by Bryson, Bill
At a place called Torquay, the Great Ocean Road rejoined the main highway towards Melbourne. Twenty miles to the west, I noticed, was Winchelsea, where Thomas Austin set free the twenty-four rabbits that transformed the Australian landscape. The countryside roundabout looked vaguely arid and unpromising – it reminded me of Oklahoma or western Kansas – but I had no way of knowing, of course, how much of this could be attributed to the voracity of rabbits. Now you would think that people might have learned a lesson from Austin’s experience, but amazingly no. At the very moment that rabbits were eating their way across the countryside, influential people were introducing other species of animals in great numbers – sometimes for sport, sometimes by accident, but mostly in an effort to liven things up a little. Precisely the same impulse that led people to build English-style parks in places like Adelaide led them to try to manipulate the countryside as well. Australia was deemed biologically deficient, its semi-arid plains too monotonous, its forests too silent. Gradually there arose acclimatization societies that made scores of eager introductions to fulfil a longing for the familiar. Before long it occurred to the societies that there was no reason to stop with British or even European animals. They began to dream of creating an African veldt in Australia, with giraffes, springboks and buffalo grazing the sunny plains. Their aspirations took on an almost surreal quality. In 1862, Sir Henry Barkly, governor of Victoria, called for the introduction of monkeys into the colony’s forests ‘for the amusement of wayfarers, whom their gambols would delight’. Before this could be acted on, Barkly had been replaced as governor by Sir Charles Darling, who said he didn’t want monkeys but would be very pleased to see boa constrictors. He didn’t get his way either, but scores of others did.
‘Acclimatization was one of the most foolish and dangerous ideas ever to infect the thinking of nineteenth-century men,’ writes Tim Low in the improbably gripping Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders, but infect them it did. Victoria, for some reason, became the hotbed of all this. Despite the experience with rabbits, dozens of other foolish introductions were made. In the 1860s the Ballarat Acclimatization Society loosed foxes into the landscape and they quickly became a scourge, a position from which they have not yet retreated. Other animals escaped or were abandoned and went wild. Camels were used to build the railway from Adelaide to Alice Springs, but were set free when the work was completed. Today 100,000 of them roam the central and western deserts, the only place in the world where one-humped dromedaries exist in the wild. Across the country there are up to five million wild donkeys, a million or more wild horses (called brumbies) and large numbers of water buffalo, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, foxes and dogs. Feral pigs have been caught in Melbourne suburbs. There are so many introduced species, in fact, that the red kangaroo, once the largest animal on the continent, is now only the thirteenth biggest.
The consequences for native species have often been devastating. About 130 mammals in Australia are threatened. Sixteen have become extinct – more than in any other continent. And guess what is the mightiest killer of all? According to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, it is the common cat. Cats love the Australian wild. There are 12 million of them out there, inhabiting every niche in the landscape from the driest deserts to the tallest mountains. With the fox they have driven many of Australia’s smallest, cutest and most vulnerable native animals to the edge of extinction – numbats, bettongs, quolls, potoroos, bandicoots, rock wallabies, platypuses and many others. Since most of these creatures are nocturnal and rarely seen, most people don’t notice their absence, but they are going fast.
As with animals, so with plants. In the 1850s, Victoria was unfortunate to have as chief botanist a dedicated accli-matizer with the imposing name of Baron Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich Von Mueller. As with animal acclimatizers, Von Mueller couldn’t abide what he viewed as the impoverished nature of Australia’s flora, and he spent much of his free time travelling the country sowing seeds of pumpkins, cabbages, melons and whatever else he thought might flourish. He had a special affection for blackberries, planting clumps of them all over. The blackberry is now Victoria’s most pernicious weed, all but ineradicable and the bane of farmers everywhere. Where unmolested, it takes over whole landscapes. I saw some now as I drove along.
The lesson in this – that exotic species often thrive in Australia in a way that staggers belief – is one that Australians have had a curiously hard time fully grasping. Prickly pear, a type of pulpy cactus native to America, was introduced in Queensland early in the twentieth century as a potential stock feed and quickly went crazy. By 1925, 30 million acres were overrun with impenetrable groves of prickly pear up to six feet high. It is an almost absurdly dense plant – an acre of prickly pear weighs 800 tons, as against about fifteen tons for an acre of wheat – and a nightmare to clear. For a while it looked as if much of Queensland and beyond would simply become one Europe-sized bed of prickly pear. Fortunately it could be treated effectively with pesticides and a moth whose larvae relished its leaves, but it was a close-run thing and the cost was substantial.
Altogether, according to Low, Australia is now home to more than 2,700 foreign weeds. Interestingly, botanical gardens are among the worst offenders. Three escapees from Darwin’s Botanic Gardens – mimosa bush, leucaena and crutch tree – threaten Kakadu National Park, a World Heritage site, and there have been others elsewhere.
Where these things come from is often a mystery. According to Low, in recent years a biting ant, from the species Iridomyrmex, has infested Brisbane. It has become a common nuisance. Interestingly, no one knows where it came from or how it got there. It just one day appeared. Nor, for obvious reasons, can anyone say where it will spread or what quiet havoc it might wreak. One thing alone is certain. As so often, it appears to be doing better in Australia than wherever it came from.
The Mornington Peninsula is a spur of land just south of Melbourne. It is, I suppose, Victoria’s Cape Cod, in that it is coastal and very pretty and crowded with summer homes. It even has something of the same shape, curling around in a scorpion tail that almost encloses the considerable immensity of Port Phillip Bay, across which, at a distance of some fifty miles, stands Melbourne. I had two particular reasons for wanting to be here: Catherine Veitch had made it sound so appealing in her letters and it was here that Australia’s tragically submersible Prime Minister, Harold Holt, went for his final swim.
Holt’s fateful dip was at Portsea, at the peninsula’s far end, so it was there I directed myself the next morning after overnighting in the little town of Mornington. Though I set off in watery sunshine, of the sort that seemed to promise a fine day later on, Portsea was settled under a heavy sea mist, and the temperature when I stepped out of the car was cooler than it had been twenty miles up the road. Most of the few people out in Portsea, I noticed, were wearing cotton jumpers or jackets.
Portsea is very small – a handful of shops and cafés against a larger backdrop of big houses looking aloof and broody in the wispy fog – but famously well heeled. A beach hut had just sold at auction here for $185,000. Not a beach house, you understand, but a beach hut – a simple wooden shed with no electricity, water or any features at all other than proximity to sand and sea. The purchaser didn’t even actually get to own the hut. All his $185,000 bought him was the right in perpetuity to pay the council several hundred dollars in annual rent. The huts, which only locals are allowed to acquire, are immensely prized possessions. The one that had just been sold had been in the same family for fifty years.
I had coffee to warm up before continuing on to the Mornington Peninsula National Park, which covers the last nubbin of land before it meets the sea at a hilly outpost called Point Nepean, beyond which lies a notorious swirl of water called the Rip – a narrow passage forming the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. Only recently had this land become public. For a hundred years, the whole of this area – several hundred acres of the most glorious coastal property in Victoria – was off limits to
the public because it was owned by the military, which used it as a firing range. Pause with me for a moment while we put this in perspective. Here you have a country of three million square miles, nearly all of it empty and eminently bom-bable. And here, just a couple of hours’ drive from the country’s second city, you have a headland of rare and sumptuous beauty, and of considerable ecological importance, and from this land you bar the public because you are trying to blow it to smithereens. Doesn’t make much sense, what? The upshot is that after many years of wheedling and cajoling, the military was finally prevailed upon to yield a fragment of this land to form a national park. Even so, the army kept about two-thirds of the peninsula and still occasionally lofts bombs into it. In consequence, once you have acquired a ticket of admission at a visitors’ centre on the edge of Portsea, you have to pass through a two-mile-long zone of military land on a road lined on both sides with tall fences bearing severe warnings of unexploded bombs and the folly of trespass. You can take a shuttle bus into the park or walk. I decided to walk, for the exercise, and set off through the cloaking mist. I appeared to have the place pretty much to myself.
I had gone no more than a dozen feet when I was joined by a fly – smaller and blacker than a housefly. It buzzed around in front of my face and tried to settle on my upper lip. I swatted it away, but it returned at once, always to the same spot. A moment later it was joined by another that wished to go up my nose. It also would not go away. Within a minute or so I had perhaps twenty of these active spots all around my head and I was swiftly sinking into the state of abject wretchedness that comes with a prolonged encounter with the Australian fly.
Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguish themselves by their very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him. Somewhere on an exposed portion of your body is a spot about the size of a shirt button that the fly wants to lick and tickle and turn delirious circles upon. It isn’t simply their persistence, but the things they go for. An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue. Get thirty or forty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow.
And so I proceeded into the park, lost inside my own little buzzing cloud of woe, waving at my head in an increasingly hopeless and desultory manner – it is called the bush salute – blowing constantly out of my mouth and nose, shaking my head in a kind of furious dementia, occasionally slapping myself with startling violence on the cheek or forehead. Eventually, as the flies knew all along I would, I gave up and they fell upon me as on a corpse.
At length the flies and I reached the end of the military zone and the beginning of the park proper. Just inside this transition area was a signposted path leading up a medium-sized eminence called Cheviot Hill. This is what I had come to see, for it was at Cheviot Beach, on the other side, that Harold Holt went for the Swim That Needs No Towel. I followed the path upward through misty groves of low bushy trees – moonah, milkwort and tea trees, according to helpful noticeboards posted at intervals. At the top of the hill a stiff breeze was running, forceful enough to make me totter when I neglected to brace for it, and here at last the flies gave me a tiny bit of surcease. I stood with the wind full in my face, happier than I can tell you just to be left alone.
The view from the top of Cheviot Hill is said to be one of the finest in coastal Victoria, though I cannot vouch for this as I could see almost nothing. Across a grey-green vale, a mile or so distant, rose another hill at Point Nepean, covered in lazy cloud. Beyond was the notorious Rip, invisible from here. Below me, things were no less impenetrable. I appeared to be perhaps a hundred feet directly above Cheviot Beach, but it was like peering into a cauldron. All I could see through the drifting soup were some vague outlines of rocks and an indeterminate expanse of sand. Only the sounds of unseen waves flopping onto an unseen shore made it evident that I had found the sea.
Still, I felt a frisson of satisfaction at having reached the place of Holt’s fateful swim. I tried to imagine the scene as it must have been, though it wasn’t easy. On the day Holt waded into the surf, the weather was windy but fine. Things were not going very well for him as Prime Minister – his skills lay more in kissing babies and making the ladies tingle (he was evidently a bit of a hottie) than in running affairs of state – and we may safely assume that he was glad to be out of Canberra for the long Christmas break. Holt came to this beach because he had a weekend home at Portsea and the army let him stroll on its grounds for the sake of his privacy. So there were no lifeguards, members of the public or even security guards in attendance when, on 17 December 1967, Holt went for a breezy stroll with some friends among the rocks and pounding waves just below. Although the sea was lively and the tide dangerously high, and although Holt had almost drowned there six months earlier while snorkelling with some chums, he decided to go for a swim. Before anyone could react he had whipped off his shirt and plunged into the surf. He swam straight out from the beach a couple of hundred feet and almost instantly vanished, without fuss or commotion or even a languorous wave. He was fifty-nine years old and had been Prime Minister for not quite two years. His body was never found.
Cheviot Beach remains closed to the public, and in any case there was no way down to it from the clifftops, so I amused myself for a few minutes prowling through a complex of pillboxes and murky concrete bunkers left over from the Second World War until I walked into a large cobweb and, with an echoing shriek and a few moments of caroming about between walls, low lintels and other unyielding impedimenta, returned in subdued form to the open air. Rubbing my head and calling round the flies again, I followed the path back down to the road. At the bottom of the hill was a large and straggly cemetery, a relic from when this was a quarantine station. I tried to have a look around, but the flies would give me no peace. I had intended to stroll out to the headland where there was a nineteenth-century fort, but the thought of having the flies as my companions for another hour was more than I could endure, so I set off back along the empty road by which I had come.
At the visitors’ centre I stopped in to have a look at the displays and got chatting with the park ranger. I asked him how dangerous this stretch of coastline was.
‘Oh, very,’ he said cheerfully. He showed me on a marine chart how the currents ran – which is to say all over the place. If they got hold of you, I gathered, they would pass you around like an unwanted parcel. Even the strongest swimmer would soon be exhausted by the fight. It was mostly to do with the Rip, where massive volumes of water rush through an opening only a few hundred yards across each time the tide rolls in or out. I hadn’t realized until I saw the chart just how proximate Cheviot Beach was to this zone of watery turmoil. Even on a map it looked supremely foolhardy.
‘So it wasn’t a good idea for Harold Holt to go swimming out there?’
‘Well, I wouldn’t go swimming out there,’ he replied. ‘You know, there’s about a hundred shipwrecks just along here.’ He indicated an absurdly modest stretch of shoreline in the vicinity of Cheviot and the Rip. ‘I think you can take it as read that when you’ve got a stretch of sea that sinks a hundred ships, it’s probably not the most placid environment for a dip, you know?’
‘Isn’t it odd that they never found his body?’
‘No.’ This was said without hesitation.
‘Really?’ I don’t understand the dynamics of the sea, but if driftwood and Coke cans are anything to go by, then I thought most buoyant objects ended up on a beach somewhere.
‘Not to be too blunt about it, if you die out there it doesn’t take too long to become part of the food chain.’
‘Ah.’
‘The thing you’ve got
to remember,’ he added with a sudden thoughtful air, ‘is that the only thing unusual about the Harold Holt drowning was that he was Prime Minister when it happened. If it hadn’t been for that the whole thing would have been completely forgotten. Mind you, it’s pretty well forgotten anyway.’
‘So you don’t get a lot of people coming here in a kind of pilgrimage?’
‘No, not at all. Most people barely remember it. A lot of people under thirty have never even heard of it.’
He broke off to issue tickets to some new arrivals and I drifted away to look at the displays of seagrasses and life in rockpools. But as I was leaving he called to me with an afterthought. ‘They built a memorial to him in Melbourne,’ he said. ‘Know what it was?’
I indicated that I had no idea.
He grinned very slightly. ‘A municipal swimming pool.’
‘Seriously?’
His grin broadened, but the nod was sincere.
‘This is a terrific country,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ he agreed happily. ‘It is, you know.’
Throughout my childhood on Friday nights whenever my father was away, which was often (he was a sportswriter who travelled a lot for his work), my mother and I had an arrangement whereby I would take a bus downtown to meet her (she also worked for the local paper) and we would go to dinner at a cafeteria called Bishop’s and then to a movie.
I don’t wish to suggest that my mother abused the trust I placed in her with regard to the selection process, but it did seem uncanny that the movies I favoured had always just left town and that we ended up seeing something involving murder, passion and betrayal, usually starring Jeff Chandler, for whom my mother had a strange admiration, usually in a part that required him to spend a good deal of time bare-chested.
