by Baxter, John
Chapter 11
Going Walkabout
Australia is an outdoor country. People only go inside to use the toilet. And that’s only a recent development.
BARRY HUMPHRIES
As if living in Los Angeles was not enough to turn me against walking, I’d been raised in rural Australia, where distances discourage the man on foot.
Well, they discouraged me.
Distance was only one reason to stay off the ground. Australia harbors the world’s largest population of lethal animals, insects, and plants. Tiger sharks, bull ants, saltwater crocodiles, venomous snakes, jellyfish, killer wasps, vampire bats, fruits that poison, thorns that spike, vines that trip, flowers that give a rash . . . everything, it seems, is out to get you. As kids, we were warned to avoid long grass, where snakes slithered, so poisonous that one bite killed not only you, your dog, and the little sister whose hand you held but probably also the woman driving the school bus.
Lurking in slanting earth tunnels disguised with a cunning lid, trapdoor or funnel web spiders waited to launch themselves up the leg of your trousers. Old bush hands wore “bowyangs”—loops of string, just below the knee. But bowyangs wouldn’t help with the redback spider, Latrodectus hasselti: a deadly pea-sized spider with a dashing red flash across its mostly black back. Our house, being on the outskirts of town, had only recently acquired a sewer. The lavatory was still entered from outside, a vestige of the old days when the “dunny man” visited a couple of times a week to collect the can. Redbacks often make their homes under the wooden seats of such outdoor facilities. As Clive James remarked, anyone bitten in those circumstances had only five minutes to live and an urgent problem about where to tie the tourniquet.
Not every Australian shared my prejudice against the outdoors. The aboriginal people who still live in tribal conditions, away from big cities, routinely “go walkabout,” setting off into the desert, living off what they can harvest or hunt, and communing in some little-understood way with the land, which for them is the basis of their religion. Among white men, hobos, called “swagmen,” trudged all over the outback, carrying their belongings in a blanket roll, or “bluey.” (In local slang, this way of life was known as “humping the bluey,” which caused some hilarity among Americans.) The hero of Australia’s national song, “Waltzing Matilda,” is a “jolly swagman” who camps where he pleases, in his case by a small lake, or billabong. He dines off “a jolly jumbuck” (a stolen sheep), is caught by the police, and drowns himself. Not everyone’s concept of a cultural ideal, perhaps, but Australians love an outlaw.
Australian swagman “humping the bluey”
Occasionally a swaggie stopped by our back door for a handout. Since we lived on the edge of town, with a rutted red clay stock trail running past our back gate, we saw more of them than other householders. Stepping off the track, they’d remove their battered felt hats, and ask politely, “Missus, could you let us have a bit of flour?”
While my mother filled a paper bag, we kids stared with fascination through the screen door.
Once, there were two men, one an aboriginal—the first I’d met. The aboriginal wore a faded blue shirt, corduroy trousers worn smooth at the knees, and nothing on his feet. Even then he looked overdressed. His friend’s once-smart tweed suit was worn and patched, his cotton vest stained under the arms with concentric rings of sweat. Above all, his boots, dusty and so scuffed and scratched that one could no longer tell the leather’s original color, spoke of hundreds, even thousands, of miles on the track.
Even as a child, the mechanisms of cooking interested me. “What do you make with the flour?” I asked.
The white man looked down without expression.
“Damper,” he said at last.
He had an accent—guttural, European. Was he one of the emigrants forced out of Europe by the war? The group dismissed by my father as “reffos,” but later rebranded by the government as “New Australians”?
I knew damper; a kind of bread, like a scone, made with flour, salt, water, and a pinch of baking soda.
“How?” By way of explaining my inquisitiveness, I added, “My dad’s a pastry cook.”
“We mix it up,” he said after a long pause, “and bake it in the ashes.”
Speaking took effort. In the isolation of the track, language shrivels for lack of use. This was probably as long a conversation as he’d had in weeks.
My mother returned. She lifted the latch and, maintaining a firm grip on the handle inside the door, passed out the paper bags of flour and salt.
“I put a bit of baking powder in, too. It’s in with the flour.”
“Thanks, missus.” He slipped the bags into pockets stretched out of shape with long use to carry things for which they’d never been intended.
“But how?” I pressed. My eyes, sweeping over the things they carried—the rolled bluey and a battered billy can with a wire handle, blackened from boiling tea over an open fire—I saw no pots, no pans for mixing or baking. How did they combine the ingredients and knead them into dough, as I’d watched my father do a thousand times in the bake house?
“Don’t bother the gentlemen,” my mother said.
“No, it’s all right, missus,” said the man. “Clever kid.”
He squatted so that our eyes were level. I smelled the not unpleasant odor of tobacco on his breath. Talking through the metal mesh recalled the confessional, the sense of privileged communication.
“How we make it, son,” he said. “Jacky here . . .” He tilted his head toward his friend. “ . . . takes off his shirt and lies down, and I mix the damper on his back.” Then he winked.
Standing up, he tipped his hat. “Thanks again, missus. God bless.”
They walked down the path to the back gate and stepped out onto the red dust track leading out of town. In all this time, the black man hadn’t said a word or even acknowledged our existence. As they closed the back gate, I expected them to laugh, but if they did, I never heard it. I hope he knew I got the joke.
Chapter 12
The Music of Walking
I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
The swaggie was an icon of my childhood, an archetype who represented an Australian trait: in his case the urge to wander. Close behind in the ranks of national types came the military veteran, the Digger, followed by the humorless moralist, or wowser, represented by those people who gelded the statues in Centennial Park.
To these, we added another, more disreputable figure: the ratbag.
A ratbag has been defined as “a troublemaker or someone causing havoc.” This misses the element of manic excess that makes him more treasured than deplored. For Australians, he’s proof that regulations made for the convenience of the many do not necessarily apply to the dissident few.
I owed my first trip away from Australia to a classic ratbag. A few Europeans “go native” when they encounter Australia’s limitless horizons, but I’d never seen the process up close until Ian, a young English academic friend, started acting oddly. With his wife, I watched in astonishment as he announced to startled colleagues that he was no longer a professor but instead the university’s resident wizard, a modern Lord of Misrule like those appointed at medieval festivals to make mischief and mock the sacred. At commencement, instead of joining the other academics solemnly precessing in academic robes, he turned up in a striped neck-to-knee Edwardian swimsuit and jumped into a vat of green Jell-O. After this and other excesses, his wife decided to return to Europe without him. I went with her.
In 1987, British writer Bruce Chatwin published a book about walking in Australia. Called The Songlines, it was an instant critical and financial success.
Chatwin had that far-seeing thousand-yard stare I remembered from Ian, as well as the capacity to speak for hours, in flawlessly syntactical sentences, of matters about which he knew nothing at all. He had impeccable credentials as a pedestrian. He�
��d crossed Patagonia and written a book about it. Not a very accurate one, but an exhilarating read. He was also a tireless, mesmeric, and charming self-promoter who, socially, sexually, and intellectually, shared many characteristics with Lawrence of Arabia. Both were closet homosexuals with itchy feet and a casual way with the truth. For years, Lawrence maintained he’d been flogged and sodomized by a Turkish official during one of his clandestine expeditions in Arab dress. This was almost certainly a pornographic fantasy. Chatwin, equally fanciful, denied that his fatal disease was AIDS, contracted from one of his sexual partners, among them Rudolf Nureyev. Instead, he claimed to be suffering from an exotic fungal infection carried by spores in a Tibetan cave.
Chatwin and Lawrence wrote with a flourish of the world’s emptiest places, generally with an enthusiasm the locals didn’t always share. In Robert Bolt’s screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia, Feisal, king of the Arabs whose warring tribes Lawrence unites as an army, is bewildered by his motives. “I think you are another of these desert-loving English,” he says. “Doughty, Stanhope. Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert—and no man needs nothing.”
But Lawrence thrived on nothing. So did Chatwin. And if there was nothing in the nothing to write about, he made something up. In the case of Australia, it was a theory about walking. Aboriginals “going walkabout” didn’t, he claimed, do so randomly. Rather, they followed directions contained in songs learned from the tribal elders. These described a “labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines.’ ”
In the book, this is explained to Chatwin by a European emigrant he calls Arkady.
“Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song described the nature of the land over which the song passes. So, if the Lizard Man were dragging his heels across the salt-pans of Lake Eyre, you could expect a succession of long flats, like Chopin’s ‘Funeral March.’ If he were skipping up and down the MacDonnel escarpments, you’d have a series of arpeggios and glissandos, like Liszt’s ‘Hungarian Rhapsodies.’ ”
“So a musical phrase is a map reference?”
“Music is a memory bank for finding one’s way about the world.”
This was vintage ratbaggery, of the sort spoofed by Steven Spielberg in Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Belloq, the French archaeologist, calls the ark of the covenant “a radio for talking to God.” Chatwin’s informants, including Arkady, were the first to tell him he misunderstood most of what they told him and exaggerated the rest. But by then The Songlines was a best-seller, particularly among the “desert-loving English.” At the 1987 Adelaide Festival of Arts, I ran into London literary agent Pat Kavanagh and her husband, novelist Julian Barnes. Pale-faced but resolute, they were headed for Alice Springs, and thence into the wilderness, seeking Chatwin’s musical route to revelation. Hopefully, someone in “the Alice” dissuaded them and they ended their visit in the air-conditioned comfort of a four-star hotel.
Chapter 13
Power Walks
Vanity made the Revolution. Liberty was just a pretext.
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
Chatwin wasn’t entirely wrong. Walks can both symbolize and communicate.
Politicians know the symbolic value of the walk. Julius Caesar, by crossing the Rubicon, hardly more than a creek, committed himself to toppling the established order. The Rubicon marked the border of Italy, and any general who crossed it at the head of his army was regarded as being in revolt against the state. Ironically, nobody now knows where the Rubicon was. It has become the idea of a river, like the Fleet that used to run through medieval London, the Tank Stream that served Australia’s first settlers, and the Los Angeles River, now reduced to an occasional dribble down the middle of those enormous concrete culverts that deal with storm runoff and provide useful locations for movie car chases.
Map of Paris at the time of the 1789 Revolution
Like these rivers, the walk in political life exists more as a symbol than a fact. In most democratic parliaments, rival parties are ranged on opposites sides of the chamber, and changing sides is called “crossing the floor”—a short stroll, but metaphoric. In such gestures, brevity is an advantage. The Italian dictator Benito Mussolini seized power in the 1922 March on Rome, for which the Fascisti converged on the capital, scaring the government into capitulation. But il Duce himself barely put foot to pavement. He let his people do the walking and only joined for the last few blocks, so as to look fresh and resolute for the press.
Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the Revolution, 1830
Since nobody walks like the French, they are the people who have raised the political walk to near perfection. Before the Revolution of 1789, the inhabitants of Paris, when they wished to protest the latest excess of the aristocracy, walked the ten miles to Versailles and shook the railings until Louis and Marie-Antoinette took notice. Today, they’re less inclined to hit the bricks with such vigor and instead stage what’s called a manifestation—manif for short—or, as we would say, a demonstration.
Manifs are a feature of life in Paris, particularly when the weather is good and the chattering classes fancy a stroll with some friends. Most bring their kids and a picnic. The level of violence is low, to the point of barely existing, since everyone understands the real impact will be made on the evening TV news. By agreement with the city authorities, manifs keep clear of the main thoroughfares, at least once the journalists have got their shots of a boulevard thronged with protestors. Guided into one of the more roomy squares on the outskirts, they can hold their meeting in plenty of time to get home before the kids need their tea. All that tearing up of cobbles to throw at the police is a thing of the past. If the organizers feel some violence is needed, a few energetic youngsters are fitted out with ski masks and sent at a time mutually agreed upon with the police and press to shout slogans and tear down some barricades.
Occasionally, in my first years in Paris, I watched these displays of violence in the naïve belief that they were legitimate. My lesson came in the 1990s. Out walking with Nicholas, a visitor from Australia, we found ourselves mixed up in the tail end of a manif, which, because it was late and the heat was oppressive, had become a little bad-tempered. On the other side of boulevard Saint-Germain, a kid heaved a café chair through a shop window. Nicholas hurried forward to look, and then simply disappeared. I searched for a while, then went home.
He turned up an hour later.
“It was incredible,” he said. “One minute I’m watching this riot; the next, I’m bundled into the back of a police van and transported with a dozen other baffled Americans and Germans to the far end of the boulevard, well out of harm’s way.”
People are seldom injured in a manif, and spectators almost never, particularly if they are foreigners. Nobody wants to impair the tourist trade. Given the degree of organization and collusion between the demonstrators and the police, there’s more risk of coming to harm watching a performance of Le Malade Imaginaire at the Comédie-Française.
The Serbian film director Dusan Makavajev, a longtime Paris resident, was the first person to alert me to how much a manif was really street theater.
In October 2000, watching on French TV as several hundred thousand fellow Serbs thronged the streets of Belgrade and even drove a bulldozer into parliament, then set the building on fire, he decided he should be there.
“But you know, it is very boring. Nobody is working, so there is no electricity. We sit in the dark, cold apartment all day and watch thousands of people march by in the street, heading into the city.”
Deciding he might as well walk himself, Dusan joined the next march. Almost immediately, he was buttonholed by a friend, accompanied by an Italian TV crew.
“Where’s the man with the Ferrari banner?” he demanded. Apparently someone had torn down the red velvet banner with the rearing horse from the Ferrari showrooms and was leading marches with
it.
Dusan hadn’t seen him, but his existence did make him wonder in exactly what cause he himself was marching. He made his way to the head of the manif, where two men held aloft a large cloth sign stretched between two poles. He craned his neck to look.
The banner, grabbed from a supermarket, simply said SAUERKRAUT.
François Mitterrand, the president of France from 1981 to 1995, was a master of the political walk. Traditionally, the newly elected president pays a courtesy visit to the Panthéon, the massive temple with the pillared portico where the great of France lie in state. Advised by his shrewd minister of culture, Jack Lang, Mitterrand left his limo a block away and walked through the cheering mob, carrying the symbol of his party, a single red rose. The image of his lone figure mounting the steps of the Panthéon was worth a million votes.
Throughout the 1980s, every year at Pentecost, Mitterrand made another walk, up the Roche de Solutré, a monolith jutting picturesquely from the vineyards of Macon. Supposedly résistants met and hid out there during the war—symbolism that escaped nobody. The president led the walk, often with his black Lab, Baltique, followed by his family and members of his inner circle (including, of course, Jack Lang), plus selected journalists, who learned to watch the list of invitees for changes in the structure of power. Mitterrand himself seldom said anything. The talking was done by the walk.
For the walk that talks, however, none equals one that once saved Mitterrand’s career. During his presidency, a scandal loomed when an opponent threatened to leak to Paris Match the details of his illegitimate daughter, who’d been brought up in the Elysée at government expense. Mitterrand got wind of this and consulted Roland Dumas, his foreign minister and a famous schemer. At a gala that night, Dumas strolled up the steps of the presidential palace with an unprepossessing woman on his arm. Mitterrand’s enemy paled. She was the madame of a brothel in the eighth arrondissement where he was a frequent client. The article never appeared.