One for the Road (10 page)

Travel rarely pays out in that fashion, least of all in Australia. The civilization is too far-flung to allow for many generalizations. And in the outback, home and work life are usually sealed away from view, way off in the scrub.

The lonely roadhouse offers a window into this remote society. And peering blearily through it, I see an irreverent and whimsical world that intrigues me—if not the real Australia, at least something more exotic than the international gloss of Sydney. A Michelin Guide to the outback would, like Bill Gillholey, never miss a pub. No chance.

      
T
wo cartons later I land in the town called Alice.

My arrival is as indirect as the pub crawl that’s carried me there. Bill bypasses town and drives to a rocky slope facing west into the MacDonnell Ranges. No verdant Blue Mountains here, just eroded ridges of red rock, winding into the desert. But it isn’t the scenery Bill’s after. Unable to be a mining engineer by profession, he has taken up mining as a hobby. And this arid hillside is one of the best places in the Territory to scrape for amethyst.

“In my country, every inch of earth has been turned,” he says, sinking his pickaxe into the stony red earth. “Here, who knows what is still buried beneath the ground?”

His passion for precious stones is contagious, particularly after a dozen beers. So for several hours we take turns with the pickaxe, then sift through the upturned dirt for the purple-black shimmer of amethyst. All we find are tiny shards, nice enough to keep but not of any value.

“Some day,” Bill says, cracking our final tube of blue, “some day I hit it big. I not come halfway across the globe to live like a peasant.”

Bill leaves me at a bottle shop in Alice. He will do some electrical work for a friend, then head back to the Top End around midnight; best to have some beer on board, just in case.

I wander into Alice, drunk, covered in dirt, and loaded with gemstones,
like an outback digger ready to blow his hard-won claim. But I’ve walked onto the wrong set. Alice has none of the frontier character of the outposts I’ve passed through en route. The town’s old center has been torn down for a pedestrian mall. The once dusty streets are paved now with tourist gold; a casino, gift shops, and Kentucky Fried Chicken have been grafted on top like so much alien skin.

At a coffee shop I hear a middle-aged man with an American accent and go over to greet him. We exchange the obligatory “Where ya from?” and then he invites me for a hamburger at a nearby restaurant. “Almost like home,” he says, sinking his teeth into a thick slab of ground beef, hidden inside an enormous bun. Remarkably, it is.

The man works at Pine Gap, or the “space base,” as the satellite station is known in Alice. Not known, really, because everything about Pine Gap is a secret. Everyone assumes it’s a CIA base, but the U.S. won’t confirm or deny this. Everyone “knows” that the strange white domes in the desert are a listening station, taking in data from spy satellites—but, again, that’s unofficial. Christopher Boyce, the California communications technician who sold secrets to the Russians and whose story is told in
The Falcon and the Snowman
, said at his trial that his work for the U.S. involved “day-to-day deceptions in our transmissions to Australia.” He didn’t go into any detail, though he later named Pine Gap as a conduit for the false information. Again, no one knows.

And this employee, munching his hamburger and chatting amiably about baseball, isn’t about to make me any wiser. We talk about the Los Angeles Dodgers (“headed for the World Series next season, no fuckin’ doubt about it”), the difference between American and Australian beer (“Aussie stuff makes our beer taste like dishwater”), and the weather in Alice (“fan-fuckin’-tastic”). But neither he, nor another American I meet, utters a clue as to what it is they do at Pine Gap.

“My job’s so classified even my wife doesn’t know what I do,” one of them tells me, “and she used to work at the base herself.”

I ask how the two hundred or so Americans at the base cope with the isolation. He says that they join as many clubs as possible to give them some “neutral ground” to share with their Australian neighbors. Baseball clubs. Bridge clubs. Astronomy clubs. Make as many friends as you want, just don’t ever mention what it is you do for a living.

It is an apt commentary on Alice Springs. Like the space base employees,
Alice has traded its identity for a patch of neutral turf to unfurl for the world. Tourists can come from Anywhere, Western World, roll dice at the casino or pitch and putt at the golf course, and never feel too far from home.

Far from home is how I’m feeling, though, standing at a street corner with a rucksack, a heavy beer buzz, and two thousand miles of sweaty travel behind me. It is the kind of faraway feeling that has me squeezing into a phone booth with enough twenty-cent pieces in one pocket to counterbalance all the amethyst in the other. I’ve called Geraldine two or three times for a quick reconnaissance (“I’m in such-and-such … all in one piece … I miss you….”). But we haven’t had a proper conversation.

Nor do we now. I let the phone ring and ring, then call again to make sure I’ve dialed correctly. Still nothing. I stand there in the booth for a moment, feeling despondent, then phone my coordinates in to the newspaper office. After all, I secured my escape with the promise of writing some stories about the outback. Seems like a good time to “check in.”

The phone call goes something like this:

For once the office switchboard functions and another editor comes on. He wants to know if I can go to Uluru (formerly, Ayers Rock). Yes, I guess. Feature on tensions after the handover of the Rock to Aborigines? Sure, why not. Two thousand words? By Saturday? Well, okay. Click.

The telephone wire has reeled me into shore like so much played-out tuna.

Part of me is relieved to make contact again. Alice was my destination, as much as I had one. I’m not sure whether to go deeper into the scrub or begin making my way back to Sydney. Now, at least, I’ll have a few days to decompress before figuring out my next maneuver.

And a few days to travel on the company budget, slamming down a desert track in a souped-up roadhog with the radio and air-conditioner blasting at full tilt. (“Top unit, mate,” the Hertz man said, slapping his palm on the bonnet. “A real ripper.”) The road is a thin line of bitumen and my rented Ford is sucking it up, five miles at a time … sixty … sixty-five … seventy…. I am moving too fast and I know it. But after days of trudging by the road, waiting for someone else to carry me on, I am intoxicated by horsepower, by my own control.

A massive, flat-topped mountain tears my eye off the road and almost sends me flying into the scrub. There are skid marks all over the highway; obviously, I’m not the first to be fooled by this warm-up to the Rock, called Mount Conner. There is no mistaking the great red beast that struts onto the desert stage a short while later. William Gosse, the first white man to reach the Rock in 1873, called it “the biggest pebble in the world.” Rising 1,115 feet into the air, the Rock is remarkable because it is absolutely freestanding. The Olgas are only twelve miles away but too far to make the Rock part of any range. So there it sits, all alone on the desert plain, looking from a distance like an oversized loaf of bread: a huge, misshapen breadloaf, baked in the midday sun and left to petrify for a few million years.

Up close, the loaf becomes animate, even sensual. From one angle it is a Rubens nude, all thighs and buttocks turning pink in the desert heat. A bit further on it is a stone fortress, or a castle of sand. Then curves and breaks appear and Uluru becomes many rocks, locked in an awkward polygamous embrace.

It is this chameleon quality that has made Uluru one of the world’s most photographed lumps of stone. Like its weird, rounded neighbor, Mount Olga, the Rock is as ambiguous as eddies in a stream. Shift the light a bit, or move back a step, and the landscape takes on a whole new dimension.

Ernest Giles understood that, although it was Mount Olga that
obsessed him. William Gosse was the first to reach the Rock, but Giles was the first to see it, on an expedition to the center in 1872. He was so tantalized by the center that he staggered through the desert twice more to rediscover the spot. Giles’s first entry describing Mount Olga in 1872 is prosaic enough: “It is formed of several vast and solid, huge, and rounded blocks of bare red conglomerate stone,” he wrote, “being composed of untold masses of rounded stones of all kinds and sizes, mixed like plums in a pudding.”

His second go at Mount Olga is more architectural: “It displayed to our astonished eyes rounded minarets, giant cupolas, and monstrous domes.” On a return visit in 1874, he becomes painterly, almost psychedelic. The Olgas suggest “five or six enormous pink haystacks leaning for support against one another.” Loosening up now, he sees “the back of several monstrous kneeling pink elephants … or [a] Chinese gong viewed edgeways.”

Animal, vegetable, gong—whatever. Now for the Rock. “Mount Olga is the more wonderful and grotesque; Mount Ayers the more ancient and sublime.” Reminiscent, perhaps, of Shelley’s ode to Ozymandias. He writes without shame: “Round the decay of that colossal rock, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Sadly, a Romantic imagination didn’t count for much in those days. To the land-hungry colonists, Giles’s expeditions did little more than demarcate vast tracts of arid territory to be avoided. He found neither an inland sea nor land of any pastoral value. And the landmark for which his journeys are best remembered is a desert—the Gibson Desert, named for the member of his party who died while trying to cross it. Giles published his journals and saw out his days as an unsung clerk at an office in the Western Australian goldfields.

But it is to Giles that we owe the name of every second bump, claypan, and riverbed between Adelaide and the center. One mountain suggested Shakespeare to him and he named it Oberon. A salt plain evoked Spain and so became Lake Amadeus, after King Amadeo. And when he felt less inspired, or depressed by the hardships of desert travel, Giles reached for blunter labels: Mount Desolation, Thirsty Glen, Stinking Pit.

Yet this prolific name dropper was struck dumb by his first view of the Rock. He came within eighteen miles of it in 1872, made notes in his journal about an unnamed range southeast of the Olgas, and turned back to Adelaide.

So the Rock’s christening was left to William Gosse, a surveyor who journeyed to the center a year later with four white men, three Afghan camel drivers, and a “black boy” named Moses. If Giles carried all of English literature in his head, Gosse stuffed his brain with the name of every dignitary and benefactor in the young colony of South Australia. And compared to Giles, his journals read like notes from the least memorable of geography lessons:

Saturday, July 19
.

Camp in Spinifex Sandhills, Barometer 28–12 in, wind south-east. Continued same course, in direction of hills, over the same wretched country. The hill, as I approached, presented a most peculiar appearance, the upper portion being covered with holes or caves…. I have named this Ayers Rock, after Sir Henry Ayers
.

   That’s as lyrical as the story gets. Having named the Rock for the South Australian premier, he was of course obliged to climb it. After “scrambling two miles barefooted, over sharp rocks,” he “succeeded in reaching the summit, and had a view that repaid me for my trouble.” He busily set about naming the surrounding ranges—after the governor and the surveyor-general of South Australia—then scrambled down. One wonders what Ernest Giles would have splashed on the same canvas.

As it is, we are left with a Rock named Ayers, and with the curious Western compulsion to scale every mountain, no matter how arduous the ascent. “The climbing of Ayers Rock was one of his lifelong ambitions,” declares a metal plaque at the mountain’s base, in memory of a Newcastle man who died of a heart attack on the way up. There are a dozen memorials beside it to fallen or coronary-stricken climbers, which makes for a grim caveat emptor to all who begin the ascent.

To most whites the Rock remains what it was for Gosse: a kind of geological freak, an oversized pebble to be gawked at and conquered. But to Aborigines, it is Uluru, the place where totemic beasts met in a Dreamtime Battle of Hastings. Uluru is still etched with the lines of battle. Kuniya, the Carpet Snake, was victorious over another serpent named
Liru, and the Kuniya still lives inside the Rock. The Devil Dingo won control of the summit, while the Hare Wallaby retreated from the field, leaving creases down the mountain’s face. The Aborigines who dwell beneath the Rock—Uluru’s traditional “owners”—still honor these ancient deeds and derive their kinships from them. Uluru is “a kind of continental navel,” writes Thomas Keneally, “the point at which the Aboriginal demigods, the ancestor heroes, half human and half animal, cut the umbilical cord connecting earth to heaven.”