The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “‘What right does this foreigner have to come and make a film about Australia?’ was one criticism.” “That’s ridiculous.”

  “‘Too many contradictions about the geography in the film,’ was another. ‘You can’t get to the outback by driving from Sydney–’”

  But you can. You might be the desperate alcoholic father leaving Yarranabee Road with his kids, intending to shoot them, or you might be a visitor to Sydney with a rental car, yearning for the open spaces. In either case, you head up George Street and keep driving, first following signs for Parramatta. In this sprawl of sunburned bungalows, each one with its own lizards and its own dead hedges and its own peculiar-smelling lantana (but this bush usually smelled of cats); the discount stores and bad hotels and bottle shops and used-car lots with tacky flapping banners, through Emu Plains and Blacktown – almost until the road rises into the first wooded slopes of the Blue Mountains – you begin to understand the disgusted snarl with which people in Sydney always utter the phrase the Western Suburbs.

  Ascending the escarpment that winds towards Katoomba, I was in a different landscape – mountainous, cool, green, with ravines and canyons, the gum trees having given over to pines. After these heights, it is a long slow descent to Lithgow, and not many miles farther on I felt I was truly in sunset country. Here, near Wallerawang on the Great Western Highway, less than two hours from Sydney, the proof of it: a big brown kangaroo, lying dead by the side of the road.

  Dubbo, where Alf the Aboriginal in Riders in the Chariot could have come from, is two or three hours more, and Bourke four or five. But out there in the west of New South Wales – Bourke in one direction, Wilcannia in the other – you will have achieved your simple goal of driving from Sydney to the outback in a long day.

  “Back o’ Bourke” is an Australian expression for any out-of-the-way place, and there are dozens more – perhaps more euphemisms in Australia for remoteness (outback, wayback, back o’ sunset, behind death o’day, Woop Woop, and so forth) than in any other language; but this is obviously because there is more remoteness in Australia than in most other countries – more empty space. These words are like little lonely cries of being lost, speaking of a solitude that is like exile on this huge island.

  Somewhere before Dubbo I was distracted by bewitching names on the map and found myself detouring to places like Wattle Flat or Oberon or Budgee Budgee (turn right at Mudgee), just to look at the small round hills, the frisky sheep and the gum trees. It is hard to imagine anywhere on earth so pretty and peaceful as these hamlets in Australia’s hinterland, green and cool in springtime September.

  I was halfway to Woop Woop. I continued the rest of the way, to Alice Springs in the dead red center of the island of Australia, leaving my collapsible kayak behind in Sydney with my butler, who still believed the two big bags contained clothes.

  I have usually yawned at travelers who describe landscapes from the window of a plane passing overhead, but the Australian landscape is well suited to such treatment, the bird’s-eye view.

  After the hills and square patches and pockets of farmland just west of Sydney, the greeny-yellow crops vanish, the rivers and lakes turn white and great gray ribbons appear and fade like enormous drips and spills of a red so red that they seem like bloodstains a hundred miles long. This is the beginning of the Simpson Desert, and there is so much of it that it takes hours to cross it flying in a jet at 500 miles an hour, and even at that you are only halfway over the country. With every passing minute the colors change from gray to mauve to pink and to a bleached bone-white that is chalky enough to pass for the Chinese color of death. No road, no water, no life, not even names on the map. I remembered Bruce Chatwin in 1983 stabbing his finger excitedly onto the map of the outback, thrilled by its emptiness, and saying to me, “Nothing there! Nothing there! Nothing there! I want to go there!”

  (Later that year, Chatwin sent me a postcard from the outback: All going well down-under … Have become interested in a very extreme situation – of Spanish monks in an Aboriginal mission, and am about to start sketching an outline. Anyway the crisis of “shall-never-write-another-line” sort is now over. As always, Bruce.)

  The Australian surface is stubbly, the gravelly texture a wilderness of boulders and wind. Then there is the so-called Dingo Fence, or vermin-proof fence, put up by the Wild Dog Destruction Board to keep the dingoes out. This structure is such a serious effort it is longer (they say) than the Great Wall of China, and much more secure, and more clearly visible from the moon.

  Farther on, below the flight path the land is scooped out and whitened. It is drizzling with sand – vast streaks of it. It becomes a rucked-up and striped horse blanket, a thousand square miles of wool. And soon after there are ridges of red hills and black patches of trees and the gouges of dry creeks, literally billabongs (dead creeks).

  And it occurs to me that this is not like another planet but like the bottom of the sea after an ocean has drained away. It is Oceania after someone has pulled the plug. And sure enough a few days later I was hiking in the cliffs of those same mountains, in the MacDonnell Range, and found small broken fossils in the red rock – “nautiloids,” the distant cousins of squid deposited here when this was an inland sea.

  Alice Springs is here in the middle of these red ranges, a jumbled little one-storey town, which is a railhead and a road junction and the confluence of three rivers – billabongs once again, because there is not a drop of water in them, only hot sand and tilted gum trees and Aborigines squatting in family groups in the splotches of shade. The Todd River is the widest, and the driest. Like many Australian rivers – few of them contained water – it looked like a bad road, but wider than others I had seen. It is said that if you’ve seen the Todd River flow three times you can consider yourself a local.

  I walked around town, noting the meeting-places of Aborigines and generally chatting.

  “I’m not a racist – I just hate Abos.”

  This neat and commonly uttered absurdity was put to me by a woman on my first day in Alice Springs. When I said that I had come to the town to meet some Aborigines she began seething. It is probably worth putting down what she said, because so many people I met said the same things, and only the tone of voice varied – ranging from sorrowful to apoplectic. Hers was outraged.

  “They drink – they’re always drunk and hanging around town. They’re slobs, they’re stupid. Their clothes are in rags – and they have money too! They’re always fighting, and sometimes they’re really dangerous.”

  I always smiled ruefully at this rant, because it was a true description of so many white Australians I had seen. I could never keep a straight face when I heard one of these leathery diggers turn sententious over the drinking habits of Aboriginals, for whom they themselves were the alcoholic role models.

  “There was a blackfella, worked for Kerry’s father as a stockman outside Adelaide. He went walkabout. He comes back after aideen months and says, ‘Where’s my job?’”

  The speaker, Trevor Something, was barefoot, twisting his greasy hat, a tattooed and ranting ringer, snatching at his three boisterous kids, and snarling at Kerry. He had a stubbie of Castlemaine Four X in his fist.

  I wanted to laugh, because he was another one, a white Australian imputing slovenly habits to Aboriginals and then behaving in precisely the same way, except the white Australian always did it wearing a hat – a Sewell’s Sweat-Free Felt for preference, and in certain seasons in a brown, ankle-length Driazabone raincoat.

  “We’re not racists any more,” Trevor said. “They’re the racists!”

  It was true that Trevor was a ringer, an ocker – a redneck – but I had heard the same twanging sentiments more prettily phrased from the mouths of accomplished and well-educated people in Sydney and Melbourne, and a well-bred woman from Perth had said to me, “All Abos are liars.”

  When I encouraged Trevor to reminisce, he said, “We used to come up here to Alice Springs and get into fights with the blackfellas. Mind y
ou, there are some first-class blackfellas. Some of the nicest blokes you’d ever want to meet.”

  “They’ve got some funny ideas, though,” his wife Kerry said. “We just come up from Ayers Rock. Blackfella we met said he wouldn’t set foot on it. It would be like climbing over a pregnant woman’s belly. He says to me,‘That rock is the pregnancy of the earth – swelling up, see.’ Yairs, but there were plenty of drunken blackfellas all around Ayers Rock, and they didn’t look too bothered.”

  “Maybe they had gone walkabout?” I asked.

  “Yeh. They disappear,” Trevor said. “They go mental.”

  The notion was that the Aboriginal lost his grip and in a severely manic mood whirled out of sight, endlessly perambulating the outback.

  The Aboriginals I met denied this, and they were unanimous in agreeing on the meaning of “walkabout.”

  “It means walking,” Roy Curtis said. Roy was an Aboriginal of the Walbiri people in Yuendumu, 400 dusty kilometers to the northwest.

  It is in that simple sense of walking that the word is used in, for example, Psalm 23 in Aboriginal pidgin: Big Name makum camp alonga grass, takum blackfella walkabout Zanga, no frightem no more hurry watta. (“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside the still waters.”)

  Big soft pot-belly, skinny legs, long eyelashes, whispering Roy Curtis was a part-time painter of dot pictures, waiting under gum trees in Alice Springs for compensation from the idiot who cracked up his car.

  “It means going home,” he said, and sounded as though he yearned to do that very thing.

  “The word has a specific meaning,” Darryl Pearce, director of the Institute of Aboriginal Development, told me. “It is when a person leaves to go to the outback on ceremonial business or family business, to visit sacred sites, to be with people of his own nation.”

  I had left my car and walked across a wide dry riverbed in Alice Springs to reach Darryl’s office. This river, a tributary of the Todd, was crammed with cast-off beer cans and wine jugs from Aboriginal drinkers, and here and there against its banks, under the gum trees, were little abandoned camps, tattered blankets and a litter of torn paper.

  Two Aboriginals were sitting impassively under a gum tree like people cast in bronze, a man and woman holding hands. I talked to the man, who was named Eric, about a scheme to dam one of the rivers. It was one of the explosive Aboriginal issues in Alice Springs at the moment; if the scheme went ahead it would mean that an Aboriginal sacred site would be under water.

  “How would you like it if Westminster Abbey were destroyed?” some people argued, fumbling about for an analogy.

  They were often greeted with a reply something like, “That site’s about as sacred as a fly’s arse.”

  There were sacred sites all over town. One was a fenced-off rock protruding, like a small fallen asteroid, from a parking lot of a pub that had borrowed its name: The Dog Rock Inn.

  What was more important – I asked these two people sitting on the bank of the dry river – saving the town from flooding, or preserving the sacred site?

  Eric said, “Preserving the site, I reckon.”

  Then I walked on to the Institute and heard a fierce version of this view from Darryl.

  As for the word “walkabout,” Darryl said he understood the concept well, because he himself was an Aboriginal. He could have fooled me. He was pasty-faced, freckled, somewhat stocky, with brownish hair cut short. I would have guessed Irish. He looked like any number of the drinkers and shopkeepers and taxi-drivers who denounced Aboriginals as boongs and layabouts.

  “The expression ‘part-Aboriginal’ is bullshit,” Darryl said. “Either you are an Aboriginal or you aren’t. It’s not a question of color but of identity. We are all colors.”

  His mother had been a full-blooded Aboriginal, one parent a Mudbara from the Barkly Tablelands, the other an Aranda from near Alice Springs.

  “People ask us why we’re angry,” he said.

  I had not asked him that. Angry was not a word I associated with any Aboriginals I had met, who had seemed to me more waif-like and bewildered.

  “We’ve been in Australia for forty thousand years, and what good has that done us? Before 1960 it was illegal for a white Australian to marry an Aborigine. We had no status. Until 1964 it was illegal for an Aboriginal to buy or drink alcohol – and anyone supplying an Aboriginal with alcohol could be jailed. We weren’t even citizens of Australia until 1967.”

  “If Aboriginals weren’t citizens, what were they?”

  “We were wards of the state. The state had total power over us,” Darryl said. “The 1967 Referendum gave us citizenship. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to ask us whether we wanted to be citizens? Yet no one asked us.”

  “Isn’t it better to be a full citizen than a ward of the state?”

  “We don’t want to be either one. Something was taken away from us in ‘67. It was the blackest day in our history.”

  Before I could ask him another question – and I wanted to, because I did not understand his reasons for seeing the citizenship issue as sinister – he went on, “We pay for things we don’t use. Lots of things are offered to us, but what good are they? We’re entitled to so many services that mean nothing to us. We don’t access the mainstream. It doesn’t matter whether roads and schools and hospitals are built for us if we don’t want them.”

  I said, “Then what do you want?”

  “Our aim is to control our own future,” he said. “We want to make our own decisions.”

  In a word, Aborigines had no power. Keeping the Aborigines powerless, he said, was the hidden reason behind many government policies.

  “Look at the Aboriginal languages – what do you know about them?”

  I said I had been to the Central Land Council in Alice Springs, because so many of the Aboriginal issues related to land questions. I had asked an official there about Aboriginal languages. How many were there in the Northern Territory – his own area?

  “Umpteen,” he said. Then, “Maybe two hundred and fifty?”

  In fact he had no idea. I subsequently learned that when the first colonists arrived in Australia two hundred years ago, there were 500 different Aboriginal languages in use. Only a fraction of these are still spoken.

  “Aboriginal languages are not taught in Australian schools,” Darryl said. “Why not? Because it would empower us. We would have to be taken seriously. It’s ridiculous. An Australian student can choose between French, German, Italian, Greek – even Japanese, for God’s sake! – but not any Aboriginal language.”

  This powerlessness he saw as the condition of many other native peoples – Maoris, Fijians, Inuits, black South Africans. But Maori was taught in New Zealand schools (and, ironically, the highest marks in it had been attained by white Kiwis); ethnic Fijians had recently taken control of their islands – with illegal force and the imposition of martial law; and as for black South Africans, Nelson Mandela was very shortly to be visiting Australia on his round-the-world tour after his release from a South African prison, and Darryl was going to meet him with an Aboriginal delegation.

  “Indigenous peoples all over the world get shit land that can’t be farmed,” Darryl was saying. “And then someone discovers minerals on it and the government wants it back.”

  “I’ve heard Australians say that in the course of time assimilation will occur and – ”

  “Assimilation is a hated word. We don’t want to assimilate. Why should we?”

  It seemed to me that Darryl himself – Irish-looking Darryl – was already assimilated. But I said, “I don’t know the arguments. But do you really want apartheid – separate development?”

  “This whole country is our land,” Darryl said. “White people need permits to go on our land. Now they’re saying that we’ll need special permits to come into town. And it’s all our land!”

  The lack of water in Alice Springs was no deterrent to the annual Henley-on-Todd Regatta, which is held in the dry riverbed. When
I heard that it was happening I headed for it, in a walkabout way – you couldn’t miss it: I followed the roar of the crowd and the plumes of dust rising like smoke from the gum trees.

  The events were in full swing: “Eights;” “Yachts” – bottomless boats carried by running men; “Oxford Tubs” – six people carrying a bathtub with someone sitting in it; “Sand Shoveling” – a relay race to fill a 44-gallon drum with sand; and men racing each other lugging sacks of wet sand.

  The announcer was yelling himself hoarse, but there was no cheering. The large audience – thousands, it seemed, looking like jackaroos and jillaroos and the sort of cattle rustlers known locally as paddy-dodgers and cattle duffers – stood in the blinding sunlight and dust, wearing sweaty T-shirts and wide-brimmed hats and rubber flipflops, drinking beer. Like many another outback event – the Birdsville Races, the rodeo in distant Laura – the Henley-on-Todd was merely another excuse to get plastered in the most good-humored way.

  “This place is a dump,” a photographer friend confided to me in Alice Springs. He was doing a photographic essay about Australia, and the stress was beginning to become apparent. “Birdsville is a madhouse. I hate the cities. I get depressed in the suburbs. I can’t win. To me, Australia is one big beer can.”

  By mid-afternoon the spectators at the Henley-on-Todd were so drunk they hardly seemed to notice who was competing and they paid no attention to the skinny biting flies that are a plague in the outback. These flies are pestilential but much too small to show up on photographs of Australia. If they did, prospective tourists might think twice about going.