Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  Allan and I explored along the beach for half an hour or so, then walked back to the clearing where the food stand was, and had a look at where the road continued on to Cooktown. Beyond the food stand it became at once a rough and rocky track, which climbed steeply up into the lush hills. It looked like something Harrison Ford would struggle to negotiate in an adventure movie. I had learned only the day before that the track is dangerously and unnervingly tippy even in good weather, so perhaps it was as well that Allan and I hadn’t been let loose on it. In any case, it was impassable now.

  Still, it did look awfully inviting in an adventuresome sort of way. Cooktown, a former gold-mining town that had once had a population of 30,000 and has just 200 now, lay seventy-five kilometres away on the other side of the mountains. It is the last town in eastern Australia. Beyond it there is nothing but a scattering of Aboriginal settlements along the 600-kilometre track to Cape York, Australia’s northernmost point. But this was as far as I was going to get here.

  I turned around to discover that Allan had slipped off. He reappeared after a minute from the direction of the food stand bearing two cans of Coke, one of which he passed to me.

  ‘They didn’t have urine,’ he said, and we both had a good laugh over that.

  And so to the top end. We bounced into Darwin through the outer strands of two minor cyclones that were bumping along the north coast, and acquired another rental car – a sleek and powerful Toyota sedan that looked as if it could cover the 1,500 kilometres to Alice Springs in a single rocket-like burst. We dubbed it the Testosterone.

  The Northern Territory has always had something of a frontier mentality. In late 1998, the inhabitants were invited to become Australia’s seventh state and roundly rejected the notion in a referendum. It appears they quite like being outsiders. In consequence, an area of 523,000 square miles, or about one-fifth of the country, is in Australia but not entirely of it. This throws up some interesting anomalies. All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory. However, since the Northern Territory is not a state, it has no seats in Parliament. So the Territorians elect representatives who go to Canberra and attend sessions of Parliament (at least that’s what they say in their letters home) but don’t actually vote or take part or have any consequence at all. Even more interestingly, during national referendums the citizens of the Northern Territory are also required to vote, but the votes don’t actually count towards anything. They’re just put in a drawer or something. Seems a little odd to me, but then, as I say, the people seem content with the arrangement.

  Personally, I feel that the Territorians should not be permitted to take full part in national affairs until they get friendlier hotel staff in Darwin. This might seem a curious basis on which to found a political philosophy, but there you are. Darwin’s hoteliers are seriously deficient in the charm department and if it takes the withholding of certain civil liberties to get them to address the problem then I think that is a small charge to exact, frankly.

  Our troubles began when we went looking for our hotel. We were booked into a place called the All Seasons Frontier Hotel, but no such establishment appeared to exist. The guidebook mentioned a Top End Frontier Hotel, and a tourist leaflet I acquired at the airport listed a Darwin City Frontier Hotel, and yet another listed an All Seasons Premier Darwin Central Hotel. All of these we spied, distantly, as we drove around for the next forty minutes, squabbling quietly in the manner of a fractious married couple. We stopped about half a dozen pedestrians, but none had heard of an All Seasons Frontier Hotel, except one man who thought it was at Kakadu, 200 kilometres to the east. With the aid of a small, inadequate map I directed Allan down a series of streets which proved always to end at a pedestrianized zone or a cul de sac of loading bays, to his increasing exasperation.

  ‘Can you not read a simple map?’ he asked in the peevish tone of a man whose happy-hour needs are going unmet, reversing into cardboard boxes and wheelie bins.

  ‘No,’ I replied in kind, ‘I cannot read a simple map. I can read a good map. This map, however, is useless. Less than useless. It is the print equivalent of your driving, if I may say so.’

  Eventually we stopped outside a large hotel on the seafront and Allan ordered me to go inside and seek professional guidance. At the front desk a young man who had evidently invested a recent pay cheque in a very large tub of hair gel stood with his back to me regaling two female colleagues with some droll anecdote. I waited a long minute, then went: ‘Ahem.’

  He turned his head to give me a look that said, without warmth: ‘What?’

  ‘Could you point me to the All Seasons Frontier Hotel?’ I asked politely.

  Without preamble he reeled off a series of complex directions. Darwin is full of strange street names – Cavenagh, Yuen, Foelsche, Knuckey – and I couldn’t begin to follow. On the counter was a pad of maps, and I asked him if he could show me on that.

  ‘It’s too far to walk,’ he said dismissively.

  ‘I don’t want to walk. I’ve got a car.’

  ‘Then ask your driver to take you.’ He rolled his eyes for the benefit of the girls, then continued with his story.

  How I longed for a small firearm or perhaps a set of industrial tongs with which to clamp his reedy neck and draw his head close to me, the better to hear what I next had to say. It was: ‘Do you think if I had a driver I would be asking directions of you? It’s a rental car, you snide, irksome, preposterously glossy little shit.’ I may not have said the words precisely in that order, or indeed at all, but that was certainly the emotional gist of it.

  With sullen gaze and a long sigh, he took a pen and rapidly but vaguely sketched the route on the map, tore it from the pad and handed it over as if giving me a voucher to which I had no right. Ten minutes later we pulled up outside a hotel that announced itself, in large letters, as the Darwin City Frontier Hotel. We had passed it several times already, but I had confidently rejected it on each occasion. I stalked through the front doors.

  ‘Is this the All Seasons Frontier Hotel?’ I barked from an unsocial distance.

  The young woman behind the counter looked up, and blinked. ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Then’ – I came much closer – ‘why don’t you put a sign up saying so?’

  She regarded me levelly. ‘It says it on the side of the building.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t.’

  She favoured me with a thin, metallic, supremely condescending smile. ‘Yes, it does.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t.’

  Torn between her training in customer relations and her youthful certitude, she hesitated, and in a soft voice said: ‘Does.’

  I held up a finger in a way that said: ‘Don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to check this out and then come back and throttle someone. You, actually.’

  I went out and ranged around the hotel in the manner of a demented building inspector, examining it from every angle and from various distances, held up a silencing finger to Allan, who watched bewildered from the driver’s seat, then came back in and announced: ‘It doesn’t say All Seasons on it anywhere.’

  She looked at me and said nothing, but I could see she was thinking: ‘Does.’

  I am happy to let the record show that by whatever name it goes, the Darwin City Frontier Hotel was a wondrously disappointing establishment. It was overpriced, charmless and inconveniently sited. The TV in my room didn’t work, the pillows were concrete slabs and the receptionist was irritating. This was not the Australia I had come to respect and adore.

  To get to the hotel bar, we discovered after much blind experimentation and a further interview with our young friend at the front desk, it was necessary to descend by a back stairway to the basement, find our way through some storage areas, leave the building and present ourselves at a pair of automatic sliding doors, which weren’t working. Allan, who is not a man to let any impediment stand between him and his evening beverage, yanked them open with a
vehemence that was impressive, and we squeezed through. The bar was liberally, not to say unexpectedly, arrayed with rough, boisterously drunk and dangerous-looking fellows, all with copious tattoos, long hair and beards like mattress ticking – not exactly the patrons you would expect to find drinking in the bar of a business hotel.

  ‘Like a fucking ZZ Top convention,’ Allan muttered darkly but correctly.

  We procured a couple of beers and sat primly in a corner, like two old maids at an inner city bus station, and watched as two of the burlier fellows played a game of pool in which each disappointing shot – and there seemed to be almost no other kind – was accompanied by a whack of cue across something metallic or unyielding: the pool table, a chairback, the swinging light above the table. It seemed only a matter of time before flesh and bone came into the equation. We decided to repair to the rooftop restaurant on the seventh floor in search of a more serene and composed environment. The restaurant was a large room with big windows giving expansive views over Darwin by twilight. Of the perhaps fifty tables in the room no more than three or four were occupied, so it came as a surprise when the hostess informed us, with a look of stark panic, that no tables were available at the moment.

  ‘But it’s practically empty,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I’m sorry, but we’ve got a terrible rush on.’ As if to underline the urgency of the situation she flew off.

  We took a seat at the bar and had two more beers, which we coaxed out of a cheerful Indonesian fellow who sometimes wandered past, and may actually have been an employee. After another thirty minutes and further enquiries we were finally granted a table by a far window. There we sat for ten minutes more until a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terracotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s bread,’ she replied.

  ‘But it’s in a flowerpot?’

  She gave me a look that I was beginning to think of as the Darwin stare. It was a look that said: ‘Yeah? So?’

  ‘Well, isn’t that kind of unusual?’

  She considered for a moment. ‘Is a bit, I suppose.’

  ‘And will we be following a horticultural theme throughout the meal?’

  Her expression contorted in a deeply pained look, as if she were trying to suck her face into the back of her head. ‘What?’

  ‘Will the main course arrive in a wheelbarrow?’ I elaborated helpfully. ‘Will you be serving the salad with a pitchfork?’

  ‘Oh no. It’s just the bread that’s special.’

  ‘I’m so pleased to hear it.’

  Before we could take our relationship to the next stage and ask for drinks or perhaps a menu, she was gone, announcing as she went that she would be back when she could but there was a bit of a rush on.

  There then followed the most extraordinary evening in which, each time we hankered for food or additional refreshment or just the sound of an Australian voice, we had to go off and stand by the kitchen doors until we caught someone emerging. Some of the other few diners were doing likewise. During one foray I asked a man with an empty beer glass if he dined here often.

  ‘Wife likes the view,’ he explained, and we looked across the room to a plump little woman who gave us a small but cheery wave.

  ‘Service is a bit slow, don’t you think?’

  ‘Bloody hopeless,’ he agreed. ‘They’ve got some kind of a rush on apparently.’

  In the morning a new man was behind the front desk. ‘And how did you enjoy your stay, sir?’ he asked smoothly.

  ‘It was singularly execrable,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, excellent,’ he purred, taking my card.

  ‘In fact, I would go so far as to say that the principal value of a stay in this establishment is that it is bound to make all subsequent service-related experiences seem, in comparison, refreshing.’

  He made a deeply appreciative expression as if to say: ‘Praise indeed,’ and presented my bill for signature. ‘Well, we hope you’ll come again.’

  ‘I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.’

  His expression wavered, then held there for a long moment. ‘Excellent,’ he said again, but without a great show of conviction.

  We went into town to look around. Darwin is in the steamy heart of the tropics, which to my mind imposes certain stylistic requirements – white buildings with verandas, louvred windows, potted palms, lazy ceiling fans, cool drinks in tall glasses presented by obsequious houseboys, men in white suits and Panama hats, ladies in floral-print cotton dresses, a little mahjong to pass the sultry afternoons, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in evidence somewhere looking hot and shifty. Anything that falls short of these simple ideals will always leave me disappointed, and Darwin failed in every respect. To be fair, the place has been knocked about a good deal – it was bombed repeatedly by the Japanese in the Second World War and then devastated by Cyclone Tracy in 1974 – so much of it is necessarily new. Even so, there was almost nothing to suggest a particular climatic affiliation. We could have been in Wollongong or Bendigo or any other moderately prosperous provincial city. The one small local peculiarity was that there seemed to be no one about of professional demeanour. Nearly every person on the streets was bearded and tattooed and scuffed along with a wino shuffle, as if some very large mission had just turned everyone out for the day. Here and there, too, were scatterings of Aborigines, shadowy and furtive, sitting quietly on the margins of sunny plazas as if in a waiting room. While Allan went off to get some money out of a bank machine, I drifted into the vicinity of three Aboriginal people, two men and a woman, all staring at nothing. I gave them a nod and respectful g’day smile as I passed, but failed signally to establish eye contact. It was as if they were somewhere else, or I was transparent.

  We had breakfast in a small Italian café, the only customers, then drove out to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory because I had read that it had a box jellyfish on display. I had expected the museum to be small and dusty, and to detain us for no longer than it took to find and briefly examine the jellyfish display, but in fact it was sleek and modern and quite wonderful. It was improbably large for a provincial museum and chock-full of interesting stuff thoughtfully presented.

  One area was devoted to Cyclone Tracy, still the most devastating natural event in Australian history. It all but blew away the town on Christmas Eve 1974. According to a recorded commentary, most people didn’t expect the storm to come to much. A weaker cyclone had passed through a few weeks earlier without doing significant damage, and the leading edge of Tracy brushed over the town without leaving any hint of particular ferocity to come. Most people turned in as if it were a normal night. It wasn’t until Darwin was hit by the back end of the storm system, about 2.30 a.m., that people realized they were really in for it. As the winds whipped up to 160 miles an hour Darwin’s frail tropical houses began to shed pieces and then to disintegrate. Most of the housing was post-war fibreboard homes of a type called the D series, which were cheap and quick to build but could not stand up to a real hurricane. Before the night was out Tracy had blown away 9,000 homes and killed more than sixty people.

  Just off the main display area was a small, darkened chamber in which you could listen to a tape recording of the storm that had been made on the night by a Roman Catholic priest. A sign on the door warned that people who had lived through the storm might find the recording distressing, which I thought perhaps a trifle overwrought until I heard it myself. Well, it was an amazingly effective way of making you realize how powerful and terrifying such a storm can be. The recording began with various lively but clearly preliminary wind noises – branches knocking, gates banging – and then rose and rose again till it was a continuous, howling, unearthly fury, with sounds of metal roofs being wrenched from their moorings and other weighty debris flying murderously through the night. Experiencing it in pitch darkness, as the locals would have done, gave it
an immediacy that was inexpressibly effective. I actually found myself ducking whenever anything crashed nearby. When it finished, Allan and I exchanged impressed and drained looks, and proceeded on to the visual part of the display with a new appreciation.

  On a wall outside, a television endlessly showed the original Australian Broadcasting Corporation footage of what the town woke up to the next day – namely, total devastation. The film, taken from a slow-moving car, showed street after street in which every structure was flattened.

  Much of the rest of the museum was given over to cases of stuffed animals illustrating the Northern Territory’s extraordinary biological diversity. Pride of place was given to an enormous stuffed crocodile named Sweetheart, who was for a time the most famous in Australia. Sweetheart – who was, despite the effeminate name, a male – had a passionate dislike for outboard engines and used to attack any boats that disturbed his peace. Unusually for a crocodile, he never harmed a person, but he crunched at least fifteen boats and their motors, bringing a certain unexpected liveliness to many a fisherman’s afternoon. In 1979 when it was feared that he would do himself some serious harm – he was constantly being clobbered by propellers – wildlife officials decided to move him somewhere safer. Unfortunately, the capture was botched when a cable snagged and Sweetheart drowned. So he was stuffed and put on display in the Darwin museum, where he has been impressing visitors ever since with his very substantial heft: he stretches almost seventeen feet and in life weighed over 1,700 pounds.

  Another case answered a question that must have occurred to nearly everyone at one time or another: namely, how exactly do they stuff the animals? I had always assumed they filled them with sawdust or old socks or something. Well, here I learned, by means of a small stuffed animal shown in cross-section, that in fact a mounted specimen is empty but for a spare interior framework of styrofoam balls and wooden dowels. I was touched and grateful that some curator had taken the trouble to provide this insight. Also on display were lots of snakes and reptiles, many of them quite severely murderous, which Allan regarded with particular absorption.