[mark in perth]

When I was a kid, I read Jack London'e stories of riding the freight trains during the depression; and for years I harboured a desire to do the same thing here in Australia. Finally, I managed it on a wood-chip train near Manjimpu in W.A. I tried a second time about a year later, but the train stopped about ten kilometres later, and my girlfriend and I were ARRESTED. There was a lot of politics happening about wood chips at the time, and the arresting officer thought he'd caught a couple of eco-terrorists. We were bunged into a paddy wagon, and the small-town officer, a nice enough guy at heart, we worked out later, began asking us a series of questions supposed to lure us into blurting out our commitment to stopping the evil blah blah blah. I asked him if he had ever read Jack London, and explained that, far from being bent on blowing up the train, we wanted to ride about on it.

You should have seen the look on his face.

(We eventually gat a twenty-five dollar fine for . . . riding without a ticket!