The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

Yes.

  “What do I know about Australia?” I said.

  Melbourne, settled and social, looked especially prosperous in bad weather, its buildings darkened by rain and its streets shining with the reflections of busy crowds. There, as elsewhere, the papers were full of harsh self-analysis. The Australian image abroad is one of swaggering confidence and contented good humor, but in Australia itself there is nagging self-criticism, a constant theme of What’s wrong with us? The visitor is frequently asked for a frank assessment of the country. If you praise it they jeer and call you a poof or a gussie (their language abounds with abusive expressions for gays: quince, queen, spurge, pood, sonk, and Are you Arthur or Martha? are just a few). What most Australians seem to want in the way of a response is something funny and familiar, such as You bloody diggers are rough as pig’s breakfast, but that’s what I like.

  I did my lunchtime spiel for 500 people in Melbourne’s Regent Ballroom, as they tucked into their meal of lamb and potatoes. I wondered whether a crowd this size would have turned up in an American city to hear me stammer. This was an odd crowd, my Australian readers, ranging from very elderly fiction buffs and railway enthusiasts, who invited me to tea, or to trips on train junkets, to furtive youths with tobacco-stained fingers and tattoos, who leaned over, reeking of dope, and proffering dog-eared paperbacks. Two of these younger readers were musicians, who handed me an invitation to their concert that night.

  Dan Loneway and the Fellow Travellers, debut gig and record launch at Dan’s Hashish Centre – serving the bestNepalese Hash and Ganja – Wed. Free.

  “I love to see young people reading,” someone said, as Dan Loneway packed his books into his Balinese shoulder-bag and glided out on a cloud of smoke.

  “I seem to have a very wide spectrum of readers in this country,” I said.

  When it came time to head for Sydney there was an airline pilots’ strike, and no planes were flying.

  “This strike is shocking,” a man said to me. “This place is ridiculous. We’re going down the gurgler.”

  “You’re the great railway traveler,” a reader told me.

  “You should have taken the Indian-Pacific from Perth to Melbourne across the Nullabor Plain. This is your chance to take the train to Sydney.”

  I had two objections. One, I had vowed that I would not board a train in the Pacific. Two, I was in a hurry to begin my real trip, going walkabout in Woop Woop and paddling beyond. I was still reading Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages and was playing with the idea of going to New Guinea after Australia.

  But I kept careful notes on the people who interviewed me, and I asked them questions, too. I had the idea of writing a little portrait about everyone who was writing about me. Theroux has a rather strange taste in leisurewear, an English interviewer, in a stained tie and a checked shirt and a rumpled sweater, had written, filling me with an urge to have the last word. I wondered what these frank Aussies would say about me and my clothes. Several of them had asked what these two canvas bags in my room were, and when I said, “A boat,” they simply made ambiguous noises that put me on my guard. Perhaps this publicity-tour prologue was also part of my trip?

  When I finally decided to take the train I was warned against it and urged to take another instead – “a lovely old atmospheric train.” Well, I didn’t say so, but they are frequently the worst ones. I didn’t want atmosphere, I wanted a train with privacy and comfort, and when I boarded this sleeper I was happier than I had been since arriving in Australia.

  This train had the sort of dining car that had just about disappeared in the rest of the First World: tables, chairs, clinking cutlery, and servers hurrying back and forth with platters of food on tin trays. The menu of the day was tomato soup followed by grilled flounder and two vegetables, and stodgy pudding for afters. No one ever ate this satisfyingly on an airplane. My waitress was Lydia, a small brisk woman with a pencil jammed into her hair, who had recently arrived in Australia from Poland, but was already using Aussie vowels and converted the simple word now into a triphthong. She intended to stay for ever, she said.

  And at the next table a man was offering a bag of candy to his son and saying, “Want some jolly boins?”

  Mark Twain took this train in 1896, on his lecture tour through Australia. He remarked on the good berths and the bad coffee (he suggested improving it by adding sheep-dip). He spent much of his trip staring out of the window, trying to get a glimpse of a kangaroo or an Aboriginal. At about the same time, Dame Nellie (“Sing ’em muck”) Melba was a frequent traveler on this line, going back and forth for concert engagements. She took her last trip, too, as she was carried in her coffin on this train from Sydney to Melbourne.

  It had always been a busy line. Before the promotion of Canberra to the nation’s capital, Melbourne was the administrative center, and I was told by older Australian civil servants that a great deal of government business was transacted on these railway carriages. One man told me that just a few years ago prostitutes worked these coaches, turning tricks in the sleeping-cars – the whole train heaved with bag-swinging chippies, while their look-out men – called gigs and cockatoos – warned them of the approach of the train conductors.

  So I went head-first, horizontally, 500 miles in my swaying berth, through Euroa, Benalla, Wangaratta and Wodonga, and across Father Millawah, the Murray River, to Wagga Wagga, Junee, Cootamundra, Yass, Goulburn and Mittagong. Towards dawn I lifted my windowshade and looked at the bush – the stringybarks and the blue gums and the mulga trees at the edge of pebbly yellow gullies. The land was stony and eroded, and when the train slowed down, the bungalows began, and the first large settlements and suburbs – Campbelltown with its jammed level-crossing and inevitably a sign saying Trusses, and then Liverpool, Lidcomb, Homebush, and finally, Sydney.

  “Mr Theroux, I am your butler.”

  This was the Presidential Suite of the Regent, thirty-eight floors above the Sydney Opera House, facing east to the mouth of the magnificent harbor and beyond to the Tasman Sea. My butler was an upright man, with a hint of Oz in his middle-European accent, and he wore a white bow tie, a white bib-like dickey, a black tailcoat and striped trousers. He had delivered me my luggage and was holding my collapsible boat, a bag in each hand.

  “May I unpack your bags and put your things away?”

  My camping clothes for Woop Woop, my kayaking shorts and T-shirts, my sleeping-bag, my water bag, my tent, my cookstove and pots, my two-part paddle, first-aid kit, compass, bilge pump, insect repellent, and assorted tools.

  “Shall I start with these?”

  He heaved my kayak bags over to the closet, and began fumbling with the knots on the drawstrings.

  I said, “That’s not necessary.”

  He straightened himself and said politely, “I am at your service. If there is anything you need, just ring eight.”

  There was a bottle of Dom Perignon in an ice bucket with a pleasant note from the general manager. In the living-room – I had four rooms altogether – there were baskets of fruit and more flowers. There was a drinks trolly, with bottles of scotch, bourbon, port, vodka, sherry, gin, each wearing an identifying silver necklace. A bowl of candy, another of nuts. And the best touch of all, a powerful telescope.

  I trained the telescope onto Sydney Harbor, conning east to the Pacific. It was the most beautiful harbor I had ever seen in my life, long and wide, spangled with sunshine, and filled with coves and bays. I focused on the little white tiles on the Opera House roof, and farther to Port Jackson and the ferries and sailboats and the mansions and tower blocks on the cliffs of the gorgeous bays, the breakers smashing against the low black headland at the harbor mouth at North Head. Down below me at Circular Quay, where the ferries docked, commuters mingled with guitarists and conjurers, and an Aboriginal sat with his knees together on a bench on Sydney Cove, nearer the Harbor Bridge. I toyed with the frivolous idea of writing a detailed profile of Sydney and its people by sitting here in this pent-house drinking champagne and l
ooking at the city through this telescope.

  The butler came and went, taking away laundry to be done, bringing me food and faxes, and rehearsing his Jeeves role for the benefit of the reporters.

  “I was in this room once before,” a woman said, “to do Lord Lichfield.”

  And there were the standard questions: “Doesn’t your wife miss you?” one said, and another, “I’d like to ask you about the novel you wrote about yourself–”

  I spoke at the literary luncheon, another ballroom, another meal, another head table, but in spite of all the good-will, I wished with all my heart that I could simply sit there and eat and listen to someone else. By that time I had read enough of Lawrence’s Kangaroo to discuss its presumptions about Australia, but the only questions people asked me were about the railway trains.

  “I look like you,” a man said afterward at the book-signing.

  I said, “Do you?”

  He was middle height and rather Latin-looking, with a beaky nose, scraped-down hair and tinted glasses, and he frowned at me.

  “I very seldom read books,” he went on, “but about fifteen years ago when I looked at your picture on your book jacket and realized that I resembled you I bought the book. As a result I have read every one of your books. And I still look like you, don’t you think so?”

  I said, “You’re much better looking.”

  He said, “May I take you to lunch?”

  I had other plans, I said, but that was the first of many invitations, often scribbled on a card, or in a note that was pressed into my hand –

  – Come to dinner …

  – My wife and I would like to have you round for drinks …

  – If you’re at a loose end please call me …

  – I’d like to show you Sydney …

  – May I interview you this weekend? It might be fun …

  – You are the funniest man I’ve ever read. Please don’t waste your comic gift. Write a book about Australia …

  They were eagerly, spontaneously hospitable. But I kept to myself. I bought more camping equipment. I went to concerts and an opera, The Pearl Fishers, at the Opera House; and I drank champagne and searched the city through my telescope. You’re the funniest man … Now and then I thought about my life, about cancer and divorce, and became maudlin.

  The room was my refuge. Of course, my first experience of such luxury – isn’t everyone’s? – was to wallow in it and wolf it all, gobble the fruit and the chocolate mints, drink the champagne, unwrap the soap, smell the flowers, take long bubble baths with the cobalt-colored bath crystals. But after a day or so, I became abstemious. I woke early and ordered porridge and green tea and a grapefruit. I spent the day doing publicity (“How long does it take to write a book?”) and when I returned to the security of this penthouse I read Malinowski and studied maps of the Trobriands. I annotated travel guides to the Solomon Islands, and Tonga and Vanuatu. How odd, I thought, to be reading about the vast and dangerous estuarine crocodiles of Guadalcanal and North Queensland, and the orgiastic yam harvest in Kiriwina, as I sat here in the Lord Lichfield suite sipping champagne.

  One night I was at my telescope when the phone rang. “It’s a call from London,” the operator said.

  I said hello but there was no greeting or salutation from the other end.

  “I just got your medical report.” It was a familiar voice, distorted by distance and emotion. “You don’t have cancer.”

  “Thank God for that.”

  The contours of the harbor and every object in it collapsed before my squinting eye and the odd liquefied light of my tears.

  A button came off my shirt, and I sewed it on myself, rather liking the thought of such a mundane chore amid all this luxury. At eight the maids came to turn down the bed. They placed a bottle of cognac and a snifter and a bottle of mineral water on the bedside table. I drank the water. I read until I fell asleep, and I woke, exhausted by my dreams.

  With breakfast, the butler brought me messages on a silver salver.

  – If you’re at a loose end, please call . ..

  – May I take you hacking? My horse-farm is not far . ..

  – My husband urged me to get in touch with you . ..

  But I was happy with my telescope, and never went nearer any of these people. One day I went out, past the swimming-pool and the five-star restaurant, and rented a beach chair at Bondi Beach, and I ate fish and chips among the surfers hanging five on the screamers and greenies and watched by lounging surf bunnies baking their bare tits before the startled gaze of Japanese tourists, who gave a convincing demonstration of never having seen such tits before, crowding out of their pausing tour bus, and madly snapping pictures of them with all the concentration they would have given photographing prize jumbo melons. Elsewhere on the beach, there were weightlifters and big hairy men and sufferers from melanoma. Bondi, something of a cliché in Australia, is a lovely beach. The people who go there praise it and defend it; the ones who stay away claim that it is unsafe and dirty, and that if the undertow doesn’t yank you under for ever, you’ll gag on the raw sewage.

  I was happy to return to my luxury suite in this pent-house with my camping equipment. But deeper than the sense of isolation I felt in all this luxury was a feeling of vulnerability, verging on paranoia, every time I left it. I couldn’t wait to get back to the paintings, the sofas, the champagne and the cool fruit, and my boat. I liked this comfort and quiet solitude. Sluttish comfort is one of the most corrupting things of all, and it easily becomes a dependency, even an addiction. At first I had wanted to share it; and then I saw it as my refuge and wished to keep it for myself; finally, I regarded it as a necessity, and I dreaded losing it. After even a short experience of luxury, anything less is like punishment.

  Obviously it was time to leave.

  In Brisbane, a celebrated trial, “The Vampire Murderers,” had riveted the city’s attention. “Vampire” was not newspaper hyperbole. Witnesses in Brissie testified on oath that three youthful lesbians who spent their evenings sucking blood from each other’s arms had grown tired of this tame domesticity and gone out, abducted a man and killed him by stabbing him in the back. His throat had been slashed and one of the women had drunk his blood. “I have fed on him,” one of the women said – she was grossly fat and had piggy cheeks and a crewcut and was eventually convicted of the crime.

  The riverside city was large and sunny, but my impression was of a great sadness in this sunshine and heat. Or was it me? The interviewers were more aggressive and blunter.

  “I wonder about all these crazy people you meet,” one reporter said. “They seem a little improbable.”

  “More improbable than that book that just appeared here, called Australian Thinkers?” I said. “More improbable than your monthly magazine, Australian Gourmet? More improbable than your vampires?”

  He squinted at me as though I had unmercifully bowled him a googly. It was odd. They could be so thin-skinned. The very mention of a funny name like Wagga Wagga could make them cross.

  A note of archness had crept into some women’s questions.

  “In what ways are you different from the main character in your novel?”

  “He is a sexual athlete,” I said.

  “And how do you know you’re not?” the woman said, tossing her hair.

  Several of them asked me, “What does your wife think of your book?”

  Exercising restraint, I asked, “Is that a literary question?”

  My throat ached from all this talk. My eyeballs felt swollen and boiled. The interviewers went on twitting me. I sat in empty studios that smelled of musty rugs, broadcasting my opinions to Hobart, Tasmania. My room boy called me “Mr Thorax.” When I confided to a journalist that I had no intention of writing a book about Australia, but only wanted to go walkabout in Woop Woop, and paddle my collapsible boat in North Queensland, she said, “If the sharks don’t get you, the crocodiles will.”

  Everyone in a jeering, mocking, we-know-better way warned
me of the dangers in the outback – of the snakes and lizards, of the biting flies, of the heat and the blinding sun and the thorns and the terrible roads. The coast was much worse, they said: there were sea-snakes, and sharks, there were sea-wasps, poisonous box-jellyfish, venomous stonefish, and seagoing crocodiles fourteen feet long. They warned me of the plants and the wildlife.

  There is a great fear of natural things in Australia. But no one mentions the drunks, who are everywhere and are a great deal more dangerous.

  There were many croc stories in Cairns, my last city in white Australia, but there were even more drunks, and drunks gave me the most persistent and colorful warnings.

  “You have to carry a gun and shoot their nose off,” one man said. “Bullets won’t penetrate their thick skin.”

  “If you see one, shout at it,” another said.

  “Once they submerge you you’re dead,” yet another said. “They can’t swallow you. They come up under you and whack you with their tail, and then they hold you under in their jaws and drown you. When your body begins to rot they eat you.”

  The more people warned me, the more determined I was to set off – first into the fly-blown outback K remembered from Patrick White’s Voss, and the Nic Roeg movie Walk-about, and then up to North Queensland, beyond Cook-town, to a part of the coast that was nearer New Guinea than Sydney, a part of the map which no one had written about.

  For some people Cairns was the outback. It was not, but it was on the very edge, and it was a pleasant place. It seemed to me an overgrown town on a muddy estuary. It had become prosperous because of its wonderful weather and its boat charters to the Great Barrier Reef for scuba divers and snorkelers. Most of its signs were bilingual, English and Japanese. It had the greatest concentration of shops selling T-shirts and opals of any I saw in Australia.

  From the publicity point of view, this was my last stand. I was interviewed by seventeen-year-old Sandra from the Cairns Post. She was nervous, she said she had not read anything I had written, she was serving what she called her cadet-ship at the paper, she said, “I’ve never interviewed anyone before.” She was stumped for questions, so we talked about her family. She said she loved her parents, her new baby sister, her house in Cairns, her bedroom with her posters and her records. She said, “I’d hate to go to Brisbane to work. Then I’d have to leave home.” I decided not to disillusion her with stories of my traveling. Later, I gave what I felt was a spirited talk at another literary lunch, and when I described how the Chinese government frequently sentenced thieves, arsonists and racketeers to death an older woman in the front row grinned and burst into applause.