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He attached some photos to his email — another recently acquired skill. One showed him relaxing at home with a can of lager in a stubby holder and a baby kangaroo peering out from under his work shirt. His girlfriend, Rowena, rescues injured wildlife, he explained, which mainly means raising orphaned kangaroos. He and the joey looked the picture of absolute contentment.
One of my aunts — recently deceased — was a so-called ten pounds settler. She lived at Albany in Western Australia, and every Christmas throughout my childhood she sent back pictorial calendars of local beauty spots. To my youthful eyes, Australia looked like another planet. One year, instead of a calendar, she sent a map of Australia printed on a linen tablecloth. My mother used it often and I always sat next to Kalgoorlie, whose apparent remoteness from anywhere else, and above all its peculiar sounding name, made me hope to go there one day.
So I emailed back to Digger that it was fantastic to hear from him, and I told him about the tablecloth and my childish wish, and said I’d be coming over right away to pay him a visit. And a fortnight later I was sitting on the once-daily Prospector train as it pulled out of East Perth station bound for Kalgoorlie. Seven hours later I alighted, the only passenger to do so, at the stop before Kalgoorlie, called Bonny Vale, which consisted merely of a short platform in the fire-blackened scrub. And waiting on this platform to meet me was my old mate Digger. We laughed at each other, then we shook each other, hard, by the arms, then he took my backpack off me, and we resumed our friendship as seamlessly and as immediately as if we’d last seen each other the day before yesterday.
He put my pack in the back of his Landcruiser and then he said he had something to show me. Carefully unwrapping a cloth lying on the passenger seat he produced, like a magician, a lizard that looked like a miniature prehistoric monster. I’d never seen such a science-fiction lizard — not even on television. He’d spotted it in the road and was going to put it in the scrub to save it from being squashed, then thought it might interest me. The wildlife theme continued when we got to his house. Rowena was in the yard, pegging out washing, and surrounded by adolescent kangaroos.
They were calm, friendly creatures, intelligent enough to recognise their names and come when called, like dogs. I squatted on the hard red earth and was immediately surrounded by curious kangaroos. ‘Smell one,’ said Digger. ‘They smell of curry.’ So I buried my bugle in the fur of the nearest one and inhaled, and it did indeed smell faintly of curry.
And then we drove into Kalgoorlie town to go to a ‘skimpies bar’ for a welcome beer. We pushed through chest-high swinging doors into a Wild West-type saloon bar on the main street, and I was served by a young woman wearing next to nothing, who came from Huddersfield. Digger and I raised our glasses to each other. And we carried on our conversation, and our rounds of drinks, from where we’d left off, as if the intervening 30 years hadn’t happened at all.
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