Sam Cutler

Driving from Melbourne to Canberra one passes an endless succession of highway signs advertising fuel and food. These signs are all over the main inter-state highways of Australia, just as they are similarly ubiquitous in America. The driving experience in both countries has become homogenised. Objectively there is little difference between the two places with oil and food provided by the same people. The Americans have the better highways, but the fuel is cheaper whilst the food is just as bad.

In both countries the fuel is always provided by the same oil companies and the food is always (it seems) provided by KFC or Macdonalds. I swear I would sooner die a slow and agonising death by starvation rather than eat in one of those ghastly places and there have been many times I have driven great distances being hungry rather than fed. In Australia KFC and Macdonalds have even managed to insinuate their logos onto state and Federal highway signs - they’re everywhere!

It was a pleasant surprise to see a hand-made and funky sign advertising a cafe. I was in the middle of a long drive of some thousand kilometers (divide by eight and multiply by five and you have the distance in miles) and idly wondering how it was that the only food was provided by the ‘unmentionables’ when up popped the hand-made sign. Great! Here was an alternative, so I slowed down and decided I’d spend my dollars with them rather than with the multi-nationals. From the highway I took a very small road into a hamlet (I couldn’t describe it as a town) of some fifteen scattered houses. There was no pub or post office, no school or shop, and not even one of those ugly microwave repeater-stations that seem to blister the landscape wherever groups of houses congregate. The road which led into the place had been paved at the highway turn-off but now had reverted to dirt. This was one small place and there on the right stood the cafe. I was delighted.

The enterprising owners had designed their cafe to look like a building from the years of early settlement or to put it another way, the years of invasion. The first people who had come to what was then a penal colony had swiftly displaced the original inhabitants basically by slaughtering them, and had built shacks very much like the ones they had been forced to leave in their old countries. Here in front of me stood a building that could just have well been in Ireland in 1860 or in rural England. It had a low roof which sloped across a front porch that had a floor made of brick. The front door was a stable door, with the upper half open and the lower half closed, so that one could see into the welcoming interior. On either side of the door was a window made of small panes of glass roughly trimmed in unpainted wood. The walls of the building were made of vertical planks and at the end of the place a brick chimney burped a thin line of smoke into the sky. A delightful place to find!

I parked the bus and walked in. Two ladies of indeterminate age were standing behind a service counter that could well have been over a hundred years old - the women weren’t far behind and I guessed they had to have arrived to their sixties. Both of them wore frilly white hats like one would see in photographs of servants from the Victorian era, and they had pinafores which matched their crisp white bonnets. I have never received more welcoming smiles nor cheerier “g’days”. I looked around and noticed that the walls were lined with newspapers, and upon closer inspection saw that the wall-paper was made of periodicals from the 1920’s simply glued to the back of the boards from which the building had been constructed. The women waited patiently as I began to read in fascination a story about the construction of some bridge or other, and then I remembered what I was there for. Could I get scrambled eggs on toast and a mug of coffee ? A cup or a mug they asked, whatever I wanted was fine. I said “a mug for a mug” and we all laughed and fell into that easy conversation which is the way of country people everywhere.

The ladies were far too polite to ask me questions directly, but I knew instinctively what it was they wanted to know. Who was I? Where had I come from, whence was I going, and how did I make a living ? Before I launched into any explanations I asked them if they had an electric power socket in the dining area. You know, one where they plugged in the vacuum cleaner when they were cleaning the place. No, they didn’t have such a thing, the only plug they had was high up on a wall and it was used to plug in a light. Could I, I wondered, plug my lap-top into the plug so that I could re-charge it? The ladies had obviously never had such a request, but took it all in their good-natured stride, and produced a set of steps so that I might be able to reach the plug which was high on the wall where it joined the ceiling. I went out to the bus to get the lap-top and returned to mine hosts. A rather stout lady (I’m not being unkind) wobbled somewhat precariously on the step-ladder and plugged me in and they then both stood by my table hovering expectantly, awaiting some explanations.

“I’m a writer” I told them, which elicited the inevitable response “what do you write”, so I returned to the bus and came back carrying a copy of my first book which they oggled with suitable reverence. They had never had a writer visit, as far as they knew, and were pleased to have one now. When they wanted to know why I had a computer I began an explanation concerning blogs and the internet, and I soon realised that I was talking a foreign language. They had heard about the internet (of course!) but they had no idea what it did or what a blog was. I was charmed and rather than give them a long-winded explanation I thought a practical demonstration was in order. We laughed as one of the ladies apologised for forgetting to bring me my coffee and I told them not to worry. First the internet demonstration then the coffee and food.

With the two ladies peering over my shoulder I fired up my MacBookPro and proceeded to open skype. Within a minute I had placed a call to my agent in Los Angeles and miraculously he answered the phone. There on the screen in front of the three of us was my agent’s face and I explained to him that he was part of a demonstration for the benefit of two ladies in a cafe in the middle of nowhere Australia. He laughed and graciously bid the ladies good morning. I invited them to say something and each of them shyly said hello. My agent wanted to see them and so it was that I maneuvered each of them in turn to a position where they could be seen by the camera-lens of the computer. One of them actually blushed to see her face on screen which I thought was terribly sweet and my agent asked all kinds of simple questions for the ladies to answer about the weather and what kind of land was around the place where they lived. The ladies were fascinated and amused and couldn’t quite bring themselves to believe that on this very morning they had talked face to face with a complete stranger on the other side of the Pacific Ocean - in Hollywood no less !

In due course the conversation ended and it was time for breakfast. A steaming heap of scrambled eggs that had the deep rich yellow colour of real eggs came to my table along with a mug of coffee, and the ladies retired behind the service counter to leave me eat in peace. The pair of them were looking through the photographs in my book and whispering to one-another as I tucked into my food and the lap-top happily re-charged from the electric plug high in the wall. Every once in a while I’d notice them peering through the window at my bus parked out the front and I knew that after I had finished my food they would want to have a look at my traveling home though they would probably be far too shy to ask. With the food done I called to the ladies and invited them to look at the bus, merrily warning them that any women who entered my bus were in imminent moral danger. They giggled like school-girls and we traipsed to the parking lot to their happy laughter as they stepped across the threshold and into my traveling world. “You live like a gypsy” one of them sighed and I could sense a deep longing in her to be gone from her security and to be done with all that she knew and held dear, if only for a brief moment. “How wonderful to be able to go wherever you want” her companion smiled at me, “to be as free as the wind”.

After some pleasant small talk I retrieved the lap-top and paid my bill, and they asked me to sign their visitors book. The last entry said a man and a woman’s name followed by  “celebrating our twentieth wedding anniversary” and I took the pen they proffered me and wrote below “Sam Cutler - writer. Celebrating NOT having to eat in KFC or Macdonalds”.

© Sam Cutler 2009
Photos © Canberra Times 2009