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.
We hailed the street car and rode it downtown. Downtown Brisbane looked a bit more modern but not much. It was a pleasantly busy large city, not too dirty and not too bustling. We walked its streets for a while, tried a few of its shops and bookstores, and enjoyed the sound of English being spoken. But one sign, frequently repeated, began to bother us; it read: "CASKET IS CLOSING!"
About the tenth time we spotted this Ticky turned to me and said quietly, "I think we've blundered into an undertaker's parlor, dear."
"I'm going to find out what it is all about." I turned into a newsstand, attempted to buy a copy of Walkabout, an Australian travel magazine, then asked the proprietor, "What is this 'Casket' business?"
"It's closing. If you are interested, you had better hurry."
"Yes, but what is it?"
"Why, it's closing, this afternoon. If you want to get in on it, you had better move fast."
"Why is it closing? Who is dead?"
This might have gone on indefinitely if he had not suddenly gathered the idea that I really did not know what "Casket" was. Rather pityingly he explained that it was a lottery. The Australians are gamblers; they will bet you that it does, or that it does not, on anything. Lotteries and horse races are among the favorite legal forms of gambling, but legal or illegal the Australian will gamble. Perhaps the favorite illegal form is "Two Up," a game as simple as matching pennies-in fact, it is matching pennies, except that sometimes thousands of pounds will change hands simply because a pair of coins show heads at the same time.
A friend of ours in Sydney told me later that the basic interests of Australian men were "-beer, the races, women, and work, in that order." Nothing that we saw in Australia caused m
e to doubt the accuracy of his statement.
The subordinate position of women in this hierarchy of interests caused a good deal of friction during the War between Australian men, such few of them as were home, and American troops. The Australian male does not believe in spoiling his women; an attitude of, "Shut up and get hoppin' before I bash you one," is not uncommon. The American G.I. showed up with more money and an attitude that undercut the position of the local swains; the G.I. spent money on taxis-worse yet, he helped the Australian lass in and out of same. He bought flowers for her, candy, dinners, and shows, and in general exposed her to the Cinderella pattern which is common courtship among us, but not in Australia. He behaved like the city-slicker villain in a melodrama and naturally he was hated for it (by the Australian men) just as such villains always are.
The emotional attitudes generated by this unfair competition have not entirely worn off.
We had only a few hours to spend in Brisbane, so we hired a taxi for sightseeing. Instead of asking for the usual sights I asked the driver if there was a place nearby where we could see koalas. There was, at Lone Pine Sanctuary just outside town, so we went there. This trip alone made the journey to Australia worth while; these little animated teddy bears are Australia's finest jewel. I still regret being forced to miss the trip across Australia, but, had our trip to the koala bear park been our only glimpse of Australia, I would have considered the money well spent.
Lone Pine Sanctuary is a small, private zoo located in a grove of eucalyptus trees-I did not spot the "Lone Pine" but it surely must have been lonely. They have there several dozen teddy bears and the place is small enough and informal enough that visitors are permitted to handle them. This does a koala no harm; he loves it. A koala will cuddle with anyone who wants to cuddle; left to themselves, they cuddle with each other. In the wild state-and there are many, many of them still wild in the eucalyptus forests on the east and south coasts-koalas have no natural enemies and have never learned to be afraid. Consequently if you pick one up, he assumes that you are a friend, hugs you and snuggles up. The Marquis de Sade could hardly resist such a response.
Ticky had her picture taken holding Little Mo, who was just two, barely adult. The picture shows Little Mo clinging to Ticky and wearing a bemused, just-woke-up, good-baby expression characteristic of all koalas and shows Ticky with a wide grin of utter delight which is equally characteristic of humans on coming into first contact with these most endearing of beasties.
The picture taken, the keeper took Little Mo from Ticky's arms, set her on the ground and said, "All right, go home." Little Mo started ambling slowly for the open door of the large cage she shared with her brothers and sisters. She came to a concrete curbstone six inches high; instead of climbing it she sat down and started to nibble at it. The keeper said, "Cut that out!" spatted her bottom and boosted her over the curb. She ambled on back to her family.
The keeper said disgustedly to us, "That happens every day. She knows that curb isn't good to eat-but each time she tries, just in case."
Koalas are not long on brains, but they don't need to be; their only food is the foliage of the eucalyptus trees they live in. What they do have is innate genius for being pets. If their diet was not so restricted (they cannot live without certain varieties of eucalyptus leaves), they would be much in demand the world over.
As it is, they may not be shipped out of Australia; each is a ward of the government, whether wild or tame-I mean "caged or loose," as there is no such thing as a "wild" koala; it is a contradiction in terms. Some have been shipped out in the past, to zoos that made special arrangements for their food, but the results were not entirely satisfactory and the Australian government is reluctant to grant such favors.
Even inside Australia the government keeps a close eye on them. They may be owned, yes, if the owner is well equipped to care for them. But let us suppose that the Lone Pine Sanctuary in Queensland were to sell one to the Sydney Zoo in New South Wales. The Zoo would pay the Sanctuary as a private transaction-but the state government of New South Wales would also pay the state government of Queensland an indemnity fixed by law to compensate Queensland for the loss it suffers in having one of its koala citizens emigrate to a neighboring state.
This stringent policy concerning the teddy bears does not indicate that the Australian government is exceptionally sentimental about animals. Bounties are paid for killing kangaroos, as a pair of kangaroos will eat as much grass as three merino sheep, and any means at all is used to kill rabbits, even biological warfare in the form of a virus disease-the offspring of a dozen rabbits introduced in 1788 grew to an estimated half a billion and almost bankrupted the country. But in the case of the koala, an animal utterly useless unless killed for its pelt, the Australian government recognized that the world would be a much poorer place in the warm intangible values if it were allowed to die. I, as a representative non-Australian, wish to thank them.
Although koalas are almost as scarce as unicorns in the rest of the world, it hardly seems necessary to describe them since they are so frequently pictured. Everybody knows that they look like toy teddy bears; indeed, the toy teddy bear is modeled after the koala, not after the carnivorous bear. I will mention only that which does not show up too well in pictures. Man is rightly proud of his opposable thumb; that and his brain set him apart from the other animals. The koala was short-changed on brains, but he has two opposable thumbs on each hand. His clown face always has a gentle, muddled look, like a person with one too many glasses of sherry. His bare and oversize nose I had always assumed to be a sort of horny beak (I was misled by the platypus, I think); instead it is soft and rubbery and the little fellow will gladly rub noses with you like an Eskimo or a Maori; it seems to be a gesture of the overflowing affection they feel for everyone.
When unhappy they weep with a cry like that of a human baby, pawing at their eyes as if to wipe tears away. This happened once while we were at Lone Pine; it is unendurable, one must console the little fellow at once-by cuddling it, of course.
There were other Australian creatures at the Lone Pine Sanctuary; we managed to find time to give them a cursory glance despite Little Mo and her relatives. Here we learned for the first time that, with Australian parrots, Polly does not want a cracker, but "Cocky wants a cup of tea." We discovered, too, that besides Old Man Kangaroo and the wallaby there are many, many other varieties of kangaroos, including a tree-climbing one. This struck me as being as inappropriate as overshoes for fish, but you can never tell about Australian fauna; they all seem determined to be as exotic as possible. Consider the bower bird, that builds a hideaway for seduction purposes only, like a roué's flat, and presents his light of love with "jewels." Or the platypus, which can't make up its mind, if any, whether to be bird, beast, or fish. Or . . . never mind; they are all on the lunatic fringe of the animal kingdom.
We met an emu there. He stared at us with big blue eyes and said, "Glug!" from way down inside, like a molasses jug on a cold morning. I said, "Glug!" back at him and he said, "Glug! Glug!" Whereupon I gave up, we were getting nowhere.
Looking around the sanctuary that day was a smooth black man with a crop of fuzzy hair. He was barefoot and wearing a skirt, with a white shirt above. I got our taxi driver aside and asked him, "Is he one of the natives?"
The driver looked at him. "Yes, he's an abo [aborigine] all right. Must have brought him here on account of the Queen's visit." I accepted the explanation and looked him over with interest, trying not to be seen staring. Later that day, in a local paper, we saw a picture of the man-he was a Protestant missionary from the Fiji Islands, present in Brisbane as an honored guest speaker at a church conference. This illustrates a fact I had not realized; the Australian aborigine is so scarce that many of the people on the thickly populated east coast have never seen one. Most of them are in the Northern Territory, where they are either cowboys or are living in their native state. No one-literally no one-who has seen both a Fiji Islander and an Australian aborigine coul
d mistake one for the other. Had I known, the bushy, kinky hair of the reverend gentleman would have told me the difference; the Australian aborigine has wavy hair quite unlike the dense, almost felted structure which tops a Fiji Islander.
We never did see an "abo." We probably would not have seen one even had we been able to cross the continent, as there are less than 50,000 of them left, almost all of whom live far from the centers of white population. There were estimated to be some 300,000 of them when the white settlers arrived; these two figures alone make it clear that the past history of the contact between the two races is not one of which the white race may be proud. On the other hand, we need not lie awake nights over it, since the entire record of the human race of all hues is one of bloody conflict; the end result has been that nine million people now live in peace and civilized comfort in an area formerly occupied by one-thirtieth that number of stone-age savages more primitive than any other people on this planet.
Indeed, so primitive were the aborigines that most Australians in the past (and many of them today) seemed to have believed that they were subhuman. There is no scientific basis for this belief even though their almost animal-like customs give it a superficial plausibility. The brain weight of this race falls within the normal spread in brain weight of the European racial groups and the accomplishments of individuals among them tend to show that their native condition is environmental rather than hereditary.
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