Bill Garner, second left, with his father Les and family friends camping by the Goulburn River in the 1950s. Picture: Author's collection Source: Supplied
AUTHOR Bill Garner says Australia was settled as a campsite and our history is inextricably linked to canvas.
It looked like a bag of cement that had got wet and set hard. The buckles on the straps were rusted and the leather was cracking but when I tapped the canvas it sounded firm. I thought I might have to cut the straps but finally I levered the tongues open and flipped out the tent.
There it lay like a giant kimono. Dad’s tent. It gave off a musty smell I remembered from long ago. Henry Lawson writes about that smell. I sensed the strangely luminous interior, and felt the sloping canvas roof brush my hair.
There is a photograph of this tent taken when I was about 10. I am standing in front of it, fishing rod in hand, with my father and some family friends. I am wearing that curious relic of colonial life, a sun helmet.
We are camped on the Goulburn River a few miles outside the township of Jamieson in north-eastern Victoria. The tent is pitched on a flat beside the river. With the hillside rising steeply behind, the camp is sheltered from the wind and catches the morning sun. In my mind, this is the first time I went camping, but perhaps that is only because it is the earliest photo of it I have. The family album is where memories of camping are stored.
Dad found the spot by tooling along the narrow road above the river in our grey Ford Zephyr. Every now and then he pulled over and peered down through the trees. Spotting a likely place, we backtracked to the gate of the farm and drove up to the house. Lifting his hat to the woman who came to the back door Dad asked if our party might camp down on the bend for a week or so. He offered to pay but she brushed the suggestion aside: that would be all right so long as we closed the gates. Would we like some eggs? She returned with six slightly stained eggs in a used brown paper bag. If we wanted milk, send the lad up in the morning with a billy.
The weather was perfect. I didn’t catch any fish, not even an eel. But I waded along the slippery rocks trying to catch Murray crayfish by hand. And I remember the smell of the tent and the creak of the stretcher and drowsing off to the murmur of the grown-ups around the campfire as they smoked and drank tea.
The heavy canvas tent had wooden poles, wood toggles, and the ropes were actual rope. It was an auto tent, a model pitched at the growing prewar automobile market. My father probably bought it new in the 1930s. As a country schoolteacher he went trout fishing with colleagues up near Corryong, camping on the Mitta Mitta and the Indi. (As a Victorian, he could recite the names of all the rivers that flowed north into the Murray). He even had boxes made to carry the camping gear on the running boards of his green Vauxhall Velox convertible, which he nicknamed “The Grasshopper”.
He loved camping, but my mother didn’t, so we rarely went camping as a family. This is not unusual. Australia (and possibly the world) seems to divide into campers and non-campers, even in the same family. To call yourself a “camper” or “not a camper” is far more than a statement about the way you like to holiday: it speaks of your personal and social values, your attitude to material consumption, and your connection to the environment.
My mother was not a camper. So our holidays were spent at a farm guesthouse on the Wild Dog Creek outside Apollo Bay. While we stayed in a bungalow, I envied the families down on the creek camping under the willows with their campfires and the 44-gallon drum in which they boiled crayfish speared off the rocks. The campers looked to my young eyes like the gypsies I read about in Enid Blyton books.
The campers weren’t poor, for their cars suggested they were probably better-heeled than a teacher. One was a doctor who drove a Riley with a bonnet like a greyhound’s snout. Sometimes he gave kids a ride around the paddock in the dicky-seat.
Campers are sentimental and the garages and sheds and under-the-houses of Australia are stuffed with old tents. Partly they are kept because they might still be useful or because different tents are good for different purposes, but they are also kept simply for the memories. Campers map their lives by their tents. If the photo album is the visual archive, then the garage is the museum.
My own family collection is probably not unusual. There’s the little el cheapo red nylon one Sue and I bought just after we married. There’s the “new” tent, a dun-coloured canvas one with an exoskeleton that looks a bit Arabian. It served us well for many years until a crucial metal crosspiece finally rusted through and could not be replaced. Its successor, of similar shape and material but with an interior tubular frame, has not proved so good. It sags.
Then there’s the long and low faded pink French tent that I bought at a garage sale across the road from two women who had taken it around the world. It’s a bit worn, but it looks so pretty. There’s a small dome tent for teenagers (broken zip) and a one-man tent for a lone child, barely more than a swag. And there are assorted tarps, ground sheets and so on with which to shape a camp to the weather.
And shelves of gas bottles, stoves, lamps, Eskies, li-los, sleeping bags, pots and pans and cutlery and mugs, dish rack, folding tables and canvas chairs. Much is now redundant, but most is more or less ready to go if required. And impossible to throw out: to throw it out would be throwing out the past. Which is why dad’s tent was still in the garage.
I folded it up again along the original creases, but try as I might I could not get the bundle to conform to the Methodist standard. Once the past has been disturbed, you can never put it back as it was, but laying out the tent had started me on a journey. If one tent held such strong memories, how many memories are packed in all the tents in all the garages, and in all the vanished tents gone before?
Lawson imagined lines of camps going both “further out” and further back, reaching into the West and receding into the past. To my mind, these are the lines of Australia’s ephemeral settlement, the temporary stopping places that sketched in everything that was to follow.
My wife Sue and I were camped at Cape Conran, where you can still light a fire and have a dog. It was a good spot in every way. But I was short one tent peg. I scouted around some empty sites until I found a rusty peg in the dirt.
You always find one. Australia is littered with lost tent pegs, reminders that this whole continent was once a vast camping ground, not only for the Aborigines, but for those who came later. Each peg tacked someone to a spot for a while, and tacked newcomers to the land itself.
This is an edited excerpt from Born in a Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian, by Bill Garner, NewSouth Publishing, RRP $39.99
Camping on the banks of the Tumut river. Picture: Thinkstock
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