I found this news particularly chilling as it has some eery parallels with our own round Australia family road trip.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/-/wa/17192113/search-for-man-near-coral-bay-continues/

A couple are snorkeling at Ningaloo Reef while their two children play on the beach, in the midst of their dream round Australia camping holiday. She has a publishing deal to write a book about their adventure. They have a boy and a girl, three years apart in age. They are camped out at Waroora Station just north of Gnaraloo, enjoying one of the great wilderness coastal camping experiences this country has to offer.

Then something goes horribly wrong. Their son raises the alarm when he swims out to join his parents and finds them floating face down. Fellow campers set off an emergency beacon and try to rescue the couple. The woman, Kathreen Ricketson, is brought ashore first but efforts to resuscitate her fail. The body of her husband, Rob Shugg, disappears below the water before he can be rescued. Despite a huge air and sea search, no trace of him is found. Two children are left orphaned, flown to Perth by child services to be united with relatives who have flown from Tasmania.

It is sobering to realise how quickly the idyllic family camping adventure can go tragically wrong. I cannot even imagine the grief and shock of the two children who witnessed all this. Instead of happy family memories of a dream holiday together, they will have a lifetime of mourning to process.

We made up one of those custom Apple books of our photos from our trip and it is now a treasured family keepsake. They will have only grim newspaper cuttings to remind them of their trip. I think about all the times I took the car to go searching for surf while the family waited in some remote bush campground, how many times I surfed alone, and how easily something could have gone very wrong a very long way from help. I am not a religious person but I am reminded of the phrase, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

It is another reminder that Australia is a very big and largely untamed country with innumerable perils. We like to think we have “settled” or “colonised” this country, somehow tamed or domesticated it. But the thing that struck me in our travels is how wild and untamed it remains.

My deep condolences go out to the children and relatives of this couple.

Kathreen’s blog now makes agonsing reading:

http://kathreenricketson.com/

They sound like wonderful people and a beautiful family, clearly intent on getting the most out of life and providing their kids creative opportunities to grow and explore. I hope those kids have enough happy memories of their parents stored up to help them on the difficult road ahead.

Tidying up the desktop today I came across this which I wrote after the big round Australia trip for some magazine or other, can’t quite recall now, about the lessons learnt on the road. Figured I ought to share. 

THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN FAMILY ROAD TRIP

WHAT I’VE LEARNT

Driving 27,000 km around Australia with a family of four, living in a caravan for eight months, might sound like your idea of heaven or hell, depending on your taste in holidays. For Tim Baker it was a teenage dream realized but an emotional rollercoaster heavy in life lessons.

When I was 15 I read a book called Surfari Highway, part of a wave of low brow surf lit brought out in the wake of the Gidget phenomenon. It told the story of two friends, Jonnie Grant and Rick Miller, driving around Australia, surfing as they went. As a newly surf-obsessed but landlocked teen in the suburbs of Melbourne, I found this cheesy, pulp fiction novel completely intoxicating. I vowed there and then, the moment I finished high school and obtained a driver’s license, I would embark on just such an adventure. After I finished high school, I studied journalism and landed a job on a newspaper. The great surfing road trip never happened. 30 years later, with a wife, two kids and a mortgage, wrestling with mid-life angst, somehow the pilot light of that distant teenage dream flickered back to life. Was it not too late for me to surf my way around the country while I was still able?

       Australians have always been enamoured with the idea of “the Big Lap” – but most of us wait until we are retirees, the dreaded “Grey Nomads,” as reward for a lifetime of toil, paying taxes, and raising kids.

I didn’t want to wait until I was old and grey and unable to surf the multitude of mind-boggling waves scattered around our vast coastline. I wanted to do it while I was still young enough to surf at a reasonable level and the kids were young enough to pull out of school for a year without damaging their education.

       The result, while often challenging, was probably the greatest surf trip of my lifetime – and I say that as someone who has spent much of his adult life surfing and traveling around the world, writing as I go.

So, what have I learnt?  Well, I’d better have acquired some valuable wisdom out of all this, because after eight months and 27,000 km on the road I returned to our regular suburban life very nearly broke, thoroughly exhausted and ill-prepared for a resumption of normal work and domestic duties. I guess there’s a good reason why most folks wait until retirement to embark on such a venture.

But I was also the fittest I’d been for 10 years, spiritually renewed, inspired and awed by the sheer beauty and diversity of our vast country, comforted by the priceless family bonding and rich life experience my children had gained. What have I learnt from the great Australian family caravanning trip? Realizing your dreams is a two-edged sword.

1.        I am an idealistic fool. I embarked on this adventure with visions of endless carefree days surfing to my heart’s content, as my children built sand castles and splashed in shorebreaks and my wife lazed in a hammock with a good book at one idyllic coastal campground after another. Stop laughing! I know. Sheer madness. The reality was altogether more fraught. Transporting a family around our mighty island nation is a complex business. All the practical stuff of shopping, cooking, washing, paying bills, all still needs to be done, in often trying circumstances. Yet, now it was all a moveable feast, a traveling circus, with family members crammed cheek to jowl 24/7. At times mere survival and sanity seemed the highest goal. Yet, at other times, we were rewarded with a sense of perfect freedom and endless adventure that will keep me warm through the long winter of old age.

2.        Don’t slam caravan doors. In a silly flash of anger after a trifling domestic dispute in Tathra, I stormed out of our van, slamming the door for dramatic effect to register my displeasure. I planned to stomp off like a petulant child until someone came looking for me. Instead, I heard my children howling in distress, trapped in the van with the door wedged shut. I had to turn on my heels, swallow my pride and gently prize the door open with a screw-driver, and spent the next 24 hours apologising profusely.

3.        If your caravan ever starts feeling a bit small during any tense family moments, simply step outside (being sure not to slam the door on your way out). You are usually in some beautiful natural environment with a calming seascape, bush setting or star-filled night sky to soothe your ragged nerves. Even the confines of the typical van park – the burps, farts and disputes of your neighbours clearly audible, old ladies bloomers flapping on the communal clothes-line - can feel restorative at such times.

4.        Board games and cards are your friend. Never under-estimate the family fun to be enjoyed from a simple game of Scrabble or Monopoly or Uno during the inevitable rainy days trapped in a van. A surprisingly convivial atmosphere can be generated in the confined space of a family caravan with a few cups of tea, a pack of Anzac biscuits and a few time-honoured parlour games.

5.        Don’t obsess about the home-schooling. Friends who’d completed similar journeys expressed regret that they spent too much time in their caravan hunched over schoolbooks and advised us to take a more relaxed approach. It seemed a shame to travel vast distances to stunning natural settings and spend your days rehearsing times tables. The kids kept journals, did a few work sheets as we drove, got out the school books a couple of times a week, and it seemed to do them no great harm. Within a term they’d caught up on anything they’d missed out on in their absence. And what they’d learnt can’t be acquired in any classroom.

6.        Carry healthy snacks. Try living on roadhouse fare and you’ll need a liver transplant or heart surgery by the time you get home. My wife always prepared a bowl of carrot and celery sticks and apple pieces for the road. If there was nothing else to eat, the kids would happily eat it.

7.        Share the driving. It’s a big country – having a reliable co-pilot is vital.

8.        Having said that, don’t necessarily share the task of reversing or hitching your van. At this very moment, all over the country, there are dozens of couples arguing over the complex mechanics of manoeuvring their caravan in and out of tight campsites. At the end of a long day on the road it is the ultimate relationship tester and, let’s be honest, most of us fail. I opted to preserve my marriage and undertake these duties solo, even if it meant jumping in and out of the car a dozen times as I monitored my positioning.

9.        Slow down. Don’t always be racing to the next destination. You never know what you might miss along the way. Even the vast emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain has its own magic, if you spend the time to absorb it.

10.   Plan ahead but be prepared to change your plans. There are plenty of destinations where you may need to book a campsite ahead of time, especially in the northern reaches in winter when the Grey Nomads descend on places like Exmouth, Broome, and Kakadu. But remain open to the happy, chance discovery. Good information can always be gained on the road from folks who are travelling in the opposite direction, who have just come from where you are headed.

11.   Get the kids some onboard entertainment. It’s a big country, requiring a lot of driving. We got the kids iPod touches – with audio books, music, movies, the ability to shoot photos and video, though we found too much game time wigged them out. Good old-fashioned fun like spotto, car bingo, and “Who Am I?” also helped wile away the long driving hours.

12.   Buy National Park memberships in each state. Any more than three night’s camping in a national park and you’re already ahead. And you’re contributing to the upkeep of some of our most beautiful wilderness.

13.   Buy a copy of the Camps Australia Wide guide, with comprehensive road maps and listings of every campsite in the country. There are plenty of free campsites if you are on a tight budget (though the Grey Nomads tend to fill them up pretty early in the day).

14.   Get in touch with Indigenous Australia. This country has an ancient history and rich living culture that ought to be celebrated. There are plenty of examples of the tragedy of alcoholism and dysfunctional communities, but encounter Indigenous people who are empowered, in touch with their culture, on their traditional lands, and you’ll pass through a window into a deeper understanding and appreciation of our country.

15.   As a people, we seem to have become incredibly soft in the space of just three or four generations. Everywhere you look in this country, cast back a hundred years or even less and there are stories of the most excruciating suffering, hardship, misery and brutality: the inhuman toil of timber-getters and whalers, workers on Tasmania’s hydro-electric scheme or Victoria’s Great Ocean Road, the wretched fates of shipwreck survivors and convicts, the brave pioneering deeds of early settlers in some of the most remote, harsh country imaginable and the atrocities they sometimes meted out on the Indigenous population. Our current era of relative peace, wealth and abundance is a mere bubble in time that might be well spent not whining about the price of petrol, cigarettes or real estate, patchy mobile reception or the speed of your internet.

16. Lots of people are driving around Australia, and this is both a good and a bad thing. Good, because hopefully more of us will form a lasting connection to our land and thus care more deeply for it and feel more empathy for the First Australians who have cultivated such a connection with it over millennia. Bad, because there are so many of us doing it that we place more pressures on often fragile environments.

Two hundred and thirty thousand caravans and campervans were manufactured in Australia in the past seventeen years, according to the Recreational Vehicles Manufacturing Association of Australia. Annual production hit a new peak of 20,000 in 2010, a figure that has quadrupled in fifteen years.

17.    Still, Australia is a very big country with relatively few people. If there’s one thing we don’t need to fear here it’s too many people or a lack of space.

18.    Don’t hurry back. It will all still be here when you get home and all those incredible experiences will very quickly seem like a dream.

19.    How you do it is less important than actually doing it. We met a family of four riding round Australia on a three-wheeler motorbike, dad driving, and mum and two kids on a bench seat behind him, towing a trailer with all their gear. A family of five, with three young kids, were camping in a tent for six months on the road. One woman we met, a hairdresser by trade, cut hair all around the country, posting little flyers on the doors of the ablutions blocks advertising the service. Camper trailers hold their value remarkably well. Pick up a second hand one for 15 or 20 grand and you’ll probably be able to sell it for the same price at the end. However you manage to pull it off, taking long service leave, renting out your house, working in the mines for a year, doing odd jobs as you go, it will all be worth it. If you commit to the expedition, the details will fall into place.

Tim Baker is the author of SURFARI ($34.95, Random House Australia, 2011)

This was written a while ago, after I read the acclaimed surfing novel the Life by Malcolm Knox. I was a little shocked to discover how heavily it borrowed from not only Michael Peterson’s life story but many other surfing books. I couldn’t find a home for it at the time - the literary world seemed unwilling to publish criticism of one of its leading lights, but I still thought it raised some valid points. I figured I may as well dust it off and give it a run here and invite your comments.

A LIFE IS A LIFE

The recent death of legendary Australian surfer Michael Peterson has shone new light on the inspiration for Australian novel, The Life.

Imagine for a moment you are part of an ancient indigenous culture in a part of the world rarely visited by westerners. You have a rich tradition of story-telling and music that is dear and precious to you.

Then, imagine a visiting, high-profile, world musician stumbles upon your music and is so swept up by it, he promptly goes away and records an album almost entirely based upon your music, with a few of his own flourishes and inflections, polished and produced to be made palatable for a general audience. You get a small mention in the liner notes, no royalties, not even a CD in the mail, while the world musician receives gushing praise from the music press about his bold new musical experiment. How might you feel? A little ripped off, perhaps? Violated even?

It’s taken me a while to get around to reading The Life, the surfing novel by acclaimed author Malcolm Knox.  I felt uneasy that this literary titan had merely fictionalised the story of the recently deceased surf legend Michael Peterson, given it a few twists, and claimed it as his own. Didn’t we already have the real story, vividly rendered by Sean Doherty in his best-selling biography, MP? What I wasn’t prepared for was the degree to which Knox had mined the entire canon of modern surf literature and weaved it together into what he claims is an original work of fiction.

Others, most notably surf writer Nick Carroll, have pointed out the many similarities between MP and Knox’s creation, Dennis Keith. Known universally by his initials, DK is an overweight, washed up, late 50s, drug-addled, surf legend, living with his mother in a unit in Tweed Heads. It is a premise immediately familiar to any surfer. Almost all the details of DK’s story mirror MP’s, apart from a dark, morbid twist at the end.

What hasn’t been pointed out before is that The Life borrows heavily from a vast collection of surfing books, including a couple of my own. In fairness, Knox acknowledges them in an author’s note at the end. But I think The Life raises questions about the degree to which it is fair and ethical to borrow from other literary works, to weave together fiction and non-fiction, and present as your own invention the real life stories of numerous others.

A few examples: DK’s boards are run over by a beach-cleaning tractor in Hawaii after being buried in the sand. DK is superstitious about seeing certain numbers on car license plates before a contest. These episodes are straight out of “Occy  - the rise and fall and rise of Mark Occhilupo.” The mother of a rival heckles DK in the queue at the bank, tells him that he is getting too old and will soon be overtaken by younger surfers. This really happened to Rabbit Bartholomew, at the hands of MP’s mum, as recounted in his biography “Bustin’ Down The Door.”

Perhaps the borrowed anecdote that struck me most strongly in The Life was this one, rendered in DK’s manic stream of consciousness, about DK’s brother Rod going for his first surf:

When Frank come in drug his whopping great redwood longboard behind him in the sand, Rod tag along after him and go: ‘Ya gunna gimme a go today?’

And Frank walk along like he’s thinking about it and then after a long while goes, ‘Nup.’

And that was it, day after day after day.

Then one day completely out of the blue, Little Big Shit thought about it for a bit and went, ‘Yep.’

He told Rod he has to swim out on his own. Frank’ll paddle the board out the back then give it to him. So that’s what they did. I stood on the beach and watched Frank paddle out, Rod swim out and then Frank gave Rod the big wooden board …

I was just standing there watching when a good wave come and Rod just sitting there rooted to his board, didn’t know how to turn it around and start paddling. Besides there was another bloke already riding the wave.

Rod just squatting there in the impact zone and there was mayhem, Frank’s board popping up in the air like a penny bunger and the other surfer falling off and screaming blue murder at Rod, and the next thing I knew Rod’s dumped Frank’s board, bodysurfing in on the next wave, the board’s washed in on another … and Rod gets to the sand and he doesn’t even stop to talk to me he’s just bolted in his trunks dripping wet up the hill and up the street to Shangrila (the family home)

This bears more than a passing resemblance to the tale of Rabbit’s very first surf on a borrowed board in Bustin’ Down The Door.

When he came in we went through a well-rehearsed ritual.

I’d go, ‘Are you going to give me a go today?’

And he’d go, ‘Nah.’ …

This went on every day for the whole of the holidays. Finally, it was the last day of the Christmas holidays and we were down at the beach. We’d gone through the whole rigmarole, the whole ritual.

I said, ‘Are you going to give me a go?’

And he’s gone, ‘Yep.’

I did the full double take, ‘Really?’

‘Yep, here’s the deal. You swim out the back, you swim all the way out the back …  I’ll paddle the board out and when you get out behind the breakers I’ll give you the board.’

It sounded like a hell of a deal.

Next thing I knew I was out the back at Greenmount, he’d got off the board and bodysurfed in, and suddenly it was just me, sitting on a surfboard out the back at Greenmount … Next second this wave is peeling down Greenmount Point towards me … This bodysurfer took off about 50 meteres further out  … He was headed towards me and I was sitting on this board and it suddenly dawned on me that I didn’t know how to manoeuvre it … He came cruising along this wave … straight into the nose of my board. The wave exploded, the board went shooting up into the air, I went under and came up trying to figure out what had happened. This guy came up next to me with this hole in his head … and he roared at me, ‘You great galoot.’ And that was all he had to say.  My adrenalin was pumping so hard and I was so scared I just swam straight to the beach. I didn’t stop. I didn’t look back. I didn’t even look to see where the board was. I hit the beach at a full run and I ran all the way home.

There are other traces of inspiration from US surf literature.

“You knew you were more a part of this coast than any other people were part of any place anywhere,” Knox writes in The Life.

“I am more a part of this life than most Americans are of any life anywhere,” Dan Duane writes in his surf novel Caught Inside.

There are presumably other similarities to other surfing books I haven’t picked up on. One of the most questionable aspects of The Life is the way Knox has weaved real life characters into DK’s story, like MP himself, Rabbit, Peter Townend and others, often portraying them inaccurately. He paints Simon Anderson as one of the new generation of starry-eyed, sponsored pro surfers who take inordinate delight in modeling their sponsor’s fashions. Anyone who knows Simon would attest that this couldn’t be further from the truth. By inter-twining fact and fiction, Knox leaves the reader confused about what to believe and distorts history. And by hugging the curves of MP’s life so closely, and then introducing a grisly murder into the plot, he invites the false impression that the Petersons might have some similarly awful skeletons in the closet (the usual author’s disclaimer about it being a work of fiction hardly suffices here, I’d argue).

Let me be clear. I think the writing in The Life is impressive – a wild, rambling, staccato rave capturing the tortured, haunting, inner voice of a deeply damaged soul, maintained convincingly for 300 or so pages. No mean feat. Plenty of non-surfers I know have loved it, without any knowledge of its debt to surfing folklore. Knox is clearly an accomplished writer, a former literary editor of the Sydney Morning Herald no less and author of several well-received novels. The Life has earned almost universal praise from the literary world. I may be accused of mere jealousy.

Yet I find it ironic that Knox is perhaps best known for exposing the Norma Khouri literary scandal, whose memoir “Forbidden Love’ he revealed as a hoax. I am not suggesting The Life represents any such scandal. I feel some trepidation even daring to question the work of such a luminary. But as a writer who has examined the ethical boundaries of truth and lie, fact and fiction, I am surprised he felt at liberty to borrow so heavily from other’s real life stories.

Michael Peterson’s legend has been exploited, his image marketed and commercialized by many others, while he eked out a sad, shadow existence on a disability pension. A fund-raising drive was launched to cover the cost of his funeral, so that his 80-year-old mother Joan, who had cared for him almost his entire life, was not burdened with the cost.  The Life seems yet one more example where others have profited from the MP legend.

Knox is apparently a recent mid-life convert to surfing, after his wife bought him a surfing lesson as gift. There is no shame in that. I imagine he came upon the existing library of surf biographies in the grip of his new-found surf lust. That he discovered a rich vein of inspiration in them is entirely reasonable. But it seems to me he has treated the authors and subjects of these works of non-fiction like a supposedly primitive tribe, whose culture he can borrow and plunder, polish up and present as his own to a whole new audience. I thought we might have been entitled to at least a few beads and mirrors.