Down Under

by Bryson, Bill

  But I hardly minded at all. And do you know why? I had seen a monotreme. Life could throw nothing at me that would diminish the thrill of that. Sustained by this thought, I drained my beer, lowered myself gingerly from the bar stool and limped through the staring crowds to see if I could find a taxi to take me back to the city.

  In the morning, I took custody of another rental car and set off on the penultimate of my Australian quests. I was on my way to the great jarrah and karri forests of the south-west peninsula. If that sounds a trifle dull, then bear with me please, for these are exceptional trees. They are to the Australian arboreal world what the giant worm of Gippsland is to invertebrates: large, under-appreciated, and mysteriously occurring in only one small area, the south-west corner of Western Australia below Perth. Karris are Australia’s sequoias. They attain heights of over 250 feet, but it is their amazing girth – they can be up to fifty feet around and scarcely taper on their climb to their distant crowns – that gives them their majesty. Think of the mightiest, most graceful sycamore you have ever seen, then triple it in every dimension and you have pretty well got a karri.

  The dominant species of the region, however, is the handsome and noble jarrah, slightly less massive than the karri, but still enormous and arresting. It is something of a miracle that jarrahs are left at all, for it is just about the unluckiest tree alive. The specialization that allowed it to flourish in the first place was also its tragic undoing, for jarrah has the poor luck to thrive in soils rich in bauxite, and bauxite is a very valuable mineral. In the 1950s mining companies discovered the connection and came almost simultaneously to the exhilarating realization that they could knock down and sell the jarrah for quite a lot of money, then dig out all that gorgeously commercial bauxite underneath, thus getting two lots of income from one plot of land. Life doesn’t get much better than that – so long, of course, as your conscience can bear the thought of removing large stands of prime forest of a type that occurs nowhere else and replacing them with large, unsightly gashes. Mining engineers – these people are so ingenious – got around this problem by having no consciences at all. Brilliant!

  In this they were long aided by their colleagues in the forestry industry. Australian foresters, it must be said, do rather like to chop down a tree. You can’t entirely blame them – it is after all how they make their livelihood – and unquestionably they are less reckless than in former times, but they were allowed to get away with so much for so long that they still need the most attentive watching. These are people, you must understand, who could describe clear-cutting as ‘the full sunlight method of regeneration’ and not blush. Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world’s largest exporter of woodchips. Now I am no authority, and for all I know this is all managed with the most exacting care (that is certainly the impression the Australian Department of Conservation and Land Management strives to create), but it does seem to me that there is a certain mathematical discrepancy between having very few trees on the one hand and the world’s liveliest chip-exporting industry on the other. Anyway, there is much less jarrah forest than there once was, and even a good deal less of the rare and clearly irreplaceable karri forests. According to William J. Lines, between 1976 and 1993 Australia lost a quarter of its karri forests to woodchipping. To woodchipping! I repeat: these people need watching.

  Even without its singular forests, the south-west corner of Australia would be an area of interest. Stretching for about 180 miles from Cape Naturaliste on the Indian Ocean to Cape Knob on the Southern Ocean, it is another of those unexpected intrusions of comparative lushness that occur in Australia from time to time. It’s rather like the Barossa Valley of South Australia, but so obscure and unassuming that it doesn’t even have a name. Nearly everywhere you go in Australia you are provided with a handy label to fix your bearings – Sunshine Coast, Northern Tropics, Mornington Peninsula, Atherton Tablelands – but the zippiest appellation I saw for this region was ‘the Southern corner of Western Australia’. I think they need to work on that a little. However, of the land itself and the seas beyond, no improvements are necessary.

  Perhaps it was because my Australian adventure was nearly at an end and I was feeling consequently affectionate, or maybe because I had spent so much of the previous couple of weeks at large in arid landscapes, or perhaps simply because I knew almost nothing of the area (hardly anyone outside Western Australia does) and thus had no expectations to disappoint, but I was charmed at once. It was as if it had been assembled from the most pleasant, least showy parts of Europe and North America: lowland Scotland, the Meuse Valley of Belgium, Michigan’s upper peninsula, Wisconsin’s dairyland, Shropshire or Herefordshire in England – nice parts of the world but nothing you would normally travel vast distances to savour. This wasn’t a world-class landscape, but it was an engagingly snug and wholesome one. I dubbed it – and offer it here for free pending the invention of something better – the Pleasant Peninsula. (‘Where everything is . . . rather nice!’)

  So I spent an agreeable day – a pleasant day – motoring through woods and rolling fields, past orderly orchards and bottle-green vineyards, on winding country roads forever running down to a blue and sunny sea. It was a blessed little realm. I stopped often in the country towns – Donnybrook, Bridgetown, Busselton, Margaret River – to sit with a cup of coffee or browse through stacks of secondhand books or take a walk along a wooden pier or duney foreshore.

  I stayed the night in Manjimup, on the edge of the southern woodlands, and in the morning rose early and refreshed, and set off without delay in the direction of Shannon and Mount Frankland National Parks. Within minutes I was in cool, green forests of erect and stately grandeur. This was very promising indeed. I was headed for a place called the Valley of the Giants, to a recently developed tourist attraction that I had been told not to miss. It’s called the Tree Top Walk, and as the name suggests it is an elevated walkway that wanders through the canopy of a grove of tingle trees – yet another of the rare outsized species of eucalypts unique to the region. I had assumed it was essentially a gimmick, but in fact I discovered that tingle trees, for all their immensity, are quite delicate and reliant on the few nutrients to be found in the soil at their bases, and that the constant trampling of visitors’ feet was interfering with the breakdown of organic matter, imperilling their well-being. The Tree Top Walk thus not only provided visitors with a novel diversion and an unusual perspective, but also kept them conveniently out of harm’s way.

  The Tree Top Walk stands a mile or two into coastal forest near the small town of Walpole. I arrived at opening time, but already the car park was crowded and filling fast.

  A lot of people were gathered by the entrance and milling around in the little shop. The whole thing is run by the Department of Conservation and Land Management and, like the Desert Park at Alice Springs, it was an impressive example of a government department doing something innovative and doing it extremely well. We could do with these people back in the Known World.

  Well, all I can say is that the Tree Top Walk deserves to be world famous. It consists of a series of cantilevered metal ramps, like industrial catwalks, wandering at exhilarating heights through the uppermost levels of some of the world’s most beautiful and imposing trees. The Tree Top Walk is an impressive erection. It runs for almost 2,000 feet and at its highest point stands 120 feet above the ground – a goodly height, believe me, when you are peering over the edge of a waist-high railing. Since the walkway surface is an open grid that lets you look straight down – indeed, more or less compels you to – there is a certain element of rakishness and daring in proceeding along it. I loved it. There are larger trees than the tingle (even the ashes of eastern Australia grow a little higher) and doubtless there are more beautiful trees than the tingle, but I cannot believe that there are any trees in the world that are both. Redwoods may reach giddier heights, but their canopy is nothing
– like a broom handle with nails hammered into it. Tingles, because they are broad-leafed, spread out with luxuriant profusion. Makes all the difference. You simply won’t find a better tree.

  I went around twice, charmed and appreciative. It wasn’t until I was halfway around the second time that I realized that actually it was quite crowded and that, like everyone else, I was sharing the experience with those around me, pointing out things to strangers and in turn allowing them to point things out to me. I am seldom drawn to strange children but I found myself now talking to two young boys – bright young brothers, about ten and twelve, on holiday from Melbourne with their parents – trying to decide between us whether there were koalas in Western Australia and whether we might therefore spy any up here in the treetops. Then their father joined us and we discussed it with him. Then the mother came along and took one look at me. ‘You know, you’re awfully sunburnt,’ she said with concern, and offered me some cream from her bag. I declined, but was touched nonetheless.

  It was oddly heart-warming to realize that we were all having this experience together, sharing our observations and pharmaceutical products. It reminded me very much of my stroll through the parks of Adelaide on Australia Day when hundreds of people seemed to be – effectively were – picnicking together. This had that same spirit of shared undertaking. In the most interesting and elemental anthropological sense, this was a social occasion.

  Even then, it didn’t quite register with me how important a component this is in Australian life until I descended to ground level and strolled through an area called the Ancient Empire. This consisted of a protective boardwalk path that made a large and inviting loop through another part of the same woods. It was in its way nearly as diverting as the Tree Top Walk – to stand at the foot of a circle of tingle trees, head craned to take in their impossibly remote heights, is an experience almost as dizzying as wandering on foot through the leafy canopy – but because the boardwalk wasn’t novel and lofty, no one came here. I had it entirely to myself, but rather than feeling pleased to have found solitude, as I normally would, I felt suddenly quite lonely. ‘Hey, everybody!’ I wanted to call. ‘Come down and see this! It’s great. Come down and be with me! Somebody! Please!!’

  But of course I said no such thing. Instead I had a long and respectful look around. It struck me in a moment’s idle thinking that this forest was quite an apt metaphor for Australia. It was to the arboreal world what Charles Kingsford Smith was to aviation or the Aborigines were to prehistory – unaccountably overlooked. It seemed amazing to me, in any case, that there could exist in this one confined area some of the rarest and mightiest broad-leafed trees on earth, forming a forest of consummate and singular beauty, and hardly anyone outside Australia has even heard of them. But that is the thing about Australia, of course – that it is packed with unappreciated wonders.

  And with that thought in mind, I set off now for what was, in its quiet way, one of the most amazing wonders of all.

  Earlier on this trip, while driving back to Sydney from Surfers Paradise, I stopped for coffee in a pleasant college town called Armidale in north-eastern New South Wales. Indulging myself in a brief amble through its attractive streets, I happened on an official-looking building called the Mineral Resources Administration and – I don’t know why exactly – I went in. I had long wondered why there is such an abundance of mineral wealth in Australia and not, say, in my back garden, and I went in thinking maybe somebody could tell me. One of the delights of poking about journalistically in a cheerful and open society like Australia’s is that you can just turn up in places like the Mineral Resources Administration with nothing very particular in mind, and people will invite you in and answer any questions you care to put to them.

  The upshot is that I spent a half hour with an obliging geologist named Harvey Henley who told me that in fact Australia is not really fantastically overendowed with mineral resources – at least not on the basis of mineral wealth per square metre. It’s just that Australia has a lot of square metres, relatively few people and a short history, so that much of the country is still unexplored and unexamined. To put matters in perspective for me, he took me through to his work area to show me what he does for a living. He makes geological maps, large, impressively detailed ones, rolled like blueprints, which he spread across a table with a certain respectful care, as if they were old prints. Even an untrained eye could see that they recorded every lump and ruffle on the landscape, with particular emphasis on pools of mineralogical splendour. Each, he explained, covered a portion of New South Wales sixty kilometres long by forty wide and took ten to fifteen man-years to produce. The Armidale team was in the process of surveying eighty such blocks.

  ‘Big job,’ I said, impressed.

  ‘You bet. But we’re finding new stuff all the time.’ He drew back one map to expose the one beneath. ‘That,’ he said, tapping a portion of the map shaded in a restful pastel tone, ‘is a new mine at a place called Cadice Hill near Orange. It contains about 200 million tonnes of mineral-bearing sands.’

  ‘And that’s good, is it?’

  ‘That’s very good.’

  ‘So,’ I said thoughtfully, trying to get a grasp on all this, ‘if it takes ten to fifteen man-years to produce one map covering a block of land sixty kilometres by forty, and if there are eight million square kilometres in Australia, then how much of the country has been properly surveyed?’

  He looked at me as if I had asked a very basic question.

  ‘Oh, hardly any.’

  I found this quite an arresting thought. ‘Really?’ I said.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘So,’ I went on, still thoughtful, ‘if you parachuted me into some random spot in the outback, into the Strzelecki Desert or something, I would be landing on a patch of land that had never been surveyed?’

  ‘Formally surveyed? Almost certainly.’

  I gave a moment to taking this aboard. ‘So just how much mineral wealth might be left out there to be discovered?’

  He looked at me with the happy beam of a man whose work will never be completed. ‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘Impossible to say.’

  Now hold that thought just for a moment while I take you with me onto the lonely coastal highway from Perth north towards Darwin, 4,163 kilometres away. Here, near the coast, there are a very few towns and quite a lot of visible farming, but head inland over the low, pale green hills to the right and with amazing swiftness you will find yourself in a murderous and confusing emptiness. And nobody really knows what is out there. I find that a terribly exciting thought. Even now people still sometimes make the sort of stupefying, effortless finds that can only happen in uncharted country. Just recently, some beaming fellow had come in from the western deserts cradling a solid gold nugget weighing sixty pounds. It was nearly the largest such nugget ever found, and it was just lying in the desert. Goodness!

  Mining experts may study satellite images and the sort of charts generated by repeated aeroplane passes at low altitudes (‘fantasy maps’ as Harvey Henley termed them for me, just a touch dismissively), but up-close investigations, the kind that involve wandering through dried riverbeds and taking rocks away for later analysis, have barely begun. The problem lies not just in the vastness of Australia – though that is daunting enough, goodness knows – but in the risks involved in wandering into unknown country. As the British palaeontologist Richard Fortey has written: ‘Tracks appear briefly, only to disappear into ambiguous washes, where the bewildered and anxious passenger is instructed to hang out the window to look for broken twigs which might indicate where a vehicle has passed before . . . It is appallingly easy to get lost.’

  In such an environment rumours of fabulous, unexploited finds naturally proliferate. The most famous story concerns a man named Harold Bell Lasseter, who in the 1920s claimed to have stumbled on a gold reef some ten miles long in the central deserts thirty years before, but for various reasons beyond his control had neglected to return to claim it. Although it seem
s an unlikely tale, the story evidently had greater plausibility than a bare description would suggest. In any case, Lasseter managed to persuade several sceptical businessmen and even some large corporations (General Motors, for one) to underwrite an expedition, which set off from Alice Springs in 1930. After several weeks of confused and fruitless tramping around, Lasseter’s backers began to lose confidence. One by one his team members abandoned him, until Lasseter was on his own. One night his two camels bolted. Lost and on foot, he died a lonely and wretched death. I dare say he drank some urine. In any case, he never found the gold. People are searching for it yet.

  Although Lasseter was almost certainly either sorely deluded or a charlatan, the idea of there being a vast reef of gold just sitting in the desert is not at all beyond the bounds of reasonable possibility. Nor is it as implausible as it seems that people might make such a fabulous find and then, as it were, mislay it. Others far more meticulous and attentive than Lasseter have misplaced important discoveries in the desert. Such was the case of Stan Awramik, a geologist who was poking about in the low, irregular, exceedingly hot hills of the Pilbara, a region of north-western Australia still largely unexplored, when he came upon an outcrop of rocks bearing tiny fossilized organisms called stromatolites dating back to the dawn of life some 3.5 billion years ago. At the time of Awramik’s discovery they were the most ancient fossils yet found on earth. From a scientific point of view, these rocks were the equivalent of Lasseter’s elusive gold reef. Awramik collected some samples and made his way back to civilization. But when he returned to the Pilbara to pursue his searches, he couldn’t find the rock outcrop again. It had just vanished into an endless sameness of low hills. Somewhere out there those original stromatolites still wait to be rediscovered. It could as easily have been gold.