Years ago I had the idea that I wanted to go to tattoo shows and write stories about the people who go to these shows. I even fantasised that I would write a book about contemporary tattoo culture. I was gunna be the next Hunter S. Thompson, but without the drugs and without the booze and without the ever present fag hanging out of the corner of my mouth. I had it all planned, I even bought a big fancy camera for it and then the government said NO! I kind of stopped paying attention because the whole thing pissed me off so much, so I directed my attention elsewhere, you know, to stuff that didn’t make me so cranky, like shredding it on my mountain bike. Because of this I might have missed the re-emergence of tattoo shows in the meantime. The Hervey Bay Tattoo show this year is the first one I’ve seen advertised in ages and it was ‘cos of the mountain bike that I found out about the show; I saw it advertised in a weird location when I was out riding last weekend: on the Toogoom boatramp.
Johnny Depp as HST in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Image source: The Guardian online.
I wasn’t sure what to expect at the show because I’d never been to one before. Overall, it was OK, but not super exciting as a spectator. I guess I might have tried harder to like it if I was getting paid to write about the event, or if my tattoos were in the show, or if I was paid to spit raps like one of the dudes running the event. In the end I had to leave before the judging because I’d run out of tolerance for sitting around waiting for something to happen. I asked one of the event people when judging would be. He looked at me like I really should have known better than to ask such an obviously ridiculous question, and said, “Could be ten minutes, could be an hour.” He kept glaring at me, so I called it and left.
I got to talk to some interesting people about their tattoos. I lobbed straight up to a table of bikies, simply because they looked the scariest. They all took a bit to get going, but they warmed up in the end. I asked Zipper why he got his tattoos. He and Andy both gave similar reasons: as a form of therapy. Zipper said it was better to get a tattoo than cut himself or hurt another person. He said he used to be very angry (he still kind of seemed that way if I’m really honest) and it was a way for him to manage his anger. I wanted to get a photo of them all, but given that Zipper had his sunglasses on inside, I didn’t think asking that would be very smart. This is Mad Dog, one of their crew:
Mad Dog announcing his charity ride
I talked to Cassy about her tattoos. She had some amazing realist artwork on her legs in WWII theme. She told me about her son and his traumatic brain injury from a quad bike accident. I got distracted by her telling me the details of the tattooist who did her artwork, so I didn’t write down any info about why she got these tattoos. Durr. Just as well I’m not getting paid! Oh well. I really love the female aviator on her lower leg.
Laura had Fuck Yeah on her toes, which was meant to be a matching tattoo shared with her sister-in-law, but apparently the SIL is chckenshit and will never get anything tattooed. Laura and her husband had a matching ink thing going on. I didn’t talk to everyone at the show, but out of the people I did meet, they were the only ones with matching ink. I didn’t catch Laura’s husband’s name, but he was a biker too.
Cassy leg
Patch on Mr Laura’s vest
Laura’s left foot. The other one one says YEAH, but I didn’t get a photo of it because that ankle was broken from roller skating.
I didn’t talk to these following people, but I liked their ink, especially the war-themed back tat.
Honour the Fallen male back tattoo
The tattooed lady
See, hear, speak no evil leg ink
Pretty lady with realistic leg ink
A very fit looking dude with lots of tats
If I ever do this again I’ll have to reacquaint myself with my camera and lenses instead of shuffling everything around every five seconds. I’ll also have to register as a journalist because then I won’t seem like some random weirdo just barrelling up to people and taking notes about them. Most people were pretty good about talking to me, but there was one person in particular, who after telling me how great they were, started acting all suspicious about what I was doing. They had a stalker and didn’t want the stalker to find them, which I found kind of strange given that they had just entered their semi-naked body in a tattoo show where photography was permitted without restriction. I just said OK and walked off. They aren’t included in this post.
I’m so grateful that I’ve put the effort into developing my interpersonal skills to the point of being able to interact with all kinds of people in all kinds of situations. I once would have been too scared to do this kind of thing, especially talking to scary-looking and potentially unfriendly people like the bikies. I’ve done this by exposing myself repeatedly to uncomfortable situations, which has taken the form of public speaking at large community events, speaking up about important stuff at work even though I was certain the consequences would be negative, approaching strangers on the street to tell them I liked their style, talking to homeless people about their situation and also by being a good listener. Kindness helps; kindness to self and kindness to others.
HST-esque Ralph Steadman Gonzo tattoo. Image source: The Bomb Tattoos & Curiosities
450km solo hike: Woodgate to Brisbane, Fraser Island Great Walk, Conondale Ranges Great Walk, Sunshine Coast Hinterland Great Walk, Cooloola Great Walk, Crows Nest NP, D’ aguilar NP, Mudlo NP, Burrum Coast NP, Bunya Mountains NP, Table Top Mountain, Mount Walsh, Mt Goonaneman , Utopia rock pools, Brooyar SF, Cooloola Wilderness Area……plus all the other SFs and NPs I can’t remember, and all the countless local walks I did, like walking to the pub on a Friday night, which is 3 hours each way, and wandering around in the bush looking for weird shit and hidden treasures, like these:
Surveyor’s scar tree in Burrum Coast National Park
Original Bridge for Gregory River crossing. Constructed 1921Old rail spikes I found on a secret rail corridor in Goodwood
I wore them into town and even out at night sometimes because I just love the way they look, plus I felt weird not wearing them if I tried to wear sandals or sneakers because I got so used to seeing my feet in them. I wore the hell out of these boots and I loved them. I’ve always worn Hitec boots, but they became next level when they switched out their Vibram soles for their current Michelin soles. The Vibram soles don’t compare at all to the Michelin soles because the Michelin soles are practically indestructible, plus they don’t go hard like the Vibram soles tend to do with time. This means they don’t get slippery on wet surfaces. It also means they’re kinder to your feet, especially on long hikes when you’re carrying a heavy pack.
I took Fatty out for a ride yesterday to a spot I found a while ago. It was awesome: I rode through a muddy creek and muddy water flicked up everywhere. I love it when this happens because for some weird reason it feels like I’m really doing something, really getting right into being in nature, and because I’m getting dirty, I’m doing it properly. I know this is ridiculous, but who cares!
I rode over a river crossing, up a massive hill and took off into the bush. I can’t tell anyone where this is because I’m not really meant to be riding there. It’s not private property, but still I’m not meant to be there, no one is, but I actually don’t care because I’m not doing anything antisocial, like illegal dumping, I’m just riding my bike. It’s a great spot. I really like it.
River CrossingThe area is all Wallum Scrub
I rode a fair way, but the track ended at a creek, which I couldn’t get across, so turned around to come back. About half way back I noticed a track off to my right. I’d already gone down a track like this on my way to the creek I couldn’t cross, so I kept riding, telling myself that it probably wouldn’t go anywhere and I’d get disappointed like I had when I’d taken the last side track to nowhere.
See, I love finding relics in the bush. The ultimate relic for me is a dead body. I want to find one before I die. I know it’s weird and I don’t care. A skeleton is what I’m really aiming for. This isn’t likely to happen, but it doesn’t stop me from getting excited everytime I come across a remote area. The next best relics are old abandoned buildings and weird stuff that is hard to explain, like how a car got to the bottom of a massive cliff that is nowhere near a road, or why a house in the middle of nowhere, still full of books, clothes and personal items was abondoned and left to rot, or how did this old Zippo lighter and leather tobacco pouch end up here in the middle of the bush, just for me to find twenty years after it was lost?
I got some way down the main track and decided that in the spirit of adventure and exploration I really should go back and check out the side track, so I turned around and followed it. It went for much further than the earlier side track had gone and I started to worry about where I’d end up because it was getting late. I won’t turn any corners I told myself, I’ll just keep going straight. I have a problem with knowing when to stop and didn’t want to end up in the middle of nowhere, fighting my way through spiders to find the car in the dark. God, I hate spiders! They always build their webs at face height across tracks.
My breath caught in my throat when I looked up to see the edge of a building come into view.” Holy shit” I said out loud. It was hard not to get too excited, but I made myself slow down, lean my bike against a tree in the direction of escape, and approach with caution. I left my helmet on so I wasn’t trying dick around with it incase a gunman came at me, even though I knew that wasn’t likely given the condition of the track I’d ridden in on – nobody had driven on it for a long, long time.
A drawing of the building I found in the absolute guts of nowhere. Wolf Creek much?
I thought I might find some bodies hanging from the beams in the theme of the Violent Femmes Country Death Song, but there was nothing in there. I’d done a pretty good job of creeping myself out by this stage, so it was just as well really. Here’s a link to that song. It’s my favourite Femmes song: Country Death Song
I swear, the Cooloola region is out to get me! The last time I planned an adventure here, The relentless wind blew me sideways on a bike trip on Teewah beach, which caused me to push my bike for 33km before jagging a lift to Tewantin with some beautiful people. Before that, I’d booked the Great Walk twice before only to have it cancelled by QPWS due to fires in the area. The Cooloola Wilderness Trail got me a couple of years back when I almost froze solid on the banks of the Noosa river. When I first got my fat bike, I drove all the way to Rainbow to ride for a day in the forestry, only to have the seat break in the first five minutes. Oh yes, and of course there was the bed incident at Teewah village in 2007, which is a long story without a happy ending in which I got to see someone I’d always loved for who they truly were: a horrible, horrible arsehole.
It’s not all bad though. I did find a $50 note on the side of Rainbow Beach Road in 2019 on my way there on a charity hike for brain injury. Plus, the community at Rainbow is really cool. Rainbow Beach is where my dad taught me how to swim safely in the surf when I was a little kid. I also had my first go at catching sandworms with Dad on the surf beach. I have always loved seeing the brumbies roaming wild in the pine forests on the way into Rainbow. It’s a really nice place and when I was a kid I used to say that when I grew up I would either live at Rainbow or on Fraser Island.
The hike started out fine:
At the trailhead: Cooloola Great walk
The first day from Carlo sandblow to Kauri campsite wasn’t too bad because it was only 15.2km. The worst part was getting up onto the trail from the sandblow. I was mindful of my hiking boots because the right one has a massive hole in it, which I’d only noticed the day before. I didn’t want my boot to fill up with sand, but after a while I decided to just forget about it because worrying about it wasn’t going to reduce the sand intrusion. In the end, it didn’t matter because no extra sand made its way into my right boot anyway.
I was hopeful I’d see some lightning sand (fulgurite), but I was too intent on getting across the sandblow to have a proper look. This desire to do everything at speed would become a problem as time wore on.
On the sandblow looking out towards Double Island PointOn the trail side of the sandblow looking towards the Great Sandy StraightsTrail marker at the start of the trail
I got to Kauri much quicker than I expected. There was a lot of “track clag”, by which I mean big tree falls blocking the trail. Some of the trees were massive and I wondered if they were infected with cinnamon fungus.I could tell that one of the big trees had fallen in the last 24 hours because I could still smell the chlorophyll. At this point I started to pay more attention to the extremely windy conditions. Would a tree fall on me? As the the day wore on, branches crashed through the canopy and onto the trail in front of me and behind me, but somehow I didn’t get taken out.
There were a lot of cool fig trees..
Fig tree: it looks like an alien has splattered itself onto the host tree
I’m not sure what species of fig these are, but they have massive fruit:
At the campsite there were two other solo hikers already set up. I was not expecting this and I wasn’t particularly excited about it, but nature doesn’t belong to me, so I have to stop thinking that I’m the only person who likes doing stuff outdoors. It was really windy setting up the tent and it had been raining on and off all day, which was really annoying for setting the tent up, but I managed to get it done before there was a major downpour. Argh! It pissed down rain all night long and I was less than impressed when water started dripping on my head. I have a $750 Wilderness Equipment tent: Water is not meant to drip on my head!
I was also a little bit worried about the wind. I kept thinking about all the fallen trees I’d seen on the trail that day. In the end I had to say to myself, I doesn’t matter if a tree falls on you because you’ll be dead, so you won’t know anything about it. All night I swear I could hear music. It sounded like a distant concert.
Campsite at Kauri. I was grateful for the lockbox. It meant I didn’t have to put all my crap in the tent.
The next day was a 20.5km walk to Littoria campsite. This was really hard because I walked too fast and as a result got royally fucked up by my need for speed. I also got bitten by a spider or a little snake somewhere along the trail, which didn’t help. About half way I started to think that I wanted to go home.
By the time I got to the campsite I could hardly move because my hip flexors were killing me. After I set the tent up and had stopped moving I realised I was in a bit of trouble because I felt like absolute shit (maybe from a combination of the snake/spider bite and the reality that I’m not invincible?). At this point I decided that it would be pretty stupid to keep going because if I did get sick combined with the obvious reality that my hip flexors would only get worse as the kilometres wore on, I would be in a bit of trouble. Someone was coming to pick me up at the end of the hike, so it was no big deal to get them to come and pick me up the next day instead.
Littoria is pretty much right on Kings Bore Road, which I knew was a way out to Cooloola Way, although I wasn’t sure if it was open to vehicles. There was phone service here, so I phoned the Qld government to find out if the road was open to vehicles. What a complete waste of time that was. They had no idea what I was even asking and would not forward my call to QPWS so I could get some local information. In the end I just winged it and it ended up being ok.
I walked about 10km out along Kings Bore Road to the intersection with Cooloola Way. It was a really nice walk and even though everything was killing me, and I had a massive headache, it didn’t get to me too much. I got to see this awesome creek, which I would not have even known existed had I not left the hike…
Teewah Creek. This is a really nice spot. Luckily it wasn’t too deep. It would’ve been good for swim.
The entire great walk is around 100km. I ended up doing about 50km. I can always come back to where I got picked up to do the remainder of the hike even though a ranger I saw didn’t seem too impressed that I’d been walking on Kings Bore Road. “I’m pretty sure I’m not a vehicle,” I said to him because there were signs that vehicles weren’t allowed, but none to say that pedestrians couldn’t use the road. It’s a real shame that these old road aren’t accessible by cyclists (bikes are considered vehicles by QPWS in some locations) because they’d be great for bikepacking. It’s a low impact activity, so who knows why you can’t take bikes on roads. A utopia of rules.
A valuable thing I learnt via this experience is that I need to treat hiking as recreation and not as a race because it’s not a race: I have to slow the fuck down. Also, just because you’re extremely fit from training on a bike and on a HIIT machine, it doesn’t mean you can just head off on a 100km hike if you don’t even go on short walks. Durr! I also learnt that it’s ok to call it quits, that it’s smart to call it quits, that it’s not weak to call it quits, that it’s the responsible thing to call it quits, that calling it quits in a situation like this means you are not a danger to yourself or to others, which demonstrates good decision-making. Being a good decision-maker is an essential quality for living an adventurous life, in fact, for living any kind of meaningful life.
…of all strategies, knowing when to quit may be the best…
The coolest chic I know lives in Toowoomba, and a while back, she bought us tickets to see some banjo players at QPAC. I’d noticed last time I visted her that Toowoomba has some cool outdoor/adventure spots, so I decided to turn the whole trip into a mountain biking and hiking adventure.
The Nonce and Fatty ready for adventure
On the first day I drove to Wondai to see if I could find the mountain bike track I’d overheard some mountain bikers talking about a few weeks back. I went to the tourist information centre, but the lady there didn’t really know anything about it, so I thought I’d try and find it on the stupid map app thing that someone put on my phone a couple of weeks ago. It took me around the block twice, so I promptly deleted it and just went back to google. Luckily I saw some mountain bikers heading down the hill, so I drove down the road and caught up to them. I asked the girl at the back if they were going on the loop (I didn’t realise that it was an actual single track mountain bike track, not just a rail trail loop). “We’re going to the mountain bike track,” she said, looking at me suspiciously. At this point I remembered I was driving a white van. “Ohh, cool! Can I follow you because I’m trying to find it and I don’t know where I’m going?” I said.
I pulled over before the carpark (I didn’t realise there was one), and she rode back to tell me that I could keep driving and park at the carpark about 800 metres further along the road. I felt good about that because it meant she didn’t think I was a white-van-stalker.
Awesome track in Wondai
This is a bloody awesome track: lots of cool hills and do-able jumps and obstacles. It was heaps of fun. I met a cool fella here called Morris, who took me around the whole thing. He was really nice and I felt like I could be friends with him in everyday life, but as usual, I felt weird about asking if he wanted to stay in touch, so I said nothing, which is stupid.
After Wondai, I headed to Wooroolin with an 18km loop off the rail trail in mind. There was a sign at the start, which I followed up a MASSIVE hill to another sign that sent me down a nice, flat dirt road. A huge dog came running out of a house and I got a bit worried it was going to have a go at me, but it was a big sook. It had its teeth out, but was only doing a stupid grin to let me know it was friendly. I gave it a big pat and told it to go home, which it did. After that, there were no more signs, so I just continued to ride in a staight line, which took me over a grid and onto what looked like a long driveway. It was a long driveway: To someone’s farm house. I turned around and decided to head back to the car because I couldn’t tell which way I was meant to go because there were no more signs. AAAAarrghhh! As it turned out, I couldn’t go back the way I’d come because someone had closed a gate across the road where I’d met the huge dog. That meant I got to ride down a massive hill and managed to go the fastest I’ve ever gone on the bike: 39km/hr. I thought I was pretty cool, but I didn’t realise how much faster I could actually go until I got to Crows Nest the next day.
Wooroolin from the bike loop. Wetlands in the background
I headed to Kingaroy thinking I’d find a stealth camp there, but after driving around there for about an hour and not finding anywhere I felt OK about, I decided to head towards Crows Nest and find somewhere on the way. I ended up at Goodger, which was a much better spot than down the end of some dodgy suburban industrial estate.
Goodger school historical site
I write all this stuff in a journal while I’m doing an adventure so that I can remember it properly later on. I really, really hate doing this! It’s the most annoying form of wrting for me and I have to write very fast so I can out-write the feeling of the approaching tantrum of I DON’T WANNA!! This is what happens when I write in a journal:
The next day at Crows Nest I called into the tourist information centre to see if they had any stuff on the local mountain bike tracks. The lady was really nice, but the biggest Covid conspiracy theorist I’ve ever come across. Apparently everyone who got vaccinated only has five years to live. She claimed that the vaccine was a way of getting us all transformed into AI because the global elite want to control everything and depopulate the world. I kept asking her why, not belligerently, but because I was genuinely interested in where she was going with her particular theory, but when she no longer had a way to answer my enquiries, she reverted to beliefs (a war between god and satan), which you can’t really question, so that shut the whole thing down. Ohhh, what a shame.
After that I went into Crows Nest to get a coffee and looked at a few maps to work out where to ride. I decided on a 20km mountain bike loop, which was pretty challenging. The first bit was OK and it was before the road went to dirt that I got the bike up to 50km/hr. That was pretty cool! The bike had a small speed wobble, but it was barely noticeable. Not long after that, the road when to dirt with massive corrugations on gigantic hills and I had to get off and push the bike a lot. It was really hot and I kept fantasising about getting a Crows Nest softdrink when I got back to the car. It was on the back end of the loop that I noticed my back brake wasn’t really working, which was a pain because there were some massive down hills on the way back towards Crows Nest and I could’ve picked up some good speed on these if I wasn’t worried about needing to slow down should a car come over the next crest or whatever. There was really only about 2km of nice riding on this loop. The rest was too corrugated and steep to really stay on the bike.
Fatty on the nice part of the Crows Nest loop
After the loop I went to Crows Nest National Park. I did the hikes there, but was struggling a bit by this point because my legs were so sore from a big run I’d done two days prior (the 2nd day after the exercise is always the most painful), and I had to find a big stick to help me get up and down all the stairs on the hike to the lookout at the top. It was worth it. I got to do some great cooees and yelps from the lookout. It was really echoey.
View from Crows Nest Falls lookout
That night, I wrote in my journal: ” I think it’s good to not know too much about what you’re going to do. There’s no way to get disappointed: That bike loop at Crows Nest wasn’t really fun, but it didn’t piss me off like the Rainbow Beach ride did because I had no ideas about what it would be like.”
The next day I went for a drive in the forestry at Hampton, with the idea that I’d end up at Lake Perserverence and then Lake Cressbrook. At Lake Perserverence I found a secret hike:
Old hiking sign at Lake Perseverance
I got really excited about this because I’d looked into the valley the day before from the Crows Nest Falls lookout and thought how cool it would be to go down and follow the creek bed and explore the bush. I went back to the car and got the GPS so I wouldn’t be held back by worrying about getting lost, but I didn’t get that far. I spent around 2 hours climbing around all the boulders in the creek bed, but couldn’t see where the trail went after the second marker. I assumed you follow the creek bed, but I just rocked hopped around up to the spillway and climbed back out to the car. I didn’t feel like getting stuck in the guts of nowhere. Given the condition of the sign and the two markers I did see, it’s obvious that this trail isn’t really used anymore, so it’s not likely that it’s going to be obvious where to go to get out of the valley at the other end.
Perseverance Creek. I think you follow this creek to get to the falls
After Lake Cressbrook, which was full of rules (YOU CAN’T! DON’T! STOP! NO DOGS! KEEP OUT! NO! NONE OF THAT! KEEP IT DOWN! SLOW! ). I went to Ravensbourne National Park, which was awesome. I found an old memorial at the Gus Beutel lookout, but I couldn’t read who it memorialised because the engraving was worn away. I did all the hikes in the park and at one point, in the middle of the rainforest, with the picabeens towering above me, two army Chinooks beat their way overhead. It gave me goosebumps as images of Vietnam sprung to mind.
Trailhead Ravensbourne National ParkA very cranky goanna Ravensbourne National ParkThere were two of these overhangs. Both had little insectivorous bats hanging inside.
That night I wrote in my journal: “Today I felt like this is why I’m alive.”
The next day I faffed around in Toowoomba before heading off to Brisbane for the gig. I bought a new seat for my bike (the existing one had snapped) and asked the dude who sold it to me about fixing my hub and my brakes. Nobody in bike shops ever really likes fat bikes, but this guy wasn’t too bad. He reckoned I should probably buy a new bike because mine needs too much new stuff, which will require me to spend more than the bike is worth. He showed me the one below, which seems pretty bloody expensive at $2K (Fatty cost $650), but he reckons it’s only entry level. Entry to what exactly? Entry to spending even more money next time, then on and on ad infinitum. People get really judgey about equipment when you’re doing a specialist-type activity. This is one of the reasons I’m not a huge fan of clubs. So far, the mountain bikers I’ve met on the tracks have been pretty accepting, but even so, I’m not rushing out to join the local mountain bike club!
Norco Bigfoot 3
After the faffing I headed into Brisbane to catch up with the coolest chic ever. We had a great time and, overall I had another really great adventure, which I would not have been able to do had I not crossed paths with the dangerous and stupid iteration of myself in 2022.
The Cool Chic (LHS) and me (RHS) at a banjo gig. I love banjos, and I love folk music, but this was really freakin’ horrible shit! I was glad I had no expectations because there was no way for me to be disappointed or pissed off. I have never, ever heard music like this before in my life! It was like cats screwing!
Free State of Jen 