by Bryson, Bill
Nervously I quickened my pace. Dogs don’t like me. It is a simple law of the universe, like gravity. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have never passed a dog that didn’t act as if it thought I was about to help myself to its Pedigree Chum. Dogs that have not moved from the sofa in years will, at the sniff of me passing outside, rise in fury and hurl themselves at shut windows. I have seen tiny dogs, no bigger than a fluffy slipper, jerk little old ladies off their feet and drag them over open ground in a quest to get at my blood and sinew. Every dog on the face of the earth wants me dead.
And now here I was alone in an empty wood, which suddenly seemed very large and lonely, and two big and angry-sounding dogs had me in their sights. As I pushed on, two things became increasingly apparent: I was definitely the target and these dogs were not messing around. They were coming towards me, at some speed. Now the barking said: ‘We are going to have you, boy. You are dead meat. You are small, pulpy pieces.’ You will note the absence of exclamation marks. Their barks were no longer tinged with lust and frenzy. They were statements of cold intent. ‘We know where you are,’ they said. ‘You cannot make it to the edge of the woods. We will be with you shortly. Somebody call forensic.’
Casting worried glances at the foliage, I began to trot and then to run. It was now time to consider what I would do if the dogs burst on to the path. I picked up a rock for defence, then discarded it a few yards further on for a stick that was lying across the path. The stick was ludicrously outsized – it must have been twelve feet long – and so rotten that it fell in half just from being picked up. As I ran, it lost another half, and another, until finally it was no more than a soft spongy stub – it would have been like defending myself with a loaf of bread – so I threw it down and picked up a big jagged rock in each hand, and quickened my pace yet again. The dogs now seemed to be moving parallel to me, as if they couldn’t find a way through, but at a distance of no more than forty or fifty yards. They were furious. My unease expanded, and I began to run a little faster.
In my stumbling haste, I rounded a bend too fast and ran headlong into a giant spider’s web. It fell over me like a collapsing parachute. Ululating in dismay, I tore at the cobweb, but with rocks in my hands only succeeded in banging myself on the forehead. In a small, lucid corner of my brain I remember thinking: ‘This really is very unfair.’ Somewhere else was the thought: ‘You are going to be the first person in history to die in the bush in the middle of a city, you poor, sad schlubb.’ All the rest was icy terror.
And so I trotted along, wretched and whimpering, until I rounded a bend and found, with another small and disbelieving wail, that the path abruptly terminated. Before me stood nothing but impenetrable tangle – a wall of it. I looked around, astounded and appalled. In my panic – doubtless while I was scraping the cobwebs from my brow with the aid of lumps of granite – I had evidently taken a wrong turn. In any case, there was no way forward and nothing behind but a narrow path leading back in the direction of two surging streaks of malice. Glancing around in desperation, I saw with unconfined joy, at the top of a twenty-foot rise, a corner of rotary clothesline. There was a home up there! I had reached the edge of the park, albeit from an unconventional direction. No matter. There was a civilized world up there. Safety! I scrambled up the hill as fast as my plump little pins would carry me – the dogs were very close now – snagging myself on thorns, inhaling cobwebs, straining with every molecule of my being not to become a headline that said: ‘Police find writer’s torso; head still missing.’
At the top of the hill stood a brick wall perhaps six feet high. Grunting extravagantly, I hauled myself on to its flat summit and dropped down on the other side. The transformation was immediate, the relief sublime. I was back in the known world, in someone’s much-loved back garden. There was a set of old swings that didn’t look as if they had been used in some years, flower beds, a lawn leading to a patio. The garden appeared to be fully enclosed by brick wall on three sides and a big comfortable-looking house on the fourth, which I hadn’t quite anticipated. I was trespassing, of course, but there wasn’t any way I was going back into those woods. Part of the view was obscured by a shed or summerhouse. With luck there would be a gate beyond and I could let myself out and slip back into the world undetected. My most immediate concern was that there might be a big mean dog in here as well. Wouldn’t that be richly ironic? With this in mind, I crept cautiously forward.
Now let us change the point of view just for a moment. Forgive me for getting you up, but I need to put you at the window beside the kitchen sink of this tranquil suburban home. You are a pleasant middle-aged homemaker going about your daily business – at this particular moment filling a vase with water to hold some peonies you have just cut from the bed by the drawing-room windows – and you see a man drop over your back wall and begin to move in a low crouch across your back garden. Frozen with fear and a peculiar detached fascination, you are unable to move, but just stand watching as he advances stealthily across the property in a commando posture, with short, frenzied dashes between covering objects, until he is crouched beside a concrete urn at the edge of your patio only about ten feet away. It is then that he notices you staring at him.
‘Oh, hello!’ says the man cheerfully, straightening up and smiling in a way that he thinks looks sincere and ingratiating, but in fact merely suggests someone who has failed to take his medication. Almost at once your thoughts go to a police mugshot you saw in the evening paper earlier in the week pertaining, if you recall, to a breakout at an institution for the criminally insane at Wollongong. ‘Sorry to crash in on you like this,’ the man is saying, ‘but I was desperate. Did you hear all the racket? I thought they were going to kill me.’
He beams foolishly and waits for you to reply, but you say nothing because you are powerless to speak. Your eyes slide over to the open back door. If you both moved for it now, you would arrive together. All kinds of thoughts start to run through your head.
‘I didn’t actually see them,’ the man goes on in a judicious but oddly pumped-up tone, ‘but I know they were after me.’ He looks as if he has been living rough. Smudges of dirt rim his face and one of his trouser legs is torn at the knee. ‘They always go for me,’ he says, earnest now, and puzzled. ‘It’s as if there’s some kind of conspiracy to get me. I can be just walking down the street, you know, minding my own business, and suddenly from out of nowhere they just come for me. It’s very unsettling.’ He shakes his head. ‘Is your gate unlocked?’
You haven’t been listening to any of this because your hand has been moving almost imperceptibly towards the drawer containing the steak knives. As the question dawns on you, you find yourself giving a small, tight, almost involuntary nod.
‘I’ll just let myself out then. Sorry to have disturbed you.’ At the gate he pauses. ‘Take it from me,’ he says, ‘you don’t ever want to go back in those woods alone. Something terrible could happen to you back there. I love your delphiniums by the way.’ He smiles in a way that freezes your marrow, and says: ‘Well, bye then.’
And he is gone.
Six weeks later you put the house on the market.
I
When Australians get hold of a name that suits them they tend to stick with it in a big way. We can blame this unfortunate custom on Lachlan Macquarie, a Scotsman who was governor of the colony in the first part of the nineteenth century, and whose principal achievements were the building of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains, the popularizing of Australia as a name (before him the whole country was indifferently referred to as either New South Wales or Botany Bay) and the world’s first nearly successful attempt to name every object on a continent after himself.
You really cannot move in Australia without bumping into some reminder of his tenure. Run your eye over the map and you will find a Macquarie Harbour, Macquarie Island, Macquarie Marsh, Macquarie River, Macquarie Fields, Macquarie Pass, Macquarie Plains, Lake Macquarie, Port Macquarie, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (a
lookout point over Sydney Harbour), Macquarie’s Point and a Macquarie town. I always imagine him sitting at his desk, poring over maps and charts with a magnifying glass, and calling out from time to time to his first assistant: ‘Hae we no’ got a Macquarie Swamp yet, laddie? And look here at this wee copse. It has nae name. What shall we call it, do ye think?’
And that’s just some of the Macquaries, by the way. Macquarie is also the name of a bank, a university, the national dictionary, a shopping centre, and one of Sydney’s principal streets. That’s not to mention the forty-seven other Roads, Avenues, Groves and Terraces in Sydney that, according to Jan Morris, are named for the man or his family. Nor have we touched on the Lachlan River, Lachlan Valley or any of the other first-name variations that sprang to his tireless mind.
You wouldn’t suppose there would be much left after all that, but one of Macquarie’s successors as governor, Ralph Darling, managed to get his name all over the place too. In Sydney you will find a Darling Harbour, Darling Drive, Darling Island, Darling Point, Darlinghurst, and Darlington. Elsewhere Darling’s modest achievements are remembered in the Darling Downs and Darling Ranges, a slew of additional Darlingtons, and the important Darling River. What isn’t called Darling or Macquarie is generally called Hunter or Murray. It’s awfully confusing.
Even when the names aren’t exactly the same, they are often very similar. There is a Cape York Peninsula in the far north and a Yorke Peninsula in the far south. Two of the leading explorers of the nineteenth century were called Sturt and Stuart and their names are all over the place, too, so that you have constantly to stop and think, generally at busy intersections where an instant decision is required, ‘Now did I want the Sturt Highway or the Stuart Highway?’ Since both highways start at Adelaide and finish at places 3,994 kilometres apart, this can make a difference, believe me.
I was thinking about all this – the confusion of place names and monuments to Lachlan Macquarie – the following morning because I spent much of it in the grip of the first while in pursuit of the second. I was in a rental car, you see, trying to find my way out of the endless, bewildering sprawl of Sydney. According to the local telephone directory, there are 784 suburbs and other named districts in the city, and I believe I passed through every one of them as I sought in vain for a corner of Australia not covered by bungalows. Some neighbourhoods I visited twice, at opposite ends of the morning. For a time I thought about just abandoning the car at the kerb in Parramatta – I rather liked the name and people were beginning to wave to me familiarly – but eventually I shot out of the city, like a spat bug, pleased to find myself on the correct heading for Lithgow, Bathurst and points beyond, and filled with that sense of giddy delight that comes with finding yourself at large in a new and unknown continent.
My intention over the next couple of weeks was to wander through what I think of as Civilized Australia – the lower right-hand corner of the country, extending from Brisbane in the north to Adelaide in the south and west. This area covers perhaps 5 per cent of the nation’s land surface but contains 80 per cent of its people and nearly all its important cities (specifically Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide). In the whole of the vast continent this is pretty much the only part that is conventionally habitable. Because of its curving shape, it is sometimes called the Boomerang Coast, though in fact my interest was largely internal. I was headed in the first instance for Canberra, the nation’s interesting, parklike and curiously much scorned capital; thence I would cross 800 miles of lonely interior to distant Adelaide before finally fetching up, dusty but ever indomitable, in Melbourne, where I was to meet some old friends who would hose me down and take me off for a long-promised tour of the snake-infested, little-visited but gorgeously rewarding Victorian bush. There was much to see along the way. I was very excited.
But first I had to make my way through the Blue Mountains, the scenic and long-impassable hills lying just to Sydney’s west. On approach the Blue Mountains don’t look terribly challenging; they rise to no great height and everywhere wear a softening cloak of green. But in fact they are rent with treacherous gorges and bouldered canyons, some with walls rising sheer hundreds of feet, and that lovely growth proves on closer inspection to be of an unusually tangled and obscuring nature. For the first quarter of a century of European occupation, the Blue Mountains stood as an impenetrable barrier to expansion. Expeditions tried repeatedly to find a way through but were always turned back. Even if progress could be gained through the lacerating undergrowth, it was nearly impossible to maintain one’s bearings amid the wandering gorges. Watkin Tench, a leader of one party, reported with understandable exasperation how he and his men struggled for hours to find a route to the top of one impossibly taxing defile, only to discover when they attained the summit that they were exactly opposite where they expected to be.
Finally, in 1813, three men, Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth and William Lawson, broke through – exhausted, tattered and ‘ill with Bowel Complaints’, as Wentworth glumly noted, then and on any occasion that anyone would listen for the rest of his long life. It had taken them eighteen days, but as they stepped onto the airy heights of Mount York they were rewarded with a view of pastoral splendour never before seen by European eyes. Below them, for as far as the gaze could reach, stretched a sunny, golden Eden, a continent of grass – enough, it seemed, to support a population of millions. Australia would be a mighty country. The news, when they returned to Sydney, was electrifying. In less than two years a road was cut through the wilderness and the westward peopling of Australia had begun.
Today the Great Western Highway, as it is grandly and romantically known, follows almost exactly the route taken by Blaxland and his companions nearly 200 years ago. It certainly feels venerable. The route goes up and through the mountains and for much of the way passes along such confined spaces that there is no room for a big modern road. So the Great Western has the tight bends and unyielding width of a road designed for an age when motorists clapped goggles over their eyes and started their cars with a crank. I had been through here not long before on the Indian Pacific, but the views from the train weren’t good – glimpsed vistas seen through a picket fence of gum trees and then, each time, an abrupt veering away into denser woodland – and anyway I had been preoccupied with exploring the train. So I was eager now to see the mountains up close, in particular the famous, dreamy views from the little town of Katoomba.
Alas, luck was not with me. As I followed the tortuous road up into the distant hills, the windscreen became speckled with drizzle and a chill, swirling fog began to fill the spaces between the coachwood and sassafras trees that loomed up on every side. Very quickly the fog thickened to the density of woodsmoke. I had never been out in such fog. Within minutes, it was like piloting a small plane through cloud. There was a bonnet in front of me, and then just white. It was all I could do to keep the car affixed to its lane – the road was almost preposterously narrow and twisting, and with the visibility so low every sudden curve was received with a whoop of surprise.
At length I reached Katoomba where the fog was, if anything, worse. The town was reduced to spooky shapes that loomed out of the murk from time to time, like frights at a funfair ride. Twice, at no more than two miles an hour, I nearly drove into the backs of parked cars. I have no idea why I bothered but, having come this far, I found my way to a lookout spot called Echo Point, parked and got out. Not surprisingly, I was the only person there. I went and grasped the railing and gazed out, the way you do at a lookout point. Before me there stood nothing but depthless white and that peculiar twitchy stillness that fog brings. To my surprise, from out of the milky vapours there emerged an elderly couple, dapper and doddery and bundled up as if for a long winter. The man walked with a particularly unsteady gait, propped by a cane on one side and his wife on the other.
As they drew level he looked at me in surprise. ‘You won’t see anything today!’ he barked as if I was wasting his time as well as my o
wn. I guessed from the volume that he might be a little deaf. ‘This won’t clear for thirty-six hours.’ More confidingly he added: ‘Depression over the Pacific. Often happens.’ He nodded sagely and joined me in contemplating the nothingness.
His wife gave me a tiny smile that was at once apologetic, long-suffering and a little wistful. ‘It might clear after a bit,’ she speculated hopefully.
He looked at her as if she had just announced an intention to have a shit on the pavement. ‘Clear? It’s never going to clear. There’s a depression over the Pacific.’ He looked for a moment as if he might swipe her with his cane.
Her optimism was not lightly deflected, however. ‘Don’t you remember how it came out all lovely that time at Bunbury?’ she said.
‘Bunbury?’ he replied incredulously. ‘Bunbury? That’s the other side of the country. It’s a different bloody ocean. What are you talking about? You’re mad. You want putting away.’ Suddenly I recognized the accent. He was a Yorkshireman, or at least once had been.
‘It didn’t look like it was going to turn out fine,’ she went on to me, expecting a more sympathetic hearing, ‘and then it did turn out—’
‘It’s a different ocean, woman! Are you deaf as well as mad?’ It was clear that this was, at least in the fundamentals, a conversation that they had been having for years. ‘You get a quite different set of meteorological conditions in the Indian Ocean – quite different. Any fool knows that.’ He was quiet for halfa second, and then said: ‘I thought we were going for a cup of tea.’