Encounters with local Aborigines were more frequent now, but still fraught with fear and misunderstanding. Jerome preferred to keep his distance. Here he found his bicycle did much of that work for him. As he memorably explained to a newspaper reporter, his bicycle ‘was the best revolver I had’.
Once, while he repaired a flat tyre, two curious Aboriginal boys came a little too close for comfort. Jerome squirted his bike pump at them, the hiss of air causing them to flee. ‘They were careful not to venture within range of so deadly a weapon anymore,’ Jerome recalled.
As well as a belief in his technological superiority, Jerome carried with him all the racial prejudice of his era. Let one stark passage suffice:
The first beholding of adult blackfellows and blackfellowesses naked may be slightly shocking to sensitive nerves. An uncomfortable, uneasy feeling will probably be induced. But this creepiness soon passes, and one comes to either look upon or pass unnoticed the ungarbed blackfellow (and later on the average lubra) as he might the apes and monkeys in a zoological gardens.
Of course, all his braggadocio masked a deep vulnerability. Most nights he went to bed terrified, with one eye open and a loaded revolver within reach. One of the few things that gave him the confidence to carry on was knowing that other white men were nearby.
Fear, too, was literally etched into the buildings Jerome stayed in. On 3 May, after a few days of rough riding, Jerome reached the sanctuary of Powell Creek Telegraph Station. One of the workers there was a cycling enthusiast and an amateur photographer. He delighted in taking shots of Jerome and Diamond with the station buildings as a backdrop. Look closely at the image on page 27 and you can see the defensive gun loops built into the cottage walls. A rifle is pointing through one of them directly at the camera, helpfully demonstrating how it was used. Such defences, Jerome explained, were a ‘reminder of the days when the natives were troublesome’.
Jerome spent a few days at the station before riding past the Ashburton Range and onto the Sturt Plain. The flood-prone terrain had a reputation for being difficult to cross. In the Wet, the blue-black clay became inundated, or at least so muddy as to be impassable. In the Dry, the retreating water left waves of cracked mud. Early settlers called it the ‘Bay of Biscay’ after the wild, pitching seas encountered in the North Atlantic off the coast of France. It was said that the jolting and choppy terrain forced horse riders to stop every 100 metres to reset the kinks in their spines and rest their aching jaws. Riding at the peak of the dry season, Jerome likened the experience to ‘cycling up and down a stairway, with the stairs of unequal height and width, blindfolded or in the dark’.
Nevertheless, he possessed the fortitude and resilience common to every overland cyclist. Once at the beautiful Newcastle Waters, a lagoon-like waterway bursting with life, he soon forgot about past hardships. He lay down beside the river, watching the birdlife, eating, sleeping, writing and reading. ‘I was right, the bike was right, so all was right as right could be,’ he recalled.
Jerome had to drag himself away. Worse still, the road ahead meant riding another 20 kilometres of these Biscay soils — yet another morning of ‘bumpy, desolate, barren wretchedness’. Once clear of the plains, Jerome entered a dense, shaded forest. Something odd began to happen, something strange and supernatural. The forest seemed to come to life. As he recalled, he cycled into ‘a fairy land’, where ‘fairy fingers pulled hard upon the wheels and stopped them’. He stood transfixed at all the life and beauty that surrounded him.
Then, as in some delightful dream, I led Diamond to a hedgewood tree, and stood stock still to drink in the melody — silent melody; for there was no sound to woo the eyes from the feast of tropic beauty … O marvellous Nature, supreme master-artist, what human brain could conceive so glorious a transformation scene — so swift, so entrancing, so unexpected!
He moved on reluctantly, riding slowly to make the most of every second, ‘to stretch the sweetness out’:
The charge of scene and country was so marked and impressive that … in the lasting gloom and shadow of countless solemn giant trees, encompassed by a penetrating solitude, I experience again those indescribable sensations … mystic sensations of a hushed expectant awe as in the presence of a something living, breathing, but unseen, intangible.
The land was ‘throbbing’ with power and purpose. It was neither dead nor inert, unlike what he had once thought. There, in Nature’s embrace, he felt trivial and frail, an ‘insignificant atom’. Yet he was not afraid; quite the opposite. He felt calm and relaxed, as if he had awoken from a deep sleep: ‘In the vast immensity of towering forest the thought of quiet death was no unwelcome one.’ Two months in the desert had left Jerome a changed man. In a very real sense he had entered another world, almost another state of being. Lost in reverie, he draped Diamond in wattle blossom and other flowers.
With a light heart, Jerome wheeled his way through the forest land towards Daly Waters and on into savannah country. A few days later, he arrived in reflective mood at Elsey Station on the Roper River. There he wandered the fertile gardens and enjoyed the pleasure of being able to sleep indoors. The river seemed to cast a spell over him. In the evening he walked its banks and gazed at the water. This ‘fair picture’ of pandanus palms and gum trees that lined the banks delivered ‘some of the most delightful scenery one could desire to look upon’. The mood was broken only by the rumbling of his stomach and the return of his insatiable appetite. Surrounded by such bounty, it was no surprise that the station gardens were able to provide a splendid feast of ‘sweet potatoes and other dainties’, a meal so alluring that only when he went to sleep did Jerome stop thinking about it. A decade after his visit, Elsey Station was immortalised in the autobiographical novel We of the Never Never, written by Jeannie Gunn, who arrived at the station with her husband, Aeneas, in 1902.
There was still 400 kilometres to go to Palmerston — the town would not be officially renamed Darwin for more than another decade — but Jerome entered the final phase of his trip in good spirits. Now deep in savannah country, grass replaced sand as the primary barrier to easy cycling. En route to his camp near the King River, 64 kilometres from Elsey, he encountered fields of grass so thick and tall that he could not see over them as he rode. Unable to see the track, he was forced to dismount and search the bottom of the tunnel of grass to make sure he was heading in the right direction. Annoyingly, grass coiled around the bike’s chain and sprockets, stopping him in his tracks. Only after hacking it away from the mechanical components could he press on.
Arriving at the Katherine River the next day — 18 May — Jerome rejoiced not only at the gorgeous sight but also at the promise of a hotel bed. His journey was practically at an end. Checking in at the telegraph station, he was bemused to find a message from the Dunlop Rubber company. The note, as Jerome saw it, was an ‘impertinent’ attempt to ‘ferret’ out of him a testimonial and endorsement for their products. Incensed that they only approached him now that success was assured, Jerome regarded this as ‘mean, and answered accordingly’. A later advertisement from Dunlop crowing about the reliability of its tyres on Jerome’s trip, however, does suggest that an agreeable arrangement was eventually reached.
In the morning, Jerome shouldered his bike and waded across the river. After a few more days of relatively easy riding, he finally arrived at the outskirts of Palmerston on 22 May, whereupon he stopped, removed his hat and wiped the sweat from his brow. At many times during the ride he had wanted nothing more than for it to be over. Now, with the end in sight, he didn’t know if he should be glad or sorry. Looking fondly at his robust metal companion that had performed so faithfully over the last seventy-four days, he gently rested his palm on one of its handlebars. ‘Thanks, Diamond,’ he whispered, adding in German, ‘Es ist vollbracht!’ The deed