Paul Carter (1) (1969–)

If you are expecting an Australian version of Long Way Round then it won't quite meet it.

Paul Carter is an ex oil rig worker who after his partner becomes pregnant decides to settle down. After a few months shuffling paperwork wants to ride around Australia on motorbike, his wife suggests rinding something unusual. he manages to find and borrow a oil powered bike from Adelaide Uni and so begins the journey. He completes 14,500km, and thankful escapes serious injury after falling off at one point.

It is written in quite a abrupt style. There are some funny bits and some quite coarse parts, so might not appeal to everyone.

Ok but not great… (more)

A collection of tales by an Australian bloke who has spent a fair whack of time working on oil rigs around the world. So we get stories of the dangers of working in Nigeria, the kangaroo-related dangers of driving cars in outback Australia and the orangutan-related dangers of getting locked in a toilet in Asia.

The quality and the interest of each story varies, as amusing tales mix it with frankly frightening tales of prostitutes getting violently beaten. Uneven is probably the word for it.… (more)

A quick and enjoyable but very limited read. Not so much a memoir as a (very) loosely-strung collection of anecdotes, Don't Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I'm a Piano Player in a Whorehouse doesn't live up to the expectations its title (or its glowing reviews) sets.

It's essentially a jumble of various experiences from Carter's time working on oil rigs in (often Third World) countries around the globe. To get a feel of the tone, here are a few select lines from some of the stories recounted: "I had stupidly blown up my monkey with a coconut…" (pg. 36); "the [hotel] staff were very nice and efficient, and would try to get you back if you got kidnapped" (pg. 98); "I had to step over a goat to get to the toilet which was just a hole in the ground anyway" (pg. 151). The unvarnished blokiness and laddish pub stories can be fun to read but Carter, for all his experiences, is not much of a raconteur. The writing is simple and you don't feel as though the ridiculousness of many of the situations have been mined for all their comedic worth. And any genuine mirth is undermined by a lot of the gross-out humour: a lot of the time Carter is not engaging in hijinks but just slumming it, and there's plenty of hangovers and cheap toilet/fart humour (at one point, he vomits on his own genitals) to kill any real stimulation of the reader's funny bone.

Furthermore, it's not all laughs: a big surprise to me was how many of Carter's anecdotes aren't even intended to be funny. There's extreme violence (the murder of a prostitute by a Nigerian security guard; the friend whose face was mashed to a pulp in a bar-room fight), animal cruelty (a scorpion and a mouse forced to fight; another scorpion forced to kill itself whilst being slowly boiled alive) and a bizarre defence of freemasonry which is shoehorned in. The book never veers into nastiness, but it can be confusing to a reader when one minute you're reading a funny anecdote about being locked in a bathroom by a monkey and the next a terrified prostitute is having her brains bashed in by the butt of an AK47.

Consequently, there was little of real value in the book. It is short and often funny, but suffers from the lack of an overall arc or of any stories of real bite. I kept waiting for it to really kick on, but the book was so short it was over before it could.… (more)