Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  I tell you sincerely. It’s a wonderful country.

  Carmel grew up on a farm in eastern Victoria on the southern edge of the Great Dividing Range, in lovely country of green fields set against a backdrop of blue hills. Howe, a lifelong city boy whose notion of the bush was of a monotonous expanse filled with deathly creatures, had gone to visit the family farm out of a sense of husbandly duty and fallen for it at once – so much so that he and Carmel had bought a parcel of land high on a neighbouring hillside, trucked in a jaunty wooden cottage and placed it in a lofty spot giving views over miles of hills, woods and farms. Howe had been telling me about it with a certain repetitive rapture for years and was keen for me to see it. So the next day, after loading up with provisions, we set off in their car for the three-hour drive to their rural idyll.

  ‘Bush’ is such a vague word in Australia that I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it became obvious once we had shrugged off the outer suburbs of Melbourne that eastern Victoria was a favoured corner of the world – greener than any part of Australia I had seen before and backed by mountains that attained a wholly respectable eminence. The road wound through meadowy landscapes in a charmingly indecisive manner and through a succession of small and pleasant little towns. With strange, unshakeable pride, Howe wore an arrestingly outsized and touchingly misguided bush hat he had lately acquired, which inclined Carmel and me, when we stopped for petrol or coffee, to signal to staring strangers that he was out on a visit and we’d be taking him back to the home at the end of the week, but otherwise the journey passed without incident or embarrassment.

  Alan and Carmel’s house stands in glorious seclusion on the brow of a steep hill. The view, over a snug and restful valley of tobacco fields and vineyards, was expansive and charming in a way that brought to mind a children’s picture book. This was, I realized after a minute, the view from high up the beanstalk.

  ‘Not bad, eh?’ said Howe.

  ‘Much too good for anyone in a hat like that. What’s this area called?’

  ‘The King Valley. Carmel’s old man used to farm over there.’ He pointed to a rolling piece of land nestled against a neighbouring hill. It recalled, almost impossibly, the landscapes of the American artist Grant Wood – gumdrop hills, rolling fields, plump trees – which depicted an idealized Iowa that never actually existed. It existed here.

  Howe let us into the house and he and Carmel immediately began moving about in an impressively practised manner, opening windows, putting on the water heater, packing away groceries. I helped carry stuff in from the car, watching for snakes with every step, and when that was finished ventured onto the broad deck to take in the view. Howe came out after a minute bearing two cold beers, one of which he passed to me. I don’t believe I had ever seen him looking so relaxed. Mercifully he had removed the hat.

  He took a sip of beer, then said in an anecdotal tone: ‘When I first met Carmel, she used to talk about one day buying a piece of land out here and putting a house on it and I thought: “Yes, dear.” I mean, why would you want to own a house in the middle of the bush with all the costs and dangers of bush fires and everything? And then one day we came up to visit her family, and I took one look and I said: “Right, where do I sign?” Not long after that the family sold up and moved to Ballarat. So we bought this corner of the property, which they were happy to sell because it’s too steep to farm, and had the house put up.’ He nodded at Carmel, humming away in the kitchen. ‘She loves it here. So do I, come to that. I never thought I’d say I loved the country but jeez you know it’s a nice place to get away to.’

  ‘Are bush fires a big worry?’

  ‘Well, they are when they happen. Sometimes they’re colossal. Gum trees just want to burn, you know. It’s part of their strategy. How they outcompete other plants. They’re full of oil, and once they catch fire they’re a bugger to put out. You get a really big bush fire moving across the landscape at fifty miles an hour with flames leaping a hundred and fifty feet in the air and it’s an awesome sight, believe me.’

  ‘How often does that happen?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose every ten years or so you get a really big one. There was one in 1994 that burned 600,000 hectares and threatened parts of Sydney. I was there at the time and in one direction there was this pall of black smoke that completely filled the sky. Burned for days. The biggest one ever was in 1939. People still talk about that one. It was during a heatwave so bad that department store mannequins’ heads actually started to melt in the windows. Can you imagine that? That one burned up most of Victoria.’

  ‘So how much at risk are you here?’

  He shrugged philosophically. ‘It’s all in the lap of the gods. Could be next week, could be ten years from now, could be never.’ He turned to me with an odd smile. ‘You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It’s just a fact of life. But I tell you one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It sure makes you appreciate something like this when you know it could all go up in a puff of smoke.’

  Howe is one of those people who can’t stand to see anyone sleeping when there is daylight to be utilized, and he rousted me out early the next morning with the announcement that he had a busy day planned for us. For a terrible moment I thought he meant we were going to shingle the roof or dig up boulders or something, but then he noted that we were going to have a Ned Kelly day. Howe was immensely proud that Kelly came from this part of Victoria and wanted to show me several of the sights connected with his short and brutish life. This sounded somewhat more promising.

  It is an interesting fact, and one that no doubt speaks much about the Australian character, that the nation never produced a law enforcement hero along the lines of Wyatt Earp or Bat Masterson in America. Australian folk heroes are all bad guys of the Billy the Kid type, only here they are known as bushrangers, and the most famous of them all was Ned Kelly.

  The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish settlers, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying innocent passers-by. Like most bushrangers he was at pains to present himself as a champion of the oppressed, though in fact there wasn’t a shred of nobility in his character or his deeds. He killed several people, often in cold blood, sometimes for no very good reason.

  In 1880, after years on the run, Kelly was reported to be holed up with his modest gang (a brother and two friends) in Glenrowan, a hamlet in the foothills of the Warby Range in north-eastern Victoria. Learning of this, the police assembled a large posse and set off to get him. As surprise attacks go, it wasn’t terribly impressive. When the police arrived (on an afternoon train) they found that word of their coming had preceded them and that a thousand people were lined up along the streets and sitting on every rooftop eagerly awaiting the spectacle of gunfire. The police took up positions and at once began peppering the Kelly hideout with bullets. The Kellys returned the fire and so it went throughout the night. The next dawn during a lull Kelly stepped from the dwelling, dressed unexpectedly, not to say bizarrely, in a suit of home-made armour – a heavy cylindrical helmet that brought to mind an inverted bucket, and a breastplate that covered his torso and crotch. He wore no armour on his lower body, so one of the policemen shot him in the leg. Aggrieved, Kelly staggered off into some nearby woods, fell over and was captured. He was taken to Melbourne, tried and swiftly executed. His last words were: ‘Such is life.’

  Not exactly the stuff of legend, one would have thought, yet in his homeland Kelly is treated with deep regard. Sidney Nolan, one of Australia’s most esteemed artists, did a famous series of paintings devoted to Kelly’s life, and books abound on the subject. Even serious historians often accord him an importance that seems to the outsider curiously disproportionate. Manning Clark, for example, in his one-volume history of Australia, devotes just a paragraph to the design and foundation of Canberra, dispenses with federation in two pages, but gives a full nine pages to the life
and achievements of Ned Kelly. He also allows Kelly some of his most florid and incoherent prose, which is saying a great deal, believe me. Manning Clark is an extraordinary stylist at the best of times – a man who would never call the moon ‘the moon’ when he might instead call it ‘the lunar orb’ – but with Kelly he was inspired to lofty allusions and cosmic musings of a rare impenetrability. Here is a small part of his description of Kelly’s fateful emergence from the compound after the night-long shootout:

  In the half light before that red disc [i.e., the sun] appeared again on the eastern horizon . . . a tall figure, encased in armour, came out of the mists and wisps of frosty air . . . Some thought it was a madman or a ghost; some thought it was the Devil, the whole atmosphere having stimulated in friend and foe alike a ‘superstitious awe.’

  Personally – and this is just a stab in the dark – I think Manning Clark was taking way too much codeine. Here’s another of his well-juiced creations, this the merest fragment of a much longer passage discussing Kelly’s legacy:

  He lived on as a man who had confronted the bourgeois calm-down with all the uproar of a magnificent Dionysian frenzy, a man who had taken down the mighty from their seat and driven the rich empty away. He lived on as a man who had savaged policemen in the old convict tradition . . . and denounced the brutal barbarism of those who clothed their sadism toward the common people in the panoply of the law.

  About 2,800 milligrams talking there, I would say.

  Today Glenrowan is a one-street town with a couple of pubs, a scattering of houses and a short strip of enterprises dedicated to extracting a little cash from the Kelly legend. On this hot summer’s day there were perhaps a dozen visitors in town, including Alan, Carmel and me. The biggest of the commercial establishments, a place called Ned Kelly’s Last Stand, was covered in painted signs of a semi-professional quality. ‘This is not a place for Whimps,’ said one, promisingly. Another added: ‘It is absolutely absurd that after allowing yourself 10 to 20 minutes to take photos, walk up and down the street and buy some souvenirs and then have the audacity to tell your friends – “Don’t go to Glenrowan, for there is nothing to see.” To be quite honest most visitors to Glenrowan wouldn’t know if the country shithouse fell on them . . .’

  The impression one derived from further study was that Ned Kelly’s Last Stand contained some kind of animatronic show. Alan, Carmel and I exchanged happy looks and knew that this was a place for us. Inside, a friendly man presided over the till. We were mildly staggered to see that they wanted $15 a head for admission.

  ‘It’s good, is it?’ said Howe.

  ‘Mister,’ said the man with the greatest sincerity, ‘it’s like Disneyland in there.’

  We bought tickets and shuffled through a door into a dim room where the spectacle was to begin. The space was designed to look like an old saloon. In the middle were benches for the audience. Before us, in a deep gloom, we could just make out the shapes of furniture and seated dummies. After a few minutes, the lights dimmed altogether, there was a sudden startling bang of gunfire and the performance began.

  Well, call me a Whimp, drop a brick shithouse on me, but I can honestly say that I have seldom seen anything so wonderfully, so delightfully, so monumentally bad as Ned Kelly’s Last Stand. It was so bad it was worth every penny. Actually, it was so bad it was worth more than we paid. For the next thirty-five minutes we proceeded through a series of rooms where we watched home-made dummies, each with a frozen smile and a mop of hair that brought to mind wind-blown pubis, re-enacting various scenes from the famous Kelly shootout in a random and deliriously incoherent way. Occasionally one of them would turn a stiff head or jerk up a forearm to fire a pistol, though not necessarily in sync with the narrative. Meanwhile, around each room lots of other mechanical events were taking place – empty chairs rocked, cupboard doors mysteriously opened and shut, player pianos played, a figure of a boy on a trapeze (and why not?) swung back and forth amid the rafters. Do you know those fairground stalls where you fire a rifle at assorted targets to make an outhouse door swing open or a stuffed chicken fall over? Well, this reminded me of that, only much worse. The narrative, insofar as it could be heard above the competing noises, made no sense at all.

  When at last we were liberated into the sunshine, we were so delighted that we considered going in again – but $45 is a lot of money, after all, and we feared that with repeated exposure it might begin to make some sense. So instead we went and looked at a giant fibreglass Ned Kelly that stood outside one of the souvenir shops. It wasn’t as big or as intimidating as the Big Lobster, and its testicles didn’t swing in the breeze, but it was still a game stab at the genre. Then we had a look around a couple of the shops and bought some postcards, and returned to the car for the next part of our day’s adventure.

  This was to see the famous Kelly Tree at a remote spot called Stringybark Creek. This involved a long drive into a strange, spooky valley of abandoned and semi-abandoned farms, nearly all of them half buried under blackberry brambles, then up into dense and verdant rainforest, and finally into crowded groves of towering stringybark trees. Australia has some 700 varieties of eucalyptus trees and they have the most wonderfully expressive names – kakadu woollybutt, bastard tallow-wood, gympie messmate, candlebark, ghost gum – but the stringybark was the first that I could identify by sight. The bark peels off in long strips and hangs from the branches in fibrous tassels or lies in curled heaps on the ground, all the better to burn apparently. It was a handsome tree, too: tall, straight and exceptionally close-growing. Some miles into the woods we came to a parking area beside a sign announcing the Kelly Tree. We were the only visitors; it felt as if we might have been the only visitors in years. The forest was cool and noiseless, and with all the strands of bark hanging down it had a strange, unwelcoming, otherworldly feel. The Kelly Tree stood along a path through the woods, distinguished from the others by the stoutness of its trunk and by a metal plaque in the shape of Kelly’s famous helmet.

  ‘And what is the Kelly Tree exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Well,’ Alan said with a learned air, ‘as the Kelly gang got more and more notorious the police started hunting them with greater determination, and so they had to hide out in increasingly remote and desperate places.’

  ‘Such as here?’

  He gave a nod. ‘Can’t get much lonelier than this.’

  We took a moment to consider our surroundings. Because of the denseness with which the stringybarks grew beside each other, there was almost no space to stretch out or move around, and the air had a kind of dank, organic closeness. It was, I think, the least bucolic forest I have ever been in. Even the light seemed stale.

  ‘For three years, Kelly and his gang laid low, but in 1878 four policemen tracked them here. Somehow Kelly and his men captured and disarmed the policemen. Then they murdered three of them in a slow and pretty horrible way.’

  ‘Horrible in what way?’ I asked, ever alert for the morbid detail.

  ‘Shot them in the balls and let them bleed to death. To maximize the pain and indignity.’

  ‘And the fourth policeman?’

  ‘Scarpered. He hid overnight in a wombat’s burrow and the next day he made his way back to civilization and raised the alarm. So it was the murder of three men here that led eventually to the shootout at Glenrowan, as so memorably depicted for us by the robotic wonders of Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.’

  ‘So how come you know so much about all this?’

  He looked at me with a hint of disappointment. ‘Because I know a great deal about many things, Bryson.’

  ‘You haven’t got a clue about hats, though,’ said Carmel cheerfully.

  He looked at her and decided that this was a comment not to be dignified with a response, then turned back to me. ‘Now to Powers Lookout,’ he announced with a certain resolve, and set off in a stately tramp for the car.

  ‘And how many more Kelly sights will we be visiting?’ I called, trying not to betray too much alarm as I fol
lowed him through the woods. I wish no disrespect to Australia’s most treasured thug, nor to imply any disappointment at all in the Kelly Tree – quite the reverse – but we did seem to be hours from anywhere and fast approaching that time of day when one begins to think about the convivial possibilities of food and drink.

  ‘Just one more and it’s on the way home and you won’t regret it, and then we’ll have a pint.’

  He was as good as his word. Powers Lookout was fabulous. A platform of rock hanging high in the sky, it was named for Harry Powers, another storied bushranger, who sometimes shared the view with Kelly and his gang. Some diligent crew had built sturdy wooden walkways up and around the craggy rocks, making it a simple if slightly taxing matter to get from the main body of the cliff to the rocky outcrop that was the lookout. The view was sensational: perhaps a thousand feet below spread the King Valley, a snug and tidy realm of small farms and white farmhouses. Beyond, across air of flawless clarity, rose waves of low mountains, culminating in the distinctive hump of Mount Buffalo some fifty kilometres away.

  ‘You know, if you put this in Virginia or Vermont,’ I mused, ‘there would be scores of people here, even at this hour. There’d be souvenir stands and probably an Imax screen and an adventure park.’

  Howe nodded. ‘It’d be the same in the Blue Mountains. It’s like I’ve been telling you. This corner of Victoria is a great secret. Don’t put it in your book.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I replied sincerely.

  ‘And wait’ll you see what we’ve got for you tomorrow. It’s even better.’