The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  Queensland is known for its conservative views and its gun-owning rednecks. Politically, it resembles a state in the American Deep South, and with these attitudes it even produces similar crops – tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, bananas, mangoes. The farther north you go in Queensland the tougher the views. And in Cairns, as in the South before Martin Luther King, there are somber gatherings of benighted-looking blacks – odd, soft, misshapen folks, with soft pretty eyes and long lashes. Even the fattest of them have skinny shanks and all of them look bowlegged. None looks alike and they shamble around in town clothes and the dusty slouch hats locally known as Cunnamulla cartwheels, the broad-brimmed diggers’ delight.

  From a distance Aboriginals were a menacing smudge at the roadside; but up close they seemed oblique and fearful or else very shy, and their clothes seldom seemed right for their odd shapes – they were either rail-thin or very fat, and many were barefoot. None of them ever came to my lectures. They were never at the literary lunches. They never entered the bookstores – not even the bookstores that featured Aboriginal literature. They never interviewed me. I saw them, but they never returned my gaze. It was as though they did not exist. Some were not locals at all, but rather Thursday Islanders from the Torres Strait.

  “More like your blokes,” a man in Cairns told me, meaning that these smooth-faced Thursday Islanders were like black Americans, and when I asked why he claimed this was so, he said, “Well, they’re further down the tree, aren’t they?”

  I had been traveling in white Australia. I wanted to see more of the country, if for no other reason than to look deeper into the lives of the Aboriginals. Now that I was done with this waffling I could go walkabout.

  4

  Walkabout in Woop Woop

  Ask white Australians what “walkabout” means and they will tell you it is an Aboriginal’s furious fugue, shambling off the job or out of the shelter of the humpy, and heading into the outback. It is a sudden departure, a bout of madness almost – after which the Aboriginal chases his tail. But is that so?

  Back in Sydney, I looked for an Aboriginal to ask. “Don’t call them Abos,” people cautioned me – not that I ever called them that – but privately they muttered a dozen or more different names for them, of which “boong,” “bing,” and “murky” were just a few. Yet those Australians who were bigoted were completely impartial: “a boong with boots on” was a Japanese and “a yank boong” was a black American.

  Searching for Aboriginals in Australia was a bit like bird-watching. Birds are everywhere, but only real birders see them clearly. Without warning, bird experts lean slightly forward, then stiffen and whisper, “Yellow-vented bulbul,” and you see nothing but fluttering leaves. In a similar spirit, making a point of it, developing a knack, I began to spot Aboriginals. They were so often camouflaged by gum trees or splotches of shadow. They were frequently motionless, usually in the shade, often in city parks, nearly always under trees. There were many.

  “So poor,” as the saying went, “they were licking paint off the fence.”

  Perhaps they were visible to everyone, but if so, Australians never pointed them out. I began to think that Aboriginals were only visible to those people who were looking for them. I kept track of my sightings, like a birder.

  Mark Twain was in Australia for more than a month in 1895 and regretted the fact that he never saw either a kangaroo or an Aboriginal.

  “We saw birds, but not a kangaroo,” Twain wrote, in one of the Australian chapters of his round-the-world tour, Following the Equator, “not an emu, not an ornithorhyncus, not a lecturer, not a native. Indeed, the land seemed quite destitute of game. But I have misused the word native. In Australia it is applied to Australian-born whites only. I should have said that we saw no Aboriginals – no ‘blackfellows.’ And to this day I have never seen one.”

  “I would walk thirty miles to see a stuffed one,” he sighs towards the end of his Australian tour.

  It seemed to me that the people and the problem were unavoidable. There was a tidy Aboriginal settlement in La Perouse, at Botany Bay, near Sydney’s airport. I walked through it one wet afternoon with a man from Sydney who had told me about it, and we looked at the hundred or so prefab houses – down Elaroo Avenue, up Adina, across to Goolagong Place. There were very few people outside and, seeing us, some Aboriginals who were gathered around their motorcycles mounted the machines and roared away, scowling into the wind.

  “They’re strange people,” Tony said. He was Italian – first-generation Australian. He was small, the sort of man Australians describe as being so short he had to stand on his head to get his foot into a stirrup. He didn’t hate Aboriginals, he said, but he pitied them – and he didn’t understand them. “They never fix anything. If they break something it stays broken. If they knock a tooth out they don’t bother to replace it.”

  Certainly there was a dark fatalism about many of the Aboriginals I met; sometimes it made them seem sad, at other times it made them seem indestructible.

  “There’s no trouble here,” Tony said. “It’s not like Redfern, where there are pitched battles with the police.” Many of the Aboriginals in the Sydney district of Redfern were notoriously scruffy. “Rough as guts,” said the white Australians – these could be last month’s immigrant Turks, or last year’s Sicilians, or the pompous people who snobbishly boasted about their convict ancestry – and they went on to generalize about Aboriginals on the basis of these rather derelict urban specimens. The Aboriginals aroused pity or disgust, they provoked feelings of violence or mockery. They were joked about, especially by school-children.

  Q. Why are the garbage bins in Redfern made of glass?

  A. So that the Abos can window-shop.

  Q. What do you call an Abo with a stick through his bum?

  A. A choc wedge (fudgicle).

  Q. What do you call an Abo in a limo?

  A. A thief.

  Everyone had an opinion and no one had a solution.

  I tried to reach Patrick White, Australia’s greatest living writer, who was a vocal advocate of Aboriginal rights. He had created a memorable portrait of an Aboriginal, Alf Dubbo, in his novel Riders in the Chariot – Alf’s walkabout, his vast vivid paintings, his confusion, his culture shock, his drinking, his martyrdom. What about the word “walkabout” as a sudden departure, I wanted to ask him; indeed, what about Walkabout, the classic film by Nicolas Roeg, which – with Mr White’s novels – had been my only previous experience of Australia? I was having trouble with the meaning of the word and wished to leave white Australia for the distant outback that it summed up in the name Woop Woop. I felt that Patrick White could help me. In his advancing and opinionated old age he had been pronouncing on most subjects.

  “I can’t meet Paul Theroux. I am too ill to meet celebrities,” the Nobel Prize winner said, from his home in a Sydney suburb.

  He died two days later – speaking of sudden departures – and the Australian obituarists went to work on him. Nothing made national traits more emphatic than a victory in an international sport or the death of a prominent citizen. In this case, the obituarists kicked Patrick White’s corpse from Maggoty Gully to Cootamundra. There was almost no evidence that any of these people had actually read the man’s novels. The vindictive philistines on Rupert Murdoch’s national paper The Australian put a portrait of Patrick White’s old enemy, A. D. Hope, on the front page instead of a picture of the man himself, and in any number of other papers White was depicted as a meddlesome old poofter.*

  Never mind his novels, what about the dreadful things he had said about Australia? True, he had been characteristically crisp.

  “After I returned to this country,” Mr White had written, “one of the most familiar sounds was the heavy plop-plop of Australian bullshit.”

  In a public lecture he had called Bob Hawke, the prime minister, “one of the greatest bull artists ever,” and said he had a hairstyle like a cockatoo. He had been cruel about the British Royal Family – “Queen Betty” and
“The Royal Goons.” He had ridiculed Dame Joan Sutherland.

  But on the day the Nobel laureate was cooling quietly in his coffin in Centennial Park, La Stupenda was being draped with paper streamers, the sort you fling at ships. They were strung out from all tiers of the Sydney Opera House, and her vast preponderant bulk could have been mistaken for an ocean liner as, after her final bow in Meyerbeer’s religious farrago, “The Huge Nuts” (as I heard it jocosely called), she said she was proud to be an Australian, sang “There’s No Place Like Home,” announced that she would never sing again, and flew back to her mansion in Switzerland. It was all walkabouts that week.

  Reminding myself of the details in the movie, I used Walkabout to guide me around the city, and beyond it to the outback, because that is precisely the direction of the movie’s plot.

  No one I met in Australia or elsewhere who had seen Walkabout had forgotten the film’s power or denied that they had been enchanted by it. After being released in 1969, it soon vanished, and had never been re-released. It was not available on video anywhere in the world. It was never shown on television. It languished, the victim of Hollywood in-fighting, in some obscure and spiteful limbo of litigation.

  Yet it still existed as a notable conversation piece in the “Did-you-ever-see?” oral tradition among movie buffs, and it endures that way, because it has a simple tellable story. Those who have seen Walkabout always speak of their favorite scenes – the opening, a salt-white tower block in Sydney with its swimming-pool smack against the harbor; the frenzied picnic in the outback where the father tries and fails to kill his two children; the father’s sudden suicide against a burning VW; the desperate kids faced with an immensity of desert; the girl (Jenny Agutter, aged sixteen) peeling off her school uniform; the shot of an ant made gigantic in front of tiny distant kids – and every other creature in the outback crossing their path – snakes, lizards, birds, beetles, kangaroos, koalas, camels; the discovery of water under the quondong tree, after which the ordeal turns into a procession into paradise, as they all swim naked together in the pools of sunlit oases; the close call with the rural ockers; the wrecked house and its curios; the lovestruck Aboriginal’s dance, ending in his suicide; the madman in the dainty apron in the ghost town howling at the children “Don’t touch that!” – and no rescue, no concrete ending, only a return to the tower block (it seems to be years later) on a note of regret.

  And that is the film, really, almost all except the spell it cast on me. In a seemingly modest way it encompassed the whole of Australia – nearly all its variations of landscape, its incomparable light, its drunks and desperadoes, all its bugs – from its most beautiful city to its hot red center. A work of art, and especially a film or a novel, with a strong sense of place is a summing-up, fixing a landscape once and for all in the imagination.

  The director, Nicolas Roeg, was an adventurer who relished the difficulties and improvisations of film-making on location. His was a triumph over mud, dust, rain, heat, impassable roads and deserters from the crew.

  “A few went apeshit in the night and started smashing things,” he had told me. “They couldn’t take the isolation. One of the toughest sparks [electricians] deserted. The grip freaked out. The cook went crazy one night, and crept off and sat on a chair near the airstrip. This was in the outback. He flew off without speaking. It was his fear of all that empty space.”

  The movie seemed to me to contain the essential Australia, even its bizarre and rowdy humor – most notably in the scene in an abandoned mining town, miles from any-where, where a loony man, hanging on, stands in a ruined building wearing an apron and ironing a pair of pants.

  “It doesn’t have Ayers Rock in it,” Roeg said. “Everyone expected that it would. I was determined to make a film in the Australian outback that didn’t show Ayers Rock. But it has everything else.”

  And it was the first feature film in which an Aboriginal played a starring role. David Gulpilil had had no training as an actor – had probably never seen a film in his life. He had been about fifteen years old, a dancer on his Aboriginal reserve somewhere in the north, in Arnhemland.

  I wanted to look at Aboriginal Australia. Going on the trail of Walkabout, in Woop Woop – the remote outback – meant going walkabout in the Aboriginal sense of the word – setting off in search of old visions and sacred sites.

  The Botanic Gardens in Sydney were easy enough to find, and it is possible to sit under the spreading tree where the little boy hurries towards Woolloomooloo Bay after school in one of the early sequences. But his home on the harbor, the tower block with the swimming-pool, was harder for me to locate. I knew it lay next to the water, and there is a glimpse of Sydney Harbor Bridge in the distance, but there are no other landmarks.

  Thinking the tower block might be at the far edge of the harbor, I took the Manly Ferry and on the way scrutinized the shoreline: south side going out, north side on the return. Any visitor to Sydney would be well advised to take the Manly Ferry soon after arriving in the city, just to get the lie of the land. It is a long inexpensive ferry ride that takes in the entire length of the harbor, from Sydney’s Circular Quay to distant Manly – an Edwardian township by the sea, with teashops and palm trees, its back turned to the harbor, and facing the breakers of a beautiful bay.

  Manly’s smug and tidy little houses have names like “Camelot” and “Woodside.” The town was named by an early settler who regarded the local Aborigines as fine specimens of manhood. But no Aborigines are found there today. Manlyness in the municipal sense is the epitome of the Australian good life: a snug bungalow of warm bricks by the sea, with a privet hedge and a palm.

  Here and there on Manly beach were delicate dying jellyfish, small and blue, and so thin, so bright, so finely shaped, fluttering on the sand, they reminded me of little hanks of Chinese silk. Beyond them, some boys were surfing the waves, which was appropriate, because the first surfing – body surfing – was done here at Manly around 1890 by an islander from the New Hebrides. (It was not until 1915 that surfboards were introduced to Australia, when the technique was demonstrated by the great Hawaiian surfer and Olympic swimmer, Duke Kahanamoku.)

  Manlyites who commuted from here to their jobs in the city had the best of both worlds, but the despairing father in Walkabout was obviously not one of them. I walked from one end of Manly to the other and could not locate the white tower block. Nor was it apparent on any of the bays on the harbor.

  “You’re looking for a needle in a haystack,” a woman on a bench said to me one day as I searched nearer the city, among the bobbing sailboats.

  And she explained. In the twenty years since the film was made Sydney had become extremely prosperous – there were plenty of stylish tower blocks now, there were lots of swimming-pools by the sea. It might have been torn down, she said. That is another aspect of a movie with a strong sense of place: it is an era in history, it is the past.

  I was told by Grahame Jennings, a Sydney movie producer who had helped Walkabout get made, that the tower block was out by Yarmouth Point, past Rushcutters Bay.

  My taxi-driver was Cambodian, six years in Australia, where he had arrived as a political refugee (“I would have gone anywhere except China”), but less than a year behind the wheel. He had struggled to pass his driving test. And his knowledge of Sydney’s streets was shaky. He agreed that he was somewhat handicapped as a cabbie. Australian passengers often berated him.

  “They say ‘You fucking stupid.’ But I smile at them. I don’t care. This is a nice country.”

  I roamed the harborside back streets, I detoured up Yarranabee Road and saw a familiar tower block – the one from the movie, with improvements; and beneath it, at the water’s edge, the greeny-blue swimming-pool. I congratulated myself on this little piece of detection, but I was also thinking how lucky all these people were who lived around Sydney Harbor. Because of the jigs and jags of its contours it is one of the most extensive pieces of real estate in the world.

  The taxi-driver who pl
ucked me from Rushcutters Bay was an economic refugee from Pakistan. We talked about Islam, about the similar stories in the Old Testament and the Koran – Joseph (Yusof), Jonah (Yunis).

  “This is the first time I have ever spoken of religion with one of my passengers,” he said – he was pleased.

  But this was merely ice-breaking on my part. I came to the point. Had he heard of Salman Rushdie?

  In his monotonously sing-song Pakistani accent, he said, “Salman Rushdie must be punished with death.”

  “I don’t agree with you,” I said. I leaned forward, nearer his hairy ears. “And no one in this nice law-abiding country agrees with you.”

  “Rushdie is a bad man – devil, I should say.”

  “And you know why people in Australia don’t agree with you?” He was still muttering, but what I said next shut him up. “Because they’re not fanatics.”

  The man’s bony hands tightened on the steering wheel, and when I got out of his taxi he gave me the evil eye.

  “Walkabout was quietly released,” Grahame Jennings told me. “I collected the reviews. Of the thirty-odd I saw from around the world, four were negative. Three of those negative reviews were written by Australian critics.”

  “Why Australians?” I asked.

  “Tall poppy syndrome.”

  Anyone who spends even a little time in the country hears this odd phrase, which means simply that people who succeed in Australia – or who distinguish themselves in any way – can expect to be savagely attacked by envious fellow Australians. It is also used as a verb: to be “tall-poppied” means to be cut down to size. That was the reason that Patrick White, in spite of his Nobel Prize – or perhaps because of it – was spoken of as an insignificant and nagging old gussie. This merciless national trait is regarded as the chief reason for gifted Australians emigrating to countries where they are – or so they say – properly appreciated.