Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  And so, radiant with cholesterol and contentment, I returned to the lonesome road. Beyond Hay, the landscape was even more impossibly flat, brown, empty and dull. The monumental emptiness of Australia is not easy to convey. It is far and away the most thinly peopled of nations. In Britain the average population density is 632 people per square mile; in the United States the average is 76; across the world as a whole it is 117. (And, just for interest, in Macau, the record holder, it is a decidedly snug 69,000 people per square mile.) The Australian average, by contrast, is six people per square mile. But even that modest figure is wildly skewed because Australians overwhelmingly live in a few clustered spots along the coast and leave the rest of the country undisturbed. Indeed, the proportion of people in Australia who live in urban areas is, at 86 per cent, about as high as in Holland and nearly as high as in Hong Kong. Out here if you found six people occupying the same square mile it would be either a family reunion or an Aum Shinrikyo planning session.

  From time to time I passed through long miles of mallee scrub – low shrubs just bushy enough and high enough to strangle any view – and very occasionally, in the open plains, I would spy a low line of vivid green on the right-hand horizon, which I presumed marked an irrigated zone along the Murrumbidgee. Otherwise nothing. Just hard earth that strained to support a little dry grass and the odd thorny acacia or bent eucalypt.

  It wasn’t always so. Although inland Australia has never been exactly verdant, much of the marginal land once experienced periods of relative lushness, sometimes lasting years, occasionally lasting decades, and it enjoyed a natural resiliency that let it spring back after droughts. Then in 1859 a man named Thomas Austin, a landowner in Winchelsea, Victoria, a little south of where I was now, made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. It is hardly a novel observation that rabbits breed with a certain keenness. Within a couple of years they had entirely overrun Austin’s property and were spreading into neighbouring districts. Fifty million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator or parasite able even to recognize rabbits, much less dine off them, and so they proliferated amazingly.

  Collectively their appetite was essentially insatiable. By 1880, two million acres of Victoria had been picked clean. Soon they were pushing into South Australia and New South Wales, advancing over the landscape at a rate of seventy-five miles per year. Until the rabbits came, much of the countryside where I was driving now was characterized by lush groves of emu bush, a shrub that grew to a height of about seven feet and was in flower for most of the year. It was by all accounts a beauty and its leaves a boon to nibbling creatures. But rabbits fell on the emu bush like locusts, devouring every bit of it – leaves, flowers, bark, stems – until none was to be found. The rabbits ate so much of everything that sheep and other livestock were forced to extend both their range and their diet, punishing yet wider expanses. As sheep yields fell, farmers perversely compensated by increasing stocking levels, adding to the general devastation.

  The problem would have been acute enough, but in the 1890s, after forty unusually green years, Australia fell into a murderous, decade-long drought – the worst in its recorded history. As the earth cracked and turned to dust, the topsoil – already the thinnest in the world – blew away, never to be replenished. In the course of the decade, some 35 million sheep, more than half the nation’s total, perished; 16 million went in a single pitiless year, 1902.

  The rabbits, meanwhile, hopped on. By the time science finally came up with a solution, almost a century had passed since Thomas Austin tipped his twenty-four bunnies out of the bag. The weapon deployed against the rabbits was a miracle virus from South America called myxomatosis. Harmless to humans and other animals, it was phenomenally devastating to rabbits, with a mortality rate of 99.9 per cent. Almost at once the countryside filled with twitching, stumbling, very sick rabbits, and then with tens of millions of little corpses. Although just one rabbit in a thousand survived, those few that did were naturally resistant to myxomatosis, and it was resistant genes that they passed on when they began to breed again. It took a while for things to get rolling, but today Australia’s rabbit numbers are back up to 300 million and climbing fast.

  At all events, the damage to the landscape, much of it irreversible, had already been done. And all so some clown could have something to pot at from his veranda.

  Just as you plunge into emptiness with startling abruptness in Australia, so you plunge out of it again. Shortly after crossing into South Australia in mid-afternoon, I found myself entering rolling hills of orange groves. It was so startling I got out and had a look. On one side lay arid emptiness – a plain of stretched hessian spattered with clumps of mallee. But before me, filling the view to the distant horizon, spread a biblical-looking promised land – citrus groves and vineyards and vegetable patches in every lush shade of green. As I pushed on, the balance between orchards and vineyards tipped increasingly in favour of the latter until eventually there was nothing but vineyards and I realized I had reached the Barossa Valley, a quite spectacularly pretty corner of South Australia, with rolling hills of abundant green that gave it, literally and metaphorically, a Mediterranean air.

  It was mostly settled by German farmers, who started Australia’s wine industry here. Today Australians are among the most wine-savvy people on earth, but that development is quite recent. A story often recounted is how the British wine expert Len Evans, on a visit to the country in the 1950s, asked for a glass of wine in a country hotel. The hotelier regarded him narrowly for a long moment and asked: ‘What are you, some kind of poof?’ Even now the wines for which the Barossa is celebrated – Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz – are all recent arrivals. Into the 1980s, the government was paying growers to uproot Shiraz vines and produce sticky sweet Rieslings. I’ve never quite understood why tourists from the more prosperous end of the market are so drawn to wine-growing areas. They wouldn’t, presumably, want to go and see cotton before it became Gap slacks or caviar being gutted from sturgeon, but give them a backdrop of vines and they appear to think they have found heaven. Having said that, the Barossa Valley is awfully appealing, particularly after a couple of days on the lonely and far-flung Sturt Highway.

  I stopped for the night in Tanunda, a handsome and well-touristed little town, mostly built along one very long street, fetchingly shadowed with leafy trees. Given its popularity with tourists and its Germanic beginnings, I had rather feared that Tanunda would be themed accordingly, but apart from one or two restaurants with ‘Haus’ in their titles and the odd mention of wurst in shop windows, there was mercifully little attempt to exploit its heritage. It was the eve of Australia Day, the big national holiday, and Tanunda was busy with people who had come for a mini-break.

  I found a room, not without some difficulty, then wandered to the main street for a stroll before dinner. It was crowded with people who, like me, were trying to fill that empty hour between the shops’ closing and the moment when one might with propriety start to drink. I walked among them, happy to be back in civilization – happy, above all, to be able to eavesdrop on conversations that didn’t involve sheep dip, temperamental machinery, new wells or land clearance. (Or rumps, sumps, pumps and stumps, as I had begun to think of it.) It was clear from the conversations that I had landed in Yuppieville. Most were engaged in the interesting middle-class pastime of identifying all the objects in shop windows that looked like objects belonging to people they knew. Wherever I lingered I could hear someone observing, ‘Oh, look. Sarah’s got a bowl just like that,’ or ‘Your mother used to have a tea service like that one. I wonder whatever became of it. You don’t suppose she gave it to Samantha, do you?’ A few couples were playing a slightly edgier version of this game, which involved supplementary comments like ‘No, the one you broke was much nicer’ and ‘But how many pairs of pearl earrings do you need, for God’s sake?’ and ‘Well, if she did give it to Samantha, I’m going to be ex
tremely pissed off, frankly, because she promised it to me. You’ll just have to have a word with her.’ These were the people, I guessed, who had driven the furthest to get here and most needed a drink. Or possibly were just assholes.

  I liked Tanunda and had a very pleasant evening there, but there was absolutely nothing exceptional or eventful in the experience, so I am going to tell you instead a little story related to me by a lovely woman named Catherine Veitch.

  Catherine Veitch was my oldest friend in Australia, both in the sense that she was my first chum there and also that she was just about old enough to be my mother. I met her at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in 1992. I can’t remember the circumstances now other than that she approached me after a reading either to set me straight with regard to some mistake I had made in one of my books on language – she was of a scholarly bent and impatient with sloppiness – or to enlighten me concerning some aspect of Australian life on which I had imprudently commented in the question and answer session. The upshot is that we had a cup of tea in the cafeteria and the next day I took a tram to her house in St Kilda for lunch, where I met most of her family. Her children, of whom she seemed to have a large but indeterminate number, were all grown and living away, but most of them called in at various points in the afternoon, to borrow a tool or check for messages or burrow in the fridge. It was just the kind of household I had always longed to grow up in – happy, comfortable, nicely chaotic, full of shouted conversations of the ‘Try looking in the cupboard at the top of the stairs’ type. And I liked Catherine very much. She was kind and funny and thoughtful and direct.

  So we became great friends – though it was a friendship based almost entirely on correspondence. She had never been to America, and I went to Australia once a year if I was lucky, and not always to Melbourne. But three or four times a year she would send me long, wonderfully discursive letters hammered out on a jumpy and wilful typewriter. These letters seldom took less than an hour to read. In a single page they could range over a galaxy of subjects – her childhood in Adelaide, the inadequacies of certain politicians (actually, of most politicians), why Australians lack confidence, what her children had been up to. Generally she stuck in a wad of cuttings from the Age, the Melbourne newspaper. Much of what I know about Australia I learned from her.

  I loved those letters. They came from so far away – just getting an envelope from Australia still seemed to me a faintly wondrous event – and described events and experiences that were unexceptional to her but breathtakingly exotic to me: taking a tram into the city, suffering through a heatwave in December, attending a lecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute, shopping for curtains at David Jones, the big local department store. I can’t explain it except to say that, without giving up any part of the life I had already, I wanted intensely to have all that in my life as well. So it was through her letters, more than from almost anything else, that I consolidated my fixation with Australia.

  Her letters were always happy, but the last one I received from her was especially sunny. She and John, her husband, were about to sell the house in St Kilda and move to the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne, to take up a life of gracious retirement beside the sea, fulfilling a dream of many years’ duration. Just after she sent that letter, to the shock of everyone who knew her, she suffered a sudden heart attack and died. I’d have been on my way to visit her now. Instead all I can offer is my favourite of the many stories she told me.

  In the 1950s, a friend of Catherine’s moved with her young family into a house next door to a vacant lot. One day some builders arrived to put up a house on the lot. Catherine’s friend had a three-year-old daughter who naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door. She hung around on the margins and eventually the builders adopted her as a kind of mascot. They chatted to her and gave her little jobs to do and at the end of the week presented her with a little pay packet containing a shiny new half crown, or something.

  She took this home to her mother who made all the appropriate cooings of admiration and suggested that they take it to the bank the next morning to deposit it in her account. When they went to the bank, the cashier was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her own pay packet.

  ‘I’ve been building a house this week,’ she replied proudly.

  ‘Goodness!’ said the cashier. ‘And will you be building a house next week, too?’

  ‘I will if we ever get the fucking bricks,’ answered the little girl.

  South Australians are very proud that theirs is the only Australian state that never received convicts. What they don’t often mention is that it was planned by one. In the early 1830s, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a man of independent means and unsavoury inclinations, was in Newgate Prison in London, on a charge of abducting a female child for sweaty and nefarious purposes, when he hatched the idea to found a colony of freemen in Australia. His plan was to sell parcels of land to sober, industrious people – farmers and capitalists – and use the funds raised to pay the passage of labourers to work for them. The labourers would gain ennobling employment; the investors would acquire a workforce and a market; everyone would benefit. The scheme never worked terribly well in practice, but the result was a new colony, South Australia, and a delightful planned city, Adelaide.

  Whereas Canberra is a park, Adelaide is merely full of them. In Canberra you have the sense of being in a very large green space you cannot ever quite find your way out of; in Adelaide you are indubitably in a city, but with the pleasant option of stepping out of it from time to time to get a breath of air in a spacious green setting. Makes all the difference. The city was laid out as two distinct halves facing each other across the green plain of the Torrens River, with each half fully enclosed by parks. On a map, therefore, central Adelaide forms a large, plump, somewhat irregular figure of eight, with parks creating the figure and the two inner halves of the city filling the holes. It works awfully well.

  I had no special destination in mind, but the next morning as I drove into the city from Tanunda I passed through North Adelaide, the handsome and prosperous zone inside the top half of the figure eight, spotted an agreeable-looking hotel and impetuously threw the car at the kerb. I was on O’Connell Street, in a neighbourhood of old, well-preserved buildings with lots of trendy restaurants, pubs and cafés. After Canberra, I wasn’t going to let a slice of urban heaven like this slip past. So I procured a room and lost not a moment getting back into the open air.

  Adelaide is the most overlooked of Australia’s principal cities. You could spend weeks in Australia and never suspect it was there, for it rarely makes the news or gets a mention in anyone’s conversation. It is to Australia essentially what Australia is to the world – a place pleasantly regarded but far away and seldom thought about. And yet it is unquestionably a lovely city. Everyone is agreed on that, including millions who have never been there.

  I had been just once myself, on a book tour a few months before. What remained from that experience was an impression of physical handsomeness coupled with an oddly pleased sense of doom on the part of the inhabitants. Remark to anyone in Adelaide what an agreeable place it is, and you will be told at once, with a kind of eager solemnity: ‘Yes, but it’s dying, you know.’

  ‘Is it?’ you say in a tone of polite concern.

  ‘Oh yes,’ confides your informant, nodding with grim satisfaction. Then, if you are very unlucky, the person will tell you all about the collapse of the Bank of South Australia, an event of fiscal carelessness that took years to conclude and is nearly as long in the telling.

  Adelaide’s problem, it appears, is geographical. The city stands on the wrong edge of civilized Australia, far from the vital Asian markets and with nothing on its own doorstep but a great deal of nothing. To the north and west lie a million-odd square miles of searing desert; to the south nothing but open sea all the way to Antarctica. Only to the east are there any cities, but even Melbourne is 450 miles away and Sydney nearer a thousand. Wh
y would anyone build a factory in Adelaide when it is so far from its markets? It is a reasonable question, but somewhat undermined by the consideration that Perth is even more remote – 1,700 miles more remote in its lonely outpost on the Indian Ocean – yet has a far more vibrant economy. At all events, the bottom line is that Adelaide seems stuck in an unhappy place, in every sense of the word.

  Yet to the casual observer it seems quite as affluent as any other big city in Australia, possibly even more so. Its central shopping district is better looking and at least as well used as the equivalent zones in Sydney or Melbourne, and its pubs, restaurants and cafés appear to be as bustling and lively as any entrepreneur could wish. It has an outstanding stock of Victorian buildings, an abundance of parks and comely squares, and constant small touches – an ornate lamp-post here, a stone lion there – that give it a dash of classiness and respectful venerability that Sydney and Melbourne all too often discarded for the sequined glitter of skyscrapers. It feels rather like an urban version of a gentlemen’s club – comfortable, old-fashioned, quietly grand, slightly drowsy by mid-afternoon, redolent of another age.

  As I strolled downhill past Pennington Gardens, one of the central parks, I became gradually and then overwhelmingly aware of the tide of human activity all moving in a single direction – thousands and thousands of people converging on a stadium in the park. I asked two young men what was going on and was told there was a cricket match between England and Australia at the Oval.