Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  She listened with what I can only call an air of startled submissiveness, never taking her gaze from my face. Then she touched a hand to my forearm and said: ‘Did you know that you have the most terrible sunburn?’

  I took a walk along the neighbouring shell beach until the flies made it impossible to persevere, then wandered back to the telegraph station. The museum was locked and in darkness, so I went to the café. The trippers, I gathered, had stopped for refreshments because the lady in charge was busy rounding up cups and plates. I wondered in passing how she managed out here to feed coachloads of people 140 miles from the nearest supermarket.

  ‘Yes, love?’ she said brightly as she passed.

  ‘I was wondering if it’s possible to see the museum.’

  ‘Course it is. I’ll get Mike to take you.’

  Mike was Mike Cantrall, an equally cheery middle-aged fellow with a raffish earring and an easygoing manner, who emerged from the kitchen wiping his hands on a tea towel and looking pleased to be excused dishwashing duty. He took me to the museum and with some difficulty unlocked the door. The museum was small and airless and felt as if it hadn’t been opened for months – he told me that not many visitors asked to see it – but entirely charming. One room was devoted mostly to stromatolites. It had a fish tank with a stromatolite quietly bubbling away in it – the only one in the world in captivity, apparently. On an old TV and VCR he showed me a four-minute video, which gave a concise rundown on what stromatolites were and how they were formed. Then he picked up a brick-sized fragment of old stromatolite and passed it to me and I made the appropriate expressions of surprise at how heavy it was.

  The rest of the museum was given over to its days as a telecommunications outpost – first for telegraph and then for telephones. It was a great deal more appealing than I had expected it to be, not least because one of the walls was dominated by a large photograph of a linesman, Adgee Cross by name, standing at the top of a ladder buck naked, repairing a telegraph line and looking for all the world as if this were absolutely the correct attire for telegraph repairs in the outback. He was naked, Mike told me, because he had just swum the Murchison River with his ladder and didn’t want to get his clothes wet. I didn’t say anything, but the thought crossed my mind that wet clothes would dry out in minutes in the desert, whereas boots – the one thing he had kept on – would stay wet for hours. My suspicion is that Adgee Cross did his line repairs naked because he liked to. To which I say: why not?

  I also learned the happy story of Mrs Lillian O’Donahue who was a telephone operator here in the days before automated telephone exchanges. At Carnarvon up the road was a big satellite dish that NASA used until the 1970s to track spacecraft as they passed over the Indian Ocean. During a mission in 1964 the communications link between the Carnarvon dish and a tracking station near Adelaide broke down, and all messages had to be routed through Mrs O’Donahue and her ancient equipment. Through one long, hot night Mrs O’Donahue sat at her switchboard, carefully recording strings of coded messages from one outpost and passing them on to the other. Each time the Gemini craft passed over southern skies the fate of the mission – I just love this – was in the devoted hands of an unassuming little old lady sitting in a small white building miles down a dusty track on the west Australian coast. She made $6 in overtime money, Mike told me. I loved that, too.

  When we emerged and Mike had locked the door, we walked together across the car park. I asked him how he had come to be in this lonely place. He told me that he and his wife, Val – the cheery lady behind the counter – had been there just three weeks. They were novice grey nomads – retirees (often these days early retirees) who sell up, buy a motorhome of some description and spend their lives on the open road, stopping from time to time to earn a little money, but never tied to anywhere and essentially ever on the move. Six months earlier this would have seemed to me the dreariest punishment imaginable – endlessly driving across a landscape that is mostly hot and dry and empty. But now I understood completely. All that emptiness and dazzling light has a seductive quality that you might actually never tire of – an amazing thought. Besides, Australia is just so full of surprises. There is always something just down the road – a treetop walk, a beach harbouring ancient life forms, museums celebrating improbable Dutch shipwrecks or naked telegraph repairmen, really nice people like Mike and Val Cantrall, a fishing village turning out to see a stricken ship limp home. You never know what it’s going to be but it is nearly always pretty good. Maybe it was just my mood at the time, but I felt I could keep this up for a good long while yet.

  So I thanked Mike for showing me around and returned to my glinting vehicle. Even from a distance I could see it was going to be unbearably hot inside, so I opened the doors to air it a little and went with my book of maps to the shade of a bent tree beside the track to the beach. I don’t know why I bothered exactly because the only way back to Perth was the way I had come, along the long and empty North West Coastal Highway. But as I stood there, I flipped idly through the other pages of Western Australia – it’s so big it needs several – and my eye was caught by a patch of highlighted landscape very near the Northern Territory border. It was a range of hills called, with unimprovable melody, the Bungle Bungles. I had only lately read about these. The Bungle Bungles are an isolated sandstone massif where eons of harsh, dry winds have carved the landscape into weird shapes – spindly pinnacles, acres of plump domes, wave walls. The whole extends to about a thousand square miles, yet, according to the book Australia: A Continent Revealed, these extraordinary formations ‘were not generally known until the 1980s’. Think of it. One of the natural wonders of the world, covering an area the size of an English county, was unvisited and essentially unknown until less than twenty years ago.

  I had a sudden powerful impulse to go there. When would I be this close again? Besides, it would be a chance to drive into the Pilbara and visit little Marble Bar, famous as the hottest town in Australia. I could see the landscape where Stan Awramik found and lost his fossilized stromatolites. From there it was but a hop along the Victoria Highway to Darwin. The wet season would be over soon, so I could go to Kakadu National Park – said to be a wonder, but a virtual lake when I had been in the area – and maybe even cross Queensland to visit Cooktown at last. Why, I could do this for ever.

  But of course this was just a fantasy, born of perhaps a little too much sun, a natural longing not to have to retrace my steps along 450 miles of lonely highway back to Perth, and a genuine reluctance to bring this adventure to a close just yet. I made callipers of my fingers to measure the distance and was both appalled and hardly surprised at all to find that it was 1,600 miles to the turnoff for the Bungle Bungles – plus another hundred miles or so over rough back-country tracks on which I was neither insured nor safe. Here I was halfway up the west Australian coast, on the very edge of the world, and there was still 1,600 miles of emptiness to an attraction in the same state. What a preposterously outsized country this was.

  But that is of course the thing about Australia – that there is such a lot to find in it, but such a lot of it to find it in. You could never see the half of it. Idly I wondered what my wife would say if I called home and announced: ‘Honey, we’re selling the house and buying an Australian motorhome. We’re off to see the Bungle Bungles!’ I didn’t think it would fly, frankly, so I shut the car doors, climbed into the driver’s seat and began the long journey back to Perth.

  I drove in the gloomy frame of mind that overtakes me at the end of every big trip. In another day or two I would be back in New Hampshire and all these experiences would march off as in a Disney film to the dusty attic of my brain and try to find space for themselves amid all the ridiculous accumulated clutter of half a century’s disordered living. Before long, I would be thinking: ‘Now what was the name of that place where I saw the Big Lobster?’ Then: ‘Didn’t I go to Tasmania? Are you quite sure? Let me see the book.’ Then finally: ‘The Prime Minister of Australia? No, sorry. N
o idea.’

  It seemed a particularly melancholy notion to me that life would go on in Australia and I would hear almost nothing of it. I would never know who ended up with the Hancock millions. I would never learn if anyone found out what became of that poor American couple stranded on the Great Barrier Reef. Chinese immigrants might wade ashore and ask for cabs, and I would never hear of it. Crocodiles would attack, bush fires would rage, ministers would depart in shame, amazing things would be found in the desert, and possibly lost again, and word of none of this would reach my ears. Life in Australia would go on and I would hear nothing, because once you leave Australia, Australia ceases to be. What a strange, sad thought that is.

  I can understand it, of course. Australia is mostly empty and a long way away. Its population is small and its role in the world consequently peripheral. It doesn’t have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca in provocative quantities or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly manner. It is stable and peaceful and good. It doesn’t need watching, and so we don’t. But I will tell you this: the loss is entirely ours.

  You see, Australia is an interesting place. It truly is. And that really is all I’m saying.

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  Foo
tnotes

  Chapter One

  *1The statement is inarguable. However, the author would like the record to show that he did not have his glasses on; he trusted his hosts; he was scanning a large area of ocean for sharks; and he was endeavouring throughout not to excrete a large housebrick into his pants.

  *2Unless otherwise indicated, all dollar signs refer to Australian dollars. As of early 2000, $1 was worth roughly 40 British pence (or £1 sterling to $2.50 Australian).

  Chapter Two

  *3According to the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey; but 1929 according to National Geographic magazine. There’s hardly a fact about Australia that isn’t significantly contradicted somewhere in print by somebody.

  Chapter Four

  *4For the record, Captain Watkin Tench, who was there, recorded the numbers as 751 convicts and 211 marines landed, with 25 fatalities en route. Hughes in The Fatal Shore puts the number of convicts landed as 696 and the total number of fatalities as 48; he doesn’t specify the number of marines. A National Geographic article I read put the number of prisoners at 775; a Penguin Concise History made it 529. I could go on and on.

  *5This was not a good period for Australian pride vis-à-vis America. Just over two weeks after the bridge opened and was found to be tragically short of superlative, Phar Lap, the greatest racehorse in Australian history, died in mysterious circumstances in California. There are still Australians who say we poisoned it. Australians are hugely proud of this horse, and will not thank you for pointing out that actually it was bred in New Zealand.

  Chapter Six

  *6Whoever named the lake evidently didn’t realize that Burley was Walter’s middle name, not part of his surname.

  Chapter Ten

  *7Respectively a singlet, a slang term for breasts (I saw it on the cover of a magazine and actually made a sales assistant blush in asking, but how else to learn?) and a type of rotary clothesline of which the Australians are mysteriously but touchingly proud.