Fourteen years ago, Tamo decided to try and kick his heroin habit for good. He left home in Cairns and moved up to a vacant beachside block that his partner Millie had a claim to just outside the remote Lockhart River Aboriginal community.
Today, Millie is gone but Tamo is still here. He lives alone, nursing a broken heart and broken dreams here in this humpy he has built from materials salvaged from the community tip.
Tamo lives a hardscrabble life. He has no power and no running vehicle. He stores rain for drinking water in blue 44-gallon drums and pumps grey water from a creek. All of Tamo’s valuables – an old guitar, a lighter, a few building tools - are piled under a tent made from crimsafe screens.
Tamo is one of the many recluses you’ll find living out here in the Australian bush, treading a delicate line between abject poverty and the beautiful simplicity of happiness.
“Yeah, it can be hard living sometimes, and there I times when I wake up and I might feel bored and lonely and depressed,” he says.
“But then all I have to do is look outside or go for a walk up the beach. I mean, look! Look at this! How can you be depressed in a place like this? Never in a million years would I have dreamed of finding a place like this.”
Tamo, girt by sea.
Out the back of Tamo’s block is his garden. It’s all neat and edged with driftwood and recycled pieces of corrugated iron.
The garden is done ‘permaculture way’, he says, with no-dig beds built up with seaweed and mulched sticks and leaves. It’s exposed to incessant trade winds and the soil is sandy, but crops of basil and capsicum and lemongrass and papaya are thriving.
Behind Tamo’s garden is the bright blue Coral Sea, and the Lloyd Bay and the Great Barrier Reef bending way around the horizon. Just off the shoreline, an interesting cluster of boulders sticks up out of the sea. Tamo points out the biggest rock, Heart Rock, its face all strafed with WWII aeroplane shellfire. Beside that is the Turtle Hunters Rock, he says.
“The local mob have got a story about that one. A turtle hunter went out hunting and left his wife waiting for him. Of course, he never came back, see. She’s still there, waiting, all lonely. All those other little rocks scattered around them are their children.”
Like many non-Indigenous people living in remote Australia, Tamo has been indigenised. He understands and can speak some of the local Wuthathi, Kuku Yau, and Kaanji languages.
While Tamo was studying anthropology at James Cook University he would translate scholarly university texts into pidgin English for his Aboriginal classmates, helping them to simplify complex ideas.
Tamo is no longer studying and he doesn’t work either; he lives off the dole and grows what he can as surplus. Sometimes growing things helps Tamo to get ahead and finance his dreams.
Tamo has many dreams: he dreams of putting another crop in to get the money he needs to turn his little shack into a café – Millie’s café, he’ll call it, in the hope it will bring her back.
But first he has to get his old Hilux ute running and registered so he can cart the materials from the tip to build up his shack, and right now, he’s struggling to even find enough coins to buy the fuel to pump water up from the creek for his garden.
“It’s easy to make money when you’ve got money,” says Tamo.
“When you’ve got nothing, all your time is spent just trying to survive. It simplifies things, gets rid of all the bullshit complexities in life, but it makes it a helluva lot harder too.”
Tamo clings on to the hope that things will get better because hope is all we humans have got. Sometimes it gets him down, he says, and he tries not to think about things too much. Instead, he just tries to focus on the positive things, and think about how fortunate he is to be here, on this beach.
Not far from Tamo’s place, relatively speaking, a narrow bush track runs down to the Pascoe River. Coming off this track is an even narrower track, if you can call it that. It is so rough and tight that it actually looks like a dead end.
The track ends in a clearing, where there are hundreds of old car wrecks leading in the bush. Landcruisers, Commodores, trucks, even an old Mr Whippy ice cream trailer.
Beyond the car wrecks are a few open bush shacks. Tibetan prayer flags are strung from the tin roof, and the bush poles and beams are painted with old engine oil to keep the termites away.. Nobody is home at any of the shacks. The place has an eerie, run down feel.
Down, past the baying camp dogs and papaya trees, across a dry creek bed, and you come to Barry’s shack. Barry is the man who built most of this communal settlement. He’s 80-years-old, has only one eye, and is sitting naked inside his shack, smoking green tobacco from a papaya stem.
“Scuse me, scuse me,” he says.
“Let me put some pants on. I get so used to being naked that I forget sometimes.”
Barry puts on a pair of Brisbane Lions footy shorts and walks outside. A crazy-eyed calf, it’s tongue hanging out and slobbering, comes lumbering up towards Barry and tries to mount him. Barry grabs an old flyscreen door from down the front of the shack, and pushes the cow away.
“Git out, git out. You gotta watch it that fella. I call it my son. It’s a bit wild. Some of the local mob killed and ate it’s mother and brought the calf here to me.”
Barry has been here since 1980, when he and his older brother and father settled after spending a good few years walking 1000km up from Port Douglas with a mob of wild horses.
“At that time, Port Douglas was changing and the shire didn’t want the horses there anymore, wandering in front of busloads of Chinese and Japanese tourists. The fella who they belonged to, he was trying to get rid of them because otherwise the council would shoot them. We only went there looking for one. He said, ‘you take one, you take the lot.’”
“We had a good think about it and thought we could use them. We walked them up here then. Most of them took off into the bush but we kept a few good ones. We camped them in the Daintree Rainforest for a couple of years. We had some good camps there.”
Barry and his family found a permanent camp when his father bought this place from an old gold miner who had a mining lease on the river here. He paid $2000 for the block, $500 more than the survey fee the miner had paid.
“When we came here we had to make our own track through the bush to get here. We just used an old Toyota to push the trees down. It was different bush then. The Aboriginal people still had something of a fire management regime. There were less trees but bigger trees, all the scrub got burned off. Now look at it. Scrub everywhere,” he says.
Barry he almost lost everything he had built here in 2006 when the category-five Cyclone Larry made landfall over Far North Queensland. Barry remembers sitting in his shack, terrified, as he watched the Pascoe River in flood, rising up 20m until it was lapping at the concrete pad of his shack.
“It took away all the trees out there. Big old trees, just washed them away down the river. You looked out from the back porch here and that forest was like an ocean. Biggest sea you’ve ever seen. For about half-an-hour I was walking around, couldn’t say anything at all.
“Over there I heard a boat motor start up, and my grandson came over in a tinny, looking to see if I was alright.”
Barry recently lost all vision in his right eye after an unsuccessful operation. Soon after, in late 2021, Barry passed away, aged eighty. He leaves behind four kids, eleven grandkids, and a legacy that will slowly rust away into the earth like those old car wrecks in the hidden clearing out front.