Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  ‘Oh,’ she would tut in a tone of shared chagrin, ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea has just gone. But the Orpheum has the new Jeff Chandler movie, Tame Lust. Shall we go see that?’

  I don’t know if through the passage of time these movies have blurred into one in my memory or whether they actually were all identical, but they seemed always to have the same elements – way too much talking, lots of steamy embraces with Lana Turner or some other hard-looking blonde, very occasional gunfire resulting in a clutched belly, a staggered walk and a disappointingly modest seepage of blood, and a part for Chandler that put him frequently on a speedboat or lifeguard’s stand dressed only in swimming trunks. (Without even looking at the screen you could tell which were the swimming trunks scenes because of the avidity with which my mother would begin to suck her lemon drops.) If a Jeff Chandler movie wasn’t available – and amazingly sometimes whole weeks passed in which he didn’t produce a picture – we would have to see something else.

  Thus it was that one week when I was about nine we went to see The Sundowners, a Technicolor epic starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in the story of a lovably feisty and indomitable couple making a life for themselves in the Australian bush. It was a memorable movie in many ways, not least in that it provided the endearing spectacle of Robert Mitchum doing an Aussie accent, and that it dealt with Australia at all, which made it, in Hollywood terms, essentially unique. Nearly forty years after the event I don’t recall much of the detail of the film other than that Mitchum and Kerr spent every waking moment herding armies of sheep and fighting one discommoding peril of antipodean life after another – bushfires, dust storms, drought, locust infestations and pub brawls mostly. It was also evidently very hot in Australia: Mitchum never spoke without first taking off a dusty hat and running a forearm across his brow. Since my plans for myself, even at the age of nine, were to spend my adulthood driving an open-topped sports car through Europe with Jean Seberg at my side, I concluded that Australia was of essentially zero interest and did not actively think about it again for thirty years.

  In consequence, when finally I made my first trip Down Under, to attend the 1992 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I was actually able to be astounded to find it there at all. I clearly recall standing on Collins Street in Melbourne, so freshly arrived that I still smelled of (possibly even glistened from) the insecticide with which the flight attendants sprayed the plane before arrival, watching the clanging trams and swirl of humanity, and thinking: ‘Good lord, there’s a country here.’ It was as if I had privately discovered life on another planet, or a parallel universe where life was at once recognizably similar but entirely different.

  I can’t tell you how exciting it was. Insofar as I had accumulated any expectations of Australia at all in the intervening years, I had thought of it as a kind of alternative southern California, a place of constant sunshine and the cheerful vapidity of a beach lifestyle, but with a slight British bent – a sort of Baywatch with cricket, as I thought it. But this was nothing like that. Melbourne had a settled and gracious air that was much more European than North American, and it rained, rained the whole week, which delighted me inordinately because it was so totally not what I had expected.

  What’s more, and here we come to the real crux of things, I liked it, straight off, without quibble or doubt, in a way I had never expected to. Something about it just agreed with me. I suppose it helped that I had spent half my life in America and half in Britain because Australia was such a comfortable fusion of the two. It had a casualness and vivacity – a lack of reserve, a comfortableness with strangers – that felt distinctly American, but hung on a British framework. In their optimism and informality Australians could pass at a glance for Americans, but they drove on the left, drank tea, played cricket, adorned their public places with statues of Queen Victoria, dressed their children in the sort of school uniforms that only a Britannic people could wear without conspicuous regret. I felt extremely comfortable with this.

  Almost at once I became acutely, and in an odd way delightedly, aware of how little I knew about the place. I didn’t know the names of their newspapers or universities or beaches or suburbs, knew nothing of their history or private achievements, couldn’t tell a policeman from a postman. I didn’t even know how to order coffee. It appeared that you had to specify a length (principally long or short), a colour (black or white) and even an angle of orientation to the perpendicular (flat or not), and these could be put together in a multitude of permutations – ‘long black’, ‘short black’, even ‘long short black’. My own preference, I discovered after many happy hours of experimentation, was ‘flat white’. It was a moment of the sublimest happiness.

  Because my responsibilities at the festival were extremely slight – one or two stage presentations and a little light sweeping afterwards – I was free to roam through the city and I did so with the greatest enthusiasm and devotion, eavesdropping on conversations, sitting in coffee bars with all the morning newspapers and half a dozen beverages (I was still in the experimental stage), devouring both, reading labels and hoardings and the signs in shop windows, asking questions of complete strangers: ‘Excuse me, what’s a Jacky Howe? What are norks? What’s a Hills Hoist?’*7

  I loved – still do – Australian voices, the lilt and cadence, the effortlessly dry, direct way of viewing the world. At a reception for some minor awards presentation – the East Gippsland Young Farmers First Novel Award or something, which I attended because I was just so pleased to get an invitation to anything and because cocktails were promised – I was standing with two female publicists from my publisher’s when some obviously self-infatuated nork breezed in.

  ‘Oh look, it’s Bruce Dazzling,’ observed one and then with a kind of distant, perfectly encapsulating disdain added: ‘He’d go to the opening of an envelope.’

  Someone else told me the story of an English friend of his who was flying to Australia when the stewardess tonged him a hot towel, which proved upon application to be cold. So he told her – not in complaint, but simply because he thought she might want to warm them up some more. The stewardess turned to him and, smiling sweetly, with only the tiniest trace of sarcasm, said: ‘Well, why don’t you sit on it a bit? That should warm it up.’ I knew as soon as I heard that story that I was going to like this place. I haven’t stopped yet.

  Because my first exposure was to Melbourne, I formed a certain slavish attachment to the place. I still find it terribly exciting to arrive in Melbourne – not an emotion you will hear expressed often, but there you are – and driving now through the glossy high-rises of its central business district had something of the feeling of a homecoming. Over there was the first Australian hotel I’d stayed in, there the first coffee shop I’d tried, there the celebrated Melbourne Cricket Ground, where I once spent three hours happily bewildered by an Australian Rules Football match and dined on my first (and last) four-and-twenty pie (‘made with real blackbirds’, I was drolly assured). Insofar as such a statement could have meaning, this was my home in Australia.

  Most people (and when I say ‘most people’ I mean of course me when I first got there) don’t realize that for a long time Melbourne was much the most important city in Australia. Although Sydney has been slightly the bigger of the two for a century (Melbourne’s population now is about 3.5 million to Sydney’s 4 million), Melbourne was until relatively recently the centre of things, particularly in the realms of finance and culture. Sydney used to compensate by making up cruel but generally outstanding jokes about Melbourne’s supposed lack of liveliness, like:

  ‘Do you have any children?’

  ‘Yes, two living and one in Melbourne.’

  These days Sydney makes jokes about Melbourne and steals its thunder, which is naturally a little hard for Melbourne people to take. Nothing better illustrates the shift in the two cities’ relative standings than that in 1956 the Olympics went to Melbourne and in 2000 they have gone to Sydney. Most things do nowadays. In 1956, Mel
bourne was headquarters to fifty of Australia’s largest companies while Sydney had just thirty-seven. Today the proportions are almost exactly reversed. A generation ago, international companies routinely chose Melbourne for their Australian headquarters; today over two-thirds opt for Sydney. But far more galling to a city that has always viewed Sydney as having the intellectual vibrancy of, let us say, daytime television, Melbourne has had to watch as Sydney has appropriated chunks of its cultural preeminence – in publishing, fashion, film and television, all the performing arts. I used to visit my Australian publishers in Melbourne. Today I go to Sydney.

  Having said all that, and once you strip out the huge visual advantage Sydney derives from its harbour, there is precious little to choose between the two in terms of quality of life or cultural satisfaction. Much less separates Melbourne from Sydney than separates Los Angeles from New York or Birmingham from London.

  Melbourne may not have a Harbour Bridge or an Opera House like Sydney’s but it has something in its way no less singular: the world’s most bizarre right turns. If you are driving in central Melbourne and you wish to turn against the traffic, you don’t get in the middle lane, but rather pull over to the kerb – as far as possible from where you want to be – and sit there for an indeterminate period (in my case until all the clubs and restaurants have shut and everyone has gone home for the night) and make your turn from there in a frantic moment just before the lights change. It’s all to do with keeping out of the way of the trams – Melbourne’s other speciality – which go down the middle of the road and can’t have turning cars blocking their way. It’s immensely confusing, not only to visitors from overseas but to other Australians – even, I suspect, to many Melbourne people.

  But what really sets Melbourne apart is its love of Australian Rules Football, a sport little followed in Sydney or New South Wales, where rugby is the passion. It’s interesting that Melburnians don’t tell jokes about Sydney. They tell jokes about their beloved footy. To wit:

  A man arriving for the Grand Final in Melbourne is surprised to find the seat beside his empty. Tickets for the Grand Final are sold out weeks in advance and empty seats unknown. So he says to the man on the other side of the seat: ‘Excuse me, do you know why there is no one in this seat?’

  ‘It was my wife’s,’ answers the second man, a touch wistfully, ‘but I’m afraid she died.’

  ‘Oh, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘Yes, she never missed a match.’

  ‘But couldn’t you have given the ticket to a friend or relative?’

  ‘Oh no. They’re all at the funeral.’

  I was on my way to meet an old friend named Alan Howe, who, it so happens, is the person who introduced me to the transfixing peculiarities of Australian Rules. I first met him nearly twenty years ago when I was working as a subeditor on the business desk of The Times in London and he was a downy-faced recruit from Down Under. I had been there for a few months already when he arrived and was given a seat beside me on the subs’ table. I don’t want to say he was awfully young back then, but he was wearing a Cub Scout uniform. Anyway, I took him under my wing as a fellow colonial and taught him all I knew. Admittedly this was only three things – that Lloyd’s the insurers had an apostrophe while Lloyds Bank did not; that the hyphen was oddly placed in the company name Rio Tinto-Zinc; and that the canteen was in the basement – but in those days that was all you needed to know to work on the business desk.

  He was a quick learner and he soon outstripped us all. I remember one day I was having an argument with a colleague over whether the ‘p/e’ in ‘p/e ratio’ stood for penis envy or Prince Edward, when Howe told us it was short for ‘price/earnings ratio’, and that it was a staple measure of an equity’s perceived worth arrived at by dividing its current value by its earnings per share over the previous twelve months, and I knew then that this was a guy who was going places. He hasn’t disappointed us, I must say. After a distinguished spell at The Times he returned to Australia, where he became a rising star in the Murdoch firmament, fetching up in the early 1990s as editor of the Sunday Herald-Sun, over which popular publication he still presides. When I think of him sitting there at The Times in his little neckerchief and blue shirt, my old heart swells with pride.

  He and his wife, a kindly and placid soul named Carmel Egan, live in South Melbourne in a lovely old house that was formerly a butcher’s shop, of all things. I was late in arriving owing to a little inadvertent experiment I conducted to establish whether it is possible to find your way to an address in Melbourne using a street plan for Perth, but I found it at length. It was Carmel who received me.

  ‘Howie’s out,’ she said, ushering me in. ‘He’s gone for a run.’

  ‘A run?’ I tried not to sound too astounded, but in the years I had known him Howe’s idea of a whole-body workout was to drink standing up. Besides, he was one of those restless, high-energy people who are constitutionally incapable of putting on fat. He needed to run the way I needed to increase my children’s college expenses. ‘It’s his heart,’ she added.

  I stared at her. ‘He’s got a heart problem?’

  ‘No, of course not,’ she laughed. ‘He’s just, you know, discovered it.’

  I understood at once. Howe has long been one of the world’s great hypochondriacs. For years he has been moving from organ to organ, certain that one of them is about to maim him in a painful and costly way. He is forever standing off in corners palpating himself for mysterious lumps and adjusting his lifestyle accordingly.

  So Carmel and I sat and had a nice cup of tea, and I told her fond stories about her husband in those far-off London days before she had met him: how I taught him to use soap and wear matching socks, and helped him to find the treatments that made his gonads drop – the usual sort of thing. It was at this point that the great man himself flopped into the house, extravagantly flushed, breathless and sweaty. ‘Hey, mate,’ he managed to breathe out in what it looked like might be his dying words.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Never been better.’

  ‘What are you running for?’ I said.

  ‘Ticker, mate.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with your heart.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said proudly. ‘And do you know why? Because I look after it.’ He nodded sagely, as if I hadn’t thought of that, and cast a privately thoughtful glance at my bulk.

  For dinner we walked to a local restaurant, where we talked agreeably about a million things – mutual friends, work, where I had been on this trip and where I was going, all the sorts of things you talk about when you get together with friends you rarely see. At one point Howe mentioned casually that he had recently been boogie boarding at Byron Bay, in New South Wales, when he had encountered a shark.

  ‘Truly?’ I said, impressed.

  He nodded. ‘It was a fair size, too – nine or ten footer, I’d say.’

  ‘So how close was it?’

  ‘Close. I could just about have touched it.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Strategically retreated. What do you think?’

  ‘Weren’t you scared?’

  He made a look of sudden enthusiasm, as if I had just put my finger on something. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I was a bit.’

  ‘A bit?’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ he returned wholeheartedly, as if being a bit scared was the maximum permitted in Australia, which I suppose it is.

  This led to a fond recollection of other near-death experiences with animals, of which Australians always have a large fund – an encounter with a crocodile in Queensland, killer snakes nearly stepped on, waking up to find a red-back abseiling on a thread towards one’s face. Australians are very unfair in this way. They spend half of any conversation insisting that the country’s dangers are vastly overrated and that there’s nothing to worry about, and the other half telling you how six months ago their Uncle Bob was driving to Mudgee when a tiger snake slid out from under the dashboard and bi
t him on the groin, but that it’s OK now because he’s off the life-support machine and they’ve discovered he can communicate with eye blinks.

  I was, of course, all ears for all this.

  ‘So what’s the story with the crocodile?’ I asked eagerly.

  Howe smiled with just a hint of sheepishness. ‘Well, Carmel and I were on holiday up in Queensland, at a place called Port Douglas, when we decided’ – he saw her about to correct him – ‘when I decided that it would be fun to hire a boat and go out for a little fishing.’

  ‘In a crocodile-infested estuary,’ Carmel added. She turned to me. ‘Alan was too cheap to pay for a big boat with a guide, so we got a little boat by ourselves. A very little boat.’ She allowed him to continue.

  ‘So we got this little boat,’ he went on, with a magnanimous nod in her direction, ‘with a little outboard motor on it, and we set off across this kind of estuary. The estuary was crowded with other boats, but I spotted an inlet, and I thought: “Oh, we’ll try up there.” Well, the inlet turns out to be a river – a really beautiful one. So we go cruising up this river and it’s just wonderful, your quintessential tropical paradise – big green river, jungle backdrop, colourful birds flying through the trees. You can imagine it. Best of all, there’s not a soul around. We’ve got it all to ourselves. So we find a nice spot and I cut the engine and we’re sitting there with our fishing lines in the water having a nice relaxing time when Carmel points out a kind of muddy bare patch on the bank, and we realize it’s a crocodile launching place. Couldn’t be anything else. Then we notice that there are several of these launching places all along the bank. It starts to dawn on us that maybe this is why there is nobody else up here, because it’s infested with crocodiles. Just as we are coming to this significant conclusion there’s a splash off to one side, like something heavy going into the water, and then a line in the water moving vaguely towards us.’