Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  Ten hours and 903 kilometres after leaving Daly Waters we arrived, dry and dusty, in Alice Springs, a grid of ruler-straight streets set like an enormous helipad on a plain beside the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges. Because it is so bang in the middle of nowhere, Alice Springs ought to seem a miracle – an actual town with department stores and schools and streets with names – and for a long time it was a sort of antipodean Timbuktu, a place tantalizing in its inaccessibility. In 1954, when Alan Moorehead passed through, Alice’s only regular connection to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brought mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts and whatever else couldn’t be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded.

  In those days, Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it’s a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors – 350,000 of them a year – which is of course the whole problem. These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne and Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. The town has not only become accessible, it’s become a destination. It’s so full of motels, hotels, conference centres, campgrounds and desert resorts that you can’t pretend even for a moment that you have achieved something exceptional by getting yourself there. It’s crazy really. A community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands of visitors who come to see how remote it no longer is.

  Nearly all guidebooks and travel articles indulge the gentle conceit that Alice retains some irreproducible outback charm – some away-from-it-all quality that you must come here to see – but in fact it is Anywhere, Australia. Actually, it is Anywhere, Planet Earth. On our way into town we passed strip malls, car dealerships, McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, banks and petrol stations. Only a scattering of Aborigines strolling along the dried bed of the Todd River gave any hint of exoticism. We took rooms in a motor inn on the edge of the modest town centre. My room had a balcony where I could watch the setting sun flood the desert floor and burnish the golden slopes of the MacDonnell Ranges beyond – or at least I could if I looked past the more immediate sprawl of a K-Mart plaza across the road. In the two million or more square miles that is the Australian outback, I don’t suppose there is a more unfortunate juxtaposition.

  Allan was evidently held by a similar thought, for a half hour later when we met out front he was staring at the same scene. ‘I can’t believe we’ve just driven a thousand miles to find a K-Mart,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘You Yanks have a lot to answer for, you know.’

  I started to protest, in a sputtering sort of way, but what could I say? He was right. We do. We have created a philosophy of retailing that is totally without aesthetics and totally irresistible. And now we box these places up and ship them to the far corners of the world. Visually, almost every arrestingly regrettable thing in Alice Springs was a product of American enterprise, from people who couldn’t know that they had helped to drain the distinctiveness from an outback town and doubtless wouldn’t see it that way anyway. Nor come to that, I dare say, would most of the shoppers of Alice Springs, who were no doubt delighted to get lots of free parking and a crack at Martha Stewart towels and shower curtains. What a sad and curious age we live in.

  We strolled through the centre of town looking for somewhere to eat. Alice’s central business district was sufficiently compact that it took little time to exhaust its modest possibilities for sustenance and diversion. When we realized that we were walking the same streets twice, we repaired more or less by default to a Chinese restaurant we had passed a few minutes earlier from the other direction. It was nearly empty.

  While we waited for our food, Allan gazed critically at the flock wallpaper and gaudy fixtures as if these alone might explain Alice’s disappointing inadequacies. For a moment he seemed even to be gazing at the background music. ‘So how long are we here for?’ he asked at last.

  ‘Well, we’re here tomorrow. And then we go to Uluru. And then we come back here for a day. And then you fly back to England.’

  He nodded thoughtfully. ‘So two days here altogether?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And what is there to do for two days in Alice Springs?’

  ‘Quite a lot, in fact,’ I said encouragingly, and pulled out a brochure I had taken from a rack in the motel. I flipped through it. ‘There’s the Alice Springs Desert Park, for one thing.’

  He inclined his head a fraction. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s a nature reserve where they’ve carefully recreated a desert environment.’

  ‘In the desert?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’ve recreated a desert in the desert? Have I got that right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you pay money for this?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He nodded contemplatively. ‘What else?’

  I turned the page. ‘The Mecca Date Garden.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘A garden where they grow dates.’

  ‘And they charge money for this as well?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Is that it or is there more?’

  ‘Oh, much more.’ I went through the list of other attractions – the old telegraph station, Frontier Camel Farm, Old Timers’ Folk Museum, National Pioneer Women’s Hall of Fame, Road Transport Hall of Fame, Minerals House, Chateau Hornsby Winery, Sounds of Starlight Theatre, Strehlow Aboriginal Research Centre.

  Allan listened intently, sometimes requesting a soupçon of elaboration, and considered all this for some moments. Then he said: ‘Let’s go to Ayers Rock.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘Yeah, all right,’ I said.

  And so in the morning we rose early and set off for mighty Uluru. Alice Springs could wait.

  Uluru and Alice Springs are so inextricably linked in the popular imagination that nearly everyone thinks of them as cosily proximate. In fact, it is almost 300 miles across a largely featureless tract to get from the one to the other. Uluru’s glory is that it stands alone in a boundless emptiness, but it does mean that you have to really want to see it; it’s not something you’re going to pass on the way to the beach. That is as it should be, of course, but it is equally a fact that when you have just completed a thousand-mile passage through barren void, you don’t really require another five hours of it to confirm your impression that much of central Australia is empty.

  Well into the 1950s Ayers Rock was inaccessible to all but the most dedicated sightseers. As late as the late 1960s, the number of annual visitors was no more than 10,000. Today Uluru gets that many every ten days on average. It even has its own airport, and the resort that has sprung up to serve it, called Yulara, is the third largest community in the Territory when full. Yulara stands a discreet and respectful dozen or so miles from the rock itself, so we stopped there first to get rooms. It consists essentially of a lazy loop road along which are tucked a range of accommodations, from campgrounds and a youth hostel up to the most sumptuously de luxe of resort hotels.

  With nothing better to do, we had passed much of the five-hour drive working out a programme for ourselves for our stay. Essentially this had established that we would spend the afternoon studying the rock in a calm and reflective manner, then divide whatever remained of the day between a cooling dip in the hotel pool, drinks on a terrace while watching the setting sun gorge the rock with the red glow for which it is famed, a little stroll through the desert to stretch our legs and look for dingoes, wallabies and kangaroos, and finally a dinner of refinement and quality beneath a sky of twinkling stars. We had, after all, just driven 1,300 miles in two and a half days. If ever anyone was entitled to a little desert R&R it was us. So there was a certain real excitement as we turned off the highway and entered the cosseted confines of Yulara.


  We went first to the Outback Pioneer Hotel, which sounded moderately priced if dangerously likely to have chandeliers made of waggon wheels and an all-you-can-eat buffet for people in baseball caps. In fact, it proved on approach to be rather grand and clearly very nice, but unexpectedly busy. Stacks of luggage were being unloaded from two tour buses out front and there were people everywhere, nearly all white-haired and pear-shaped, standing around squinting or fiddling with cameras and video recorders. Allan dropped me out front and I trotted inside to enquire about rates. I was amazed at the amount of hubbub in the lobby. It was early afternoon on a weekday out of season and the place was a circus. The check-in area brought to mind a mustering station on a foundering cruise ship. I asked a guy at the concierge desk what was going on.

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ he said, joining me in considering the unattractive chaos. ‘It’s always like this.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘Even out of season?’

  ‘There is no out of season here now.’

  ‘Are there any rooms here, do you know?’

  ‘Afraid not. The only place with rooms left is the Desert Gardens.’

  I thanked him and hied back to the car.

  ‘Problem?’ said Allan as I climbed in.

  ‘Very poor dessert selection,’ I said, not wishing to alarm him. ‘Let’s try the Desert Gardens Hotel. It’s much nicer.’

  The Desert Gardens was vastly more swank than the Pioneer Outback, and mercifully less crowded. Only one person, a man of about seventy, stood between me and the check-in clerk. I arrived just in time to hear the clerk say to him: ‘It’s three hundred and fifty-three dollars a night.’

  I swallowed hard at this.

  ‘We’ll take it,’ said the man in an American accent. ‘How big is it?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘How big is the room?’

  The clerk looked taken aback. ‘Well, I’m not sure of its dimensions exactly. It’s a fair size.’

  ‘What’s that mean? “Fair size”.’

  ‘It’s amply proportioned, sir. Would you like to see the room?’

  ‘No, I want to sign in,’ the man said shortly, as if the clerk were needlessly delaying him. ‘We want to get to the rock.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  As he signed in he asked a million subsidiary questions. Where was the rock exactly? How long did it take to get there? Was there a cocktail lounge in this hotel? Where was that exactly? What time was dinner served? Could you see the rock from the dining room? Was it worth seeing the rock from the dining room? Where was the pool? Through which doors? Which doors? And what about the elevator – where was that? Where?

  I looked at my watch unhappily. It was getting on for two o’clock, and we didn’t even have rooms yet. Time was speeding away.

  ‘So is it good, this rock?’ the man was saying in what might have been an attempt at levity.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir?’

  ‘The rock. Is it worth coming all this way?’

  ‘Well, as rocks go, sir, I think you could say it’s first class.’

  ‘Yeah, well, it’d better be,’ the man said darkly.

  Then his wife joined him and to my dismay she began asking questions. Was there a hairdresser’s? How late was it open? Where could they mail postcards? Did the gift shop accept travellers’ cheques? These were US dollar travellers’ cheques; was that OK? And how much are postage stamps for America? Is there an iron and ironing board in the room? Where’d you say the gift shop is? And what about my brain? Have you seen that anywhere? It’s about the size of a very small walnut and never been used.

  Eventually they shuffled off and the clerk turned to me. With a regretful air, he informed me that the gentleman ahead of me had taken the last room. ‘There might be dormitory space at the youth hostel,’ he said, and allowed this deeply unappealing proposition to sit there for a moment. ‘Shall I check?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ I murmured.

  He consulted his computer and looked suitably doleful. ‘No, I’m afraid even that’s full now. I’m sorry.’

  I thanked him and went out. Allan was leaning against the car with a hopeful face, which fell when he saw mine. I explained to him the situation. He looked crushed.

  ‘So no swim?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘No wine on the terrace? No sunset over the rock? No elegant room with downy pillows? No complimentary fluffy dressing gown and tinkling mini-bar?’

  ‘The dressing gowns never fit anyway, Allan.’

  ‘Not quite the point.’ He fixed me with a frank gaze. ‘And instead of these things we will be . . .?’

  ‘Driving back to Alice Springs.’

  He removed his focus to the wider world while he allowed this thought to settle. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I suppose we’d better go and see if this bloody rock is worth a 600-mile round trip.’

  * * *

  It was.

  The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it. Even when you are a thousand miles from it, you can’t go a day in Australia without seeing it four or five or six times – on postcards, on travel agents’ posters, on the cover of souvenir picture books – and as you get nearer the rock the frequency of exposure increases. So you are aware, as you drive to the park entrance and pay the ambitiously pitched admission fee of $15 a head and follow the approach road around, that you have driven 1,300 miles to look at a large, inert, loaf-shaped object that you have seen photographically portrayed a thousand times already. In consequence, your mood as you approach this famous monolith is restrained, unexpectant – pessimistic even.

  And then you see it, and you are instantly transfixed.

  There, in the middle of a memorable and imposing emptiness, stands an eminence of exceptional nobility and grandeur, 1,150 feet high, a mile and a half long, five and a half miles around, less red than photographs have led you to expect but in every other way more arresting than you could ever have supposed. I have discussed this since with many other people, nearly all of whom agreed that they approached Uluru with a kind of fatigue, and were left agog in a way they could not adequately explain. It’s not that Uluru is bigger than you had supposed or more perfectly formed or in any way different from the impression you had created in your mind, but the very opposite. It is exactly what you expected it to be. You know this rock. You know it in a way that has nothing to do with calendars and the covers of souvenir books. Your knowledge of this rock is grounded in something much more elemental.

  In some odd way that you don’t understand and can’t begin to articulate you feel an acquaintance with it – a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred. It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an importance to you at the species level – perhaps even at a sort of tadpole level – and that in some way your visit here is more than happenstance.

  I’m not saying that any of this is so. I’m just saying that this is how you feel. The other thought that strikes you – that struck me anyway – is that Uluru is not merely a very splendid and mighty monolith, but also an extremely distinctive one. More than this, it is very possibly the most immediately recognizable natural object on earth. I’m suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveller who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: ‘Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red rock. You can’t miss it.’ If ever on earth they dig up a 150,000-year-old rocket ship from the Galaxy Zog, this is where it will be. I’m not saying I expect it to happen; not saying that at all. I’m just observing that if I were looking for an ancient starship this is where I would start digging.

  Allan, I noted, seemed similarly affected. ‘It’s weird, isn’t i
t?’ he said.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘I don’t know. Just seeing it. I mean, it just feels weird.’

  I nodded. It does feel weird. Quite apart from that initial shock of indefinable recognition, there is also the fact that Uluru is, no matter how you approach it, totally arresting. You cannot stop looking at it; you don’t want to stop looking at it. As you draw closer, it becomes even more interesting. It is more pitted than you had imagined, less regular in shape. There are more curves and divots and wavelike ribs, more irregularities of every type, than are evident from even a couple of hundred yards away. You realize that you could spend quite a lot of time – possibly a worryingly large amount of time; possibly a sell-your-house-and-move-here-to-live-in-a-tent amount of time – just looking at the rock, gazing at it from many angles, never tiring of it. You can see yourself in a silvery ponytail, barefoot and in something jangly and loose-fitting, hanging out with much younger visitors and telling them: ‘And the amazing thing is that every day it’s different, you know what I’m saying? It’s never the same rock twice. That’s right, my friend – you put your finger on it there. It’s awesome. It’s an awesome thing. Say, do you by any chance have any dope or some spare change?’

  We stopped at several places to get out and have a look, including the spot where you can climb up it. It takes several hours and much exertion, which comfortably eliminated it from our consideration, and in any case the route was closed for the afternoon. So many people have collapsed and died on the rock that they close it to climbers when the weather is really warm, as it was this day. Even when it’s not too hot, lots of people get in trouble from fooling around or taking wrong turns. Just the day before a Canadian had had to be rescued after getting himself onto some ledge from which he could not get either up or down. Since 1985, ownership of the rock has been back in the hands of the local Aboriginal people, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunyjatjara, and they deeply dislike visitors (whom they call ‘minga’, or ants) clambering all over it. Personally I don’t blame them. It is a sacred site to them. I think it should be for everyone, frankly.