by Pico Iyer
Thus Australians seem at once to play up, and play down, to tourist expectations; theirs is as much a subversive as a supplicant air. On a Qantas flight into Sydney, a cabin attendant mimes along with the safety announcement, while one of the tour guides at the Opera House is as floridly self-amusing as any guide this side of Key West. The Jolly Swagman show of Australiana in the quaintly renovated 150-year-old Argyle Tavern in Sydney suddenly causes its laughing visitors to blanch when it stages an actual sheep-shearing on stage, followed by an impromptu lecture from a bearded Bushman over his bald, still bleeding victim. And as a shuttle bus pulls out of Alice Springs train station, its passengers dazed from twenty-four hours in tiny compartments, the beefy driver unexpectedly bursts into tour-guide patter: “Directly in front of us,” he begins, “we have the K mart.”
This fondness for drollery, and its attendant suspicion of all stuffiness, breathes constant life and surprise into the country’s culture. Folksingers stroll with guitars around the lovely main reading room of Adelaide’s old Mortlock Library, and the country’s museums are scarcely cathedrals of orthodoxy. The Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney devotes an entire floor to plastic bags, embellished with videos of people banging bags together and a guide denoting “Points in Plastic History.” The National Gallery in Melbourne fills one display case, rather surprisingly, with a pig’s head and offers, in alarming proximity, specimens designated as “Lamb Brains,” “Calves Livers” and “Spring Lamb Chops.” (The stained-glass ceiling that is the museum’s centerpiece can be appreciated only by visitors supine on the floor.) When the Opera House, financed largely by lotteries and partly by kissing contests, staged its first performance, koalas and kangaroos bounded across the stage in front of the visiting Queen.
It is common, of course, to hear people claim that Australian culture is a contradiction in terms: Bronte is a beach here, they say, and the country’s unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda,” was written by a man named Banjo. Certainly the feeling that the world lies outside the country’s borders has propelled many rare minds to find themselves in exile: Germaine Greer, Clive James, and Robert Hughes all evince a uniquely Australian mix of erudition and iconoclasm, yet all are features now of the Anglo-American scene; and the brief wave of tasteful Masterpiece Movies that put Australia on the world’s screens at the beginning of the eighties subsided when the directors of Breaker Morant, Gallipoli, and The Devil’s Playground transported their Australian myths to America. Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere.
Nonetheless, the culture still has a native vigor constantly quickened by its unforced sense of free speech. The Old Parliament House in Adelaide reserves an entire room that any group can take over for a month, and a bulletin board on which visitors respond to the displays set up by euthanasiasts, conservationists, or just plain Liberals. And the excellent Migration Museum around the corner likewise maintains a “Community Access Gallery.” Far from sanitizing the country’s rocky history of migration, moreover, the museum delivers some unpretty home truths (“Racist attitudes towards Asians have a very long history in Australia”) and does not shy away from asserting that the aboriginals were “hunted and herded like animals.” Provocative and hard-hitting, this is a fresh kind of art form: the museum as radical documentary.
The first-time visitor, indeed, may well be surprised at how conspicuous is the aboriginal presence. Though their numbers once sank to almost 60,000, the original guardians of the continent now constitute a subculture of more than 228,000, and many non-aboriginal Australians are aware that the usurpation of a people who regarded the land itself as their sacred text and mythology represents, in a very particular sense, a kind of desecration. It is this position that finds the Bicentenary most irrelevant. “Why celebrate two hundred years old when society here is forty thousand years old?” challenges a thoughtful young Australian. “And why call it our party when it should be theirs?”
The other most striking feature of Australia today is the prominence of the “New Australians,” the latest wave of immigrants, who have turned cities like Melbourne into a clash of alien tongues as piquant and polyglot as New York, where nothing seems outlandish except standard English. The signs for public toilets in Melbourne are written in Greek (as well as English and Italian), churches solicit worshipers in Korean script, and when the Prostitutes Collective recently put out a multilingual pamphlet urging customers to use condoms, one of the tongues they employed was Macedonian. Though Australian voices still sound blond, their heads are increasingly dark: at the stately old Windsor Hotel in Melbourne, one of the last great relics of Victorian elegance, the maître d’ is Vietnamese, the waiters are Sri Lankan, the owners are Indian, and the courtly man serving drinks comes from Bangladesh.
Inevitably, such developments have been somewhat tumultuous in a country whose leading magazine, as recently as 1960, ran with the slogan “Australia for the White Man.” For decades isolation bred ignorance, and ignorance intolerance. Even today, the country whose ghost lurks at the edge of many a conversation in Australia is South Africa. “Australia is a very racist country,” says a conservative English immigrant. “If you just scratch the surface, you come upon it. England’s bad too, of course, but at least they’ve had to face up to the problem. Here it’s still simmering.”
The unease felt by some Australians as Vietnamese and Chinese have streamed down the golden brick road to Oz has only deepened as the new “Austr-aliens” have flourished through such imported virtues as seriousness and unrelenting hard work. For decades, as Donald Horne argued in The Lucky Country, his scathing attack on Aussie complacency, the country languished in a kind of lottery consciousness, content to believe that success was more the result of luck than of industry (in a single year, the estimated turnover from betting was three times the defense budget). Now, however, the determination of the immigrants, bolstered by the entrepreneurial energy of such controversial types as Rupert Murdoch and Alan Bond, has begun to invest Australia with a new sense of dynamism and to raise fresh questions about its identity as an Asian power. Twenty-four years after the publication of Horne’s attack, the country may be less prosperous, but it is decidedly more promising.
Today, in many ways, Australia seems to reflect the eccentric ways of a Western European society set down in the middle of a Lonely Place: hotels as imaginatively designed as pavilions in some world’s fair; cities that offer Balkan, Burmese, Mauritian, Uruguayan, and Seychellian cuisine; casinos that are typically down-home affairs where neither solemnity nor discretion is held in high regard (“Not a Poker Face in Sight,” promises the Adelaide casino). Nearly all the heads in Australian bars are frothy, and tattooed bikers down 3.3-pint “stubbies” of Foster’s in dusty outposts like the Humpty Doo Bar, where a bulletin board advertises pigs and a sign warns customers tersely, “Don’t Ask for Credit as Refusal Often Offends.” Australian entertainment, in fact, is nothing if not straightforward: a slim tourist brochure in Melbourne includes twenty-two full ads for escort agencies.
For the historically minded traveler, the main lure of the place may well be Tasmania, the oldest convict settlement after Sydney, and one of those out-of-the-way places that many people want to visit because of their vague sense that no one has visited them before. With its blustery skies and lowering, snow-capped Mount Wellington, Tasmania is in some respects an inversion of the mainland, itself an inversion of England, and so ends up a little like the mother country. But its green and pleasant land is scarred with the remnants of its gloomy penal past: the gutted gray buildings at Port Arthur, the graves on the Isle of the Dead, and all the other grisly mementos of a place once known as “Hell on Earth.”
By contrast, the social history of modern Australia—and of many places like it—is summarized most tidily in the main shopping street in Adelaide, the wondrously compact little town laid out in a square by a man named Light. The thoroughfare begins life as Hindley Street, a rough-and-t
umble desolation row of sailors’ haunts—video arcades, take-away joints, and tawdry souvenir shops. The names say it all: the Box Adult Book Shop, Joynt Venture smoking paraphernalia, For Roses Tattoo Studio, the Sweetheart cocktail lounge, the Pop-in Coffee Lounge, and Crazy Horse Striptease Revue. Then, downtown, it turns into Rundle Mall, a gleaming, pedestrian-only monument to civic order, the sort of middling Middle Australian area you expect to find in any suburban center: Florsheim Shoes, Thomas Cook Travel, Standard Books, Woolworth’s, and—on both sides of the central intersection—the Golden Arches.
Finally, on its eastern edge, Rundle Mall opens up into Rundle Street, a SoHoian anthology of today: the Appar-allel boutique, Known Space books, the Campari bistro, Al Fresco gelateria, the Australian School of Meditation, Bryan’s Hairdressers, the Bangkok restaurant, Kelly’s Grains and Seeds—one long neon-and-mannequin line of vintage clothes stores and veggie restaurants, culminating (as it must culminate) in the New Age Emporium. This street alone, it seems, tells the story of how the twenties became the fifties became the eighties, or how raffishness turned into Standard Shopping Center and then was reborn as Authentic Renovated and Redecorated Raffishdom.
As for the booming present tense, it is best inspected in the one area that contradicts the quiet and unpeopled air of the continent—and also, not coincidentally, the one area expressly designed for foreigners: the twenty-one-mile Floridian motel-and-minigolf seaside strip known as the Gold Coast, an hour south of Brisbane. Centered on the town of Surfers Paradise, a place as self-effacing as its name, the Coast has become a furious riot of development, disco music pulsing through its glassy new arcades, Porsches cruising along its jungle of high-rises, a seemingly unending stretch of traffic-choked boulevards littered with ice cream parlors, Spanish-style motels, and Pizza Huts. There is a wax museum here, and Kenny Koala’s Dreamworld. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is scheduled to open any day. And in truth, Surfers Paradise—or should it be called Surface Paradise?—has all the wound-up frenzy of an amusement park writ huge, a neo-Atlantic City tricked up in Miami Vice colors and high-tech accessories. Nothing is missing here, it seems, except surfers, perhaps, and paradise.
Amidst the hustle-bustle of the Gold Coast, you can even get a glimpse into the future tense of Australia and of many other outposts of the Japanese empire. Huge toy koalas sit on sidewalks, cradling hard-sell messages in katakana script. Japanese honeymoon couples, identified by their matching outfits (or their HOMEY HONEYMOON T-shirts), crowd into pink coffee shops and “Love Buses.” Neon signs flicker above prices in yen, and even male strip shows couch their ads in terms guaranteed to please wholesome visitors from Kansai—“Revealing, Naughty, but Nice.” What used to be the Holiday Inn is now the All Nippon Airways Hotel, and the most famous koala sanctuary in all Australia, Lone Pine, is now owned by Kamori Kanko Ltd. Even in the distant town of Cairns, desultory koto music drifts around the malls.
In the end, though, the greatest marvels of Australia reside simply in its land—the silence and the sky. For more than a day, you can travel through the Outback, a parched white land of ghosts, of blanched trees twisted at odd angles across a plain as vast and mysterious as Africa. Nothing breaks the vacancy but a dead cow, an upturned car, a stray eagle. Everywhere there is only emptiness and flatness. And then, rising up unanswerably against a diorama-bright landscape of shocked blue and thick red, Ayers Rock, old and mute and implacable, in powerful counterpoint to the young, pretty, somewhat uninflected society all around. The sacred rock is one of those rare places with a genuine sense of mystery: it casts a larger shadow than any postcard could suggest.
Or awaken one Edenic morning in Kakadu to see the sun gilding the swampy billabong, jackaroos hovering above the water in the golden, gauzy early light. Two hours later, on the South Alligator River, listen to a guide reciting names as if riffling through the multicolored pages of some children’s picture book: pelicans and egrets and snakebirds are here; pied herons, masked plovers, and migrant warders from Siberia; lotus birds are among the mango trees, and white-breasted sea eagles (with a wingspan of six feet), glossy ibises (with sickle-shaped beaks), and whistling ducks (“not capable of quacking”). There are blue-winged kookaburras in the sky, and sulphur-crested cockatoos; frill-necked lizards along the riverbank, and even lazy crocodiles sunbathing just ten feet from the boat. At dusk, the birds honk and squawk above a huge, pink-flowering lily pond, and flocks of black magpie geese and silver-winged corellas fly across the face of a huge full moon that sits in the middle of the darkening sky, catching the silver of their wings. In the daily enchantment of dusk, a visitor begins, at last, to catch the presence of an Australia within, a terra incognita deep inside, and a loneliness that will stay with him even when he leaves. In the twilight of Australia, the foreigner can catch an intimation of what Melville calls “the great America on the other side of the sphere,” and so a sense of how everything brings him back to the natural state where he began: a lonely person in a Lonely, Lonely Place.
VINTAGE DEPARTURES
THE EMPEROR’S LAST ISLAND
by Julia Blackburn
The story of the deposed emperor Napoleon holding court amid the shabbiness and paranoia of an island prison is interwoven with a history of St. Helena itself and with a personal account of the author’s own voyage in search of Napoleon’s ghost.
“Dazzling … a compelling meditation on Napoleon’s exile … Blackburn has brought her startlingly imaginative sensitivity to bear on a vanished time.”
—The New York Times Book Review
History/Travel/0-679-73937-8
AMONG THE THUGS
by Bill Buford
From a vandalous ride on the English railway to full-blown riots in Turin and Sardinia, the editor of the prestigious literary journal Granta gives us a terrifying record of his passage through an alternate society: that of England’s soccer thugs.
“An unflinching look into the festering soul of England … a great read.”
—David Byrne
Sociology/0-679-74535-1
PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS
by Tim Cahill
In his latest grand tour of the earth’s remote, exotic, and dismal places, Tim Cahill sleeps with a grizzly bear, witnesses demonic possession in Bali, assesses the cuteness quotient of giant clams in the South Pacific, and survives a run-in with something called the Throne of Doom in Guatemala. The resulting travel pieces are at once vivid, nerve-wracking, and outrageously funny.
“Tim Cahill [has] the what-the-hell adventuresomeness of a T. E. Lawrence and the humor of a P. J. O’Rourke.” —Condé Nast Traveler
Travel/Adventure/0-679-74929-2
THE ROAD FROM COORAIN
by Jill Ker Conway
A remarkable woman’s exquisitely clear-sighted memoir of growing up Australian: from the vastness of a sheep station in the outback to the stifling propriety of postwar Sydney; from untutored childhood to a life in academia; and from the shelter of a protective family to the lessons of independence and tragedy.
“A small masterpiece of scene, memory … this book [is] the most rewarding journey of all.” —John Kenneth Galbraith
Autobiography/0-679-72436-2
BAD TRIPS
Edited and with an Introduction by Keath Fraser
From Martin Amis in the air to Peter Matthiessen on a mountaintop, some of the best-known writers of our time recount sometimes harrowing and sometimes exhilarating tales of their most memorable misadventures in travel.
“The only aspect of our travels that is guaranteed to hold an audience is disaster.… Nothing is better for survival.” —Martha Gellhorn
A Vintage Original/Travel/Adventure/0-679-72908-9
FALLING OFF THE MAP
SOME LONELY PLACES OF THE WORLD
by Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer voyages from the nostalgic elegance of Argentina to the raffish nonchalance of Australia, documents the cruising rites of Icelandic teenagers, gets interrogated by tipsy Cuban polic
e, and attends a screening of Bhutan’s first feature film. Throughout, he remains both uncannily observant and hilarious.
“[Iyer is the] rightful heir to Jan Morris [and] Paul Theroux.… He writes the kind of lyrical, flowing prose that could make Des Moines sound beguiling.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
Travel/Adventure/0-679-74612-9
RIDING THE WHITE HORSE HOME
A WESTERN FAMILY ALBUM
by Teresa Jordan
The daughter and granddaughter of Wyoming ranchers tells the stories of her forebears—men who saw broken bones as professional credentials and women who coped with physical hardship and killing loneliness. She acquaints us with the lore and science of ranching, and does so with a breathtaking immediacy that recalls the best writing of Wallace Stegner and Gretel Ehrlich.
“A haunting and elegant memoir.” —Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge
Memoir/Travel/0-679-75135-1
BALKAN GHOSTS
A JOURNEY THROUGH HISTORY by Robert D. Kaplan
As Kaplan travels from the breakaway states of Yugoslavia to Romania, Bulgaria, and Greece, he reconstructs the Balkans’ history as a time warp in which ancient passions and hatreds are continually resurrected.
“Powerfully argued … the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date.”
—Boston Globe
History/Current Affairs/Travel/0-679-74981-0
LOOKING FOR OSMAN
ONE MAN’S TRAVELS THROUGH THE PARADOX
OF MODERN TURKEY
by Eric Lawlor
As he traverses Turkey in search of exotic splendor recorded by nineteenth-century romanticists, Eric Lawlor finds instead a modern, professional, sometimes brutal land, with unexpected remnants of the old Turkey to be encountered along the way.