Yeats slowed to watch the action and to prevent his wake destabilising the standing man and tipping him into the water as he passed.
“I’ve got one!” Yeats heard him exclaim, his voice carrying over the billabong. As Yeats watched them, a line tightened and one of the adults leapt to his feet, dangerously rocking their boat. Yeats found them trolling lures past a spot where he had become snagged. The men and the two boys he had seen earlier were obviously tourists too.
“Because tourists don’t know that, and you’re meant to be a tourist.” It was the wrong time of the year, and the winds would cause a chill factor on the water and keep the fish deep and inactive, Clyde explained.
Clyde had told Yeats not to expect to catch any fish. The lilies were browning in the heat and had lifted and curled their rims to protect from the worst of the sun. In the afternoon, after the midday heat abated, Yeats refilled the fuel tank in the punt from a jerry can brought for the purpose and ventured out onto the billabong again. Whether sharing Yeats’ admiration for an apricot-hued sunset as it soars across an aurora borealis-like sky, watching nectar-eating parrots getting tipsy on the fermenting blossoms of paper bark trees or learning how to bake damper over hot coals, odds are you have never enjoyed a journey as unique as this, following one of life’s nicest losers as he becomes a winner. Set during tropical Australia’s oppressively humid build-up to the annual monsoon-the Suicide Season-when tempers are short, children are constantly irritable, and adults are tight-lipped, Yeats stumbles across an illegal wildlife poaching operation, falls in love with an attractive female mechanic, and becomes an unwitting trespasser on Aboriginal land. When demoralised Warren Yeats abandons his failing business, his ex-wife and his city lifestyle to embark on a road trip with more twists and turns than Sydney’s streets, he has no idea how gruelling the outback can be.
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