With Every Step Read online

  DAYS 22–25, 17–20 JANUARY 2011

  MALLACOOTA TO CANN RIVER (185 KM)

  Andrew snared a lift back to the Pacific Highway (saving him 24 repeated kilometres), where he resumed his walk south. About 20 kilometres down the road a policeman stopped and tried to convince him to get a lift over Mt Drummer, as there was no hard shoulder, it was very windy and he was concerned about Cad’s and the motorists’ safety. Andrew asked politely if he was ordering him to do so but the policeman said he could only advise. Andrew, not wanting to ‘cheat’, said he’d walk and was told to jump over the guardrail if he came close to colliding with ongoing traffic.

  He quickly found out that the copper wasn’t just being a nark. ‘I start the climb and wonder what he is on about but soon see as there is a guardrail tight to the line on one side and a ditch on the other. It’s too dangerous to walk around the blind corners on the inside so I find myself running from side to side whilst dodging traffic. It’s dodgy as and I have to listen for the cars because it’s too late by the time I can see them. A couple of trucks passed leaving inches between us. I was a happy camper to reach the top.’

  After lunching with a French backpacking couple at the bottom of the mountain, Cad broke the cord to his headphones while swatting another killer march fly, so had to walk for days without music. Instead he daydreamed, about everything – ‘sex was the top of the list!’ – and was away with the fairies enough to forget to get off the road a couple of times and was almost run down.

  Despite following his mate Adam’s suggestion of putting honey on his oats, it didn’t make them any more palatable and he continued to always feel famished. ‘He’s full of shit, they still taste crap. I’m still starving all day every day, and I ate three peanut-butter sangas, an apple, orange, three muesli bars, and a whole box of Shapes for lunch!’

  He came across two blonde women, an American and an Aussie, who were on a bicycle tour, and they were soon exchanging experiences. ‘They were cool, they turned out to be the same chicks who rode past the other day when I was having something to eat, one of them had blown a tyre and they had to hitch back to a bike shop and then ride the leg again. She tried to fix it with duct tape but it just blows a big duct tape egg out of the hole. I told her to use a bank note next time, which another cyclist told me after it had happened to me [during his 2008 ride to Cairns].’

  He stopped at Orbost to do some banking and buy food and replacement earphones, and camped the night at Wombat Creek, reaching Lakes Entrance the next afternoon. Just short of town he was passed by four cyclists who seemed to be in a hurry. They were there when he stopped at KFC for lunch so he introduced himself to Indi, Simon, Locky and Ben, bike couriers from Melbourne who had caught a flight to Sydney with nothing but their courier bags and had a week to return home. They invited him to have a drink with them at their ‘local’ in Melbourne when he got there, an offer he would take up, which sparked a great friendship.

  He decided to pay for the luxury of a camp spot and shower block in Lakes Entrance, and that was just as well: ‘Had a shower to find I’m covered from head to toe in pimples, maybe I need to start showering more.’

  DAYS 26–28, 21–23 JANUARY 2011

  LAKES ENTRANCE TO BAIRNSDALE (37 KM), THEN TWO REST DAYS

  Andrew had arranged to meet Justin, a mate he’d worked with in the United Kingdom who was now living at Albury, to spend a night out in Bairnsdale. He arrived late Friday and couldn’t find accommodation at the caravan park or the first four pubs he passed. Resident Ross saw him sitting in the gutter on the phone outside of his home and offered Cad a cuppa; Andrew thanked him but said he had to find somewhere to stay the night. Next thing he was offered a free bed and dinner of a seafood salad, which he gladly accepted.

  The following day Cad checked into a motel (on his old man’s credit card as he didn’t have one!) and Justin rode his motorbike from Albury to join him for a big night, which ended with Cad losing his motel key and having to wake the owner to get in at an ungodly hour, then sleeping past check-out time next day. So he booked an extra night and had to pay $50 for the lost key, making it an extremely expensive weekend (again on my credit card!). He did a shop for the next few days and afterwards had $1 in his wallet and $1 in the bank.

  DAYS 29–30, 24–25 JANUARY 2011

  BAIRNSDALE TO TRARALGON (118.2 KM)

  Andrew didn’t sleep well, and woke up sweating after having a dream about breaking his back (he’d had back troubles for years from lifting heavy materials). He woke again at 5 am with severe back pain and spent an hour trying to stretch it out. ‘My back has been giving me more grief than my legs so far,’ he wrote. ‘I was hoping it was going to get better now I’m off the tools but it’s getting worse.’

  He’d walked the 67 kilometres to the centre of Sale with an hour of light left and so ‘decided to have a crack at the 70-club’, clearing town and pitching his tent in the dark beside a farm driveway; he had done 71.2 kilometres for the day. He woke up feeling really well: ‘surprised I wasn’t tired or sore from yesterday, I must really be getting match fit now.’ Yet within a few hours his feet were sore and he decided to take Panadol Forte for the first time since leaving Sydney. ‘It was only the other day that I was daydreaming that I could walk around Oz without taking a single painkiller, I was kidding myself.’

  He made it to Traralgon, where he had arranged to hook up with Steve, another former colleague from Fit Out UK. He was part-owner and manager of what Cad described as a flash motel where he stayed that night, Steve’s wife, Melissa, having only just arrived home after delivering their first child a week earlier.

  DAY 31, 26 JANUARY 2011, AUSTRALIA DAY

  REST DAY, TRARALGON

  It was a quiet Australia Day for Cad, who usually would have hopped into the grog, and maybe two-up, in true Aussie spirit. Instead, Steve took him for a tour of the town and the open-cut coalmine and power station. ‘It blew me away, I’d never seen anything like it,’ he wrote.

  Cad later borrowed Steve’s car to do some shopping (I’d deposited some money into his bank account) and watched DVDs in his room. There were several Canadian helicopter pilots and mechanics staying at the motel for the summer, paid guests of the Victorian government while on standby with a chopper in case of bushfires. Typically, Cad picked their brains over a few beers. ‘It was interesting learning about the chopper and how it can suck a backyard pool empty in seconds. What’s with Canadians and moustaches?’

  DAYS 32–35, 27–30 JANUARY 2011

  TRARALGON TO ST KILDA (167 KM)

  Cad conspired with his cousin Matt Ruff, a plumber, to solve the problem of pulling into parks in desperate need of water only to find there was no handle to the tap. Matt sent him a tap handle, which would have been handy except Cad only got to use it once, in Launceston, and left it there by mistake.

  Contributions from a local named Lynda, Matt’s mother, Lynne, and Cad’s other aunty, Alison, saw him collect enough to buy new shoes. Chris and I bought the next two pairs after those wore out, and from then I was able to get a couple of pairs from Nike, a couple from the Parramatta Eels, where I was doing media consultancy work, and another pair from Peter Wynn’s Score sports store (Peter is a mate of mine). We got him through the walk (nine pairs used) without him having to dip into his own pocket. It’s hardly big sponsorship, I know, but it typified the basis of Andrew’s support – all a bit piecemeal.

  With no pedestrians allowed on the motorway into Melbourne from the east, Cad had to zigzag on the service roads, winding through sheep farms and power stations before reaching Moe just on dusk. There he threw up his tent on the grass at the first service station he came to, in full sight of the pumps and main road. This wasn’t the least bit conducive to a good night’s sleep.

  Next morning a regional TV news crew arrived, arranged by one of the locals who’d met Andrew the day before, and he was as nervous as a kitten doing his first on-camera interview. ‘I was so nervous, my first TV interview,’ he wrote.
‘I hope I don’t come across as an idiot.’ He must have come across well enough; donations spiked the next day with many plus-$50 contributions, several from people whose families had been touched by cancer.

  By the afternoon he’d decided to ignore the signs banning pedestrians on the motorway, fed up with the meandering service roads. After he reached Dandenong on the city’s southern outskirts, Stevie Parkin, a mate from the Central Coast and another former work colleague from the UK, took him back to his place in Brunswick, a northern Melbourne suburb, for a night of laughs and liquor. He didn’t get back to the drop-off point until 11 am but still knocked out over 36 kilometres to St Kilda Beach, where he joined the large throng in the cool water of the bay before catching a tram back to Stevie’s.

  DAYS 36–37, 31 JANUARY–1 FEBRUARY 2011

  REST DAY IN BRUNSWICK,

  THEN A FERRY ACROSS BASS STRAIT TO DEVONPORT

  Cad was brilliantly hosted by Stevie and his partner, Sarah, over the next two days, but he admits he stretched the friendship when, after borrowing Steve’s beard trimmer, he ignored the warning not to prune his pubic region (if Stevie reads this he will be horrified!). ‘I couldn’t help myself and mowed the green and trimmed up the fairway. I probably wouldn’t have if he didn’t say anything – HA HA HA!’

  Cad was on the lookout for a good tattooist for some ink-work after deciding he’d add, when he returned to Melbourne after completing his Tasmanian leg, to his already extensive array of body work. He decided on Korpus Tattoo in Brunswick and booked in Jaclyn Rehe to have the first fleet ship Endeavour tattooed on his leg. Jaclyn was to see much more of him.

  After catching a train to the city and walking four kilometres to the port, Andrew had to go through all sorts of bother with security before being allowed to take his pram on board. ‘One halfwit suggested sending it down the long stainless steel chute with the other bags. I took one look and said, “You have to be kidding – you wouldn’t believe how fast it rolls, you will kill someone.” All this fuss because they were so sure it wouldn’t fit down the escalator. I said, “Let me have a look at the escalator, I’ll tell you if it will go down, I’ve just walked it here from Sydney.” I took one look, assured them it would go, then they still had to hang onto it with me. Got to the boarding ramp only to have some other tool freaking out, asking me if there were kids in there – he felt the need to call his supervisor as well’.

  After locking himself out of his room and lining up for thirty minutes to get assistance so he could get back in, it was off to the dining hall, where he caused a raft of whispers at the ‘Tower of Pisa’ pile of food he loaded onto his plate, so keen was he to get some value from the $27 being asked for one serving from the buffet. ‘I really was taking the piss, all to the amusement of the oldies in the line, who all felt the need to make remarks like, “Geez, you must still be growing.”’

  In the morning he woke in the state of his birth, Tasmania. It wasn’t to be a pleasant reunion.

  4

  A PAINFUL RETURN TO HIS BIRTHPLACE

  I’m not sure why Andrew decided to add Tasmania to his itinerary. I thought it was because he was curious about the state in which he was born, in April 1981, during a twenty-month stint I had as a journalist on the Launceston Examiner. He’d never seemed particularly inquisitive about his link to the state and had never wanted to return previously, and while there he didn’t even stop to look at the home he lived in on Trevallyn Road, right near the beautiful Cataract Gorge, despite me giving him the details. Yet I’m glad he saw the state and town in which he was born, and where he learned to speak his first words. And I know he was too.

  Nicole was ten months old when we arrived in ‘Lonnie’ in June 1980, days after the end of an ill-timed six-week journalists’ strike that saw me having to appeal for handouts from a union trust fund to pay the mortgage on our first home in Seven Hills in Sydney’s west. We drove the Mazda 929 sedan I’d bought from my eldest sister, Robyn, freshly fitted with a new towbar so I could cart a second-hand trailer with our remaining possessions (from memory, a washing machine, dryer, television and cot, plus clothes) to a place I had only seen for two very wet days on a weekend, and Chris had never set eyes on.

  A mate from my cadet journalist days at the Parramatta Advertiser, Peter Dwyer, had moved to the Examiner, and I felt we could do with a break from working two jobs to pay off our home loan and get out of the hustle and bustle of Sydney for a while. It was a big gamble and lifestyle change for Chris and me, both in our early twenties with a young baby, leaving the security net of good friends and family behind.

  Unbeknown to us at the time, Chris was a few weeks pregnant with Andrew when we left the mainland. He was born at Launceston Maternity Hospital and I have vivid memories of the overnight/earlymorning event and being locked out twice after I had to vacate to the waiting room, the first time while they prepped Chris and the second because of a change of shift. Both times the nurses had forgotten I was outside and I had to ring a doorbell to be let back in. Then, without any previous notification or request for permission, a maze of medical students rushed to the room (the doctor was late arriving) as Chris delivered our only son.

  It was a wonderful period of our lives in a pretty place that gave us some friends for life, and I got to play a few cricket games with future Test legend David Boon at Launceston Cricket Club (I was definitely a lower-grader but was called in to fill up the numbers in first grade on a handful of occasions). As a reporter for the local paper, I often travelled with the Tasmanian Sheffield Shield side that included future internationals Boon, Roger Woolley and Peter Faulkner (father of current international James Faulkner).

  Amusingly, the Examiner recognised Andrew’s now-distant association in a front-page story on his mission, published during his Tassie trek, that began with ‘Former Launceston resident Andrew Cadigan …’ Spending the first ten months of his life there conveniently made him a ‘former resident’? Geez, I laughed, especially as former colleague (and great bloke) Martin Gilmour was the editor.

  But it was not to be an enjoyable homecoming. Cad hit a physical wall that left him in writhing pain halfway along the Midland Highway, forcing him to abandon his walk for three weeks.

  DAY 38, 2 FEBRUARY 2011

  DEVONPORT TO DELORAINE (51.3 KM)

  On board the Spirit of Tasmania for the Bass Strait crossing, Andrew shared a cabin with a Canadian man. Much to the chagrin of his roommate, Cad was up before the captain’s wake-up announcement at 6 am, and he also reckoned the Canadian would have been unimpressed with his farting and tossing (and snoring, no doubt) all night.

  He was off the boat at 7 am but had to wait two hours in Devonport to do an interview and photo with The Advocate newspaper. During that period, he made his compulsory visit to the local bakery, where he was given a surprising greeting. ‘I walked in with my phone charging on my motorbike battery and [store owner] Judy freaked out big time: “That’s not a bomb, is it?” she uttered. I think she was serious. I suppose it does look a bit suss with the digital reader and regulator taped to the side with wires hanging off it everywhere.’

  He enjoyed the change of scenery as he headed east – potato crops and apple orchids – but not the many dead possums he had to dodge. After ten hours’ walking he experienced his first touch of Tassie hospitality when a woman pulled over to give him a bag of raspberries dipped in chocolate. ‘They were exquisite. She had seen me walking up a big hill and said it looked like hard work, so went and bought them and brought them back.’ It was chocolate raspberries and a banana sandwich for dinner as he’d forgotten to get fuel for his cooker (the security staff had made him empty it when he boarded the ferry).

  DAYS 39–41, 3–5 FEBRUARY 2011

  DELORAINE TO CAMPBELL TOWN (129 KM)

  After a cold night, Cad was up early and made good time to Launceston. He recorded his first glimpse of his birthplace: ‘Made it to the big hill that descends into Launceston about eight o’clock. I got a good view of the
town and surrounds, and it wasn’t at all what I’d imagined. It was surrounded by big hills and was much bigger than I’d expected.’

  At 9 pm he set up camp in the dark at an oval on the edge of town after completing a 60-plus-kilometre day. When he woke next morning he saw a blackberry-covered fence as far as the eye could see: ‘Breakfast is served! I shovelled them in until I felt sick and then cut the top off a water bottle and filled it for later.’

  He’d planned to spend a couple of days in Launceston to get to know the place on the way back to the port at Devonport at the end of the Tasmanian trek, so for now it was a big shop to last him the four days he planned it would get him to Hobart and a quick exit. During this process, he decided to look at the nutritional information on everything he bought for the first time in his life. ‘I nearly flipped out to read that a single muesli bar has more energy and carbs than a bowl of oats. To think I’ve been forcing that slop down my throat every morning. I came to the conclusion that nuts are the best all-rounder but they’re not bloody cheap!’ The rep from Tassie Forest Waters was in the store and she took a shine to Cad, giving him fourteen free bottles of water. He was loaded to the max as he climbed the big hill south out of town to hit the Midland Highway.

  He set up camp at a rest area next to the South Esk River near the north-eastern town of Perth after a long 61-kilometre day. As he settled in an old English gentleman walked past, having just finished fly-fishing. ‘I asked him if he had caught anything and he said, “I’ve caught two trout in three years,” and he said if he caught his third I could have it for breakfast. With those odds I wasn’t holding my breath! He got a massive tangle within minutes, blamed the fading light and left. I was asleep before the sun was.’