The purpose of my visit was to photograph a motel, The Astor, which I had seen online, that reminded me of some of the ‘California’ style motels that I had seen on the Gold Coast as a kid in the 1970s and 1980s, with a view to completing a landscape painting. On a trip to the Gold Coast in the previous year, I had noticed these monuments to mid-century campness seemed to have been demolished, to make way for an increasing number of high-rise developments. On that visit, I ended up painting a picture of the Cavil Avenue police station. To me this seemed to be one of the only remaining certainties in the ever changing Surfers Paradise landscape.
I waited until the last minute to book my ticket to Albury, and found myself with an unreserved seat on the train, which meant I had to sit at the back of the ‘A’ carriage with other suitably unprepared travellers.
The first passenger I noticed was a young lady, who, to my eyes, could have been plucked from a country town at any point in the last half century. She was possibly in her late teens or early twenties, and wore stonewashed denim jeans, with shoulder length, straw-like hair, and a nondescript t-shirt. The only thing that anchored her in the now was a vape pen sticking out of her back pocket.
‘Give me three Red Bulls’, she yelled at the man.
He looked bemused, but went to get them, before the girl, unprompted, felt like she needed to explain herself.
‘It’s alright, I’ve got ADHD, I need them to help me sleep’, she said, before necking one almost instantly, opening another and returning to her seat.
She was seated near another seemingly unremarkable man, possibly in his mid 60s, who dressed like a farmer in a flannel shirt and jeans, but wore the shoes of a 15 year old skater boy. He seemed to be on the phone to a friend or relative discussing some church group he was involved with, and despite his Christian tendencies, was gleefully dishing the dirt on the other group members.
The man (Let’s call him Barry) spoke in a bellowing tone of voice, which seemed to denote gravitas, even though he really didn’t seem to have anything important to say. Like the girl (let’s call her Tina), he also seemed to be fixated on the food service area and attendant, who wore a stoic, yet increasingly weary look on his face as the journey progressed.
Barry didn’t ask questions, he just regaled the food service attendant with ‘facts’ such as ‘nobody buys the hot food on that menu’, ‘people don’t pay with cards any more these days - it’s all cash’ and ‘that brand of coffee machine wasn’t designed for train use - that’s why it isn’t working.’
Barry and Tina eventually started chatting to each other. They were like two moons caught in each other’s gravity, drawn by their own unique peculiarities. Barry told Tina that he had been travelling around Australia for the last six years - to me this sounded like he was possibly homeless - but he seemed relatively cashed-up and well presented.
Tina started discussing her home life and admitted that she once was addicted to meth amphetamines, but once she kicked that habit, realised she had ADHD and was prescribed Ritalin… resulting in a net-zero gain. Following this revelation, Tina decided to sleep on the luggage racks and moved everybody’s bags onto the floor before curling up and drifting off into a fitful Red Bull-induced slumber.
It was then that some commotion started at the front of the carriage with a woman yelling, and another woman trying to placate her. Barry couldn’t wait to get involved and see what was happening. He discovered from the conductor that a woman at the front of the carriage was being kicked in the shins by another woman, who didn’t want anyone sitting near her. Barry saved the day by getting the woman being attacked to sit in the back of the carriage with us.
The poor woman (who was neatly presented and dignified-looking) went from being kicked in the shins, to being sat next to a country bumpkin who wouldn’t shut up, a girl asleep in the luggage racks, and a middle aged weirdo wearing a fake fur hat. Barry and the woman (let’s call her Angela) proceeded to engage in awkward, stilted conversation for the next half an hour before Angela got off the train in Wangaratta.
Almost as quickly as Angela left her seat, the vacuum was filled by another presence. I looked up from my book and did a double take, as a sense of foreboding entered the room - it was the Shin Kicker from earlier. My initial assessment was she didn’t appear that strange… possibly in her early 70s, with long, straggly unkempt hair, round owl-like glasses, a jumper and jeans. Certainly not someone I would deem a ‘threat’… but just to be sure - I returned to my book and didn’t make any eye contact.
Some time later the Shin Kicker piped up.
‘Hey fucker - you’ve been secretly filming me for the last half an hour!’ she seemingly yelled at random. I then realised it was me she was addressing.
I had taken my camera along to take photos of the motel in Albury, which had been sitting in my lap since the journey began. Technically, it had been facing the Shin Kicker the whole time, but the lens cap was on, and the camera wasn’t even turned on. I thought briefly about explaining this to her, but thought better of it, and simply turned the camera away and rolled my eyes.
‘That’s something even a four year old knows, dickhead’, she yelled again at me, before mumbling under her breath to herself with various threats for the next 20 minutes.
I don’t know if it’s just me - but these sort of encounters, no matter how ridiculous, just seem to strip away the years and leave me feeling like an embarrassed little school boy, who had just answered a question incorrectly and was being mocked by his classmates. Her comment about camera etiquette being something ‘a four year old knows’ also made me feel bad as a parent, because I had never taught my child anything about how to use a camera at that age… So thanks, Shin Kicker, for making me feel bad on two separate levels!
Thankfully, the train soon terminated at Albury and I quickly alighted, racing ahead of my carriage-mates so as not to inadvertently cause another ‘scene.’
The day I had chosen to visit Albury was unfortunately gloomy and overcast. Shadows are usually something I look for in a painting subject, and this is hard to achieve without daylight.
Anyway, my mission was over within an hour, which was lucky, because that’s all the time I had before having to catch the last train back to Melbourne. The return journey would be easier because I had an allocated seat this time. Surely this would be a more dignified way to travel?
Before the train had even left the station, an overweight woman was travelling down the aisle talking to the passengers, who seemed to be dismissing her. She got to me, held out a box of chocolate ice creams and asked if I wanted one. I told her ‘no’, and she explained there was nothing wrong with them, but she couldn’t eat more than four. She tried to convince me to take one for longer than felt comfortable before leaving in a huff.
After she left, the train conductor walked down the aisle checking tickets. He looked more like a prison guard than a train conductor, with heavily tattooed arms, thick horn-rimmed glasses and a shaved head. He seemed to be in a very bad mood.
A man in his mid-forties had his feet on the seat in front of him, which the train conductor remarked upon, asking him to please remove them. The man angrily objected, before getting into a heated argument. I dunno, this seems like a weird hill to die upon to me. ‘Being allowed to place your feet on a train seat’ is not a cause I can see mentioned in a eulogy as a noble cause of death, as mourners wipe away anguished tears.
I only had to endure one more trial for the rest of this journey home… The man behind me was playing a game on his phone, whilst loudly chewing gum for three hours straight, and intermittently kicking the back of my seat. I had some ear-buds which had run out of charge that I used as makeshift ear-plugs, but these had little effect. To put the journey into perspective, I think he might have been the least annoying passenger I encountered on my journey.
Eventually I alighted from the V/Line train at Broadmeadows station. I sat waiting for a metro train for another half an hour. Black, track-suited figures farted and belched into the cold night air as they downed their fast-food Subway and McDonalds dinners. They were weirdos, but at least they were local weirdos.
As I walked back from the train station to my house, I felt slightly disappointed that I had gone to all that trouble to photograph the motel at Albury, which ended up not being quite what I expected… but then again… like the passengers on this train journey, maybe under the surface it’s nothing like you would expect.
