The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

I met another beachcomber the next day. He said hello, then thought better of it and ducked into the woods. This was another mile up the beach. I later learned that he had a sailboat moored out of sight, in a tidal creek. These people, beachcombers and Aborigines, were miles apart, but even so they seemed to think they were too close. Tony certainly believed that. I saw Tony over the next few days, and I had the idea that he coveted some of my equipment for his voyage around Cape York.

  I encouraged Tony to visit my camp. I wanted to know more about his beachcombing. I began to see a kind of luxury in his life that would be very hard to buy – it was not just comfort but privacy. I was interested in his periods of activity, his plans, his days of total idleness; his total self-absorption, and in his pleasures.

  There was something deeply respectable and orderly about him. There was his satchel, containing his day’s essentials – shoes, hat, food, water. He always wore a shirt and trousers, though buttons were missing from his shirt, and his trousers were torn in half a dozen places. He never went anywhere without his dog, which was a tiny mutt with a hoarse and timid bark.

  I asked him one day whether the dog had a name.

  “No,” Tony said. “Well, he’s so small” – as though his size did not justify having a name. He went on, “Sometimes I say ‘chop chop’ meaning hurry up. Maybe that could be his name.”

  The dog loved him, needed to be picked up and hugged. I was especially interested in the idea of Tony’s trying to survive in this difficult place, and needing to find food for a dog, but when I mentioned it to him he simply shrugged.

  Tony’s routines and opinions, and the way he ran his life, suggested respectability. He could not bear the proximity of other people, and I knew from his reactions to my questions that he had a real aversion to anyone discovering where or how he lived. He was entirely self-sufficient, contemptuous and selfish. The fact that he was a beach-comber did not mean that he was an exile. He had a place in the world, which was wherever he happened to be. Beachcombing, though, was his preoccupation: he needed bottles for his beer-brewing, floats and cast-up line for his raft, driftwood for his stove. The rest of the time he went after fish, oysters and crabs. He was proud of his soup-making and his bread-making. He was often very busy, involved in the process of survival – and he managed this without spending any money at all – but he also had immense leisure.

  He said to me one morning, “I drank eight or twelve bottles last night, listening to the radio. I slept late. Had a bit of a hangover. Then I put out my crab pot. Now I’m going for a walk.”

  This was his whole life on the hot windy coast of Cape Bedford, and it amazed me, because it combined the most rigid discipline with an utter disregard for time.

  And sometimes I seriously wondered: Am l like him?

  The night before I left my camp, I asked him whether he had been back to London.

  “Oh, yes, I went back once. About ten years ago. Didn’t have no money, so I got a job in the post office, the central one, in West One.” He smiled. “It was all Indians and Jamaicans. Blacks from the West Indies on my right, Hindus from India on my left. I couldn’t understand a word they said, and they were always jabbering. I said to myself, ‘What’s this country coming to?’”

  He was in his early fifties, small and rather slender, scorched by the sun that always burned in a cloudless sky.

  “That’s why I couldn’t see any point in staying.”

  I was tying my boat to the mangrove roots so that the tide wouldn’t take it away.

  “And I’m not even a racist,” he said, in a complaining way.

  I aimed to set off for the Aboriginal mission, and I wanted to lighten my load, so I gave him some food I would not need and my spare water jug that held two and a half gallons.

  ‘‘I’ll use it on my raft,” he said, “when I go north.”

  “I wish you luck.”

  “I’m not bothered,” he said, and then in a casual way he summed up what I took to be his guidimg philosophy, “What I find is that you can do almost anything or go almost anywhere, if you’re not in a hurry.”

  After so many warnings about crocodiles, I was determined to see one. I had read the pamphlet, Living with Wildlife: Crocodiles, published by the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service, and that seemed to contain sensible advice: “Avoid murky water … Don’t trail arms and legs from boats … Pitch camp at least 50m from the water’s edge [that was inconvenient; I took the risk] … Don’t leave food scraps around your camp … Be careful during the breeding season, October through April … Never feed crocodiles … Never approach them: crocodiles have been known to charge boats and canoes … Be particularly wary of any large crocodile floating high in the water or with its tail arched out of the water. This is often a sign that the animal is likely to be aggressive …”

  If I had a nightmare it was based on that last warning, with the image of a large bobbing croc, his tail erect and arched, coming at me like a monster scorpion.

  I paddled up Leprosy Creek to where it became narrow, and almost a mile from the creek’s mouth, I saw two small crocs at rest at the edge of a sandbank, their bug eyes and their snouts just above the surface. Maybe their mother would get crazed and attack me!

  I looked around, but of course I saw nothing.

  “You will never see the croc that eats you,” a man in Cook town told me. This sounded true. “You’ll never hear it. You’ll never know what hit you. You see nothing. They are simply not there. And in the next second you’ll be in its mouth. They have this incredible capacity for sudden movement. And of course, they don’t eat you. They twist you underwater and hold you there until you drown. Then they hide your corpse in the mud, and when your flesh is rotten and falling off your bones, they’ll devour it.”

  I paddled back to the creek mouth and in the Cape Bedford direction to the point. At least now, if someone asked me if I had seen any crocs, I could say casually, A couple.

  The Hopevale Mission was some miles inland. I started walking through the pig and lizard tracks, found a path, and after a while came to a road. I was picked up by a man in a fairly new four-wheel-drive vehicle – many of the Aborigines in Hopevale seemed to own them.

  He was a fat cheery man named Paul Gibson. “G’day “where you headed?” He was coffee-colored, frizzy-haired, and wore a trimmed beard. He was extroverted in a way that I had not seen in any of the Aborigines I had met. I asked him his business.

  “I’m a disc jockey.”

  “Is there a radio station here on the reserve?”

  “Everyone listens to it.”

  “What’s the most popular music on your show?”

  “Country music. Aborigines love country music.”

  “Willie Nelson? Dolly Parton? Loretta Lynn? That kind of thing?”

  “Too right, mate.”

  So we discussed country music until we came to the settlement.

  No one was quite sure just how many Aborigines lived here. Some people said six hundred, other people said seven hundred. They lived in houses that ranged from gunyahs or glorified humpys to large well-maintained brick-fronted bungalows, with planted trees and vegetable gardens and fences. The last thing I ever thought I would see in an Aboriginal reserve was a fence. But these were Lutheran Aborigines.

  It was a flat place of wide streets and low dwellings, all sun-struck and dry, with the look of a camp that was evolving into a village. It had that company town sense of order: the stores on the main street hadn’t sprung up – they had been imposed, according to a designer’s scheme. The store, the post office, the community center, the gas station – someone had put them here. Some Aborigines were working on the roads, and some were leaning on their shovels. But the work was slowly being accomplished, and there was no question but that the curbs and sewers and roads were superior to those in Cooktown.

  I lurked at the community center. I had now been among Aborigines long enough to see that they carried silence with them. They didn’t shout, they chatte
d softly when they chatted at all, they moved keeping themselves very straight, loping quietly along on big flat feet. When I said hello they didn’t speak to me but only nodded.

  On the bulletin board a large notice read Pig Dogs For Sale See Steve Lee. Pig dogs were ferocious hounds that went after pigs in the bush.

  Another notice read, Could Owners of the Horses which is wondering about the Community please collect them by next week and put them in your paddocks. If you cannot do that, well your horse will be trucked away and sold.

  One of the notices concerned the Aborigines’ weekly payments: Those people who has missed out on wages will not be paid by cheque until next week’s wages. “Wages” was a euphemism for their share of the money paid to the community by the mining company, and the implication of the notice was that some of them were too lazy to pick it up on the appointed day.

  Anyone wanting their dogs to be shot, another notice ran, please see Goombra Jacko.

  Half a dozen surnames dominated in the community – Flinders, Gibson, Deemal, Woibo, Cobus and Bowen. The place was full of Bowens, but I could not find Ernie or Gladys.

  “Probably off fishun,” Lynton Woibo said.

  This was in the store that was run by the mission, and it was more thoroughly stocked than any food store in Cooktown. The only thing missing was alcohol – the reserve was dry. That was the primary reason for any of the Aboriginals going to Cooktown: to buy liquor. I was surprised that the Aboriginal store had such expensive and fancy food – duck-liver pâté, Sara Lee Black Forest Gateau, frozen quiche lorraine, Birdseye Chinese Vegetables, and Papa Giuseppi’s Microwave Pizza. And, in a reserve that had tillable soil and irrigation, canned vegetables. I kept trying to imagine the spear-throwing, dugong-drowning Aborigines I had seen in the bush, coming back from an unsuccessful expedition and flinging a Papa Giuseppi’s Pizza into the microwave.

  Microwaves were on sale in the dry-goods store, along with toasters, video machines, radios and axes. The butcher shop was well stocked and also expensive (rib fillet at twelve dollars a pound).

  This settlement, as Ernie Bowen had told me, was started after the war, when the Aborigines had been taken back from Rockhampton. The history was recorded on a plaque at Pioneer Hall, but it was a short history – three lines, about its beginnings in 1949 and In Memory of Our Pioneers, with a column of the familiar surnames.

  There was no single color, or face, or racial type in the community. They were all colors, from the deepest, purplest black to plain pinkish white.

  Barry Liddie was a great deal paler and more civilized than most of the white Australians I had met elsewhere, yet he had several Aboriginal grandparents. His house at the edge of the settlement was low and rambling and rather littered, with a clutter of dead and rusted machinery all over the garden and the porch. He was sitting on his veranda. He had locked himself out of the house. Instead of looking for his wife, he simply sat down. She’d be home later to let him in.

  He was stocky, with reddish hair, and handsome in a beefy way. He came from the hot far northern town of Coen in the deepest outback. After marrying Lynette Deemal, who had been born right here at the mission, they had come here to live. He fished. She worked at the council offices. Besides this house they owned a boat and two large four-wheel-drive vehicles.

  To kill time waiting on the veranda for his wife’s key, Barry had a few beers. I declined the beer – too early: it was about eleven in the morning.

  “It’s never too early,” he said, but he drank furtively, hiding the bottle with his hand. The place was supposed to be dry.

  When Lynette arrived and let him in he disappeared, and Lynette told me about their twenty-three-year-old daughter, whose name was Sacheen – pronounced “Sha-heen.” I asked if that was a Guugu Yimidirrh name.

  “No. Don’t you remember that Indian girl who collected the Academy Award for Marlon Branda? She was called Sacheen. The name just stuck in my mind, and when we had a daughter I knew that was what I wanted to call her.”

  “Does she go to school here?” I asked.

  “No. She’s at school in Cairns. I think she’s better off there than in the reserve,” Lynette said. She was articulate and poised; it was hard to tell what proportion Aboriginal she was. She had the features and the complexion of a Tamil, from south India. “Sacheen is studying hard. She might do hairdressing later on, or business.”

  “Would you like to see her get involved in the life of the reserve?”

  “I don’t want to influence her. I want her to do whatever she wants to do. I’d like her to stand on her own two feet.”

  It was an admirable sentiment, because here on the reserve, where every Aboriginal was a landlord, money was free: no one ever had to work. I remarked on what a quiet place Hopevale seemed.

  “It’s noisy here on Fridays, when the people get their money,” Lynette said. “Then all the drunks are out.”

  I said I had to get back to the coast – to my boat. Barry helped me find a lift, and when I left him I shook his hand. He took my hand without gripping it, one of the strangest handshakes I have ever experienced – stranger even than that of the most tepid non-handshaking Englishman.

  I mentioned to an Australian that I found it odd that Barry claimed to be an Aboriginal. He was white, after all. “How can you tell he’s really an Aboriginal?”

  “Did you shake his hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did it feel like a dead fish?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the proof. They don’t shake hands.”

  This was back in Cooktown. I had not had a shave or a hot bath for a week. As an experiment I walked into the so-called animal bar to see whether I would blend in. My disguise worked: no one took a second look at me.

  “Quiet tonight,” I said to the young man next to me.

  He was not quite as grubby as I was, but he was bare-foot.

  “Wait till check day,” he said. “The Abos’ll all be in here. They love fire water. They get their money and then go on the piss.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “They’re not too violent,” he said. “No knives. Nothing like that. They might use the broken end of a glass stubbie. Yeah, some of the younger footballers are tough, but most of the Abos just drink and fall down.”

  Then he started the old refrain: government money, land royalties, free cash, land rights, two-percent housing loans. “And what have I got?”

  It seemed to me that he had a very great deal if he lived in this lovely climate on the dole and could sit on his ass drinking beer throughout the night, chatting to the pretty barmaid, seemingly without a care in the world. But I said nothing.

  “Ever heard of this bloke,” he said, becoming warmly vindictive, “down in Melbourne who’s trying to prove that the first people in Australia weren’t the Abos?”

  “Never heard of him,” I said. “But if the Aborigines weren’t the first people here, who were?”

  “That’s just it. According to this bloke, it was the Jews.”

  “The Jews were here first?”

  “Right,” he said, and he was triumphant. “And if he proves it, then these Abos are up the creek.”

  I said, “Then Jews will be collecting money from the mining companies. They will control the sacred sites. And they will be getting two-percent loans.”

  His eyes became very small. He swallowed some beer. He saw my point.

  “Yeah. Rather have the bloody Abos.”

  He had been counting on disinheriting the Aborigines, but this conclusion made him thoughtful. He was glassy-eyed anyway, but his eyes grew glassier. After a while, realizing that I had not moved or spoken, he piped up again.

  “Have I seen you in town before?”

  “Probably not. I’m camping up the coast, Cape Bedford way.”

  “Place is full of Abos. And bloody crocs.”

  I smiled harmlessly, conveying the thought That’s obvious!

  “You seen any crocs?” And he put his w
hiskery face closer to my whiskery face.

  “A couple,” I said casually. “What do you call them – estuarine crocodiles?”

  “A couple! Good on yer!”

  PART TWO

  MELANESIA

  6

  Buoyant in the Peaceful Trobriands

  I was nearer to the mangrove coast of Papua New Guinea, when I was up among the Aborigines and beachcombers of Cape Bedford, than I was to Brisbane or any other Australian city of any size. And now that I knew I wanted to see the Islands of Love, described in graphic detail in Malinowski’s The Sexual Life of Savages, couldn’t I simply get in my collapsible kayak and paddle there from here?

  A map of the Torres Strait, the passage between Australia and New Guinea, made the trip seem pretty straight-forward. I would paddle to Cape York, camping on the way, and then I would go island-hopping across the strait – no island involved much more than a twenty-mile, or one-day, crossing: from Thursday Island, to Moa Island, and from one rock to another, heading for the New Guinean depot of Daru Island near the mouth of the Fly River; across that estuary and up the coast, where there were little stations and muddy harbors to Port Moresby – a couple of weeks. If you’re not in a hurry you can go anywhere, as the man said. Then I would figure out how to get to the Trobriands.

  Maps, especially simple ones, can offer very hospitable and kindly portraits of a place. Maps of the Torres Strait cannot depict the powerful current rushing between the islands, the strong wind, the numerous reefs, the few real refuges in case of trouble, the absence of freshwater sources, the miserable insect-ridden mangrove coast of the far side, and – in the vast muddy estuary of the Fly River – the crocs. I did not get my information from townies; asked old black Thursday Islanders, and fishermen, and boatmen in Cooktown who had cruised and worked in the Torres Strait. They didn’t tell me scare-stories, they told me what they had seen. And they didn’t try to discourage me. Don’t go alone, they said, and they told me to allow a month or six weeks for the trip. And on no account was I to spend a night among the savage and desperate (so they said) mud men in the unfriendly stilt-villages of the Fly.