Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  ‘Now say you get stuck in sand and need to increase your offside differential,’ Len was saying on one of the intermittent occasions I dipped into the lecture. ‘You move this handle forward like so, select a hyperdrive ratio of between twelve and twenty-seven, elevate the ailerons and engage both thrust motors – but not the left-hand one. That’s very important. And whatever you do, watch your gauges and don’t go over one hundred and eighty degrees on the combustulator, or the whole thing’ll blow and you’ll be stuck out there.’

  He jumped out and handed us the keys. ‘There’s twenty-five litres of spare diesel in the back. That should be more than enough if you go wrong.’ He looked at us again, more carefully. ‘I’ll get you some more diesel,’ he decided.

  ‘Did you understand any of that?’ I whispered to Trevor when he had gone.

  ‘Not past the putting the key in the ignition part.’

  I called to Len: ‘What happens if we get stuck or lost?’

  ‘Why, you die of course!’ Actually, he didn’t say that, but that’s what I was thinking. I had been reading accounts of people who had been lost or stranded in the outback, like the explorer Ernest Giles who spent days wandering waterless and half dead before coming fortuitously on a baby wallaby that had tumbled from its mother’s pouch. ‘I pounced upon it,’ Giles related in his memoirs, ‘and ate it, living, raw, dying – fur, skin, bones, skull and all.’ And this was one of the happier stories. Believe me, you don’t want to get lost in the outback.

  I began to feel a tremor of foreboding – a feeling not lightened when Sonja gave a cry of delight at the sight of a spider by our feet and said: ‘Hey, look, a redback!’ A red-back, if you don’t know already, is death on eight legs. As Trevor and I whimperingly tried to climb into each other’s arms, she snatched it up and held it out to us on the tip of a finger.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she giggled. ‘It’s dead.’

  We peered cautiously at the little object on her fingertip, a telltale red hourglass shape on its shiny back. It seemed unlikely that something so small could deliver instant agony, but make no mistake, a single nip from a redback’s malicious jaws can result within minutes in ‘frenzied twitching, a profuse flow of body fluids and, in the absence of prompt medical attention, possible death’. Or so the literature reports.

  ‘You probably won’t see any redbacks out there,’ Sonja reassured us. ‘Snakes are much more of a problem.’

  This intelligence was received with four raised eyebrows and expressions that said: ‘Go on.’

  She nodded. ‘Common brown, western puff pastry, yellow-backed lockjaw, eastern groin groper, dodge viper . . .’ I don’t remember what she said exactly, but it was a long list. ‘But don’t worry,’ she continued. ‘Most snakes don’t want to hurt you. If you’re out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes.’

  This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I had ever been given.

  Our extra diesel loaded, we climbed aboard and, with a grinding of gears, a couple of bronco lurches and a lively but inadvertent salute of windscreen wipers, took to the open road. Our instructions were to drive to Menindee, 110 kilometres to the east, where we would be met by a man named Steve Garland. In the event, the drive to Menindee was something of an anticlimax. The landscape was shimmering hot and gorgeously forbidding, and we were gratified to see our first willy-willy, a column of rotating dust perhaps a hundred feet high moving across the endless plains to our left. But this was as close to adventure as we got. The road was newly paved and relatively well travelled. While Trevor stopped to take pictures, I counted four cars pass. Had we broken down, we wouldn’t have been stranded more than a few minutes.

  Menindee was a modest hamlet on the Darling River: a couple of streets of sun-baked bungalows, a petrol station, two shops, the Burke and Wills Motel (named for a pair of nineteenth-century explorers who inevitably came a cropper in the unforgiving outback) and the semi-famous Maidens Hotel, where in 1860 the aforementioned Burke and Wills spent their last night in civilization before meeting their unhappy fate in the barren void to the north.

  We met Steve Garland at the motel and, to celebrate our safe arrival and recent discovery of fifth gear, crossed the road to Maidens and joined the noisy hubbub within. Maidens’ long bar was lined from end to end with sun-leathered men in shorts and sweat-stained muscle shirts and wide-brimmed hats. It was like stepping into a Paul Hogan movie. This was more like it.

  ‘So which window do they eject the bodies through?’ I asked the amiable Steve when we were seated, thinking that Trevor would probably like to set up his equipment for a shot at chucking-out time.

  ‘Oh, it’s not like that here,’ he said. ‘Things aren’t as wild in the outback as people think. It’s pretty civilized really.’ He looked around with what was clearly real fondness, and exchanged hellos with a couple of dusty-looking characters.

  Garland was a professional photographer in Sydney until his partner, Lisa Menke, was appointed chief warden of Kinchega National Park up the road. He took a job as the regional tourism and development officer. His territory covered 26,000 square miles, an area half the size of England but with a population of just 2,500. His challenge was to persuade dubious locals that there are people in the world prepared to pay good money to holiday in a place that is vast, dry, empty, featureless and ungodly hot. The other part of his challenge was to find such people.

  Between the merciless sun and the isolation, outback people are not always the most gifted of communicators. We had heard of one shopkeeper who, upon being asked by a smiling visitor from Sydney where the fish were biting, stared at the man incredulously for a long moment and replied: ‘In the fucking river, mate, where do you think?’

  Garland only grinned when I put the story to him, but conceded that there was a certain occasional element of challenge involved in getting the locals to see the possibilities inherent in tourism.

  He asked us how our drive had been.

  I told him that I had expected it to be a little more harsh.

  ‘Wait till tomorrow,’ he said.

  He was right. In the morning we set off in mini convoy, Steve and his partner Lisa in one car, Trevor and I in the other, for White Cliffs, an old opal-mining community 250 kilometres to the north. Half a mile outside Menindee the asphalt ended and the surface gave way to a hard earthen road full of potholes, ruts and cement-hard corrugations, as jarring as driving over railway sleepers.

  We jounced along for hours, raising enormous clouds of red dust in our wake, through a landscape brilliantly hot and empty, over tablelands flecked with low saltbush and spiky spinifex, the odd turpentine bush and weary-looking eucalypt. Here and there along the roadside were the corpses of kangaroos and the occasional basking goanna, a large and ugly type of monitor lizard. Goodness knows how any living things survive in that heat and aridity. There are creekbeds out there that haven’t seen water in fifteen years.

  The supreme emptiness of Australia, the galling uselessness of such a mass of land, was something it took the country’s European settlers a longtime to adjust to. Several of the earliest explorers were so convinced that they would encounter mighty river systems, or even an inland sea, that they took boats with them. Thomas Mitchell, who explored vast tracts of western New South Wales and northern Victoria in the 1830s, dragged two wooden skiffs over 3,000 miles of arid scrub without once getting them wet, but refused to the last to give up on them. ‘Although the boats and their carriage had been of late a great hindrance to us,’ he wrote with a touch of understatement after his third expedition, ‘I was very unwilling to abandon such useful appendages to an exploring party.’

  Reading accounts of early forays, it is clear that the first explorers were often ludicrously out of their depths. In 1802, in one of the earliest expeditions, Lieutenant Francis Barrallier described a temperature of 82.5 degrees F. as ‘suffocating’. We can reasonably assume that he was recently arrived in the country. Hi
s men tried for days without success to hunt kangaroos before it occurred to them that they might stalk the creatures more effectively if they first removed their bright red jackets. In seven weeks they covered just 130 miles, an average of about one and a half miles a day.

  In expedition after expedition the leaders seemed wilfully, almost comically, unable to provision themselves sensibly. In 1817, John Oxley, the surveyor-general, led a five-month expedition to explore the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers, and took only 100 rounds of ammunition – less than one shot a day from a single gun – and hardly any spare horseshoes or nails. The incompetence of the early explorers was a matter of abiding fascination for the Aborigines, who often came to watch. ‘Our perplexities afforded them an inexhaustible fund of merriment and derision,’ wrote one chronicler glumly.

  It was into this tradition of haplessness that Burke and Wills improvidently stepped in 1860. They are far and away the most famous of Australian explorers, which is perhaps a little curious since their expedition accomplished almost nothing, cost a fortune and ended in tragedy.

  Their assignment was straightforward: to find a route from the south coast at Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the far north. Melbourne, at that time much larger than Sydney, was one of the most important cities in the British Empire, and yet one of the most isolated. To get a message to London and receive a reply took a third of a year, sometimes more. In the 1850s, the Philosophical Institute of Victoria decided to promote an expedition to find a way through the ‘ghastly blank’, as the interior was poetically known, which would allow the establishment of a telegraph line to connect Australia first to the East Indies and then onward to the world.

  They chose as leader an Irish police officer named Robert O’Hara Burke, who had never seen real outback, was famous for his ability to get lost even in inhabited areas, and knew nothing of exploration or science. The surveyor was a young English doctor named William John Wills, whose principal qualifications seem to have been a respectable background and a willingness to go. A notable plus was that they both had outstanding facial hair.

  Although by this time expeditions into the interior were hardly a novelty, this one particularly caught the popular imagination. Tens of thousands of people lined the route out of Melbourne when, on 19 August 1860, the Great Northern Exploration Expedition set off. The party was so immense and unwieldy that it took from early morning until 4 p.m. just to get it moving. Among the items Burke had deemed necessary for the expedition were a Chinese gong, a stationery cabinet, a heavy wooden table with matching stools, and grooming equipment, in the words of the historian Glen McLaren, ‘of sufficient quality to prepare and present his horses and camels for an Agricultural Society show’.

  Almost at once the men began to squabble. Within days, six of the party had resigned, and the road to Menindee was littered with provisions they decided they didn’t need, including 1,500 pounds (let me just repeat that: 1,500 pounds) of sugar. They did almost everything wrong. Against advice, they timed the trip so that they would do most of the hardest travelling at the height of summer.

  With such a burden, it took them almost two months to traverse the 400 miles of well-trodden track to Menindee; a letter from Melbourne normally covered the same ground in two weeks. At Menindee, they availed themselves of the modest comforts of Maidens Hotel, rested their horses and reorganized their provisions, and on 19 October set off into a blank ghastlier than they could ever have imagined. Ahead of them lay 1,200 miles of murderous ground. It was the last time that anyone in the outside world would see Burke and Wills alive.

  Progress through the desert was difficult and slow. By December, when they arrived at a place called Cooper’s Creek, just over the Queensland border, they had progressed only 400 miles. In exasperation Burke decided to take three men – Wills, Charles Gray and John King – and make a dash for the gulf. By travelling light he calculated that he could be there and back in two months. He left four men to maintain the base camp, with instructions to wait three months for them in case they were delayed.

  The going was much tougher than they had expected. Daytime temperatures regularly rose to over 140 degrees F. It took them two months rather than one to cross the interior, and their arrival, when at last it came, was something of an anticlimax: a belt of mangroves along the shore kept them from reaching, or even seeing, the sea. Still, they had successfully completed the first crossing of the continent. Unfortunately, they had also eaten two-thirds of their supplies.

  The upshot is that they ran out of food on the return trip and nearly starved. To their consternation, Charles Gray, the fittest of the party, abruptly dropped dead one day. Ragged and half delirious, the three remaining men pushed on. Finally, on the evening of 21 April 1861, they stumbled into base camp to discover that the men they had left behind, after waiting four months, had departed only that day. On a coolibah tree was carved the message:

  DIG

  3 FT. N.W.

  APR. 21 1861

  They dug and found some meagre rations and a message telling them what was already painfully evident – that the base party had given up and departed. Desolate and exhausted, they ate and turned in. In the morning they wrote a message announcing their safe return and carefully buried it in the cache – so carefully, in fact, that when a member of the base party returned that day to have one last look, he had no way of telling that they had made it back and had now gone again. Had he known, he would have found them not far away, plodding over rocky ground in the impossible hope of reaching a police outpost 150 miles away at a place called Mount Hopeless.

  Burke and Wills died in the desert, far short of Mount Hopeless. King was saved by Aborigines, who nursed him for two months until he was rescued by a search party.

  Back in Melbourne, meanwhile, everyone was still awaiting a triumphal return of the heroic band, so news of the fiasco struck like a thunderbolt. ‘The entire company of explorers has been dissipated out of being,’ the Age reported with frank astonishment. ‘Some are dead, some are on their way back, one has come to Melbourne, and another has made his way to Adelaide . . . The whole expedition appears to have been one prolonged blunder throughout.’

  When the final tally was taken, the cost of the entire undertaking, including the search to recover Burke’s and Wills’ bodies, came to almost £60,000, more than Stanley had spent in Africa to achieve far more.

  * * *

  Even now, the emptiness of so much of Australia is startling. The landscape we passed through was officially only ‘semi-desert’, but it was as barren an expanse as I had ever seen. Every twenty or twenty-five kilometres there would be a dirt track and a lonely mailbox signalling an unseen sheep or cattle station. Once a light truck flew past in a bouncing hell-for-leather fashion, spraying us with gravelly dinks and a coating of red dust, but the only other lively thing was the endless shaking flubbity-dubbing of the axles over the corduroy road. By the time we reached White Cliffs, in mid-afternoon, we felt as if we had spent the day in a cement mixer.

  Seeing it today, it is all but impossible to believe that White Cliffs, a small blotch of habitations under a hard clear sky, was once a boom town, with a population of nearly 4,500, a hospital, a newspaper, a library and a busy core of general stores, hotels, restaurants, brothels and gaming houses. Today central White Cliffs consists of a pub, a launderette, an opal shop, and a grocery/café/petrol station. The permanent population is about eighty. They exist in a listless world of heat and dust. If you were looking for people with the tolerance and fortitude to colonize Mars this would be the place to come.

  Because of the heat, most houses in town are burrowed into the faces of the two bleached hills from which the town takes its name. The most ambitious of these dwellings, and the principal magnet for the relatively few tourists who venture this far, is the Dug-Out Underground Motel, a twenty-six-room complex cut deep into the rocks on the side of Smith’s Hill. Wandering through its network of rocky tunnels was like stepping into an early James Bon
d movie, into one of those subterranean complexes where the loyal minions of SMERSH are preparing to take over the world by melting Antarctica or hijacking the White House with the aid of a giant magnet. The attraction of burrowing into the hillside is immediately evident when you step inside – a constant year-round temperature of 67 degrees. The rooms were very nice and quite normal except that the walls and ceilings were cavelike and windowless. When the lights were off, the darkness and silence were total.

  I don’t know how much money you would have to give me to persuade me to settle in White Cliffs – something in the low zillions, I suppose – but that evening as we sat on the motel’s lofty garden terrace with Leon Hornby, the proprietor, drinking beer and watching the evening slink in, I realized that my fee might be marginally negotiable. I was about to ask Leon – a city man by birth and, I would have guessed, inclination – what possessed him and his pleasant wife Marge to stay in this godforsaken outpost where even a run to the supermarket means a six-hour round trip over a rutted dirt road, but before I could speak a remarkable thing happened. Kangaroos hopped into the expansive foreground and began grazing picturesquely, and the sun plonked onto the horizon, like a stage prop lowered on a wire, and the towering western skies before us spread with colour in a hundred layered shades – glowing pinks, deep purples, careless banners of pure crimson – all on a scale that you cannot imagine, for there was not a scrap of intrusion in the forty miles of visible desert that lay between us and the far horizon. It was the most extraordinarily vivid sunset I believe I have ever seen.

  ‘I came up here thirty years ago to build reservoirs on the sheep stations,’ Leon said, as if anticipating my question, ‘and never expected to stay, but somehow the place gets to you. I’d find these sunsets hard to give up, for one thing.’

  I nodded as he got up to answer a ringing phone.