Shelter from the storm of Africa
In this Herald series, we asked prominent artists, comedians, authors and journalists to write about their “summer that changed everything”.
It was the northern summer of 1985. I had just finished playing a season of truly dreadful football for the Italian rugby club of Rovigo, just south of Venice, and was loving life more than ever. For, you see, the reason my rugby had fallen away so badly despite having been good enough to play for the Wallabies the year before, was because I had discovered something much more interesting than beating up blokes from Rome, Treviso and Padua every weekend.
Summer of adventure: Peter FitzSimons playing for Brive in 1985.Credit:
Her name was Debbie and she was the 19-year-old sister-in-law of one of my teammates, the other straniero (foreigner) in the team, from South Africa. Things were so great between us that instead of returning to Australia I decided to travel across the African continent to meet up with her and hopefully have a few more precious weeks in her fragrant company.
At the southern Italian port of Brindisi I bought a map of Africa and set off on the 10-week trip of my life. Egypt blew me away, but I had seen nothing yet! From there I went through places I had not previously conceived of, let alone experienced, and met characters and peoples of so many different stripes, strips and colours that the whole thing felt like being in a long-running Bob Dylan song …
Ah, sing it, Bobby!
’Twas in another lifetime/One of toil and blood/When blackness was a virtue/
The road was full of mud/I came in from the wilderness/A creature void of form/“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give ya/Shelter from the storm”
Left: Peter FitzSimons and Deborah before his epic trip. Right: Rovigo train station, setting off for Brindisi with all my worldly possessions.
After just making it through the blowy badlands of northern Sudan, and as parched as a parrot in the Nullarbor, I manage to get my dad on the phone over a very crackly line.
“I’m in Khartoum, Dad,” I croak down the blower, “heading for Jo’burg, via Tanzania and across the Zambezi River. The next couple of weeks might be a bit hairy as I’ll be trying to get through Uganda. There’s a bit of a civil war on, but I reckon I’ll be OK!”
“OK, sonno,” he calls back down the line from our Peats Ridge farm, completely unconcerned, “call us when you get there!”
From the cache of $1000 cash I had hidden behind an incision on the inside of my Italian leather boots, I carefully withdraw a $US20 note and pay a couple of Somali truck drivers to get me through Uganda. It was hairy. We are regularly stopped by roving gangs of rebel soldiers who set up roadblocks and demand “contributions” to the revolution, which means anything from my deodorant to the few American dollars I show in my wallet.
FitzSimons heads off for his African adventure.Credit:
I have to further pay my way with the drivers each night by sleeping beside the fuel tanks as a guard, while they go into Ugandan villages looking for women. On our last night before getting into Kenya I awake to find that the erotic dream I am having has as its foundation an African woman they had brought back for me, now beaming at me in the moonlight. I am aghast! But that’s another story …
In Tanzania, my bag is stolen by a thieving bastard who could run faster than Carl Lewis, leaving me with the passport I have in the leather pouch around my neck, and the money in my boot.
In a Zambian village, some children burst into tears as I am the first white man they’ve seen. Not far away, a very old woman is singing and dancing with a beat I swear must come from the original spring source of rock’n’roll.
In Zimbabwe, I am certain I am going to die at the hands of rogue Matabele policemen, only to find they are actually taking pity on me and insist I sleep in their police cell that night for my own safety.
I cross the Zambezi courtesy of a white bloke called “Buffalo Des”, who boasts that as a sniper placed beside tracks coming from Mozambique in the Rhodesian War, he had been credited with 263 “kills” of “terrorists”. Only when I get out do I notice that the black man in the back of his ute is chained up!
After other rides I am eventually dropped in the roughest and most heavily populated black part of Jo’burg. When Debbie and her parents come to pick me up in a brand-new white Mercedes, it is the first time they have been in that part of the city – and whether the wrinkle in their nose is my stench or their surroundings is indeterminate. But things do not go well from there.
So, sing this one, Bobby, as I walk on down the road, with a black smudge of smoke on the horizon.
When your rooster crows at the break of dawn/Look out your window, and I’ll be gone/You’re the reason I’ll be travelling on/But don’t think twice, it’s alright
I later find out that smoky smudge was the riots in Soweto in full swing. One way or another I get back to Oz a far more worldly man than the transplanted Knox boy who’d left Brindisi just 10 weeks before.
It was the summer I lived in a Dylan song and I have only ever wanted that, or echoes of that, thereafter. Take us out, Bobby:
I see my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
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