The Outback

"Land Down Under," by Men at Work, arrived on the top 100 charts in 1980.  I still remember when the American TV show, Solid Gold (and their amazing Solid Gold dancers) blared this new sound by an Australian rock band that pretty much no one north of the equator had ever heard of.  On Saturday night as those same Solid Gold dancers grooved out to the tunes of the '80's, I tape recorded the song with the help of my trusty tape recorder where you had to push both the play and the record button at the same time to transfer the sound onto the cassette tape.  At seven years of age, I had no idea what in the world they were talking about, but it sounded cool.

So, I've got this image of Australia planted some thirty-five years ago that resounds in Australian lingo with drug references and Australian stereotypes that would have made no sense to me as a young American boy, but as I grew up and listened to that tape occasionally, it became apparent that Men at Work was speaking about a country and a group of people that longed to be noticed.  They want to be recognized for their commitment and participation in the world, not just for traveling outside of their aquatic borders, their amazing ability to ingest the bottom scrapings of a beer vat (vegemite), and their propensity (as the band proclaimed) for glowing women and puking men who are well over six feet three inches and have been pumping iron for years.

It's in the lyrics, I promise

But as a young American boy from Iowa where I didn't even see the ocean until I was thirteen, I couldn't really fathom an island country the size of the United States.  I didn't visit Australia until I was twenty-one and that was with the jazz choir from college.  We saw some of the sights and did the tourist thing, but the song, "Land Down Under" would continue to haunt me.  It wasn't until I saw Crocodile Dundee that I knew that I wanted to experience more than chundering and thundering.

It was in this movie, probably the first American attempt to bring to the forefront Australian culture (however fake it may have been).  Crocodile Dundee, in my opinion, was probably the platform from which all American's understanding of Australia came, whether it was the launching pad for the Crocodile Hunter or the Big Red Car of the Wiggles.

Now that Christine and I have been married for eighteen years, we have had various opportunities to travel inside the borders of Australia.  We have visited the major cities and all the capitals of the states except Darwin; we have been to Tasmania, to Perth, to Uluru, but staying in a drought stricken Outback Town, that is something we hadn't done...

Until this last week.

Sarah Grayson, a police officer in Charleville, Queensland, invited our family to come out and be part of a drug prevention program in Charleville and the surrounding area.  The program, W.A.S.T.I.D., (Wasted Adolescence Spent Taking Illegal Drugs), is a response to the epidemic dis-ease related to the drug, ice, better known as methamphetamine much popularized in the American TV show Breaking Bad.

I'll get into the some of the statistics later and some of the stories that the officers shared with us regarding ice, but I wanted to lay a foundation for the journey, like the Israelites who were heading off into the unknown desert wasteland.

We left our home town of Gatton on a Monday morning.  We bustled around the house making sure that all the windows were shut, the toilet lids were up, the power points were turned off.  It's still one of the things that I have to get used to in Australia that you don't just turn the lights off, but you actually turn their power sources off too.  We made sure that everything was tucked away and we packed into our car like the Australian Griswalds heading off to the Australian Wallyworld of Charleville. 

Charleville - population roughly 3,500 about five hundred kilometers west of the nearest big town of Toowoomba. Welcome to the Queensland Outback.

For a boy who came from the Land Up Over, the Land Down Under was about to surprise him.