, meandering few minutes up, you’ll run into the first of the flaming hoops you’ve gotta jump through to make it onto the track. Of the 40 odd people we saw come in for a look at the crossing, about 10 or 15 just poked their heads in, said "nooooope" and then fucked off to the easy road up. And I can’t say I blame them. We took the chicken track and still had to get snatched out up the exit ramp. If you do it exactly right you’ll still come within an inch of stoving in your driver’s side quarter panel. Try to be a hero and you’ll put a spa sized dent in your car.

So anyway, we did that. Then came the long rolling goat track that switched between scrub and grass, rocks and and forest. You don’t go five minutes without some kind of drastic scenery alteration. Shit’s beautiful up there.

All told, to do the tele track properly you have to tackle about 20 crossings, one or two of which are real drowners. People talk in hushed tones of Nolan’s brook and Gunshot creek. As well they bloody should. Nolan’s is deep enough to have a stand up bath in and Gunshot owns its hardcore reputation all the way. If I was to recount the whole adventure front to back, you’d be bored shitless and I’d slag a bundle of neurons trying to come up with a twentieth synonym for shovelling rocks into a mudhole.

The point is we made it. 4 days later, having camped at Dulhunty, Cockatoo creek, Nolan’s brook and finally making it to the Jardine river and over to Punsand bay. We spent the next few days wandering around, photographing things and such, I hiked to the tip with a grizzly baby on my back and all of our clean washing got rained on for what felt like a week.

We snagged a new radiator for our bus in Bamaga. At a little joint called Cape York Spares and Repairs, just across from the BP. Do not go to this place if you can avoid it. There are other options nearby.

See it’s like this. Our radiator was well shagged at this point. The fan had basically turned into a claymore mine back up the track and the corrugations had sheared off some important bits as well. It looked like one of those mangled shiny things that fall off Optimus Prime when he gets a missile up the robo-colon in act three.

We wound up buggered for a fan but did happen to get sold a brand new OEX radiator that this, ahem, "gentleman" had sitting under one of the giant piles of crap in his rat’s nest of a workshop. He opened the unstapled flap on one end while explaining how it got ordered in for some job or other and then never used. One side of the box had a little hole in it, about the profile of a pack of cards. I took a peep inside, saw a perfectly serviceable core and chalked it up to some bump or other on the transport truck, no big deal. Off we went with our emergency radiator packed carefully onboard. Did you see the foreshadowing? I foreshadowed there. It was all foreshadowey and shit.

Onward to Weipa. You’d think it was shitty except for how it’s kind of ok. Go do the sunset tour. It’s amazing to see saltwater crocodiles all like close by but yet somehow not eating you, even though the guardrail on the boat is super low. And they disappear in two inch deep water, it’s fucked. Good place to buy some new wheel bearings, is Weipa.

Back down to Musgrave, we got to introduce our new friends to the magic of watching some guy in a hat feed very small crocodiles, before parting ways the next day. They went off toward Karumba and we bailed back toward Mt Carbine. Spent a night in Lakeland on the way.

Then the rest and refit. The fan we bought in Weipa turned out to be wrong. Gulf Parts and Spares were totally cool about it. It’s on its way back up for a refund as we speak. It’s the point where our new radiator came out of the box that the fuckery begins.

See it came out with a hole in it. In a spot that lined up quite well with the hole in the box, just turned over on the other side. Some surprise was expressed. A phone call was made. And in two shakes of a bullshit spackled cordless phone, we were informed that absolutely everybody in the workshop remembered how that specific box they dug out from under one of their big heaps of shit along one wall most definitely had no damage when they all absolutely saw it in the workshop. Which wasn’t suspicious as buggery in the slightest.

Now I’m inclined to believe the young parts guy (ie. the poor fucker who’s been left to absorb our hatred since his gutless maggot of a boss started refusing to take our calls, oh look, here’s his number, please don’t, you know, do anything immature with it). Adam’s obviously never laid a spanner on anything more complicated that the axle adjusters of his dirtbike. He would have paid attention to the fiftieth box of fourby-related shit to frieght in on a Tuesday morning like I would have paid attention to something (insert vapid celebrity) said in (seriously, they still print Woman’s Day Magazine? That’s kind of impressive. Wow). But when you’ve got a brand new, excessively ventilated radiator to return and a miserable pack of fucknuckles who say you broke it, not them, "nuh uh, I know are so what am I?" there’s only so much understanding you can field.

Collecting the replacement radiator took a 200km round trip down to Atherton (where the owner of the Natrad both gave us a discount on hearing our story and also insisted on taking the new unit out of the box to show John and I) and ate up a whole day, plus a big chunk of grandkid time for Poppy, who was at this point the only one with a working car. We booked an extra day at Mount Carbine to fit all the repairs in and thankfully got the hot tip about the pies at Mt Carbine servo. Homemade awesomeness. Big ups to Nikki and Darryl for putting us onto that. Plus giving up the office phone and summoning the infernal and ancient magics of the yellow pages tome to guide our radiator related quest (mobile coverage is not so much with the existing there, it’s kind of one of the good points). Hail Mount Carbine Caravan Park! Hail!

So where does this epically disjointed tale leave us now? Uh, Mount Isa actually. Look it’s taken like a week to write this, I left out a bunch of stuff, there’s obviously been about eight different mindsets at work etcetera. Kind of not looking forward to the editing process really.

We’re heading Darwinward, to find the holy grail of places we might like to settle down in. Everyone I know who moves there never comes back. I can practically hear the Barra calling.

Some other things’ve also happened since then but it turns out that travel blogging as a parent is like that old Greek thought experiment where the arrow almost hits the tortoise, but then the tortoise moves a bit but then the arrow also catches up a bit but then the tortoise moves a little bit more but then the arrow also moves a bit more and oh my god I’m so tired, seriously how how are my lungs and stuff still working shdhfhufudhfhfoiwgsdjdnf

[jakebraque-blog]

Mission: not impossible, but definitely more difficult than before.

Do you know what camping is as a parent? It’s doing all of your normal repetitive household chores, except under a fucking tarpaulin. All the while tortured by memories of how it used to be when you’d go bush for the weekend with nothing but 2 cartons of beer and a spare pair of jocks tucked into your swag somewhere. Your pillowcase I guess, if you were the organised type. Dinner was whatever animal wandered close enough to be clubbed and burnt and the only other things there were to do was tip back stubbies, chain smoke and share stories about everyone’s various childish antics/horrifying workplace accidents/blatant fishing related falsehoods etcetera; and if it was winter, maybe commit some amateur pyrotechnics and burn all your arm hair off with a tin of petrol and some dunny rolls (in a well cleared area of course).

So anyway, we’re doing that next (he said, as though they hadn't been doing it for the better part of 2 years already). We’re on our way to Cooktown, the stepping stone to Cape York and there we’ll dump the (increasingly wonky and bent-looking) caravan, tent the fuck up and head North. The replacement tent has been purchased (our old one having been dogstroyed back up in the high country, when we tried to use it for a kennel), the thoroughly worn out butane stove has been replaced (took three years to warp the alloy hotplate though, not bad for 50 bucks). The poor, rusty old ute has finally been sold. Hell, we’ve been on the road for 4 days now already. Bye bye Airlie Beach.

Towing with the 105 series has, I must say, been a mite nerve-wracking. I took for granted how naturally stable the caravan was on the back of that old tank of a ute (god I miss her, hope she enjoys her new life lugging potting mix around the Gold Coast). The settling in period for towing with the ute was from Kal to about Eucla. Once we’d passed through the crazy storm activity back in Feb '16 and emerged upright we pretty well knew how she’d handle in anything.

The settling in period with this new prime mover is shall we say, ongoing. Sway bars have been added, tyre pressures have been altered, weight has been shed and repositioned, sway bars have been removed again. I’m contemplating shortening the hitch a bit. We can’t pull up anywhere without me succumbing to the urge to climb back there and dick with it some more. This is all probably nerves. Shan assures me that it tows just fine when she’s on the wheel. But we do have a certain item of precious cargo onboard now and that effects your attitude to safety more than just a wee bit.

Speaking of certain little persons of incontinence, he’s doing very well. Rapidly expanding, developing personality and learning new and interesting ways to bang his head on shit. He’s not quite crawling yet and already able to stand up if he’s got something to lean on. Long stints in the car seat are, sadly, not appreciated. Something that severely limits our ground-covering ability. Should work out fantastically up on the pointy bit.

What else? Damn I’m rusty at this. But you can’t run a travel blog without travelling unless you're also getting enough sleep to have a functional imagination, so here we are, back in this awkward middle bit where I try to get a grip on it again. 

Being a boat mechanic was fun. I’ve never had to factor the potential for sinking something into my work before. And damn are there a lot of ways to sink a yacht while you’re dicking around in the engine bay. You can do it by leaving a single stray cable tie end in there, it's totally bullshit. Kinda amazing it doesn’t happen more often except that oh yeah, it totally does all the time. It’s like cranes falling over. The general public just has some fucken stupid blind spot for this deadly thing that happens constantly.

But anyway, I’m getting off track here. And more to the point, running out of Declan’s afternoon nap time. We’re parked in a lovely spot up on the Bruce Highway. It’s all rainforesty, there’s crocodile warning signs by every roadside ditch and Mission Beach is a stone’s throw away. We went there today. People were skydiving. There’s lots of pretty scenery, rainforest, beach, rainforesty beach.

Many pubs, billions of fucking green ants, you know, all the good stuff. Ooh! Cassowaries! There’s cassowaries too.

And teeny little adorable sugar cane trains everywhere, cos the cane crush is on at the moment. Am I babbling, I think I’m babbling. Let’s all just pretend this bit was an actual conclusion eh? Or do you want me to crap on for another 300 words? Yeah, ok, the first one.

[jakebraque-blog]

The tale of the time the thing happened in (blank), with (redacted).

 Wow, so that was a lot of grown up stuff being said in that last one. It’s getting so you wonder where to find some good quality toilet humour around this website. Fortunately we’ve just awkwardly segued into another horrible tale of someone's past life. So without further ado:

The tale of the time the thing happened in (blank), with (redacted).

It had been a long car trip, on tyres so bald, we honestly weren't sure we’d make it to (blank). But make it we had, with much humorous shit-dribbling and many repetitions of the title (and let’s face it, only listenable) track to the Gorillaz latest CD on (redacted)'s car stereo (Doot doo doo doo doo, doo doo, hoo hoo). A stereo which, much like the alarm system, was of disproportionate value to the car its self.

The head unit was festooned with bogan-candy, all colour shifting LEDs and graphic hoozawhatsits. The subs couldn’t be cranked right up without popping the windscreen out and whenever you locked or unlocked the car this ridiculous yankee voice would bellow out "SYSTEM DISARMED" like the voiceover on Mortal Kombat. The fact that all of this had been bolted into a rusty old shitbox with steel belting hanging out of one tyre and a levered-off petrol lid may speak to our roundabout ages at the time, but I’m not narrowing down the incriminating details any further than that.

We’d driven down to the picturesque town of (blank) because my mate (redacted) had been invited to meet the folks by his girlfriend at the time. He’d also somehow talked me into coming along to run interference against her Dad and any possible shotgun-related incidents that might crop up, through a series of conversations that presumably made sense at the time (maybe it was someone’s birthday as well, I forget the exact reasoning behind it all). Let's not pretend that any good decisions were made here. 

Also, being sensible young men, we’d decided this important event would be best utilised with a secondary objective of getting shitfaced after all the fogies had gone to bed, and had provisioned ourselves accordingly. Thus did each rolling thump of the subbies echo with a chorus of bottles chiming together in the boot. Long live teenage logic. The first stubby got cracked open ten seconds after the handbrake came on, when the old boy’s dogs started barking to announce our presence on the farm.

Skipping over the whole family gathering now, because eugh, boring and awkward, we come to sometime after the oldies cleared out for home. Now the prospective father-in-law was not at all alongside the idea of his daughter and (redacted) getting up to any midnight shenanigans under his roof. To this end we were politely told to grab whatever stuff we needed for the night, lock the car up and get in his ute. Once the night’s ration of booze, durries and doritos was secured in the tray, we were taken up to the back hills of the property and tucked away in an old cabin with a fire pit outside, while he returned to the main homestead below.

A fire was lit and an hour or two was used up in the traditional young Aussie game of Who Can Get His Own Liver To Spontaneously Combust First. Then (redacted) announced his intention to go and have a crap in the dark and scary woods. Several minutes passed, they may have done so ominously but I’m hard put to remember that part with any clarity. Let’s assume that they did.

He burst back into the fire-lit clearing, pants inside out and trailing behind by one leg, which had become stuck on his shoe.

"Auuugh!" he screamed, flailing at them as though they’d suddenly become venomous.

"Auuugh!" he elaborated. "I got shit on me! I got shit on me!"

His method of locomotion devolved into some kind of strange dance around the clearing, while he frantically tried to remove said effluvia from himself without touching it or falling over. My response was swift and decisive. I collapsed into helpless laughter, spilled beer all over myself and almost rolled into the fire.

This important task completed, I proceeded to coerce the story of what had just happened out of him. Being a fairly simple explanation (he’d pooed from on top of a fallen log, then fallen off the log), it nevertheless took some time to relay, what with the attendant commentary breaks, laughter intermissions and breathless demands for repetition, whereupon the laughter would begin again.

Once this vital debriefing had been completed (quite some time later), it became aparrent that replacement clothing was going to be required. We were down in the south of WA, during winter and while there was technically a fire at the cabin, it was situated outside of it, which negated much of its effect. Also (redacted) was now firmly refusing to wear his hideously befouled trousers on pain of hypothermia and the only suitable replacements were back in the car. Which naturally presented further obstacles.

See, we’d been brought up to the cabin by what you might call the roundabout route. It was on the same property alright, but instead of following any track through it when he’d ferried us up, the old boy had used the main roads surrounding it; with, we suspected, a few extra turns thrown in to confuse (redacted)'s sense of direction. Thus hopefully ensuring no late night activities would ensue after a spot of bushwalking (and then presumably throwing some propofol-filled steaks into the dog kennels- look, the guy was a bit paranoid about this apparently).

Confident in our ability to navigate by the stars, we set out into the forest, one suitably attired for hiking and the other in boxer shorts and a jumper. Did I mention how cold it was? Very. Did the pisstaking continue for the entire walk downhill until we reached the stream? Maybe.

There was a stream. It bordered the paddocks along the edge of the coniferous forest that crowned our little hilltop eyrie. By the light of the stars did we ford it heroically, the boxer-shorted member of our party almost immediately falling in off the rock he was climbing over. Soon to be followed by the rearguard, who found himself unable to maintain the correct fording technique upon witnessing this unfortunate event.

Fortunately the stream was about 2 feet deep, despite being composed of some new supercooled version of water hitherto undiscovered in our balmy home up north. Maybe the terrain naturally secretes ethylene glycol antifreeze into the rivers down there, I dunno. Equally fortunately this was back in the days before smartphones existed, thus saving us both a thousand dollars when we went in and me only being annoyed that my rollie weed got wet. Onward we trekked, coming at last to the outskirts of the house paddock. Where all was quiet.

Getting our respective Sam Fishers on as best we could, in our chilled and rapidly sobering state, we approached from the upwind side of the house and crept toward the car. And then, with the full and unstoppable force of habit driving his thumb down, my friend hit the button on his central locking remote.

"BWOOP BWOOP! SYSTEM DISARMED!" The bellowing noise seemed to echo among the hills and valleys around us in the half second before the whole kennel full of dogs woke up and went fucken batshit, just behind the garden fence.

Various snippets of logistical information were relayed back and forth, such as "get the pants", "fuck!" and "run away." The first household lights started coming on just as the dogs hit their stride and really got into barking gear, presumably trying to make up for sleeping on the job through sheer volume.

We bolted for the tree line, another booming "SYSTEM ARMED!" echoing out behind us as force of habit relocked the car. Breathless seconds passed until we negotiated (read: briefly got stuck on) the border fence around the paddocks. And then we were there, at the edge of the tree line, falling over with fear-laughter as we bolted for cover. We each remembered there was a stream about 2 seconds after it would have been helpful.

The climb back up through the timber was a damp and subdued affair, until finally we spied the light of the fire again and rushed to huddle around it. Sleep wasn’t far off. Mind you, neither was dawn. I’d just about dried out by the time I woke by the fire, having decided against moving into the cabin and instead dragged a mattress outside.

Needless to say, the trip back down the hill was a muted affair, the old boy not being keen on talking and (redacted) and myself not being keen on eye-contact. We left the property not long after.

We’d just made it back home when that bloody tyre let go. Right in the driveway. 

Well that’s the way I remember it anyway. There's only one other party who may disagree but memory’s a funny thing and I doubt he'll want to chime in somehow. Sooooo, I guess if there’s any moral at all to this story it’s:

Don’t be young.

Have fun applying that life lesson.

[jakebraque-blog]

The distant chorus of chainsaws.

How bout that cyclone eh? Yeah, I know. Should have got to writing something up a week ago but that's how it is. Adult, family, all that jazz. It's getting so I can't even enjoy a natural disaster these days.

The lead up to Severe Tropical Cyclone Debbie making landfall was long, painful and drawn-out as fuck. Which, I mean, yay, cos we got lots of time to barricade and tie shit down; but also boo, cos the waiting had big, dangly knobs on. The miserable cow didn't exactly speed up when she hit land either. Just ground over us like a millstone on an anthill.

Preparation started well in advance. We stapled the caravan down with 2.5 tonne truck straps and 6 foot star pickets, removed all of the valuables (and tax documents, because the ATO does not accept "a vengeful deity ate my homework" as a valid reason to not take all of your shit and then roll around in it like Scrooge Mcduck) and then ran for the safety of my father's house. Where we battened down some more.

After a properly interminable period of time (like, so interminable you guys), she made landfall (the eye all of a kilometre or two away) and we spent a thoroughly miserable 20-some hours huddled in a stinking hot garage before it was safe to come out. Shan and Declan handled it like old hands. I'm not even sure the tyke really noticed anything was happening, to be honest.

Anyway, cue the usual, deafening winds, small bits of house detaching, ominous clanging noises outside. By the time ten hours had gone by I was trying very hard not to verbally express my opinion about the caravan being destroyed and then all of the bits re-destroyed and then those remaining fragments blown into the damn ocean. Everyone else was also trying to stay chill after nearly a full, sleepless day of having their psyches sodablasted by pissed off archangels. Less said about that, the better, really.

When we finally ventured outside (3 days later- it was a very slow moving cyclone), the town was looking a wee-bit second hand. Trees everywhere (well, I mean the joint was all verdant and shit beforehand, but now they were more uprooted and horizontal-ey), debris, wreckage, and a couple hundred newly-amphibious watercraft washed up in the mangroves all around.

Channel 7 put in some truly hilarious attempts at trying to dramatise their on-the-ground reporting the next day. Baling up random locals like: "How terrified were you during the cyclone?" To be met with Queenslandian replies of "Oh yeah, it was just a big storm really, no dramas." I spent half an hour gleefully watching the sheila from sunrise bang her head against that wall before finally wrenching myself away from the live comedy masterpiece to go do some work.

Our first foray back into the caravan park was a bit of a resigned affair. Wading through the downed trees and floodwater toward our bay, we caught clearer and clearer glimpses of the ute and van. Like: "Yeah, that's the tray of the ute, we'll see the canopy trashed in a second. Ok, that's the canopy, one side must have survived. Well, it's the whole canopy, that's just one of those weird cyclone things, we'll see the van trashed in a second. Ok, I see part of the van, two seconds, there'll be tree on it or something, just you wait. All the windows smashed out or whatever. Alright, so the front of the van's in one piece, mark my words, the back end'll be ripped right off........"

"Well fuck me."

After all that, the damn thing survived without a scratch. It was two days or so before we could pull the pickets and move it. Two weeks until we found a place to park up again (kindly locals, folks rule here). We lived on generator power and jerry cans of water for a fortnight up at the house, while the van sat in a boggy laydown yard, waiting to get looted.

The pool pump stayed on religiously whenever the gen-set was running (the swimming pool then being the only source of bathing, dishwashing and toilet flushing water). Turns out the dark ages are just waitin in the wings for us, ready to pounce whenever the stars of poor preparation and disastery weather events align. Thanks be to our accumulation of expensive outdoor equipment. Who's soft for buying a gas camping shower now Gary?!!

So that's where it's at now. The water came back on a week ago. The power, the day we moved back into the van. And all around, above the chittering of the rainforest, rings the bark of small 2-stroke engines, turning the aftermath of a natural disaster into mulch and firewood. Airlie Beach is up and running again. I might have even found some work in marine diesel.

We'll be in touch.

[jakebraque-blog]

Cogitations.

You’ve gotta wonder about how those aftermarket car repair manuals get made right? You know, the ones from companies like that one that rhymes with fershleggory’s. In theory they run out of some workshop somewhere, filled with stern faced folk in overalls who probably all have moustaches and smoke briar pipes.

The company staff get hold of a new model car or two when they come out, pull them apart, take some photos of themselves measuring things with vernier calipers or whatever and then hey presto! A moderately helpful technical tome is born.

From our hands to the poorly-equipped workshops of bogans and technically inept vehicle owners this land over. Let the chorus of shattering interior clips and dropped socket extensions ring out the infernal mechanical gods below. All shall love us and despair!

Anyway, my idiotic bullshit aside, I’m sure we all know that’s not how it really goes. This is Australia. We are the point on the graph where the indicator of genial corruption meets the wobbling blue line of 'somehow still civilised and has a functional economy' (hereafter referred to as ’peak fuckery’). In this country it’s not unreasonable to think that one could pick up a sheaf of classified military hardware specs for a carton of beer somewhere. Or cognac or whatever, you know. In the right social circles.

It’s not like anybody gives too many shits about securing the tech info for the latest Folden Falcodore or whatever. Someone at the factory or dealership could just run off a copy of certain juicy info and pass it on to their old high school buddy at the manual company over a parmy and chips down the pub. And they won’t get caught because they’ve already cut their boss in on the action. And their boss won’t get caught because their boss

A: knows it’s going on and

B: doesn’t care

It’s not worth sacking people and dragging a scandal into the eyes of the shareholders for the sake of clawing back the exactly zero dollars in income it’d generate. Hell, if said superboss got it into their head to be mean about it, it’d be easier to slip a few malicious errors into the data before it got surreptitiously passed across the burnished oak by said underling. Let the end buyers run off to scramble something expensive and electronic, before venting their frustration upon the hapless book vendor. Save the open recriminations for when you need an excuse to fire someone. 

A suspicious man might even speculate that it’s in the manufacturer’s interest to have several hundred morons invalidate their warranties in an attempt to prove to their spouse that "I’m a real man who can change his own damn fuel filter Bethany!" You know, before accidentally arcing something out on a battery terminal and then trying to convince the weary dealership mechanic that he hit an alpaca or some shit. It could be looked at from a few different angles.

Maybe there’s a smoky room full of people in shadow-pooled armchairs involved somewhere. People do all kinds of things to stave off boredom these days. Sounds as good as anything.

Where was I going with this again?

Lizard people? I dunno.

Peace out.

[jakebraque-blog]

Yet more repairs have been undertaken upon the car. The charming old exhaust chug she picked up coming over the hills a while back finally got a little too voluminous and had to be corrected. Packing maniseal in there worked for a little while but sooner or later this was always going to come down to doing battle with a bunch of brittle and rusty old manifold studs and that confusticated bloody heat shield that never comes off without a fight. You know the one (cough cough, tinsnips, cough). Of course I found a busted intake hose while replacing the exhaust manifold gasket and had to fix that as well. And there were some rounded off bolts and a dodgy airbox outlet barb to deal with along the way (chisel, cough).

This kind of shit always happens when you go poking around your problems instead of ignoring them like a sensible person. It’s why I much prefer to let mine fester away in the darkness, where they grow and multiply, out of sight and mind and so forth until you reach the metaphorical storming the old mill with torch and pitchfork stage, whereupon the whole cycle starts anew. It’s important to have a consistent strategy for dealing with life’s upsets. Anyway, all of that shit is sorted now and it’s nice having an audible turbo noise again. Suuubjeeect Chaaaeeeengeee!

We’ve spent the last week wandering down in Victoria again, sans caravan. That stayed up in Tamworth, thus easing the various logistical aspects of our whirlwind drop-in-and-bludge-off-the-relatives tour. It’s gone well. Minus a wee bit of grumpy kid syndrome, said kid at times not being totally on board with his newfound fame and adoration among our friends and family. He’s had a spot of cuddle fatigue here and there.

We've seen some sights, walked along a fallen-down pier at Mornington, recoiled in horror at that creepy as fuck mailbox statue and disturbed the peace in several wanky coffee shop areas with the chuggity-chug of our family wagon’s passage.

We just drove through Katamatite. Which I believe was named for that freaky space rock in the old DC comics that turned superman into a big red dragon. Not like the red dragon from the Thomas Harris novels who bit off Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s nose with his gross dentures and then set him on fire in a wheelchair, but more like an actual... gaah. Look, never mind, I’m getting off track here.

We’ve pulled up in Jerilderie for a boob stop as I write this, the kid having woken up in his car seat just previous and started haulin on the ol' dinner bell. Seems nice here. There’s less Ned Kelly shit than I was expecting. Glenrowan could come take a lesson about turning it the fuck down a notch. Oh, wait.

Forget I said anything.  

[jakebraque-blog]

30-something couple reveal their secret to travelling Australia with this one weird trick. You won't believe what happens next. Doctors hate them!

We’ve all heard of the Allen-head bolt. You turn it with an Allen key. Everybody thinks it was invented by "Mr Allen". They’re also known as hex-bolts, inhex bolts, capscrews etc. Because as far as mechanics are concerned, a bunch of complex and disparate names for the same thing are all the better to confuse and disorient your customers dearie (it makes the money fall out easier).

Anyway it's a normal-arse bolt, with a little hexagonal hole punched into a cylindrical top, instead of the usual solid hexagonal-outer head. And they’ve been around since the late 18s- early 19s. As for Mr Allen, well there was one of them and his company Allen Manufacturing slapped a patent on one of the cold punching methods of producing inhex bolts around 1910. About 30 years after the first ones actually appeared and around the same time as the Standard Pressed Steel company whacked a patent on theirs. Then world war 2 rolled into town, people needed bolts for a lot of armoured/flying murder equipment and one of those two companies had their name take off and stick in the public consciousness. What's the point of this long, rambling opening I'm typing while our kid gets his morning feed on the roadside? Well there isn't one, because life is cruel and meaningless.

Speaking of nihilistic bullshit, most of New South Wales has been on fire for the last couple weeks. There was a run of 44s, strong winds, a few wretched little arsonists and probably more than one errant durry butt involved in the whole shit show. 90-some fires took off around the state and the whole landscape got doused in smoke, while we all packed our dacks and hoped one wouldn't come sweeping down the hill behind us before we could shake the nuggets out and flee. The smoke around Tamworth’s finally buggered off now but you can still smell it a wee bit in the van.

We travelled through one of the worst hit areas this week, near Dunedoo, where the Sir Ivan fire ate a couple of small towns and 55,000 hectares of bush and farmland.

Driving down the highway is bloody surreal, with the bitumen cutting a neat divide between landscapes. One side a patchwork of grassy paddocks dotted with cattle, the other a burned out plain scattered over with incinerated tree stumps. Stretches of red earth roll out to the West, overlaid with a coating of ash and only broken by the few meandering ribbons that show where a vehicle’s come past since the fire. Smoke still hangs in the air everywhere. Little plumes rise up from reignited tree trunks every few hundred metres.

And of course, down at ground level amidst the stumps, the first shoots of green are coming back in. Cos despite all the pain and suffering it visits on us Homo Sapiens, the appearance of the odd apocalyptic firestorm is just business as usual for Old Mother 'Straya.

The RTA wombles are already out replacing all the melted roadsigns. The locals are already banded together and helping each other out. Cos cruel and meaningless can get the nuts.

Anyone who wants to donate to the Sir Ivan fire appeal can get amongst it at:

https://www.sirivanfireappeal.com/donate/

In other news, we’ve upgraded to a 120 amp alternator on the Landcruiser, to keep the dual batteries charged up, while running the engel in back and also because the old one melted and took out an $80 fusible link box with it. It’s always bloody something.

Other than that, all is well. The kid’s growing like a thing that grows a lot and we’re not too far from the big leap up north to Queensland. Beaches here we come.

Which reminds me. Crocodile repellant. That’s a thing right?

[jakebraque-blog]

Notes from the hatpocalypse.

​BAM. BAMAMAM. BAMAMAM. DE DEEDLE DEEDLE DEEDLE, BAM. BAMAMAM. BAMAMAM. BAMAMAM.

"AAAAAAOOOOWWW. BACK IN....."

Erm, something less copyright protected than that.

Crack?

Sack?

Moving on.

It's been a while. Hours have been worked. Lawns mowed and bins collected. Children have shat many nappies, drank many boobies and grown several centimetres. Wives have good-heartedly tolerated becoming a housebound milkbar and relatives have continued to graciously allow our intrusion upon their lives.

And the godforsaken country music festival has begun (ominous peal of thunder behind yonder castle). We've been working up to the big belt-buckle-bash down at ye olde caravan parkery now for, oh, couple months I guess. Renovated some cabins. Tended a bunch of grass (the whipper snipper they’ve stuck me with is like what you'd get when some Stihl company engineer's wife runs away with the gardener and he's all like "I'll take my revenge out on all of those muscular, well endowed bastards, damn them!" It’s about 5 kilos too heavy and has some sort of homicidal rogue AI in control of reeling out the trimmer line. That shit’ll take an ankle off. Also, can you even type full sentences within parentheses? Somebody remind me to look that up).

Mostly shit’s all groundhog day around there. Trim trim, paint paint, shovel shovel. There was some weirdness with one of the permanent residents who skedaddled and left a bunch of shit behind in the cabin for us to clear out and store, but least said, soonest mended (cough cough, so many dildos, cough).

Anyway, the adorable yet incompetently-traffic-managed town of Tamworth has hit the big switchover from hipstery wafflehouse to swirling, metamucil-scented cloud of Akubras and stockman's hats. The streets have filled with folk and country buskers and the already shithouse road network has been plunged into the dark ages. It starts with a years-old reverse angle parking system where somehow, mysteriously not one of the locals is able to reverse a car properly and then hits the metaphorical gutter-turds and Yersinia Pestis level when they start blanking off streets for bearded folks to warble on and sell $40 straw hats.

Needless to say, we’re heading in to watch this train wreck in action again tomorrow. Who wouldn't?

Aaand, now it’s a few days later. Cos uninterrupted patches of spare time are a thing that happens to other people now, or so I'm learning. Mustn't grumble. Shan has the all the hard jobs in this arrangement.

We've spent a couple of days wandering the streets and venues now. We just saw the old Sheik of Scrubby Creek (Chad Morgan) do a set in the Woolies complex. The dude’s in his nineties and still cracking up crowds of baby boomers with constipation jokes. Granted, he’s not jumping around the stage like Mick Jagger, but still. I kept looking for the wires that were holding him up.

That brings us about up to date. It’s always difficult trying to get up to speed again after a long stint back in the real world. Adulthood acts much like spongiform encephalopathy, in that it sort of chews away at the real you until there’s nothing left but a drooling husk lurching back and forth with a screeching baby in it’s arms at 5am, trying to put the little bugger back to sleep so it can dip into sweet unconsciousness once again for just a little while. Which ahaha, is, er, what someone with a severely deteriorating mental state would say. If there were anybody like that around here.

Ahem.

[jakebraque-blog]

Slouching toward parenthood.

​Well the kid's here. Hello kid.

Also goodbye sleep. Hello satanic amounts of faeces. Goodbye having any spare storage space in the caravan and a warm welcome to all of you parental neuroses that made the trip out her to be with us for the rest of our lives. It really is an honour.

Declan made his big appearance after almost a whole day's labour (shudder), slept soundly for a day or two (to lull us into complacency) and then launched his one man war on our sleep schedule as soon as he and Shan were discharged from the hospital. We've so far discovered that though caring for an infant isn't all that technically difficult, expecting said kid to comply with the process in any way is both laughable and sad. Many things are changing.

I guess the oddest part of it all is the sensation of your own brain getting pretzeled into a more parenting-suited shape, the process of which has set in more or less immediately for both of us. On an intellectual level, I'm pretty sure we knew this would happen, but experiencing it while trying to use said brain for its normal, everyday purposes has been a profoundly weird experience. It's like tap dancing over quicksand.

To explain this in scientific terms, the basic idea is that these squalling little fart-demons burst into the world in a cloud of tailor made pheromones, that then set about rewiring all of your squishware into zombified obedience to their every whim. Parents talk about the whole thing being "magical" and "wondrous", which non-parents (very rightly) interpret along the lines of shambling, alien parasite infested flesh-puppets moaning "join uuuuusssssss." Of course what everyone forgets about being zombified by alien parasites is that it's kinda fun from the inside looking out. The stares of horror just sort of come off as funny while you watch your own grey matter dribble out of your eye sockets.

And so another past self sloughs off, to be hung up in the batcave gallery of villains. Inside a bulletproof glass case. Surrounded by lasers and shit, lest it reanimate and try to escape (just try it fucker, there's sharks in that moat). This last one was almost human-shaped. Back down the line they're all stunted and hunchbacked little emotional Oompaloompas. I guess that's what maturing looks like. No wonder I never venture into this part of my psyche.

Anyway, here we are. Still parked up in Tamworth for a while. Shan's locked horns with the role of Mum and seems to be handling it with as much ease as one can handle anything on four hours of sleep and with a small pink gremlin attached to one's boob at all times. I've still got work, helping refurb and maintain a caravan park in the lead up to Tamworth Country Music. I have descended into the whipper-snippering abyss and return with knowledge most foul and unholy. Mostly concerning the correct way to feather in footpath edges. One shoulder is still locked up from 6 hours spent trimming yesterday.

We'll stick it out here a little longer, before heading up to Queensland. The beaches are calling (as are the grandies) and the yachts are broken and need fixing. Till next time.

Joooiiinnn uuuuuusssssss........

[jakebraque-blog]

Sky go boom boom.

Boo! Still here. Tamworth that is. There doesn't seem to be much point in a travel blog when you're not travelling. Still, let's take this ornery horse out for a ride and see how many fences it kicks over. Shut up, it's a farm saying. Probably.

It's been warming up out here. The rolling green hills are getting a wee bit more tinderboxey and the spiders more large and disconcertingly adventurous. Hooray, giant spider season again.

Today brought storms that did to our annex what my shitty writing equipment does to basic grammar. Like, not totally ruining it, but leaving me a lot of slow and painful patch up to get through that I'll probably just avoid the shit out of while I read books about wizards or something.

Shan's still busy gestating. Just a few days to go, with no sign of little bugger coming out yet. Needless to say she's mad keen to get this business done with, so she can shower love all over the kid. I'm getting a wee bit less scared as well. Kind of looking forward to it actually. Weird eh?

Getting to Tamworth was good in a lot of ways. Being with family is nice but so is going back to work again. Stir crazy's my natural state of being outside of work hours and that shit gets mad contagious in a 16ft caravan. The hunt for work took a wee bit longer than expected, mainly due to me being honest about only being in town for a few months wherever I applied. Shout outs to the literally every single person and company who didn't bother sending an email back after I personally dropped off resumés. Lesson learned. I will just be the lyingest motherfucker from here on out (insert grown up sounding line about supporting your family).

Of course the one field that's always hiring is Muscle-that's-smart-enough-to-not-eat-the-poly-filla, so I've wound up working for a caravan park that's refurbishing in the lead up to the big country music festival they have here (maybe you've heard of it?). It's kinda fun. Plenty of time to burn through the old podcast backlog, no angry miners throwing rockbolts at your head, finally get to use all those carpentry tools we've been lugging around. Even lawn maintenance is cruisy enough. Shit's all looking up.

Dunno what else really.

We're waiting on the big news ourselves.

[jakebraque-blog]

The hideous art of major machinery rebuilds.

It starts off so innocently. You get a crane or a truck or something dropped off to the workshop. Peeling paint adorns its rusted surfaces and unspeakable fluids gather in viscous pools beneath it wherever it is parked. Everybody points and laughs about how fucked it is. 

The operator hangs around for a while to share stories about awful shit that has befallen this now broken thing over the years. A forensic level of examination is carried out by the whole crew over afternoon beers. 

  There is hope in the air. Hope and possibility. You will rip this baby apart, build it back up and make it shine once more. The work begins in earnest. Within mere days it's been degreased and pressure cleaned to the bone. Major components are plucked off and set aside for tender loving rebuild and before you know it, it's up on stands with all its insides laid bare.

Parts orders are drafted, cost estimates are finalised and customer's final approvals are sent for, before the real work begins. Then you get the go-ahead. Order all the bits, send various hydraulic doohickeys off to be fixed by people who get paid more than you do to work in air conditioned clean-rooms and unleash an auto-sparky or two upon the electrical systems. Oooh yeah, it's go time baby.

Now you're gunna get about 2 days into this whole deal before the first time you're summoned off the job and many miles away to be distracted with some other shit. The boss'll tell you how important it is to have you fill in on some mine site or other for just a couple of days. There'll be valid sounding reasons put forth about customer satisfaction and monthly cashflows, all of which will turn to dust and ash in your earholes, because you're both fully aware you're being fucked with because some higher-up said yes to a mate without checking if it was a good idea first. You will tolerate this because its steady recurrence throughout your employment is the drumbeat your career has marched to since you dropped out of high school to become a tradesperson, and you couldn't put a step out of time by this point if you wanted to.

Anyway, off you go for a 'couple of days.'

You get back about three weeks later to find the apprentices have been unleashed from their gimp-kennels and set loose upon your work area. All of your shit has been scattered around, several important parts are missing and for all you'll ever know about it, your meticulously documented markings and disassembly notes have been rolled up and used to smoke bath salts. There's dust on everything and a small yet flourishing bird nest in one of the previously covered engine intake pipes.

When the red mist finally clears from your eyes and the millennials have been safely locked away again with some nice crayons, it'll be your job to put things back to rights. This will take about half a day of completely un-bookable time, spent thinking calming thoughts while you clean and cover up shit-coated parts while trying to remember where everything belongs and if there's any stuff that needed to get sent off to a specialist repairer oh, I dunno, maybe three bloody weeks ago. The other tradies will laugh and mock you openly, as they have every right to, for you are shamed and dishonoured and not fit to walk amongst them.

It's usually around this time that the customer will drop in to see how his twenty-odd-thousand dollars worth of expert mechanical rebuild is coming along. He's going to pop up unannounced to find you smeared from head to toe in grease with important pieces of his million dollar technological wonder lying around in dust bunnies and shit while you curse and swear your way through levering half a discarded pie crust out of the hydraulic filter housing. Then assuming he can suppress his horror long enough to politely ask how it's going, you're still fucked, because you've been back for 5 minutes, so how in the hell would you know? You'll need to make him go away somehow. Maybe pretend you don't speak english.

It's around about this time that you'll notice half the parts haven't turned up. They'll be stuck behind a trade embargo, or the order forms fell down behind the copier or whatever. This takes another half a day of crawling behind office equipment and calling in favours from the Russian mafia to sort out. Gradually shit comes back on track. The urge to butt-chug methylated spirits, always a sign of work-related stress, begins to taper off.

You get sent back to some outback hellpit the next morning. The workshop foreman has shame in his eyes when he gives you the order. As you drive out the gate, a single tear runs down his stubbled cheek.

The next fortnight goes by while you receive a steady string of calls from the boys in the workshop, asking after details of the job and what has to be done. One by one they get rotated over your machine for just long enough to scrape off a few bits of gasket material, lose a couple of bolts and accidentally remove a marker tie or two from various bits of wiring harness before being reassigned elsewhere by management.

When you return, it is as though all hope has been leached from the atmosphere around this pile of wreckage that used to be a machine. Inexplicably a tumbleweed blows past as you step into the bay where once rested a proud workhorse of Australian industry. The customer drops in again, just as you are getting reacquainted with the horror that lies before you. Your eyes meet across the jumbled scrap pile and something wordless passes between you. His shoulders sag and he retreats, feet dragging across the concrete, without uttering a sound.

Over the next week you'll track down every missing part and hassle the shit out of all your suppliers and subcontractors until everything you need is located and summoned unto your fortress of repair-itude. You will cease communicating in anything above a grunt and further incursions into your space by the foreman will be met with shrieking and hurled faeces until he barricades himself into his office. Your dreams become a vortex of darkness and oblivion into which you plunge for a few short hours every night. Other people are naught but shadows moving insubstantial through the fog that surrounds your consciousness.

Then one day a shape swims into being before your bloodshot eyes. Can this be? Somehow your task is nearing its end, for before you sits the very vision of the machine you started work on so very long ago. Sure it's missing all the wheels and it's only coated in primer but this is a sign. Your torment is nearing its end.

The first start up is always the big nerve-wracking moment of it all. The first few times you turn the key will be met with screeching alarms and strange warning lights. You'll open the bonnet and spend another day or two finding all the crossed wires and unplugged relays introducing the whole ecto-containment system of ghosts into your machine. Then give it another go.

A few more components will fountain out sparks or start up backwards, but you'll take that shit in stride. Nothing can stop you now. Slap the wheels on, double check the brakes (always double check the brakes) and get that bad boy outside for some running tests. Now you get to hang concrete weights off things and type calibration factors into stuff, slap some paint on it and send it out the door. Go my little birdie, fly fly.

Well you did it. Feels good doesn't it? Of course it made that funny groaning noise as it went round the corner and you've just found a suspiciously familiar looking bolt that'd rolled under a bench nearby, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

Yessirreee, everything's fine.

Doop doop de doo.