NOT many drivers will stop. Not grey nomads, not truckies, not women alone, not the elderly, not families with kids, not backpackers in rented vans, not young men – not young people in general, but especially not young men – not the pilots of vehicles with safety lights on top, not the risk-averse who turn their headlights on in the day, not owners of cars with leather seats, not owners of aqua-marine or burnt-orange speed machines, not owners of late-model Holdens and Fords – no, not them.

Above all: not young men driving leather-seated, late-model, burnt-orange Holdens with their headlights on.

I watched one whoosh by in Marla, South Australia, 230 kilometres north of Coober Pedy, 450 kilometres south of Alice Springs.

Few cars were passing. Marla is a roadhouse, hotel, shop and caravan park, and not much more.

I’d been dropped there by Amy, a Vietnamese woman wearing large sunglasses – a woman alone – who picked me up at Coober Pedy, and thereby proved my rules mistaken.

From where I stood, in opal territory:

She didn’t even pull off the highway; she just stopped. She was driving a Toyota sedan, its fender busted in a way that made it look like a racecar. That’s how she drove it. She didn’t have much English and wasn’t interested in small talk. She was driving from Melbourne to Darwin for a few months’ fruit picking. She was driving in a hurry. There was no rush, she said, except that she couldn’t sleep.

“Very tired,” she said, as I observed the speedometer chasing 130 kilometres an hour. The speed limit on that part of the Stuart Highway is 110. “Very tired,” she repeated, as she switched the music from smooth Vietnamese crooner to hard, relentless trance.

Amy had her GPS set for Alice Springs, but she was having trouble connecting times and distances. Not far into our race, she glanced at the device and said: “How long take Alice Springs? Two hours? Three hours?” The GPS said we had 620 kilometres to go.

I suggested she might consider staying overnight at Marla. “Very tired,” she said, as usual, and lit another cigarette.

Thankfully, she stopped. (“Very tired,” she explained, apologising for not taking me to Alice.) And so I stood by the road at Marla. It was about 1 pm.

I’d dallied at the campground that morning, talking with Jenny and Mike, a couple who’d camped nearby.

Mike had asked me a few questions: how was I going getting lifts? Where had I come from? His thick grey moustache was ambushed by several days growth, and it gave him a haphazard, approachable look. I’d noticed them the evening before, because they were camping in a simple tent, not hauling a fully appointed, medium-sized house, as is the fashion.

He couldn’t contain himself any longer: “You know you’re talking to two of the world’s biggest hitchhikers?” he said.

Through the 70s they’d hitched all around the world: more than a thousand lifts. Afghanistan? For sure! They worked in cabin crew for Qantas. Whenever they could, they picked a new spot on the map and went there. “We never had a plan for where we’d get to by the end of the day,” Mike said. “We met the most wonderful people, and we went everywhere.”

They hitched with their two toddlers, when they were aged one and three. “All you need is two backpacks and six cloth nappies. That’s what we’d say.”

They made me a cup of tea. Earlier, Jenny had gently discouraged Mike from talking too much. But then she warmed to the story-telling too, with an hilarious anecdote about sashaying into a stuffy, cigars-and-evening-dress British club in the Sri Lankan high country, their bohemian best caked with mud after a downpour on the way.

Mike was bursting with all these memories. Jenny suggested he get his thumb on the road again. But he wouldn’t, he said, sadly. He couldn’t: “I can’t go back. It was a magic time then. I don’t want to ruin it. The world’s not what it used to be.”

He gave me a lift to the highway, apologising for detaining me with their reminiscences, which had meant I’d missed the early morning travellers. (I couldn’t have imagined a better way to spend the time.) “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “You always get the right lift.”

So there I was in Marla, a few hours later. Arguably, the lift with speeding Amy had not been ideal. But the experience of hitching does lend itself to the metaphysical. One long-time practitioner told me recently that it had changed his life. He’d come to believe in manifestation: you get back what you put out. By the road, it feels that way to me too – at least in part.

I take off my hat and sunglasses for each passing vehicle and try to make eye contact. I smile and wave, whether they slow or not. Whoever stops, stops. It’s beyond my control. If nothing else, I’m fishing for a reciprocal wave, a small addition to the global stock of friendliness.

I’d been aiming for Alice that day, but maybe it wouldn’t happen. That wasn’t so bad. I was reading a magazine article about the conflict in Syria while I waited, scanning the wide desert horizon for people in cars. I pondered Mike and Jenny’s extraordinary adventures, and his view about how the world had changed. Had it? Could it change again?

The burnt-orange-Holden driver accelerated past and I waved and smiled, trying, as much as I was able, to inject a little something different into his day.

Two years ago, I hitched for the first time in Australia, to Cairns and back. I was very nervous. Thousands of kilometres later, on the way south again, I was humming, brimming with joy. I remember standing a while near Tenterfield, watching each passing car and thinking: “You missed out, dude! We would’ve had a great conversation!”

Perhaps the Bureau of Statistics could introduce a Hitching Index, tracking minutes spent waiting for a lift. It would be a proxy for the state of our society, a better one than Gross Domestic Product.

For now, not many drivers will stop. Many can’t, of course, for practical reasons. But someone always will.

It was Dave who pulled up, in a blue ute with a loaded trailer. He hobbled round the back, to shift his gear so I’d have room. He was going right through to Alice, four hours drive away.

“Just before I left, my sister called and told me not to pick up a hitch hiker,” he said. “But I saw you there and thought it wouldn’t be right to drive on.”

And my, did he have a story to tell.

AS we rolled into Port Augusta, Allan, the travelling salesman who was driving, told me that South Australians call the town Port Agutter. “No one cares about anything much up here,” he said. A police car was stopped up ahead. “That’ll be an issue with the tinted ones.”

Until then, we’d had a pleasant yarn. When we got closer, we saw a young Indigenous man sitting on the footpath.

The council’s slogan is “the crossroads of Australia”. I suppose Allan would snigger at that. In part, it’s a service town – nearly a third of employees are in community or admin work. One in five of the town’s residents are Indigenous. It’s a hub for the state’s northern regions.

Mainly, though, it’s a struggling industrial town. Cargo trains line its eastern flank, and coal power plants lie south and north. The lung cancer rate is twice the expected national average.

Nevertheless, at the top of Spencer Gulf, the foreshore is pretty. I drove to Perth in the heat of summer ten years ago and one of the images that remains in my mind is watching young Indigenous kids backflipping into the sparkling water from a small jetty there.

This time, my experience countered Allan’s cynicism. In fact, I lingered a day longer, because I’d been told there’d be a stall outside Woolies, set up by Repower Port Augusta.

In the library, I briefly met Daniel Spencer, a worker with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition who’d been living there for a few months, helping with the local community group’s campaign. We didn’t talk long – he was heading off to meet with a local elder.

The Repower campaign unites some unlikely allies: the local council, the business coalition and the National Union of Workers, as well as environmentalists near and far. They all want to replace the two coal power plants with solar thermal ones, if for different reasons. The locals want jobs, and solar thermal promises more ongoing employment than the other alternative, gas.

The plan (PDF) was developed by renewable energy advocate Beyond Zero Emissions. It says six solar thermal plants and 95 wind turbines would match the base-load capacity of the two coal plants.

For the time being, neither plant is operating, although the generator, Alinta, plants to fire up one for the summertime peak season. But it, too, is interested in solar thermal, albeit on a smaller scale.

A poll taken by Repower last month recorded votes from one-third of the town’s residents, and 99 out of every 100 ticked the box for renewables. This Sunday, September 16, there’ll be a rally signalling the start of the Walk for Solar. About 100 students are marching from there to Adelaide – 325 kilometres in two weeks – arriving for another rally in the big smoke, where they’re calling for an end to the coal smoke altogether.

So, with all this in mind, I thought I’d stick around. But the stall didn’t happen. Overnight, the federal government announced it had stopped negotiations for payouts to close the country’s least efficient plants, Port Augusta’s among them. They’ll receive compensation to keep running, instead. Dan jumped on a bus to Adelaide to attend a protest, and figure out what next.

In the absence of the stall, I got the best image I could. Just put your thumb over the ‘Ty’.

My experience in Port Augusta also countered Allan’s racism. Heading north, I got a lift from Robbie and Jimmy Barnes, an Arabunna man and his son, who were driving to Roxby Downs, where Jimmy was about to do a stint as a trades assistant.

Robbie had lived and worked there for a spell, decades ago. He’d worked all over as a boiler-maker. Early in the drive, there was a moment of silence. He shifted stiffly in his seat and looked at me in the rearview. “C’mon Mick, give us some yarnin’. Tell us a story about what it’s like in Melbourne!”

I went blank, but it didn’t matter. Robbie filled the space. He was talker of the first order. He spoke about growing up on Davenport Reserve north of town, the places they’d walked and camped, and how many goals he kicked from the forward flank. He grouched about young men drinking and fighting, about his diabetes and failing eyesight, and about the black cloud from Maralinga that killed his wife’s mother and many of her people.

As we drove on, Jimmy began to talk more too. He said there were too many suicides in town. But he thought that the programs run by a group of local Indigenous men called Males in Black (PDF, see page 12) made a difference, if only they could run them more often.

They dropped me off in Pimba, inviting me to visit them when I came to Port Augusta next time. “Just ask for the Barnes Boys,” Robbie said, with a wry smile. “We’re more famous than the Kelly Gang.”

I GOT a lift this afternoon without even trying. I’d been dropped on the highway at the turn off to Port Pirie, about three hours north of Adelaide, and I was standing in the dirt, head down, scribbling in my notebook.

I’m in the practice of writing the names of each person who gives me a lift, together with a few choice details. So I was writing: “Andi and Jim, Port Wakefield to Port Pirie, maroon Mazda 323, nurse and plasterer, heart arrhythmia and bipolar, Coca Cola beanie, adult kids, the golden rule tattooed on his left forearm, Jim wants ‘to go on an adventure, hey’, like me…” when a white van slowed and stopped up ahead.

It was Harm (pronounced, to my ears, something like Harem). He’s balding, with a thin grey ponytail, and great joy in his face. The great joy is always there – of that I was sure very quickly – but he was particularly chuffed right then, thrilled by my means of travel.

We talked enthusiastically. He reminisced about his wandering days, and picking up hitchers past, and how he and his wife, Tinky, ran a hostel where they live, in the big old ship workshop in Port Germein. Now they run a small gallery, called Germein Art Focus, where they show Harm’s work and that of six other local artists.

Harm and Tinky have re-furbished their building, which dates from the 1880s. He took me there to visit. It is magnificent: stone walls and huge wooden doors with the original doorknobs and locks.

When they bought it, there was a hitching post on either side, Harm told me. He was just describing the building, but to me the detail seemed significant. They’ve created something that people – locals and wayfarers alike – want to attach themselves to.

He brewed coffee and told me about how he’d arrived in Australia on the last of the migrant boats from the Netherlands and talked his way into a surveying job, almost on the spot. “Anything was possible then,” he said.

Port Germein was once Australia’s largest grain port. There’s not much to the town now, besides the quiet, and a long wooden jetty, which reaches 1500 metres over the shallow Spencer Gulf, towards Whyalla on the other side. 

I walked out, and by gee, it sure is a long jetty. At the end a few gnarled dudes were fishing. One had ridden out on a pushbike, rigged with plastic pipes to stow his rods. “Caught anything?” I asked.

“A squid and a crab,” he said. “So far.”

By the time I returned, the sun was setting. It glowed pink on the silver timber of the jetty, and the Flinders Ranges in the distance.

Over our coffee earlier, we’d fallen to discussing nearby Melrose, which has become a popular mountain biking destination, through the vision and efforts of a few residents. I commented on the way they’d changed their small community.

“It is slow,” Harm said. “It takes a long time. You have to keep on going.”

He showed me an aerial surveyors’ photograph of Port Germein in 1988. It was a dustbowl. “I counted 168 trees, and that’s being generous,” he said.

In the decades he and Tinky have been here, they’ve grown thousands of indigenous trees from seed, and given them to locals. The town is transformed. You still couldn’t call it lush, I don’t suppose – the rain shadow from the Flinders Ranges rules that out – but its houses are now nestled among foliage. Behind the gallery, hundreds more seedlings are growing. 

THE ‘Apple Spiral Machine’ is surely one of the greatest technological advances known to humankind. Have you seen one?

Push an apple onto the prongs, wind the handle, and a miracle ensues: the apple emerges peeled, cored and sliced into a spiral.

Occasionally it doesn’t.

 

This autumn, my house – sometimes squalid – has become a hotbed of domesticity.

I live in a double-fronted terrace house, with a north-facing concrete courtyard. We’re renters, but we have made some minor alterations – we’ve built large raised garden beds, converted a bathtub into a wicking bed, and collected all kinds of containers for food growing. I installed three connected pickle-barrel water tanks, and we rarely need to water from the mains.

Over the last two weekends, we pulled out the remnants of our summer vegie patch, and returned a colourful crop of tomatoes, rocket, purple king beans, basil and beetroot.

With the green tomatoes, we made chutney, following this recipe (add chilli for kick). With the basil and rocket, I made pesto.

That’s not all. We re-potted our worn-out perennial herbs, rejuvenated our wicking bed, saved tomato seeds and beans, scattered the seed-head from the leftover lettuce and rocket, and spread chook pellets and worm castings through the patch. Inside the house, we re-sealed gaps below our wonky doors with a cheap, inventive and effective combination of timber strips, old bike tubes and a staple gun.

Yikes. So we’ve been harvesting, eating, preserving and preparing for winter. Unfortunately, another (altogether more common) pastime in the house is pun-making. At the end of our apple bottling, we had created a small mountain of apple cores and peels.

“The worms will love it,” said Neesh, as we moved the mound towards our worm farm. I sensed the puns coming on. “It’s going to be hard-core,” I said. “They’ll be jumping out of their skins.”

Silence. Grimaces. Stifled laughter. But then I was trumped by Paul, calling out from another room: “I’m sure they’ll find it very a-peel-ing.”

SINCE last year, my dozens and dozens of preserving jars have been waiting patiently in the hallway, under tables and beneath kitchen benches.

But Shaun, our new housemate, is a member of the Seddon Organic Collective – a very attractive quality in a prospective roomy. Last week he bought a box of tomatoes from the wholesale market, and we put the Fowler’s kit to work.

We chose the least fuss method: quartering the tomatoes, buzzing them briefly, and pouring them into the jars, skins, seeds and all.

When Margaret, my Fowler’s fairy godmother, first wrote to me she said she had “the complete works”, and she spoke the truth. As well as the jars, lids, seals clips, and the boiler, she gave me bottle tongs, a peach pitting spoon, a pineapple corer, a cherry stoner, and vacuum bottle opener. And of course, her old instruction book, with Mrs B. Thrifty on the front.

So, while we brought the tomato jars to the boil, we passed the time flipping through the instruction book.

Naturally, we were drawn to the meat-bottling pages, most of all.

These days Fowler’s only recommends bottling high-acid fruit, but when Margaret’s book was printed, any edible substance was fair game: fruit, vegetables, eels, sheep’s tongues or calves’ feet. No matter. Just load ’em in. 

We held the tomatoes on the boil for 15 minutes, then plucked them out. I think they’ll suffice for the winter.