Down Under (11 page)

You haven’t been listening to any of this because your hand has been moving almost imperceptibly towards the drawer containing the steak knives. As the question dawns on you, you find yourself giving a small, tight, almost involuntary nod.

‘I’ll just let myself out then. Sorry to have disturbed you.’
At the gate he pauses. ‘Take it from me,’ he says, ‘you don’t ever want to go back in those woods alone. Something terrible could happen to you back there. I love your delphiniums by the way.’ He smiles in a way that freezes your marrow, and says: ‘Well, bye then.’

And he is gone.

Six weeks later you put the house on the market.

When Australians get hold of a name that suits them they tend to stick with it in a big way. We can blame this unfortunate custom on Lachlan Macquarie, a Scotsman who was governor of the colony in the first part of the nineteenth century, and whose principal achievements were the building of the Great Western Highway through the Blue Mountains, the popularizing of Australia as a name (before him the whole country was indifferently referred to as either New South Wales or Botany Bay) and the world’s first nearly successful attempt to name every object on a continent after himself.

You really cannot move in Australia without bumping into some reminder of his tenure. Run your eye over the map and you will find a Macquarie Harbour, Macquarie Island, Macquarie Marsh, Macquarie River, Macquarie Fields, Macquarie Pass, Macquarie Plains, Lake Macquarie, Port
Macquarie, Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (a lookout point over Sydney Harbour), Macquarie’s Point and a Macquarie town. I always imagine him sitting at his desk, poring over maps and charts with a magnifying glass, and calling out from time to time to his first assistant: ‘Hae we no’ got a Macquarie Swamp yet, laddie? And look here at this wee copse. It has nae name. What shall we call
it
, do ye think?’

And that’s just some of the Macquaries, by the way. Macquarie is also the name of a bank, a university, the national dictionary, a shopping centre, and one of Sydney’s principal streets. That’s not to mention the forty-seven other Roads, Avenues, Groves and Terraces in Sydney that, according to Jan Morris, are named for the man or his family. Nor have we touched on the Lachlan River, Lachlan Valley or any of the other first-name variations that sprang to his tireless mind.

You wouldn’t suppose there would be much left after all that, but one of Macquarie’s successors as governor, Ralph Darling, managed to get his name all over the place too. In Sydney you will find a Darling Harbour, Darling Drive, Darling Island, Darling Point, Darlinghurst, and Darlington. Elsewhere Darling’s modest achievements are remembered in the Darling Downs and Darling Ranges, a slew of additional Darlingtons, and the important Darling River. What isn’t called Darling or Macquarie is generally called Hunter or Murray. It’s awfully confusing.

Even when the names aren’t exactly the same, they are often very similar. There is a Cape York Peninsula in the far north and a Yorke Peninsula in the far south. Two of the leading explorers of the nineteenth century were called Sturt and Stuart and their names are all over the place, too, so that you have constantly to stop and think, generally at
busy intersections where an instant decision is required, ‘Now did I want the Sturt Highway or the
Stuart
Highway?’ Since both highways start at Adelaide and finish at places 3,994 kilometres apart, this can make a difference, believe me.

I was thinking about all this – the confusion of place names and monuments to Lachlan Macquarie – the following morning because I spent much of it in the grip of the first while in pursuit of the second. I was in a rental car, you see, trying to find my way out of the endless, bewildering sprawl of Sydney. According to the local telephone directory, there are 784 suburbs and other named districts in the city, and I believe I passed through every one of them as I sought in vain for a corner of Australia not covered by bungalows. Some neighbourhoods I visited twice, at opposite ends of the morning. For a time I thought about just abandoning the car at the kerb in Parramatta – I rather liked the name and people were beginning to wave to me familiarly – but eventually I shot out of the city, like a spat bug, pleased to find myself on the correct heading for Lithgow, Bathurst and points beyond, and filled with that sense of giddy delight that comes with finding yourself at large in a new and unknown continent.

My intention over the next couple of weeks was to wander through what I think of as Civilized Australia – the lower right-hand corner of the country, extending from Brisbane in the north to Adelaide in the south and west. This area covers perhaps 5 per cent of the nation’s land surface but contains 80 per cent of its people and nearly all its important cities (specifically Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra and Adelaide). In the whole of the vast continent this is pretty much the only part that is
conventionally habitable. Because of its curving shape, it is sometimes called the Boomerang Coast, though in fact my interest was largely internal. I was headed in the first instance for Canberra, the nation’s interesting, parklike and curiously much scorned capital; thence I would cross 800 miles of lonely interior to distant Adelaide before finally fetching up, dusty but ever indomitable, in Melbourne, where I was to meet some old friends who would hose me down and take me off for a long-promised tour of the snake-infested, little-visited but gorgeously rewarding Victorian bush. There was much to see along the way. I was very excited.

But first I had to make my way through the Blue Mountains, the scenic and long-impassable hills lying just to Sydney’s west. On approach the Blue Mountains don’t look terribly challenging; they rise to no great height and everywhere wear a softening cloak of green. But in fact they are rent with treacherous gorges and bouldered canyons, some with walls rising sheer hundreds of feet, and that lovely growth proves on closer inspection to be of an unusually tangled and obscuring nature. For the first quarter of a century of European occupation, the Blue Mountains stood as an impenetrable barrier to expansion. Expeditions tried repeatedly to find a way through but were always turned back. Even if progress could be gained through the lacerating undergrowth, it was nearly impossible to maintain one’s bearings amid the wandering gorges. Watkin Tench, a leader of one party, reported with understandable exasperation how he and his men struggled for hours to find a route to the top of one impossibly taxing defile, only to discover when they attained the summit that they were exactly opposite where they expected to be.

Finally, in 1813, three men, Gregory Blaxland, William Charles Wentworth and William Lawson, broke through – exhausted, tattered and ‘ill with Bowel Complaints’, as Wentworth glumly noted, then and on any occasion that anyone would listen for the rest of his long life. It had taken them eighteen days, but as they stepped onto the airy heights of Mount York they were rewarded with a view of pastoral splendour never before seen by European eyes. Below them, for as far as the gaze could reach, stretched a sunny, golden Eden, a continent of grass – enough, it seemed, to support a population of millions. Australia would be a mighty country. The news, when they returned to Sydney, was electrifying. In less than two years a road was cut through the wilderness and the westward peopling of Australia had begun.

Today the Great Western Highway, as it is grandly and romantically known, follows almost exactly the route taken by Blaxland and his companions nearly 200 years ago. It certainly feels venerable. The route goes up and through the mountains and for much of the way passes along such confined spaces that there is no room for a big modern road. So the Great Western has the tight bends and unyielding width of a road designed for an age when motorists clapped goggles over their eyes and started their cars with a crank. I had been through here not long before on the Indian Pacific, but the views from the train weren’t good – glimpsed vistas seen through a picket fence of gum trees and then, each time, an abrupt veering away into denser woodland – and anyway I had been preoccupied with exploring the train. So I was eager now to see the mountains up close, in particular the famous, dreamy views from the little town of Katoomba.

Alas, luck was not with me. As I followed the tortuous
road up into the distant hills, the windscreen became speckled with drizzle and a chill, swirling fog began to fill the spaces between the coachwood and sassafras trees that loomed up on every side. Very quickly the fog thickened to the density of woodsmoke. I had never been out in such fog. Within minutes, it was like piloting a small plane through cloud. There was a bonnet in front of me, and then just white. It was all I could do to keep the car affixed to its lane – the road was almost preposterously narrow and twisting, and with the visibility so low every sudden curve was received with a whoop of surprise.

At length I reached Katoomba where the fog was, if anything, worse. The town was reduced to spooky shapes that loomed out of the murk from time to time, like frights at a funfair ride. Twice, at no more than two miles an hour, I nearly drove into the backs of parked cars. I have no idea why I bothered but, having come this far, I found my way to a lookout spot called Echo Point, parked and got out. Not surprisingly, I was the only person there. I went and grasped the railing and gazed out, the way you do at a lookout point. Before me there stood nothing but depthless white and that peculiar twitchy stillness that fog brings. To my surprise, from out of the milky vapours there emerged an elderly couple, dapper and doddery and bundled up as if for a long winter. The man walked with a particularly unsteady gait, propped by a cane on one side and his wife on the other.

As they drew level he looked at me in surprise. ‘You won’t see anything today!’ he barked as if I was wasting his time as well as my own. I guessed from the volume that he might be a little deaf. ‘This won’t clear for thirty-six hours.’ More confidingly he added: ‘Depression over the Pacific.
Often happens.’ He nodded sagely and joined me in contemplating the nothingness.

His wife gave me a tiny smile that was at once apologetic, long-suffering and a little wistful. ‘It might clear after a bit,’ she speculated hopefully.

He looked at her as if she had just announced an intention to have a shit on the pavement.
‘Clear?
It’s never going to
clear.
There’s a depression over the Pacific.’ He looked for a moment as if he might swipe her with his cane.

Her optimism was not lightly deflected, however. ‘Don’t you remember how it came out all lovely that time at Bunbury?’ she said.

‘Bunbury?’ he replied incredulously.
‘Bunbury?
That’s the other side of the country. It’s a different bloody ocean. What are you talking about? You’re
mad.
You want putting away.’ Suddenly I recognized the accent. He was a Yorkshireman, or at least once had been.

‘It didn’t look like it was going to turn out fine,’ she went on to me, expecting a more sympathetic hearing, ‘and then it
did
turn out—’

‘It’s a different ocean, woman! Are you deaf as well as mad?’ It was clear that this was, at least in the fundamentals, a conversation that they had been having for years. ‘You get a quite different set of meteorological conditions in the Indian Ocean – quite different. Any fool knows that.’ He was quiet for halfa second, and then said: ‘I thought we were going for a cup of tea.’

‘We are, dear. I just thought we’d have a little stroll.’ Deftly she set him in motion again.

‘A stroll? What
for?
There’s bugger all to see. Are you blind as well as deaf and mad? This won’t clear for thirty-six hours.’

‘I know, dear, but—’

Within moments they were just voices floating out of a veil of white and then they were gone altogether.

Reluctant to leave the area, I spent the night in Blackheath, a pretty village in the woods a dozen miles further down the highway. My last view from my motel window before turning in was of a car passing slowly on the highway, its headlamps like searchlights, and the world settled under a thick eiderdown of murk. It didn’t look terribly promising.

So you may imagine my surprise when I awoke in the morning to find bright sunshine spilled across my bed and filling the tops of the trees outside. I opened the door to a golden world, so bright it made me blink. Birds were singing in the exotic tones of the bush. I wasted not a moment getting back to Katoomba.

The view when I returned to Echo Point was outstanding – a broad vale of very green forest broken at intervals by square-topped outcrops and fractured pinnacles, the whole filled with a vast and imposing silence. The sky was a rich and all but cloudless blue. Even at nine in the morning you could tell it was going to be a really hot day. I spent ninety minutes or so walking along the clifftop, enjoying the view from various angles; I had a look at Katoomba Falls and the stranded sandstone uprights known as the Three Sisters, and at length, entirely satisfied, wandered back into town for coffee.

In the 1930s and 1940s, Katoomba was a popular retreat for people of a genteel and discriminating nature. It was much less raffish than Bondi or the other beach outposts, where there was always the danger that young Bruce and Noelene might be exposed to more flesh than was healthy at their ages or overhear strong language – men
saying ‘jeezums’ and ‘strewth’ and so on. Katoomba offered more refined pursuits: strolls through the woods, a therapeutic dip in a hydro pool, orchestral dancing in the evenings. Today Katoomba clings, with a slight air of desperation, to its bygone glory. Its main street had a generous sprinkling of art deco buildings, notably a wonderful old movie house, though several, including the movie house, were closed.