Kurt's Bus

"All aboard, move to the rear of the bus thankyou ...
...tickets please." Spinifex takes us on board

'Look, it could be. It could be Kurt's bus.' I was being careful. He knew a lot about old cars and trucks and things like that and I didn't. Couldn't let him know though.
He was crawling all over it like an ant on sugar. He loved these old things.
'No compliance plate, they used them even then you know.' He rubbed his head. 'A curved back bus, the last one like that you would've seen about, oh I don't know, about 1956 or 1957. This old thing could be that recent.' He looked her over lovingly and stroked his chin.
We were just a little bit outside of town this time. The skeleton of an old omnibus was stuck up on creaking and rusty old forty four gallon drums. A busted roof rack that was once set on the top and a beautiful old curved ladder leading up to the top both had spinifex sprouting up through them. They were lying uselessly in the red dirt.
'Kurt's old bus looked a bit like this but I think it was a different vehicle. This has got to be a Ford or Chevrolet. His old 'Barkly Belle' was an International, I think.'
By Kurt, we meant the road pioneer Kurt Johannson who, among a million other things associated with early road transport in the Territory, used to run a bus up here from Alice. He used to do the mail run for years, way back in the thirties as well. He was a vital link to the goldfields, bringing up stores and the precious mail and on occasions a special bottle, ordered by the odd miner around the diggings. Their occasional treat in the hard place this had been.
We'd been looking for a while at old machines and cars and bits of trucks. They're littered everywhere if you look. Out at Mad Mick's, on the alluvial fields, there's a great old Ford twin spinner, about 1953 model, and a Vanguard from maybe 1956.
The old man rolled one of them with us in it one day. We didn't get hurt but I still remember my brother punching me in the ribs to make me cry because the ambulance bloke was giving us ice creams to stop us crying and he wanted a couple more. And then there's an old, old chevvie, maybe 1939 with the sloped back, just like in the gangster movies, it's out at Mad Mick's too.
Out at Fazel Dean's there's the left-overs of a Model A, an early Henry Ford thank you very much, parts strewn all over and never to be put back together. Burnt out seats and old gearboxes and parts of panels. Have a look around Eldorado and there's more recent trucks and chasses and funny bits and pieces.
'Much chance of restoring any of those old heaps down at Wauchope?' I asked him.
'Probably not. Maybe you could, but finding those parts and pieces , that'd be a huge job just in itself.; He paused. 'You see some pretty amazing fix-up jobs though on old vehicles. Think about that pile of panels and mudguards and stuff down at the wolfram mines at Wauchope.'
Someone had piled up some pieces of an old A model Ford. It looked suspiciously like they had intended to come back and take the parts away. But there was spinifex growing through it and whoever had done it seemed to have gone cold on the idea.
'Yeah, there's bits and pieces everywhere. Some of it I just don't know. Some's easy though. He quietly gloated over his superior knowledge. 'There's the old Blitz truck on the highway just up at Pine Creek and then that other big chunk of one down below the Estralita, near that mine that we can't put a name too.'
His mind was racing, a bit different to the speed those old things used to get along at in those days. And those blokes in the thirties and around then, they used to be incredible mechanics and fixers. Blow a tyre and there's no spare? Too easy. Just pack the tyre with spinifex, put a couple of thick rubber strips across the hole if there was one and Bob's your uncle. As good as a modern radial. Break an axle? Carve one out of some strong straight timber and bang it in. It'll do for ten to fifteen miles, good enough to maybe get you out of trouble.
And drive that vehicle until you can't do anymore to make it go. Littered around everywhere, at the Whippett, near Plain Jane, out past the Mammoth, just everywhere really are the bones of those old work horses, cars and trucks both that were driven and fixed, driven and fixed and then finally just left there, all worn out. A metallic tribute to old engineering and then old bush innovation.
They worked them hard. There weren't graders around to give a nice surface to the roads or tracks they drove along and they carried some weights, those old trucks. In the real early days they had to carry forty-four drums full of promising ore down over that rotten track to Alice to the train. They'd go to Peterborough for crushing then from there.
Those old miners had to have their vehicles, relied on them to survive really and they jury-rigged and fiddled and cannibalised bits off other vehicles and kept them going just as long as they could. And then they just left them.
I turned around to say something to him but he wasn't there. He'd got a rusty old five gallon drum, climbed up on board and was sitting on it at the old buses steering wheel, spinning and turning it and bouncing over some rougher roads in his mind than even Kurt had had to manage.
I left him to it. Someone had to get the mail through.