Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  Perhaps the most admirable quality about the museum – and I suspect this is a real Northern Territory thing – is that it didn’t mince words about the dangers of the world outside. Most museums in Australia are at pains to stress the unlikelihood of anything happening to you. The Darwin museum makes it quite obvious, with cold facts and figures, that if something does happen to you out there, you are really going to regret it. This was most potently displayed in the aquatic creatures section – and here at last we found what we had come to see: a large glass cylinder containing a preserved box jellyfish, the deadliest creature on earth.

  It was remarkably unprepossessing – a translucent box-shaped blob, six or eight inches high, with threadlike tentacles several feet long trailing off beneath it. Like all jellyfish, it is all but brainless, but its lethality is unbelievable. The tentacles of a box jellyfish carry enough wallop to kill a roomful of people, yet they live exclusively on tiny krill-like shrimp – creatures that hardly require a great deal of violent subduing. As ever in the curious world of Australian biology, no one knows why the jellyfish evolved such extravagant toxicity.

  Alongside were displays of other dangerous sea creatures, of which the Northern Territory has an impressive plenitude – five types of stingray, two of blue-ringed octopus, thirty varieties of sea snake, eight types of coneshell, and the usual roguish assortment of stonefish, scorpionfish, firefish and others too numerous to list and too depressing to dwell on. All these are found in shallow coastal waters, in rock pools and even sometimes on the beaches themselves. It is a wonder to me that anyone goes within a hundred feet of the sea in northern Australia. The sea snakes are especially unnerving, not because they are aggressive, but because they are inquisitive. Stray into their territory and they will come to check you out, all but rubbing against you in the manner of cats seeking affection. They are the most sweet-tempered creatures in existence. But cross them or alarm them and they can hit you with enough venom to kill three grown men. Now that’s scary.

  As we were studying the display, a man, lean and lavishly bearded in the Darwinian style, said g’day and asked how we were going. He identified himself as Dr Phil Alderslade, curator of coelenterates. ‘Jellyfish and corals,’ he added at once, seeing our expressions of frank ignorance. ‘I noticed you taking notes,’ he added further.

  I told him of my devotion to box jellyfish and asked him if he worked with them himself.

  ‘Oh, sure.’

  ‘So how do you keep from getting stung?’

  ‘Basic precautions really. You wear a wetsuit, of course, and rubber gloves, and you just take a good deal of care when handling them because if even a tiny piece of tentacle is left on a glove and you accidentally touch it to bare skin – wiping sweat from your face or brushing away a fly or something – you can get a very nasty sting, believe me.’

  ‘Have you ever been stung?’

  ‘Once. My glove slipped and a tentacle touched me just here.’ He showed us the soft underside of his wrist. It bore a faint scar about half an inch long. ‘Just touched me, but jeez it bloody hurt.’

  ‘What’d it feel like?’ we asked together.

  ‘The only thing I can compare it to is if you took a lit cigarette and held it to your skin – held it there a goodish long while, maybe thirty seconds. That’s what it felt like. You get stung from time to time by various things in my line and I can tell you I’ve never felt anything like it.’

  ‘So what would a couple of yards feel like?’ I wondered.

  He shook his head at the thought of it. ‘If you tried to imagine the worst pain possible, it would be beyond that. You’re dealing with pain of an order of magnitude well past anything most people have ever experienced.’

  He did something you don’t often see a scientist do: he shivered. Then he smiled cheerfully through his extravagant facial hair and excused himself to get back to his corals.

  We left the museum and headed out of town through Darwin’s sunny, orderly suburbs – white bungalows on tidy lawns – and at the edge of town passed a sign that said: ‘Alice Springs 1479 kilometres’. Ahead, along the lonely Stuart Highway, lay nearly a thousand miles of largely unrelieved emptiness all the way to Alice Springs. We were on our way into the famous and forbidding Never Never, a land of dangerous heat and bone-white sunshine. The road – the Track, as it is still sometimes called – was nearly empty but straight and well maintained. Ask ten people in Sydney or Melbourne whether the highway from Darwin to Alice Springs is paved or not and most will have no idea. In fact, it was paved long before most other outback roads: during the Second World War when northern Australia became a principal staging post for the Pacific campaign. These days it carries a small but growing number of tourists, a very little local traffic and lots of road trains – multi-trailered lorries up to a hundred and fifty feet long, which haul freight between the most distant outposts of Australia. To meet a barrelling road train coming at you at full throttle on a two-lane highway on which it desires all of its lane and some of yours is a reliably invigorating experience – an explosive whoomp as you hit its displaced air, followed at once by a consequent lurch onto the shoulder, several moments of hypermanic axle action sufficient to loosen dental fillings and empty your pockets of coins, an enveloping shroud of gritty red dust and the metallic dinks and savage thumps of flying rocks, some involuntary oral emissions on your part as the dust clears and you spy a large boulder dead ahead; and a sudden, miraculous return to tranquillity and smoothness as the car regains the highway, entirely of its own volition, and continues on its way to Alice Springs.

  The only time that this part of the world had any life at all was during the Second World War, when sixty airfields and thirty-five hospitals were built along the highway between Darwin and Daly Waters, and a hundred thousand American troops were stationed in the area. The sites are still indicated with historical markers, and a couple of times we pulled off to have a look. When Alan Moorehead passed this way for Rum Jungle, a decade after the war’s end, most of the buildings were still standing. Sometimes he came across abandoned planes and stacks of munitions quietly decomposing in the desert. I naturally hoped we would as well, but there was nothing out there now – nothing but stillness and oppressive heat and a sense of being on the edge of a boundless nullity.

  In every direction for as far as the eye could see the earth was covered with spinifex, a brittle grass, which grew in clumps so closely packed as to give an appearance of verdure. It looked like land that could support a thousand head of cattle an acre. In fact, spinifex is useless – the only wholly non-edible grass in the world apparently. It is also murder to travel through because its needle-sharp points, tipped in silica, break off when brushed and become embedded in the skin, where they fester into small but horrible sores. Scattered among the spinifex were turpentine bushes and man-sized termite mounds, which stood in the desert like ancient dolmens. And that was it.

  After about three hours we passed through Katherine, a dusty, inoffensive little community, and the last town worthy of the name for 400 miles. Beyond it, the landscape grew more visibly impoverished, and the traffic thinned out from little to almost none. For much of the way the highway was simply a taut line connecting impossibly distant horizons, the landscape on either side a monumental emptiness punctuated by spinifex, low bushes, lunar rocks and almost nothing else. The sky everywhere was huge, and brilliantly blue.

  We had been driving for perhaps ninety minutes in a largely mindless silence when at last Allan spoke. He said: ‘How are you off for urine?’

  ‘I have all I need, thank you. Why do you ask?’

  ‘It’s just that I notice we’re nearly out of petrol.’

  ‘Truly?’ I leaned over to confirm that Allan could indeed interpret a petrol gauge – if not perhaps quite as frequently as one might wish.

  ‘Interesting time to notice, Allan,’ I observed.

  ‘This thing just seems to suck up fuel,’ he replied, perhaps just a trifle inadequately. ‘S
o where are we?’ he asked after a moment’s further reflection.

  ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere, Allan.’

  ‘I mean in relation to the next town.’

  I looked at the map. ‘In relation to the next town, we are’ – I looked again, just to confirm – ‘in the middle of nowhere.’ I did some measurements with my fingers. ‘We appear to be about forty kilometres from a dot on the map called Larrimah.’

  ‘And do they have petrol there?’

  ‘One sincerely hopes so. And do you think we have enough to get there?’

  ‘One sincerely and, if I may just say, bloody well hopes so.’

  We chugged into Larrimah on the last vapour of gas. It was an all but dead hamlet, but it did have a petrol station. While Allan fuelled up, I went in and purchased a stock of bottled water and snack foods for future emergencies. We vowed that henceforth we would jointly keep a steady eye on the fuel gauge and not let it dip below the halfway mark. There were even greater stretches of emptiness to come.

  Still, the very slight brush with crisis buoyed our spirits, and we were in a triumphant frame of mind when in late afternoon we rolled into Daly Waters, our destination for the day. Daly Waters – 370 miles from Darwin, 570 from Alice Springs – was off the Stuart Highway a couple of miles down an unpaved side road and over a small ford, which added to its already palpable sense of remoteness. If you were looking for a classic outback spot, you could not improve upon it. It consisted of a few small houses, a tumbledown and obviously long-closed general store, two petrol pumps unattached to any particular building beneath a sign saying ‘Outback Servo’ and a utilitarian pub with a tin roof. All the rest was heat and dust.

  We parked outside the pub. It had signs hung all over it. One said: ‘Est. 1893. Australia’s oldest licensed public house.’ Nearby another sign said: ‘Est. 1930. Northern Territory’s Oldest Pub.’ The heat when we stepped from the car was stifling. The temperature must have been pushing 110 degrees. A tourist brochure I had picked up in Darwin hinted, without actually saying, that the Daly Waters pub provided accommodation. I certainly hoped so as we were 230 miles from the next town, with nothing but a scattered and uncertain assortment of roadhouses in between. Anyway, it’s dangerous to drive through dusk in the outback. That’s when kangaroos come bounding out of the gloaming and into the paths of passing vehicles, to the frequent regret of both. Trucks sweep them aside, but they can make a mess of cars, and sometimes the cars’ occupants.

  We stepped into the gloomy interior – gloomy because the world outside was so painfully bright and we had been out in it all afternoon. I could hardly see a thing.

  ‘Hello,’ I said to a face behind the bar that might, for all I could tell, have been a ping-pong paddle, ‘do you do rooms?’

  ‘Finest rooms in Daly Waters,’ responded the paddle. ‘Also the only rooms in Daly Waters.’ As the form spoke, it transmogrified before my eyes into a cheerfully sweaty, bespectacled, slightly harassed-looking man of late middle years. He was sizing us up with a look that was very slightly askance. ‘You want two rooms,’ he said, ‘or are you bunking up together?’

  ‘Two,’ I said at once.

  This seemed to please him. He rummaged in a drawer and produced two keys with unmatching tags. ‘This one’s a single,’ he said, laying a key on my palm, ‘and this one’s got a double bed in it – in case one of yers gets lucky tonight.’ He bounced his eyebrows in a slightly salacious manner.

  ‘And do you think that’s likely?’

  ‘Hey, miracles happen.’

  The rooms were in a separate block that stood alongside the pub, ten or so of them ranged on either side of a central corridor. I insisted Allan take the double as he was far more likely to get lucky than I was.

  ‘Out here?’ He gave a hollow laugh.

  ‘There’s eighty million sheep in the outback, Allan. They can’t all be picky.’

  We parted to examine our rooms. Basic was the word that leaped to mind. Mine consisted of an ancient bed, a battered dresser and a raffia wastebasket. There was no TV or phone, and the illumination consisted of a bare yellow bulb dangling from the ceiling, but the solitary window held an ancient air conditioner, which shook and juddered violently when switched on but did actually seem to generate a little cool air. The bathroom was at the end of the corridor and was a touch insalubrious, with rust stains in the sink and a shower that looked actively infectious.

  I went to visit Allan, who was sitting on his bed grinning inanely. ‘Come in!’ he cried. ‘Come in. I’d offer you something from the minibar, but I don’t seem to have one. Pull up a chair – oh, no! There is no chair. Well, please make full use of the wastebasket.’

  ‘It is a little basic,’ I conceded.

  ‘Basic? It’s a bloody cell. I’d show you the light, but it’s burnt out.’

  ‘I’m sure we can get a replacement for you.’

  ‘No, no, no. I think I’ll like it better in full darkness.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Is it too early to start drinking?’

  I looked at my watch. It was only four forty-five. ‘It is a bit. There’s actually something I wanted to see.’

  ‘An attraction? In Daly Waters? What can it be? Someone getting petrol? The evening sheep shag?’

  ‘It’s a tree.’

  ‘A tree. Of course it is. Please lead the way.’

  We went out to the car and drove a couple of miles down a hot dirt track. There on the edge of a large, barren clearing beside the road stood a sign announcing that we had found our way to the Stuart Tree, commemorating John McDouall Stuart, perhaps the greatest of all Australian explorers. A Scottish soldier of bantamweight dimensions (he barely topped five feet), Stuart led three epic expeditions through the interior, and all but killed himself in the process. The bright light of the outback severely disagreed with his vision, and on at least two of his trips he was soon seeing double – not perhaps the most encouraging affliction in someone choosing a route through an uncharted wilderness. (‘So, boys, which of those twin peaks do you think we should head for? I say we go for the one under the left-hand sun.’) Generally he would finish the trips effectively blind. On his second expedition, he also became crippled with scurvy, for which he seemed to have a particular susceptibility. His body became ‘a mass of sores that will not heal’. The skin, one of his lieutenants noted, ‘hung from the roof of his mouth, his tongue became swollen and he was incapable of talking’. Virtually insensible, he was carried on a stretcher for the last 400 miles and each day his colleagues lifted him down from his mount expecting to find him dead. Yet within a month of returning to society he was on his feet again and setting off once more into the punishing void.

  His final attempt, in 1861-2, seemed fated to end in failure as well. His horses ‘were much distressed’ for want of water, and both men and beasts were tormented by bulwaddy, a treacherous shrub with thorny spikes. But at Daly Waters they found a stream with potable water. It was the moment that saved the venture. The men rested, rewatered and pushed on. In July 1862, nine months after setting off from Adelaide, they reached the Timor Sea and in so doing became the first to find a practical route through the heart of the continent. Within a decade, a telegraph line had been strung from Adelaide to what would eventually become Darwin, putting Australia at last in direct touch with the world.

  In his delight at finding the stream at Daly Waters, Stuart carved an S into a big gum tree. It was this that we had come to see. The tree, it must be said, was not much – a fifteen-foot-high chunk of gum tree, lopped of its upper branches and long dead. Every guidebook tells you the S is clearly visible, but we couldn’t find it. Still, there was a certain pleasure in being at a famous spot that few Australians visit. As we stood there, a flock of galahs, a noisy pinkish parrot, came and settled on the surrounding trees. It was a scene almost entirely without feature – a barren plain, a fat setting sun, a scattering of ragged gum trees – and yet, in a wholly uncharacteristic way, I was captivated by it. I don’t know why, but
I loved it out here.

  We regarded it for quite a time, then Allan turned to me and asked in a respectful voice if we could go for a drink now.

  ‘Yes we can,’ I said.

  Daly Waters’ fame did not begin and end with the fleeting visit of Stuart and his band. In the 1920s a rather shadowy couple by the name of Pearce came to Daly Waters and opened a shop with a borrowed twenty pounds. Amazingly, they did pretty well. Within a few years they had a shop, a hotel, a pub and an aerodrome. Daly Waters became a stopoff point between Brisbane and Darwin on the run to Singapore and on to London in the early days of Qantas and the old Imperial Airways. Lady Mountbatten was among the first overnight guests at the hotel. Goodness knows what she made of the place – though I dare say she was just awfully glad to be on solid ground. In the early days a commercial flight from London involved, in addition to nerves of steel, forty-two refuelling stops, up to five changes of aircraft and a train journey through Italy because Mussolini wouldn’t allow flights through Italian air space. It took twelve days. As well as the seasonal monsoons, the flights were subject to dust storms, mechanical failures, navigational confusion and occasional pot-shots from hostile or impish bedouins. Crashes were not infrequent.

  The perils of aviation in the period are neatly encapsulated in the experience of Harold C. Brinsmead, the head of Australia’s Civil Aviation Department in the first days of commercial aviation. In 1931, Brinsmead was on a flight to London, partly for business and partly to demonstrate the safety and reliability of modern air passenger services, when his plane crashed on takeoff in Indonesia. No one was seriously hurt, but the plane was a write-off. Not wanting to wait for a replacement aircraft to be flown in, Brinsmead boarded a flight with the new Dutch airline, KLM. That flight crashed while taking off in Bangkok. On this occasion, five people were killed and Brinsmead suffered serious injuries from which he never recovered. He died two years later. Meanwhile, the surviving passengers carried on to London in a replacement plane. That plane crashed on the return trip.