Tramp Royale (37 page)

She looked them over while the Javanese women looked her over and I looked them over. They stared at her silently, quite a crowd of them. Their faces showed nothing, but I wondered what they thought of her, with her white skin and her red hair and her purse full of rupiahs-and her height. Ticky is not big; she has a twenty-two-inch waist and I tower over her, but she was a foot taller than most of these women. Even the Javanese men seem small and smooth and childlike to us; they are not the big-boned hairy apes that we of the colder regions are. Very possibly our appearance alone is enough to make them think how pleasant it would be if we were dead; we offend just by existing.

But they simply stared, while Ticky bought enough batik to start a small tent & awning company. I got her back into the car as quickly as possible, as we were already short on packing space. The coolie hat would not, of course, pack at all and it was already a nuisance in the car. On the trip back we continued to encounter dragons, but they were getting a little tired by now and did not dance quite as much. Perhaps they were beginning to realize that the New Year hardly ever lives up to its promise.

When we got back to the ship we found that we had missed a chance to reach the west coast of Australia and with it the chance to cross the Australian continent. The sister ship of our own, the ship for Fremantle which we had been unable to book in Singapore, had been lying in the berth just forward of us; it had sailed an hour before our return. There had been a cancellation for one double room at the last minute and its purser had come aboard to see if any of us wanted it-so a search had been made for us and the space had been held for us right up to sailing.

I swore feelingly for a bit, as I had wanted very badly to make the trip overland across Australia . . . and, besides, the other ship might even have been clean. But it was impossible to do anything about it; we had literally missed the boat.

Ticky displayed her plunder and our Indonesian chief steward taught her several ways to wrap a sarong. It seems that each island has its own style of wrapping-none of them the way Dorothy Lamour wraps one-and you can tell what island a woman is from by the way she ties her sarong. He also showed her how to judge quality by sniffing the cloth. The rule seemed to be that the worse the odor the better the batik, though I may have been wrong about this.

We had planned for the next day several visits intended to be both educational and instructive. I wanted to take advantage of Mr. Lothar Wolff's invitation to visit the movie studios, this being a subject I knew enough about to form some opinions, and I wanted to see a Chinese school which was run by a relative of Mr. Ho. I had been told in Singapore that the school had more than four hundred pupils, grammar and high, but nevertheless met in the small home of the principal as the school buildings had been a casualty of the War. I had asked how this was possible and had been told that each pupil attended only one hour a day, just long enough to recite and be assigned homework for the next day. The Chinese thirst for knowledge in the face of difficulties I had met before; it seemed to me that such a school was well worth seeing. I planned too, to call on a newspaperman to whom Mr. Ho had given me a letter; working journalists can, if they wish, give the real low-down on a situation better than anyone.

The next morning there was a steady tropical drizzle that seemed likely to keep up all day. The ship's newspaper, posted on the bulletin board, reported the murders of an entire family of Dutch dairy farmers at Bogor; it appeared that we had passed in front of their house about two hours before it happened. Another news item reported the arrest of the Dutch personnel of one of the two major steamship companies; they were charged with sabotage, nature unspecified, and the government had moved in on the firm.

There had been one incident right inside the ship, one which had everyone nervous. One of our shipmates, a nurse from Sydney, was traveling alone, taking the round trip to Singapore as her vacation. She had a single cabin. She was awakened in the middle of the night to find one of the Indonesian soldier-police leaning over her bunk-the cabin doors locked but the locks were the old-fashioned sort which could be opened by almost any skeleton key.

She had been too frightened to scream. He said to her softly, "Oh? So you are alone?" then had gone back and locked the door from the inside. Most fortunately her cabin connected with the next one by a door which could be used to make the two rooms a suite; she jumped up and unbolted it and ran into the next cabin, where an Australian married couple were living-to her great good luck they had not bolted it from their side.

By the time she had made her alarm understood the soldier had disappeared. She had reported the matter to the Captain but there was nothing he could do about it other than to make a useless report of it ashore. A merchant ship tied to a dock is part of the soil of the country it is in, regardless of the flag it flies; the soldier-police-customs-guards were free to come and go in the ship as they pleased, and which they did, night and day. Could she identify the man?

No, she could not; he had simply been a helmeted face in the dark.

I read the depressing news bulletins and thought about the fright the nurse had received, then turned to the rail and stared out at the rain. Ticky came out of the dining saloon and joined me. "Delightful day!"

"Just ducky, for ducks. See here, are you anxious to do more shopping?"

"Not really. But I'd give a nice price for a small snow storm."

"So would I. And I've just remembered that I've seen a movie studio; I don't need to see another one."

"You certainly don't! If you never take another Hollywood job it will be soon enough for me."

"Maybe so, but I wish we were in Hollywood right this minute. To tell the truth, hon, I've had just about all I can stand of being polite to little brown men with Tommy guns. What do you say we stay aboard today?"

She looked relieved. "I was hoping you would say that. This place makes my flesh creep. But I wasn't going to let you go ashore alone; you would get into trouble without mama to look out for you."

I did not argue this amazing perversion of the facts; I simply said, "Swell! I'll skunk you at crib. Or maybe we can get up a game of liar dice."

I suppose that it was a foolish waste not to go ashore in a foreign port, having spent the money necessary to get there, but I did not regret it then or now. Nor do I intend to go back. When our ship stood out of the harbor early the next morning it made us happy.

The next two weeks through the Java Sea, the Flores Sea, the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea, around the northeast corner of Australia through Torres Strait (transited by the indomitable blackguard Captain Bligh in the longboat of the
Bounty
) and then south through the Great Barrier Reef, were not comfortable but were not entirely unpleasant. The weather was so hot that we slept naked without even a sheet, but no exertion was required of us-we had steadfastly refused to sign up for the deck sports contests organized by the untiringly athletic Australians. The hardest work of the day was to shower just before dinner, then dress and get out on deck before clean clothes were soaked through with sweat. We had Mollie and Bert with us as table mates, the Australian couple who had been with us in the
Ruys,
and they were unfailingly good company at all times. Just to grouse with them about the filthy condition of the ship made the conditions more tolerable.

Most of the other passengers were Australian sheepmen and their families, extremely wealthy but not showing it in any fashion. Several of them owned sheep stations, or "selections," larger than the fabulous King Ranch in Texas; a typical Australian sheep station will have an airfield of its own for the convenience of family and friends-but Mum will nevertheless be doing all the cooking for family and hired hands; the great wealth that has come to them in recent years has not changed their way of daily living. We found them easy as an old shoe and we were offered unlimited station hospitality, which most regrettably we were unable to accept.

The ship did not have the facilities for amusement that the
Ruys
had; most of our time was spent sitting around talking or in non-athletic games like liar dice. Liar dice was a game introduced by Bert; it can be played by any number of people as long as they are dishonest. It requires a set of five poker dice and an ability to lie convincingly, the idea being to pass the poker hand (of dice) from player to player, each player being permitted to roll once to improve the hand but being required to pass the hand along at a higher poker combination each time. The hand is not shown, that is to say the dice are always kept concealed until some player refuses to accept the declared valuation and challenges. If he challenges correctly, the other player puts a chip in the pot; if the hand turns out to be as high or higher than the declared value, the challenger contributes a chip. It is a freeze-out game; the last player surviving takes all.

This game brings out the very worst in people.

The three best at it were Bert, whose honest brown eyes would have served well a confidence man, Ticky, who is ordinarily painfully honest but who turned out to have a deviousness in her that I had never suspected, and Brian Salt, a young Englishman who not only had the natural advantage of a full set of blond whiskers to conceal his expressions but also was possessed of a telekinetic ability to roll five of a kind whenever he really needed them. Or perhaps he had the rare manual skill to roll dice without the usual element of chance-you can never tell with liar dice; it is an immoral game.

I am happy to say that we played only for chips, or I would have arrived in Brisbane in a barrel.

The thousand miles and more inside the Great Barrier Reef passed placidly and monotonously through water with hardly a ripple. As we came out of the reef we edged into a cyclone which had been tearing up roads and bridges all through Queensland, destruction so extensive that many of our sheep-raising shipmates were unable to go home and chose to go on to Sydney to wait out the weather. I concluded that we had had a narrow squeak; the Barrier Reef is no place to encounter a storm and there are plenty of wrecks inside the Reef to prove it. The Reef itself is not spectacular from inside, being usually just a vague line of white on a horizon that seems a little too near, plus numerous rocks and coral islands. The coral formations are said to be marvelously beautiful close up and there are many resorts along the reef to permit people to enjoy the phenomena, but from the shipping channel little can be seen but a line of white on one hand and the coast of Queensland, lush and green, on the other.

XI
Wildlife and Red Tape

While the population density of Java is more than a thousand to a square mile, the density in Australia is only three to the square mile. All other comparisons between the two countries are subordinate to this one. In almost every possible aspect Australia, the Australian culture, and the Australian people are as different from that which we had just left as is conceivable, but each of the differences (other than skin color) is strongly related to the fact that the Australians are a handful of people inhabiting a vast and almost empty continent.

Australia's people are almost entirely English in ancestry, but the culture is not English. Americans are more easily at home there than are Englishmen. But it is not our culture, either; it is simply one that we fit into without much friction. It is aggressively democratic in a fashion quite un-English, much more so than our own far west. The Australian working stiff isn't taking no nonsense off cops, or platoon sergeants, or bosses, or nobody, and if you want to make something of it, he is happy to drop what he is doing and oblige, with bare hands, boots, broken beer bottles, or take your choice. On the other hand he is quite willing to be civil to anyone who is civil to him and does not pretend to be better than he is. The attitude and manners are only an extension to the logical extreme of a common American
mores;
any American with enough sense to pound sand should be able to stay out of trouble and get along in Australia. They think as we do, only more so.

We arrived in Brisbane early in the morning and were able to go ashore with a minimum of red tape, since we were not disembarking here. The port doctor looked at our wrists, the immigration authorities looked at our passports, and we went ashore. Brisbane is located up the river of the same name; ships are able to tie up right inside the city, although in this case our berth was a mile or more from the downtown area. When we came out the customs gates we found ourselves in a middle-class residential area of small homes each on its own lot.

The climate and vegetation were strongly reminiscent of Southern California, but there was an even stronger impression of utter and homely familiarity, combined at the same time with strangeness, which I could not at first figure out. Then, as a street car came winding noisily down the street, I suddenly got it: this place had precisely the flavor and appearance of the American middle west of thirty to forty years ago.

I was to have that feeling many times in Australia, a feeling as if I had slipped slightly in time, like the
Connecticut Yankee
but in a lesser time span. I felt it most intensely in that neighborhood of modest homes in Brisbane but it never quite left me. Much of Australia feels the way America used to feel about a generation ago.

I know this sounds patronizing but it is meant simply as careful reporting. Australia is anything but a backward country, but it is rich in food rather than in manufactures, as of today. It is hardly surprising that its trams and much of its physical equipment look as if left over from the Mauve Decade, since such is often literally the case; the imported stuff is expensive and hard to replace.

The immediate effect on me was to make me feel at home for the first time in many months, most especially so after the depressing strangeness of Java. I liked Australia and I wanted it to like me.