Down Under (17 page)

‘How much aluminium is in it?’ I asked.

‘Oh, I’ve no idea. But a great deal, you can be sure of that.’

‘Enough to wrap a lot of sandwiches!’ I suggested brightly.

He looked at me as if I were dangerously stupid. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said and, after a moment’s befuddled hesitation, took his leave.

As it was a Sunday morning, I hadn’t expected Parliament House to be open to visitors, but it was. I had to submit to a security inspection and had a small pocket-knife taken away from me and twenty minutes later was sawing away on a scone in the cafeteria with something far more lethal. The whole of Parliament House is rather like that – superficially grave and security-conscious, in keeping with the trappings of an important nation, but at the same time really quite relaxed, as if they know that no international terrorists are going to come storming over the parapets and that visitors are mostly just people like you and me who want to see where it all happens and then have a nice cup of tea and a cautiously flavourful treat in the cafeteria afterwards.

Inside it was much handsomer than the bland exterior had suggested, with a lot of native woods covering the floors and walls. Best of all, you weren’t herded round in a group but left to explore on your own. I have never been
in America’s Capitol Building, but I dare say they don’t just leave you to wander as whimsy takes you. I felt here as if I could go anywhere – that if I had known which was the right door I could have slipped into the Prime Minister’s office and scribbled a note on his blotter or perhaps left my salmon cartoon to brighten his day. A couple of times I furtively tried door handles. They were always locked, but no alarms went off and no security people crashed through the windows to smother me with nets and take me away for interrogation. In the areas where security people were posted, they were always friendly and happy to answer any questions. I was very impressed.

Australia’s Parliament is divided into two chambers, the House of Representatives and the Senate (interesting, in a very low-grade sort of way, that they use the British term for the institution and the American terms for the chambers), and both of these were open for inspection from the visitors’ galleries. Both were quite small, but handsomer than I had expected. On television the green of the House of Representatives has a decidedly bilious look, as if the members are debating inside someone’s pancreas, but in person it was much more tasteful and restrained. The Senate, which I had never seen on television (I believe because the Senators don’t actually
do
anything – though I will check my John Gunther and get back to you on this), was in a restful ochre tone.

In a large upstairs foyer was a gallery containing portraits in oil of all the Prime Ministers, which I toured with interest. I had been doing quite a lot of reading, as you can imagine, so there was a real pleasure – a genuine oh-I’ve-heard-so-much-about-you quality – in seeing their faces at last. Here was kindly old Ben Chifley, a Labor PM just after the war and so much a man of the people that
when in Canberra he stayed in the modest Kurrajong Hotel at a cost to the taxpayer of just six shillings a day, and could be found each morning strolling in his dressing gown to the communal bathroom to shave and wash with the other guests. Then there was the grand and leonine Robert Menzies, who was Prime Minister for twenty years but thought of himself as ‘British to the bootstraps’ and dreamed of retiring to a cottage in the English countryside, evidently happy to turn his back on his native soil for ever. And poor old Harold Holt whose fateful plunge into the sea in 1967 earned him my permanent devotion.

It’s quite a small club. Since 1901 Australia has had just twenty-four Prime Ministers, and I was startled to realize how many of them remained unfamiliar to me. Of the twenty-four, I counted fourteen of whom I knew essentially nothing, including eight – exactly one third – of whom I had not even heard. These included the festively named Sir Earle Christmas Grafton Page, who was, to be fair, Prime Minister for less than a month in 1939, but also William McMahon, who held the office for almost two years in the early 1970s and whose existence was until this moment quite unsuspected by me.

I would have felt worse about this except that only the day before I had read an article in the papers reporting a government study that had found that Australians themselves were essentially as ignorant of these men as I was – that indeed more people in Australia could identify and discuss the achievements of George Washington than could provide similar service for their own first elected head of state, Sir Edmund Barton.

And with that sobering thought to ponder, I left the nation’s capital and set off for distant Adelaide.

It is 800 miles from Canberra west to Adelaide, most of it along a lonely, half-forgotten road called the Sturt Highway. The highway was named for Captain Charles Sturt, who explored the region in a series of expeditions between 1828 and 1845. Apart from charting the languid course of the Murray River and its tributaries, Sturt’s principal distinction was in being the first of the early explorers to show a measure of competence. He knew, for instance, to secure his horses at night. This might seem a self-evident requirement for anyone hundreds of miles into a desolate void, but it was a skill indifferently applied before him. John Oxley, the leader of a slightly earlier expedition, failed to keep his horses tethered and woke up one morning to find them all gone. He and his men spent five days, mostly on foot, rounding them all up. Soon after, the horses wandered off again. Nonetheless, Oxley is
commemorated with a highway of his own in northern New South Wales. Australians are very generous in this respect.

The Sturt Highway begins near Wagga Wagga, a hundred miles or so west of Canberra, and crosses broad, flat, dust-brown sheep country known as the Riverina, an area of plains cut by the fidgety meanderings of the Murrumbidgee River. It provides a perfect demonstration in three dimensions of how swiftly you can be in the middle of nowhere in Australia. One minute I was in a comely world of paddocks, meadows and pale green hills, with little country towns scattered at reliably accommodating intervals, and the next I was alone in an almost featureless nowhere – a disc of brown earth under a dome of blue sky, with only an occasional gum interposed between the two. Such habitations as I passed through weren’t really communities at all, but just a couple of houses and a petrol station, occasionally a pub, and eventually even they all but ceased. Between Narrandera, the last outpost of civilization, and Balranald, the next, lay 200 miles of highway without a town or hamlet on it. Every hour or so I would pass a lonely roadhouse – a petrol station with an attached café of the sort known in the happy vernacular of Australia as a chew and spew – and occasionally an earthen track bumping off to a distant, unseen sheep station. Otherwise nothing.

As if to emphasize the isolation, all the area radio stations began to abandon me. One by one their signals faltered, and all those smoky voices so integral to Australian airwaves – Vic Damone, Mel Torme, Frank Sinatra at the mindless height of his doo-bee-doo phase – faded away, as if being drawn by some heavy gravity back into the hole from which they had escaped. Eventually the
radio dial presented only an uninterrupted cat’s hiss of static, but for one clear spot near the end of the dial. At first I thought that’s all it was – just an empty clear spot – but then I realized I could hear the faint shiftings and stirrings of seated people, and after quite a pause a voice, calm and reflective, said:

‘Pilchard begins his long run in from short stump. He bowls and . . . oh, he’s out! Yes, he’s got him. Longwilley is caught leg-before in middle slops by Grattan. Well, now what do you make of that, Neville?’

‘That’s definitely one for the books, Bruce. I don’t think I’ve seen offside medium slow fast pace bowling to match it since Baden-Powell took Rangachangabanga for a maiden ovary at Bangalore in 1948.’

I had stumbled into the surreal and rewarding world of cricket on the radio.

After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind) I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn’t fix in a hurry. It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don’t wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game. It is the only sport that incorporates meal breaks. It is the only sport that shares its name with an insect. It is the only sport in which spectators burn as many calories as players (more if they are moderately restless). It is the only competitive activity of any type, other than perhaps baking, in which you can dress in white from head to toe and be as clean at the end of the day as you were at the beginning.

Imagine a form of baseball in which the pitcher, after
each delivery, collects the ball from the catcher and walks slowly with it out to centre field; and that there, after a minute’s pause to collect himself, he turns and runs full tilt towards the pitcher’s mound before hurling the ball at the ankles of a man who stands before him wearing a riding hat, heavy gloves of the sort used to handle radioactive isotopes, and a mattress strapped to each leg. Imagine moreover that if this batsman fails to hit the ball in a way that heartens him sufficiently to try to waddle sixty feet with mattresses strapped to his legs he is under no formal compulsion to run; he may stand there all day, and, as a rule, does. If by some miracle he is coaxed into making a misstroke that leads to his being put out, all the fielders throw up their arms in triumph and have a hug. Then tea is called and everyone retires happily to a distant pavilion to fortify for the next siege. Now imagine all this going on for so long that by the time the match concludes autumn has crept in and all your library books are overdue. There you have cricket.

But it must be said there is something incomparably soothing about cricket on the radio. It has much the same virtues as baseball on the radio – an unhurried pace, a comforting devotion to abstruse statistics and thoughtful historical rumination, exhilarating micro-moments of real action – but stretched across many more hours and with a lushness of terminology and restful elegance of expression that even baseball cannot match. Listening to cricket on the radio is like listening to two men sitting in a rowing boat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren’t biting; it’s like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps not to know quite what’s going on. In such a rarefied world of contentment and inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction.

‘So here comes Stovepipe to bowl on this glorious summer’s afternoon at the MCG,’ one of the commentators was saying now. ‘I wonder if he’ll chance an offside drop scone here or go for the quick legover. Stovepipe has an unusual delivery in that he actually leaves the grounds and starts his run just outside the Carlton & United Brewery at Kooyong.’

‘That’s right, Clive. I haven’t known anyone start his delivery that far back since Stopcock caught his sleeve on the reversing mirror of a number 11 bus during the third test at Brisbane in 1957 and ended up at Goondiwindi four days later owing to some frightful confusion over a changed timetable at Toowoomba Junction.’

After a very long silence while they absorbed this thought, and possibly stepped out to transact some small errands, they resumed with a leisurely discussion of the England fielding. Neasden, it appeared, was turning in a solid performance at square bowel, while Packet had been a stalwart in the dribbles, though even these exemplary performances paled when set beside the outstanding play of young Hugh Twain-Buttocks at middle nipple. The commentators were in calm agreement that they had not seen anyone caught behind with such panache since Tandoori took Rogan Josh for a stiffy at Vindaloo in ’61. At last Stovepipe, having found his way over the railway line at Flinders Street – the footbridge was evidently closed for painting – returned to the stadium and bowled to Hasty, who deftly turned the ball away for a corner. This was repeated four times more over the next two hours and then one of the commentators pronounced: ‘So as we break for second luncheon, and with 11,200 balls remaining, Australia are 962 for two not half and England are four for a duck and hoping for rain.’

I may not have all the terminology exactly right, but I believe I have caught the flavour of it. The upshot was that Australia was giving England a good thumping, but then Australia pretty generally does. In fact, Australia pretty generally beats most people at most things. Truly never has there been a more sporting nation. At the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, to take just one random but illustrative example, Australia, the fifty-second largest nation in the world, brought home more medals than all but four other countries, all of them much larger (the countries, of course, not the medals). Measured by population, its performance was streets ahead of anyone else. Australians won 3.78 medals per million of population, a rate more than two and a half times better than the next best performer, Germany, and almost five times the rate of the United States. Moreover, Australia’s medal-winning tally was distributed across a range of sports, fourteen, matched by only one other nation, the United States. Hardly a sport exists at which the Australians do not excel. Do you know, there are even forty Australians playing baseball at the professional level in the United States, including five in the Major Leagues – and Australians don’t even
play
baseball, at least not in any particularly devoted manner. They do all this on the world stage
and
play their own games as well, notably a very popular form of loosely contained mayhem called Australian Rules Football. It is a wonder in such a vigorous and active society that there is anyone left to form an audience.