Down Under (7 page)

A door led out into a hallway with a grand stairway. From the ground to the distant ceiling, a good three storeys above us, the stairwell walls were divided into panels of different sizes by strips of wood and some artist had filled each of them – scores in all – with a mural, some of them several feet across, some much smaller. They consisted entirely of romantic and idealized landscapes showing herds of kangaroos sipping at billabongs or swagmen gathered around a lonely coolibah tree. They were undeniably hokey, but charming even so and without question from a gifted hand. Almost involuntarily, we found ourselves advancing slowly up the stairs, moving with silent absorption from one image to the next.

‘Good, eh?’ came a voice after a minute and we turned to see a young man looking up at us and apparently not at all perturbed that we were making our way into the depths of his building. He was wiping his forearms with a cloth,
as if he had been engaged in some large task like cleaning out a cauldron.

‘They were done by a blackfella named Gordon Waye,’ he went on. ‘Pretty amazing bloke. He didn’t sketch anything out or anything, didn’t have any kind of a plan. He just picked up his paints and a brush and did it straight off. At the end of the day there’d be a finished painting. Then he’d collect his pay from the owner and clear off. Go walkabout, you know? Some time later – maybe a week or two, maybe a few months – he’d come back and knock off another one, collect some more money and clear off again, until eventually he’d done them all. Then he cleared off for good.’

‘What became of him?’

‘No idea. Don’t think anyone knows. So where you fellas come from?’

‘America and Britain,’ I said, pointing appropriately.

‘Long way to come. Expect you’ll be wanting a cold beer then.’

We followed him into the bar, where he drew us two schooners of Victoria Bitter.

‘Nice hotel,’ I said, not really meaning it.

He looked at me faintly dubiously. ‘Well, you can have it if you want. It’s on the market.’

‘Oh, yeah? How much for?’

‘One million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’

It took me a moment to form the words. ‘That’s a
lot
of money.’

He made a look of agreement. ‘More than most people around here have got, that’s for sure.’ Then he disappeared with a crate through the door behind him.

We wanted to ask him more, and after a few minutes we wanted another beer, but he never did come back.

The following morning we caught the second of the twice-weekly Indian Pacifics to Perth. In the deliciously air-chilled bar car of the train, Trevor and I spread out a map of Australia and discovered with astonishment that for all our hours of driving over the previous days we had covered only the tiniest fraction of land surface – a freckle, almost literally, on the face of Australia. It is such an immense country, and we still had 3,227 kilometres of it to get through before we reached Perth. There was nothing to do but sit back and enjoy it.

After the heat and dust of the outback, I was glad to be back in the clean, regulated world of the train, and I fell into its gentle routines with gratitude and relish. Train life, I decided, takes some beating. At some point in the morning, generally when you have gone for breakfast, your bed vanishes magically into the wall, and in the evening just as magically reappears, crisply made with fresh sheets. Three times a day you are called to the dining car, where you are presented with a thoroughly commendable meal by friendly and obliging staff. In between times there is nothing to do but sit and read, watch the endlessly unfurling scenery or chat with your neighbour. Trevor, because he was young and full of life and unaccountably had failed to bring any of my books to make the hours fly, felt restless and cooped up, but I wallowed in every undemanding minute of it.

With all your needs attended to and no real decisions to make, you soon find yourself wholly absorbed with the few tiny matters that are actually at your discretion – whether to have your morning shower now or in a while, whether to get up from your chair and pour yourself another complimentary cup of tea or be a devil and have
a bottle of Victoria Bitter, whether to stroll back to your cabin for the book you forgot or just sit and watch the landscape for emus and kangaroos. If this sounds like a living death, don’t be misled. I was having the time of my life. There is something wonderfully lulling about being stuck for a long spell on a train. It was like being given a preview of what it will be like to be in your eighties. All those things eighty-year-olds appear to enjoy – staring vacantly out of windows, dozing in a chair, boring the pants off anyone foolish enough to sit beside them – took on a special treasured meaning for me. This was the life!

Our new complement of passengers seemed a livelier bunch. There was Phil, a printmaker from Newcastle in New South Wales; Rose and Bill, a sweet, quiet couple from England who were on their way to see their son, a mining engineer in Kalgoorlie; three white-haired guys from a lawn bowling club in Neutral Bay, who drank like sailors on shore leave; and a wonderful, rake-thin, chainsmoking, perpetually wobbly-drunk lady whose name no one seemed to know and whose response to any pleasantry of any type directed at her – ‘Good morning,’ ‘Sleep well?’, ‘I’m Bill and this is Trevor’ – was to cry ‘Yes!’ and give a prolonged, demented laugh, and take a sip of Shiraz. In such a crowd, the evenings tended to be nicely festive – so much so that my notes for the relevant periods are on matchbooks and the backs of beer mats, and show a certain measure of elevated incoherence (‘G. attacked by camel in men’s lav. Alice Springs 1947 – great!!!’). Still, my recollection is of having a jolly nice time and that is of course the main thing.

On our second day out from Broken Hill, we entered the mighty Nullarbor. Many people, even Australians, assume Nullarbor is an Aboriginal term, but in fact it is a
corruption of the Latin for ‘no trees’, and the name could not be more apt. For hundreds of miles the landscape is as flat as a calm sea and unrelievedly barren – just glowing red soil, tussocky clumps of bluebush and spinifex, and scattered rocks the colour of bad teeth. In an area four times the size of Belgium there is not a scrap of shade. It is one of the most forbidding expanses on earth.

Just after breakfast, we entered the longest straight stretch of railway line in the world – 297 miles without a hint of deviation – and in mid-morning we heaved into Cook, a community that makes White Cliffs look accessible and urbane. Five hundred miles from any real town to east or west, a hundred miles from the nearest paved highway to the south and over a thousand to the north, Cook (pop. 40) exists solely to water, fuel and otherwise service the trains that pass through. Beside the track stood a sign that said: ‘No Food or Fuel for Next 862 Kilometres’ – rather a daunting thought, what?

We had two hours to kill in Cook – goodness knows why so long – and everyone was allowed to get off and look around. It was agreeable to move about without having to steady yourself against a swaying wall every couple of paces, but the thrill of Cook swiftly palls. There was nothing much to it – a railway station and post office, a couple of dozen prefabricated bungalows standing on dusty ground, a little shop whose shelves were mostly bare, a shuttered community centre, an empty school (it was the middle of school holidays), a small open-air swimming pool (also closed), and an airstrip with a limp windsock. The heat was terrific. On every side desert lapped at the town like floodwater.

I was standing there with a map of Australia, surveying the emptiness and trying to absorb the ungraspable fact
that if I walked north from here I wouldn’t come to a paved surface for 1,100 miles, when Trevor trotted up and told me we had been given permission to travel for an hour in the locomotive, so that he could take photos. This was a rare treat, and exciting news. Just before the train resumed its journey, we climbed aboard the locomotive with two replacement drivers, Noel Coad and Sean Willis, who would take the train on to Kalgoorlie.

They were genial and laid-back, in their late twenties or early thirties. Their cab was snug and comfy – homey even in a high-tech sort of way. It featured a fancy console with lots of switches and toggles, three shortwave radios and two computer screens, but also a number of domestic comforts: a kettle, a small refrigerator, an electric hotplate for cooking. Coad drove. He flipped a couple of switches, moved a gear lever a fraction of an inch, and we were off. Within a couple of minutes we were up to our cruising speed of 100 kilometres an hour.

I sat quite still, fearful of touching anything that would get us on the evening news, and enjoyed the novel perspective of looking straight ahead. And what an ahead it is on the boundless Nullarbor. Before us stretched a single-line track, two parallel bars of shining steel, dead straight and painfully shiny in the sunshine, and hatched with endless rungs of concrete sleepers. Somewhere in the vicinity of a preposterously remote horizon the two gleaming lines of steel met in a shimmery vanishing point. Endlessly, monotonously, we hoovered up sleepers as we progressed, but however much we pressed onward the vanishing point stayed always in the same place. You couldn’t look at it – well, I couldn’t look at it – without getting a headache.

‘How far is it to the next curve?’ I asked.

‘Three hundred and sixty kilometres,’ Willis answered.

‘Don’t you go crazy out here?’

‘No,’ they replied in unison and with evident sincerity.

‘Do you ever see anything to break the monotony – animals and so forth?’

‘A few ’roos,’ Coad said. ‘A camel from time to time. Once in a while somebody on a motorbike.’

‘Really?’

‘On that.’ He indicated a rough dirt maintenance road that ran alongside the track. ‘Very popular with the Japanese for some reason. Something to do with an initiation into a club or something.’

‘We saw a bloke on a bicycle the other week,’ Willis volunteered.

‘No kidding?’

‘Japanese bloke.’

‘Was he all right?’

‘Out of his mind if you ask me, but he seemed all right. He waved.’

‘Isn’t it awfully risky out there?’

‘Nah – not if you keep to the track. There’s fifty or sixty trains a week along this line, and nobody’s going to leave you out here if you’re in bother.’

We had arrived at a siding called Deakin, where the Indian Pacific had to pull over to let a freight train through, and where Trevor and I were to return to the passenger section. We hopped down from the locomotive and walked briskly back along the train towards the passenger carriages. (And you would walk briskly too, believe me, if you were outside a train with its motor running in the middle of a desert.) At the door of the first passenger carriage, David Goodwin, the train manager, was waiting for us.

He helped us up – it’s a long way up onto a train when
you haven’t got a platform to start with – and we half fell in. Looking up, I discovered with a start that we were in the forbidden coach section. I have never felt so stared at in my life. As we followed David through the two coach carriages, 124 pairs of sunken eyes sullenly followed our every move. These were people who had no dining carriage, no lounge bar, no cosy berths to crawl into at night. They had been riding upright for two days since leaving Sydney, and still had twenty-four hours to go to Perth. I am almost certain that if we had not had the train manager as an escort they would have eaten us.

We arrived in Perth at first light and stepped from the train, glad to be back on solid ground and feeling disproportionately pleased with our achievement. I know that all that was required of us to get there was to sit passively for a total of seventy-two hours, but still we had done something that lots of Australians never do – namely, cross Australia.

It is a lame and obvious conclusion to draw, but Australia truly does exist on a unique scale. It’s not just a question of brute distance – though goodness knows, there is plenty enough of that – but of the incredible emptiness that lies within all that distance. Five hundred miles in Australia is not like 500 miles elsewhere, and the only way to appreciate that is to cross the country at ground level.

I couldn’t wait to see more.

You wouldn’t think that something as conspicuous, as patently
there
, as Australia could escape the world’s attention almost to the modern age, but there you are. It did. Less than twenty years before the founding of Sydney it was still essentially unknown.

For nearly 300 years explorers had been looking for a conjectured southern continent,
Terra Australis Incognita
– some commodious mass that would at least partly counterbalance all that land that covered the northern half of the globe. In every instance one of two things happened: either they found it and didn’t know they had or they missed it altogether.

In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle. Thirty-six years later the Dutchman
Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon. Eventually he bumped into Tasmania (which he called Van Diemen’s Land after his superior at the Dutch East India Company), and went on to discover New Zealand and Fiji, but it was not a successful voyage. In New Zealand, Maoris captured and ate some of his men – not the sort of thing that looks good in a report – and he failed to find anything in the way of riches. On the way home he passed within sight of the north coast of Australia, but, disheartened, accorded it no importance and sailed on.