Down Under (14 page)

The museum went on and on, and seemed to contain everything that everyone in Young had ever acquired and no longer wanted – sewing machines, adding machines, rifles, wedding albums, christening gowns. On a table was a large jar filled with small shiny black spheres, thousands of them. I peered at it, trying to figure out what it was.

‘Canola seeds,’ said a voice, quite near – so near it made me jump. I turned to find the lady who had let me in.

‘Oh! You made me jump,’ I said and she smiled in a way that made me suspect that that had been her intention. Perhaps, it occurred to me, that was how people passed the time in Young.

‘Are you finding everything?’ she asked.

I looked at her with interest. How would I know if I was or not? But I replied: ‘Yes, I am,’ then added politely: ‘It’s very interesting.’

‘Yes, there’s a lot of history in Young,’ she agreed, and looked around as if thinking perhaps there was too much.

My gaze returned to the jar of seeds. ‘Do you grow a lot of canola around here?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said simply.

I considered this and tried to think of something more to say. ‘Well, you’ve got the seeds if you decide to start,’ I observed helpfully.

‘Some people call it . . .
rape,’
she said, all but whispering the last word and raising her eyebrows significantly.

‘Yes,’ I agreed in what I believe was a concerned tone.

‘I prefer canola.’

‘Me, too.’ I don’t know why I said that. I have no position on seed names, however emotive, but it seemed prudent to agree with her.

Mercifully, just then a bell went – the kind of bell that sounds when someone comes in a shop entrance – and she excused herself. I waited half a dozen beats then followed her out, for I had seen all I needed to and I wanted to get a move on.

In the front hallway a middle-aged couple were in the process of buying tickets. The space was confined and I had to wait for them to step aside to let me out, and I thanked the white-haired lady as I passed.

‘You enjoyed it, did you?’ she asked.

‘Very much,’ I lied.

‘Here on holiday?’ asked the lady customer, presumably picking up on my accent.

‘Yes, I am,’ I lied again.

‘How are you enjoying Australia?’

‘I love it.’ This was not a lie, but she looked at me doubtfully. ‘Honestly,’ I added.

Then a rather strange thing – well, I thought it was strange. The female customer placed a hand on my forearm and said, with a touch of real anxiety: ‘I hope everyone is nice to you.’

I looked at her.

‘Of course they will be,’ I said. ‘Australians are always nice.’

She gave me a look of imploring earnestness. ‘Do you really think so?’ Now don’t get me wrong. Australians are the most wonderful people, but when they grow introspective it’s sometimes a little strange.

I nodded. ‘Really,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Australians are always nice.’

‘Course they are, Maureen!’ barked her husband. ‘Salt of the earth. Now let the poor man go. I’m sure he has places he wants to be.’ He was clearly from the other, heartier
school of Australian archetypes – the one that thinks that any bloke not lucky enough to be born in Australia is tragically ill-favoured by fate and probably has a tiny dick as well, poor bastard.

And he was right, of course – about having places to be, I mean. It was time to move on to Canberra.

Before Australia’s six colonies federated in 1901, they were, to an almost ludicrous degree, separate. Each issued its own postage stamps, set clocks to its own time, had its own system of taxes and levies. As Geoffrey Blainey notes in
A Shorter History of Australia
, a pub owner in Wodonga, in Victoria, who wished to sell beer brewed in Albury, on the opposite bank of the Murray River in New South Wales, paid as much duty as he did on beer shipped from Europe. Clearly this was madness. So in 1891, the six colonies (plus New Zealand, which nearly joined, but later dropped out) met in Sydney to discuss forming a proper nation, to be known as the Commonwealth of Australia. It took some years to iron everything out, but on 1 January 1901 a new nation was declared.

Because Sydney and Melbourne were so closely matched in terms of pre-eminence, it was agreed in a spirit of
compromise to build a new capital somewhere in the bush. Melbourne, meanwhile, would serve as interim capital.

Years were consumed with squabbles about where the capital should be sited before the selectors eventually settled on an obscure farming community on the edge of the Tidbinbilla Hills in southern New South Wales. It was called Canberra, though the name by then was often anglicized to Canberry. Cold in the winter, blazing hot in the summer, miles from anywhere, it was an unlikely choice of location for a national capital. About 900 square miles of surrounding territory, most of it pastoral and pretty nearly useless, was ceded by New South Wales to form the Australian Capital Territory, a federal zone on the model of America’s District of Columbia.

So the young nation had a capital. The next challenge was what to call it, and yet more periods of passion and rancour were consumed with settling the matter. King O’Malley, the American-born politician who was a driving force behind federation, wanted to call the new capital Shakespeare. Other suggested names were Myola, (the first syllables of the state capitals), Opossum, Gladstone, Thirstyville, Kookaburra, Cromwell and the ringingly inane Victoria Defendera Defender. In the end, Canberra won more or less by default. At an official ceremony to mark the decision, the wife of the Governor-General stood up before a gathering of dignitaries and, ‘in a querulous voice’, announced that the winning name was the one that had been in use all along. Unfortunately, no one had thought to brief her, and she mispronounced it, placing the accent emphatically on the middle syllable rather than lightly on the first. Never mind. The young nation had a site for a capital and a name for a capital, and it had taken
them just eleven years since union to get there. At this blistering pace, all being well, they might get a city going within half a century or so. In fact, it would take rather longer.

Although Canberra is now one of the largest cities in the nation and one of the most important planned communities on earth, it remains Australia’s greatest obscurity. As national capitals go, it is still not an easy place to get to. It lies forty miles off the main road from Sydney to Melbourne, the Hume Highway, and is similarly spurned by the principal railway lines. Its main road to the south doesn’t go anywhere much and the city has no approach at all from the west other than on a dirt track from the little town of Tumut.

In 1996 the Prime Minister, John Howard, caused a stir after his election by declining to live in Canberra. He would, he announced, continue to reside in Sydney and commute to Canberra as duties required. As you can imagine, this caused an uproar among Canberra’s citizens, presumably because they hadn’t thought of it themselves. What made this particularly interesting is that John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director – someone whose burning ambition from the age of eleven was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors’ Association – then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty well got John Howard. When a man as outstandingly colourless as John Howard turns his nose up at a place you know it must be worth a look. I couldn’t wait to see it.

You approach Canberra along a dual carriageway
through rural woodland, which gradually morphs into a slightly more urban boulevard, though still in woodland, until finally you arrive at a zone of well-spaced but significant-looking buildings and you realize that you are there – or as near there as you can get in a place as scattered and vague as Canberra. It’s a very strange city, in that it’s not really a city at all, but rather an extremely large park with a city hidden in it. It’s all lawns and trees and hedges and a big ornamental lake – all very agreeable, just a little unexpected.

I took a room in the Hotel Rex for no other reason than that I happened upon it and had never stayed in a hotel named for a family pet. The Hotel Rex was exactly what you would expect a large hotel built of concrete and called the Rex to be. But I didn’t care. I was eager to stretch my legs and gambol about in all that green space. So I checked in, dumped my bags and returned at once to the open air. I’d passed a visitors’ centre on the way in, and recollected it as being a short walk away, so I decided to start there. In the event, it was a long way – a very long way, as things in Canberra invariably prove to be.

The visitors’ centre was almost ready to close when I got there, and in any case was just an outlet for leaflets and brochures for tourist attractions and places to stay. In a side room was a small cinema showing one of those desperately upbeat promotional films with a title like
Canberra – It’s Got It All!
– the ones that boast how you can water ski and shop for an evening gown
and
have a pizza all in the same day because this place has . . .
got it all!
You know the kind I mean. But I watched the film happily because the room was air conditioned and it was a pleasure to sit after walking so far.

It was just as well that I didn’t require an evening gown
or a pizza or water skiing when I returned to the street because I couldn’t find a thing anywhere. My one tip for you if you ever go to Canberra is don’t leave your hotel without a good map, a compass, several days’ provisions and a mobile phone with the number of a rescue service. I walked for two hours through green, pleasant, endlessly identical neighbourhoods, never entirely confident that I wasn’t just going round in a large circle. From time to time I would come to a leafy roundabout with roads radiating off in various directions, each presenting an identical vista of antipodean suburban heaven, and I would venture down the one that looked most likely to take me to civilization only to emerge ten minutes later at another identical roundabout. I never saw another soul on foot or anyone watering a lawn or anything like that. Very occasionally a car would glide past, pausing at each intersection, the driver looking around with a despairing expression that said: ‘Now where the fuck is my house?’

I had it in mind that I would find a handsome pub of the type that I had so often enjoyed in Sydney – a place filled with office workers winding down at the end of a long day, so popular at this hour that there would be an overspill of happy people on the pavement. This would be followed by dinner in a neighbourhood bistro of charm and hearty portions. But diversions of this or any other type seemed signally lacking in the sleepy streets of Canberra. Eventually, and abruptly, I turned a corner and was in the central business district. Here at last were stores and restaurants and all the other commercial amenities of a city, but all were closed. Downtown Canberra was primarily a series of plazas wandering between retail premises, and devoid of any sign of life but for a noise of slap and clatter that I recognized after a moment as the
sound of skateboards. Having nothing better to do, I followed the sounds to an open square where half a dozen adolescents, all in backward-facing baseball caps and baggy shorts, were honing their modest and misguided skills on a metal railing. I sat for a minute on a bench and with morbid interest watched them risking compound fractures and severe testicular trauma for the fleeting satisfaction of sliding along a banister for a distance of from zero inches to a couple of feet before being launched by gravity and the impossibility of maintaining balance into space in the direction of an expanse of unyielding pavement. It seemed a remarkably foolish enterprise.

If there is anything more half-witted than asking six adolescents in backward-facing baseball caps for a dining recommendation then it doesn’t occur to me just at the moment, but I’m afraid this is what I did now.

‘Are you an American?’ asked one of the kids in a tone of surprise that I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to encounter in a world capital.

I allowed that I was.

‘There’s a McDonald’s just around the corner.’

Gently I explained that it was not actually a condition of citizenship that I eat the food of my nation. ‘I was thinking of maybe a nice Thai restaurant,’ I suggested.

They looked at me with that flummoxed, dead-end expression that you have to be fourteen years old to produce with conviction.

‘Or perhaps an Indian?’ I offered hopefully and got the same no-one-home look. ‘Indonesian?’ I went on. ‘Vietnamese? Lebanese? Greek? Mexican? West Indian? Malaysian?’

As the list grew, they shifted uncomfortably, as if fearing
that I was going to hold them individually accountable for the inadequacies of the local culinary scene.

‘Italian?’ I said.

‘There’s a Pizza Hut on Lonsdale Street,’ piped up one with a look of triumph. ‘They do an all-you-can-eat buffet on Tuesdays.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, realizing this was getting me nowhere, and started to leave, but then turned back. ‘It’s Friday today,’ I pointed out.