Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  So my mood as I strolled into town from my motel was, let us say, restrained. Macksville wasn’t so bad really. Set on the bank of the swift and muddy Nambucca River, it was essentially just a pause in the highway: a tentacle of neatly gardened bungalows and small office buildings leading to a very compact town centre. Though the road through town is the Pacific Highway, the main artery connecting Sydney and Brisbane, only two cars passed as I followed its dusty margin into town. At the heart of the modest community stood the large and fading Nambucca Hotel, and I stepped in, glad to escape the heat. It was a roomy place but nearly empty. Two older guys in singlets and battered bush hats propped up one end of the long bar. In a side room a man and a woman sat in silent absorption amid the soft, mechanical glow of pokies. I procured a beer, stood long enough to establish that no one was going to take any interest in me that might lead to a conversation, and retired to the central portion of the bar where I parked myself on a stool and idly watched the evening news on a silent TV mounted on the wall.

  Somewhere police were out in the bush with a pack of straining sniffer dogs; there was no telling what the dogs were looking for, though if it was red clay soil they were doing extremely well. Somewhere else there appeared to be a fresh outbreak of Ross River fever – yet another previously unknown malady for me to worry about. Then there was Paul Keating, the former Prime Minister – he of the deeply expressive vocabulary, as you may recall from the Canberra chapter – standing on the steps of an office building answering questions from reporters and looking testy. It was impossible to determine what he was saying, but I imagined he was telling all those present that they were nongs and maggots. I decided I quite liked watching the news with the sound off.

  Meanwhile, back in the Known World something was happening in Kosovo; convoys were rolling along country roads and mortars were throwing up puffs of smoke on distant hills. Bill Clinton was in some kind of moral hot water again, or so I assumed because he was shown strolling through the Rose Garden holding hands with Hillary and Chelsea, all of them looking mutually devoted. They had a lovable spaniel with them as well, which I took as a sign that the President had been very bad indeed. It hardly mattered. It all seemed so far away.

  Then lots of sport, all of it featuring Australians performing commendably. Finally a weather chart came on and showed sun everywhere and then the newsreader tapped her papers square and smiled in a way that suggested that we could all go to bed happy because Greg Norman was winning the golf and everything else was a long, long way away and didn’t really affect us.

  It is amazingly easy in Australia to forget, or at least to reduce to a dim awareness, that there is a world out there. Australians work hard in their news coverage to overcome the handicap of distance, but even so sometimes around the margins of the news you get a curious sense of disconnectedness – little things that remind you that this is a far, far country. I had noticed, for instance, that Australian newspapers commonly run obituaries, particularly of foreign figures, weeks or even months after they die. That’s fair enough in a sense, I suppose – these people are going to be dead for ever, after all – but it does lend the pages a curiously leisured air. Then the previous day on my flight from Melbourne to Sydney, while browsing through a copy of the Bulletin, the country’s venerable news magazine, I read a section called ‘Flashback’, which recorded important events in history on that week’s dates. For 22 January, it had this interesting entry: ‘1934: Actor Bill Bixby (died 1993) is born in Park Ridge, Illinois, US.’

  Consider that just for a moment. In a column devoted to significant moments in world history, the birth date of an actor whose culminating achievement was to play the straight man in a 1960s’ television series called My Favorite Martian is still being recalled in Australia six years after his death. Well, I think that’s kind of spooky, frankly. I appreciate, of course, that this was a filler item at the back of a magazine and one shouldn’t read too much into it, so let me offer a rather more compelling piece of temporal eccentricity.

  As I sat at the bar now I pulled out my one-volume history of Australia by Manning Clark and dutifully ploughed into it. I had only about thirty pages left and I would be less than candid if I didn’t tell you that I couldn’t wait to have Mr Clark and his extravagant dronings out of my life for ever. Still, Australia’s history is an interesting one and I had a comfy stool and the prospect of as much beer as I wanted, so I wasn’t unhappy.

  So I sat and read the rest of the book, and here’s the thing. It finished in 1935. After 619 pages of the densest exposition, the book terminates with the appointment of John Curtin as leader of the Australian Labor Party on 1 October 1935. This is, let me stress, the standard, current, one-volume history of Australia – the one to which you will be directed in every bookshop in the land – and it finishes in 1935. That’s sixteen Prime Ministers ago!

  I was so dumbfounded that I actually lifted the book over my head to see if some pages had fallen out, then looked on the floor around my bar stool. But no. The book finished by design in 1935. Manning Clark died – or yielded the final tortured spark of life, as I am sure he would have wished me to put it – in 1991, so I was prepared to excuse him the last decade or so of Australia’s eventful saga, but I would have thought he would find space for, let us say, the Second World War. Although his history was written long after the war (specifically, between 1962 and 1987 as a series of six books, of which I held the distilled essence), it contains not one mention of the most important event of the twentieth century. There is not even a hint of gathering storm clouds. Nor does the text find room for the Cold War, Aboriginal land reforms, the emergence of a multicultural society, the fall of the Whitlam government, the move to become a republic or the life and times of Bill Bixby, among rather a lot else.

  To cover this troubling gap, the publishers had introduced into the present edition an afterword – a ‘coda’ – written by the book’s editor and abridger. This condensed the last sixty-five years of Australian history into thirty-four pages, which, as you can imagine, gave the whole a somewhat breathless and incidental flavour. And until the 1995 edition, it didn’t even have that.

  Well, I find that extremely odd. That’s all I’m saying.

  Sighing, I closed my book and realized I was famished. According to a sign on a door across the room, the Nambucca had a restaurant, so I wandered over to investigate. The door wouldn’t open.

  ‘Dining room’s closed, mate,’ said one of the two guys at the bar. ‘Chef’s crook.’

  ‘Must’ve ate some of his own cooking,’ came a voice from the pokie alcove, and we all had a grin over that.

  ‘What else is there in town?’ I asked.

  ‘Depends,’ said the man, scratching his throat thoughtfully. He leaned towards me slightly. ‘You like good food?’

  I nodded. Of course I did.

  ‘Nothin’ then.’ He went back to his beer.

  ‘Try the Chinese over the road,’ said his companion. ‘It’s not too bad.’

  The Chinese restaurant was just across the road as promised, but according to a sign in the window it was not licensed to serve alcohol and I couldn’t face small-town Chinese food without the solace of beer. I have travelled enough to know that a chef does not, as a rule, settle in a place like Macksville because he has a lifelong yearning to share the subtleties of 3,500 years of Szechuan cuisine with sheep farmers. So I went off to see what else there might be in Macksville’s compact heart. The answer was very little. Everything appeared to be shut except one small takeaway establishment called, not altogether promisingly, Bub’s Hotbakes. I opened the door, briefly enlivening 5,000 flies that had dropped by to see what Bub and his team were up to, and stepped inside, knowing in my heart that this was almost certainly going to be a regretted experience.

  Bub’s had a substantial range of food, nearly all of it involving brown meat and gravy lurking inside pastry. I ordered a large sausage roll and chips.

  ‘We don’t do chips,’ said the amply
proportioned serving maiden.

  ‘Then how did you get like that?’ I wanted to say, but of course I suppressed this unworthy thought and revised my order to a large sausage roll and something called a ‘continental cheesecake square’ and went with them outside. I ate standing on the corner.

  I take nothing away from Bub’s culinary prowess, I trust, when I tell you that a large sausage roll and a continental cheesecake square was not the most satisfying possible culmination to a night on the town even in as remote and challenging a spot as Macksville. Besides, it was only seven thirty in the evening. I weighed my options – TV back in the motel, a sunset stroll along the highway or more beer in the Nambucca – and toddled back into the Nambucca.

  The two men at the bar had departed, and their place had been taken by a lone woman who was engaged in some deep and earnest conversation with the barmaid. Judging from their pinched and animated faces, this clearly involved gossip. ‘Aw, he’s all right in his place – they just haven’t dug it yet,’ I heard one quip drily to the other.

  I acquired another beer and retired with it to my favoured spot at the bar, where I cracked open my book of maps to see where exactly I stood. It had only begun to dawn on me in the last day or two just how much of this amazingly vast and ungainly country I had still to tackle. I had been driving around almost continuously now for four weeks and I had covered only the tiniest portion of it. What’s more, I had done the easy parts – the parts that are well paved and reasonably inhabited. Altogether Australia has 180,000 miles of paved highway, enough to keep a dedicated driver occupied for about a year, but the great bulk of it is bundled into the populous eastern corridor. Elsewhere, over vast areas there is nothing. Not an inch of paved road exists along the nearly 2,000 miles of indented coastline from Darwin to Cairns, which must make it one of the longest, not to say comeliest, stretches of coastline in the world not touched by highway. Similarly, no road intrudes on the tropical lushness that stretches for 500 miles from just beyond Cairns to the tip of Cape York, Australia’s northernmost point and another area of superlative beauty. In the whole of Queensland, an area into which you could comfortably fit most of Western Europe, just three paved roads venture into the state’s vast and arid interior, and only one provides an outlet to the two-thirds of Australia that lies to the west. From Camooweal in the north to Barringun in the south, you could, if you were completely out of your mind, walk 1,400 miles of Queensland without once crossing a paved surface. Travel any distance into the interior and you are, with amazing swiftness, in an empty country.

  The outback does have dirt tracks in relative abundance, 300,000 miles of them altogether, but standard rental cars aren’t allowed on them and even in a fully equipped offroad vehicle it is a brave or foolhardy driver who ventures out on his own because it is so easy to get lost or stranded. Just recently a young couple from Austria, on a trip into the outback in a rented four-by-four, had sunk to their axles in sand on a lonely, nameless track in the Simpson Desert. When they realized they were hopelessly embedded, the woman decided to hike forty miles to the Oodnadatta Track, where rescue was more likely. Why the woman went and not the man I don’t know. What is known is that she took nine of their twelve litres of water and set off into 140 degree F. heat.

  For most of us it is not possible to conceive just how punishing such heat is. Under a full sun with temperatures that high, it is actually possible to begin to cook, rather as you would in a microwave oven, from the inside out. The poor woman didn’t stand a chance. Even with a good supply of water, she lasted less than two days and covered just eighteen miles, less than half the distance required. (Her partner, sitting in shade, survived and was rescued.) In short, you don’t want to be caught in the outback.

  My more immediate problem was what I was going to do with my last couple of days. My original programme called for me to go to Brisbane, Surfers Paradise, and the Big Banana at Coff’s Harbour. But I didn’t really have time now to see Brisbane, at least in any meaningful way, and I wasn’t all that excited about the Big Banana. I mean no disrespect to a national treasure, but my devotion to giant fruit goes only so far. So as I sat at the bar now I leafed idly through the pages looking at the alternative diversions – Byron Bay, Dorrigo National Park, the Darling Downs of south Queensland – when two words, printed small and attached to a pale and erratic blue line, leaped out at me. I had my destination. I was going to a place called Myall Creek.

  It was time to consider Australia’s forgotten people.

  One of the most momentous events in human history took place at a time that will probably never be known, for reasons that can only be guessed at, by means that seem barely credible. I refer, of course, to the peopling of Australia.

  Until fairly recently accounting for the presence of human beings in Australia was not such a problem. At the beginning of the twentieth century, it was thought that Aborigines had been on the continent for no more than 400 years. As recently as the 1960s, the time frame was estimated to be perhaps 8,000 years. Then in 1969 a geologist named Jim Bowler from the Australian National University in Canberra was poking around on the shores of a long-dried lake bed called Mungo in a parched and lonely corner of western New South Wales when something caught his eye. It was the skeleton of a woman, obtruding slightly from a sandbank. The bones were collected and sent off for carbon dating. When the report came back, it showed that the woman had died 23,000 years ago, at a stroke almost tripling the known period of occupation of Australia. Since then, other finds have pushed the date back further. Today the evidence points to an arrival date of at least 45,000 years ago, but probably more like 60,000.

  The first occupants of Australia could not have walked there because at no point in human times has Australia not been an island. They could not have arisen independently because Australia has no apelike creatures from which humans could have descended. The first arrivals could only have come by sea, presumably from Timor in the Indonesian archipelago, and here is where the problems arise.

  In order to put Homo sapiens in Australia you must accept that, at a point in time so remote that it precedes the known rise of behaviourally modern humans, there lived in southern Asia a people sufficiently advanced that they were fishing inshore waters from boats of some sort, rafts presumably. Never mind that the archaeological record shows no one else on earth doing this for another 30,000 years. We have got to get these people waterborne.

  Next we have to explain what led them to cross at least sixty miles of open sea to reach a land they could not know was there. The scenario that is invariably invoked is of a simple fishing raft – probably little more than a floating platform – accidentally carried out to sea, probably in one of the sudden squalls that are characteristic of this part of the world. This craft then drifted helplessly for some days before washing up on a beach in northern Australia. So far so good.

  The question that naturally arises – but is seldom asked – is how you get breeding stock out of this. If it’s a lone fisherman who is carried off to Australia, then clearly he must find his way back to his homeland to report his discovery and to persuade enough people to come with him to start a colony. This suggests, of course, the possession of nautical skills sufficient to shuttle back and forth between invisible land masses – a prowess few prehistorians are willing to grant. If, on the other hand, the trip was one-way and accidental, then it must necessarily have involved a community of people of both sexes swept out to sea, either all together on a large raft (thought very unlikely) or in a flotilla of small rafts, and after successfully weathering a storm and at least a few days at sea, they were washed up on proximate parts of the north Australian coast where they regrouped and established a society.

  You don’t need vast numbers of people to populate Australia. Joseph Birdsell, an American academic, calculated that a group of twenty-five founding colonists could have produced a society of 300,000 in a little over 2,000 years. But you still need to get those initial twenty-five people there – more
than can be plausibly accounted for with a raft or two blown off course.

  Of course all of this may have happened in any number of other ways, and it may have taken generations to get fully under way. No one can possibly say. All that is certain is that Australia’s indigenous peoples are there because their distant ancestors crossed at least sixty miles of fairly formidable sea tens of thousands of years before anyone else on earth dreamed of such an endeavour, and did it in sufficient numbers to begin to start the colonization of a continent.

  By any measure this is a staggeringly momentous accomplishment. And how much note does it get? Well, ask yourself when was the last time you read anything about it. When was the last time in any context concerning human dispersal and the rise of civilizations that you saw even a passing mention of the role of Aborigines? They are the planet’s invisible people.

  A big part of the problem is that for most of us it is nearly impossible to grasp what an extraordinary span of time we are considering here. Assume for the sake of argument that the Aborigines arrived 60,000 years ago (that is the figure used by Roger Lewin of Harvard in Principles of Evolution, a standard text). On that scale, the total period of European occupation of Australia represents about 0.3 per cent of the total. In other words, for the first 99.7 per cent of its inhabited history the Aborigines had Australia to themselves. They have been there an almost unimaginably long time. And here lies their other unappreciated achievement.