Return to Paradise

by James A. Michener

  The continent is filled with other strange creatures: the beautiful lyre bird, whose feathered dance is magnificent; the wombat, whose pouch is set backwards so that dirt won’t get into it when he digs tunnels; the stately black swan of Western Australia; the brumbies (wild horses); the dingoes (wild dogs of handsome mien who howl but do not bark); crocodiles whose skins are valuable; and the great wild Cape buffalo whose ancestors were brought in as beasts of burden. They are fantastic creatures well suited to a violent land.

  Although the Outback is cruel, many rugged Australians have challenged it. In this, they have been helped by two remarkable agencies. The Bush Brothers are missionaries who wander back and forth across the waste lands. One had a parish of 300,000 square miles. Sometimes they hit a community where they baptize adults, marry them and then baptize their children, all in one afternoon. “They’re great Christians, but they’re not stuffy.”

  More spectacular are the Flying Doctors, also an outgrowth of missionary effort. Peter Stevenson, the manager of Durham Downs station, runs 15,000 cattle on his 3,600 square miles. His wife Lillian writes away each week for correspondence courses which she teaches her three children. On Sunday, there is a radio Sunday school.

  Stevenson is helped by fourteen men, one of whom suffers serious injuries when a horse falls on him. The nearest doctor is 450 miles away at Broken Hill.

  Stevenson goes into his living room where the pedal wireless stands. He pumps the pedals and finally gets shortwave contact with Broken Hill. The voice comes through faintly. “This is Frank Basden. The doctor is on a trip to Innamincka. I’ll tell him.”

  From Broken Hill, the message is relayed north to fifty different pedal wireless sets established on remote stations. The doctor has left Innamincka and is heading for Tibooburra, where he visits the hospital at intervals. Finally, word reaches him, and the two-engine De Haviland turns north to Durham Downs, hundreds of miles distant.

  Meanwhile, at the station, trucks have been lined about the field with their headlights ready. Mrs. Stevenson is tending the injured man, while a woman, two hundred miles away, says over the pedal, “Try putting on hot presses.”

  Shortly before dusk, the De Haviland appears from the south. All hands run out to the landing field and greet the young doctor as he climbs out. “Come in for some tea,” they say, and he agrees. “Now the patient.” They lead him to a half-caste—they are the best stock riders—who lies on a cot in a screened verandah. The doctor studies his injuries, and asks him to remove the clean white pajamas provided by Mrs. Stevenson.

  There has been no fracture, no rupture. Everyone is relieved. The half-caste gets a sedative, because the sprain is painful. Then the doctor has a big station feed. Mrs. Stevenson gets on the pedal and informs Broken Hill that the doctor will stay with them for the night. She also exchanges local gossip—her neighbors are 25, 60, 80 and 105 miles away—over the pedal circuits, and everyone settles down for a long chat.

  The doctor has brought six books from the lending library, a spool of blue silk, and other items ordered by the Stevensons on his last visit. He promises to bring glucose and a ham on his next.

  In the morning, he leaves promptly. Mr. Stevenson winks at his wife. It’s odd how the Flying Doctors always visit the Tibooburra hospital on race day. “It’s a beaut morning!” they cry as he takes off. They may not see him again for months. But he is ready, 450 miles away.

  The Outback colors all Australian life. Most of the best literature deals with settling the bush. Most of the paintings deal with it in one way or another. “In back of Bourke” refers to the great Never-Never. The constituency of Woop Woop is an imaginary place “where a cyclone could erase all human life and it wouldn’t be discovered until the next election.” But it is the fabled town of Snake Gully about which center the hilarious Outback yarns.

  Here live Dad and Dave, two characters who originally appeared in a book called On Our Selection (Homestead). Dad is the Australian countryman, hard-pressed, hoping for rain, ragging the Government. He speaks in a drawl that yields about five words to the minute. Dave is the universal yokel whose courtship of Mabel is the basis for most Australian dirty stories.

  Dave’s great delight is to attend a Two Up school. Sneaking far out behind a sand dune—for Two Up is a crime—Dave and his friends form a circle. Watchmen, called cockatoos, are posted on hilltops to warn against police. In the center of the ring, a man holds a small paddle called the kip. On it, he places two pennies. Breathless with excitement Dave says to the man next to him, “Two bob it comes heads.” The kip is adroitly twisted upward. The pennies flash in the air and then fall onto the sand. A head and a tail. They are tossed again. This time, they’re both heads, and Dave wins. Across the circle two other men exchange fifty pounds. The cockatoos sing out that all’s well. Australia’s greatest gambling game continues.

  Said a Frenchman, “Australia is most religious. Everyone stands about a circle. A man in the middle throws up his hand and falls upon his knees. Then everybody bows and half the crowd cries out, ‘Oh, Christ.’ ”

  But Mum, Dave’s mother, is not a humorous character. No Australian woman of the Outback is. She lives in a corrugated iron shack that has never seen paint. Although Dad and Dave buy tractors and headers, she often has no running water, no coal, no electricity, often no refrigeration, no indoor toilet, no new sink. In summer, she cooks over a wood stove when temperatures reach 120 degrees.

  She is the heroine of Australia, and before the pedal wireless, she lived a life of loneliness and peril. No Australian writer has begun to capture her saga. But Mabel has no such aspirations. As fast as possible, she hightails it into Sydney. It has been truly said of Australia, “It’s a heaven for men and dogs, hell for women and horses.”

  Women have an odd status in Australia. The great feminine reform that has swept Russia and the United States and which is now startling the British has not even started in Australia. Women are excluded from much of a man’s life. They may not drink beer with him, except in extra-charge lounges that make any woman look immoral They are not welcome in his clubs. They have the vote, but they don’t really exercise it. They dress exceptionally well—David Jones’ in Sydney is one of the largest buyers in the world of French fashions—but they are essentially of the nineteenth century.

  Perhaps that is why so many American young men married them during the war. They were fresh, pretty, athletic, intelligent and above all, willing for the man of the family to be the man. Australian men don’t want their women to change. Specifically, they don’t want them to become too much like American women. “Beautiful, lovely, smart, but too bossy.”

  Australia is a man’s country. It is not surprising, therefore, that art has had a bad time. Says a leading architect, “Up to 1935, a full-grown man who was interested in painting or music was obviously pathetic and to be spoken of in whispers.” On the pediment of the national shrine in Melbourne, men are shown tending sheep. In an off corner, a woman is tending the arts. Until recently, art has played almost no part in the over-all national life. (Some minor artists have made a fair living and done passable work.) As a result, domestic architecture is atrocious. “We never have a straight line if we can tack on some gingerbread.” In Queensland, because early settlers built their homes on stilts to protect against termites, people have done so ever since, when there were dozens of better ways to combat white ants. It has been said that one good architect in 1850 would have been more valuable to Australia than Broken Hill.

  But this has changed radically in recent years. In the painters Dobell and Drysdale, Australia has artists of absolutely top magnitude. Tabloid newspapers run competitions in which young people sing Italian operatic arias for a chance to win scholarships in music. In Henry Handel Richardson, Eleanor Dark and Xavier Herbert, the nation has fine novelists; and the architects are working day and night to make the nation more attractive. Clean, straight homes are replacing the rococo. People who buy land are being begged not to chop down the
trees. (In colonial times, the first thing a man did to start a home was to ringbark the trees. Today trees that would be worth $200 in any other country are ripped out before building starts.) In every form of art, there is awkward interest plus a knowledge of what is going on throughout the world.

  In poetry, the Jindyworobaks—it means roughly a campfire meeting place—feel that Australian poetry can have meaning only if it returns to aboriginal patterns, as in the following lovely passage using the native word for dove:

  I would be unseen as Gul-ar-dark-ark calling

  out of the sky and tresses of the leaves,

  now that the fig lets fall her single flowers

  like stars to pass beyond my trailing hand.

  Aboriginal words are also used effectively in naming sleeping cars: Allambi (quiet place), Tantini (sleeping), Weroni (quiet), and Dorai (to sleep).

  Australian belles lettres have recently taken a terrific shellacking. There suddenly appeared a fiery natural poet, Ern Malley, who became a pet of the intellectuals. Nobody understood his work, but journals carried extravagant praise of his tortured rhythms. Then tragically he died and newspapers lamented the loss of “this authentic Australian voice.” Then came the tempest, for Ern Malley had never lived at all, was a gigantic hoax. Two bored soldiers in New Guinea had made him up. His immortal verse? Clippings from the most horrible examples of tortured prose in army field manuals printed in short lines so as to resemble modern poetry.

  Artists have a hard time making a living in Australia. What the nation needs is things: houses, trains, telephones, roads. Hugh Ramsay, in the 1890’s, was the typical artist. Showing great promise as a painter, he scraped together a few pounds and studied in Paris. When he returned to Australia, he starved, and like bankrupt Rembrandt before him, painted his own portrait many times. Now they are tragic memorials, because you can trace in their gaunt lines sure proof that Ramsay was dying of tuberculosis. At 29, this immense talent was buried.

  Ironically, shortly after his death, his brother discovered and sold Kiwi shoe polish, so that the family became very rich. They gave Hugh’s pictures to various museums. But the artist was dead.

  When I remarked that the Sydney museum—crammed with chauvinistic stuff—must be one of the most gloomy public buildings extant, a Melbourne friend exploded. “Don’t say that. Australians love art. Come with me!” He took me to his own excellent museum, where a steady stream of visitors climbed the steps to the second floor. They went to the precious Van Eyck, one of the loveliest, and whispered to the guard. “Turn right,” he whispered back. They went in silence to stand reverently before the stuffed skin of Phar Lap, “the greatest horse that ever lived.” One man sniffed back his tears and said, “I still think American gamblers poisoned him in Kentucky.” He blew his nose and went back past the Van Eyck to the street.

  Australians are extremely world-minded. The average business leader has been to London, Paris, Rome, New York, San Francisco and Capetown plus other cities relating to his special interests. He makes the American businessman seem provincial.

  One of the most frequent questions asked any visitor is: “Are our accomplishments of world class?” Hotels are far below. Air service far above. Magazines way below in appearance, about equal in content. Newspapers about equal, except that there is no Manchester Guardian or St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Radio equals the standard with a fine national system plus commercial networks. Women’s styles equal the standard. Restaurants, with some exceptions, do not. Government is above the standard. Roads are way below. Health services above. Swimming beaches far above, except for intruding sharks. Labor unions also above, except for those admittedly controlled by Communists. Hospitality far, far above.

  Trains present a special problem. In colonial days, each governing unit thought it smart to have its own special gauge, so that today only rarely can a train from one state pass onto the tracks of another! Four different gauges are used from 2′ 8½″ in the north to 5′ 3″ in the south.

  A businessman who travels from Melbourne to Sydney leaves on the evening train at 6:30. But he can’t turn in early, for there are no sleepers on the 5′ 3″ part of the trip. At 10:30, he reaches the 4′ 8½″ section, and his sleeper is waiting. He grabs his bags—no porters—walks some two and a half blocks along a gusty platform, and climbs aboard. But even then he can’t get to bed, because everyone wants to use the washroom at the same time. The Australian dismisses this with a shrug. “Night air,” he grunts. “Very bracing!”

  A royal commission has estimated that to unify gauges would take eleven years, 850,000 tons of unavailable steel, 12,000,000 new ties, and adjustments to 38,000 pieces of stock. Although some rationalization is taking place, the Australian is prepared to keep his trains as they are. “After all,” he points out, “if you want speed, fly. Our planes are the best in the world.”

  If you sought two words to sum up Australia, they would be average and British. Australians love the average—not the mediocre—but the average wage, the average good bloke, the average happiness. There are few millionaires, almost no poverty. The cow cocky with a dozen head will argue with the squatter.

  You can understand this best at the great memorial shrine in Melbourne. It is an impressive Assyrian mound to the dead of World War I. In Australia, it looks self-conscious. But in the shadows, on a vacant lot near the shrine, stands a small statue which no Australian can view without deep emotion. It’s the “Man with the Donkey,” and as statues go, it isn’t much.

  But it symbolizes a nation. At Gallipoli, a sour-faced Aussie called Simpson—it later turned out that wasn’t even his name—was a bad case. Took orders from no one. When his mates were driven from the hills, he found himself an old donkey. He made more than a hundred trips right across No Man’s Land, dragging in the wounded who would otherwise have died. His superiors warned him that if he persisted, he would be killed. On the twenty-fourth day, he was.

  On Bougainville, I knew a murderous Aussie who took offense when some G.I.’s claimed that MacArthur was a better general than Blarney. This cobber offered to take on the crowd, one by one or Rafferty’s Rules. Four days later, I learned that General Blarney was coming to inspect the troops. I told my friend the good news. He looked at me and spat. “Bugger the old barstud,” he snarled. “Wattinell’s he doin’ up ’ere? Why don’t he stop in bed and swill his booze?” That cut the general back to size.

  There is one Australian, however, who is never content with the average: R. M. Ansett, whose story is hard to believe. He quit school after the eighth grade and finally wound up with a broken-down passenger car which operated as a bus between two country towns. At 26, he had so large a fleet that competitors sought government protection to keep him out of their areas.

  He turned to aviation and in a few years had a training school, an airline and a reputation as a very hot pilot. He almost went broke and hadn’t the money to pick up three much-needed Lockheeds when they reached the dock. Bankers wouldn’t help. “Young fellow’s overextended,” they said.

  He swung the deal himself and became one of Australia’s big air companies. But war knocked this in the head and he devoted his planes to evacuation and training work. One of his pilots flew 23 hours a day moving people from Darwin when the Japs threatened.

  In the meantime, he became fascinated by large, de-luxe motor buses, operated on a tour basis. He bought out an established company and immediately revolutionized a profitable business.

  Australians love to travel. Ansett takes them anywhere, from Melbourne streets right to the dead heart of the continent. When he couldn’t find decent hotels, he bought decrepit ones and made them over. When he couldn’t buy, he built new ones, beautiful jobs definitely of world class. He became one of the most influential hotel men in the nation and spurred others to meet his standards.

  Next he found that he was having trouble getting buses, so he decided to build his own. On chassis made in England, he attaches luxurious bodies with a hundred gadgets. They
are so good that he even sells them to his competitors.

  Then he re-established his air lines, so that today he runs many trips—say thirty luxurious days for $260, 5,000 miles—by a combination of private car, bus, airplane and cruising boat, with all stops at Ansett hotels.

  His most startling venture, however, has been the purchase of several tropical islands near the Barrier Reef. On one of them, he has erected a hotel that will compare with any in the world. Modern, set beside a coral reef, facing a prospect of unmatched beauty, it provides each guest with a private cabana done in the flossiest style. “At present exchange,” he said, “I can give American tourists a perfect tropical holiday with hot and cold bath, gourmet’s meals, and perfect service for $33 a week.”

  His companies now control millions of dollars, thousands of people. And the remarkable thing is that he did it all before he was 40! Bankers still predict that he’s got to go bust: “We’ve never operated like that before in Australia. Isn’t sound.” Ansett laughs.

  “Maybe you’ve never heard of Sam Insull,” I goaded.

  “Sure I’ve heard of Insull,” the thin, alert young man laughed. “I’m not making his mistakes. But assume that I did. Well, I can still drive a bus.”

  As for the fact that Australia is British, few Americans can understand this. Yet the same conditions and principles operate here as in New Zealand. Australia is economically, emotionally, spirtually and historically British.

  An Australian will apologize for driving a Ford. It’s unpatriotic to do so. “I’ve got to have one,” he mumbles. “Damned English cars don’t stand up on our roads. But even so, I prefer ’em.”

  In his will, a rich businessman says, “Any nurses, maids, or attendants coming into contact with my children shall be British or Australian born. My reason is that I am of Australian birth … and wish that my children shall never become imbued with foreign ideas.”