Down Under (16 page)

‘Is this where the bags go?’ he asked gravely.

‘Yes, it is,’ I replied with equal gravity.

In my momentary capacity as director of internal operations I watched him lean the bag carefully against the wall. Then we stood for a moment together and regarded it judiciously, pleased to have contributed to the important work of moving hundreds of yellow bags from the foyer to a
mustering station in the next room. As we stood, two more people came along. ‘Place them just there,’ we suggested, almost in unison, and indicated where we were sandbagging the wall. Then we exchanged satisfied nods and moved off into the museum.

The National Capital Exhibition was excellent. These things in Australia generally are. It wasn’t a large building, but it gave a good grounding in the history and development of Canberra. What surprised me was how very recent most of it is. Several of the walls had blown-up photographs of Canberra as it was in times past, and most of these were arresting when compared with the present. Lake Burley Griffin,
^*6
for instance, wasn’t filled until 1964. Before that, for many years, it was just a muddy depression between the two halves of the city. On another wall a pair of matched aerial photographs showed Canberra in 1959 (pop. 39,000) and Canberra now (pop. 330,000). Apart from the addition of a few large buildings in what is known as the Parliamentary Zone and the filling of the lake, what was remarkable was how little changed the city looked.

Thus briefed, I was eager now to see it all with my own eyes, so I left the building and ventured along the wooded lakeside to the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and set off for the distant and, as it were, official side of the city. The rain had stopped, but Lake Burley Griffin contains an engineering wonder (the wonder being why they bothered) called the Captain Cook Memorial Jet, a plume of water that shoots a couple of hundred feet into the air in a dazzlingly unarresting manner, then catches the prevailing
breeze and drifts in a fine but drenching spray over the bridge and whatever is on it. Sighing, I pushed through it and emerged on the other side into an area of the most extravagantly spacious lawns, punctuated at distant intervals with government buildings and museums, each as remote as objects viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.

Even the National Capital Authority, the governing body for the city, admits in a promotional fact sheet that ‘many people believe the Parliamentary Zone has an empty and unfinished character, where the vast distances between the institutions and other facilities discourage pedestrian movement and activity.’ I’ll say. It was like walking around the site of a very large world’s fair that had never quite got off the ground.

I called first at the National Library because I wanted to see the
Endeavour
Journal, Captain Cook’s famous diary of his voyage. Cook naturally took the journal home with him after his epic trip of discovery, but it was lost soon after his death and remained lost for almost one hundred and fifty years before it turned up unexpectedly at a Sotheby’s auction in London in 1923. The Australian government hurriedly bought it for £5,000 (almost double what it was prepared to pay for the design of the city in which it sits) and it is now treated with the sort of reverence we in America reserve for ancient treasures like the Constitution and Nancy Reagan. Unfortunately, as I discovered when I presented myself at the information desk, it isn’t out on display, but rather is shown just once a week by appointment.

I stared at the man in dismay. ‘But I’ve travelled eight thousand miles,’ I blurted.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said and seemed to mean it.

‘I spent a night in the Rex,’ I said, thinking surely that would clinch it, but he was powerless to help. He did, however, direct me to a leaflet in which I could see a picture of the journal and encouraged me to have a look round the public galleries. As it happened, these were splendid. One room held paintings showing Australians of note (well, of note to other Australians) and in another was an exhibition of the original drawings for the Sydney Opera House. These included not only Utzon’s winning sketches, but the second and third place entries – both radiantly undistinguished. Second place went to a fat cylinder with a harlequin-style pattern in stainless steel. Third place looked like a large supermarket. In a glass case was a wooden model made by Utzon showing that the sails of the Opera House roof were not meant to echo the sailboats in the harbour (an assertion that is made over and over in books and articles, inside Australia and out) but are simply sections of a sphere.

Then it was across another thousand acres of undeveloped veldt to the National Gallery, a surprisingly big museum in a fortress-like building. It was airy and various and generally very good. I was particularly taken with the outback paintings of Arthur Streeton, of whom I had not heard, and with the large collection of Aboriginal paintings, mostly done on curled bark or other natural surfaces and covered in colourful dots and squiggles. It is a fact little noted that the Aborigines have the oldest continuously maintained culture on earth, and their art goes back to the very roots of it. Imagine if there were some people in France who could take you to the caves at Lascaux and explain in detail the significance of the paintings – why this bison is bolting from the herd, what these three wavy lines mean – because it is as fresh and sensible to them as
if it were done yesterday. Well, Aborigines can do that. It is an unparalleled human achievement, scarcely appreciated, and I think that is worth a mention here, don’t you agree?

I had intended to go on to Parliament House, but I emerged from the National Gallery to find that the afternoon was almost gone. I would have to leave that for the next day. I started back down the gentle slope towards the lake and bridge. The skies were clearing at last and on the far-off hills lay patches of silvery light. Now that the clouds had ceased their low-level assault and retired to fluffier heights, the view was really quite fine. Canberra is a city of memorials, most of them fairly grand and nearly all with a private avenue of trees, and from here I could take them in with a single panning motion of my head. It reminded me less of a city – much less – than of, say, a preserved battlefield. There was that sense of spaciousness and respectful greenness that you would expect to find at Gettysburg or Waterloo.

It was impossible to believe that 330,000 people were tucked into that view and it was this thought – startling when it hit me – that made me change my perception of Canberra completely. I had been scorning it for what was in fact its most admirable achievement. This was a place that had, without a twitch of evident stress, multiplied by a factor often since the late 1950s and yet was still a park.

I imagined some sweet little American community such as Aspen, Colorado, trying to absorb 300,000 additional residents in forty years and thought of the miles of random, carelessly dribbled infrastructure that that would require – the shopping malls and parking lots, the eight-lane roads stretching off into a forest of bright signs and elevated hoardings, the vast graded acres of housing (bye, woods! bye, farm!), the distant plazas of supermarkets and
box stores, the tangled ganglia of motels, petrol stations and fast food places. Well, there is virtually none of this in Canberra. What an accomplishment that is. My feeling for the place was transformed entirely.

Still, I must say a decent pub or two wouldn’t go amiss.

Now here is why you will never understand Australian politics. In 1972, after twenty-three years of rule by the conservative Liberal Party, Australia elected a Labor government under the leadership of the dashing and urbane Gough Whitlam. At once Whitlam’s government embarked on a programme of ambitious reforms – it gave Aborigines rights they had not previously enjoyed, began to disengage Australian troops from Vietnam, made university education free, and much more. But, as sometimes happens, the government gradually lost its majority and by 1975 Parliament was in a deadlock from which neither Whitlam nor the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser, would budge.

Into this impasse stepped the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, the Queen’s official representative in Australia. Using a reserve privilege not before invoked, he dissolved Whitlam’s government, placed Fraser in control and ordered a general election. The outrage and indignation Australians felt at this high-handed interference can scarcely be described. The country was thrown into a fury of resentment. Before they had had any real chance to sort out their differences themselves, an unelected representative of a government on the other side of the planet had taken the matter out of their hands. It was a humiliating
reminder that Australia was still at root a colony, constitutionally subordinate to the United Kingdom.

Nonetheless, as required, the Australians held a general election at which the voters overwhelmingly – overwhelmingly – turned Whitlam out of office and brought in Fraser. In other words, the electorate calmly endorsed the action that had so exercised the nation only a month before.

And that, as I say, is why you will never understand Australian politics.

Part of the problem, of course, is that it is nearly impossible to track Australian politics from abroad because so little news of the country’s affairs leaks out into the wider world. But even when you are there and dutifully trying to follow it, you find yourself mired in a density of argument, a complexity of fine points, a skein of tangled relationships and enmities, that thwarts all understanding. Give Australians an issue and they will argue it so passionately and in such detail, from so many angles, with the introduction of so many loosely connected side issues, that it soon becomes impenetrable to the outsider.

At the time of my visit the big national issue was whether Australia was to become a republic – whether it was going to snip its last colonial ties to Britain and take the steps necessary to ensure that no future John Kerr ever similarly humbled the nation again. It seemed to me no issue. Surely any nation would want to have control of its own destiny? You would expect, at the very least, that the decision would be a straightforward one.

Yet for two years to my certain knowledge Australians had been tying themselves in knots over every possible objection to such a change. Who will be the new president under such a system and how can we guarantee that he
never does anything he shouldn’t do? What becomes of all those names like ‘Royal Australian Air Force’ and ‘Royal Flying Doctor Service’ if we’re not actually royal any longer? What words shall we put in the new preamble to the constitution? Shall we refer to the Australian quality of ‘mateship’ as John Howard would like or shall we recognize that that is a fundamentally vacuous and embarrassing concept? Oh dear, this is awfully complicated. Maybe it would be better if we just left things as they are, and hope the British are good to us.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are not important issues, of course. But it is an exhausting process to witness, and you do rather come away with two interlinked impressions – that Australians love to argue for argument’s sake and that basically they would rather just leave everything as it is. In the end, of course, they voted against a republic, though at the time of my visit that seemed an extremely unlikely outcome. Yet another reason why outsiders will never understand Australian politics.

On the other hand, and what makes up for a lot, is that Australians have the best and most entertaining parliamentary debates anywhere. American and even British television news coverage would be vastly enlivened if it provided a nightly report from Australia’s parliamentary chambers. You wouldn’t have to explain what it was all about – it generally surpasses understanding anyway – but just allow the audience to savour the rich thrust and parry of Australian insult.

In his book
Among the Barbarians
, the Australian writer Paul Sheehan records an exchange in Parliament between a man named Wilson Tuckey and the then Prime Minister Paul Keating of which the following is a small part:

This was actually a fairly tame exchange for the linguistically versatile Mr Keating. Among the epithets that have taken flight from his tongue during the course of public debate, and are to be found gracing the pages of whatever is the Australian equivalent of
Hansard
, have been
scumbags, pieces of criminal garbage, sleazebags, stupid foul-mouthed grubs, piss-ants, mangy maggots, perfumed gigolos, gutless spivs, boxheads, immoral cheats
, and
stunned mullets.
And that was just to describe his mother. (I’m joking, of course!) Not all parliamentary invective is quite so ripe, but it is nearly all pretty good.

I had watched this sort of thing with the greatest of pleasure during my various Australian visits, so you can imagine the eagerness with which I parked my car in the visitors’ area on Parliament Hill the next morning and proceeded across the manicured lawns for a quick look round before moving on to Adelaide.

Parliament House is a new building, which replaced an older, more modest Parliament House in 1988. It is a rather arrestingly horrible edifice, crowned with a ridiculous erection that looks like nothing so much as a very big Christmas-tree stand. On the way in, I stopped beside a large ornamental pool to have a look at the rooftop erection.

‘Largest aluminium structure in the southern hemisphere,’ declared, with evident pride, a man with a camera around his neck who saw me studying it.

‘And are there many other aluminium structures competing for the honour?’ I asked before I could stop myself.

The man looked flustered. ‘Why, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But if there are they’re smaller.’

I hadn’t meant to offend. ‘Well, it’s certainly very . . . striking,’ I offered.

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘I think that’s the word for it. Striking.’