hot and spicy

IF IT'S TUESDAY, THIS MUST BE MUNGALLALA

Whoo-hoo, Betty! I'm back!

I can barely walk, admittedly, but I AM home.

You see, folks, I've been away. You may have noticed my absence. (Or not. And if not, why not?) But yes, after floating around Queensland on one long delicious magic-carpet ride for the past, oh, six weeks or so, my wandering days are at an end (for the moment, at least) and I'm back where I belong -- at Rancho Hiss, in the arms of my hairy husband and the paws of my furry little wolves (or vice-versa).

And hey, I know what you're thinking: you're thinking that I've been gone because I was called on (once again, and sigh...it gets so gruesomely tiresome after the thousandth or so time...) to single-handedly save the tourism industry in this great state by being the starring attraction in a yet another ubiquitous marketing campaign flaunting the ubiquitous spectacle that is Queensland bosoms (well, in particular that would be MY bosoms), such as the travel marketing gurus seem to ubiquitously favour. For if the hype is to be believed, in fact, nothing actually goes on here except for flocks of winsome mostly-naked sheilas frolicking in the sand and the sun and the surf, enticing tourists to queue up at airline counters around the world to buy seats to see the amazing phenomenon of pert-nippled Queensland norks.

But if you guessed that, why, you'd be wrong! I had to decline Tourism Queensland's exceedingly generous offer and keep the Miss Hiss Mammaries under wraps for the moment, of course. For one thing, I anticipated being kept far too busy annoying pilgrims by handing out prophylactics and gay marriage licences (and even hair shirts and dear little matching leather floggers as well) to them (and possibly even to the Pope himself, who's flown in from the Vatican with bells on but immediately had to lie low and have a nap for a few days, being as he's as old as Methuselah and, like cheap wines AND me when I'm a tad tetchy, apparently doesn't travel well) who are flocking to Sydney for World Youth Day celebrations in what the media is screaming is "POPEMANIA!" as we speak. [Newsflash: The Pontiff woke up for long enough to take the Popemobile for a spin around the city, watch an enactment of the Stations of the Cross and murmur some encouraging things about Blessed Mary MacKillop FINALLY being canonised sometime soon -- they're just waiting on one of those pesky miracles, apparently.]

But that fervidly-religious dream of mine of spreading the good news (or just being a serial menace, at the very least) to the devoted pilgrims about the magical benefits of contraception and BDSM and outing themselves without shame didn't eventuate, and the truth is -- and you know I NEVER lie about this stuff -- that I've really just been on holidays for a while, catching up with family and friends in BrisVegas and road-tripping my way around the highways and byways with my bestest girlfriend in the entire known universe, The Divine Miss V.

Let me tell you about it.

My Odyssey all started some time back in early June, when I went to town and got THE most fabulous haircut of my life -- all layered and shaggy and with black and chocolate and bright-red and hot-pink and white-blonde foils, and sensationally sexy in that "just got out of bed and dragged through a hedge backwards before being fucked roughly by a group of a dozen or so sweaty cowboys wielding stockwhips" look that I love. Yes, after twenty or more years of militantly eschewing layered hair in favour of SERIOUS shiny severe straight bob-type haircuts, and biting and pinching until she/he/it was bruised and bloodied any hairdresser who dared to even suggest anything other than a blunt cut and drying it dead-straight, and spending thousands of dollars on conditioning "product" to detangle my ridiculously thick and knotty hair every single time I washed it, I've gone over to the dark side. It's taken about a year of gradual layering in selected sections to get to this stage (and apparently layering techniques have been greatly refined -- go figure -- since the bad old days when I'd beg drunken and/or stoned housemates to snip and hack randomly at my mane with blunt nail scissors while I furiously rubbed blue-black dye and extra-strength gel into it to turn it into a spiky mop resembling Lydia Lunch's or Joan Jett's or Chrissie Hynde's) but now I'm a rabid convert to the fine art of layering.

Just quietly, I especially love it when they use the razor on my tresses, and I can hear it menacingly gnawing and grating and slashing away on my follicles like Mack the Knife or Jack the Ripper or thereabouts, as scarlet billows start to spread -- but perhaps that's a story best kept for another time�

Anyway, following that hairdressing high point (and a really tasty Hunza Pie and carrot-and-raisin-and-walnut salad at the Whole Food Cafe, plus rather a lot of mango cheesecake with whipped cream and also several lattes to celebrate) I returned to the ol' rancho, painted my toenails rainforest-green and my fingernails raven-black, admired myself in the mirror some more then and threw together all the winter clothes I own (and some mysterious ones I didn't actually recognise, but I presume have been left by friends so are technically mine now according to the Antient Laws of Abandoned Garments) into approximately forty-five Ella Maiden (black-and-white cowhide) and Betsey Johnson (tattoo and/or leopard-print) travel bags I keep stacked up in the wardrobe precisely for that purpose.

I also packed my brand-new "Roxy" Ugg Boots Nomad Style As Worn By A Very Stylish Sienna Miller which, while very fetching indeed, surprisingly did NOT make my feet feel like running off with Jude Law and/or one of the Gettys even a tiny bit, and barked out orders to our Hired Man (The Fabulous K-meister, who seemingly LOVES it when I boss him around shamelessly, for some reason) to wash and wax the car AND load it up for me, please, and don't spare the horses. Then I pashed my husband goodbye, with quite a lot of gratuitous tongue (and threw in a jolly fun spot of high-energy last-minute bonking so he'd remember me fondly while I was away, which unfortunately sapped all the strength in my legs and entirely removed my ability to control the accelerator -- thank goddess for Cruise Control, I say!) and hit the road for a wild ride of some thousand or so kilometres down the Matilda Highway to the south-east corner of the state.

After a later-than-anticipated getaway (see paragraph above) and a couple of delightful evenings spent paying out ridiculous amounts of money in motel accommodation and room service, including an especially memorable breakfast of what I'm reasonably certain were two raw eggs lazily passed over the steam from a kettle a couple of times and then hurriedly stuck in bone china egg-cups, garnished with a bit of recycled parsley, deceitfully labelled "soft-boiled" by lying kitchen staff and popped on a tray with a frangipani blossom and an outrageous price tag of some ten bucks -- which I dropped in hot water in my bathroom sink and then bravely ate, incidentally, while whipping up a few banners for THE GREAT JAVELINA HUNT which you really should be going to if you're not already, trust me; because it TRULY ROOLY SHOULD NOT BE MISSED, and besides which, you'll probably get to meet a lot of cowboys, which is almost never a bad thing, but I digress -- I hit the Big Smoke ready to rumble.

Once in BrisVegas I spent my usual Little Hiss in the Big City holiday-adventures catching up on scads of gossip and/or slander, going out for Mexican, Indian, Greek, Lebanese and Italian dinners, swilling millions of midnight margaritas, crashing in friends' and relatives' guest rooms (and drooling on their pillows, I fear) and eating chocolate cakey for breakfast every chance I could.

Ah, it was the sweet life. It's always nice to know that for some obscure reason I'm still (mostly) welcome in other people's houses, even though I usually contribute absolutely nothing to the household except occasionally witty conversation (and a few outright lies) AND I tend to appropriate their remote controls and take over their television viewing choices AND I eat them out of house and home, again and again, into the bargain.

My sister and mother, of course, lavished me with bajillions of lovely gifts and fine meals, as they always do. My sister-in-law somewhat incautiously gave me my birthday presents, some six months in advance, making me promise hand-on-heart that I wouldn't open them until the official day. (Poor, foolish girl.) My needlewoman-friend M finally handed over the astonishingly gorgeous Lady of Guadalupe art quilt she's been hand-stitching for me for the past year or more (photos to follow), and gave me a sneaky peek at the amazing Frida Kahlo quilt she's in the process of making for our main guest bedroom (which already boasts a magnificent Frida collage sent to me by the sublimely sensual (and sensuous) Miss Wittycakes and which I may yet turn into a total Frida shrine, possibly including live peacocks, a few monkeys and a life-sized realistic fibreglass model of Trotsky).

And my friend V presented me with the Frida Kahlo oil painting "Roots" (a.k.a. "The Pedregal") which she'd had framed for me in a lusciously luxurious burnished antique gold ornately-carved timber frame.

Here's the original. Mine looks exactly the same, you must imagine, only significantly larger, and also not really executed by Frida:

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What happened was that my dear friend D, currently living in Hong Kong, had sent me the rolled-up painting as a Yule present last year after she'd had it "recreated" for me by some highly talented (and no-doubt deeply frustrated) artist at the southern Chinese artists' village of Dafen which specialises in hand-painted replicas of existing paintings. The original -- an oil-on-sheet-metal work which was only a piddling 12" by 19 1/2" -- was sold by Sotheby's for a mere $5 616 000 a couple of years ago, so D decided I seriously needed its goddesseous earth-mothery beauty fashioned on canvas in my cosmic rancho. Except she wisely proclaimed, "Oh, but Hiss loves HUGE things! She wouldn't want such a small tschotschke in her house! She'd want one MUCH bigger than the original!"

The result is that I have a painting which is pretty much the length and height of a train carriage and meant I had to take down two other large paintings to fit in on my dining room wall -- well, to be entirely accurate, our hired man The K-meister had to, as I relentlessly barked "Left!" "Right!" "Lower!" "Higher!" orders at him on his ladder, and cracked my bullock whip a few times to get him in the mood -- but hey, it looks utterly sumptuous up there and is the first thing that hits you in the face (albeit not literally, you understand) when you walk into the room.

Anyway, things were going quite swimmingly on my little holiday until the fateful day I leapt out of the shower like a young gazelle, slipped on the wet tiles of my sister's bathroom floor, skidded along for a few metres and screeched to a halt only by doing the splits in a most spectacularly immodest, ungracious and exceedingly painful fashion. And no, I wasn't doing star jumps or even practising the can-can in there for my upcoming starring role in Moulin Rouge 2!: I was merely reaching for a fluffy towel. (Sadly, just between you and me and the gatepost, I'm no longer the lithe, limber and even willowy creature I once was, perhaps about a hundred years ago, and all I did was scream a lot in agony, smash the tempered glass shower cubicle while trying to break my fall and spend the next several days limping everywhere like a bandy saddle-sore grizzled cowpoke from an old western and quietly sobbing to myself when anyone looked sideways at me.)

I am reliably advised that what I have is what we doctors technically call an "Avulsion of the Adductor Longus Muscle" (a.k.a. "acute groin pull") which sounds downright vulgar if you ask me, and which allegedly may take at least 12 months to heal and which may or may not include such wondrously long-term hurty-travesties as inflammation of the pubic bone, pinched nerves in the lower back and even a labral tear or two.

I mean, honestly. If I'm going to have even one labral tear to boast about at dinner parties, mate, let me tell you I'd prefer to incur it in a far more pleasurable (and controlled) fashion than by randomly splitting myself in two on fired ceramic tiles like a human butterfly prawn.

At any rate, as you know I am nothing if not a star trooper (also starfucker), so although I'm still -- not quite four weeks later -- shrieking and wailing in pain at crucial times (especially when I try to, ahem, climb on anything, if you get my drift, Mrs C), I managed to ignore my throbbingly achy-breaky pelvis long enough to take the steering wheel and go on a long-winded but very fun GIRLS' ONLY ROAD TRIP back here to the ol' rancho with the Doors in the stereo, the Frida painting well-padded and secured in the pickup bed under the tonneau cover (along with 44 of my 45 travel bags and my booty-boxes of treasures from the city), the Divine Miss V in the passenger's seat and a very handsome taxidermied Red Deer head and shoulders with double-four antlers (which I named Bucky -- the deer head, not the antlers), which I bought from an antique shop in the mountains outside BrisVegas because he was so majestically Monarch of the Glen-ish, on the back seat.

So off we went, wearing our kickarse kinky kowgirl boots and our perfectly adorable faux-fur cloche hats studded attractively with tasteful sparkly crystal brooches of bats and sterling silver salt spoons (mine) and glaringly garish glittering rhinestone snowflakes and snowmen (V's), and singing, "Me and You and a Deer Named Bucky, Travellin' and a-Livin' off the Land" in our very best quivery-quavery Lobo-voices before bowing reverently to the ol' leather-trousered Lizard King and letting him (quite deservedly and indeed preferably, some might argue) have the vocal spotlight for a while.

Bucky, you'll be pleased to learn, wore a long garland of velvety white silk gardenias wrapped around his neck Isadora-Duncan-fashion to make him an Honorary Gal, somewhat resembling that glorious Georgia O'Keeffe painting of the cow skull with calico roses (only less bovine, also with fur and antlers). He/she was able to gaze regally and serenely (albeit with glassy eyes) at the world rushing by as we whooshed our way from the city through western and northern Queensland along the Warrego Highway, the Kenniff Byway, the Matilda Highway, the Swagman's Byway, the Opal Byway, the Outer Barcoo Byway, the Muttaburrasaurus Byway, Starlight's Byway, the Gidyea Bug Byway, the Dinosaur Way, the Marine Fossil Byway, the Basalt Byway, the Overlander's Way and a few other rocky and smooth roads with similarly imaginative names I've doubtless neglected to mention.

The reason for our road trip was, of course, that being the Wild Witchy Warrior Women Who Wander With Wolves that we are (We Wish), V and I just love nothing better than hitting the open road (especially in winter) and "seeing the elephant", as they used to say in the Old West. That (as Dee Brown explains it, at least) means expecting to find marvels and wondrous fortunes through "hard travel, exotic adventures along the way, discomfort from the elements, chicanery from traders and trickery by the Indians".

Except for the teensily troublesome fact that neither of us is as young as we used to be and we now ride in air-conditioned lumbar-supported comfort all day and stay in four-star (minimum) motel rooms all night, AND that historically there are not all that many Indians 'round these parts, why, that could almost describe us to a tee.

Oh, and unlike the olden days when I'd fearlessly criss-cross this wide brown land for weeks on end in a crappy car with NO contact whatsoever with concerned family or friends who were keeping the home fires burning and wondering if my lack of communication meant that perhaps I'd been eaten by dingoes or kidnapped by koalas, I now tend to venture nowhere at all without at least one carphone (with external antenna), a mobile phone or two, a 2-way radio (with external antenna), a satellite phone that works anywhere on earth in the glovebox, a laptop behind my seat and a bewilderingly sophisticated GPS device with tracking capabilities/alarm-thingy/nuclear flares (that scares me so much I dare not even touch it in case it accidentally triggers a complex air-and-sea rescue operation by the Royal Australian Navy).

Plus my trusty old baseball bat under the seat.

Yes, yes; I know that contrary to popular belief, there are not psychopathic clowns lurking around every corner, waiting to pounce on naive women who are travelling alone. But you never know, do you? There MIGHT be.

Actually, the main reason for our extended road trip was that my husband was mustering a few thousand head of cattle here and directed us, in no uncertain terms, NOT to come back until the end of the week, instead of at the beginning as we'd planned. It seemed he had about a dozen cowboys here (most of whom spent a lot of time -- when they weren't wrangling li'l doggies and drinking beer -- dribbling man-urine on the formerly-fluffy floor mats in the main toilet, it would appear) and J thought that would be far too stressful an environment for a highly-strung lass like me to come straight home to after such a nice relaxing break.

One of our long-term employees had even asked if he could please bring out his new girlfriend, their baby son and the girlfriend's 18-year old daughter for the mustering, all of which sounded exceedingly dodgy to me. (Not to mention noisy -- I mean, little babies demand attention and whine and cry a lot, right? So back off, bitch, because everyone knows that's MY exclusive domain.) But according to J, the baby was fat and happy and gurgly and the women were excellent workers in the paddock AND the kitchen and their presence meant that I wasn't needed at all for cooking or cleaning up afterwards. (Except for that teensy little awkward matter of the splattered toilet mats...)

So, fortified with fried food and shocking coffee from every gas station we passed, V and I road-tripped our way to places we hadn't been for years, revisiting constellations of tiny outback towns consisting only of the inevitable post office, general store, pub and gallery of local "artworks". We even happened upon a couple of tiny hippie artist enclaves where I saw more men with ponytails that I've seen gathered in one place for a very long time.

The skies were huge, the Milky Way at night was splendidly overwhelming and the whole magnificent journey was a feast for the eyes and the ears and the hearts and the souls. (If not quite the stomachs.) We went from cattle land to sheep land and back again, and sang "Return of the Grievous Angel" at the tops of our lungs as we crossed a lot of dry creeks and river beds with fanciful names and rickety bridges. Our favourite part (being the kozmic-desert-heads we both are) was the lunar-landscape around Winton (home of Boulder opals and the place where that Jolly Swagman himself actually camped by that billabong under the shade of that coolibah tree, and where Banjo Paterson wrote "Waltzing Matilda" about it 113 years ago), resplendent with its mesas and plateaux and dinosaur tracks, and where Nick Cave's "The Proposition" was filmed.

Here's someone's YouTube footage of "some nice little mesas" in that shimmering stretch of the desert, filmed through a windshield, to give you a bit of a taste of how amazing it is -- although it's a lot browner and drier right now because we're smack-bang in the middle of winter:

It kind of looks like the rocky Pedregal landscape in Frida's "Roots" painting, doesn't it?

As you head further north-west towards the Northern Territory, the land becomes even more dramatic and theatrical and, as always, I kept imagining that I could see Indians on horseback lined up along the cliffs and the bluffs. (Clearly I watch far too much television.)

We chatted up (and were chatted up by) stock car drivers, bowser boys pumping diesel, road train drivers, truck stop cowboys, motel proprietors, baristas, ponytailed silversmiths and -- yes, it's absolutely true, Ms Beanie and Miss Poola, so don't be too jealous -- carnies. We lounged about in our motel rooms (hiding from aforementioned carnies) and watched "The Farmer Wants a Wife" and "Australia's Next Top Model", and sat out in our motel courtyards every frosty morning and every freezing night drinking lattes and eating cream-filled pastries from local bakeries and doing woo-woo exotic girly-stuff like reciting extracts from "The Art of War" and tossing the I Ching and reading V's Goddess cards, in order to divine exactly what time we should pay our bill and get on the road. (Answer: very, very late indeed, being as we're both hopelessly disorganised and had to do terribly important girly-things like take long baths, fix our hair and apply smudgy eyeliner, mascara, and lipstick -- because hey, it takes a lot of time and money to look this gorgeous. Or this trashy.)

Anyway, after an indescribably fabulous journey, we arrived back here safely, assessed J's house-cleaning efforts with the white glove test and pretty much immediately washed the scary toilet mats and disinfected the Elvira-bedecked bathroom -- which V was profoundly dubious about the hygiene of, given that dozens of randy cowboys had showered in there and presumably been bedazzled by the bounteous beauty of Elvira's boobies while having time on their hands. (V therefore attacked the room in full Hazmat gear, with night-vision goggles and Luminol spray reagent to detect semen traces while yelling, "If I get pregnant in that bathtub, J, on your head be it!")

The bathroom thus de-spermed and re-sparkled, we eventually settled down to a gloriously indolent week of rest and recovery spent reclining near the red-hot woodstove watching DVDs, drinking excellent coffee and eating chocolate before V had to catch that great flying bird back to her real life in the SE corner.

But she's winging her way back in October to babysit me while J heads off on another one of his Errol Flynn's Boys' Own Adventures, sailing the high seas with friends for a month, and we stay here and "manage" the homestead for him. It's a big responsibility for a couple of bony-armed girls, I can tell you. Maybe we'll just have to turn the place into a kind of Rubber Rose Ranch and hire us Bonanza Jellybean to run things...

Hey, I'm only hoping my inner thighs will have healed by then.

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