Down Under (5 page)

‘It’s a problem,’ Keith said again, still fixed on his food.

‘But they’re lovely people really. When they’re not drinking.’

And that pretty well killed the conversation.

After dinner Trevor and I ventured into the lounge carriage. While Trevor went to the bar to order I sank into an
easy chair and watched the dusky landscape. It was farming country, vaguely arid. The background music, I noted with idle interest, had gone from ‘Much Loved Show Tunes’ to ‘Party Time at the Nursing Home’. ‘Roll Out the Barrel’ was just finishing when we arrived and was swiftly succeeded by ‘Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye’.

‘Interesting choice of music,’ I observed drily to the young couple opposite me.

‘Yes, lovely!’ they replied with simultaneous enthusiasm.

Suppressing an urge to shriek, I turned to the man beside me – an educated-looking older man in a suit, which was striking because everyone else on the train was in casual wear. We chatted about this and that. He was a retired solicitor from Canberra on his way to visit a son in Perth. He seemed a reasonable and perceptive sort, so I mentioned to him, in a confiding tone, my puzzling conversation with the schoolteachers from Queensland.

‘Ah, Aborigines,’ he said, nodding solemnly. ‘A great problem.’

‘So I gather.’

‘They want hanging, every one of them.’

I looked at him, startled, and found a face on the edge of fury.

‘Every bloody one of them,’ he said, jowls trembling, and without another word took his leave.

Aborigines, I reflected, were something I would have to look into. But for the moment I decided to keep the conversation to simple matters – weather, scenery, popular show tunes – until I had a better grasp of things.

The great if obvious feature of a train, as compared with a hotel room, is that your view is ever changing. In the morning I awoke to a new world: red soil, scrubby
vegetation, huge skies and an encircling horizon broken only by an occasional skeletal gum tree. As I peered blearily from my narrow perch, a pair of kangaroos, flushed by the train, bounded across the foreground. It was an exciting moment. We were definitely in Australia now!

We arrived at Broken Hill just after eight and stepped blinking from the train. An airless heat hung over the land – the kind of heat that hits you when you open an oven door to check a roasting turkey. Waiting for us on the platform was Sonja Stubing, a good-natured young lady from the regional tourist office who had been sent to collect us from the station and take us to pick up a rental car for a drive around the outback.

‘How hot does it get here?’ I asked, breathing out hard.

‘Well, the record’s forty-eight.’

I thought for a minute. ‘That’s one hundred and eighteen degrees!’ I said.

She nodded serenely. ‘It was forty-two yesterday’.

’Another brief calculation: 107 degrees. ‘That’s very hot.’

She nodded. ‘Too hot.’

Broken Hill was a positively delightful little community – clean, trim, cheerfully prosperous. Unfortunately this was not at all what we wanted. We wanted proper outback: a place where men were men and sheep were nervous. Here there were cafés and a bookstore, travel agents offering enticing packages to Bali and Singapore. They were even doing a Noel Coward play at the civic centre. This wasn’t the outback at all. This was Guildford with the heat turned up.

Things took a more hopeful turn when we went to Len Vodic Vehicle Hire to pick up a four-wheel drive for a two-day jaunt into the baking wilderness. The eponymous Len was a wiry old guy, energetic and friendly, who looked as
if he had spent every day of his life doing tough stuff in the out of doors. He jumped behind the wheel and gave us the kind of swift, thorough rundown that people give when they assume they are dealing with intelligent and capable listeners. The interior presented a bewildering assortment of dials, levers, knobs, gauges and toggles.

‘Now say you get stuck in sand and need to increase your offside differential,’ Len was saying on one of the intermittent occasions I dipped into the lecture. ‘You move this handle forward like so, select a hyperdrive ratio of between twelve and twenty-seven, elevate the ailerons and engage both thrust motors – but
not
the left-hand one. That’s very important. And whatever you do, watch your gauges and don’t go over one hundred and eighty degrees on the combustulator, or the whole thing’ll blow and you’ll be stuck out there.’

He jumped out and handed us the keys. ‘There’s twenty-five litres of spare diesel in the back. That should be more than enough if you go wrong.’ He looked at us again, more carefully. ‘I’ll get you some more diesel,’ he decided.

‘Did you understand any of that?’ I whispered to Trevor when he had gone.

‘Not past the putting the key in the ignition part.’

I called to Len: ‘What happens if we get stuck or lost?’

‘Why, you die of course!’ Actually, he didn’t say that, but that’s what I was thinking. I had been reading accounts of people who had been lost or stranded in the outback, like the explorer Ernest Giles who spent days wandering waterless and half dead before coming fortuitously on a baby wallaby that had tumbled from its mother’s pouch. ‘I pounced upon it,’ Giles related in his memoirs, ‘and ate it, living, raw, dying – fur, skin, bones, skull and all.’ And this
was one of the happier stories. Believe me, you don’t want to get lost in the outback.

I began to feel a tremor of foreboding – a feeling not lightened when Sonja gave a cry of delight at the sight of a spider by our feet and said: ‘Hey, look, a redback!’ A red-back, if you don’t know already, is death on eight legs. As Trevor and I whimperingly tried to climb into each other’s arms, she snatched it up and held it out to us on the tip of a finger.

‘It’s all right,’ she giggled. ‘It’s dead.’

We peered cautiously at the little object on her fingertip, a telltale red hourglass shape on its shiny back. It seemed unlikely that something so small could deliver instant agony, but make no mistake, a single nip from a redback’s malicious jaws can result within minutes in ‘frenzied twitching, a profuse flow of body fluids and, in the absence of prompt medical attention, possible death’. Or so the literature reports.

‘You probably won’t see any redbacks out there,’ Sonja reassured us. ‘Snakes are much more of a problem.’

This intelligence was received with four raised eyebrows and expressions that said: ‘Go on.’

She nodded. ‘Common brown, western puff pastry, yellow-backed lockjaw, eastern groin groper, dodge viper . . .’ I don’t remember what she said exactly, but it was a long list. ‘But don’t worry,’ she continued. ‘Most snakes don’t want to hurt you. If you’re out in the bush and a snake comes along, just stop dead and let it slide over your shoes.’

This, I decided, was the least-likely-to-be-followed advice I had ever been given.

Our extra diesel loaded, we climbed aboard and, with a grinding of gears, a couple of bronco lurches and a lively
but inadvertent salute of windscreen wipers, took to the open road. Our instructions were to drive to Menindee, 110 kilometres to the east, where we would be met by a man named Steve Garland. In the event, the drive to Menindee was something of an anticlimax. The landscape was shimmering hot and gorgeously forbidding, and we were gratified to see our first willy-willy, a column of rotating dust perhaps a hundred feet high moving across the endless plains to our left. But this was as close to adventure as we got. The road was newly paved and relatively well travelled. While Trevor stopped to take pictures, I counted four cars pass. Had we broken down, we wouldn’t have been stranded more than a few minutes.

Menindee was a modest hamlet on the Darling River: a couple of streets of sun-baked bungalows, a petrol station, two shops, the Burke and Wills Motel (named for a pair of nineteenth-century explorers who inevitably came a cropper in the unforgiving outback) and the semi-famous Maidens Hotel, where in 1860 the aforementioned Burke and Wills spent their last night in civilization before meeting their unhappy fate in the barren void to the north.

We met Steve Garland at the motel and, to celebrate our safe arrival and recent discovery of fifth gear, crossed the road to Maidens and joined the noisy hubbub within. Maidens’ long bar was lined from end to end with sun-leathered men in shorts and sweat-stained muscle shirts and wide-brimmed hats. It was like stepping into a Paul Hogan movie. This was more like it.

‘So which window do they eject the bodies through?’ I asked the amiable Steve when we were seated, thinking that Trevor would probably like to set up his equipment for a shot at chucking-out time.

‘Oh, it’s not like that here,’ he said. ‘Things aren’t as wild
in the outback as people think. It’s pretty civilized really.’ He looked around with what was clearly real fondness, and exchanged hellos with a couple of dusty-looking characters.

Garland was a professional photographer in Sydney until his partner, Lisa Menke, was appointed chief warden of Kinchega National Park up the road. He took a job as the regional tourism and development officer. His territory covered 26,000 square miles, an area half the size of England but with a population of just 2,500. His challenge was to persuade dubious locals that there are people in the world prepared to pay good money to holiday in a place that is vast, dry, empty, featureless and ungodly hot. The other part of his challenge was to find such people.

Between the merciless sun and the isolation, outback people are not always the most gifted of communicators. We had heard of one shopkeeper who, upon being asked by a smiling visitor from Sydney where the fish were biting, stared at the man incredulously for a long moment and replied: ‘In the fucking river, mate, where do you think?’

Garland only grinned when I put the story to him, but conceded that there was a certain occasional element of challenge involved in getting the locals to see the possibilities inherent in tourism.

He asked us how our drive had been.

I told him that I had expected it to be a little more harsh.

‘Wait till tomorrow,’ he said.

He was right. In the morning we set off in mini convoy, Steve and his partner Lisa in one car, Trevor and I in the other, for White Cliffs, an old opal-mining community
250 kilometres to the north. Half a mile outside Menindee the asphalt ended and the surface gave way to a hard earthen road full of potholes, ruts and cement-hard corrugations, as jarring as driving over railway sleepers.

We jounced along for hours, raising enormous clouds of red dust in our wake, through a landscape brilliantly hot and empty, over tablelands flecked with low saltbush and spiky spinifex, the odd turpentine bush and weary-looking eucalypt. Here and there along the roadside were the corpses of kangaroos and the occasional basking goanna, a large and ugly type of monitor lizard. Goodness knows how any living things survive in that heat and aridity. There are creekbeds out there that haven’t seen water in fifteen years.

The supreme emptiness of Australia, the galling uselessness of such a mass of land, was something it took the country’s European settlers a longtime to adjust to. Several of the earliest explorers were so convinced that they would encounter mighty river systems, or even an inland sea, that they took boats with them. Thomas Mitchell, who explored vast tracts of western New South Wales and northern Victoria in the 1830s, dragged two wooden skiffs over 3,000 miles of arid scrub without once getting them wet, but refused to the last to give up on them. ‘Although the boats and their carriage had been of late a great hindrance to us,’ he wrote with a touch of understatement after his third expedition, ‘I was very unwilling to abandon such useful appendages to an exploring party.’

Reading accounts of early forays, it is clear that the first explorers were often ludicrously out of their depths. In 1802, in one of the earliest expeditions, Lieutenant Francis Barrallier described a temperature of 82.5 degrees F. as ‘suffocating’. We can reasonably assume that he was
recently arrived in the country. His men tried for days without success to hunt kangaroos before it occurred to them that they might stalk the creatures more effectively if they first removed their bright red jackets. In seven weeks they covered just 130 miles, an average of about one and a half miles a day.

In expedition after expedition the leaders seemed wilfully, almost comically, unable to provision themselves sensibly. In 1817, John Oxley, the surveyor-general, led a five-month expedition to explore the Lachlan and Macquarie Rivers, and took only 100 rounds of ammunition – less than one shot a day from a single gun – and hardly any spare horseshoes or nails. The incompetence of the early explorers was a matter of abiding fascination for the Aborigines, who often came to watch. ‘Our perplexities afforded them an inexhaustible fund of merriment and derision,’ wrote one chronicler glumly.

It was into this tradition of haplessness that Burke and Wills improvidently stepped in 1860. They are far and away the most famous of Australian explorers, which is perhaps a little curious since their expedition accomplished almost nothing, cost a fortune and ended in tragedy.

Their assignment was straightforward: to find a route from the south coast at Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria in the far north. Melbourne, at that time much larger than Sydney, was one of the most important cities in the British Empire, and yet one of the most isolated. To get a message to London and receive a reply took a third of a year, sometimes more. In the 1850s, the Philosophical Institute of Victoria decided to promote an expedition to find a way through the ‘ghastly blank’, as the interior was poetically known, which would allow the establishment of
a telegraph line to connect Australia first to the East Indies and then onward to the world.

They chose as leader an Irish police officer named Robert O’Hara Burke, who had never seen real outback, was famous for his ability to get lost even in inhabited areas, and knew nothing of exploration or science. The surveyor was a young English doctor named William John Wills, whose principal qualifications seem to have been a respectable background and a willingness to go. A notable plus was that they both had outstanding facial hair.