I travelled to far North Queensland once for a holiday. It was humid, but the golf courses were great and I was able to explore them more than most people because I was always looking for my balls. After playing a round at an exclusive and therefore expensive golf course, we stopped in Proserpine to buy some cheap lunch. Prosperpine is a nice town which is appreciated best when you drive straight through it at high speed. It’s known for a rich history of sugar cane production, drinking and casual violence. When we arrived it was obvious we were outsiders or ‘cockroaches’ from New South Wales and as I got out of the car, I felt like a ’shag on a rock’. I say I only felt that way, but I was too tired to give it a try and even if I did have the energy, that sounds really uncomfortable, so I let my feelings of hunger take precedence over the desire for awkward littoral congress. The fast food joint we found was typical. It had faded and flaking signage with a grimy menu suspended over a gigantic stainless rangehood. There were two people behind the counter, one cooking and one serving. The guy serving looked to be about sixty, which in Queensland years is about one hundred and ten. He had the friendly dispositon of an inland taipan (Oxyuranus microlepidotus), or a male tree-dwelling funnel web spider (Hydronche formidibilis) which are both common in Queensland but he looked like a cane toad (Rhinella marina). He asked us what we wanted by saying:
“Whadda ya want?”
I said I’d like a plain hamburger and added a nice ‘please’ on the end for him. As he leaned in and locked his vertical pupils on me, he grunted, “What?”.
“A plain hamburger please.” I said.
He leaned in more, so much more that for a terrifying moment I expected an ultra fast viscoelastic tongue to whip out and grab me. Then he straightened, placed his hands on his hips and while shaking his head said, “Look at the menus mate, do you see ‘hamburger’ anywhere? I looked up at the menu but I couldn’t read it because it was so dirty. So I gave up and looked straight back at him with an urgency driven by not wanting to miss a moment of his delightfulness. Then he said, “We don’t call ‘em ‘hamburgers’ up here, we call ‘em minceburgers!” He took a moment to scoff with disbelief, twisted his palms outward, shrugged and added: “There ain’t any ham in ‘em!” He was so pleased with himself for having pointed this out to me. He not only told me about ‘minceburgers’ in the most patronising tone possible, but followed up with gestures that made it seem like he’d just corrected a common misconception or irrationality. It was like he was explaining how to disengage the handbrake to a teenage learner driver. I admit to being stupid, but I’m pretty stupid, but not that stupid. If you explain to me that you call a sandwich with ground beef in it a ‘minceburger’ instead of a ‘hamburger’ (because it has no ham in it) you've reached a level of stupid beyond the frontiers of space and time.
Anyway, I haven’t let it bother me more than a few hundred times over the last two decades.
Established in the year 808, Hamburg is a city in Germany. So this means the history of the world’s favourite meat delivery system started with building a castle to defend the Holy Roman Empire from Slavs. The Slavs had heard about the increasing commercial dominance of Gothic sandwiches in Northern Europe and they were worried more people would tuck into these insidious Tuetonic snacks as they made their way east. That of course, had to be stopped. And naturalich, extreme violence was the only way to stop it. But those Teutonic wunderkinder had a plan and after a needlessly violent and often tedious series of battles, the German Barbarian sandwich makers won. Years later, these beef products came to be known as ‘Hamburger steaks’ which was minced beef with garlic, salt, pepper and some spices to taste. Eventually, Americans started eating these tasty steaks between two slices of bread and they were called ‘Hamburgers’. Then even more eventually, hamburgers became so popular that they spread around the world. Except (of course) in Proserpine, a small town in Queensland Australia. It turns out the Slavs won in the end, but it was a phyrric victory on account of the fact they’d sacrificed all those lives but only managed to stop the German sandwich menace in a sweaty, far north Queensland town. I remember with great fondness a story my great grandfather told me about a wealthy, well-travelled Proserpinian woman who’d made her fortune in sugar. She longed to visit England, her ancestral home. She’d traced her family history back to the city of ‘Birming’ where her father was born. On her travels she visited ‘Dur’, ‘Notting’ and ‘Wrex’. She was an avid supporter of the Premier League football team ‘West United’ and her favourite Shakespeare play was ‘Let’ which is the tragic story of a young danish prince who overthinks everything as he avenges his father’s death all while possibly dealing with an Oedipus complex.
When the ‘minceburger’ finally arrived, I tried to eat it, but it was one of those modern self-disintengrating sandwiches where the first bite squeezes all the contents onto the table as the shitty bun absorbs moisture then flattens into a kind of crepe before breaking apart like a thin panel of cardboard-soaked grease re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. By the time I attempted a second bite, my mouth was covered in a thick, oily mass. It felt like my oral cavity had been waterproofed before tiling. Then the toad walked outside and said, ‘How is it?’ I looked up, BBQ sauce dripping down my face, my hands covered in wilted lettuce and crumbling definitelynothambutbeef, my chest covered with ringlets of onion, tomato up both nostrils all while the space between my elbows piled with a greasy compound of protein and carbohydrates that would no doubt soon drip through the gaps in the wooden table and onto my fancy golf pants.
“Good.” I said. (I was being polite/he caught me off guard/I’m a wimp from New South Wales.)
“Good.” He replied firmly.
I can honestly say I was so relieved my work was up to scratch.
He turned on his heel and marched back towards the counter. I saw an opportunity. There was a chance I could dispose of the minceburger and make a clean getaway. (Just to clarify, I mean clean metaphorically, as in getting away fast and smooth. I myself was not clean. I was literally unclean. I was covered in shit. (And no, I don’t mean shit metaphorically.) There was a buzzing Prosipinian bin to my left, it was only a few yards away on a slight upslope. My golf teacher once told me that good players ‘picture’ the shot before they take it. They stand over the ball and look down the fairway and imagine where the ball will land. Tiger Woods even cups his hands and makes them like horse blinkers to block out any distractions. The next step is to address the ball with your club and make your shot. I turned and pictured the shot. I cupped my hands around my eyes and the focus was intense until I realised I'd just put two rings of BBQ sauce round each eye. The bin was on a slight angle away from me, this meant that from my seated position I couldn’t see the hole. The shot would have to be perfect. It was the shot of the day, the big one. Slight break right, then left, then a straight drain to the hole. My imaginary caddy reminded me of the slight breeze which was from the south but said it shouldn’t be a problem while she adjusted her bikini and backed away clutching the flag. This, I thought to myself, is just like Tiger at the 2005 Masters when he made that shot on the 16th hole. I looked around for the minceburger man, just to confirm he wasn’t looking my way - he wasn’t - he was busy explaining to a customer how croissants don’t have ants in them. In haste, I piled the remaining minceburger and all the other stuff back into the cardboard box, closed the lid and made my shot. The minceburger, or at least the remains of it, immediately separated from the box because its little tab didn’t hold. Presumably because its torsional stiffness had been comprimised by the moistness of the minceburger remains. As a consequence, the box landed not far from my feet and the minceburger separated like a lard-laden ICBM and fell either side of the bin. On one side of the bin was the sidewalk and on the other side a big four wheel drive vehicle with Queensland number plates. I’ll never forget that car because it was white and featured a huge spare wheel on the back, and it had roof racks and a trailer and a genuine partially-digested Queensland minceburger spread evenly along the length of the passenger side door.
