I’ve been accused of being a racist.
I categorically deny it.
I think if you allow one race the right to drink booze, and another no right to drink, that’s racism.
And if it’s being enforced by a Anglo Saxon formed government over an indigenous race, then it’s government enforced racism.
There was no time to waste.
I had 10 000 kilometers to cover over seven days, most of in the desert.
I was chasing the sun.
Sleeping out of a car with the onset of winter, wasn’t a proposition.
It had to be avoided at all costs.
North.
The sun was calling me.
‘Come dear, come.’
The sun never discriminated against anyone.
It blessed us all equally with it’s rays.
Sun, sun, sun, here we come.
It was a mad dash across the English channel to Ibezia.
On the other side was sun, sex and sand, as the argument went, for those paisley Brits escaping a miserable overcast drizzly day.
I was no different.
I wanted the sex bad.
If I played my cards right, I might be able to a Steve Irwin and sneak up behind a roo for a good marsupial fuck.
I know, slim pickings hay?
I was open to anything.
I’d need permission to enter the sacred lands.
I had just the the right thing that would buy me
Luck while traveling around their lands.
Booze.
More so, booze in a dry zone.
Their ancestors would be looking benevolently over me as I roared through their desert.
‘Could you buy us some booze.’
Could I?
Why fucking not.
And while we are at, I said, could you give me your blessings?
They’d give me a fucking possum totem, if they had one, they said.
I signed for the booze. Had to show I.D.
The fucking humiliation of it. The next petrol station was in Broome, a thousand clicks away.
I paid up.
The lady who served me said she landed here twenty years ago.
The poor fucker, I thought, as I paid for the booze.
The Pilbara natives came up to my car.
Happy getting fucked up at the white man’s expense, I said and handed them a carton of Emu Bitter.
I had never seen such a rag tag of forlorn human beings so fucking happy with glee and the anticipation of getting fucked up on booze in a dry zone.
See, we aren’t all racists.
And I for one, believe everyone has the right to get fucked up.
It’s one way of dealing with reality.
And it’s their way of dealing with reality.
That they are treated as children, not adults, who are denied the right to drink booze.
Huh. You don’t read that in the dailies…
'Why did you do that?' asked the park ranger, who took my money, a lot of it, to enter the Big Rock.
'Because they are entitled to drink as much as you are.'
She didn't see it that way. So I put it another way.
'What if you walked into a pub and were denied a drink on your race and color?'
She had bigger things to be concerned about.
She got on a two-way and sent out a dispatch.
'We have a pontential climber,' she relayed, reading out my rego number.
I was long gone by the time that dispatch was out.
I was heading for another big rock, the Olgas.
And by jimmeny, it was a rock I was going to climb, by hook or by crook.
And I'd even leave my scent on it.
A scent that would remain off limits to 99.9 percent of the population.
And that .1 percent of the population would be too drunk to climb that particular rock.
These thoughts intoxicated me, as I gunned it to a rock less climbed by.
