The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  From where I stood, in the sand in the middle of the Todd River bed, I could see dark clusters of Aborigines under the distant trees. They were no more than insubstantial shadows. Two of these shadows were Michael and Mary, an Aboriginal husband and wife. I introduced myself to them that day and met them again a few days later in town. They told me that when they were in town they slept under the gum trees. Today they were standing mute and barefoot not far from the Dreamtime Art Gallery. They were covered in buzzing flies and looked quite lost. Michael had a rolled-up painting under his arm. They were both drunk but reasonably coherent. I looked at the painting.

  “It’s a kangaroo,” Michael said. “I painted it.”

  “Do you paint, Mary?”

  “I help with the dots,” she said.

  It was almost all dots, an amorphous pattern – perhaps a kangaroo but one that had been squashed by a truckie with a ’roo bar on the road to Tennant Creek. Michael said he would sell me the painting for $200.

  He turned towards the art gallery and said, “They know me in there.”

  He took me inside. The gallery owner was a white Australian woman in a bright dress, sorting Aboriginal drawings in a folder.

  Michael approached her. He said shyly, “You have my painting?”

  “I think we sold it,” she said.

  “It was there,” Michael said, pointing to a space on the gallery wall.

  His wife in her torn dress stood on the sidewalk, staring through the plate glass and somewhat unsteady on her feet, sort of teetering.

  The gallery was full of paintings in a similar pointilliste style, dots on canvas, some showing identifiable creatures – kangaroos, lizards, crocs – and other paintings depicted the collapsing geometry of Aboriginal designs, which occasionally had the look of those dotty eye charts that are used in tests for color-blindness.

  I said, “You understand these pictures?”

  Michael nodded. He blinked. The flies had followed him into the gallery. Some flies hurried around his head and others rested on his shoulders.

  I pointed to a painting showing two crescents and a blob. “What’s that?”

  “People sitting in a circle.”

  I pointed to one showing just a blob, dots of two colors. “An egg.”

  “That’s a goog?” I said, trying out an Australian word. Chooks laid googs.

  “Yah.”

  “What’s this?” I said, in front of a large canvas covered in squiggles.

  “Water. Rain.”

  “And that?” It looked like an irregular horizon of dots.

  “A snake.”

  Michael said he bought canvas and paint here in Alice Springs and took them back to his house in the reserve near Hermannsburg where he did the paintings. Many of the canvases in the gallery were priced in the thousands.

  “How much do you get for your paintings?”

  “Not much,” he said. “But enough.”

  I wanted to go to a reserve. I had been told that I would need an official permit to enter an Aboriginal reserve, but in the event I simply drove into Amungoona, a reserve outside Alice Springs, and asked the man in charge – Ray Satour, formerly a bulldozer-driver, now a headman – if I could look around.

  “Sure thing, mate,” he said. He said I should pay special attention to the tennis-courts, the swimming-pool, the gymnasium and all the new houses.

  Why had he said that so proudly? Amungoona Aboriginal Reserve was fenced and ramshackle and looked like a cross between a free-range chicken farm and a minimum security prison. It was very dirty. The tennis-courts were derelict, there was no water in the swimming-pool, the gym was a wreck and so were the houses. This was all something of a conundrum to me.

  I thought: Perhaps rather than build swimming-pools, the authorities should plant more gum trees for Aboriginals to sit under. There was surely something amiss when almost no white person spoke an Aboriginal language, and this in a country where a good two-thirds of the place names had Aboriginal roots. It made for alienation and hard feelings.

  My intention was to go to Palm Valley, which was part of Michael and Mary’s Aboriginal reserve, beyond Hermannsburg, about a four-hour drive west from Alice Springs.

  “I wouldn’t go if I were you,” the clerk at the car rental agency told me.

  A half a dozen times I was told this same thing, about other places. Some of my informants were Americans. There seemed to me many Americans in Alice Springs – they said they loved it there and wanted to stay as long as possible. They were the dependants, wives mostly, of the American soldiers who worked at the Joint Defense Facility at Pine Gap – a satellite tracking station or perhaps a nuclear missile base: it was secret, so no one knew.

  “Whites aren’t welcome in Palm Valley.”

  I could not determine whether these warnings were sound. I felt that much of it was just talk. After all, I had simply waltzed into the reserve at Amungoona – my being polite and respectful had worked. And I had made a point of saying that I was not an Australian.

  Being a foreigner helped me in so many ways. But it sometimes provoked Australians to give advice. I kept noticing how Australians – the most urbanized people in the world – were full of warnings, full of anxieties about the sun and the sea and the creepy-crawlies and what they call “bities,” snakes, spiders, box-jellyfish, crocodiles, kangaroos bursting through your windshield, wild pigs eating your lunch. It is apparently a fact that the Australian desert contains more species of reptile (250 – many of them venomous) than any other desert in the world, and it has been proven scientifically that the Australian inland taipan is the most poisonous snake on earth – its bite will kill you in seconds. But none of this ought seriously to deter anyone from confronting the outback on foot, or even on all fours.

  I was doing this very thing, perambulating on my hands and knees, at Glen Helen Gorge, 130 kilometers from Alice Springs, climbing the red cliffs, looking for the shy black-footed rock wallaby. Beneath this magnificent ridge of crumbly russet sandstone was the Finke River – one of the few rivers in the outback that actually had some water in it – and there was a large cold pool of black water at the gorge itself. I climbed to the top of the hill, a hot two-hour trek up a fissure in the cliffs, and wandered around and then lost my way – couldn’t find the return fissure, only a sheer drop to the valley floor. But just when it seemed to me that Walkabout was turning into Picnic at Hanging Rock I saw a way down and followed it.

  There were Australians swimming at the pool at Glen Helen. They were shrieking at their kids, they were munching sandwiches, they were drinking beer, they were sitting under trees with their white legs thrust out, and they had hiked up their T-shirts to cool their bellies. The T-shirts said, Freddy Krueger, and These Here are Strange Times and I Climbed Ayers Rock. It was all families. They were having a wonderful time.

  These white Australians were doing – perhaps a bit more boisterously – what Aboriginals had always done there. Because there was always water at Glen Helen it had been a meeting place for the Aranda people, who wandered throughout the central and western MacDonnell Ranges. This waterhole was known as Yapalpe, the home of the Giant Watersnake of Aboriginal myth, and over there where Estelle Digby was putting sunblock on her nose (and there was something about the gummy white sunblock that looked like Aboriginal body paint) the first shapeless Dreamtime beings emerged.

  The pool at Ormiston Gorge was even prettier – shadier, more secluded, with pure white tree trunks looking stark against the cracked and branched red rock. It looked as serene as Eden, even under the bluest sky. And here too kids were yelling and adults snoozing and a few old women with scowling emu-like faces, totally unfazed, were kicking through the loose gravel. They happened to be white, but they could easily have been Aboriginals. It just so happened that Aboriginals chose to gather at other waterholes – the large dark pool at Emily Gap, east of Alice Springs, was one. There I saw Aboriginals swimming or snoozing or dandling their babies, doing what they had done for te
ns of thousands of years, but now wearing shorts and T-shirts.

  It is perhaps over-simple to suggest that white Australians are Aboriginals in different T-shirts, but they are nearer to that than they would ever admit, even though they are rather trapped and blinded by the lower-middle-class English suburban culture they still cling to. After all, a bungalow is just another kind of humpy.

  About twenty or thirty miles northwest of Alice Springs on the road to Tanami, I stopped the car to look at a lizard squatting by the roadside, and heard the wind plucking at the thorn bushes and moaning in the telephone lines. And then I realized that some cattle behind a fence were looking up, with rapt expressions. It was the music I had on the cassette player, Kiri Te Kanawa, singing I know that my Redeemer liveth. I played it louder, and the cattle crowded closer, listening to that glorious voice.

  I got out of the car and walked up the road. It was a typical outback road, with dust and corrugations, hardly distinguishable from a riverbed except that it was straighter.

  A tin sign was nailed to a tree:

  This plaque in memory of Jonathan Smith

  who if he hadn’t jumped the fence in Darwin

  would have been able to do kaig. 13-8-88.

  I had no idea what it meant, but I was sure that Jonathan Smith had been an Aboriginal, and this was one of those gnomic expressions of Aboriginal grief.

  Going walkabout myself had led me here, looking hard at some of Australia’s empty places, and I realized it was not just a dramatically beautiful land but a unique one, full of wild creatures which were just as strange as its people – its skinks and snakes and adders and wasps. Some I saw a few feet off on a track of red dust, others squashed in the middle of the road to Tennant Creek, and many were the subject of horror stories.

  Some of the ugliest creatures were harmless, such as the thorny lizard, a horrible-looking but innocent spiny and scaly harlequin. Yet the eastern brown snake – second most toxic in the world – was an unprepossessing reptile. There was Spencer’s goanna, with its baggy yellow belly and black tongue, the gidgee skink, a spiny lizard with a fat prickly tail, and the shingle-back lizard that was so flat it looked as though it had been mashed by a car even when it was fully alive. The frilled-neck lizard looked like a lizard’s version of Bozo the Clown, and the desert death adder tricked its prey with its grub-like tail. And if you went down the road slowly you might see, watching by the roadside, the military dragon, a patient creature that squatted on the shoulder of the road, scoffing up insects that had been smashed by oncoming cars. As for the carpet python, which hunted at night, it had heat receptors in its head and a whip-like response that allowed it to catch a bat blindfolded.

  Aborigines had learned to live with these creatures. Some they caught and skinned and ate raw, others they chucked into a fire and left them until they were black and bursting like sausages, and then they stuffed them into their mouths. They were not frightened of snakes. They believed they were related to snakes – to kangaroos, to the whole earth; and they did not see the point where the earth began and their lives ended. It was all part of a continuum, a natural process, in which with the blessings of the gods they whirled around with the rocks and stones and trees.

  They coped well with the inland taipan and the death adder. It was the white Australian who presented problems.

  “Very little has been done to give [Aborigines] a sense of security in the country we invaded,” Patrick White wrote on Australia Day in 1988, the year of the Australian Bicentenary. “In spite of a lot of last-minute face-saving claptrap from the Prime Minister – one of the greatest bull artists ever – Aborigines may not be shot and poisoned as they were in the early days of colonization, but there are subtler ways of disposing of them. They can be induced to take their own lives by the psychic torments they undergo in police cells. It’s usually put down to drugs or drink – and some of them are on these – they learned it from the whites. In a town like Walgett, prestigious white characters can be seen reeling about the streets on important occasions. In my boyhood when I used to go there to my uncle’s sheep station on the Barwon, and he drove me in his buggy past the shanties on the outskirts of town, he said, ‘There’s nothing you can do for these people.’”

  The statistics for Aboriginal suicides in jail are terrifying, because a jail cell is an Aboriginal’s idea of hell on earth, and waking up sober after being hauled in for drunkenness – or for possession (being found with alcohol within a hundred yards of a bottle shop) – the realization of being penned in is such a nightmare to a nomadic soul that many hang themselves in these hot little holding cells before guilt or innocence can ever be determined. Yet drinking was not the main reason for younger Aboriginals entering the criminal justice system. They were usually arrested for petty nuisances – for breaches of “good order,” or for property offenses, burglary and vehicle theft. But seldom for traffic violations or shoplifting, offenses in Australia which were monopolized by whites. In the normal way, Aborigines did not kill themselves, though you would have expected them to be hanging themselves left and right from gum trees on the basis of the jail suicides – somehow deducing that they had a propensity for it. But no, it was the result of their having been taken captive.

  There was no question that Aboriginal drunks had become a problem. But were they more of a problem than white drunks? With the possible exception of Finns in winter, I had never in my life seen so many people, black and white, dedicated to intoxication as I did in Australia. And it was not socially disapproved of, not any more than football rambunctiousness, nor obscene rugby songs, nor the peculiarly insulting manner that in Australia was taken to be a form of mateyness – “mate-ship” being the concept that helped Australia operate. In Australia generally a non-drinker was regarded as a much greater irritation, not to say a threat, than a shouting puking drunk.

  So why in a drinking and drunken land were Aboriginals blamed for being drunks? Perhaps it was their cheerlessness. All the Australian boredom and desperation was evident in Aboriginal drinking. They didn’t sing when they were drunk, they didn’t dance or become matey. They simply hurled up their supper and fell down and became comatose in a pool of their vomit. There was a furious single mindedness about it all, and it was not unusual to see Aborigines under the gum trees getting through a four-liter box of Coolabah Moselle in a morning, and when money was short it was time for a “white lady” – methylated spirits and milk. All I had was anecdotal evidence, but statistics were available, and they were surprising. An authoritative report (by Pamela Lyon, for Tangentyere Council, June 1990) on alcohol abuse by all racial groups in Alice Springs stated that Aborigines drank less than whites but were more affected by it, suffered more physical disability and died earlier as a result.

  I was told that David Gulpilil might have a thing or two to say on the subject of Aboriginal drinking. As the first Aboriginal movie star, he might also have views on fame and fortune. I had wondered about his life since that movie. He had apparently been given rather a raw deal by the makers of the movie Crocodile Dundee, his only other movie effort.

  “He’s gone walkabout,” a woman in Sydney told me. That word again. Then I was told that he had been sighted in Darwin, and in Alice Springs. Everyone knew him.

  “I saw him the other day walking down the street,” someone else told me in Sydney. “A tall skinny bloke. Couldn’t mistake him. He’s such a beautiful dancer.”

  I was given a telephone number for him – the phone was in a reserve up north. I called but there was no answer. I tried a number of times, and then I was told that it was a public call-box, somewhere on the reserve in Arnhemland, another Woop Woop place. I had seen call-boxes like that – dusty, vandalized stalls, scratched with dates and nick-names and obscenities, baking in the sun, the phone almost too hot to hold. I never spoke to him – no one picked up the phone. Is it any wonder? But I kept imagining the phone ringing on a wooden post in Woop Woop, under a cloudless sky – ringing, ringing – and a tall black
figure in the distance, not deaf, just not listening to the thing, and walking away.

  5

  North of the Never-Never

  I picked up my collapsible kayak, flew north almost two thousand miles to Cairns, kept going by road to Port Douglas, caught a boat to Cooktown – which is spitting distance from New Guinea-set up the kayak and started paddling the thing offshore, near the mouth of the Endeavour River, fishing for mackerel with a handline – bliss. But for nearly everyone in Australia this area is regarded as Crocodilopolis.

  The wind was strong, a gusty twenty-five knots from the southeast, the sort that whips your hat off and stretches a flag straight out and lifts a sea into a short stiff chop with breaking waves. Everyone had warned me of sharks and man-eating crocodiles; no one had mentioned this wind. That seemed to me the proof that they didn’t know what they were talking about.

  All the way from Port Douglas to Cooktown the hover-craft, Quicksilver, had been buffeted. Port Douglas was a newly Nipponized resort, with golf courses and spruced-up shopping malls. Japanese tourists in silly hats flew here from Tokyo to buy designer merchandise and to hit golf balls. They said it was cheaper to do this than to join a Japanese golf club. I was happy to board the big boat and take off, but I was surprised by the way the white foam was blown alongside by the wicked wind.

  “It’s always like this,” one of the deckhands had said. “It’s the worst place for wind. Going up to Cooktown, eh? It’s bloody awful there.”

  The headlands and bays that Captain Cook named were a record of the emotions in his progress up the coast – Weary Bay, Cape Tribulation, Hope Island. The hills are arid and scrubby, the headlands rocky and scoured smooth by the wind. This same wind had blown Cook’s ship, the Endeavour, onto a reef just here in June 1770, and then he had limped to shore to patch the boat. He slid up the river, watched from the bushes by the Aboriginals of the area who called the river Wahalumbaal, which meant “You will be missed,” a word of farewell, for these Aboriginals paddled canoes out of this place.