Getting to know Brad Beven is going to be easy. He’s a friendly bloke – and it’s not as though he could avoid anyone if he wasn’t. After arriving in Mt Isa on the same plane, Beven and I head for Meteor Car Hire, situated in front of the towering slag heaps and smoke stacks of the famous smelter.

As the process of hiring a car is far from meteoric, there’s time for a leisurely yarn. This is the four-time World Cup champion’s third trip to the Julia Creek Dirt and Dust Festival. “Even if you’ve competed all over the world, it’s the sort of event you can’t stop talking about, it’s so different. It really sticks in your mind.”

It’s hard to think of him as “The Croc.” I recall the poignant regret I felt when he missed out on the 2000 Olympics after getting clobbered by a car while training for the World Cup event that doubled as an Olympic qualifier. He might have won that gold medal. Every sport has some brilliant athlete who collided with misadventure at the very moment his or her appointed time arrived, and I’ve mostly admired their take on life. Most decide to disown the disenchanted bearing that being unfairly thwarted entitles them to. Beven’s no different. The old cane-cutter has the pleasant air of a man with a philosophical handle on history’s judgments, and those two imposters, victory and defeat.

We leave with a diesel ute each (of course), a Festival organiser gets a small bus, and we pick up a gathering airport entourage that includes a talented young triathlete named Sam Betten. The convoy 290km east to Julia Creek begins. I share my ute with Chris Hill, former world number one triathlete turned journalist.

In one line Chris encapsulates every reason Brad Beven is, and should not be, still competing in triathlons: “Triathletes are the labourers of sport.” Toting his dictaphone, Hill’s pleased to be liberated from the inconvenience and cost of hauling bikes through airports; working on his shorthand, he wryly observes those still trying to master three triathlon disciplines for the sort of money other elite athletes wouldn’t even bend over to pick up off the sidewalk.

*

Rock formations east of The Isa resemble petrified dung squeezed out of colossal reptilian clackers, and the land is greener than we thought it would be. But as we near our destination, the landscape falls away to endless spaces of khaki nothingness. Not even locals can think of reasons anyone would stop at Julia Creek. Google it, and you get this: “Service centre on the road between Townsville and Mt Isa.” The place doesn’t even rate mention as a town, despite its status as the first European settlement in north-western Queensland, and the spot where Burke and Wills knocked on oblivion’s door, decked in hats and spats.

The town went wayside when the railway moved on to Cloncurry and Mount Isa. The wool market dropped. Shearing teams left. Councils merged. The high-school closed. Young families moved on. It was moribund in 1994, when the Festival was first conceived.

The sheer energy and ingenuity people employ to keep their towns alive out this way is astonishing. Some strong-minded character; some determined, independent thinker, always emerges.

In Julia Creek it takes the form of an offbeat, profane pixie named Margie Ryder. Margie and her committee are the kind of people you need to overcome the twin tyrants of distance and scarcity. Drought, floods, generators falling over, insurance – all prosaic details handled with hardy good cheer. Margie’s nicknames run to any number of alliterative accompaniments, such as “Mad” and “Magic.” They all fit. “Out-west people know how to get things fuggin’ done!”, she declares proudly, waving one hand vigorously while pulling strings with the other to secure Hockeyroo Nikki Hudson as celebrity guest.

The event is now one of those sparkling examples of tourism and sport combining to create an “income stream” for a township whose next best option is stopover on a ghost-town tour. Committee president Stephen Malone reckons it “sits under the banner of community health. Farmers feed their stock early to get in and people doing it tough get the chance to come into town and meet friends. That social aspect’s a key part. It’s a high-end event for out here.” At least a thousand out-of-towners are expected, from as far away as Townsville.

*

The sun rises, already intent and relentless. Black kites, wings languidly outspread, catch wafts of updraft, and revolve the Earth like a lazy Susan for a pick of carrion, or grasshopper, overlooking the triathletes who warm up on their bikes parallel to the train tracks. Many are from hereabouts. All are fit. Not all have the habitus of the triathlete. Some bikes, chains caked with mud and grimy grease, look as though they haven’t been maintained for a decade.

The locals assembled at the pubs last night, restive, riotous, joyful in their way. As friendly cops gathered outside to enforce the street-drinking curfew, a wiry, long-haired buccaneer, half his mouth filled with snaggled teeth, the other half a dark space of gum and brown stumps, bawled rummily, “This is our big day of the year mate!” He’s yet to awaken to tender temples and dry horrors.

Blond-haired Sam Betten – a breathing Arno Breker sculpture – is 18, around 6’6”, and already solidly accomplished. He’s here to win. Brad Beven queues outside the Festival office at the Civic Centre, enclosed in a certain cheerful resignation that Hill, speaking as a retired 31 year-old, finds easy to explain: “He’s 38. That’s ancient. He’d probably rather pick up an easy three grand for once.”

Beven’s like a seasoned boxer, kitbag full of significant trophies and assorted tricks, accustomed to the near-death of championship rounds, coming down to fight an eight-rounder against a promising prelim boy.

Local triathlete Max Fegan is also a worthy challenger who’s competed internationally, won the Julia Creek twice and got five seconds. His farmer brothers laugh at his lycra and shaved legs. A few years ago, Max fell off a windmill and nearly killed himself. His shattered arm was set so the elbow still comes up on the correct angle in the swim.

It’s that kind of event.

*

A whumping chopper hovers. Little Eastern Creek, 25 km west of Julia Creek, is vibrant with artificial colour. This looks like a triathlon, writ small and rustic. A road train passes carrying rows of Euclid tyres, each one big enough to wipe out the entire transition area and everyone in it if it bounced loose.

Lacking a pontoon, participants walk to the soggy edge and go in up to their necks, heads lined up like buoys, to take off in the heavy water from a standing start. Looking ahead at the muddy green expanse divided lengthways for 400m, feeling the suspicious tickles around his ankles, one yells, “Anyone got any doubts yet?” Laughter is drowned by the gun. Five minutes into the swim, some competitors at the back of the first group have already stopped.

Thirty minutes later at Burke and Wills Junction, The Croc and Betten are locked in a grim struggle on the straight chute ride back to Julia Creek (“No technical difficulties there. Just a gunbarrel”, says Hill, who was the best technical rider going round). They arrive in town at the same time.

Like Glenn McGrath charged by some upstart batsman, The Croc’s been roused. Few can run with cycling fatigue like him. The rising heat hasn’t escaped his notice, and he gives young Sam some stick with a quick breakaway at the transition, just as Sam’s feet feel like stone slabs. Innate brilliance, no matter how impatient for success, cannot beat that glorious union of technique and experience called Perfect Timing: proceeding at the right time, pausing at the right time, bluffing at the right time; poking a leisurely right cross through a tight arm defence, or feathering the edge with one that leaves an impregnable batsman by a centimetre. Croc’s timing is perfect, and just like that, the challenge is over. The prelim boy wobbles, a touch bemused at this old bloke’s burst of energy and the sudden onset of weariness, but those long levers keep on pumping, and he finishes with a gutsy second, and a new trick for his kitbag. One day, he’ll know when he’s ready and able to use it.

Beven’s elegantly proportioned girlfriend, the dark-haired Laetitia, runs second in the women’s section, looking stately even while running the final lap through town. She picks up a few hundred for the Croc contingent.

*

The rest of the Festival is an old-fashioned country good time. Beven enjoys lunch of red claw and beer with us at the racetrack, before all eyes turn to the rodeo, where nervous and intense cowboys mount one-ton, two-pronged nutbags as someone else tries to get them angry, and Beven’s a judge for the Best Butt contest. The rodeo crowd, like Maxie’s brothers, probably cast a wary eye toward triathletes.

As if to confirm that we’re part of some kind of social experiment, the “Harley-owners club” turns up, engines hammering eardrums, and Herculean Polynesian security men keep an exceptionally watchful eye on everybody.

The national anthem is rendered with a country twang. It’s in the outback that Australia intertwines with America. The rodeo is put on by America’s Professional Bull Riders Inc. It’s won by Tim Wilson, a three-time Australian champion with an admirable ability to stay on a berserk snorter a fraction longer than anyone else. Some of the riders come up looking so busted, it’s hard to imagine them backing up to do it again at the next meet – or ever! They get paid very little unless they win, but, like triathletes, they’re incorrigible.

A cowboy talks to a local journalist: “Well you know, you wanna be a pussy, you can always play football, or do ath-a-letics or somethin’.”

*

Sunday morning. “There’s a British bog snorkeller in the clubroom, but we don’t know if he’s comin’ out.” It’s one of those enigmatic Margie things to say. “If no-one turns up, the committee’ll just have to jump in.” A deep, reeking rectangular 25-metre hole was dredged out this morning by a local backhoe operator, and filled by local firemen. They couldn’t get the water for a full 50-metre course, so we have a new event: short-course bog snorkelling. I’m not sure it even comes close to the Welsh peat bogs – the Lords’ and MCGs of this great pastime – but it’s pretty filthy nonetheless. Margie wants a world record, but may be underestimating the challenge. The effort of keeping goggles, snorkel and flippers on in the dense mire, not to mention propelling themselves though the morass without moving their arms, just kicking, proves impossible. The races become goggle-less, snorkel-less and flipper-less free-for-alls.

Ever the wholehearted good sport, Beven takes on the “main event” against Triathlon QLD’s Brad Gunn, and is dubiously beaten with a combination of running, dunking and mud flinging. I think Gunn is now world-rated! Margie conducts her race in a similar vein, after flapping around to keep her balance, then slipping face-first, in mud as she approached the bog. Intentionally or not, Mad Margie’s great slapstick. The Pythonesque spectacle is topped off with a yabbie race, in which the gun yabbie, claws widely outstretched in triumph, stops dead just before the bucket, and is passed by inferior challengers. No-one minds – they’re all about to taste the same. The skillet is a great equalizer.

We fly out of The Isa that night, and standing at the baggage carousel at Brisbane airport, The Croc tosses a significant nod and a smile at Sam Betten before the kid totters off, his baggage that little bit bulkier. Beven’s next gig is a camp for junior triathletes in Budapest, where he’ll take on multiple roles: mentor, motivator, coach. Has bike, will travel. It is a labour – of love.

Published in Inside Sport, May 2007