by Jan Morris
Another England has emerged now, and Oxford is adapting to it, learning to live with the motor plants and the traffic, trying to keep up with the times. There is nothing pathetic to this city, and the new Oxford will doubtless be just as self-satisfied as the old. But as you contemplate its condition now it is as though you are watching the envoi to a majestic play. The great trees planted in the heyday of the English landscape gardeners are now past their prime, and will soon be toppling, and the island character of the English is waning, too, as the wider civilization of the West takes over. Soon it will survive only in the history: but we are not too late, and Oxford stands there still to remind us of its faults and virtues – courageous, arrogant, generous, ornate, pungent, smug and funny.
I am proud to say that when in 2001 All Souls did once again honour the memory of that duck, my description of the ludicrous ceremony was quoted on the cover of the college’s commemorative booklet. By then, though, by no means everything in Oxford was as it had been in 1965 …
13
Australia
The Guardian sent me for some months to Australia. I had never been there before. In those days aircraft from Europe generally landed at Darwin to refuel before going on to Sydney or Melbourne; I decided to leave my flight there, and so gave myself a boisterous introduction to Australia.
Darwin
When you arrive at Darwin, your landfall in Australia, you are given a form to complete for the Customs, and satisfyingly bush-whacking are its demands. Have you any dangerous weapons, like spring-blade knives, daggers, bludgeons, coshes, knuckle-dusters or swordsticks? Are you carrying any saddles, bridles or horse rugs? Are there horns or hoofs in your baggage, dried blood, feathers, germ cultures or microbes? Are you accompanied by insects in any stage of development?
Thus you are pre-conditioned to Darwin, for this is a town that prides itself upon its frontier manners, its horse-rug flavour, its traditions of bludgeon, horn and hoof, the weird animal life that leaps and wallows about it, kangaroo to buffalo, crocodile to dingo. Never did a town greet its visitors more boisterously. Never did the beer flow quite so fast. Nowhere is the traveller treated with such an easy, lolloping, happy-go-lucky, careless and gregarious courtesy. As an introduction to Australia, Darwin is a work of art, for here, carefully fashioned by climate, custom and inclination, is a mosaic of all the reputed Australian virtues, from the instant accessibility of the biggest swell to the determined golden faces of the barmaids. (‘But don’t judge it all by this place,’ its genial citizenry will assure you. ‘There’s nowhere else in the whole bloody continent like the Top End.’)
The Top End: Darwin stands at the very extremity of Australia’s Northern Territory, on the shore of the Timor Sea, scarcely a gun-shot from Indonesia and linked with the distant south only by the long lonely road to Alice Springs – ‘The Track’, as they fondly call it, or ‘The Bitumen’. Immediately behind Darwin there begins one of the world’s most fearful wildernesses, all desert and dry scrub from here to Adelaide. It is almost exactly a thousand miles to Alice, the next town of any size. Even the railway peters out three hundred miles to the south, and the Darwin telephone district is bounded east west by areas that have, as the directory blandly tells you, no telephones at all. This is an isolated tropical town, twelve degrees south of the equator, blazing and humid in the Australian summer, caressingly warm in July. It is all on its own at the Top End, very fond indeed of its own company, but sometimes uncomfortably aware that several hundred million Asians live in crowded indigence just across the water.
You must not envisage it a Pacific paradise, all palm-fringed and zephyr-blown. Arnhem Land, this bump in the forehead of Australia, is a tough and unlovely place, clad in scrub jungle, with mangrove swamps at the water’s edge and a flat monotonous bushland around. Thirty years ago, I am told, this was a whole-hog frontier port, gambling dens, molls, Chinatown and all. Today it is much more respectable. Its principal purpose is government, for it is the administrative centre of the Northern Territory, and some 60 per cent of its people are civil servants. They live in trim uniform government houses, they honour all the hierarchical rules of civil servants everywhere, and they multiply, so the locals say, faster than jack-rabbits. The chief import of Darwin, according to a local proverb, is civil servants: the chief export is empty beer bottles.
But if 60 per cent of the people are conventional enough, the other 40 per cent are marvellously free-and-easy. If Darwin has self-service stores, espresso bars and used-car lots, it also retains some spirited echoes of its roistering days, and many reminders that down the road there still stands an empty continent. The saloon bars are full of handsome sprawling young men in shorts; prickly longshoremen with beer on their breath still lounge around the docks; sometimes a splendid rangy cattleman strides into the Darwin Hotel, with his wide-brimmed hat and his patrician air; and just occasionally one may see in a store one of those tight-lipped taciturn women, in faded floral prints and curlers, who are traditionally the helpmeets of pioneers.
With one eye always cocked towards Asia, Darwin has long since outgrown its racial prejudices. You may observe its tolerant proliferation best on Saturday evening, during the interval at the Smith Street picture house, when the audience pours out to its Cokes and ice-creams in the neighbouring milk bars. This is a people of astonishing variety: black, brown and yellow, Italianate and Chinese, gleaming aborigines, half-castes, women who look like Californians and men who look like gigantic Dutchmen. Up here the notion of White Australia seems ludicrous indeed, and there is nothing strait-laced or loftily Nordic in the air. The illegitimacy rate is extremely high, miscegenation is as old as Arnhem Land, and Smith Street on such an evening fizzes with an almost Brazilian gusto.
Binding all this community together, though, stamping its character, providing the cast for the crucible, is the Australian as we have always thought of him, still recognizably British, and one of the very best and most likeable men on the face of the earth. Here you may see him at his most confident, on the edge of the great Outback. He may be of any age, this ‘dinkum Aussie’, descended from convicts or new-arrived from Newcastle. He may be a humdrum bank clerk, or a prospector driven wildly in from his shack in the wilderness, to squander his money on drink and loose living – ‘riding the vaudeville’, as an old fossicker described the process to me. Whoever he is, he is magnificent to meet: as free a spirit as you can find in the world today, shackled by no inhibition of class or disadvantage, with little sense of thrift and still less of decorum, no agonizing reserve, no envy, no contempt, no meanness. He is like some splendid English working man relieved of the burden of the centuries, strengthened and cleansed by the southern sun, and allowed to begin history all over again.
Of course there are blemishes to such a reincarnation. The brewery jokes soon stale, and the beeriness of life itself sometimes borders upon the bestial. For myself I find those steely golden barmaids something less than alluring, and I resent the laboured bandying of my Christian name – ‘Nice to know you, Jim’ – as though I were participating in a television quiz show. There is a certain air of middlingness to the place, like a boom town without a boom, or perhaps an army without any officers. Darwin does not feel to me a place of spectacular promise, an embryo San Francisco: it is growing all the time, but it remains, after many a long decade of settlement, and many a million gallons of beer down its collective throat, still a small and undistinguished town.
Nevertheless it is a fine introduction to Australia – something fresh, and new, and crackling. It is always alive, always laughing, always full of tall stories and improbable characters, always drinking, always ready to help. The visiting Briton can scarcely help feeling a dude in such a setting, but for myself I respond all too easily to these tolerant and spendthrift philosophies. Perhaps it is some hereditary instinct in the blood, that makes me feel at home and at ease in this wide unfamiliar landscape. Perhaps it is the old yearning of the islander for horizons less cramped, skies less smoky. I
t may not seem likely, when you hear my effete voice diffidently requesting a second pineapple juice across the bar, but by golly, give me a four-wheel drive and a good bush-woman, and I may well go walk-about myself.
Sydney
I was so ignorant about Sydney that I was never quite sure even how to spell it, and disliked it at first sight. After the publication of this essay it was five full years before the last indignant riposte reached me from down under.
Sydney is a harbour, with a bridge across it that everyone knows by sight, and a city around it that nobody can quite envisage. The origins of Sydney are unsavoury, its history is disagreeable to read, its temper is coarse, its organization seems to be slipshod, its suburbs are hideous and its politics often crooked, its buildings are mostly plain, its voices rasp on the ear, its trumpeted Art Movement is, I suspect, half spurious, its newspapers are either dull or distasteful, and in the end, when you hunger for beauty or consolation in this famous place, you return willy-nilly to the harbour-front, where the ships tread with graceful care towards their moorings, and the great humped bridge stands like an arbiter above the quays.
Harsh words for a stranger to utter, but then there was never a harsher contrast than the disparity between Sydney and its setting. This harbour is not, to my mind, so beautiful as its popularly nominated peers, Rio, Hong Kong and San Francisco, but it is still exceedingly lovely, and to stand upon North Head on a crisp sunshine afternoon, with a swell rolling in from the South Pacific and an idle flurry of yachts beyond Bradley’s Head – to stand at the gateway of Sydney on such an afternoon is among the classic experiences of travel: such an ineffable antipodean blue is the sky above you, so unexpected and inviting are the countless coves and fjords of the harbour, so imperturbably do the tankers sweep out to sea, so silent and lordly are the warships in Athol Bay, so grand but monstrous does the crook-back of the bridge protrude above the promontories. It is a San Francisco that such an environment deserves, and sometimes indeed the anxious traveller will find himself reminded of that celestial seaport. He will see affinities in the winter mists, the clap of the water at the end of every vista, the cool green gardens of The Domain above Wooloomooloo, the villas poised so delectably on their cliffsides above the harbour. He will taste, if he meets the right Sydney people, the same careful but seldom humourless diligence, the same meticulous interest in a brief past, comparable cheerful clubs, and, among the cramped espresso bars of King’s Cross, similar wayward but resolute Bohemians. Pinchgut Island, with its stone fortress and its dismal recollections, will remind him of Alcatraz, and the bustle of the boats at the Circular Quay, as the Manly Ferry sails away to a tinkle of its resident piano and a quaver of its mendicant violin, may seem a distant homespun echo of Fisherman’s Wharf.
This is, though, a San Francisco sadly manqué, just as Dorman Long’s fine bridge, however sensible and sturdy, is a lumpish substitute for the Golden Gate. Sydney is not one of your absolute cities, and in nothing that I have detected, except perhaps the racing commentaries, is it quite in the first class. It is almost as old as San Francisco, indeed, and bigger than all but a handful of European capitals, but there is something cold and vacuous at its core, something that makes the stranger, however hospitable his acquaintances, feel obscurely lonely in its streets. For most Sydney citizens the purpose of life may perhaps be summarized in the parade of the life-savers on Manly Beach, all bronzed open-air fun on Saturday afternoons, and perhaps it is this paucity of purpose, this lack of lofty memories or intentions, that makes this metropolis feel so pallid or frigid at the soul.
This, and what seems to be a shortage of kindness. The people of Sydney will usually greet you warmly enough, even heartily, but compared with the great immigrant cities of the New World, Montreal, New York or São Paulo, this place feels cruelly aloof. Perhaps it is the origins of Sydney that invoke this sensation – for despite the sophistries of its society ladies, it was founded by the scum of England only six generations ago. Perhaps it is the expressions on the faces of those ladies themselves, so steely, scornful and accusatory, as though they are expecting you (which Heaven forbid) to offer them an improper suggestion. Perhaps it is the intolerance of one citizen to another, sour bus conductor to irritable passenger, cross-patch waitress to graceless customer. Sydney does not feel like a haven. It does not reach out, as New York once did, to receive ‘your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’. No great ideals of politics or humanity animate its visions, but only starker impulses of self-advancement or survival.
Nor does it even feel content. It seems full of reproach, sneer and grumble. The immigrant from Europe or England all too often feels resented. The dinkum Aussie all too often seems to cherish racial prejudices of the nastiest kind. The sleazy bars of the place, looking like public lavatories and smelling of slopped beer, exude no genial good cheer, but only a mindless and sometimes rather frightening sense of male collusion. A proud new bridge collapsed in Melbourne while I was in Australia, but the Sydney Daily Telegraph, in its editorial on the matter, offered not a breath of sympathy, nor even a kindly joke, but only a column of crude and spiteful mockery. The people of Sydney like to think of themselves as a ‘weird mob’, but they strike me as weird not in any free-and-easy gallivanting way, but only in a sort of twisted uncertainty and isolation. I blush even to consider the numberless exceptions to these hasty generalizations: all the kind and cultivated people who do live in Sydney, all the patient Dutch waiters and merry Italian stevedores, all the charming dons up at the University, all the scholarly attendants at the Public Library, many a jolly taxi-driver and many a thoughtful bookseller, the courteous attendants at the State Parliament, the splendid ferry-captains who stride so grandly, like admirals on a quarter-deck, from one wheelhouse to the other when their boat turns round. The brave new Opera House plan is perhaps a foretaste of more stylish things to come, and each year the influx of Europeans rubs a little elegance into this raw city, and a little gentleness too. Some of the new skyscrapers, though scarcely breathtaking, are handsome enough. Some of the new highways breathe the dash and dazzle one expects of such a young and explosive port.
Even so, Sydney does not yet feel a great city – not a generous, confident, serene city, not a city of any warmth and splendour. Turn your back on the bridge and you will travel through a wilderness of peevish suburbs, a labyrinth of unlovely boulevards, a humdrum desolation, until at last you reach the outskirts of the place, and before you, if you persevere, stretches the emptiness of Australia, which is inescapable, which runs like some chill virus through the bloodstream of this country, and so binds the fragile years together that even now you may sense the presence of the chain-gangs in Sydney, and fancy the punishment cutter striking out to Pinchgut.
It was during my first visit to Sydney, Australia, that I learnt to enjoy food and drink. Until then I had never much cared about either, but an Australian friend gave me a picnic lunch on a lawn overlooking the harbour, and something about the way he ate our simple victuals, slurped our Australian white wine and broke the crisp loaves between his fingers, suddenly opened my eyes to the delights of gastronomy. When many years later I came to write a little essay about this experience I could remember its sensations exactly – my host’s vivid enjoyment of the food, the wide blue sky over our heads, the grand panorama of the harbour below us and above all the white wings of the Opera House spread like a benediction upon the moment. It was only when I had completed the essay that I realized the Opera House hadn’t been built then.
Alice Springs
‘The Alice’ had long been world-famous because of Nevil Shute’s 1949 novel A Town Like Alice. Despite this, even in the 1960s few tourists got there.
As Florence was to the old Grand Tour, so Alice Springs stands in any Australian itinerary: an apogee, where all that the journey represents is, in theory anyway, consummated at last. The Alice, as they call it in the Outback, must be one of the most famous little towns on earth, and though its origins
are strictly functional, conceived as it was as a station on the transcontinental telegraph line, today one treats it as a sort of symbol or slogan, the home of the Flying Doctors, of the aboriginal painters and the Afghan camel-drivers, where the stock-trails converge upon the railhead and the Bitumen strikes out for Darwin and the Timor Sea.
If you have only a day in The Alice you can still extract a proper essence of Australiana, a happy whiff of that dusty, tangy, seat-and-leather flavour that informs the whole Australian myth, and still hangs evocatively around the bush. Contemporary Australia is essentially an urban country, rather flabby in spirit; but up at The Alice, where the wilderness lurches in vast barren formations towards an illimitable horizon – here the legend comes alive again.
