My travelling companion from Sydney to Brisbane,
the retired school teacher
Two years ago to the day I escaped the Southern winter by booking myself on Queensland Rail's Sunlander Class to Cairns. However, before I could start my luxury train travel into endless summer, I had to get from Sydney to Brisbane on the not-quite-so-luxurious XPT. As it was an overnight trip, leaving Sydney at 4 p.m., I had booked a sleeper compartment which I shared with Ian, a retired school teacher from St.Ives.
We hit it off well and seemed to have solved most of the world's problems by the time dinner was served. I then remembered a recently rediscovered and painstakingly restored Australian movie about a teacher who, having been assigned to a tiny school in a remote township in the Australian Outback, is desperate to return to Sydney for the Christmas holidays. Forced to stop off at a rough-and-tumble mining town called Bundanyabba (known colloquially as "The Yabba") en route to catching his flight home, he is drawn into the brawling, hard-drinking lifestyle of the town's residents.
I had watched this uncompromising and controversial vision of life in a hellish town in the Australian Outback some months earlier and asked if my travel companion, having been a school teacher himself, knew about it. He not only knew about it but had seen it way back in the early 1970s when it was first released. We kept discussing it as we lay in our bunks but neither of us could remember its name.
The clickety-clack of the rail tracks must've lulled me to sleep when I was shaken awake. Startled, I opened my eyes, only to see my travelling companion, the retired teacher, leaning over me.
"It must be past midnight", I remonstrated, "What is it?"
"I remembered", he said, "'Wake in Fright'".
Wake in fright indeed!
P.S. For some insightful commentary on the movie, click here and here.
P.P.S. For an interesting remake of the original movie into a TV mini series, click here.
