Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  ‘Not possible,’ I said.

  ‘No, it is. It’s even better.’

  What he had for us the next day was a place called Alpine National Park, and in fact it was even better. Covering 2,500 square miles of eastern Victoria, it was lofty, grand, cool and green. If ever there was a portion of Australia remote from all the clichéd images of red soil and baking sun, this was it. They even skied here in winter. Alpine is perhaps a somewhat ambitious term. You will find no craggy Matterhorns here. The Australian Alps have a gentler profile, more like the Appalachians of America or the Scottish Cairngorms. But they do attain entirely respectable heights – Kosciuszko, the tallest, tops out at something over 7,000 feet.

  Howe, through one of his contacts, had got hold of a friendly and helpful warden named Ron Riley, who had agreed to show us round his airy domain. A genial man with a dapper grey beard, Ron had the lean bearing and far-off gaze of someone whose world is the outdoors. We met in the little town of Mount Beauty, where we decanted into one of the park’s four-wheel-drive vehicles and set off on the long, twisting drive up Mount Bogong, Victoria’s highest peak at 6,500 feet. I asked him if Mount Bogong was named for the famous bogong moths, which erupt in vast, fluttery multitudes every spring and for a day or two seem to be everywhere. Along with plump witchetty grubs and long, slimy mangrove worms, they are the delicacies of the Aboriginal diet most often noted by chroniclers – noted because of course they are so unappealing to the western palate. The bogongs are roasted in hot ashes and eaten whole, or so I had read.

  Ron acknowledged that this was where they came from.

  ‘And the Aborigines really eat them?’

  ‘Oh, yeah – well, traditionally anyway. A bogong moth is eighty-five per cent fat and they didn’t get a lot of fat in their diet, so it was quite a treat for them. They used to come from miles.’

  ‘Have you ever eaten one?’

  ‘Once,’ he said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Once was enough.’ He smiled.

  ‘What did it taste like?’

  He thought for a moment. ‘Like a moth.’

  I grinned. ‘I read that it has a kind of buttery taste.’

  He thought about that. ‘No. It has a moth taste.’

  We climbed up a steep, winding road through dense groves of an amazingly tall and beautiful tree. Ron told me they were mountain ashes.

  I made an appropriately appreciative face. ‘I didn’t know you had ashes here.’

  ‘We don’t. They’re eucalypts.’

  I looked again, surprised. Everything else about it – its long, straight body, its height, its lushness – was completely at odds with the skeletal gums associated with the lowlands. It really was true that the eucalypts have filled every ecological niche in Australia. There never was a more various tree.

  ‘Tallest tree in the world after the California redwoods,’ Ron added with a nod at the ashes, causing me to make another appreciative face.

  ‘How tall do they grow?’

  ‘Up to three hundred feet. They average about two hundred.’ Three hundred feet is about the height of a twenty-five-storey building. Big trees.

  ‘Do you get many bush fires?’

  Ron gave a regretful nod. ‘Sometimes. We lost five hundred thousand hectares in this part of the Great Dividing Range in 1985.’

  ‘Gosh,’ I said, though the figure meant little to me. Later I looked in a book and discovered that 500,000 hectares is equivalent to the area covered by Yosemite, Grand Teton, Zion and Redwood National Parks in America. In other words, it was a natural disaster on a scale almost inconceivable elsewhere. (I also looked in the New York Times Index to see what coverage it had been given: none.) Even without being able to conceive quite what 500,000 hectares is, I knew of course that it was a lot, so I added politely: ‘That must have been awful.’

  Ron nodded again. ‘Yeah, it was a bit,’ he said.

  We passed through a zone of snow gums – yet another niche dominated by the versatile eucalypts – and emerged into a sunny world of high, gently undulant plains, covered everywhere in pale grass and spongy alpine plants, with long views to distant summits. Quite a few visitors were evident, most of them with the springy step and considered apparel of the serious walker. At every group we passed, Ron slowed and called, ‘G’day,’ and asked if they had everything they needed in the way of information. They always did, but it seemed an unusually welcoming gesture.

  And then we had the most marvellous day. Sometimes we stopped and walked a little, and the rest of the time we drove. The weather was gorgeous – cool at these heights but sunny – and Ron was droll and good-natured. He knew every leaf and bud and insect, and seemed genuinely to enjoy showing off all the secret corners of the park. We bumped along overgrown tracks through meadowy vales and skittered up near-perpendicular gravel roads to hidden firetowers. At every turn there was a point of interest or a memorable view. Alpine National Park is immense. It extends to 6,460 square kilometres – the equivalent of about seventeen Isle of Wights – but it is actually vaster still because it is contiguous along its eastern border with the even larger Kosciuszko National Park in the Snowy Mountains just over the border in New South Wales. Ron pointed out Kosciuszko – ‘Kozzie’, he called it – almost exactly 100 kilometres away, but I couldn’t see it even with binoculars.

  We finished the day at an imposing eminence called Mount McKay, where there were yet more top-of-the-world views: range upon range of steep hills rolling away to a far-off horizon. He took in the view with the assessing gaze of someone watching for a tell-tale plume of smoke.

  ‘So how much of all this are you responsible for?’ I asked.

  ‘A hundred thousand hectares,’ he replied.

  ‘Lot of ground,’ I said, thinking of the responsibility.

  ‘Yeah,’ he replied, squinting thoughtfully at the vista before us, ‘I’m very lucky.’

  It would of course take something extremely exceptional to match Glenrowan and Powers Lookout and Alpine National Park, and frankly I am not sure that many other countries could have provided it, but Howe assured me that he had one last special something for us to see – something that existed nowhere else in the world but in one small corner of Victoria. Beyond that he would not be drawn. The next day, to add to the savour of pleasure deferred, we went to a sleepy, old-fashioned coastal resort called Lakes Entrance, where we stopped for the night and had a nice seafood supper and a shuffle around, and the day after set off for our mystery attraction en route to Melbourne.

  For quite a spell we drove through flat, sunny, uneventful farming country. I sat in the back in a state of tranquil mindlessness until Alan abruptly steered the car off the highway beside a big sign I couldn’t see well enough to read and parked in a large and mostly empty car park. I unfolded myself from the back seat and stepped blinking from the car. Beside us was a long tubular building – rather like a very large cloche, but made of concrete and painted white.

  I looked questioningly at Howe.

  ‘The Giant Worm,’ he announced.

  I stared at him in wonder and admiration.

  ‘Not as in the famous giant worms of south-west Gippsland?’

  ‘The same. You’re familiar with them then?’

  I gave the hollow laugh that such a question deserved. I had been reading about these behemoths of the underworld for months, albeit mostly in footnotes and other passing references. I had never expected to find a shrine to them.

  Even in a land of extraordinary creatures, the giant worms of Gippsland are exceptional. Called Megascolides australis, they are the world’s largest earthworms, growing up to twelve feet in length and more than six inches in diameter. So substantial are they that you can actually hear them moving through the earth, with a gurgling sound, like bad plumbing. What it is about this one small corner of Victoria that led to the evolution of extremely outsized worms is a question that science has yet to answer – but then, it must be said, very few of the world’s best mind
s are drawn to questions of earthworm physiology and distribution. However, Howe promised, such knowledge as the world holds was contained within the tubular structure before us.

  We procured three tickets and stepped eagerly into the display areas. On the wall facing us as we entered was a blown-up photograph, taken early in the twentieth century, showing four ridiculously pleased-looking men holding a droopy twelve-footer, little thicker than a normal earthworm but clearly ambitious in the length department. This I studied with great interest until Carmel drew my attention to a display of living giant worms. These were in a large glass panel, half an inch thick and filled with earth, rather like a very large ant farm, which hung on the wall. According to a label, the case contained a pair of giant worms. In a couple of spots where the earth had come away from the glass, we could see a millimetre or two of living giant worm, but as they weren’t moving or doing anything (Megascolides is extremely devoted to rest, it seems) the experience was, I confess, a trifle anticlimactic. I had rather hoped there would be a petting corner or perhaps a tamer with a whip and a chair getting them to go through hoops. Alan and I tried to enliven the worm by tapping lightly on the glass, but it declined to respond.

  Beside the panel were two long glass tubes filled with formaldehyde and containing a pair of preserved giant worms, each of normal earthworm circumference but about four or five feet long – not exactly titans but long enough to impress. Worms don’t preserve terribly well and the formaldehyde had horrible little bits of worm skin floating in it as if somebody had been shaking the tubes or, more probably (as Alan and I conclusively established by tapping on them), by tapping on them. It was hard to look at them without growing a little queasy.

  In the next room was a short film that told all that was known about the giant earthworm, which is to say almost nothing. They are reclusive, delicate, not terribly numerous and deeply uncooperative creatures, and thus not easy to study, even assuming you had a mind to. As you may recall from childhood experiments, earthworms really don’t wish to come out of their holes, and if you pull they tend to snap. Well, imagine trying to tug a twelve-foot-long worm out of its burrow. Nearly impossible.

  The one thing the Giant Worm Museum establishes beyond question is that you can only get so much mileage out of giant worms. Recognizing this, the proprietors had provided many other displays. Next door were some glass cases containing live snakes, including the famous and fearsome taipan, Australia’s deadliest snake. Alan and I conducted some further glass-tapping experiments, then retreated four yards together in a platonic embrace when the taipan snarled at us (or possibly just yawned), opening its jaws wide enough to swallow a human head, or so it seemed. Deciding that henceforth we would keep our hands in our pockets, we followed Carmel outdoors where there was a compound containing yet more animals – kangaroos and emus, a forlorn-looking dingo, some caged cockatoos, half a dozen curled and dozing wombats and a couple of koalas, also dozing. It was a very hot, still afternoon and evidently siesta time, so the enclosures had an air of profound inertness – even the cockatoos slept – but I strolled among them with fascination, delighted to see so much native exotica brought together in one place. I peered with particular interest at the wombats – ‘a squat, thick, short-legged and rather inactive quadruped, with great appearance of stumpy strength’, as the first Englishman to see one recorded in 1788 in words that could not be bettered. (The man, David Collins, was a little less reliable with the kangaroo, which he described as ‘a small bird of beautiful plumage’.) Alan and Carmel looked on with the tolerant amusement with which an American might view a display of raccoons and chipmunks, for most of these were animals that they saw regularly in their natural state, but to me every one was a novelty, even the dingo, which is after all just a dog. I made two complete circuits of the menagerie, then with a look of satisfaction I gave a nod and we set off once again for Melbourne.

  We went to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond, on a street lined seemingly for miles with exotic restaurants, and Alan made the point, with which I could not argue, that Melbourne is an infinitely better city than Sydney for dining out in. In the course of conversation Alan asked if I was going to the Great Barrier Reef, a place for which he had a special fondness. I said I wasn’t on this trip, but I was when I came back in a few weeks.

  ‘Just be careful they don’t leave you out there.’ He gave a thin smile.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There was a story here recently. An American couple were left out on the reef.’

  ‘Left?’ I said, puzzled but intrigued.

  Howe nodded and speared at some pasta. ‘Yeah. Somehow the boat went back to port two passengers short. Bit of a pisser for the people left behind, wouldn’t you say? I mean, one minute you’re swimming around looking at coral and fish, having the time of your life, and then you surface and discover that the boat has gone and you are all alone in a very large and empty ocean.’

  ‘They couldn’t swim to shore?’

  He smiled tolerantly at my ignorance. ‘Barrier Reef’s a long way out, Bryson – something over thirty miles where they were. Long way to swim.’

  ‘And there were no islands or anything?’

  ‘Not where they were. They were effectively out to sea. Apparently there were a couple of things they could swim to – a big moored pontoon that the dive company used and some kind of a coral atoll, both a couple of miles away. So presumably they started swimming towards those. What they didn’t know – couldn’t know – was that they were swimming across a deep-water channel. And guess what lurks in deep-water channels?’

  ‘Sharks,’ I said.

  He nodded at my perspicacity. ‘So imagine it. You’re miles out to sea, stranded. You’re tired. You’re swimming towards a coral outcrop and it’s hard going because the tide is coming in. The light is fading. And you look around and see fins circling you, maybe halfa dozen of them.’ He gave me a moment to form a picture in my mind, then fixed me with a deadpan expression. ‘I don’t know about you, but I think I’d ask for my money back.’ He laughed.

  ‘So nobody came back to rescue them?’

  ‘It was two days before anyone noticed they were missing,’ said Carmel.

  I turned to her in wonder. ‘Two days?’

  ‘By which time, of course, they were long gone.’

  ‘Eaten by sharks?’

  She shrugged. ‘No way of knowing, but presumably. Anyway, they were never seen again.’

  ‘Wow.’

  We ate in thoughtful silence for a minute, then I mentioned that every time there was an odd story in Australia, it seemed to come out of Queensland. My favourite of the moment concerned a German man, recently detained outside Cairns, who had arrived on a tourist visa in 1982 and spent the past seventeen years wandering on foot through the northern deserts living almost exclusively off road kill. I was also extremely partial to the story of a group of illegal immigrants who were brought from China on an old fishing boat, which dropped them in shallow water a hundred yards off a beach near Cairns. They were caught when one of their members, carrying a suitcase, dripping water conspicuously from sodden trousers and squelching with every step, presented himself at a newsagent’s shop and politely asked the proprietor if he would order a fleet of taxis to take him and some associates to the railway station at Cairns. Nearly every day, it seemed, the papers had a story of arresting improbability under a Queensland dateline.

  Alan nodded in accord. ‘There’s a reason for that, of course.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They’re crazy in Queensland. Madder than cut snakes. You’ll like it up there.’

  In the morning, Alan ran me to the airport by way of his office. While he went off to hold the front page, or do whatever editors do, he left me to sit at his big desk and play in his swivel chair. When he returned he was carrying a folder, which he passed to me. ‘I dug out some stuff on that American couple that disappeared. I thought it might be o
f use to you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, quite touched.

  ‘It should give you some tips on how not to get left on the reef. I know what a dozy bugger you are, Bryson.’

  At the airport he jumped out of the car and helped me haul my bag out of the back. He shook my hand. ‘And remember what I said about watching yourself up north,’ he said.

  ‘Madder than cut snakes,’ I repeated, to show that I had been listening.

  ‘Madder than a sack of them.’

  He smiled, then jumped back in the car, waved and was gone.

  It is possible, I suppose, to construct hypothetical circumstances in which you would be pleased to find yourself, at the end of a long day, in Macksville, New South Wales – perhaps something to do with rising sea levels that left it as the only place on earth not under water, or maybe some disfiguring universal contagion from which it alone remained unscathed. In the normal course of events, however, it is unlikely that you would find yourself standing on its lonely main street at six thirty on a warm summer’s evening gazing about you in an appreciative manner and thinking: ‘Well, thank goodness I’m here!’

  I was in Macksville owing to the interesting discovery that Brisbane is not three or four hours north of Sydney, as I had long and casually supposed, but the better part of a couple of days’ drive. Well, if you look on the television weather map Brisbane and Sydney are practically neighbours, their little local suns and storm clouds all but bumping on the chart. But in Australia neighbourliness is of course a relative concept. In fact, it is almost 1,000 kilometres from Sydney to Brisbane, much of it along a cheerfully poky two-lane road. And so, in mildly confounded consequence, I was in Macksville for the night.

  I don’t wish to disparage a community that 2,811 people proudly call home (and what a miraculous notion that is), but as I had rather had it in mind that I would be dining on fresh-caught barramundi and watching a sunset emblazon the Pacific on Queensland’s storied Gold Coast rather than stuck in an obscure backwater barely halfway there, my disappointment was real. My immediate preoccupation was that I was running out of time on this trip. I had a commitment of long standing to take part in a fund-raising hike in Syria and Jordan for a British children’s charity. In three days I was to fly home from Sydney, to collect hiking gear and see how many of my children still recognized me, before flying off again to London and onward to Damascus. It was clear that I wasn’t going to see as much of the northern reaches of the Boomerang Coast as I had hoped.