Down Under (15 page)

‘Yeah,’ the kid agreed, nodding solemnly. ‘They don’t do it on Fridays.’

I found my way back to the Rex, but got only as far as the front entrance when I realized that I did not want to dine in my own hotel. It is such a tame and lonely thing to do – an admission that one has no life. As it happened, I had no life, but that wasn’t quite the point. Do you know what is the most melancholy part of dining alone in your hotel? It’s when they come and take away all the other place settings and wine glasses, as if to say: ‘Obviously no one will be joining
you
tonight, so we’ll just whip away all these things and seat you here facing a pillar, and in a minute we’ll bring you a very large basket with just one roll in it. Enjoy!’

So I lingered by the entrance of the Rex for the merest moment, then returned to the street. I was on a boulevard built on an important scale, though it had almost no traffic and was mostly lined with darkened office buildings lurking in dense growth. Several hundred yards further on I came to a hotel not unlike the Rex. It contained an Italian restaurant with its own entrance, which was probably as good as I was going to get. I went in and was taken aback to realize that it was full of locals, dressed up as if for an occasion. Something in their familiar manner with the
waiters, and with the surroundings generally, bespoke a more than transient relationship with the place. When locals eat in the restaurant of a big glass and concrete hotel, you know that the community must be in some measure wanting.

The waiter took away all the other place settings, but he brought me six breadsticks – enough to share if I made a friend. It was quite a jolly place with everyone around me getting comprehensively refreshed – the Australians do like a drink, bless them – and the food was outstanding, but it was nonetheless evident that we were dining in a hotel. Canberra has quite a lot of this, as I was to discover – eating and drinking in large, characterless hotels and other neutral spaces, so that you spend much of the time feeling as if you are on some kind of long layover at an extremely spacious international airport.

Afterwards, bloated with pasta, three bottles of Italian lager and all six of the breadsticks (I never did make a friend), I went for another exploratory amble, this time in a slightly contrary direction, certain that somewhere in Canberra there must be a normal pub and possibly a convivial restaurant for the following evening, but I passed nothing and once again found myself eventually on the threshold of the Rex. I looked at my watch. It was only nine thirty in the evening. I wandered into the cocktail lounge, where I ordered a beer and took a seat in a deep-backed chair. The lounge was empty but for a table with three men and a lady at it, getting boisterously merry, and a lone gent hunched over a tumbler at the bar.

I drank my beer and pulled out a small notebook and pen and placed them on the table in front of me in case I was taken with a sudden important observation, then followed that with a book I had bought at a second-hand
bookshop in Sydney. Called
Inside Australia
and published in 1972, it was by the American journalist John Gunther, a name that once towered in the annals of travel journalism but is now, I fear, largely forgotten. It was his last book; it just about had to be as he died while preparing it, poor man.

I opened it to the chapter on Canberra, curious to see what he had to say about the place back then. The Canberra he describes is a small city of 130,000 people with the ‘pastoral feeling of a country town’ – an easygoing place with few traffic lights, little nightlife, a modest sprinkling of cocktail lounges and about ‘half a dozen good’ restaurants. In a word, it appeared actually to have gone backwards since
1972.I
was proud to see that the Rex Hotel was singled out as a stylish address for visitors – always nice to see one’s choices validated even when they are nearly thirty years out of date – and that its cocktail bar was adjudged one of the liveliest in the city. I looked up from my book and shrank at the thought that very possibly it still was.

At length I turned to the chapter on Australian politics – my reason for buying the book in the first place. Apart from the scoring of Australian Rules Football and the appeal of a much-esteemed dish called the pie floater (think of something unappetizing and brown floating on top of something unappetizing and green and you pretty well have it) there is nothing in Australian life more complicated and bewildering to the outsider than its politics. I had tried once or twice to wade through books on Australian politics written by Australians, but all these had started from the novel premise that the subject is interesting – a bold position, to be sure, but not a very helpful one – so I was hoping that the detached observations of a
fellow American might be more instructive. Gunther gave it a game stab, I must say, but it was a challenge beyond even his talents for lucid compression. Here, for instance, is just a snippet of his attempt to explain Australia’s system of preference voting:

I particularly liked that casual concluding ‘And so on.’ It’s a deft piece of work because it seems to say: ‘I understand all this perfectly, but I see no need to tax you with the details,’ whereas of course what he is really saying is: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what any of this means and frankly I don’t give two tiny mouse droppings because, as I pen these words, I am sitting in the lounge bar of a bush mausoleum called the Rex Hotel and it’s a Friday night and I am half cut and bored out of my mind and now I am going to go and get another drink.’ The uncanny thing was I knew the feeling exactly.

I glanced at my watch, appalled to realize it was only ten minutes after ten, and ordered another beer, then picked up the notebook and pen and, after a minute’s thought, wrote: ‘Canberra awfully boring place. Beer cold, though.’ Then I thought for a bit more and wrote: ‘Buy socks.’ Then I put the notebook down, but not away, and tried without much success to eavesdrop on the conversation among the
lively foursome across the room. Then I decided to come up with a new slogan for Canberra. First I wrote: ‘Canberra – There’s Nothing to It!’ and then ‘Canberra – Why Wait for Death?’ Then I thought some more and wrote: ‘Canberra – Gateway to Everywhere Else!’, which I believe I liked best of all. Then I ordered another beer and drew a little cartoon. It showed two spawning salmon, halfway up a series of lively cascades, resting exhausted in a pool of calm water, when one turns to the other and says: ‘Why don’t we just stop here and have a wank?’ This amused me very much and I put the page in my pocket against the day I learn to draw objects that people can actually recognize. Then I eavesdropped on the people some more, nodding and smiling appreciatively when they appeared to make a quip in the hope that they would see me and invite me over, but they didn’t. Then I had another beer.

I think the last beer might have been a mistake because I don’t remember much after that other than a sensation of supreme goodwill towards anyone who passed through the room, including a Filipino lady who came in with a hoover and asked me to lift my legs so that she could clean under my chair. My notes for the evening show only two other entries, both in a slightly unsteady hand. One says: ‘Victoria Bitter – why called??? Not bitter at all. But quite nice!!!’ The other said: ‘I tell you, Barry, he was farting sparks!’ I believe this was in reference to a colourful Aussie turn of phrase I overheard from the people at the next table rather than to any actual manifestation of flatulence of an electrical nature.

But I could be wrong. I’d had a few.

In the morning I woke to find Canberra puddled under a dull, persistent rain. My plan was to stroll across the main
bridge over Lake Burley Griffin, to a district of museums and government buildings on the other side. It was a rotten morning, a foolish day to be out on foot, made more wretched by the slow-dawning realization, once I had set off from the hotel, that I was embarked on an expedition even more epic than the one the afternoon before. Canberra really is the most amazingly spacious city. On paper it looks quite inviting, with its serpentine lake, leafy avenues and 10,000 acres of parks (for purposes of comparison, Hyde Park in London is 340 acres), but at ground level it is simply a great deal of far-flung greenness, broken at distant intervals by buildings and monuments.

It is worth considering how it got this way. In 1911, with the capital site chosen, a competition was held for a design for it, which was won by Walter Burley Griffin of Oak Park, Illinois, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Griffin’s design was unquestionably the best, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a great deal. Another leading entrant, a Frenchman named Alfred Agache, failed to read the briefing notes carefully, or possibly at all, and placed Parliament and many other important buildings on a flood plain, guaranteeing that legislators would have to spend part of the year treading water while debating. Also, for reasons that can only invite wondered speculation, he placed the municipal sewage works in the very heart of the city, as a kind of centrepiece. Despite these quirky shortcomings, his entry came third. Second prize went to Eliel Saarinen, father of Eero, the man who later persuaded the Opera House judges to choose the bold design of Jørn Utzon. The elder Saarinen’s design was perfectly workable, but it had a kind of brutal grandeur about it – a sort of proto-Third Reichish quality – that unsettled the Australian judges.

Griffin’s plan, by contrast, was instantly engaging. It
envisaged a garden city of 75,000 people, with tree-lined avenues angling through it and an ornamental lake at its heart. Handsome and confident, majestic but not imperious, it ideally suited the modest yearnings for respectability without fuss that marked the Australian character. Moreover, Griffin had an advanced understanding of the importance of presentation. His submissions were not modest sketches that looked as if they had been scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin, but a series of large panoramic tableaux, exquisitely drafted on the finest stretched linen. In this he was assisted inestimably – totally, in fact – by his new bride, Marion Mahony Griffin, who was without doubt one of the great architectural artists of this century.

The drawings, all done by Marion, show a silhouetted skyline full of comely shapes – a dome here, a ziggurat there – but with surprisingly little in the way of committing details. They are tantalizing impressions – ethereal, cunningly distant. These are drawings you could gaze at for hours with pleasure, but turn your back for a moment and you cannot remember a thing that was in them, other than a vague sense of a pleasing composition. Although Griffin and his wife had never been to Australia (they worked from topographic maps) the drawings show an almost uncanny affinity for the landscape – an appreciation of its simple uncluttered beauty and big skies that you would swear was based on the closest acquaintanceship. Take nothing away from Walter: he was a gifted, occasionally even inspired, architect; but Marion was the genius of the outfit.

The Griffins had a decidedly bohemian bent – he liked big floppy hats and velvety ties; she had an unfortunate fondness for dancing through woodland glades in
diaphanous gowns, in the manner of Isadora Duncan – and this no doubt counted against them in the rough and ready world of Australian politics in the second decade of the century. In any case, they found little in the way of funds or enthusiasm awaiting them when they arrived in Australia in 1913, and the outbreak of the First World War the following year made both scarcer still. Once on site, Griffin seemed unable to get to grips with things. He had no experience of managing a big project and clearly it did not suit his temperament. By 1920, no work at all had been done beyond a cursory staking out of the main roads. At the end of the year, more or less by mutual agreement, he left the project.

Griffin stayed in Australia another fifteen years and became one of the country’s most illustrious architects, but nearly all the buildings he designed either were never built or have since been torn down. Increasingly beset by financial difficulties, he moved to India in 1935. There, in 1937 he contracted peritonitis after falling from some scaffolding and died, aged sixty. He was buried in an unmarked grave. Today almost all that remains from a long and busy career are Newman College at the University of Melbourne, a couple of municipal incinerators, and Canberra – and Canberra isn’t really his at all.

Only the floor plan, so to speak, is his – the avenues, the roundabouts, the lake that cuts the city in half. The component parts fell to scores of other hands, none working together. An entirely new city was built on his layout, but it has none of the coherence that his design implied. It’s really just a scattering of government buildings in a man-made wilderness. Even the lake, which winds a serpentine way between the commercial and parliamentary halves of the city, has a curiously dull, artificial feel. On a sloping
promontory on its wooded north shore was a modestly sized building called the National Capital Exhibition, and I called there first, more in the hope of drying off a little than from any expectation of extending my education significantly.

It was quite busy. In the front entrance, two friendly ladies were seated at a table handing out free visitors’ packs – big, bright yellow plastic bags – and these were accepted with expressions of gratitude and rapture by everyone who passed.

‘Care for a visitors’ pack, sir?’ called one of the ladies to me.

‘Oh, yes please,’ I said, more thrilled than I wish to admit. The visitors’ pack was a weighty offering, but on inspection it proved to contain nothing but a mass of brochures – the complete works, it appeared, of the visitors’ centre I had visited the day before. The bag was so heavy that it stretched the handles until it was touching the floor. I dragged it around for a while, and then thought to abandon it behind a pot plant. And here’s the thing. There wasn’t room behind the pot plant for another yellow bag! There must have been ninety of them back there. I looked around and noticed that almost no one in the room still had a plastic bag. I leaned mine against the wall beside the plant and as I straightened up I saw that a man was advancing towards me.