THE HITCHERS OF OZ (2009)

The Hitchers of Oz Cover

Hitchhiking Stories and Observations from Australasia and Beyond
by Tom and Simon Sykes


Marty Willson-Piper contributed a 4-page story, titled Keep On Truckin', to this book. it appears on page 143 in the Part III: Hitching Further Afield section.

Keep On Truckin'

Hitchhiking in 1978 was a rather different beast than it is today. It was a means to an end. It didn't seem dangerous, even if it maybe was. Most people who picked you up were purely kind, although I did have a couple of dicey moments out there, trapped in a car at the driver's mercy. Having said that I never did think there was much chance of being attacked. Sitting in a car generally amongst traffic or on a motorway, dropped off in another public place. A strapping lad, I was an adventuring adult child of 19, the same age as my daughter now, and there was simply no option but to travel by thumb. It may be appropriate to point out at this stage that when years later I arrived in Australia for temporary residency, I was most perplexed to see Australian hitchhikers not using their thumb at all but sticking out a straight finger to signal. I wondered how that had developed; as to me the thumb was an iconic motif.

In those days a popular image was the Keep on Truckin' T-shirt, an icon of the day that had a striding cartoon character in flared jeans or loon pants. Truckin' across the countryside to get to a festival probably or perhaps to find a way beyond the stifling atmosphere of society or just moving like a young contemporary hippy gypsy from place to place spreading good vibes and Led Zeppelin. Hitchhiking was the spirit of the times.

If you have hitchhiked often you are likely to have many stories of kindness but the occasional awkward moment rears its head. Without trying to nail this too specifically, I would think it was probably something like Septemberish 1978.

I had been on a journey or two like this before and was rather addicted to heading out into mainland Europe with a rucksack and a guitar. Heading towards the sunnier south, whether it be France or Spain. On other trips it had been grape picking in Maury near Perpignan, or peach and pear picking in Lerida in Northern Spain. This time I frankly can't quite remember where I was heading except to say out of England with little money. All my trips had been full of stories, this is just a humorous scary small one.

I had caught the ferry from Dover to Calais. It was dull and rainy and although I hadn't made it far my journey had begun. I was out of England. It was a different language. I had my trusty phrase book and an enthusiasm for being there unequalled, despite having nowhere to sleep and only some vague idea of where I might be heading.

I walked off the ferry out from the docks toward the road out of town. I remember it didn't really feel like a highway, more like a road from a suburb, but I must have seen a sign that had me sure I was heading in the right direction. I can't quite remember how long I waited but as I did the oddest thing happened. I noticed a fellow looking at me through his car window as he was driving on the other side of the road, in the opposite direction. Later I realised that he was looking at me in a peculiar way for a reason, although that was hard to determine in that fleeting moment. All I know is that five minutes later he pulled next to me facing in the way that I wanted to go, south.

I remember he was youngish, 20s or 30s perhaps, blonde hair and a rather distant demeanour. It was the middle of the afternoon, I had the whole day ahead of me to travel, so was happy to get on my way in daylight.

I put my bags in the back of the car, I think it was silver and it was either a Peugeot or a Renault. I always made a point of having my French-English dictionary available in France as my schoolboy French was missing some important verbs and adjectives, and a lot of French people seemed to have no English at all.

I fastened my seatbelt and proceeded to start up a conversation, "Do you speak English?"

The man didn't respond, he just shook his head. So I told him in French, "Je suis Anglais..."

He nodded but with little interest. He just kept on looking at me in a rather odd way, half an eye on the road.

An uncomfortable silence ensued.

Thirty or forty minutes in... he put his hand on my leg!

Agh! I thought. I removed his hand quickly and carefully and said some garbled message like, "I'm not interested in that kind of thing."

It had begun to get weird because he wasn't communicating with me at all, just silence, nods, and then this.

The car rolled on southwards and I wondered if I should persevere with trying yo communicate or whether I needed to cut my losses, lift or no lift.

I decided to try and communicate. Big mistake.

I took out my English-French dictionary and wondered what the word for gay was? It didn't occur to me tht the word 'homosexual' may be the same in French...so I said, "Je suis pas... gay, erm joyeux!"

It wasn't working! I frantically tried to let him know in French, that his being gay was just fine as long as he didn't want to engage me. This was very difficult to address in French, with a man who never spoke, never responded, but just looked at me with an empty stare.

We carried on driving south, the right direction destinationwise, but wrong direction socially.

Suddenly he began to start tugging on my safety belt. The part that went across my crotch! It was so insidious and disagreeable that I immediately asked him to stop it. He did, for a moment, and then continued. This was the last straw.

After an hour or so in the car I asked him to pull over, which he did immediately. I said that I couldn't carry on with this going on. He just looked at me blankly. I took out my things by the side of the road in a small French country village somewhere on the way to Paris. He pulled away and turned around, heading back in the direction of which we came.

I stood on the side of a road an hour further away from England. I was unruffled and happy to have escaped, obliviously unaware whether I was in real danger or not.

But when I think back to the missing kids who found themselves trapped in bad situations I can only be grateful that this short, middle of the day experience never had the chance to develop into something more alarming.

As I recall this event, it reads as a minor incident, even amusing as I struggle with my schoolboy French, but there was something else, something unsettling, and something bad going on. This man was dark and cold and I wonder what liberties he may have taken with others weaker than me. I can only hope that he didn't actually harm or assault anybody on another occasion, perhaps at night in a lonelier stretch of road. This I will never know.


Press info:

"World famous actor Sam Neill and rap legend Chuck D rub shoulders with writers like JP Donleavy and Carmel Bird. Physicists, business leaders, publishers, political activists, soldiers, poets, athletes and comic book creators are brought together by their common experience of hitching a ride sometime in the past. Since the '60s and '70s - the heyday of hitching - people have thumbed rides worldwide. Money never changes hands, but all manner of social transactions take place. These tales will open your eyes and take you back - or forward. Just when you think you've heard it all, turn the page. You'll discover you haven't!"

Tom Sykes was born in 1979 and graduated from the University of East Anglia in 2001. He has published short fiction and articles in magazines in the US, UK, Canada and Southeast Asia, as well as in international anthologies such as Small Voices, Big Confessions (2006). He is a regular performer at spoken word events and his recordings have appeared on audiobookradio.net and Wildfire Radio. He is a member of the British Society of Authors and a life member of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Service. He is associated with the international creative bureau omnimoda.com. Simon Sykes is an author, linguist, musician, designer and carpenter who hitchhiked extensively during the 1970s.

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