Blue Latitudes

by Tony Horwitz

  Even so, Aborigines hadn’t taken easily to Lutheran ways. George said the Guugu Yimidhirr resented the Germans’ regimented work schedule, preferring to fish and hunt when they felt like it. The missionaries also spoke poor English and little of the native tongue, making it hard to convey the finer points of Lutheran theology. (For instance, there is no word in Guugu Yimidhirr for love, so “Jesus loves me” had to be translated as “Jesus is my best friend.”) It took a decade for the missionaries to conduct their first baptism and many more years before Aborigines agreed to Christian marriage rather than informal, often polygamous unions.

  The mission’s German flavor also caused problems during the Second World War. As combat raged offshore and in nearby New Guinea, the government interned the missionaries and evacuated the Aborigines, fearing they might somehow collaborate with the Japanese—possibly by sending smoke signals. George, then twelve, was loaded into a truck with the others and sent twelve hundred miles south to Queensland’s much drier and cooler interior. A quarter of the Guugu Yimidhirr quickly died from flu and dengue fever. “We were treated like little black Germans, almost prisoners of war,” George said. “Kids at school called us names and threw stones at us.” Not until 1949 were they allowed to return to Elim, which was moved to its present location from the now-abandoned mission site.

  Hopevale had since become one of the first Aboriginal settlements in Australia to win title to its own land. Aborigines, like Maori, had also revived many of their crafts; young people in Hopevale learned traditional arts such as bark painting. “It’s strange to think that when I was in school, we’d get in trouble if we spoke our own language or drew pictures of the Rainbow Serpent,” George said. “Now, even white schoolchildren learn about the Dreamtime, and their parents pay thousands of dollars for our artwork.”

  But acceptance and assimilation came at a price. Like his cousin, George had been struck by Cook’s writing about Aborigines and their lack of interest in material goods. “To my grandparents, life was important, the land was sacred, but not things and not surplus,” he said. “If we went fishing and hunting and got more than we needed, we gave it away.” As Aborigines became integrated into the cash economy, taking farm and mining jobs, or government subsidies, the old attitude changed. “Now people want more of everything, they destroy too much. Instead of one turtle they’ll kill two or three, and they want the meat only for themselves. They’re never satisfied.”

  George still lived simply, without a telephone or other conveniences. “But I am retired now, in the long paddock,” he said. “When my generation goes, there will be no living connection to the old ways.”

  I asked him if he ever went to the annual Cook festival. George winced. Hopevale remained a church-centered community and prohibited the sale of liquor, thus sparing itself the rampant alcoholism that afflicted many Aboriginal settlements. Cooktown, by contrast, was a veritable Gomorrah, particularly during the upcoming weekend. But people in Hopevale joked about one day printing up a T-shirt for sale at the festival. It would picture an Aborigine on the front and Cook’s famous quote on the back: “In reality they are far happier than we Europeans.” George smiled. “That’d give whitefellas something to think about.”

  Perhaps it was his talk of the Dreamtime, but as I bumped back to Cooktown I was struck by the mythic overtones of the Endeavour’s voyage along the coast of Australia. After the crew’s brief and mystifying encounter with Botany Bay’s Aborigines, who reject Western trinkets, Cook sails for home—and is trapped in the unseen labyrinth of the Great Barrier Reef. The only escape lies in literally throwing away his weightiest possessions: weapons, casks, ballast, food stores. Only after being relieved of these wordly goods is he delivered from the reef and driven back to shore—and to a much deeper encounter with the nonmaterialist Aborigines.

  It seems doubtful that Cook read the copy of Homer on board the Endeavour, or spent much time perusing the Bible, except when he was obliged to conduct divine service. But in his journal and letters he frequently referred to “Fate.” Perhaps that’s why Aborigines, content with so little, struck a powerful chord in Cook: a sense that his trials off the reef were a cautionary commentary on his own ceaseless striving.

  Late on Friday, I collected Roger at Cooktown’s tiny airport. He stepped from the single-engine plane looking green from the short but bumpy flight from Cairns. “I need a drink,” he said. “Any decent pubs up here?”

  “Depends what you call decent.”

  “Cold beer. No class. Some colorful louts.”

  “I think we can arrange that.”

  The town had filled up in the course of the week and we had to elbow our way to the bar of the Cooktown Hotel. I told Roger about “ferals,” but couldn’t find an example to point out. He studied the ragged, shouting crowd. “You mean there’s people more feral than this? Even the barmaid’s got mad wolf eyes.” I spotted Rob Buck, a.k.a. Captain Cook, and took Roger over to introduce him. Rob was studying the final schedule for the weekend, which had been printed only hours before.

  “The snobs are trying to clean it right up, turn it into a family occasion,” he griped. Gone was an annual sculling contest, in which competitors swilled beer from chamber pots. Also canceled was a lawn mower race. The previous year, Rob said, a drunken contestant had mowed down a spectator. In the place of these events were activities such as a mock bank robbery and a children’s fun run. Rob doubted all this would change the tone of the festival. “They can try and make it tasteful,” he said, “but they can’t take Cooktown out of it.”

  After a few rounds, Roger and I wandered over to the West Coast Hotel, the Aboriginal hangout. A sign near the entrance said, “This is a Bloody Pub. Not a Bloody Bank. Or a Bloody Finance Company.” We crowded onto stools by the L-shaped bar, the only furniture in the place. Roger was impressed. “It’s barely a building, just a bar. A place to vend alcohol.”

  A reggae-style band began playing in an adjoining room. We carried our beers to the edge of the dance floor. Before I could take another sip, a young man with a very firm grip relieved me of my can and emptied it in one guzzle. Roger, who had an Australian’s instinct for clinging to beer cans, managed to fight off another patron attempting to do the same. But an enormous woman dragged him onto the floor for a sloppy slow dance as the band played “I Shot the Sheriff.” He emerged from the throng a few dances later looking rumpled and dazed.

  “How was it?” I asked him.

  “Remember the Tahitian waltz? Like that, without the waltz. Or the Tahitian.”

  Suddenly the lights came on and the barmaid shouted, “Last call!” It was only ten-thirty, doubtless a record early closing for a Cooktown pub. We asked a security guard by the door what was up. “Publican woke a guy sleeping at the bar,” he said. “Bloke sat up and gave him a black eye. So the barkeep reckoned he’d pack it in for the night.”

  We decided to do the same and save our strength for the rest of the weekend. The next morning, drinking coffee in front of our motel room, we watched as guests emerged on either side of us and opened beers. “Starting early, eh?” Roger said jovially to the couple beside us, as they drained their breakfast. The man looked at Roger strangely. Then, glancing at his watch, he said, “Mate, it’s already nine o’clock.”

  We wandered up the main street to watch the parade kicking off the festival. Several thousand people crowded the avenue, many of them toting beer coolers, or “eskies” as they’re called in Australia, short for “Eskimos.” Many of the coolers had been mounted on wheels, hooked to strollers, piled into supermarket trolleys, or rigged atop tricycles and lawn mowers. Some of these homemade beer wagons came equipped with foot brakes, license plates, and umbrellas for shade. One had a picture painted on its side of Cook clutching a can of XXXX. I was also struck by the array of exclamatory T-shirts. “Happier Than a Two Peckered Puppy at the Cooktown Festival!” “Losing Is Nature’s Way of Saying You Suck!” “The Liver Is Evil and Must Be Punished.”

  The para
de began an hour late, led by men clad as escaped eighteenth-century convicts. They dragged balls and chains while one lashed the others with what looked like a skipping rope. Near the back of the parade came the local police, waving from a pickup truck. They were greeted with a hail of curses, water balloons, and crushed beer cans. The police turned a water hose on the crowd. In the midst of this melee, a policeman tumbled from the truck and lay in the road, where he was assailed with still more water balloons.

  “Good God, this looks like the West Bank,” Roger said. “Casualties already.”

  “Naah,” said a woman standing beside us. “He’s dead drunk, that’s all. The coppers always get on the piss.” A few of the officer’s colleagues dragged him back into the truck and motored off. “Our last police chief got done for having sex in a cell with his secretary,” the woman went on. “His wife caught him in the act.”

  The parade was followed by a truck-pull contest, the vehicle, of course, being a beer truck. There was also a soapbox derby, in which the go-carts included a coffin borrowed from a funeral parlor. “It’s a real deathtrap,” the driver declared, climbing inside and closing the lid. After this came the “Great Esky Race,” though it was less a race than a riot. Lining up at one end of the main street, contestants took off, pulling or riding their coolers until they collapsed twenty yards from the starting line in a pileup of crushed vehicles, skinned knees, and broken bottles. “We’ve lost wheels, we’ve lost people!” the emcee shouted. “And, tragically, we’ve lost beer!”

  Rob Buck’s concern that the weekend might shape up as a tame family affair was rapidly dissipating. And that was before the wet T-shirt contest. Late in the afternoon, the crowd surged up the main street to a scrubby vacant lot adjoining the West Coast Hotel—a paddock, I’d noticed the night before, that served as a latrine for those too drunk to find a toilet. At the back of the lot stood a dusty tractor-trailer, opened on one side to form a makeshift stage.

  The crowd stretched all the way across the main street to the curb in front of Cooktown’s preschool. A bearded, ponytailed man climbed on the truck trailer and tested the microphone. This was the emcee, who went by the name of Dirty Pierre. “Can you hear me back there at the kindergarten?” he called out. Then, spotting a teacher in front of the school, he added, “Hey, she’s got a good set.”

  “Pierre, you’re a sick puppy!” bellowed a man standing beside me.

  “Bring on the tits!” yelled another.

  “Okay,” Pierre said, glancing at his watch, “since it looks like everyone in town is already here, we’ll get away on time.” This was the first and only event of the entire weekend to start on schedule. “There’s a bar over there,” he said, pointing at the West Coast, “so you don’t have to die of thirst.”

  Then he explained the rules, such as they were. A rubbish bin filled with ice water would be poured over each woman, with the crowd electing the winner by the volume of its cheers. “Now, does anyone have a girl to nominate?” Pierre asked. “I see a young lady right over there, in the blue tank top. Come on up!” She did, and six others quickly followed. Pierre handed each of the women a beer and asked their hometowns. One of the contestants was a British tourist. “She’s a little English rose, so she needs encouragement,” Pierre told the crowd. This wasn’t strictly true. As soon as cold water was poured over her, she put her hands beneath her breasts and shook from side to side.

  “Take it all off!” the crowd chanted. “Off off off!”

  This went on for twenty minutes, until the women had been drenched several times and prodded around the truck like cattle on auction. The English rose won, although she refused the crowd’s and Pierre’s pleas that she remove her T-shirt.

  “Don’t give her the trophy!”

  “Bring on the dog!”

  The dog? When the show concluded, I asked Pierre what this meant. Three years before, he said, someone had entered a bull terrier bitch in the contest. She had recently had a litter, and she won. “She had eight tits,” Pierre said. “The general feeling was that quantity was better than quality.”

  I found this year’s winner cradling a trophy while tossing back a beer with her boyfriend. It turned out that she came from a small town in North Yorkshire, near Cook’s childhood home. I asked her what she thought the navigator might have made of this event.

  “He’d think I was a complete lunatic,” she said. “Women in his day covered up.”

  “His loss,” her boyfriend said proudly. “If Cook had seen a pair like this, he never would have left England.”

  Pondering this version of what-if history, I tried to imagine what Cooktown might be like if the Endeavour hadn’t come: a French colony, perhaps, or still a mangrove wilderness. Reflecting on this, I realized I was drunk. Though not nearly so drunk as the crowd flooding from the paddock and down the street to watch a tug-of-war contest. I found a place on the curb beside an older woman who seemed one of the few sober people in Cooktown. A man in a “Legless as a Blind Chook on Crutches” T-shirt staggered in front of us, clutching a beer in one hand and a rum bottle in the other.

  “They don’t know when to stop, do they,” the woman said.

  “Guess not,” I replied, hoping she couldn’t smell the beer on my breath. Then I realized she was gazing, not at Legless and his mates, but at a small party of Aborigines, quietly drinking amid the white revelers.

  “It’s sad how they’re always drunk,” she said.

  A howl went up as the tug-of-war began between two women’s teams. “Fuckin’ dykes!” Legless shouted.

  “When they’re not drinking,” the woman went on, “Aborigines are very docile. But as soon as they’re on the grog they’re barely human.”

  “If you sheilas can’t pull, then suck!” Legless shrieked, cracking a fresh beer and covering himself in foam.

  “It’s supposed to be their country. But do you see them participating in all the fun here? Not bloody likely. Too lazy and drunk.”

  I resisted the urge to argue and went in search of Roger, whom I’d lost in the crowd several hours before. I found him sipping beer in front of the West Coast and watching police wrestle two brawling drunks into a paddy wagon. Prone, dusty figures lay splayed in the street, beside overturned eskies spilling empty beer cans. “I’m out-gunned,” Roger said, shaking his head. “It almost makes me want to be sober.”

  The next thing I recall clearly is waking Sunday morning on the couch in our motel room, a few minutes before the reenactors were scheduled to muster behind the police station. I rousted Roger and we ran down the main street. No one was there. Inside the station, I asked the constable on duty how the weekend was going.

  “It’s dead, thankfully,” he said. Four years before, there had been ninety-seven arrests. So far this year, there had been only six. “Don’t know why, but people aren’t drinking as much.”

  Forty-five minutes after the scheduled assembly time of eight-thirty, a few reenactors arrived, led by Rob Buck. “Sir,” one of the crew said to him, “we refuse to get dressed until we’ve been issued our rations.” Rob glanced at his watch. “You’re correct, sailor. It’s beer o’clock.” Two men went to a truck and brought back a faux sea chest filled with cold XXXX.

  “Haven’t had one since three,” a sailor said, quickly downing one.

  “That’s six hours on the wagon.”

  “Best all year.”

  “We’re being historically accurate, of course,” Rob said, reaching for a second beer. “Why do you think Cook ran up on the reef? He was on the piss.”

  We drank for another half hour until the rest of the crew arrived and slowly began donning their costumes. A man playing the ship’s one-handed cook put on a chef’s hat and placed a hook in his sleeve. The pale teenager acting the part of Tupaia smeared dirt on his face. The surgeon, Monkhouse, carried a tattered briefcase, meant to represent a medical bag. “I’ve got a crook back, a hernia, and bad kidneys, so I know plenty about doctors,” he said. He held his head. “I could use
some laudanum right now.”

  Rob pulled on a blue jacket, tights, and an ill-fitting wig. He retired to a back room to study his lines, calling out, “Lieutenant Hicks, bring a beer and the drummer boy to my cabin.”

  “Sir, you said last night to bring the goat.”

  “So I did.”

  The People glanced at cue cards, then begged the captain to distribute more rations. Six women showed up wearing hoop skirts, mob-caps, and low-cut bodices. “Wenches here—where’s our drinks?” they shouted in unison. Then a few Aborigines appeared in body paint and skirts made of torn burlap. I asked a man named Lindsay if he had any qualms about participating in a celebration of Cook’s landing. He shrugged. “His ship was crippled, he didn’t invade. The bad stuff happened later.”

  “Of all-time white people,” added another man, “Cook would be near the top of my list. Maybe that’s not saying much. My list wouldn’t be too long.”

  Lindsay said that Aborigines had boycotted the event in 1988 as part of a nationwide protest against the bicentennial celebration of the First Fleet’s arrival. “Some whitefellas put on skirts and blackened their faces and played our part,” he said. “They looked so bad we decided to come back the next year.”

  Rob emerged from his “cabin” and did a quick head count. Then he pointed at Roger and me and said, “Mr. Hicks, press-gang these men.” We slipped into the remaining sailors’ uniforms: gray shorts, white tunics, blue neckerchiefs, and wool caps. Roger, broad-shouldered and English-featured, almost looked convincing, and I told him so. “That makes one of us,” he replied.

  We staggered to the river and climbed into wooden boats. The wind was blowing hard and several men fell as they stumbled aboard. I was ordered into Cook’s pinnace to man an oar while Roger boarded a separate vessel carrying the marines. Our destination, a hundred or so yards upriver, was a park near Cook’s landing site.

  “Stroke!” called out the man at the tiller.

  “I prefer a soft rubbing motion,” the oarsman beside me replied.