ME AND BOBBY McGEE by JANIS JOPLIN. Story by Mary Pomfret.

Oodnadatta, South Australia, 1972

Funny how a song can take you right there in an instant. One uneventful cloudy, Melbourne Saturday afternoon just as I was about to start the ironing piled high in the basket, I heard the song playing on the radio. I hadn’t heard that Janis Joplin classic for years.

I was eighteen and Johnny was twenty-one. We were returning to Alice Springs after spending a few weeks in Adelaide. A holiday you might call it, although for me, in those days, life was an eternal holiday. I was always in and out of work, taking whatever I could find until I got sick of it, or had an argument with the boss, abused someone, or slept in or just plain didn’t show up. But Johnny had money, a local lad he lived at home with his mum and dad. He’d grown up in Alice. And he had more friends than anyone I had ever known.

I had no friends, a tourist sheila, a blow-in from down south. a long way from home, homeless really. But Johnny liked to have a good time. I just wanted to survive.

In Adelaide, we spent our time eating fish and chips on the Glenelg foreshore and drinking cold beer in Hindley Street pubs and not doing too much else. There is something about an Adelaide summer: a certain mood, a certain stillness, a certain promise. But time had run out. The holiday was over. Now we were returning to Alice. Just like Janis used to sing, Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. Her words were my mantra, except when I ran out of cigarettes or didn’t have money for a packet of tampons.

Johnny had bought our return tickets on The Ghan—the old one, not today’s luxurious model. But to me it seemed like luxury compared to the concrete-floored hostel with the cigarette-burn pocked mattress I was returning to. We’d been travelling for nearly a day and a half, when the train pulled into the station at Oodnadatta and the engine stopped. There we stayed for five days. Stuck.

I have a vague recollection the Finke River had flooded – a very rare thing – and water on the track had caused damage to the line ahead making it unusable. Johnny and I got off the train to have a look around. He walked ahead of me, and I was amazed to see how the back of his new white shirt, that had looked so cool with his faded blue jeans, was now a solid mass of black flies. I’d never seen so many flies.

Each night of our derailment, when the hot sun went down, we’d go and sit on the still-warm tracks with a crazed old railway fettler who had befriended us. He shared his whisky with Johnny and gave me cigarettes. He called me ‘Mama’ and he used to play a battered old harmonica that looked as if it had been with him all his life. I have never been able to sing a note but, somehow, I managed to belt out the lines of the tune he played over and over. The old fettler too crazed to notice and Johnny too drunk to care, I screeched a tuneless rendition of Me and Bobby McGee out into the dark desert night.

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose
Nothing, and that’s all that Bobby left me, yeah
And feeling good was easy Lord, when he sang the blues
Hey, feeling good was good enough for me, hmm hmm
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee

My memory of the five days is that it was just all one day. In a way, for me, being stuck for that time was a kind of respite. I didn’t have to worry about finding work, or how to buy food, or anything much at all. Time just stood still. But ‘the day’ came to an end. The conductor announced that they would be resuming the journey the next day. Johnny was elated. He couldn’t wait to get home.

That night, lying on the top bunk, I began to sob. What’s the matter, Johnny asked.  I miss my family I said, trying to control my sobs but I couldn’t. Johnny swore and left the cabin. Maybe he went out to have a final drink with the old fettler. I don’t really know where he went. He was gone for over an hour. I could smell whisky when he came back to the cabin. I had stopped crying then. I don’t think he even said goodnight.

Early the next morning, before even the porter had been round with the cups of tea, I woke to the clatter and movement of the train. Johnny was going home. I was just going back.

Stereo Story 832