Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  ‘Well, g’day, Bruce,’ I stammered uncertainly. ‘I’m Bill.’

  ‘Yes, Bill, we’ve established that,’ he said and dropped my hand abruptly. ‘You’re in room six.’

  I took my key to my room, opened the door and stepped in. The room was, in every tiny particular, from 1958. I don’t mean that it had not been decorated since 1958 or anything remotely disrespectful. I mean that inside that room it was 1958. The walls were panelled in knotty pine. The TV had a UHF dial on it. The toilet seat had been gift-wrapped with a ‘sanitized for your convenience’ wrapper. In a drawer in the bedroom were two complimentary postcards featuring views of the motel and a paper bag into which I was urged, for my further conve- nience, to place unflushable objects. The bag bore a drawing of a lady (to tip us off, presumably, that it was intended for female ‘personal’ things rather than, say, corn cobs or small engine parts). I could not have been happier. I dumped my stuff and walked into town through the baking end-of-day heat. Now I saw the 1950s everywhere. Even the ‘children crossing’ signs in Australia, I noticed, show kids in 1950s attire – a little girl in a party dress, a boy in short trousers.

  Superficially, Young didn’t look terribly much like the towns I had grown up with. The exceptionally wide streets (they love really wide streets in Australian country towns), the red tin roofs, the metal awnings that run like hat brims around every commercial building – all this was indubitably Australian. But in the way it worked, and what it contained, Young was uncannily familiar. This was a place where, when you had an errand to run, you drove into town, not out of it, and parked in an angled slot on Main Street. This alone was enough to hold me transfixed for some minutes. I had forgotten that there was a time when a little parking along Main Street was all a community needed. I walked around in a state of the profoundest admiration. Except for the banks and a supermarket, the businesses were locally owned, with all the peculiarities of taste and presentation that that implies. There were shops here of types I hadn’t seen in years – fix-it shops and little electrical shops, bakeries, cobblers, tea rooms – and sometimes they sold the most extraordinary combinations of goods. At the far end of the main street, I came across one place so exceptional in this respect that it stopped me in my tracks.

  It was a shop that sold pet supplies and pornography. I am quite genuine. I stood back to stare at the sign, then peered through the window and finally stepped inside. It was a smallish shop and I was the only customer. On a raised platform about halfway back sat a man beside a cash register, reading a newspaper. He didn’t say hello or make any acknowledgement, which seemed odd – very un-Australian – until I realized he was being discreet. I imagine most of his customers do what I was doing now: wander around showing an unwonted interest in catnip and flea powders, pausing from time to time to study the labels on canisters of fish flakes and the like, before ending up, entirely by accident, at the back of the shop, in the heavy breathing section. Remarkably, this is what happened to me now. The adult section was partitioned into a little compound, with admission through a wooden gate. As I stood there, the gate made a small electronic buzzing sound – the kind of buzz that is made in office buildings when a door is opened from a remote location – and swung to in a provocative manner. I looked around, surprised. The man was still to all appearances absorbed in his newspaper. He seemed unaware that I was even in his shop, much less on the threshold of porno heaven. I grinned foolishly and thought about approaching him to explain that he had just made a quite understandable but nonetheless comical error – that I, far from being a desperate pervert in need of pictorial nutrition, was in fact a respectable travel writer drawn to his shop by the unusual juxtaposition of its contents. Then we would have a good laugh and possibly strike up a correspondence.

  But then it occurred to me that if I did buy something – I am not suggesting for a moment that I would, but on the other hand I still had nothing for the kids – I probably wouldn’t want my business card pinned to his bulletin board. It also occurred to me that I had a certain duty to find out if there was some unexpected connection between the two strands of his business. Perhaps petting had a whole different meaning in rural Australia. To say nothing of dog fancier. For all I knew the racks beyond the barrier were full of publications with frisky, animalistic titles – Prime Mounts, Whip and Collar, Sheep Dip Frolics. Who could say? Clearly I had a duty to find out, so I resumed my expression of sober perusal and stepped inside.

  I had never actually been in one of these places before – and by that I don’t mean a pet-supply porno parlour. I mean any kind of adult enclosure, and frankly I was shocked. The participants were human, not animal. More than that I am unwilling to specify. It certainly wasn’t 1958 at the back of the pet-food shop in Young. That’s all I’m saying.

  II

  Gratified though I was to find a pornographic pet-supply store in Young (or indeed anywhere), my business there was of a slightly more elevating nature. I had come to see the famous Lambing Flat Museum, which commemorates the town’s days of glory as a gold-mining outpost. It was too late to visit the museum that afternoon, but I presented myself at the front door at 9 a.m. the next morning only to find that the museum didn’t open till ten.

  Never one to waste a living moment, I decided to repair to a town centre café for breakfast and prepare myself with a little background reading. Thus I was to be found ten minutes later sitting in a mostly empty establishment on Young’s main drag, drinking coffee, waiting for eggs and bacon, and delving through a hefty one-volume paperback history of Australia by the noted historian Manning Clark, which I had purchased a few days earlier in Sydney.

  The history of gold in Australia is a lively and generally heart-warming tale. It begins with a fellow named Edward Hargraves, who in 1849 travelled from Sydney to the California goldfields hoping to make his fortune. In two years of digging he found nothing but dirt, but he did notice an uncanny similarity between the gold-bearing terrain of California and the land of New South Wales beyond the Blue Mountains – the countryside I had just been driving through.

  Hastening back to Australia before anyone else was struck by a similar thought, Hargraves began to hunt in the creekbeds around Orange and Bathurst, and very quickly found gold in payable quantities. Within a month of his discovery a thousand people were swarming through the district turning over rocks and banging away with picks. Once they knew what to look for, they began to find gold everywhere. Australia was swimming in the stuff. An Aboriginal farmworker tripped over one lump that yielded nearly eighty pounds of precious ore, an almost inconceivable amount to be found in one place. It was enough to ensure a life of princely splendour – or would have been except that as an Aborigine he wasn’t allowed to keep it. The rock went instead to the property’s owner.

  Scarcely had this rush got under way than gold was found in even more luscious quantities over the border in the newly created colony of Victoria. Australia became seized with a gold fever that made the California rush seem almost pale and indecisive. Cities and towns became visibly depopulated as workers left to seek their fortunes. Shops lost all their clerks. Policemen walked off their posts. Wives came home to find a note on the table and the waggon gone. Before the year was out, it was estimated that half the men in Victoria were digging for gold, and thousands more were pouring into the country from abroad.

  The gold rush transformed Australia’s destiny. Before it, people could scarcely be induced to settle there. Now a stampede rose from every quarter of the globe. In less than a decade, the country took in 600,000 new faces, more than doubling its population. The bulk of that growth was in Victoria, where the richest goldfields were. Melbourne became larger than Sydney and for a time was probably the richest city in the world per head of population. But the real effect of gold was to put an end to transportation. When it was realized in London that transportation was seen as an opportunity rather than a punishment, that convicts desired to be sent to Australia, the notion of keeping the country a p
rison became unsustainable. A few boatloads of convicts were sent to Western Australia until 1868 (they would find gold there as well, in equally gratifying quantities) but essentially the gold rush of the 1850s marked the end of Australia as a concentration camp and its beginning as a nation.

  Despite all the wealth that was to be found, things weren’t always so easy for the diggers. In the hope of giving everyone a fair crack, prospectors were allowed to stake out only very modest claims – an area of just a few square yards – and here was where the problems began. When, in April 1860, gold was found at Lambing Flat, as Young was then known, fortune seekers turned up in quantity. By 1861, 22,000 people, among them 2,000 Chinese, were digging away, each on a plot of land about the size of a large throw rug. Inevitably most weren’t finding much. Many of the miners began to cast resentful glances at the Chinese, who seemed to bear the heat and privations more cheerfully than their European counterparts, and who cooperated in a way that was felt to give them an unfair advantage. Also they seemed to be finding more gold. Also they were Chinese.

  The upshot is that the white diggers decided to go and beat up the Chinese. That would make things much better surely. So in the middle of 1861 a substantial minority of the white miners – somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000, it appears – got together and staged a riot. It was a curiously organized affair. To begin with, the rioters brought in a brass band, which played ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘The Marseillaise’ among other rousing songs deemed suitable for a civil disturbance. They also made and carried a large banner, which has since become something of an icon in Australian history. So, as the band played the kind of tunes normally heard at a Sunday afternoon park concert, the miners moved through the Chinese area beating people up with pickaxe handles or worse, robbing them and setting their tents alight. Then, just to make a day of it, they went on to burn down the courthouse. Afterwards, eleven of the rioters were tried but none was convicted. Obviously not Australia’s proudest moment.

  What was the immediate outcome of all this I can’t tell you. Manning Clark, who is – I just have to say this – a most exasperating historian, mentions that one European miner was killed in the fray, but gives no hint as to how many Chinese died or were injured. Nor does he say what became of them afterwards – whether they were driven permanently from the site or whether things settled down and they returned to work. What is certain is that the Lambing Flat riot led to the adoption of what became known as the White Australia Policy, which essentially forbade the immigration of any non-European people until the 1970s. It would – and I really don’t mean a pun here – colour nearly every aspect of Australian life for over a century.

  The Lambing Flat Museum was a large, old, single-storey brick building on a side street. I was there for the opening of the front door – an event that seemed to involve a great deal of unbolting and fiddling with a set of keys by someone on the inside. I began to suspect that it wasn’t quite as popular or important an institution as I had supposed, for when the door swung open the lady nearly jumped out of her skin – ‘Oh, you gave me such a start!’ she said, chuckling merrily as if I had played a waggish joke on her – which left me with the impression that visitors were perhaps somewhat occasional. Anyway, she seemed glad to have me and, after accepting my $3 admission, urged me to take my time and come straight to her if I had any questions.

  The museum was quite large and filled with the most extraordinary collection of stuff – flat irons, boot lasts, a buggy, old lanterns, odd fragments of machinery. Except for the absence of cobwebs, I could have been in my grandfather’s barn. In a corner of the main room I found the centrepiece of the museum’s collection – the large banner that the rioters carried in 1861. It is known as ‘the roll-up flag’ because neatly embroidered across it are the words: ‘Roll Up. Roll Up. No Chinese.’ In his book A Secret Country, which I had read before coming to Australia, the Australian journalist John Pilger suggests that the Lambing Flat Museum rather glorifies the event and offers nothing in the way of contrition. If that was true when Pilger visited – his book was published in 1991 – it no longer is. The labels give a balanced and thoughtful account of the riots, though again with a curious blankness regarding casualty numbers on either side.

  The museum went on and on, and seemed to contain everything that everyone in Young had ever acquired and no longer wanted – sewing machines, adding machines, rifles, wedding albums, christening gowns. On a table was a large jar filled with small shiny black spheres, thousands of them. I peered at it, trying to figure out what it was.

  ‘Canola seeds,’ said a voice, quite near – so near it made me jump. I turned to find the lady who had let me in.

  ‘Oh! You made me jump,’ I said and she smiled in a way that made me suspect that that had been her intention. Perhaps, it occurred to me, that was how people passed the time in Young.

  ‘Are you finding everything?’ she asked.

  I looked at her with interest. How would I know if I was or not? But I replied: ‘Yes, I am,’ then added politely: ‘It’s very interesting.’

  ‘Yes, there’s a lot of history in Young,’ she agreed, and looked around as if thinking perhaps there was too much.

  My gaze returned to the jar of seeds. ‘Do you grow a lot of canola around here?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ she said simply.

  I considered this and tried to think of something more to say. ‘Well, you’ve got the seeds if you decide to start,’ I observed helpfully.

  ‘Some people call it . . . rape,’ she said, all but whispering the last word and raising her eyebrows significantly.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed in what I believe was a concerned tone.

  ‘I prefer canola.’

  ‘Me, too.’ I don’t know why I said that. I have no position on seed names, however emotive, but it seemed prudent to agree with her.

  Mercifully, just then a bell went – the kind of bell that sounds when someone comes in a shop entrance – and she excused herself. I waited half a dozen beats then followed her out, for I had seen all I needed to and I wanted to get a move on.

  In the front hallway a middle-aged couple were in the process of buying tickets. The space was confined and I had to wait for them to step aside to let me out, and I thanked the white-haired lady as I passed.

  ‘You enjoyed it, did you?’ she asked.

  ‘Very much,’ I lied.

  ‘Here on holiday?’ asked the lady customer, presumably picking up on my accent.

  ‘Yes, I am,’ I lied again.

  ‘How are you enjoying Australia?’

  ‘I love it.’ This was not a lie, but she looked at me doubtfully. ‘Honestly,’ I added.

  Then a rather strange thing – well, I thought it was strange. The female customer placed a hand on my forearm and said, with a touch of real anxiety: ‘I hope everyone is nice to you.’

  I looked at her.

  ‘Of course they will be,’ I said. ‘Australians are always nice.’

  She gave me a look of imploring earnestness. ‘Do you really think so?’ Now don’t get me wrong. Australians are the most wonderful people, but when they grow introspective it’s sometimes a little strange.

  I nodded. ‘Really,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Australians are always nice.’

  ‘Course they are, Maureen!’ barked her husband. ‘Salt of the earth. Now let the poor man go. I’m sure he has places he wants to be.’ He was clearly from the other, heartier school of Australian archetypes – the one that thinks that any bloke not lucky enough to be born in Australia is tragically ill-favoured by fate and probably has a tiny dick as well, poor bastard.

  And he was right, of course – about having places to be, I mean. It was time to move on to Canberra.

  I

  Before Australia’s six colonies federated in 1901, they were, to an almost ludicrous degree, separate. Each issued its own postage stamps, set clocks to its own time, had its own system of taxes and levies. As Geoffrey Blainey notes in A Shorter History of Australia
, a pub owner in Wodonga, in Victoria, who wished to sell beer brewed in Albury, on the opposite bank of the Murray River in New South Wales, paid as much duty as he did on beer shipped from Europe. Clearly this was madness. So in 1891, the six colonies (plus New Zealand, which nearly joined, but later dropped out) met in Sydney to discuss forming a proper nation, to be known as the Commonwealth of Australia. It took some years to iron everything out, but on 1 January 1901 a new nation was declared.

  Because Sydney and Melbourne were so closely matched in terms of pre-eminence, it was agreed in a spirit of compromise to build a new capital somewhere in the bush. Melbourne, meanwhile, would serve as interim capital.

  Years were consumed with squabbles about where the capital should be sited before the selectors eventually settled on an obscure farming community on the edge of the Tidbinbilla Hills in southern New South Wales. It was called Canberra, though the name by then was often anglicized to Canberry. Cold in the winter, blazing hot in the summer, miles from anywhere, it was an unlikely choice of location for a national capital. About 900 square miles of surrounding territory, most of it pastoral and pretty nearly useless, was ceded by New South Wales to form the Australian Capital Territory, a federal zone on the model of America’s District of Columbia.

  So the young nation had a capital. The next challenge was what to call it, and yet more periods of passion and rancour were consumed with settling the matter. King O’Malley, the American-born politician who was a driving force behind federation, wanted to call the new capital Shakespeare. Other suggested names were Myola, (the first syllables of the state capitals), Opossum, Gladstone, Thirstyville, Kookaburra, Cromwell and the ringingly inane Victoria Defendera Defender. In the end, Canberra won more or less by default. At an official ceremony to mark the decision, the wife of the Governor-General stood up before a gathering of dignitaries and, ‘in a querulous voice’, announced that the winning name was the one that had been in use all along. Unfortunately, no one had thought to brief her, and she mispronounced it, placing the accent emphatically on the middle syllable rather than lightly on the first. Never mind. The young nation had a site for a capital and a name for a capital, and it had taken them just eleven years since union to get there. At this blistering pace, all being well, they might get a city going within half a century or so. In fact, it would take rather longer.