Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  Daly Waters claims to be Australia’s oldest international airport, though I suspect many other venerable airstrips make a similar boast. It is certainly true that it was used as a stopoff point on some international flights and more regularly on cross-country flights from Queensland to Western Australia, so it was a kind of crossroads. The airport stayed open until 1947. The pub opened in 1938, so it is not by any stretch the oldest in the outback or the Northern Territory, but it is certainly one of the most extraordinary.

  As with most outback pubs every inch of interior surface – walls, rafters, wooden support posts – was covered with mementos left by earlier visitors: college ID cards, drivers’ licences, folding money from many nations, bumper stickers, badges from various police and fire departments, even a generous and arresting assortment of underwear, which dangled from rafters or was nailed to walls. The rest was nicely spartan: a large but basic central bar, concrete floor, bare tin roof, an assortment of tables and chairs of different vintages and styles, a battered pool table. At the bar, seven or eight men, all in shorts, T-shirts, boots and bush hats, stood drinking stubbies – squat bottles of beer – served in insulated foam holders to keep them cold. They all looked hot and dusty, but then everything in Daly Waters was hot and dusty. The atmosphere in the pub can best be described as convivially sweltering. Even standing still, the sweat dripped off us. The windows had screens, but most were full of holes and anyway the doors were wide open so flies came in freely. The men at the bar gave me compact but friendly nods as I bellied up to the bar, and obligingly made space for me to stand to order, but showed no special interest in me as an outsider. Clearly, as the souvenirs attested, visitors were not a novelty.

  I acquired a pair of chilled stubbies and conveyed them to the table where Allan sat beneath a bumper sticker commemorating a visit by the ‘Wheredafukarwi Touring Club’. Allan was suffused with a strange happiness.

  ‘You like it here?’ I said.

  He shook his head with a kind of speechless delight. ‘I do. I actually do.’

  ‘But I thought you hated it.’

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘But then I was sitting here looking out the window at the setting sun, and it was lovely – I mean really quite astoundingly lovely – and then I turned and saw the bar with all these outback characters, and I thought: “Bugger me, I like it here.”’ He looked at me in the frankest wonder. ‘And I do. I really like it.’

  ‘I’m so pleased.’

  He drained his beer and rose. ‘You ready for another?’

  Now it was my turn to be filled with wonder. I started to point out that it was a touch early to be setting such a blistering pace, but then I thought: what the hell. We had come a long way and this place was, after all, built for drinking.

  I drained my bottle and handed it over. ‘Sure,’ I said, ‘why not?’

  Well, I can’t pretend I remember a great deal of what followed. We drank huge amounts of beer – huge amounts. We ate steaks the size of catcher’s mitts (they may actually have been catcher’s mitts) and washed them down with more beer. We made many friends. We circulated as if at a cocktail party. I talked to ranchers and sheep shearers, to nannies and cooks. I met fellow travellers from around the world, and talked for some time to the proprietor, one Bruce Caterer, who told me the complicated story of how he had come to own a pub in this lonely and far-flung spot, of which confidence I have not the tiniest recollection and certainly nothing approximating a note. As the evening wore on, the bar grew almost impossibly crowded and lively. Where all the people were coming from I couldn’t guess. What was certain was that there were at least fifty cheerfully committed drinkers tucked away in the bush in the vicinity of Daly Waters and at least as many visitors like us. I got comprehensively beaten at pool by at least fourteen people. I bought rounds for strangers. I called my wife and professed my lasting devotion. I giggled at any story told me and radiated uncritical affection in all directions. I would have gone anywhere with anyone. I awoke the next morning, fully clothed and on top of the bedding, with no clear memory past the catcher’s mitt portion of the evening and a head that felt like a train crash.

  I pressed my watch to an eyeball and groaned at the discovery that it was nearly ten o’clock. We were hours late if we were ever going to get to Alice Springs. I stumbled down to the bathroom and put myself through some cursory ablutions, then found my way blearily into the pub. Allan sat propped against a wall with his eyes closed, a cup of black coffee steaming untouched before him. There was no one else around.

  ‘Where coffee where?’ I croaked in a tiny voice.

  He indicated vaguely with a weak hand. In a side room I found an urn of hot water and containers of instant coffee, tea bags, powdered milk and sugar with which to make a hot beverage. I loaded a cup half full with instant coffee powder, dribbled in some water, and rejoined Allan.

  Weakly, in the manner of an invalid, I lifted the cup and introduced a little coffee to my lips. After a couple of more sips, I began to feel a little better. Allan, on the other hand, looked terminally wretched.

  ‘How late were we up?’ I asked.

  ‘Late.’

  ‘Very late?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Why are you sitting with your eyes closed?’

  ‘Because if I open them I’m afraid I’ll bleed to death.’

  ‘Did I disgrace myself?’ I peered around the room to see if my boxer shorts were draped from any rafters.

  ‘Not that I recall. You were shit at pool.’

  I nodded without surprise. I often use alcohol as an artificial check on my pool-playing skills. It’s a way for me to help strangers gain confidence in their abilities and get in touch with my inner wallet.

  ‘Anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re doing a house swap next summer with a family from Korea.’

  I pursed my lips thoughtfully. ‘North or South?’ I asked.

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘You’re making this up, aren’t you?’

  He reached over and plucked from my shirt pocket a business card, which he presented to me. It said: ‘Park Ho Lee, Meat Wholesaler’ or something and gave an address in Pusan. Underneath it, in my own handwriting, it said: ‘June 10-August 27. No worries.’

  I placed the card, folded once, in the ashtray.

  ‘I think I’d like to get out of here now,’ I said.

  He nodded and with an effort of will rose from the table, wobbled ever so slightly, and went off to gather up his things. I hesitated a long moment and followed.

  Ten minutes later we were on our way to Alice Springs.

  Now here’s a story to ponder.

  In April 1860, during the second of his heroic attempts to cross Australia from south to north, John McDouall Stuart reached the almost waterless centre of the continent, roughly halfway between the present sites of Daly Waters and Alice Springs. A thousand miles from anywhere, the spot was the very ‘climax of desolation’, as Stuart’s fellow explorer Ernest Giles once nicely put it, and Stuart and his men went through hell to get there. They were sick and ragged and half starved, and it had taken months, but at least they had the satisfaction of knowing that they had become the first outsiders to penetrate to the brutal heart of the continent.

  So you may imagine Stuart’s surprise when, in the middle of this baking nowhere, he and his party encountered three Aboriginal men who greeted them by making a secret sign of the Freemasons. Stuart didn’t say in his journal what the sign was, but it was clear from his amazed description that it was unlikely to have been coincidental. Then a few days later Stuart and his men found horse tracks following a natural course across the plains. Finally, some distance further on, the explorers were setting up camp for the night when some people from the Warramunga tribe approached. One of Stuart’s party, a young man named W. P. Auld, was sitting with his boots off rubbing his aching feet when one of the Warramunga men knelt before him. While Auld watched bemusedly, the man replaced the boots on Auld’s feet and
carefully but deftly tied the laces for him, then sat back with a big pleased smile. It was painfully evident to Stuart that he and his men were not in fact the first white people to reach the empty centre of the country. So who preceded them? No one has ever had the faintest idea.

  I mention this to make the point that the outback is an odd and unfathomable place. There is something about all that emptiness that exerts a strange hold on people. It is an environment that wants you dead, yet again and again in the face of the most staggering privations, for the meagrest of rewards, explorers ventured into it. Sometimes, as Stuart found, they didn’t even bother to leave their names. It is almost not possible to exaggerate the punishing nature of Australia’s interior. For nineteenth-century explorers, it wasn’t just the inexpressible heat and constant scarcity of water, but a thousand other miseries. Stinging ants swarmed over them wherever they rested. Natives sometimes attacked with spears. The landscape was full of thorny bushes and merciless spinifex whose silicate pricks nearly always grew infected from sweat and dirt. Scurvy was a constant plague. Hygiene was impossible. Pack animals grew frequently crazed or lost the will to go on. Ernest Giles recorded in his memoirs how his horse once grew so delirious after an unsuccessful search for water that when they returned to camp at the end of the day the animal plunged its nose into a fire in the deluded hope that it would provide relief. In pity, Giles gave the injured animal a drink from his own meagre supplies, but it died anyway. Even camels could barely cope with the desert conditions. In Beyond Leichhardt, a history of Australian exploration, Glen McLaren notes how blowflies doted on the wounds of camels, laying eggs in any raw lesions, which soon erupted in horrible swarms of wriggling maggots. On one expedition, a camel’s wound grew so infected that the maggots ‘were scooped out daily with a pint pot’. Eventually the animal just lay down and died. When even camels can’t manage a desert, you know you’ve found a tough part of the world. For human and animal alike, nearly every breathing moment was a living hell.

  And yet over and over the explorers returned. Nearly every expedition of the nineteenth century started off with some ostensible practical purpose – to find a route for a telegraph line, to look for gold, to uncover some zone of hidden promise – but almost without exception the explorers soon became transfixed by the emptiness. Unable to resist its allure, they just pushed on and on.

  Perhaps no one suffered privations more willingly and repeatedly, to less effect, than Ernest Giles. In 1874, while he was travelling with a companion named Alfred Gibson through the barren wastes of Western Australia, Gibson’s horse died. Giles gave Gibson his own mount with instructions to follow their tracks 120 miles back to a place called Fort McKellar to fetch another. Gibson lost his way in the emptiness and was never seen again. (The area is now called the Gibson Desert.) Left to find his own way back on foot, Giles staggered for days over exhausting sandhills, the last sixty miles with almost no water. It was while in this desperate state, tormented by flies and half dead with hunger, that he famously spotted a baby wallaby and fell upon it, devouring it raw, fur, skin and all.

  These were not exceptional experiences, you understand. This is what awaited you when you went into the outback. When Robert Austin and his men, lost in the featureless wastes of Western Australia, drank their own and their horses’ urine, there was nothing terribly unusual about that. Lots of people did likewise in the desert. When Giles found and devoured the baby wallaby, he thought himself exceedingly lucky – not just at that moment but for years afterwards. ‘The delicious taste of that creature I shall never forget,’ he wrote with sincere and telling enthusiasm in his memoirs. Stuart and his men retained equally fond memories of a time when, on the brink of starvation, they found a clutch of dingo puppies and boiled them up in a pot. They were, he wrote, ‘delicious!’

  Why people repeatedly subjected themselves to such ordeals is a mystery that surpasses understanding. Despite the extreme travails he experienced on the fatal expedition with Gibson, Giles returned almost at once to his compulsive wanderings. Stuart did likewise; almost continuously for four years he hurled himself at the unyielding interior until he succeeded in breaking through. Worn out by the effort, he retired to London and died soon after.

  It is impossible to say who endured the greater hardships, Stuart or Giles, but there is no question that Giles did it for less reward. No explorer was ever unluckier. In the same year that he lost Gibson in the desert and stumbled 120 miles through appalling heat, Giles also explored the central regions around the area known as Yulara. One day, he struggled up a small rise and was confronted with a sight such as he could never have dreamed of finding. Before him, impossibly imposing, stood the most singular monolith on earth, the great red rock now known as Uluru. Hastening to Adelaide to report the find, he was informed that a man named William Christie Gosse had chanced upon it a few days ahead of him and had already named it Ayers Rock in honour of the South Australia governor.

  Eventually, too old to explore, Giles ended up working as a clerk in the gold fields of Coolgardie, where he died in obscurity in 1891. Today he is almost entirely forgotten. No highway bears his name.

  And so the doughty Mr Sherwin and I proceeded through the hot and inexhaustible desert. As we travelled south from Daly Waters, the landscape became more sparsely vegetated. It began to feel eerily as if we had left Planet Earth. The soil took on a reddish glow, more Martian than terrestrial, and the sunlight seemed to double in intensity, as if generated by a nearer, larger sun. Even on a smoothly paved highway, in the comfort of air conditioning, you are not entirely robbed of the sense of what the explorers must have gone through. The discomforts can’t be fully imagined but the scale can, and it was awesome.

  To the left were several thousand square miles of stubbled nothingness called the Barkly Tableland, which eventually merges into the Simpson Desert, probably the toughest ranching country in the world. So unyielding is the land that ranches have to be vast to support a single operation; the largest of them, at a place called Anna Creek, is bigger than Belgium. To the right, unbelievably, the land was even harsher. This was the infamous Tanami Desert, an area of hellish dryness that even now is largely uncharted. On my map, not a feature was indicated – not a dried creekbed or old dirt track – for 300 miles to the Western Australia border. Beyond that, it was virtually as bleak for 600 miles more.

  Even along the Stuart Highway, with its life-bearing traffic, the 550-odd miles between Daly Waters and Alice Springs could boast just one small town, an old gold-mining community called Tennant Creek, three or four clustered habitations that made Daly Waters look cosmopolitan, and a roadhouse perhaps once every eighty miles. And that was it. I had never been out in such a boundless blank. Eventually, some hills began to rise in the middle distance: the MacDonnell Ranges. Very occasionally – once or twice an hour – a road train would bomb past. Once we saw an approaching car, the driver evidently sedated by monotony, leave the road and bang wildly along the rough shoulder for perhaps two hundred feet, pulling in its wake a long speed ramp of dust. As he neared us – stirred possibly by Allan’s honking – the driver jerked to startled wakefulness and veered reflexively, but much too sharply, for the pavement and thence, to our shrill amazement, into our path. It was absurd: in an area of inexpressible emptiness the only two pieces of moving metal were about to bang together in a very big way. There passed an instant made up in equal parts of horn blare, muted shrieks and wild, tight swerves. For the strangest moment, time went into arrest and I could see perfectly our unwitting assailant, frozen as if in a candid photograph, looking at us with a mixture of bewilderment and apology. I shouldn’t wonder that it’s a moment all people are given when they are about to die suddenly. Then all was blurred swiftness again. The cars passed without hitting – goodness knows how – and I turned full in the seat to watch our adversary shooting away into the distance behind us, soberly attentive to his lane. I watched until he was a dot at vanishing point, then turned to Allan.

  �
�Well, I don’t know about you,’ he said brightly, ‘but I’m ready for a cup of coffee and a change of underpants.’

  ‘Excellent plan,’ I agreed, and I joined him in scanning the horizon for a lonely but welcoming roadhouse.

  The great virtue about driving through emptiness is that when you come to anything – anything at all – that might be called a diversion you get disproportionately excited. In mid-afternoon we saw a signpost for something called the Devils Marbles and, with the briefest exchange of glances, followed a side road a mile or so to a parking area. And there we saw something really quite fabulous – enormous piles of smooth granite boulders, many as big as houses, stacked in jumbled piles or scattered over an immense area (1,800 hectares, according to a signboard). Every one brought to mind something else: a jelly bean, a bread roll, a bowling ball – except that they were immense and often perched on impossibly fine points. Imagine a boulder maybe thirty feet high and nearly spherical standing on a base little larger than, say, a manhole cover. Needless to say, there wasn’t a soul around. Put these stones anywhere in Europe or North America and they would be world famous. In every family album would be a photograph of mom and the kids having a picnic against a backdrop of fantastic rocks. Here they were a lost wonder, off the road in the middle of a boundless nowhere. We wandered around for half an hour, as amazed by the solitude as much as by the rocks, then congratulated ourselves on our good fortune and good sense in stopping, and returned to the road in a state of elevated contentment.