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Vice Blog

AUSTRALIA - LOSING YOUR MARBLES IN MARBLE BAR

A couple weeks ago you read an

interview with Andy Winter

, who traveled to the coldest place in the world and found a handless coot who lives along the Highway of Death and is basically just waiting for it to take him. Now here's another interview with Andy, only this time it's about his trip to the hottest place in the world (or if not the actual absolute hottest, at least it's insanely fucking sizzling), where he met a half-Aborigine kangaroo hunter who jut disappeared. Yes, it's a gimmick. Enjoy.

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Vice: So, Marble Bar in Australia is the hottest place in the world, huh?

Andy Winter:

The temperatures differ, but it's one of the strangest placest in the world.

How come?

Well, it's an old boom town, but they haven't found anything there for ages. Nevertheless, there are around 200 people living there, although I haven't got the slightest idea why. Its fuckin' hostile. Practically everything you need has to be taken there from miles away, but because there are still people, there's a shop, and because there's the shop, there are people.

And this is where Greg Jones lived?

Right. I got to know him when I was there for the first time, with my girlfriend. He had a house there. We stayed with him and his family for a week and hunted kangeroos and stuff. He had four children and was divorced. One of his daughters went with her mother. He always told me she wanted to come back to him. He was half Aborigine.

What up with the Aborigines nowadays?

Well, you could say the problem is solving itself. They are slowly drinking themselves to death. They get 250 dollars a week. The day they get it they go to the shop to get booze. But there are others too.

Others?

[Hitch-hiking in Australia] is horrible. You are literally nowhere, around you absolutely nothing for miles and miles and miles. Sometimes you have to wait like two days for someone to pick you up, and than he is maybe just going 80 kilometers to the next mine or something. Once a bunch of Aborigines took me along. The police had warned me just that day: Never go with the Aborigines. They said that the Aborigines would rob me and leave me to die in the outback. Well, straight after the police left, the first car to come by was full of Aborigines.

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How many?

It was a pick-up with a complete family. Children and old women between them. They whispered all the time about me. I really panicked. Then all of a sudden they stopped the car. One of the guys takes out a shotgun. I am like: Shit. Game over. Then he cocks the gun and shoots a kangaroo.

To eat it?

Yep. Although you find dead kangaroos there on the street all the time anyway--they bask on the hot asphalt when the evening comes and get smashed by trucks. The Aborigines took the roo, buried it under hot ashes, and after "cooking" it like that for maybe two hours, they split him it up: the bowels for the old ladies, the flesh for the adults. The children drank the blood… dont get me wrong, the Aborigine children in the cities are not like that, they guzzle Coke like everyone else, but the ones from that truck drank the warm blood directly out of the animals veins. I got my piece of flesh.

Was it tasty?

It tasted like shit. It was very ropey too.

And this is also where Greg lived?

Exactly, near Marble Bar. I visited him again a few years later. His daughter hung herself because she didn't get along with her new stepdad and wanted to come back to him, or so he said. I couldn't stay any longer that time and soon left. But when we arrived there this time and as we came closer to Greg's house a guy greeted us with a shotgun.

What did he want?

"What are you doing here?" he asked. We were like, "Visiting Greg!" and he said, "Greg Jones is not living here anymore, he's in prison. And if he ever gets out he will regret it."

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What had happened?

Dunno. We asked the villagers but they refused to say anything. "What Greg?" they said. It's a village with 200 people living there, they KNEW Greg. But even the pub owner we'd visited together was like "Greg Jones? Never heard of him." As if they just decided he never existed. His brother, who I knew quite well, did not answer his mobile either. As if I just made Greg up.

Weird.

I mean, I knew him for five years.

Did you ever find out what happened?

Somebody told me than he abused his children. No idea if it's true, but it would make sense. The behavior of his children. The suicide of the daughter. He was one of those typical cases where you say you NEVER thought anything bad of the guy. Always kind, liked goat meat and beer. I never found out if it was true--the villagers just decided he had never existed.

JULIANE LIEBERT

(photos by Andy Winter)