The Road to Banana, part 3

On the morning drive from Rockhampton to Banana I’m singing Capricorn Dancer, a seventies yacht rock song by Richard Clapton. 

This unwanted ear worm has plagued me for days. The cause is the latitude. I’m on the Tropic of Capricorn and the tropic topic is everywhere, from Capricorn Plastic Extrusions to kids names in the park.  

The plot of the song is all over the place. The narrator rides a horse, confusingly to shelter from paradise, to ease his ‘worried mi-ind’. The bolted on final verse consists of quite a lot of whistling as man and horse are on the ‘sa-and’ under the ‘sky-y’ being led by a mythic dancer to a ‘zo-one’.

Desperate to purge the ear worm, I try to imagine if Jimmy Webb, my favourite songwriter, had grown up in Banana. ‘By the time I reach Banana / She’ll be risin’, ‘And the Banana Lineman, is still on the line’. It’s a Frank Spencer fix.

I stop to buy a sandwich in Mount Morgan, a mining town. The retailers here are ‘my shop, my rules’ types. One window sign says ‘no smoking within 5 metres of this window’. As the shop owner making my sandwich wraps it in cling film (as if I’m heading off to primary school), I notice a ‘no shirt, no service’ sign in caps lock on the wall behind her. Next door, the video shop (yes) has a ‘keep proof of purchase’ sign. One shop has a sign that reads ‘no miners’ which might not be a typo.

An hour later I’m on the outskirts of Banana. I pull up in front of the ‘welcome to’ sign. There are rivetts on the verge from the hundreds of semi-emergency stops by people wanting the same picture as me. No sign of skids, though. Google tells me that we share 60% of our DNA with bananas. Bananas, therefore, are our cousins. This photo is for the family album.

Normally, arrival in a town requires some orientation, but there’s little need here. Banana has a population small enough to verify with an hour of door knocking. There’s a small green space in the middle with a neatly-ironed Australian flag flying, a community hall, a service station, a shut-down shop, my motel, a parking lot for road trains (three sections, but they can go up to nine or more), Banana state school, Banana machinery exchange, a playground and, yes, maybe 200 houses.

My first mission, obviously, is to try and buy a banana here. Banana’s one shop is closed. It’s unclear whether it’s for refurbishment or because it’s unviable. I go to the Garage shop instead, find a couple of things to buy to soften the obvious question, place them on the counter, and ask, “do you sell fruit?” The young lad says, “no, sorry” and I say “I guess you get asked all the time.” He does a small snort “yeah”. I tap the card to pay for my watermelon juice and bottle of water. 

“Mostly people ask whether we sell bananas”, he adds, knowing that this is my game. “I guess that must wear a bit thin after a while,” I say and I sense that “I guess that wears thin” also wears thin. “There might be some banana bread”, he softens, and points me to where it might be, but there’s only a long life chocolate and cherry muffin. “Oh well,” I say. “I’ve probably got some banana bread in the car”, which I do.

I wander around town looking for more evidence of banana. I take photos of some signs. I try to get a photo of the Banana Machinery Exchange, but the proprietor catches my gaze and won’t let it go, so I back off. There’s Banana State School. I wonder if attendance might be a door opener on some CVs. There’s Banana Playground, unattended. Banana sewage works. Not much else though. 

I walk up to what I suppose represents the town square. Getting to it on foot isn’t straightforward because of the road trains. I don’t want to walk through the long grass, so I step up onto a long and strangely disjointed traffic island. There are kids attempting to play hide and seek when there’s really nothing to hide behind. 

I’m feeling some resistance. Bananas seem to have been wiped off the face of this town. There’s no merch anywhere. Even Cole’s Banana Cake is 26% banana, but the town of Banana? 0%. There is not a banana in town, unless they’re hiding.

I’ve had enough Banana for a while (haven’t we all?), so instead of frittering away the day, I peel off Main Street, Banana, and drive the 21km to Moura. There’s a lovely baobab tree on the way and cactuses on the verges. There are impressive mirages on the long stretches of straight road.

The 5km before Moura are open cast mining of several shades, including grey, brown and black. Mountains are being dismantled here. On the immediate outskirts there are hundreds of tin box dormitories for miners. The rural entrepreneurial streak in shops is in evidence. One shop sign reads ‘camping, sporting, computers, fridges, donuts’. A bit further on, the post office, which is up for sale, is also a cafe and an Indian restaurant. There’s a massive mural of a guard dog on the side of the building. The dog has a Mona Lisa smile. In the supermarket I buy a couple of bananas from the several hundred available.

I drive back and check in to my motel. Later in the bar, Howzat by Sherbet comes on. I’ve always liked this song. In the song’s famous abrupt and elongated pause, the space is filled by a guest pitching her volume to compete with music. She shouts “So how long have you lived in Banana?”to her drinking companion. But then the song resumes and the bar, full of grey nomads meerkatting, misses the rest of it. Even the dessert menu here is an act of cultural iconoclasm. There are blueberries, raspberries, pears and dates, and that’s it.

I wake suddenly at 4am with an idea. In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there’s a scene in a church in Venice where they’re searching for the holy grail. Suddenly Harrison Ford starts sweeping the floor and then runs up some stairs to the gallery. He looks down at the floor and there, on the freshly swept ground, is a giant X, marking the spot.  

The dawn light dials up as I climb on a chair to get mobile reception. My hands are shaking with excitement. The curved whisps of cloud in the sky are glowing red, resembling bananas of the genus Musa Acuminata. (As most banana enthusiasts will know, these are bananas with reddish-purple skin, smaller and plumper than the common Cavendish banana, with a flesh that is cream to light pink in color. But I digress.)

I load up Google Maps and zero-in on my current coordinates.

Close readers may recall that I mentioned a slightly unusual traffic island earlier. Let’s call it McGuffin traffic island.

Well, take a look at the screen grab, and tell me that you’re not looking at prima facie evidence that the official responsible for road maintenance strategy in Banana hasn’t planted recondite evidence that he/she/they is/ are a banana fancier.

It was there all the time. A giant concrete tribute to the banana. I’m going to call the council on Monday and ask if they will paint it yellow and black, which, conveniently, are Queensland road safety colours.

The drive through bottle shop at the hotel becomes the Breakfast bar at 5am, so I walk across for a coffee. Blutacked to the wall behind are hundreds of loyalty cards with people’s names on them.

“That’s amazing,” I say to the barista. “Can I have one?”

“A loyalty card?” she says. “That’s only half of them. They’re strangely popular.”

I notice that all are stamped once. “Do you think you’ll be back?”, she asks hopefully.

“I might,” I say.

Perhaps to paint the town yellow. Or maybe not. Banana obsession is a slippery slope and I think that my overnight Raiders of the Lost Banana moment may have given me closure.

THE END