With Every Step Read online

  For the next week (which included four days of walking), being around him was like being on the edge of a whirlwind. But in between finishing his walk, appearing on the Sunrise breakfast TV program on Channel Seven the next morning, catching up with friends and family, including an enjoyable night at Central Coast Leagues Club with cousins, aunties and uncles and his beloved grannie, and spending his last night at his cousin Matthew’s (and Lynn, Jessica and Paul’s) home in Sydney, he’d departed.

  And that brief airport goodbye was the last face-to-face conversation we had.

  ‘See ya when I see ya.’ It’s another sentence that lingers tragically.

  The next time I saw him was not a scene I had ever envisaged.

  14 JULY 2012

  It’s the moment every parent dreads, the call in the middle of the night that chills your spine with fear. The call that you hear about on the news, but the one that is never going to happen to you.

  For me, it interrupted my life just prior to midnight, six days before I was due to fly to London to work for the Australian Olympic Committee at the 2012 Games, an experience I was looking forward to. Three days later, Chris was to leave on a Pacific cruise with a good friend.

  At the other end of the line was a woman who identified herself as being from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) in Canberra. She said she’d been trying to get hold of me for hours. My missed call log indeed confirmed calls at 6.45 pm and 6.50 pm, when I was away from my phone, and then again at 10.10 pm, just twenty-five minutes after I’d gone to bed with the phone sitting on the bedside table. That I had not heard it shows how deeply I could plunge into a good sleep … well, back then, anyway.

  It was a call I feared I might receive during the first year of Andrew’s Oz On Foot walk, especially after he had described the many times he came within centimetres of being hit by road trains on the lonely highways of Western Australia and the Northern Territory. I had woken in the night a few times during his journey dreaming that something dreadful had happened. But I wasn’t expecting it now, not while he rested and sank his teeth into preparing his diaries for this book.

  When the DFAT rep called, she had no idea whose unconscious body was lying in a hospital in Chiang Mai. She first asked me if I knew of anyone travelling in Thailand, and I said, ‘Yes, my son.’ Then she asked my name and my son’s name. I frantically asked what had happened and she requested I hold on for a moment, obviously checking her computer records to find Andrew’s details and that he was indeed travelling in Thailand. She then explained it appeared that Andrew was in the Maharaj Nakorn Hospital with a broken leg and very serious head injuries, and was in a coma.

  The department had received a call from an Australian man whose son, travelling in Thailand, had asked him to call DFAT and explain that an Australian in Chiang Mai was in hospital and in a bad way after being involved in a motorcycle accident. I’m still not sure of the whole sequence, but someone had extracted the phone number Andrew had listed as ‘Dad’ in his mobile; that was the department’s only clue as to his identity. He had only some cash and his phone with him, having left his wallet in his hotel room.

  The DFAT woman had no more information but said she would try to put me in direct contact with the hospital to talk to a doctor. I was struggling to make sense of all of this. I knew the situation was dire but I still couldn’t fathom how serious Andrew’s condition might be, and just assumed that if he was alive, he’d recover. The call ended with her saying she would call back when she had the doctor on the line.

  Our goddaughter Emma was asleep in the next room; we’d been living at the Shaws’ house keeping her company while her parents, Mandy and Alan, were overseas. Chris was at Swansea, fifty minutes’ drive north, staying overnight at her parents’ place with her sister, Lynne, and our niece Jessica, who was heading to London for a couple of years. How was I going to break this to Chris?

  I rang, and my mother-in-law, Maureen, answered the phone. I apologised for the late hour but asked her to get Chris to call me back, as Andrew thad been involved in an accident. Probably two minutes later Chris called, and soon Lynne was driving her back to the Central Coast.

  The next few hours were a bit of a blur. I remember talking to the doctor in Chiang Mai, who explained that Andrew’s right leg was broken and he had severe head injuries. They had removed half his skull (which was never replaced) and done an emergency operation. I struggled to comprehend his accent, but he was telling me that on a scale of one to ten, Andrew’s head injury was a ten. I kept asking, ‘Okay, could he die?’ but the doctor would not answer. I guessed that meant yes.

  By 5 am our bags were packed and we drove to Sydney. I’d been unable to book a flight because of issues with the Thai Airlines web-site, though once we got to the airport they were fantastic in helping us. We boarded a 10 am flight and arrived at Chiang Mai at 9.30 pm our time (6.30 pm in Thailand).

  By then I’d rung our daughter, Nicole, who lives in Brisbane, and my sister Alison, asking her to inform the rest of the family what had happened (I was due to meet her, another sister, Robyn, and my mother for breakfast that morning), I’d also called Cad’s best mate, Matt Delaney, and asked him to tell Andrew’s friends. For the entire flight we were anxious and uneasy. It all felt so surreal, so unbelievable. Unable to sleep, I made myself watch a movie just to reduce the tension inside me. We hadn’t really fully considered, nor did we even want to, what we might hear or see when we got to our destination.

  We went straight to the hospital. From the moment we walked into the Intensive Care Unit’s trauma ward, the horrible truth confronted us. We debated whether the only white-skinned patient in the ward could possibly be our son, so unrecognisable was his face. Our lives, and Andrew’s, had changed forever.

  This was not how the Oz On Foot legend was supposed to end.

  1

  CAD

  How should I describe Andrew ‘Cad’ Cadigan? Certainly he was a very likeable larrikin. He had a mischievous smile and a golden heart inside a rough-diamond exterior. He could endear himself to royalty as readily as he could to an Irish backpacker, a neighbour, the ‘grey nomads’ who so affectionately took to him on his travels or the knockabout tradesmen he encountered on worksites. I bet Cad could have matched every one of them in dropping the ‘f-bomb’, which forever attracted the ire of his mother.

  Cad was a talker and a doer, someone who felt compelled to do what he said he would. He so often had a grand plan, a funny scam or a dream, or was embroiled in one of his many schemes for making a dollar. He worked hard and he partied hard, but just about always he had an goal in mind.

  He was a cuddly and warm child, born in Tasmania during a brief period when we lived there, but from ten months old grew up on the Central Coast of New South Wales, about an hour’s drive north of Sydney. There he attended Point Clare Primary School, then St Pat’s at East Gosford.

  When Andrew was nine, we left on an adventure to Wakefield, in Yorkshire, England, where I worked as general manager of the local rugby league club. I still have the clip of the Channel Ten coverage in Australia that refers to the snowy-haired Andrew leading the 1990 Australian Kangaroos onto the field to play Wakefield Trinity.

  On our return to Point Clare, Andrew went to St Edward’s College at East Gosford. He and school didn’t have a particularly warm relationship, although Cad did often attend six days a week. Normally, the Saturday visit was in the company of his ‘partner in crime’, Todd Bailey – on detention.

  He became more mischievous and restless as he got older, before being diagnosed with ADHD in early adolescence. From there we encountered some tough years when he was rebellious and often distant. He left school at fifteen after completing Year 10, but fortunately had his mind set on being a carpenter. He became an exceptionally good one, which was no surprise; he had built a two-storey tree house at age twelve, and a skate ramp that filled an entire section of our yard at fifteen.

  But don’t think he was any intellectual f
ool – he went on to prove he had an exceptional mathematical and logical mind, and he retained a great interest in and knowledge of world affairs and many other subjects.

  Cad almost didn’t finish his apprenticeship because of his decision to spend a winter in the Snowy Mountains, snowboarding and working as a ‘dish pig’. His calling to be the leader of men, or more accurately the village idiot, was obvious when he got one of his mates to bring a second-hand three-seater lounge down (formerly belonging to his sister, Nicole, and her partner, Glenn) and stretched the sport of snowboarding into snow-couching down one of the steepest slopes – everything was caught on film. Fortunately, he returned to his trade and TAFE and became a carpenter with one of the best names on the Central Coast. He obviously inherited that skill from Chris’s side of the family, not mine; like my father before me, I’m much better at destruction that construction.

  Cad left home at seventeen, and his later teenage years were certainly difficult ones when it came to our relationship. Chris worried terribly about him and his lifestyle. Let’s not beat around the bush: like so many of his generation, his life from then included binge drinking, crazy behaviour and social drug use. He was no angel or model son (and I’m sure I was no model father either), but he was a good one of whom I was generally very proud, and whom I loved immensely, no matter how difficult at times he could be. I felt we had a strong bond. He had a love for and connection with his family greater than he knew how to express.

  While Cad was a genuine, popular and extremely loyal friend or relative, there were two sides to him: the happy-go-lucky life-of-theparty mate to all and sundry, and then the stress-head who frequently put too many demands and expectations on himself, always at full throttle and with a deadline, a plan, a scheme or a dream. And too often it threatened to wear him down.

  Cad loved travel once he got a taste for it while living in the United Kingdom from 2005–08 with his partner, Jaime, with many mates from home at close hand. He travelled to forty-five countries – short of his stated goal of seeing a hundred countries – and studied Mandarin and Spanish. (In fact, he became fluent in Spanish by the end of his walk after hours of audio lessons.)

  After starting out in the United Kingdom building pergolas for a landscaping company, he joined Fit Out UK, a firm that fitted out large retail stores. There he climbed from a tradesman to job foreman to regional manager by the age of twenty-seven. That period was a great example of his personal drive; he was paid by the hour and, under pressure to complete store refits in the shortest period of time, he often worked 100- to 120-hour weeks.

  Another well-known part of his character was his bizarre get-richquick penchant. I’ll never forget when he bought his first ute, suitable for loading his tools as a carpenter, and he would head around suburbs collecting junk thrown out for council pickups, only to stack them at our place (he was living elsewhere). Later, he’d sell the goods at garage sales, making several hundred dollars each time.

  The scheme I liked best was when he potted a thousand chilli plants in his backyard, which he planned to sell at markets or on the roadside. But either a resident possum or birds would get into his crop, so there was no great harvest or profit.

  While sport has always been my life, Andrew leaned towards other activities, although he did play soccer, cricket and rugby league briefly. Skateboarding (at which he was brilliant) and, for a while, bodyboarding were his passions, along with stretching the boundaries whenever he could; thus his nickname, ‘Cannonball Cad’. That became the title of a Jackass-style video he released in 2004 (the full title was Cannonball Cad: Bored Individuals), a compilation of a couple of years’ worth of recordings of his crazy stunts, like jumping off bridges into water with an umbrella as a parachute (and one time while riding a bike), licking an electric fence (twice for good footage) or any similar stupid dare that he was silly enough to accept. He organised a gala premier at the historic Avoca Theatre and filled it, then ran off a thousand DVDs, about a third of which stayed in my garage unsold!

  His other passion became tattoos – another area where father and son differed. His first was done at age seventeen, with a letter of approval from his parents. He was only six months short of being of legal age, and we knew he would have worn us down anyway. I don’t know how many tatts followed – I’d guess fifteen, and just about each one had a story. Some were inked during his Oz On Foot trek, but none on his arms or neck.

  The thing that was always stable about Cad was his remarkable work ethic, and his ambition to achieve something and really experience life.

  When he was twenty-one, Chris and I asked him if he wanted to take half-ownership of an investment property we decided to buy in our suburb of Point Clare, with the aim of him renovating it when it suited us all. After we’d rented it out for eighteen months, he moved in to live there while doing the work section by section and adding a second storey. He did a magnificent job with the help of some tradesmen mates – after a rather unusual start. I went around after a couple of weeks to check on the progress, only to find that the whole back of the house had been converted into an inside skate ramp with two half-pipes, and an outside bleacher for spectators!

  Cad left for England as soon as the house was finished, and when he returned three years later, with much of his UK earnings in the bank, he was determined to buy a house of his own. After acquiring a place at North Avoca, not far from the beach, Cad did a second magnificent major renovation, on top of working tirelessly in his busy building job, where he was rarely ‘on the tools’ but a site manager for Carpentry Construction. That was yet another time in his life when I begged him to slow down with ‘what’s the hurry, son?’ style talks, but, conversely, I admired his incredible determination and resilience.

  An example of his truly amazing determination came in 2009, when he took up an invitation from his mother’s brother, Ken Knight, to enter, as a two-man crew, the 111-kilometre Hawkesbury Canoe Classic paddle race from Windsor to the Hawkesbury River. It’s a gruelling event, much of which is conducted in the dark from a Saturday evening through to the Sunday morning. Ken, an experienced canoeist, suffered a shoulder injury two weeks before the event and had to pull out. After unsuccessfully trying to coerce his best mate, Matt Delaney, into joining him, Cad decided to compete by himself in a totally insufficient and unsuitable kayak (without a rudder) owned by Alan and Mandy Shaw, and with about a month of inadequate training (he’d never paddled prior to then). Ken and I served as his support crew. In an amazing show of his determination and resilience, he endured pain, a pitch-black night and greater struggle than other competitors experienced for sixty-five kilometres and nine hours before being towed back to Wiseman’s Ferry totally exhausted. I’d never seen him so drained, nor seen him concede to a challenge like that, but Ken and I were in awe of how he had continued for so long.

  Generally, if Cad made a commitment to others or had a goal to reach, he had to fulfil it. And he always seemed to have somewhere to go and something to achieve. His walk around Australia became one of those ‘must do’ events. However, I must admit that Cad was the last person I expected to become a charity fundraising champion; I’d never seen that in his nature.

  Who knows what path he would have tried next, armed with the obvious maturity and peacefulness about himself after his walk that wasn’t there before? Like so many conundrums that were part of his character, we’ll never know.

  2

  THE PROMISE HE HAD TO KEEP

  Andrew had long thought of throwing himself into a memorable trek. And it wasn’t some fanciful notion that he would tell others about but never get around to doing. That’s one thing about Cad that impressed, or horrified, people: he would announce he would do something and invariably do it, whether some crazy stunt at a party like a drinking challenge, or more respectable pastimes like making sure a house was built to impeccable standards, or honouring any commitment he made to do a ‘love job’ for a friend or family member.

  The first I knew of his year
ning for a long walk was when he told Chris and me he was going to walk the Great Wall of China; he had even started learning Mandarin. But after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, getting a visa to travel to China became a difficult exercise, with tourists having to document where they would stay on every night of their trip. Plus several parts of the wall had been closed, some due to damage and others in an effort to preserve what was left. He reluctantly dropped that plan.

  So the challenge became traversing across or around Australia, and not just in any conventional way. He mused on becoming the first person to cartwheel from coast to coast; other ideas were pushing an orange with his nose from one side of the continent to the other, or crossing the nation on a pogo stick. Then there was a more achievable method for entering the Guinness Book of Records (he even emailed them about this): crossing the country using the greatest number of non-motorised means – walking, running, cycling, uni-cycling, skateboarding, on a pogo stick, crawling, walking forwards and backwards. At some stage the plan became a more sensible task of walking Australia’s circumference.

  When Cad and Jaime stopped in central America in September 2007 on their way home from three years in England, Cad read Karl Bushby’s book Giant Steps and was gobsmacked. Bushby, a former British paratrooper and red beret, had left Punta Arenas in Chile, the southernmost point of South America, in November 1998 with the intention of walking home … to Hull, England. This meant walking north to Alaska and then to Russia across the treacherous Bering Strait, the 93-kilometre stretch that is frozen and thus navigable for only a small part of each year, when temperatu.mres are around minus 80 degrees Celsius. It took almost seven and a half years for Bushby to achieve his first objective, reaching then crossing the strait by foot to Russia. Since then, he has been unable to clear Russia because of visa issues; his trek, called the Goliath Expedition, remains incomplete.