Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  ‘What – here in Adelaide? Today?’ I said in surprise.

  He considered the question with the bemusement it merited. ‘Well, either that,’ he replied drily, ‘or thirty thousand people have made one pretty amazing bloody mistake, wouldn’t you say?’ Then he smiled to show that he wasn’t being aggressive or anything. It appeared that he and his partner had stopped for a gallon or two of refreshment en route.

  ‘Do you know, are there still tickets left?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah, mate, sold out. Sorry.’

  I nodded and watched them go. That was another very British thing I’d noticed about Australians – they apologized for things that weren’t their fault.

  I found my way along North Terrace, the city’s grandest thoroughfare, to the South Australian Museum, a stately pile devoted to natural and anthropological history. I was interested to see if it displayed a fossil called Spriggina, named for a minor hero of mine called Reginald Sprigg. In 1946, Sprigg, then a young government geologist, was poking around in the blisteringly inhospitable Ediacaran hills of the Flinders Ranges, some 300 miles north of Adelaide, when he made one of those miraculous discoveries in which Australian natural history almost impossibly abounds. You will recall from an earlier chapter the case of the strange and long-lost proto-ant Nothomyrmecia macrops found unexpectedly at a dusty hamlet in the middle of nowhere. Well, Sprigg’s find was in much the same general area and, in its way, no less remarkable.

  His special moment came when he clambered a few yards up a rocky slope to find a piece of shade and a comfortable rock to lean against to have his lunch. As he sat eating his sandwiches he idly stretched out a toe and turned over a hunk of sandstone. Sprigg left no informal account of the event, but I think we can safely imagine him pausing in his chewing – pausing for a long moment, mouth slightly open – to stare at what he had just turned over, then slowly creeping nearer to have a closer look. What he had just found, you see, was something that wasn’t thought to exist.

  For almost a century, since the time of Charles Darwin, scientists had been puzzled by an evolutionary anomaly – that 600 million years ago complex life forms of an improbable variety had suddenly burst forth on earth (the famous Cambrian explosion), but without any evidence of earlier, simpler forms that might have paved the way for such an event. Sprigg had just found that missing link, a piece of rock swimming in delicate pre-Cambrian fossils. He was looking, in effect, at the dawn of visible life – at something no one had ever seen before or ever expected to see. It was a moment of supreme geological significance. And if he had sat anywhere else – anywhere at all in the infinite baking expanse that is the Australian outback – it would not have been made, certainly not then, possibly not ever.

  That’s the thing about Australia, you see. It teems with interesting stuff, but at the same time it’s so vast and empty and forbidding that it generally takes a remarkable stroke of luck to find it.

  Unfortunately, in 1946 the world scientific community paid little heed to news from Australia, and Sprigg’s reports of his findings, duly recorded in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, languished for two decades before their significance became generally appreciated. But never mind. In the end, credit fell where it was due: Sprigg was immortalized with the name of a fossil, and the epoch he uncovered became known as the Ediacaran, after the hills through which he had tramped.

  Alas, the museum was not open when I passed by – closed for the national holiday, I supposed – and so my hopes of glimpsing the dawn of life were dashed. Wandering on through shady side streets, however, I found a second-hand bookshop open and was happy to take that as a consolation prize. Probably because new books have always been expensive in Australia, the country has outstanding second-hand bookshops. These always have a large section devoted to ‘Australiana’ and these sections never fail to amaze, if only because they show you what a remarkably self-absorbed people the Australians are. I don’t mean that as a criticism. If the rest of the world is going to pay them no attention, then they must do it themselves surely. That seems fair enough to me. But you do find in any trawl through the jumbled stacks the most wondrous titles. One of the first I took down now was called That’s Where I Met My Wife: A Story of the First Swimming Pool in the National Capital at Canberra. Nearby was a plump volume entitled A Sense of Union: A History of Sydney University Football Club. Beside that was a history of the South Australia Ambulance Service. There were hundreds of titles like this – books about things that could never possibly have been of interest to more than a handful of people. It’s quite encouraging that these books exist, but somehow faintly worrying as well.

  Among them, however, you will often find the most rewarding surprises. This was so now when I took down a photographic history of Surfers Paradise, the famous Queensland beach resort, which caught my eye because I was heading there shortly. The book covered the story of the resort’s development from the 1920s, when it was a flyblown coastal hamlet of neither fame nor consequence, to the early 1970s, when it abruptly burst forth as a kind of Miami Beach of the southern hemisphere. What particularly captivated me were the photographs of it during its intermediate phase, in the 1940s and 50s, when it was much closer in spirit and appearance to Coney Island or Blackpool. It is odd to be filled with a nostalgic longing for a place you have never known, but I was with Surfers Paradise and its innocent holidaymakers. I gazed enraptured at page after page of crisp black and white photographs showing happy people at play – strolling in groups along the Esplanade, jitterbugging in dance halls, sitting with drinks at surfside bars. How I envied them their snazzy outfits. I realize I may be in a minority here, but I would give almost anything to live in an age when I could put on two-tone shoes, red socks, a lively cotton shirt with a repeating pattern based on, say, baggage labels, hoist my baggy brown pants to just level with my nipples, drop a felt hat on my head and have people walking past look at me twice and think: ‘Stylish guy!’

  There was something so marvellously innocent, so irretrievably lost, about the world back then. You could see it in the easy, confident gait and sun-drenched smiles of the holidaymakers in every photograph. These people were happy. I don’t mean they were happy. They were happy. They were living at a good time in a lucky country and they knew it. They had good jobs, good homes, good families, good prospects, good holidays in cheerful, sunny places. I wouldn’t suggest for an instant that Australians are unhappy people now – anything but, in fact – but they don’t have that happiness in their faces any more. I don’t think anybody does.

  It was, it must be said, an age of the most dazzling primness. In the 1950s, Australia was probably the least confident nation in the English-speaking world. It was so far from everywhere that the authorities didn’t seem to know quite what was acceptable, so essentially they played it safe and allowed nothing. One of the photographs in the Surfers Paradise book showed a souvenir emporium that had a very large billboard on its roof. The ad on the billboard was the famous Coppertone suntan lotion ad in which a small girl is having her swimsuit pulled down by an impish puppy, exposing an inch or two of sweet little bottom. And here’s the thing. Someone had got out a ladder, climbed up with a bucket of paint and carefully painted panties over the little girl’s crack. (Well, can’t have people masturbating on the Esplanade, after all.) It wasn’t just suntan lotion ads that were censored, but movies, plays, magazines and books in numbers unbelievable.

  One thing you won’t find much in Australian secondhand bookshops are 1950s or earlier editions of lots of books – The Catcher in the Rye, A Farewell to Arms, Animal Farm, Peyton Place, Another Country, Brave New World and hundreds and hundreds of others. The reason for this is simple: they were banned. Altogether, at its peak, 5,000 titles were forbidden to be imported into the country. By the 1950s this had fallen to a couple of hundred, but it still featured some extraordinary exclusions – Childbirth Without Pain, for instance, whose unflinching candour in describing where babies come from was co
nsidered a little too rich for Australian sensibilities. This was just conventional titles, by the way. The total doesn’t include smutty stuff, which was of course banned outright. It wasn’t just that you couldn’t get certain books. You couldn’t even find out which ones you couldn’t get because the list of proscribed books was itself a secret.

  It was Adelaide, interestingly, that put an end to all this. For decades it had been one of the more arrestingly unprogressive of Australian cities. The blame for this can be dropped in the lap of one Sir Thomas Playford, who for thirty-eight years, from the 1930s to the 1960s, was South Australia’s Premier. Playford was a man so parochial that once during a commodities crisis he suggested that the state might have to ‘import wheat from Australia’, and on another occasion remarked to the Vice Chancellor of the University of Adelaide that he couldn’t see any point in universities at all. As you can imagine, he did not notably enrich the intellectual vigour of South Australia. Then in 1967 the state elected a youthful and charismatic Labor Premier named Don Dunstan, and almost at once Adelaide and South Australia underwent a transformation. The city became a haven for artists and intellectuals. The Adelaide Festival blossomed into the nation’s pre-eminent cultural event. Books that were still banned elsewhere in Australia – Portnoy’s Complaint and Naked Lunch, for example – were freely available in Adelaide. Nude bathing beaches were allowed. Homosexuality was legalized. For one giddy decade or so, Adelaide was the hippest city in the country – the San Francisco of the Antipodes.

  In 1979, Dunstan’s wife died and he abruptly retired from politics. Adelaide lost its momentum and began a gentle descent into obscurity. The artists and intellectuals drifted away; even Dunstan moved to Victoria. Under Playford South Australia had been backward but interestingly so. Under Dunstan it was racy and exhilaratingly so. The real problem with Adelaide these days, I suspect, is that it has just stopped being interesting.

  Still, it’s a lovely place for an amble on a summer’s day. I made a couple of small purchases in the bookshop – an old hardback called Australian Paradox, which I bought for no more solid reason than that I rather liked the cover and it was attractively priced at $2, and a more recent volume entitled Crocodile Attack in Australia, which was nearly ten times dearer but had the compensating virtue of containing a great many gruesome anecdotes – then wandered off for a hike through the city’s green and commodious parks.

  Central Adelaide boasts almost 1,800 acres of parks, less than Canberra but a great deal more than most other cities of its size. As so often in Australia, they reflect an effort to recreate a familiarly British ambience in an antipodean setting. Of all the things people longed for when they first came to Australia, an English backdrop was perhaps the most outstanding. It is notable, when you look at early paintings of the country, how awkward, how strikingly un-Australian, the landscape so often appears. Even the gum trees look unusually lush and globular, as if the artists were willing them to take on a more English aspect. Australia was a disappointment to the early settlers. They ached for English air and English vistas. So when they built their cities, they laid them out with rolling English-style parks arrayed with stands of oak, beech, chestnut and elm in a way that recalled the dreamily bucolic efforts of Humphry Repton or Capability Brown. Adelaide is the driest city in the driest state on the driest continent, but you would never guess it from wandering through its parks. Here it is forever Sussex.

  Unfortunately, such arrangements are out of fashion in the horticultural world. Since many of the original plantings are now coming to the end of their natural lives, the park authorities have instituted plans to sweep away the intruder species and recreate a riverine landscape dominated by mallee scrub and red river gums of the sort that existed here naturally before Europeans came along. Heart-warming though it is to see Australians taking pride in their native flora, the plan seems unfortunate to say the least. To begin with, Australia has several hundred thousand square miles of landscape featuring mallee scrub and red river gums; it is not as if this is a threatened environment. Worse, the parks as they are now are unusually fine, among the best in the world, and it would be a tragedy to lose them wherever they were. If you accept the logic that they are inappropriate because they are in a European style then clearly you would have to get rid of all of Adelaide’s houses, streets, buildings and European-derived people. Unfortunately, as so often in a short-sighted world, no one asked me about any of this.

  Still, the parks remain lovely for the moment and I was happy to pass into them now. They were packed with large family groups enjoying Australia Day, picnicking and playing cricket with tennis balls. Adelaide has miles of good beaches in its western suburbs, so it surprised me that such numbers of people had forsaken the shore to come into the city. It gave the day an engagingly old-fashioned air. This is how we spent the Fourth of July when I was a kid in Iowa – in parks, playing ball games. It seemed odd, too – but again pleasing – that in a country of so much space people chose to crowd together to relax. Perhaps it’s all that intimidating emptiness that makes Australians such social creatures. The parks were so crowded, in fact, that it was often impossible to tell which ball game belonged to which group of onlookers, or even sometimes which fielders belonged to which ball game. When a ball bounced into a neighbouring party, as seemed to happen quite regularly, there was always an exchange of apologies on the one hand and a call of ‘No worries’ on the other as the ball was tossed back into play. It was effectively all one very large picnic, and I felt almost ridiculously pleased to be part of it even in such a marginal way.

  It took about three hours, I suppose, to do the complete circuit of the parks. Quite often a roar would rise from the Oval. Cricket was obviously a livelier spectacle in person than on the radio. At length I emerged onto a street called Pennington Terrace, where a row of neat bluestone houses with shady lawns overlooked the Oval. At one a family had essentially moved its living room onto the front lawn. I know it can’t have been so, but in my recollection they had brought out everything – floor lamps, coffee table, rug, magazine basket, coal scuttle. They had certainly brought out a sofa and a television on which they were watching the cricket. Behind the television, a couple of hundred yards away across open parkland, stood the Oval, so that whenever anything dramatic happened on their screen it was accompanied in real time by a roar from the stadium just beyond.

  ‘Who’s winning?’ I called as I walked past.

  ‘Bloody poms,’ the man said, inviting me to share his amazement.

  I trudged on uphill past the imposing hulk of St Peter’s Cathedral. I was heading in a general way towards my hotel, intending to have a shower and a change of clothes before setting off to look for a pub and dinner. Out of the shade of the parks it was a blisteringly hot afternoon, and I was by now quite footsore, but I found myself drawn helplessly into the residential streets of North Adelaide. It was an area of quiet prosperity, settled under a Sunday serenity, with street after street of old houses, each buried under roses and frangipani, and every little plot a model of meticulously managed floral abundance.

  At length I arrived at a place called Wellington Square, an open space overlooked by a grand pub of venerable aspect. I went straight over. Inside, it was cool and convivial, with gleaming fittings and a lot of burnished pale wood – nothing like the austere pubs of the bush. This was a place for cocktails, for talking about one’s investment portfolio. It was busy, too, though most of the customers were eating rather than drinking – or at least eating as well as drinking. At nearly every table, they were hunched over steaks or battered portions offish so hearty that they hung over the edge of the plates. On a large pulldown screen the cricket was showing, but with the sound turned down. I had found my home for the evening. I ordered a pint of Cooper’s Draught and retired with it to a table overlooking the square. And there I sat for a good few minutes doing nothing at all, not even touching my glass, just savouring the pleasure of sitting down and finding myself in a far country with a
glass of beer and cricket on the TV and a roomful of people enjoying the fruits of a prosperous age. I could not have been happier.

  After a while I remembered my purchases from the second-hand bookshop and pulled them out for examination. I turned first to Australian Paradox, an account of a year-long stay in the country in 1959-60 written by an English journalist named Jeanne MacKenzie, and cracked it open, interested to see how Australia today compared with the Australia of forty years ago.

  Well, what a different world it was. The Australia Ms MacKenzie describes is a place of boundless prosperity, full employment, twinkling wholesomeness and infinite optimism. In 1959-60, Australia was the third wealthiest country on the planet – I hadn’t realized this – exceeded only by the United States and Canada. But what was particularly interesting was how modest were the components of material well-being back then. With admiration bordering on amazement, Ms MacKenzie notes that by the end of the 1950s three-quarters of city dwellers in Australia had a refrigerator and almost half had a washing machine (there wasn’t yet enough electricity in most rural areas to run big appliances, so they didn’t count). Nearly every home in the nation, she went on, had ‘at least one radio’ – gosh! – and ‘most homes have other electrical appliances such as vacuum cleaners, irons and electric jugs’. Oh, to live in a world in which the ownership of an electric jug is a source of pride.

  I spent a good hour reading through the book at random, spellbound by the simplicity of the age she described. In 1960, television was still an exciting novelty (it didn’t reach Australia until 1956, and then only in Sydney and Melbourne at first), colour television a distant dream. In Melbourne on Sundays there were no newspapers, and cinemas and pubs were shut by law. Perth was still at the end of a very long dirt road and would remain so for many years. Adelaide was just half the size it is now and its famous festival was then brand new. Queensland was backward. (Still is!) Even in the best restaurants, chicken Maryland and beef stroganoff were dishes of exotic distinction, and oysters were served with ketchup. For most people, foreign cuisine began and ended with spaghetti out of tins. Cheese came in two varieties – ‘sharp’ and ‘tasty’. Supermarkets were a new and exciting concept. Five per cent of university-age kids in 1959 were actually in university – this also reported with admiration – up from 1.56 per cent twenty years before. It was, in every way, a different world.