Lost Worlds Read online

  And so for the next half hour or so Graeme gave me his potted-history version of the Aborigine versus the white Australian. It was a long, tawdry monologue, amusing at times, but basically the familiar “surely we’ve done enough for them now” kind of diatribe one hears at home from staunch right-wingers.

  “I mean, it’s gettin’ crazy, Dave. They’ve got these sacred sites everywhere. Any bloody rock or stream or mountain you look at—it’ll be a sacred site of some kind.”

  “Well—isn’t that the ‘songline’ concept?” (I had decided it was time to say something.) “The Aborigine idea that Australia was ‘sung’ into existence and only keeps that existence by constant ‘singing’ along invisible trails that link all landmarks—all those sacred places—lakes, rivers, ranges—whatever.” (I’d just finished rereading Bruce Chatwin’s beautiful book The Songlines and was feeling a little professorial).

  Graeme gave me a frowning sidelong glance—a rather diffiuclt thing to do, as we were now crashing and bounding along a five-foot-wide dirt track that disappeared with increasing regularity into creek beds and thickets of spinifex, dwarf palm, and thorn trees. It looked like the African savanna.

  “How long y’say y’been here, Dave?”

  “Four days—and mostly without sleep.” (God—was I looking forward to a quiet campsite and a bed on soft earth, hummed to sleep by choirs of cooing doves and whistling cicadas….)

  “Y’been doing some readin’, then?”

  “Oh, some. But it’s interesting to hear your viewpoint.”

  “Yeah, well,” growled Graeme, his voice a little lower now, “you’ll be hearin’ plenty more as you travel around. We’re gettin’ really fed up with the whole bloody thing. Y’know what they done now. They’ve gone’n claimed Ayers Rock as a big sacred site and they’re stoppin’ ordinary people takin’ photos and they’re chargin’ journalists and that kind a flippin’ fortune.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’d heard something about that.”

  “Yeah, well—it’s getting worse all the time. We jus’ keep throwin’ money at ’em and they just keep grabbin’ for more. And then they waste it all. We buy ’em bloody Land Cruisers—brand-new, twenty-five to thirty-thousand-dollar machines—and what do they do? They run out of petrol and think the bloody thing’s gone ’n’ conked out on ’em, so they ditch it and say it’s no good and ask for another!”

  (Memories of all the old tales back in England about the uselessness of building public housing for poor slum families—“What do they do? They’ve never seen a bathtub in their lives before, so they use it to keep coal in…and pigs in the back garden…and…”)

  Graeme must have read my thoughts. “I mean, take Halls Creek. My town. Only a little place. I was on the council. We built brand-new houses for ’em—lovely, they were—painted ’em up pretty—new kitchens, bathrooms. Planted trees and bushes ’n’ that. An’ jus’ look at ’em now. Five years later. Bloody great holes in the walls, windows knocked out, wiring and pipes gone. They’re out there in the garden where the grass was, burnin’ up their trees ’n’ bushes in campfires. We had to move them. You’ll see when you get back. Most of ’em’s empty now. They were wrecked! They said they wanted to go back to the bush. So we gave ’em some concrete floors, a well, some toilets—in the hills jus’ out of town—and some sheets of corrugated iron ’n’ stuff, and let ’em build whatever they wanted—and they built what they’ve built for thousands of years, little humpies, like open Quonset huts with sidewalls of spinifex and bushes. They’re happy now…but all them houses are just wasted. I mean, it’s bloody criminal, Dave. I tell you—we’ve had enough.”

  I nodded. There didn’t seem to be much point in arguing fine details at this time about the slow pace of societal evolution and imposing Western values on ancient indigenous cultures that weren’t particularly enamored with us—or our material trappings.

  “I hear what you say. I’ve seen similar problems in the Indian reservations back home in the United States.”

  “Yeah, well, I heard America’s got plenty o’ problems. But I think we’ve just gone too soft. We give ’em everything they ask for and hope they don’t make any more fuss. Y’just can’t keep doin’ that, Dave.”

  Murray added his assertions and affirmations in the form of strings of expletives and graphic threats of confrontations and retributions to come.

  Then there was silence for a while. We seemed to have got through the diatribe stage and I was glad they’d let off steam so early in the journey. Now perhaps we could move on to other things—like the journey itself.

  “Wallaby there, Dave—y’see it?” Murray was pointing to a hillside of bare boulders. I couldn’t see anything except rocks.

  “Y’gotta keep your eyes peeled,” he cautioned. “They move like the ’crackers ’round here.”

  And so did we. The Land Cruiser seemed an old exponent of buckled, rockbound track travel as we crashed and thrashed our way through more creek beds and over boulder-strewn ridges. The land was cracked and brittle despite the recent downpours. Heat hazes shimmered along the horizons. The sky was a searing silver which stung the eyes. Hot dry air full of dust and grit tore through the open windows.

  “Doesn’t look like this track is used much.”

  “Naw, y’right, Dave,” said Graeme. “The Bungle’s still a pretty remote place for most folks. Some of ’em start out all right, but after the first puncture or a sideswipe from a boulder they decide they’d rather keep what’s left of their car than chance it any further.”

  After a couple of hours driving deeper and deeper into the buckled, broken desert, we paused by a spring-fed pool shaded by white-trunk eucalyptus—aptly named “ghost trees.” After the din and dust of the trail it was wonderful to lie on warm soft sand, dangling my legs in cool water, and listening to the silence of the desert. Even Graeme and Murray seemed moved. All the aggressive belligerences of their earlier outbursts seemed to have faded away into the peace of the place and they lay back in the shade, smoking cigarettes, sipping the cool water from their billycans, and saying nothing.

  Our break was only a short one. The driving continued and the track got worse, and I began to realize why the Bungle Bungle may have remained an elusive secret for so long.

  Then we topped a high, barren ridge and Graeme paused on the crest. As the red dust dissipated he pointed across the spinifex plain below to a hazy gray-red rock massif.

  “There she is,” he said.

  At first sight it was not a particularly entrancing scene.

  “Where are all the beehives?” I asked. It looked like a poor man’s Ayers Rock.

  Graeme laughed. “You’re looking at the west face. The beehives are all on the other side. You’ll see ’em!”

  I was still not convinced it had been worth all the effort. Many of Australia’s “sights” are notable for their subtle modesty—enjoyed more in microcosm than in breathtaking macrovistas. There are no great alpine ranges or Grand Canyons in the vast red and ancient plateaus that form most of the nation’s endless outback. This looked like just one more rather anticlimactic attraction.

  “You wait on, Dave. You won’t believe this place.” Graeme smiled and slapped my shoulder. “No place like it—anywhere.”

  I smiled back, a little weakly, and hoped he was right.

  After more interminable bone-battering driving we arrived at “camp,” which consisted of a series of army-gray tents and a cookout area on the edge of a dry creek and shaded by white brittle range gum and river redgum trees. “Shaded” is perhaps the wrong term. Eucalyptus trees are notorious for their lack of shade. Sparse narrow-leaf coverage creates at best a lacy semblance of shadow but no real protection from the heat, particularly at this time, the approach of searing summer and the great “wets” which last from November through March.

  Graeme possessed a remarkable love for the scraggly, bark-dripping gum trees of the outback and, after unloading supplies, took me on a tour of the campsite. He rattled
off the names, both in colloquial Australian and loquacious Latin: “Now that’s a Eucalyptus papuanti, the famous ghost gum that you see in a lot of paintings, and there’s your Eucalyptus confertiflora, the cabbage gum. Now here’s a nice little snappy gum, the Eucalyptus brevifilia, and your silver-leafed box, the Eucalyptus pruinosa….”

  Someone told me that Australia boasted over two hundred different species of gum or eucalyptus trees and it looked like Graeme was endeavoring to find an example of each around our dusty camp.

  Fortuntately, he noticed my sweaty, tired face.

  “Jeez, Dave, y’look bushed, mate. Listen, we’ve got things to do for a while. Why don’t you just kip down and we’ll take a drive later on when it cools?”

  If I was in the habit of doing so I would have hugged him. But I compromised with a grateful smile and a weary nod.

  He suggested a place shaded by the trunks of a group of trees and gave me a hefty canvas “Kimberley Swag.”

  “Y’see one of them before—right?”

  “No—I don’t believe I have.”

  “Aw, these are great. Real outback kit. Here let me show you….”

  He carefully undid the leather straps and buckles and opened up a broad piece of green canvas, around nine feet square, to reveal an instant bed—pillow, thin foam mattress, two Velcrosealed pockets for valuables, and a long, sewn-in mosquito net.

  “Okay, mate. Get a bit a kip and I’ll wake y’up with a cuppa later on.”

  I didn’t believe it. I was actually being invited to sleep after three days of almost constant movement. As soon as my head sank into the little foam pillow I was gone.

  Evening was all an outback evening should be. A great crimson ball of sun sinking slowly toward the western ridges, stroking the plains in a translucent orange light and casting long, thin shadows of spinifex and thorn tree. The bulk of the Bungle Bungle looked more majestic now, its towering sandstone cliffs glowing with such violent intensity it seemed that the light came from within the ancient rock itself.

  I remembered something else I’d read in D. H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo. He wrote of “a subtlely remote, formless beauty, more poignant than anything I’ve ever experienced before.” I was beginning to understand the feelings behind his words.

  Something was watching me. Something quite close by. I lifted myself up slowly from the swag and saw a four-foot-high rotund ball of fur with a face something like an interbred deer and rabbit with delicate little front paws clasped together as if about to make a speech, and a rotund haunch, ending in a long, leathery, wormlike tail.

  A young wallaby. At last!

  My eyes were still full of sleep and I must have moved a little too clumsily trying to reach for my camera. The creature gave a kind of frustrated sigh—and vanished.

  “Did y’see him?” asked Graeme, carrying a huge enamel mug of hot tea over to my swag.

  “Only just. He didn’t seem to want to hang about.”

  “Aw—he’ll be back. We’ve seen six already. They’re always a bit nervous at first.”

  I drank the tea and watched the shadows ease across the dry sandy earth. Birds fluttered and chirped in the trees. Graeme murmered their names (without the Latin this time): “Couple of willie wagtails there…a jacky winter…restless flycatcher on that branch, y’see it…rufous songlark…there’s the little friarbird…a honeyeater, yellow-tinted…a young nightjar…there’s a kookaburra out here somewhere, but I can’t see it…two sulphur-crested cockatoos earlier on, they’re gone now…couple of blackfaced wood swallows over on that bloodwood….”

  The tea, very strong and very sugary, was doing what tea does so well.

  “Listen,” Graeme said, “You wanna have a quick wash? Dinner’ll be ready in five minutes. Murray’s the bush tucker-stuffer, the camp cook, tonight so it won’t be fancy. We let you sleep. You were fagged out. So—forget walking tonight. You can start early tomorrow.”

  Over thick steaks, mushy peas, mashed potatoes, and damper (a basic form of campfire bread made from flour and water and little else), I met two men who were very different from the angry, almost racist bigots of the early morning. Both Graeme and Murray had traveled widely across Australia and their colorful tales of outback adventures made me salivate with anticipation.

  But eventually—inevitably—conversation returned to the constantly niggling “problem” of the Aborigines.

  “Y’know, we really fucked ’em around,” said Graeme with a gentleness I hadn’t noticed before. “I mean—dammit, it was their country. For over forty thousand years—who knows?—m’be much, much longer if you believe some of them Sydney anthropologists. And then we come along…hell, our Australia was nothing but crooks and shysters from Britain and penal colony governors and guards who were as bad as the riffraff they carried here in convict ships. Not much of a way to start a country, eh?”

  “I suppose not,” I said, sensing dangerous ground ahead. “I’ve felt a lot of repressed anger about those early days, even in the short time I’ve been here.”

  “S’not so bloody repressed,” mumbled Murray. “Doesn’t take much to set us off, ‘specially if there’s a bloody pommiebastard around…” he hesitated, “no offense, Dave.”

  “None taken, Murray. But the anger seems to get in the way somehow. I’m never quite sure when it’s going to surface. There’s a kind of in-your-face feeling…if I make the slightest slip of the tongue, particularly with my British accent, it’s like I’d better be ready for a punch-up.”

  “That’s Australia, Dave,” said Graeme with a gentle smile. “It’s the ‘no one’s better than me and no one’s worse’ attitude. We can’t stand people who are stuck up, y’know, bloody pompous. We don’t like ‘knockers’—people comin’ in and criticizing the country. We’re still a pretty rowdy bunch—‘least some of us are—we like mavericks—guys that take on the system and win, and we like our beer—when you hear people talking about driving across the outback they’ll describe it in terms of how much beer you’ll need—‘That’s a five-stubbie trip, that’s a ten-stubbie trip’…that kinda thing. We eat all the wrong foods, but you’d better watch out if you say so. We do dumb things like—well, like dwarf-throwing contests and that kinda stuff, y’heard of them…what else?—Well—Slim Dusty sings about them—he’s like our Australian country cowboy—listen to some of his songs.”

  “No wonder the Aborigines get a bit confused,” I said. “I’ve noticed how they just seem to sit and watch as if they’re curious to see what the whites’ll do next.”

  “Poor buggers,” said Graeme with a sigh, a genuine one. “I mean, they had the whole thing all set, all organized. Maybe just like Europe was in the Middle Ages when everything was all laid out nice and neat—y’know, y’had your kings and barons and lords and bishops and priests, y’had your workers, your serfs, and then y’had God—right on top of the pile—God telling you what to do and how to keep things straight. A nice neat system.” He suddenly seemed a little embarrassed by revealing that he’d obviously done some reading, and some thinking himself. “Well tha’s how it seems to me, anyway. What y’think, Murray?”

  “Yeah,” said Murray.

  How nervous Australians seem about revealing knowledge, qualities, and talents that may differentiate them from the mythical “ordinary bloke.” There seems to be a deep fear or certainly suspicion of overt “tall poppy” success (unless it comes from beating the system) and flamboyant demonstrations of education or ability. An abiding assumption of equality and the ordinariness of mankind is the great unspoken leveler here. Not quite so evident as the kerekere spirit of South Pacific Islands, where all individual achievements and possessions are considered the property of the communal family or clan, but enough to mute men and minds and encourage the pub-bound spirit of beery bonhomie. An odd contradiction in a country that superficially glorifies the individual. “Be your own man,” Australia seems to say—and then adds, “But don’t think or show you’re better than any other man.”

 
“So—you think the Aborigines got a rough deal, then?” I asked.

  “No kiddin’, they did,” said Graeme, glad to be on safe conversational ground again. “Down in Tasmania they wiped out the lot of them in less than a hundred years. Up here we shot ’em, like rabbits—pests—we pushed ’em further and further into the outback just like the Americans did with the Indians. Plowed up the sacred sites, built towns over their graves, gave ’em a few handouts to keep ’em happy, gave ’em booze to mess up their minds…. We really did a job on them.”

  “But earlier on this morning you were criticizing them for not living like other Australians.”

  “Yeah, I know, Dave, I know. Most Aussies feel the same way. Sort of mad and sorry at the same time…. It’s guilt, I suppose. Guilt at what we’ve done and guilt that they’re still around to remind us what we’ve done. A hundred sixty thousand of ’em, most trapped in that old poverty crunch—cheap booze, bad health, poor education, and no jobs. That’s why all the money’s spent on ’em, pamperin’ ’em with things most of ’em don’t want. We’re sick of hearin’ about their Dreamtime and their songs and their sacred places…. I suppose we wish they’d just go away. We give ’em big chunks of the outback—I mean, real big, some the size of Britain—and hope they’ll just bugger off into them and stay there.”

  I remembered something I’d read in the reprinted 1770 journals of Captain James Cook, one of the first “discoverers” of Australia, then referred to as the fabled Southland. This hot-tempered son of a Yorkshire farmhand was not known for gushy sentimentality and yet his brief description of Australia’s “noble savage” was the precursor of many later expressions of admiration for—and regret—for the decimation of indigenous cultures during that volatile Age of Discovery:

  In reality they are far more happier than we Europeans; being wholly unacquainted with not only the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe…the Earth and sea, of their own accord, furnishes them with all things necessary for life.