Postcard from Cairns

I’d moved to Alice Springs because I felt I needed to settle down for a while. I’d been living and working in the bush for years. All that time spent in the middle of nowhere had left me disconnected from society. I decided to give it six months regardless of how I felt.

I had thought of moving back to the city but couldn’t see how it was going to work. Adelaide had died in the arse economically and I’d be lucky to even get part time work there. Perth was too expensive to live in and too far from everything else. Alice Springs seemed like a safe bet. If at the end of the six months I decided I couldn’t hack living in town, it was simply a matter of heading out bush again.

I got a place just across the road from the hospital. A nice little fenced off complex of units where everyone was from somewhere else and just here for work. Transient, anonymous and easy.

I got a job at one of the pubs in town. Two thirds of the staff were European backpackers just here for a short time. They treated the pub like a hostel; everyone was rooting someone else who worked there, travel plans were made and lots of alcohol was drunk. Transient, anonymous and easy.

I decided to cut my rent in half by going across the road and putting a notice on the hospital’s staff notice board. The place was full of nurses who were on short contracts and needed a place to live. They came here from the cities back east because the money was better and being able to put something about Indigenous health on their resumes helped their careers no end. During their time in Alice Springs they partied with other nurses and doctors, avoided the locals like the plague and sometimes managed to get a ring on their finger or a dose of the clap. Transient, anonymous and easy.

The nurse who rang me first was named Melinda. She was from somewhere on the Central Coast of NSW, Gosford I think. She had that classic surfie hair that gets blonder as it gets longer. I showed her the spare room, told her the price and she was up for it. She moved in right away and we got comfortable living in the same house. I did my shifts at the pub while she did hers at the hospital. Neither of us gave a flying fuck about the town. We both understood that Alice Springs was a place to live temporarily and we had no interaction with any locals.

Occasionally she’d get together with a couple of the other nurses and come to the pub while I was working. Because I didn’t give a fuck about the job, I’d slip them a free drink or two - justifying it on the grounds that drunk young women tend to attract more customers to a pub. They would get loose and loud and have a grand old time.

Inevitably, I would drive them home. Melinda would sit next to me and drivel shit in my ear while I drove, and the other girls would sit in the back and sing “Why’d you have to go and make things so complicated?” They’d sing with their heads hanging out the window and we’d get stares from any pedestrians who were out. I’d tell them to chill out in my car and they’d dismiss it. “Aww, you love us!” they’d say, and I couldn’t really deny it.

The next morning, I would have three or four hung over nurses lurking around my place barely dressed. I’d chill out with them and even make them breakfast if they thought they could hold it down. Nothing ever happened between Melinda and me. Nothing ever happened between me and her nurse friends either. If I had been a little sharper and tried a little harder I probably could have fucked at least one of them, but I never did. I was too shy, too decent and I always opted for the quiet life rather than try for great sexual heights.

Melinda lived with me for six months until her contract at the hospital expired. She went back to NSW with an improved resume and a bunch of new friends on Facebook, of which I was only one, and probably not a very important one. That’s the way it goes in these places. Transient, anonymous and easy.

I needed a new housemate and one of the backpacker girls at the pub had a friend, so without further ado she came and had a look at the place. Her name was Madeline and she was English. Not lower-class English either - proper posh accent, went to a posh school, the whole deal. She was doing the standard backpacker thing, working and travelling around Australia having the time of her life. She’d just done the required amount of fruit picking down in Renmark to qualify for a second year on her visa. Now she was looking for a job and a place to live here in Alice Springs.

She moved in and we got along just fine. She wasn’t as much of a party animal as the other backpackers and we could have actual conversations about stuff. She was very interested in hearing about my years out bush and the places where I’d lived and worked. I took her out to Ormiston Gorge on one of my days off and showed her the sights.

We spent a lot of time together, more than housemates normally would, and I began to think there was something there. Our mutual friends began to think so as well. I was too shy and cautious to try my luck, so we hovered in the no man’s land of being just really good friends.

Four months went past like nothing. She began to plan the next part of her Australian adventure. She told me she would be leaving in a week and flying to Cairns to meeting friends. They had organised to get themselves a van and drive down the east coast.

I wished her luck and thought about putting my cards on the table and telling her how I felt. I was just about to but my shyness stopped me, so I weakly told her to send me a postcard instead.

I took her to the airport on the day she left. We chatted for a bit about nothing much and when her flight was called I almost blurted out how I felt there and then, but I restrained myself and without much fuss she gave me a hug and said goodbye. I went home to an empty house and drank the rest of the day away. The routine of my life went on, I worked at the pub and bummed around the house on my days off. I thought about getting a new housemate, but the lease would be up soon and I didn’t feel like extending it. I decided to go back out bush and not bother with the civilized world for a while. I’d tried, gone on record as having tried and I hadn’t exactly hit it for six. Some people just aren’t destined to do the settled down family life thing, I told myself. I was better off being out bush where I didn’t have to try and fit in with society.

Two weeks after she left Madeline sent me a postcard from Cairns as promised. She didn’t say much. She was having a good time and had met some cool people and was looking forward to the big drive down the east coast. I looked at the card for a long time, as if it was some sort of sacred relic whose mysteries I could unlock. I knew I would never see her again. She had already moved on with her life. Whatever I had wanted to say before she left would never be said. We’d had our time and that was that.

Transient, anonymous and easy.

Lewis Woolston grew up in a small beach bum town in Western Australia. When he left he travelled around Australia living in several cities as well as spending long periods in the bush. He worked at remote roadhouses on the Nullarbor and in the NT for years before settling down in Alice Springs with his wife and newborn daughter.