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    Tales From The Tar Baby "...Up The Track"
    Tales From The Tar Baby "...Up The Track"
    Tales From The Tar Baby "...Up The Track"
    Ebook65 pages52 minutes

    Tales From The Tar Baby "...Up The Track"

    By Lindsay Johannsen

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    About this ebook

    Being memories and observations from selected events and personal experiences gathered during trips from Alice Springs to Darwin over one's lifetime, fifteen hundred K's from the Red Heart to the Top End – most recently in our retirement motor-home Tar Baby. How boring, thinks you. And so did I at first, but as I started writing I began to remember things, some recent and others from my childhood...

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLindsay Johannsen
    Release dateFeb 18, 2015
    ISBN9781311450265
    Tales From The Tar Baby "...Up The Track"
    Author

    Lindsay Johannsen

    There's not a lot to tell really, though on reflection, looking back on it through the lens of one’s recollections and memories, the whole business seems more akin to an extended Huckleberry Finn adventure, but set in the vastness of Central Australia. Born, raised and schooled in Alice Springs; taken from the leafy glades of learning mid-way through Year-eight to work at my father's remote little copper mine; later employed for some years driving his cattle-hauling road trains – him having pioneered road trains and the cattle hauling business (see "Kurt Johannsen: A Son of the Red Centre"). Married in the fullness of time; built a bush homestead on the northern edge of the Simpson Desert and raised a family there, all while running a small tungsten mining business and provisioning the hundred or so Aboriginal people local to the area who adopted us. Sold our mine and homestead a few years after the kids had flown the coop, acquired a forty foot (12m) touring coach, converted it into a big steel-wheel mobeel Palaise-de-passion motor home and took to the roads of this great land of Oz - in the main visiting our offspring (most of whom had moved to coastal regions), our grandchildren generally and a couple of great grandies, plus various friends and associates from years gone by. So these days all I have to do is keep the missus happy – my Bride my Precious Lamb and Flower of the Early Mid Morning. 'Anywhere you wish, my darling,' I tell her. 'You just say the word and we'll be on our way.' So it's free as the breeze, we are now, out and about having wild and exciting adventures and being amazingly cool generally. Best job I ever had.

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      Book preview

      Tales From The Tar Baby "...Up The Track" - Lindsay Johannsen

      TALES FROM THE TAR BABY

      …up the track

      Published by Lindsay Johannsen at Smashwords

      Copyright Lindsay Johannsen 2015

      Smashwords Edition Licence Notes.

      This alleged travelogue thing is presented to you free of cost. I insist on maintaining my copyright, however, for whatever that’s worth, though until such time as I amend this notice please feel free to disseminate, reproduce, copy or distribute it amongst your friends and/or enemies to your heart’s content, provided you do it for non-commercial purposes only and the story remains complete and in its original form. My preference, however, is for you to recommend to others that they download the …up the track

      story from Smashwords themselves, so enriching my life with a warm glow of satisfaction in lieu of any monetary reward.

      Thank you.

      National Library Of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data:

      Author: Johannsen, Lindsay Andrew

      Title: Tales from the Tar Baby …up the track

      Cover art and design bungled by the author.

      Also published at Smashwords by one’s sylph: the novels McCullock’s Gold and The Cassidy Chronicles, plus a poem and some other short story rubbish, a couple of children’s stories and a couple of Christmas Stories.

      To order the McCullock’s Gold paperback version or contact the author please visit

      www.vividpublishing.com.au/lajohannsen

      TALES FROM THE TAR BABY

      When my wife and I were planning our retirement we settled on acquiring a second-hand twelve metre (forty foot) touring coach motor home – either one already converted or a bus we could strip out and set up ourselves.

      The vehicle we purchased proved to be in good order mechanically and the fit-out had progressed far enough to be lived in, yet the conversion was far from complete. This and the slap-dash nature of the work explained the asking price, which was considerably lower than similar twelve metre conversions on offer. More importantly, the price was within our budget.

      In the event we decided to strip the whole interior and redo it – plumbing, wiring, air conditioning, flooring, cupboards… All bar the shower cubical which had been fitted professionally. Aiding me was a young German house renovation-specialist back-packer friend called Ronny, who (not surprisingly, I suppose) turned out to be the most infuriatingly perfectionistic boss I have ever worked for.

      Unyielding, he was. Tyrannical, even, with everything I did independently of him being subjected to his micrometer-accurate scrutiny. A half millimetre's misalignment somewhere would bring raw Aryan censure. And a millimetre's, worse.

      So you'll not be surprised to learn, then, that our motor home conversion is, everything considered, a pretty fair sort of job quality-wise without being sumptuous, which suits us very nicely.

      I am also happy to advise that Ronny and I are still friends.

      With the fitting-out completed and our motor home ready for the road, we advertised our little two bedroom bush residence and its ancillary buildings etc in a nationally circulated, self-sufficiency type alternative-lifestyle magazine – for the princely sum of $25,000. Well the property was hardly prime real estate, you understand, situated as it was four hundred kilometres north east of Alice Springs on the savannah grassland cattle country bordering the northern end of the Simpson Desert.

      Unsurprisingly, we were not stampeded in the rush. But we did manage to sell the place, as its location happened to suit perfectly a member of one of the region's pastoral families.

      We named our motor home Tar Baby, the notion being that after forty years of living in the bush we'd had enough of unmade or poorly maintained dirt roads, and so intended keeping our big steel-wheel mobeel Palaise-de-Passion strictly on the bitumen (…sealed road, blacktop, tar or whatever name you may know the stuff as).

      * * *

      …UP THE TRACK

      Journeying up the track from Alice Springs to Darwin is something I have done many times during my life – as a child, in my teens by car to visit my mother, as a young truck driver, and, more recently, with my wife Joan in the Tar Baby, for extended stays in the company of our children and grand children.

      Alice Springs is our home base, however and, despite having family and dear friends in both places, it is only natural we should venture interstate occasionally to visit these others and to play tourists.

      Yet for me the Alice to Darwin trip has always been special. It's the journey itself, somehow, the recollection of previous adventures northward following a prolonged absence to that region and the expectation of

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