Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  ‘Whoa,’ I said.

  ‘My sentiments exactly, Bryson.’ He grinned.

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Well, like the good sailor I am, I hopped to the motor to get us out of there. Only the motor wouldn’t start. It just would not go.’

  ‘Meanwhile,’ Carmel interjected, ‘I’m sitting in the back of the boat watching this line coming towards us and saying, “Alan, the crocodile’s coming. It’s definitely coming our way. Let’s get out of here, mate. What do you say?”’

  ‘And I’m pulling on the cord, and pulling and pulling, and the engine is just going putt putt putt pfffffft. And all the while the crocodile’s coming. Finally, miraculously, the engine catches and we’re able to move off. Only we’re pointing in the wrong direction, so we’ve got to go up the river, away from where we want to be, in order to turn around. Anyway, after much messing around and crashing into banks and a little affectionate discussion of how we’re going to die in a minute and it’s all my fault, we get turned around. Only to get out of there we’ve got to go towards where the crocodile is.’

  ‘So where is the crocodile now?’

  ‘No idea. There’s no sign of him now. He’s there somewhere, but we don’t know where. He could be right alongside the boat for all we know. The water’s so murky you can’t see two inches into it. But we do know that sometimes crocodiles go for boats.’

  ‘Especially little cheap tinny boats,’ Carmel said, smiling at him.

  Alan grinned happily. ‘So I throw open the throttle,’ he went on, ‘and the boat putters along at about half a mile an hour because it is, I have to admit, a very small and cheap boat. We’ve got to go maybe a quarter of a mile through the crocodile’s territory at crawling speed and all the while we’re sitting there expecting to feel a bang against the hull and to be tipped into the water. It was a little unnerving.’

  ‘Did you know,’ I said, ‘that an outboard motor engine sounds to a crocodile very like the territorial growl of another crocodile? That’s why crocodiles so often go for small boats apparently.’

  They looked at me with amazement. It’s not often a foreigner gets to scare the crap out of Australian listeners, but I had just read the book after all.

  ‘I’m so glad I didn’t know that at Port Douglas,’ Carmel said. She gave an expansive shiver.

  ‘But you got back OK, I take it?’ I asked.

  Alan nodded happily. ‘We went down the river, across the estuary and were out of that boat – and I mean clean out – before it touched the dock.’ He looked at me with a very pleased and expectant smile. ‘And how long do you think we’d had the boat out? We’d hired it for a half day, bear in mind.’

  I indicated that I couldn’t guess.

  Howe leaned towards me, beaming all over. ‘Twenty-nine minutes,’ he said with the supremest pride. ‘Guy told us it was a record.’

  ‘That’s splendid,’ I said.

  ‘A proud achievement for the Howe family,’ he added, and you could see that he meant it.

  Howe had to put out a paper the next day, but Carmel offered to show me the sights. So late the next morning we drove into the city to drop off my rental car, and to do some shopping and have a look around. We were driving down Chapel Street looking for a place to park, and Carmel was telling me about her work – she is the Melbourne correspondent for News International – when she broke off and said brightly: ‘Oh look, it’s Jim Cairns.’ She indicated a little old man crossing the road in front of us carrying a chair and a card table. He looked a touch timeworn, but otherwise unremarkable. ‘He was Deputy Prime Minister in the Whitlam government,’ she informed me. I looked at her to see if she was pulling my leg, but she smiled sincerely. ‘He sells his autobiography at that market over there.’ She indicated the sort of covered market where you would go to buy vegetables.

  I looked at her. ‘He sells books – his own book – from a card table?’

  She smiled, cheerfully acknowledging that this might strike an outsider as just a trifle cheesy. ‘I suppose it’s a way for him to make a little pocket money,’ she added.

  This was a man, you understand, who had not so long ago held the second highest office in the land. The equivalent in America, I suppose, would be to find Walter Mondale sitting at a card table in a mall in Minneapolis selling White House coasters and other memorabilia.

  ‘He does this regularly?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, he’s a fixture. You want to meet him?’

  ‘Very much.’

  We found a space and parked, but when we got to the market we discovered that he had gone. Evidently we had seen him on his way home. ‘I think things are sometimes a little slow for him,’ Carmel said sympathetically. ‘He’s been selling the book for a long time.’

  I nodded and reflected, not for the first time, what a strange, small, distant country Australia is.

  We were headed for the Immigration Museum but our route took us past the new Crown Casino, a gaming palace that all Melbourne people either loathe because it’s tacky and tempts foolish people to lose their savings, or adore because it’s tacky and sometimes pays out big. ‘You want to have a look at it?’ Carmel asked. I hesitated – I felt I had satisfied my gambling curiosity at the Penrith Panthers club in Sydney on my first trip – but she said with unusual certitude, ‘I think it’ll interest you,’ and we went in.

  She couldn’t have been more right. It was an amazing place, vast in scale – it dwarfed by far even the Penrith club – and dripping with ornate fixtures. Some kind of frantic laser show involving synthesized music and lots of drifting smoke (the better to show up the dancing beams, I guess) was taking place in a lofty outer atrium, but almost nobody was watching. The real business was in the casino beyond, which was no less extravagant in decor and went on seemingly for ever. I can say with confidence that whoever won the contract for the carpet at the Crown Casino has not had to work since. It took twenty minutes to stroll from one end of the room to the other. The amazing thing was its busyness and strange intensity. It was barely lunchtime and perhaps 2,000 gamblers were already in devoted attendance. Hardly a pit or machine wasn’t in fully active service. I had never seen anything on this scale outside Las Vegas, and in Las Vegas a good chunk of the people are just fooling around and having a good time. The people here were merely intent. At one roulette table I saw a man distribute perhaps twenty chips around the baize, lose them all, then reach into a wallet and pluck out twenty $50 bills to buy more. Quite slowly – for urban Australia is such a multicultural place that you scarcely notice these things normally – it dawned on me that he and the overwhelming proportion of other patrons were Chinese. I may have misjudged his attire, but he looked like a waiter or cook – certainly not like someone who could afford to lose thousands in a session. I mentioned this to Carmel and she nodded.

  ‘Spectacular gamblers,’ she whispered. She gave a wan smile. ‘It’s huge business. A billion dollars a year goes through here. Victoria gets 15 per cent of all its revenues from gambling.’

  I thought for a moment. That must be hundreds of millions of dollars. ‘So how many casinos are there in the state?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re in it,’ she said.

  The Immigration Museum, just over the Yarra River in a grand old edifice that was once the local Customs House, provided a calm and decidedly more cerebral contrast. It had only recently opened, and still gleamed with shiny newness. Howe had been particularly eager that I see it because in his capacity as pillar of the community he had been one of the driving forces behind its foundation. Since the immigrant experience is essentially the story of modern Australia, it was really a museum of social history and quite the best one I have seen anywhere.

  In a cavernous central hall was a large walk-in display in the shape of an ocean liner and designed, with the help of replica cabins and various ephemera, to convey the flavour of shipboard life for immigrants at different periods. I was particularly taken with the 1950s portion. I suppose because I grew up a
thousand miles from the sea and missed the great age of passenger liners, I have always been subject to a romantic longing for ocean travel. In any case, I found myself helplessly lingering over every trivial detail of shipboard life – studying a forty-year-old menu as if I would soon be making my choice between lamb cutlets and braised beef, imagining my own books and toiletries on the shelf beside the bunk, thinking whether for the tea dancing this afternoon I should wear my baggage label shirt or go for a wild-orchids-of-Hawaii motif.

  I hadn’t realized – or at least hadn’t stopped to reflect in anything like an adequate manner – quite what an investment in both time and funds a trip to Australia represented in those days. Until as late as the early 1950s a round-trip aeroplane ticket from Australia to England cost as much as a three-bedroom suburban home in Melbourne or Sydney. With the introduction by Qantas of larger Lockheed Super Constellation airliners in 1954, prices began to fall, but even by the end of the decade travelling to Europe by air still cost as much as a new car. Nor was it a terribly speedy or comfortable service. The Super Constellations took three days to reach London and lacked the power or range to dodge most storms. When monsoons or cyclones were encountered, the pilots had no choice but to put on the seat-belt signs and bounce through them. Even in normal conditions they flew at a height guaranteed to produce more or less constant turbulence. (Qantas called it, without evident irony, the Kangaroo Route.) It was, by any modern measure, an ordeal.

  So for nearly every immigrant throughout the 1950s, a trip to Australia meant a five-week sea cruise. Even now, of course, when you must allow yourself to be sealed into a winged canister for a full day in order to get there, Australia feels a long way away. But how infinitely remote it must have seemed when you stood on a ship’s deck and watched the continents fall away one by one and measured out the distance in 12,000 miles of ship’s wake. I studied the faces of the beaming people lounging on sun-chairs or striding about on breezy decks. They wore expressions just like those on the faces of the people I’d seen in the Surfers Paradise book in Adelaide. These people were happy, too – radiantly so. They were on their way to a lucky country and they knew it. Awaiting them was a life of abundant sunshine and good jobs, good homes, good prospects, and electric jugs for all. They were going on a holiday and they were going for ever.

  It was such an interesting age for Australia. It wasn’t just millions of foreigners who became Australian in the 1950s but, in an odd way, Australians themselves. I had only just learned that until 1949 there was no such thing as Australian citizenship. People born in Australia were not in any technical sense Australians at all but Britons – as British as if they were from Cornwall or Scotland. They swore allegiance to king and country, and when Britain went to war they unhesitatingly went off to die in foreign fields for her. At school, they studied British history, geography and economics as assiduously as if they were growing up in Liverpool or Manchester. I remember in one of her letters Catherine Veitch remarking to me on the surreal quality of sitting in an Adelaide classroom in the 1930s looking out on blazing waratah trees and flocks of kookaburras or whatever while learning the heights of Scottish mountains or the figures for barley production in East Anglia.

  The absurdity of the situation wasn’t lost on Australians, but Britain was all they had. As the historian Alan Moorehead once wrote: ‘Australians of my generation grew up in a world apart. Until we went abroad we had never seen a beautiful building, hardly ever heard a foreign language spoken, or been to a well-acted play, or eaten a reasonably sophisticated meal, or listened to a good orchestra.’ The oddest aspect of all was that millions of Australians, most of whom had never left the country, went through life thinking of England in some odd, ultimate sense as home. As late as 1957 in On the Beach, the Nevil Shute novel in which a nuclear war leaves Australia as the last inhabited place on earth, the author could have his Australian heroine lament: ‘I was going home in March. To London. It’s been arranged for years . . . It’s so bloody unfair.’ By ‘home’ she means a country she has never seen and now never will.

  But even as Shute wrote Australia was in the process of becoming a very different country. In the Second World War it had suffered a kind of blunt trauma when, after the fall of Burma and Singapore, Britain pulled out of the Far East, leaving Australia suddenly alone and dangerously exposed. At the same time Winston Churchill, a man whose presumptuousness was never less than enthralling, asked Australia’s military leaders to divert their troops to India – in effect, to abandon their wives and children and fight for the greater good of empire. The Australians decided they could not. Instead they stayed behind and fought a rearguard action to try to stop the Japanese advance across New Guinea.

  Not many people outside Australia realize just how close the Japanese got. They had captured most of the Solomon Islands and much of New Guinea, just to the north, and seemed poised for an invasion. The Australian military, knowing the position was hopeless, drew up a plan to fall back to the south-east corner of the country, sacrificing nearly the whole of the continent in the hope of defending the main cities. It could have been no more than a delaying tactic. Luckily, the tide of battle moved elsewhere after the American naval victory at Midway and an Australian victory over Japan at Milne Bay. Australia was reprieved.

  Australia escaped but it was left with two scars – a realization that Britain could not be counted on to come to its rescue in a crisis, and a sense of immense vulnerability to the teeming and unstable countries to the north. Both of these matters deeply influenced Australian attitudes in the post-war years – indeed still do. Australia became seized with the conviction that it must populate or perish – that if it didn’t use all that empty land and fill all those empty spaces someone from outside might do it for them. So in the years after the war, the country threw open its doors. In the half century after 1945 its population soared, from seven million to 18 million.

  Britain alone couldn’t provide the necessary bodies, so people were welcomed from all over Europe, particularly Greece and Italy in the immediate post-war years, making the nation vastly more cosmopolitan. Suddenly Australia was full of people who liked wine and good coffee and olives and aubergines, and realized that spaghetti didn’t have to be a vivid orange and come from tins. The whole warp and rhythm of life changed. Good Neighbour Councils were established everywhere to help the immigrants settle and feel welcomed, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation offered English language courses which were enthusiastically taken up by tens of thousands. By 1970, the country could boast of 2.5 million ‘New Australians’, as they were known.

  Of course, it wasn’t perfect. In the fever to populate, some migrants were accepted with less reflection than might have been wished. At least ten thousand children, many as young as four, were dispatched from British orphanages between 1947 and 1967 by child welfare groups such as the Salvation Army, Barnardo’s and the Christian Brothers. The impulse was genuinely altruistic – it was felt that the children would have a chance of a better life in a country that was warm and sunny and needed labour – but the execution often lacked subtlety. Siblings were frequently parted, never to meet again, and many of the children had essentially no notion of what was happening to them. In his book Orphans of the Empire, Alan Gill notes how one little boy, seeing a sign announcing the mustering point for ‘the Barnardo’s party’, was thrilled because he presumed ‘party’ meant cake and ice cream. Another enquired, as the ship made its way up the Thames, whether they would be home in time for tea. Stories don’t get a great deal more poignant than that.

  There was also the deep odium of the White Australia Policy, which allowed immigration officials to keep out undesirables by requiring them to pass a literacy test in any European language of the authorities’ choosing (including on one famous occasion Scottish Gaelic) and to deport non-whites with little thought of compassion. In the early 1950s, Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration, tried to repatriate the Indonesian-born widow and eight children of an
Australian citizen. If Australians have a single radiant virtue, it is the belief in a ‘fair go’ – a sense of the fundamental rightness of common justice – and the case caused an outcry. The courts told Calwell to get real, and the more insensitive side of the exclusion policy swiftly began to erode. Around 1970, as Australia increasingly recognized that it was, at least geographically, an Asian nation and not a European one, the colour bar came down and hundreds of thousands of immigrants were let in from across the region. Today Australia is one of the most multicultural countries on earth. A third of the people in Sydney were born in another country; in Melbourne the four most common surnames are Smith, Brown, Jones and Nguyen. Across the country as a whole almost a quarter of people have no British antecedents on either side of their families. For millions of people it truly was a chance of a new life – one that, on the whole, was generously extended and gratefully accepted.

  In a single generation, Australia remade itself. It went from being a half-forgotten outpost of Britain, provincial, dull and culturally dependent, to being a nation infinitely more sophisticated, confident, interesting and outward looking. And it did all this, by and large, without discord or disturbance or serious mistakes – indeed often with a kind of grace.

  By coincidence, a few nights earlier I had watched a television documentary about the immigrant experience in the 1950s. One of the people interviewed was a man who had arrived from Hungary as a teenager after the uprising there. On his first full day in the country he had gone as instructed to the local police station and explained in halting English that he was a new immigrant who had been told to register his address. The sergeant had stared at him for a moment, then risen from his seat and come around the desk. The Hungarian recalled that for one bewildered moment he thought the policeman might be about to strike him, but instead the sergeant thrust out a meaty hand and said warmly, ‘Welcome to Australia, son.’ The Hungarian recalled the incident with wonder even now, and when he finished there were tears in his eyes.