Tramp Royale

by Robert A. Heinlein

  So I asked the booking clerk, not very hopefully, about booking passage from New Zealand to the States. He referred us to another clerk, where we were told that no bookings were available. Nor was our name on the waiting list so far as records here showed. I asked them please to let the home office know that we had arrived and were still interested. Would they accept a deposit?

  No-but the clerk did promise to write a letter to the home office. Perhaps when we got to New Zealand-

  We left with a list of shipping companies which had ships to our west coast-or to Canada, Hawaii, or Panama City. We even asked about ships to the west coast of South America, for we were beginning to realize that the situation was desperate, but there were none. It would appear that there is no trade of any sort between South America and Australia plus New Zealand even though they face each other across the Pacific.

  It did not take "three or four days" to get our income tax clearance; it took the whole time we were there. In consequence we were never able to get out of Sydney any distance greater than could be driven in one day; our longest drive was about four hundred miles and did not take us past the Great Dividing Range which parallels the east coast, never got out of the coastal, eucalyptus forest geographical region.

  Each day we would first telephone the Union line and ask about income tax clearance and our ticket; each day we would be told to call back the following day. Then we would do local sightseeing-except that the first Monday was spent in tramping from one steamship agent to the next, trying to find anything from a raft to submarine which would accept us for passage to any port on the other side of the Pacific. There were none.

  Perhaps I should not say "none" for we had one very promising false alarm and once were actually offered passage the long way round via Manila and Hong Kong, then back across the Pacific, in the Cunard Liner Coronia, which was making a circum-Pacific cruise originating from London. The agent had to stop to figure out what our fare would be for that portion we wanted. Presently he looked up and said cheerily, "Better sit down first."

  "Pretty expensive?" I asked. I had done a rough calculation in my head, based on the number of days we would be in the ship and what I knew of usual first-class fares; I had estimated it at $2000, or perhaps a few dollars over-almost twice what it would cost to fly home, but worth it in view of the way Ticky felt about flying over the ocean. So I was braced for a sizable figure.

  "Just over seven thousand dollars," he said.

  I blinked. "I don't want to buy the ship, I just want to ride in it."

  "Yes, I know. It is a fantastic cost. I wouldn't pay it."

  "Nor I. It's way out of my price bracket. What do they give you for that? Dancing girls? Pheasant for breakfast?"

  "Well, it is a luxury ship. It has a swimming pool and dancing in the evening, all that sort of thing."

  The Ruys had had a swimming pool and dancing in the evening, and all that sort of thing, but no megalomania about the worth of such. From curiosity I studied the ship's plan. The Coronia had a swimming pool not noticeably bigger than the one in the Ruys . . . for ten times as many passengers. Her other "luxuries" were on the same meager scale when compared with the ample arrangements of the Ruys. She was a floating sucker trap. Seven thousand dollars indeed! "Hmm-" I said. "Would you do something for me? Tell them to take the Coronia, fold it until it is all corners, and-"

  "Robert!" Ticky said sharply.

  Ticky was right. The agent was a nice chap and seemed as shocked by the larcenous attitude as I was. So I thanked him and we left.

  The second false alarm concerned a ship whose owners had no delusions of grandeur. She was going to Panama, an acceptable enough destination by then, from where we could fly home or might even manage to catch the good old Gulf Shipper. The home office was in New Zealand, and the booking clerk in the Sydney office, a most pleasant lady, could not tell us positively that space was available, but was glad to attempt the booking through the home office.

  "Good!" I agreed. "Suppose we wait while you phone them."

  "Excuse me? Did you say 'telephone them'?"

  "Certainly. There is telephone service between here and New Zealand, is there not?"

  "Well . . . yes," she conceded.

  "Then let's telephone them at once. I pay for the call, of course-perhaps I didn't make that clear."

  "But I couldn't telephone them."

  "Why not? There's a telephone right there on your desk. Just call them and we will know at once."

  The poor woman seemed quite agitated at my insistence. I finally found myself talking to her boss; where she was agitated, he was bland, but he was quite as firm in his refusal to permit a call to be made to the home office. "Airmail will do nicely, my dear chap. We'll get one off at once and we will hear promptly, probably tomorrow."

  I explained that it was decidedly worth the cost of a long-distance phone call to me to tie down the reservation at once. "It is possible that someone might walk into the New Zealand office later today and book the last available stateroom in that ship. I don't want to chance it; it means too much to me."

  He frowned and smiled, seemed perplexed by my stupidity, a little surprised that I would propose anything so obviously improper, even though I was an American. "But we can't, you know. That isn't the way we do business. Sorry."

  And there the matter stood. The phone call was not made. We Americans are used to telephoning twice the distance from Sydney to New Zealand, as casually as we call the corner grocery, on any matter of business important enough to warrant the minor expense-or simply to inquire about a relative's health, for that matter. A branch office will phone the home office several times a day; that is how business is done.

  But apparently not so in Australia. My willingness to pay the cost had no bearing on the matter; one simply does not telephone the home office. It is not done.

  We had still hoped to make a flying trip outback, starting Tuesday, but this delay kept us in Sydney two more days . . . to no avail, as the New Zealand office turned our request down. Then we still hoped to make a trip at least to Melbourne the last two days of the week even though our income tax clearance still had not come through. This time we were stopped not by red tape but by a chance in a thousand: Queen Elizabeth was in Melbourne that day, which meant very simply that a hotel bed was not to be had under any circumstances in Melbourne . . . plus crowds dense as a Mardi Gras, plus choked public transportation.

  So we never got out of Sydney. I do not know what would have happened had we entered the country at Fremantle, crossed by train, and arrived in Sydney only a couple of days before our scheduled sailing. Would we have been allowed to catch our ship and leave the country? Or would we have been held there while our null & nothing "income tax" returns were processed? I don't know, but I have no reason to think that Australian red tape will budge for anyone no matter what the predicament. I suspect that it might have been like the telephone call that "couldn't" be made. (And I shall always wonder if we missed being able to reserve passage by that one day's loss of time.)

  This income tax nonsense for tourists, indulged in by both Australia and New Zealand, caused me to wonder if our own country indulged in such a useless, time-wasting irritation, so I inquired of Internal Revenue on our return. We do not-neither under the old law nor the new (1954). A non-resident alien, tourist or other visitor, who has earned no money in the United States, is not required to make any income tax report of any sort-nothing! Which is as it should be.

  Nevertheless we liked Australia on the whole. In seeing Brisbane, Sydney, and the environs of Sydney we did see that part of Australia occupied by more than half of the population, even though we did miss "the salt pans in the middle of Australia" where Yellow Dog Dingo chased Old Man Kangaroo. We saw two of their three biggest cities and found them no worse than and much like American cities of similar size. The countryside outside those two cities was magnificent; I kept feeling that a landscape architect had been through ahead of us, rearranging it into perfect c
omposition and beauty. In fairness I must admit that the random views around Sydney for a hundred miles or so (as far as we got) are superior to random views in the U.S. countryside save for certain areas overtly touted as tourist beauty spots.

  But before we leave the subject of the shortcomings of Australia, let's list the others that came to our attention. The hotel we were in was not very good and Australians readily admit that their hotels are not much. The Hotel Australia is comparable to the Commodore in New York in size and age; it is the best Sydney has to offer, which is hardly true of the Commodore in New York. But the Commodore is a much better hotel in plant and immeasurably better in service and in cuisine. The prices of the Commodore are about half again as much as those of the Australia-which makes the Hotel Australia quite expensive in view of the scale of other prices in Sydney and very expensive compared with a similar hotel outside New York.

  No need to itemize the shortcomings of the Australia, but here are a few that are typical: we were placed in a room built like a railroad tunnel with a single window at the far end. The only shaving mirror was located the room's length away from the wash basin, which made shaving a source of healthy exercise. The beds-well, never mind the beds; we didn't sleep much anyhow. The cooking was adequate but dull; the menu never changed. Food was available only at set meal hours and a late Sunday morning breakfast in your room was a metropolitan luxury not to be had.

  That was Australia's "best" hotel, not bad but not good. The primary cause of the poor hotels in Australia-and the ordinary run of them are conceded to be much worse than the one we were in-is the liquor licensing system; a hotel is primarily a saloon. The profit lies in beer sold over the bar; lodging and meals are supplied only to meet the requirements of the law. The secondary cause lies in union rules; organized labor dominates Australian politics to an extent that American union men would find amazing and union rules of a type undreamed of in most parts of the United States are taken as a matter of course there. In my opinion they have taken advantage of a good thing in a fashion of no real benefit to the union workers and detrimental to all.

  For example, I tried to get a glass of water in the restaurant of the Australia and I made the mistake of asking the table waiter for it. But by union rules he is not permitted to pour a glass of water, nor is the bus boy; water being a "drink" must be handled by a liquor waiter or not at all. But a barman was not available at that time. I could see empty glasses and carafes of water not ten feet away, but the table waiter was literally afraid to touch it; the job was not authorized by his union classification.

  Groceries may not legally be purchased on a weekend. This makes it tough on working housewives. There are grocery "bootleggers" of course, with their back doors open and with higher prices. I went to one of them with a Sydney housewife; it reminded me of a speakeasy during Prohibition.

  Ticky and I, one day when we were sightseeing in Sydney, decided to wait until the business lunch-hour rush was over before eating, for Sydney is a place where more than a million people try to crowd into restaurants sharp at noon. So we waited and so we missed lunch-the restaurants close as soon as the midday rush is over. Union rules again.

  This list could go on tediously, so let us consider the examples multiplied by almost any one you can think of and many that, fortunately, have never been thought of in this country. I mean to say, we have proved repeatedly that short hours are not incompatible with high production and good service. The feather-bedders in Australia don't seem to know that. This anti-productive attitude was the very last thing we ran into as we left Australia. Our ship was trying to make the tide and there was just one more sling to be loaded-when it came time for the dockmen to have "smoko," the midafternoon break for a cigarette. Our captain sent down word asking the men to please postpone "smoko" for twenty minutes and get that last sling aboard. No go-the rules, rules with the force of law from a government "awards" commission, said to break at that hour. So the ship missed the tide.

  Of course, any decent person will prefer the unionism-gone-wild of Australia to the serfdom existing in Russia and South Africa. But there can be a golden mean, fair to everyone-and we are much closer to it than is Australia.

  But most Australians seem more than content with their own ways in these matters. I learned from a reporter on one of the Sydney daily papers that a reporter was not permitted to drive his own car nor even a company car while on duty; while out on his news gathering rounds he must be driven by a union chauffeur in a company car. I told him that this struck me as a silly waste of manpower. He informed me quite stiffly that I did not know what I was talking about and that any other rule would be the "-thin entering wedge" which would destroy their rights. The quoted phrase is one that they are fond of and use to justify their most ridiculously non-productive practices. I suppose that the cited practice could be justified in the fierce traffic of Manhattan, but Sydney is not Manhattan; its traffic is not as dense as it is in any American city of comparable size. Carried to its logical extreme, this so-called principle would require every man who moves around in the course of his day's work to be accompanied by a driver who did nothing else-plumber, real estate agent, milk man, police officer, traveling salesman, building inspector, and so forth. Such a rule would reduce the working force of the United States by several millions without any gain of any sort.

  But I have no doubt that this is just what they are trying to achieve in Australia. Remember the waiter who could not pour a glass of water.

  This is not the way to increase a country's standard of living.

  We made our usual effort to see the slums in Sydney. Sydney's slums are much like our own, neither worse nor better-to the shame of both countries. But I noticed two interesting and depressing variations from our pattern. We saw dwellings, or human lairs, that were entirely underground save for air holes-you could not call them windows-on the downhill side only. We saw also the narrowest row houses imaginable, eight feet wide and five stories tall. It was hard to imagine how a staircase was fitted inside such a building, or why such uneconomic structures would be built in the first place, even as tenements with Scrooge himself as proprietor; the ratio of parasitic structure to rentable space in such a building is all out of proportion.

  But on the whole there was not too much to criticize in Australia. Ticky reported to me that ladies' rooms were the worst she had ever seen-not merely primitive but uniformly filthy. I found the men's room much the same sort, but I have seen some bad ones in the United States. Housing in general is old-fashioned and dreary, more of that 1910 feeling. Public transportation in Sydney is almost as bad as it is in Los Angeles. But faults of this caliber can be found in any country; our own beloved country has some dillies.

  We never did encounter the intentional rudeness which we had been warned to expect, even warnings from Australians. But we did experience rather frequently a naive, almost childlike way of speaking one's whole mind without thought to how it might sound to the listener, a trait which would have been considered rudeness were it not so ingenuous. For example, our closest friends in Australia informed us that they hoped that, in this coming war, the United States would be bombed rather than England-since it was our "turn." I admit that the wish had a certain bleak logic to it, but it never occurred to them that we, as one of the targets, might not relish the role they had chosen for us.

  Another time our host at dinner expressed his admiration for the United States and said that he wished Australia would join up as a forty-ninth state. "Only," he added, "I suppose that if we did, we would have a flood of American tourists and there would be no way to keep them out." He knew, of course, that we were American tourists.

  But these remarks were utterly without malice; the speakers would have been shocked and mortified had their unintentional rudeness been pointed out. There were many such remarks, but never a one intended to hurt.

  Another custom struck me as naive though not at all rude. In introducing a university graduate to a stranger in Australia it se
ems to be quite the usual thing to mention the fact that this person is a graduate; the possession of a college degree of any sort seems to be sufficiently unusual to warrant mentioning it, just as we tack "doctor" on the name of anyone possessing a doctor's degree. They do have a rather small number of degree-granting institutions for the size of the population, by our standards, but I have not been able to track down comparative statistics as to college graduates. However, it is evident that the privilege of going to college is more highly regarded by them than it is by us.

  American books and magazines are forbidden entrance to Australia, which is commonly the case throughout the Commonwealth. The excuse is dollar exchange, although the printed word is no important fraction of foreign trade. The result is not really harmful to us as trade (and I make my living by just such trade), but it is, I think, quite harmful to both countries in that it cuts us off from each other; it is an important and ugly barrier to free communication.

  Another result is (since their numbers are not large enough to support writing as a profession to any extent) their magazine stands and bookstores are filled with some of the most amazing trash to be found anywhere. It is as if our stands contained only confession magazines and comic books-no Harper's, no Time, no Saturday Evening Post, no Scientific American.

  But let us speak of the good things about Australia, for we did like it a lot. First, the people themselves are remarkably likable, even when blurting out some opinion better left unstated. Second, the culture as a whole is a good one, filled with a generous amount of social justice, founded on human dignity, and honed with a determination to live and fight for freedom. Even the frustrations engendered by silly union practices (and they are confoundedly annoying!) derive from good intentions toward the common man.