The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  “People up in Cooktown get crazed by the wind,” the deckhand said. “One bloke couldn’t take any more of it. Started screaming about the wind – raving, actually. Went mental. Climbed onto the roof of his house and started firing his shotgun into the wind.”

  Windy conditions are the very worst for a paddler – much worse and more wearying than high waves or a big swell. But I was so impatient to be paddling, so glad to have a chance to do so, that I spent most of the day fighting the wind. I caught no fish.

  “You’re bloody lucky you didn’t get a fish!” a man shouted at me when I got to shore. “Some of the mackerel here are a hundred and eighty pounds. They’d sink your little boat in short order. Some of those buggers are as big as me!”

  He was very fat and had (as they said in Cooktown) a face like a gumnut. His T-shirt advertised a brand of beer, and he was smacking his lips. He clearly loved telling me how I had almost lost my life to a giant fish.

  “I was more worried about the wind,” I said.

  “Never stops,” he said.

  I was about to ask him how many calm days they had at this time of year, and whether I should wait for the wind to slacken. I knew there had to be flat days, but if I asked him this he would have laughed and mocked me for being a bloody yank and a tourist.

  There were mangroves at the bank just below the town, and there I left my boat, tying it bow and stern so that the tide wouldn’t take it away. I had spent my first night at a hotel in Cooktown, but I had wanted to make camp, so I pitched my tent on the far bank of the Endeavour River, which was just bush and dunes, and wild pigs. And as for the river, everyone said – of course – that it: was full of crocs. A fourteen-footer had just been trapped and sent to the croc farm at Cairns where it was called George and photographed by tourists.

  Cooktown, the classic dust-and-bungalow settlement of the Never-Never, or distant outback, was one main street and not much more. It resembled an African town out of the 1950s, complete with barefoot beaten-looking blacks, and those who were not downright lugubrious were roaring drunk in one or other of the town’s many pubs. It was pay-day for the Aboriginals – they got money every week, like a welfare check, but it was also compensation for the use, by miners and exploiters, of their reservation or their traditional lands and stomping grounds. Just up the coast the Japanese had started a silica industry, turning the Aborigines’ sand into Japanese sake bottles, and paying for the privilege.

  “It’s drip-feed money,” a drinker at the Sovereign Hotel bar told me. He was a local electrician, self-sufficient and somewhat a loner, like many men I had met in outback towns. “It’s intravenous money. They just sit on their arses and they get it.”

  Cooktown was full of wild white men – fuller than any Woop Woop I had seen in the whole of Australia – and they were not just dirty and drunken, but sunburned and pugnacious as well, with filthy bare feet and torn T-shirts. Locally they were known as “ferals,” they too were on the dole, and they poked their sunburned noses and whiskery faces into mine and warned me of the Aborigines in Cooktown, as they warned me of the sharks and the crocs and the poisonous box-jellies.

  “There seem to be a lot of bars in this town.”

  “Not that many, mate,” the man said. “But every place has three bars inside it. There’s the animal bar, the regular bar and the snobs bar.”

  “What’s this?” We were at the Sovereign.

  “This is the regular bar. Around back – that’s the animal bar. The ringers, the ockers, the ferals and the Abos.”

  He didn’t like the ferals much but he resented the Aborigines even more.

  “They’re paid for being black. They get drip-feed money and two-percent loans. They borrow money and buy fancy trucks and jeeps. And maybe they forget about the loan. If they default they still keep the vehicle, and their organization comes in and pays it off.”

  He was drinking slowly and eyeing two Thursday Islanders playing billiards – they were bald beefy Melanesians with the look of boxers, and they were watched by some rather gaunt and drunken Aborigines who were waiting for their turn at the table.

  “They’re demoralized,” he said. “Why work if people are paying you not to?”

  He asked me where I was living in town.

  “I’m camping on the other side of the river.”

  “Got a gun, mate?”

  “No.”

  “You should have one. Everyone who camps out here needs a gun of some kind.” He thought a moment, “There’s pigs, crocs, all kinds of things.”

  If he had been like the others – warning me away from the bush, trying to frighten me with tales of giant fish and mammoth crocs, I would have dismissed this. But he was a different sort – encouraging me but suggesting that l go armed. He recommended a gun dealer on the main street, Charlotte Street.

  Padlocked and fortified against thieves with iron grids – standard protection for a rural gun dealer – the shop was dusty and temporary-looking, with most of its merchandise in cardboard cartons. The man inside was middle-aged – a tough man with graying hair and a sensitive and watchful gaze.

  “New in town?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said and told him where I was camping and that I was planning to kayak up the coast.

  “I have just the rifle for you,” he said.

  It was no more than the black plastic stock of a rifle, but nesting inside (you pulled off the shoulder-rest to find them) were the barrel, the action and a magazine. It was easy to assemble – screw on the barrel, clap the action on underneath and secure it with a wingnut, shove in the eight-shot magazine. Not only waterproof and foolproof, it was also semi-automatic: one pull of the bolt and then you could fire as fast as you pulled the trigger.

  “It floats, too.”

  “But do I really need it?”

  “Ever see a feral pig? The wild ones? They have big tusks and they root around the beach looking for oysters.” He smiled at me. “I’ve seen 200-pound pigs. Terrible tempers. What would you do if one of those came at you?”

  I bought the rifle and thought: 200-pound pigs, 180-pound mackerel, 14-foot seagoing crocodiles, man-eating sharks. Some camping trip this was going to be.

  “I’d like to try out this rifle,” I said.

  “No problem.”

  We drove just outside Cooktown to a little quarry that served as a rifle range. On the way he told me about himself – his name was Fred Hardy and he had come to Cooktown because he liked the open spaces. He was not a native-born Australian. He said he made a point of never using the word “mate.” He ran several businesses and, as he was able to repair most machines and do electrical work, his skills were in demand. Cooktown was a place where motors were always breaking down and spare parts were in short supply. Any welder or mechanic could find work here. It was the frontier in many senses, a new start for some people, an escape for others, a fortune for a few of those prospecting for gold in the outback.

  A hundred and twenty years ago, there had been a real gold rush, and Cooktown had swelled almost to the size of a city, with 30,000 people – half of them Chinese prospectors wearing pigtails. This being Australia, a Chinatown sprang up by the river. The town was famous for having 163 brothels and 94 bars. Goldseekers traipsed over Aboriginal land to get to the Palmer River goldfields and to look for areas with more gold; there were pitched battles between prospectors and Aborigines (who were suspected of being cannibals). Not far away was the settlement of Battle Camp, the name a reminder of a well-known slaughter of Aborigines by white goldminers. Some great fortunes were made from gold in just a few years. Then the gold ran out and Cooktown reverted to being a little spot with a tiny population, at the far edge of the Never-Never.

  “But it’s funny,” Fred Hardy said. “A fellow came in the other day and asked me to fix his cradle. Know what a cradle is? For sluicing gold. And his was huge. He’s got a bloody great gold operation going on somewhere in the bush – no one knows where – and for all I know he’s got bags of gol
d, too. I fixed his cradle. I didn’t ask any questions. You learn not to ask where the gold prospecting is going on. Showing too much interest could be fatal.”

  We riddled a half a dozen targets with bullets, and when the sun went down and the light was too poor to shoot by, we packed up our guns.

  Fred said, “Want to see a bit of the outback tomorrow? I have a few errands to run. You could come with me.”

  I said I would, and the following morning I left my camp and paddled across the river to town once again to meet him. He said that because of the rutted road we would have to weigh down his pick-up truck to keep it from jouncing. We loaded it with fourteen sacks of cement – about half a ton – and set off.

  In the yellowy bush of thin gum trees and pale dry soil just ten minutes out of Cooktown Fred peered at the wheeltracks in the straight flat road ahead and said, “It’s all like this – for hundreds of miles. This is what we’ll see all day. This is Australian bush.”

  Then why not turn back? I wanted to say. I hated the narrow track and the way the pick-up slewed in the ruts, and whenever another truck passed us we were over-whelmed with choking dust. There was no shade here – the trees were too thin, the leaves too small. Sunlight slashed through the woods.

  Several hours passed. He asked what I did for a living.

  In a rare burst of candor, I told him I was a writer. Normally, this admission makes the listener self-conscious; it strikes people mute or else makes them talkative – non-stop questions, unedited monologues about unforgettable trips or colorful characters. When they don’t know you are a writer most people tell much better stories and converse more naturally. Fred was unfazed. He had read three of my books, and we talked about them, but he was as eager to tell me about Australia as I was to listen – and this was a guided tour of one of its strangest corners.

  We went through Battle Camp and at the Normandy River we had lunch – he had brought a picnic basket – and had target practice: shooting the bolts off an old boiler that had become mired at the river’s edge. He was a crack shot with his .38. He described a trip he dreamed of taking down this river in a croc-proof boat of his own design. He had actually seen crocodiles here; he was not afraid of them, though he said that on any trip down this river you would have to take them into account. He told the sort of sensible, rational croc stories that I liked to hear. His point was always: Be careful of crocodiles but don’t let them dominate your life.

  “I have a greater problem with sharks,” I said.

  “I don’t know much about them around here,” Fred said.

  “Peter Benchley told me to be careful of sharks on the Queensland coast,” I said. “When the author of jaws tells you something about sharks, you listen and take heed.”

  “I suppose it’s a bit like you telling someone about railway trains,” Fred said.

  More miles into this dry yellow bush took us to Laura, a small cattle station deep in the Never-Never, which contained one pub and several houses, and rumors of Aboriginal cave paintings. It was too small to be a town, too small for a village – “station” was about right. It was a proper Australian word, meaning a farm with the status of village; it was larger than a “property” or a “run.” Laura was very tiny in the silence and the heat. There was no breeze; the only movement was that of the flies.

  Lakeland Downs was farther on. Each station had a gas pump and a pub. Soon we were on the main road north to Cape York. Max, a peanut farmer whose crop had failed, was directing traffic on a construction site on this empty and dead straight Cape York road. He was terribly sunburned. He said, “There’s a car about every fifteen minutes.”

  Fred gave him a cold beer.

  A kangaroo, pumping its legs, dashed m front of us, moving fast through the trees on a gravelly back road. I marveled at its speed. Fred just shrugged and said there were millions of kangaroos around. Paradoxically, kangaroos are listed under the United States Endangered Species Act, as a threatened species, but in Australia they are not protected. In fact, the Australian government encourages the slaughter of kangaroos, and in 1991 sanctioned the killing of 4,208,800 kangaroos to be made into dog collars, stuffed toys, sports shoes and whips. In the shops selling tourist curios in most of Australia you can buy a little leather purse made from a kangaroo’s scrotum. Down the road, we saw magpie geese. We saw vultures. Towards the end of the afternoon we saw big pale turkey-like birds pecking in a field, browsing among the corn shucks.

  “Bustards. Endangered species,” Fred said. “They taste fantastic.”

  “You eat them?”

  “‘Don’t shoot them!’ people say.” Fred derided the thought and mimicked again in a nasal nagging voice. “‘They mate for life! The poor mate will grieve!’” And then he smiled. “But I have the perfect answer to that.”

  “You do?” I said, because he was staring knowingly at me.

  “Yup. Shoot ’ em both.”

  At sundown, after this long dusty day of sunshine and buzzing flies, we found a bar back in Cooktown.

  “Can I tell you something – and promise you won’t take it the wrong way?”

  It was an awkward moment – I could see that Fred Hardy was a man not given to exchanging confidences – but I said, “No problem.”

  ‘You’re the only person in the world that I envy,” he said.

  I then realized how little I had told him of my life.

  “See those ringers?” he said, abruptly changing the subject. He indicated a table near the back of the bar.

  There were four people sitting together – two heavily tattooed men who were bearded and barefoot, wearing dirty shorts and torn T-shirts, and two Aboriginal women. The women, in faded shapeless dresses, had scraggly hair and big soft faces; they sat with cans of beer resting on their skinny thighs.

  “Gin jockeys,” Fred said.

  And he explained it was the local expression for a white Australian who lived with an Aboriginal woman, a so-called “gin.” All Aborigines got a weekly check and so the relationship, which might very well have been a fulfillment of true love, was regarded by most white onlookers as easy money for the man in question.

  Think I’ll go round back and bang a boong, Fred once heard a drunken man say in a bush bar. In the outback Aboriginal women were often abducted for sexual purposes. “Gin burglar” was another term. They looked for what they called “creamies” or “halfies,” preferably a lubra, a girl.

  “Tell you something, Paul,” Fred said. “Some of those Abo women are all right. They buy guns from me and shoot pigeons – they like four-tens or twelve-gauge shot-guns. They’re good shots. The men couldn’t care less. The women shoot, the men drink.”

  There were six or seven drunken Aborigines at other tables, swigging beer together, and they looked miserable – red-eyed, skinny, and very dirty, with matted hair. It was almost frightening the way an Aboriginal’s bones were so obvious, and some of them looked like skeletons wrapped in crushed velvet, like zombies, or like their own horrific water monsters, the bunyips.

  “They own a lot of guns,” Fred said, “but they don’t shoot each other. Matter of fact, they have a low crime rate. They drink and fight – the ones that come to town. I can’t blame them. I’ve been in a fair few fights myself. By the way, I’ve been meaning to write a letter to someone in Hollywood. Why is it that fights in movies last so long? You see these blokes punching each other back and forth for ten or fifteen minutes.” He thought a moment and then said, “Ever been in a fight?”

  “A fist-fight? No,” I said.

  “I’ve been in lots of them and they were all settled with the first punch. Bang, right in the face, splat, and it’s all over. Never more than one punch. I’m not saying I’m tough or anything – all the fights I’ve seen have been settled with one punch. What are you grinning at?”

  “At the idea of you punching one of these ringers in the face.”

  “I did that very thing not very long ago – a man made a remark about my wife. I gave it to him in the
face and that was that. See, I have a problem. I suffer from a medical condition known as a very short fuse.”

  “Would you say these Aborigines are pugnacious?”

  “One or two. But there are plenty of quiet respectable blacks in Hopevale, on the reserve, across the river,” Fred Hardy said. “Listen, did you know you’re camped on their land?”

  I had not immediately realized how much land these Hopevale Aborigines possessed, but it turned out that everything north of the Endeavour River was theirs, a large notch of North Queensland. This included the little place I had hacked out for myself, which I called Windy Camp. After what Fred had told me about my trespassing I had an urge to go farther up the coast – it had been my original intention in any case – so that I would be smack in the middle of the Aboriginal reserve.

  It took me three trips to town to carry enough food and drinking water for another week on the coast. The heavily loaded kayak sat well in the ocean, stabilized by all the food jammed fore and aft in waterproof bags. The weather that day was similar to that on all the other days I had been on the coast – sunny, temperature in the low eighties, southeasterly winds twenty-something, gusting to thirty. Beyond the harbor mouth there were waves breaking all over the sea, a short breaking chop, as the wind whistled around Anchor Point, Cooktown’s headland.

  The stiff wind annoyed me, but I was determined to stay afloat, and on this coastal run I could go ashore at any time and make camp, write something, listen to the radio. Or eat a meal – I vastly preferred my own cooking to the Australian tucker I had found in hotels and restaurants – flyswisher stew, fried barramundi, snorkers and googs, roast chook; bewitching names for uneatable meals. I had never in my life felt more portable or self-sufficient. I had shelter, food, water, medical supplies and a seaworthy boat. No one was waiting for me at either end.

  There were three- to four-foot breaking waves all over the ocean, as far as I could see. I set off for the headland I could see, Saunders Point – a high hill and at the foot of it foaming surf. It was clumsy paddling in a beam wind, the waves breaking against the side and twisting the boat. But it was well known that both crocodiles and sharks avoided such suds – it was much too exhausting for them – so at least I didn’t have to worry about being eaten.