No Stopping for Lions Read Free Page A

and opportunities for young white males would lessen considerably. South Africa was relatively stable then, but Neil found the regime of apartheid abhorrent and he couldn’t see himself living there with any conscience. So instead of returning to Africa he went to Australia via the United States and an old girlfriend.
    It was the time of Poseidon, when Australia was experiencing a mining boom and stock exchange floors were a hotbed of soaring shares and instant fortunes. Neil walked into a Sydney stockbroking firm and asked for a job. He chose this particular one because Neil made up part of their name and perhaps because of this cheeky reason he got the job as an operator on the stock exchange floor. He made big money, and good friends on the rugby field, and it didn’t take long for him to decide that Australia was where he wanted to be; he became a citizen as soon as he was allowed.
    Between then and when I met him three years later Neil had flown to Perth in a light aircraft, been stranded in Fiji during a cyclone and backpacked around New Zealand. The old need to be on the move was always there, but he compromised by staying put at the stock exchange and getting his light aircraft licence so that he could at least go flying on weekends.
    In comparison, my upbringing was very pedestrian. I’d grown up in a New South Wales country town, Mittagong, at a time when a trip to Sydney with Mum, dressed in our Sunday best, took two and a half hours in a sooty steam train. We’d emerge at Central Station to the smells and sights of an altogether different, more glamorous life. It was escalators and lifts, and lunch at David Jones’ sixth-floor cafeteria. La de da. Our family went away twice a year for school holidays, always in the car except very early on, just within the reaches of my memory, when it was by flying boat from Rose Bay to Grafton. May school holidays were spent on the south coast, Uludulla and later Batehaven, from where we’d go for drives inland in search of cheese and in-breds. In the September holidays we’d drive up to Mum’s family home, a property outside Grafton, where we’d ride horses and collect bush lemons and watch proudly as Dad, originally a city boy but an ex–Light Horseman, mustered cattle with the best of them.
    These commutes to holiday destinations were a necessity, a means to an end, and sitting just beneath the excitement there was boredom and bickering. Bedding stacked high under our feet in the backseat, our turns at the window being timed to the second, and stupid games that I never won. One successful year Dad bought all the kids a carton of Life Savers each and we spent the hours swapping rolls, making necklaces and rings with them, and having competitions as to who could keep one in their mouth for the longest time without chewing. I remember these trips as endurance tests but they must have cast the seed of adventure too. Back home it was a different matter: the car was our magic carpet, our escape from the mundane.
    There were seven of us in the family, and on Sundays we’d all pile into the Ford Customline and go for drives around the district, exploring fresh landscapes and old back roads. Sometimes on a Saturday someone bored would say the magic words let’s go for a drive and Dad would back her out and we’d be fighting for a window seat before he could say where to? Sometimes Mum would stay at home, overcome by the business of having five young children, and we’d bring her back souvenirs of our trip — a big brown feather, a waratah (not picked by us, honest), and once, a dead wombat we’d come across bloated by the side of the road.
    Dad was an avid bushwalker and would take us up tracks on Mount Alexandra, behind Mittagong, where he taught us orienteering along with his love of the bush, and of photography too. We all had cameras, and we were very proud of Dad’s movie camera, really an 8 millimetre cine