Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  We stopped at the visitors’ centre for a cup of coffee and to look at the displays, which were all to do with interpretations of the Dreamtime – the Aborigines’ traditional conception of how the earth was formed and operates. There was nothing instructive in a historical or geological sense, which was disappointing because I was curious to know what Uluru is doing there. How do you get the biggest rock in existence onto the middle of an empty plain? It turns out (I looked in a book later) that Uluru is what is known to geology as a bornhardt: a hunk of weather-resistant rock left standing when all else around it has worn away. Bornhardts are not that uncommon – the Devils Marbles are a collection of miniature bornhardts – but nowhere else on earth has one lump of rock been left in such dramatic and solitary splendour or assumed such a pleasing smooth symmetry. It is a hundred million years old. Go there, man.

  Afterwards we had one last drive around the rock before heading back to the lonely highway. We had been at the site for barely two hours, obviously not nearly enough, but I realized as I turned around in my seat to watch it shrinking into the background behind us that there never could be enough, and I felt moderately comforted by that thought.

  Anyway, I’ll be back. I have no doubt of that. And next time I’m bringing a really good metal detector.

  So we drove all the way back to Alice Springs. To compensate for our setback at Uluru, we decided to stay at one of Alice’s fancy outlying resort hotels and hang the expense. Imagine then our surprise and gratification when we pulled into the oasis-like splendour of the Red Centre Resort and discovered that it was $20 a night less than we had paid for much less at the town-centre Best Western the night before. This alone, we agreed at once, was almost worth a 600-mile drive.

  The Red Centre was really just a very large motel with a bit of landscaping, but it was friendly and welcoming and at its heart was a pool with a terrace and an adjoining bar and restaurant. Needless to say, this is where we were to be found thirty seconds after arrival. There we were told by the kindly staff that we were too late for dinner, but that they could probably rustle us up a couple of steak sandwiches or something. We told them we would be grateful for whatever they could give us, particularly if it was accompanied with drink, then took a table by the pool’s edge, where we sat watching the tranquil shimmer of the water and savouring the delightfully warm and wholesome desert air, under a sky spread with stars.

  Suddenly life seemed pretty good. Our driving was behind us now. We had seen Uluru – too briefly, perhaps, but sufficient to appreciate its wonders. And here at the Red Centre we appeared to have landed on our feet.

  Allan announced his intention to spend his final day in Australia sitting in a lounger beside the pool, reading inferior fiction and working on his tan.

  ‘How very shallow of you,’ I said.

  He accepted the criticism with imperturbable equanimity.

  ‘So you’re not coming to see the desert park?’ I said.

  ‘Nope. Nor the telegraph station, nor the sand dune hall of fame, nor the fig farm . . .’

  ‘It’s a date garden.’

  A pause to stand corrected. ‘Nor anywhere else. I’m going to sit right here beside this pool and pass my day in a vain and idle manner. And you?’

  ‘I’m going to see the sights, of course.’

  ‘Well, then I will meet you afterwards and you can tell me all about it, no doubt in excruciatingly boring detail.’

  ‘You can count on it.’

  And so the following morning I emerged from my room in a clean summer shirt, clutching a notebook with a pen tucked into the spiral, and went off in a dutiful frame of mind to see what Alice had to offer. I called first at the telegraph station, on a patch of sunny high ground a mile or so outside town. In its early days Alice Springs was a repeater station, one of twelve between Darwin and Adelaide, which were needed to boost signals on their way across the country. What a forlorn and tedious existence that must have been, stuck in the middle of a suffocating nowhere, endlessly tapping out second-hand messages involving people you would never see or know, living in places you could only dream about. Outside the station was the reedy pool of water from which Alice Springs takes its name. The Alice in question was the wife of the director of telegraphs in Adelaide, and originally it was only the station that was called Alice Springs. The town that slowly rose in the valley below was called Stuart, after the explorer. For some reason people found this confusing, and in 1933 the whole became known as Alice Springs. So the most famous town in the outback is named for a woman who had no connection with it and, as far as I know, never saw it.

  This done, I made a tick beside ‘Telegraph Station’ on my list of things to do, then drove on to the Alice Springs Desert Park. My expectations frankly were not high, but in fact it was splendid. It’s run by the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory. What they have done is recreate over a large area three primary desert habitats – one that is very dry, one that gets a little moisture, and one that is normally dry but occasionally is swept by flash floods. This alone provided a worthwhile lesson – it makes you realize that deserts in their quiet, arid way are as varied as other environments – but I was also grateful to find various shrubs and other plants labelled and explained. It was a pleasure to be able to say: ‘Ah, so that’s kangaroo paw. Well, I never. And let’s see if this spinifex really does hurt as much as Ernest Giles said. Why, yes, it does!’

  Scattered at intervals were large walk-in enclosures containing birds and other small desert animals – bandicoots and bush-tailed possums and so on – with labels detailing their habits. Best of all was a large nocturnal house where all manner of night creatures endlessly prowled and hopped and sniffed the air in a succession of night-time dioramas. The display area was so faintly illuminated that it was actually possible to walk into walls and glass panels, but as my eyes slowly adjusted I was able to pick out an amazingly diverse and rewarding range of small marsupials – potoroos and bettongs and bilbies and numbats and quolls and much more.

  Because Australia is so vast and arid and difficult a landscape to study, and because the modest population base produces comparatively few scientists for the amount of ground to be covered, and because, above all, the animals within it are often small, furtive, nocturnal and sometimes mysterious, even now nobody really knows quite what is out there. Any list of Australian wildlife is arrestingly punctuated with qualified comments like ‘possibly extinct’ or ‘thought to be endangered’ or ‘may survive in some remote areas’. The difficulties are well illustrated, I think, by the uncertain fate of the oolacunta, or desert rat kangaroo. Nearly everything that is known about this interesting creature is owed to two men. The first was a nineteenth-century naturalist named John Gould, who studied and described the animal in 1843. It had, according to Gould, the shape and manner of a kangaroo but was only about the size of a rabbit. What particularly distinguished it was that it could move at very high speeds for unusually long distances. Since that one initial report, however, the oolacunta had not been seen. Enter Hedley Herbert Finlayson.

  Finlayson was a chemist by profession, but devoted much of his life to searching for rare native animals. In 1931 he led an expedition that travelled on horseback deep into the interior, to the perpetual furnace that is Sturt’s Stony Desert. Upon arriving, Finlayson was surprised to discover that the little desert rat kangaroo, far from being on the verge of extinction or possibly gone altogether, was both visible and clearly thriving. The animal’s speed and endurance were just as Gould had reported. Once when Finlayson and his colleagues gave chase on horseback a desert rat kangaroo ran twelve miles without pause through the searing heat of day, exhausting three horses in the process. Ounce for ounce, the little oolacunta may well have been the greatest runner (or bouncer, actually) the animal kingdom has ever produced. Returning to society, Finlayson reported his exciting find and naturalists and zoologists everywhere dutifully amended their texts to account for the desert rat kangaroo’s rediscov
ery. Over the next three years Finlayson made further expeditions, but in 1935 when he returned once more he was nonplussed, as you may imagine, to discover that the little desert rat kangaroo had quietly vanished – as utterly as it had after Gould’s single sighting in 1843. It hasn’t been seen since.

  The chronicles of Australian fauna are amazingly full of stories such as this – of animals that are there one moment and gone the next. A more recent casualty of the phenomenon was a frog called Rheobatrachus silus, which was around for such a short time that it didn’t even manage to attract an informal name. What was extraordinary about R. silus (and it almost goes without saying that there would be something) was that it gave birth to live young through its mouth – something never before seen in nature inside Australia or out. It was discovered by biologists in 1973 and by 1981 it had disappeared. It is listed as ‘probably extinct’.

  My favourite animal disappearance story, however, harks back to a somewhat earlier age. It concerns a nineteenth-century naturalist named Gerard Krefft, who in 1857 caught two very rare pig-footed bandicoots. Unfortunately for science and for the bandicoots, Krefft soon afterwards grew hungry and ate them. They were, as far as anyone can tell, the last of the species. Certainly none has been seen since. Krefft, incidentally, was later appointed head of the Australian Museum in Sydney, but was invited to seek alternative employment when it was discovered that he was supplementing his salary by selling pornographic postcards. I am sure there must be a moral in there somewhere.

  From the Desert Park, I went to the Strehlow Aboriginal Research Centre. This was a quietly boring display concerning a man born on the Hermannsburg Mission, an Aboriginal reserve outside Alice, who devoted his life to studying Aborigines. He collected a huge stock of spiritual artifacts, but because they are sacred and not allowed to be seen by the uninitiated, they cannot be put on display. What you get instead are lots of old photographs of life at Hermannsburg and more detail on the life and work of Theodore Strehlow than a reasonable person could wish.

  However, as I was walking back to the car, I noticed a small aviation museum in an old hangar next door. Curiously, no one was in attendance, but the door was open so I stepped inside and had a look around. The museum had a fairly predictable assortment of old engines and walls of yellowing photographs, but in a separate building there was something I had no idea still existed and certainly never expected to see. No guidebook I have ever seen draws attention to it; even the local tourism literature contained no hint that it is there. But for a few fretful days in 1929 it was the most famous and sought-after object in Australia – and here it was in a small aviation museum in Alice Springs, of all places. I refer to the remains of a light aircraft known as the Kookaburra, which went down in the desert while searching for a lost pilot named Charles Kingsford Smith.

  Kingsford Smith was not only the greatest Australian aviator of his age, but possibly the greatest aviator ever. He held more records than anyone else and tackled infinitely more daring challenges. Just a year after Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo flight across the Atlantic, Kingsford Smith became the first to cross the Pacific – a far more ambitious enterprise, not simply because the scale was greater but because flying conditions were much, much tougher and far less well understood. At the time of his Pacific attempt, only ten months had passed since the first aeroplane had successfully flown to Hawaii in a race sponsored by a Hawaiian pineapple magnate – and that event had claimed the lives of ten airmen. So when, in 1928, Kingsford Smith set off with a crew of three from San Francisco aiming to reach Brisbane by way of Honolulu and Suva in Fiji, the undertaking was widely held to be impossible and insane, and so it nearly proved. Six hundred miles out from Hawaii, Kingsford Smith flew into a belt of meteorological liveliness known as the intertropical convergence zone – an expanse of boiling clouds, towering storms and the sort of winds that could blow a moustache off. As his small craft began to bounce about like some kind of elasticated toy, Kingsford Smith had no idea what to expect, or when it might end, because no pilot had ever flown into such a system before.

  This was, bear in mind, in a frail, spruce-framed, cloth-covered 1920s Fokker so elemental in design that the seats weren’t even bolted down. For hours Kingsford Smith fought to hold the plane steady and in one piece. When at last it popped into clear air, he and his men were perilously low on fuel and faced with the problem of finding Fiji – a dot in an all but infinite ocean – before their engine ran dry and they fell into the sea. This and a hundred other alarming obstacles Kingsford Smith tackled with courage, skill, resolution and wit. Crossing the Pacific was possibly the most daring organized feat of aviation ever.

  Kingsford Smith always flew with a co-pilot, and generally with a navigator and radioman as well, so it is unfair to compare his achievements with the solitary heroics of Charles Lindbergh. None the less it is fair to observe that Lindbergh never flew through anything as ferocious as Kingsford Smith’s Pacific storm. Indeed, after 1927 Lindbergh scarcely made another notable flight. Kingsford Smith, on the other hand, flew on and on, establishing records all over. He became the first to fly the Atlantic from east to west (again much tougher because it was against the jet stream), first to fly from Australia to New Zealand and back again, and first to cross the Pacific in the other direction. He also held a fistful of records for fastest flights between Australia and England, and for various legs along the way.

  Which brings us to the Kookaburra. In March 1929, with a crew of three, Kingsford Smith set off to fly from Sydney to England. Over north-west Australia, along the Kimberley coast, they hit bad weather, grew hopelessly lost (not altogether surprisingly: for guidance they had only a couple of admiralty charts and a map of Australia torn from a standard Times Atlas) and made a forced landing on a coastal mudflat, with almost no fuel left and hopelessly short of supplies. Almost all they had was a flask of coffee and some brandy, which could be combined to make a drink called a coffee royal. Thus what followed became known, somewhat darkly, as the Coffee Royal Affair.

  Luckily for Kingsford Smith, he and his men were in an area with plentiful fresh water and some adequate if unappealing sources of food (mud snails mostly). However, because the plane’s radio was broken, they had no way of telling the outside world where they were. When news of the disappearance reached Sydney, two of Kingsford Smith’s associates, Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock, decided to mount a rescue. In the little Kookaburra they took off from Mascot Airport in Sydney, flew by stages to Alice Springs, and finally set off from there on what was supposed to be the final leg early on the morning of 12 April 1929. Soon afterwards, while crossing the parched emptiness of the Tanami Desert – the area that Allan and I had skirted in the car on our drive from Daly Waters to Alice Springs – the engine began to sputter and backfire and they were forced to make an emergency landing in the desert. In their haste to depart they had packed no food and only three litres of water. Unlike Kingsford Smith, they landed in a place that offered no succour.

  They were dead by the third day. That is how unimaginably murderous the outback is. I don’t wish to seem obsessive about this, but they drank their own urine, too. Nearly everybody does who gets stuck in the outback. (It’s actually counterproductive because the salts in urine accelerate thirst.)

  At almost the moment when Anderson and Hitchcock were wretchedly expiring, Kingsford Smith and his cronies were rescued by someone else. They returned to civilization looking so fit and rested that some people began to suspect (and some newspapers to speculate) that it had all been a publicity stunt. The whole thing grew rather ugly. Kingsford Smith was subjected to the humiliation of a public inquiry into his character (he was ultimately exonerated). Meanwhile, the nation waited breathlessly for news that Anderson and Hitchcock had been found alive. Alas, they were not. In late April, a search plane spotted the downed Kookaburra with their bodies nearby, and a few days later a rescue party recovered the remains and brought them back to civilization. Hitchcock’s family opted for a q
uiet funeral in Perth, but Anderson was given a state funeral of the most grave and magnificent pomp in Sydney. For days beforehand people in their thousands stood in line for hours to view the coffin. On the day of the funeral, thousands more lined the streets to watch the cortège or gathered at the burial site. It was the biggest funeral in Sydney to that time, possibly the biggest ever.

  Today, it almost goes without saying, Anderson and Hitchcock are completely forgotten, inside Australia as well as out. So, too, for a long time was the Kookaburra. It sat in the desert, rusting and unnoted, for half a century before it was finally collected and taken to Darwin for restoration. About ten years ago, it was placed in a special small building at the aviation museum at Alice Springs, where it appears to attract no attention whatever.

  Kingsford Smith returned to flying, setting yet more records. In 1935, while flying home from England, his plane crashed into the sea off Burma, taking him with it. Today, he is fitfully remembered in Australia (Sydney’s airport is named after him) and not at all elsewhere. In 1998, the American writer Scott Berg produced a 600-page doorstop biography of Charles Lindbergh, which naturally ranged over the whole story of aviation’s early days. Of Charles Kingsford Smith it contained not a mention.

  Allan and I dined that evening on the patio of the Red Centre, where I told him in great detail about my many exciting discoveries of the day. As we sat enjoying the warm evening and lazily finding our way to the bottom of our second bottle of very nice Western Australia Cabernet Sauvignon, as if on cue a wallaby hopped up to the perimeter fence on the far side of the swimming pool, regarded us for a moment with a general air of unconcern, and began nibbling the shrubs that were planted there. It was the first time since my crossing of the country on the Indian Pacific many weeks earlier that I had seen a distinctive Australian animal in the wild. It was the first time Allan ever had, and he was thrilled.