Authors: Bill Bryson
No, the mystery of cricket is not that Australians play it well, but that they play it at all. It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament. Australians much prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each
other’s noses. I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other.
And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it.
In the late afternoon, while the players broke for high tea or fifth snack or something – in any case, when the activity on the field went from very slight to non-existent – I stopped at a roadhouse for petrol and coffee. I studied my book of maps and determined that I would stop for the night in Hay, a modest splat in the desert a little off the highway a couple of hours down the road. As it was the only community in a space of 200 miles, this was not a particularly taxing decision. Then, having nothing better to do, I leafed through the index and amused myself, in a very low-key way, by looking for ridiculous names, of which Australia has a respectable plenitude. I am thus able to report that the following are all real places: Wee Waa, Poowong, Burrumbuttock, Suggan Buggan, Boomahnoomoonah, Waaia, Mullumbimby, Ewlyamartup, Jiggalong and the supremely satisfying Tittybong.
As I paid, the man asked me where I was headed.
‘Hay,’ I replied, and was struck by a sudden droll thought. ‘And I’d better hurry. Do you know why?’
He gave me a blank look.
‘Because I want to make Hay while the sun shines.’
The man’s expression did not change.
‘I want to make Hay while the sun shines,’ I repeated with a slight alteration of emphasis and a more encouraging expression.
The blank look, I realized after a moment, was probably permanent.
‘Aw, you won’t have any trouble with that,’ the man said after a minute’s considered thought. ‘It’ll be light for hours yet.’
Hay was a hot and dusty but surprisingly likeable little town off the Sturt Highway across an old bridge over the muddy Murrumbidgee. In the motel, I dumped my bag and reflexively switched on the TV. It came up on the cricket, and I sat on the foot of the bed and watched it with unwonted absorption for some minutes. Needless to say, very little was happening on the pitch. An official in a white coat was chasing after a blown piece of paper and several of the players were examining the ground by the stumps, evidently looking for something. I couldn’t think what, but then one of the commentators noted that England had just lost a wicket, so I supposed it was that. After a time a lanky young man in the outfield, who had been polishing a ball on his trouser leg as if about to take a bite from it, broke into a loping run. At length he hurled the ball at the distant batsman, who insouciantly lifted his bat an inch from the ground and putted it back to him. These motions were scrupulously replicated three times more, then the commentator said: ‘And so at the end of the four hundred and fifty-second over, as we break for afternoon nap, England have increased their total to seventeen. So still quite a lot of work for them to do if they’re going to catch Australia before fourth snack.’
I went out for a stroll over the terrestrial hotplate that is inland New South Wales in summer. The day was extravagantly warm. Every leaf on the kerbside trees was limp, like a tongue hanging out. I wandered up and down both sides of Lachlan Street, the main drag, and then some way out into the country to enjoy the sunset – an event always of
calm and golden glory in the bush – and in the hope, ever unfulfilled, of seeing some kangaroos hopping picturesquely into frame. Kangaroos are commoner in Australia now than they were before Europeans came because all the rural improvements – the encouragement of grassland, the creating of ponds and so on – have benefited them in the same way they have sheep and cattle. Nobody knows how many kangaroos the country holds, but the number is generally assumed to be over 100 million, making them not much less numerous than sheep. But could I find even one out here? I could not.
So I strolled back into town and passed the evening in my usual gracious style – lager cocktails in a forlorn and nearly empty pub, dinner of steak and salad in a restaurant next door, another stroll to the edge of town to look, in vain, for kangaroos by moonlight. I was back in my room by about nine thirty. I switched on the TV and was impressed to see that play was still going on. Give the cricketers their due. It may be light work but they put in the hours. The man in the white coat was still chasing paper, though it wasn’t possible to tell if it was the same piece. England, according to the commentator, had lost another three wickets, which seemed rather absent-minded of them. At this rate they would soon run out of equipment altogether and have to call it a day.
Perhaps, I decided as I switched the TV off, that was what they were hoping for.
In the morning I treated myself to a big breakfast to fortify myself for another long day’s drive. Breakfast is, of course, our most savage event in western society (if you hesitate to agree, then I urge you to name me another occasion – any occasion at all – when you would happily devour an
embryo), and Australians seem to have a good fix on this. A lot of it comes down to a mastery of bacon. Unlike the curled shoe tongues that are consumed in Britain or the boringly crisp, regimented strips we go for in America, Australian bacon has a rough, meaty, fair dinkum heartiness. It looks as if it was taken off the pig while it was trying to escape. You can almost hear the squeal in every bite. Lovely. Also, they cut their toast thick. In short, the Australians know what they are about with breakfasts.
And so, radiant with cholesterol and contentment, I returned to the lonesome road. Beyond Hay, the landscape was even more impossibly flat, brown, empty and dull. The monumental emptiness of Australia is not easy to convey. It is far and away the most thinly peopled of nations. In Britain the average population density is 632 people per square mile; in the United States the average is 76; across the world as a whole it is 117. (And, just for interest, in Macau, the record holder, it is a decidedly snug 69,000 people per square mile.) The Australian average, by contrast, is six people per square mile. But even that modest figure is wildly skewed because Australians overwhelmingly live in a few clustered spots along the coast and leave the rest of the country undisturbed. Indeed, the proportion of people in Australia who live in urban areas is, at 86 per cent, about as high as in Holland and nearly as high as in Hong Kong. Out here if you found six people occupying the same square mile it would be either a family reunion or an Aum Shinrikyo planning session.
From time to time I passed through long miles of mallee scrub – low shrubs just bushy enough and high enough to strangle any view – and very occasionally, in the open plains, I would spy a low line of vivid green on the right-hand horizon, which I presumed marked an irrigated zone
along the Murrumbidgee. Otherwise nothing. Just hard earth that strained to support a little dry grass and the odd thorny acacia or bent eucalypt.
It wasn’t always so. Although inland Australia has never been exactly verdant, much of the marginal land once experienced periods of relative lushness, sometimes lasting years, occasionally lasting decades, and it enjoyed a natural resiliency that let it spring back after droughts. Then in 1859 a man named Thomas Austin, a landowner in Winchelsea, Victoria, a little south of where I was now, made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. It is hardly a novel observation that rabbits breed with a certain keenness. Within a couple of years they had entirely overrun Austin’s property and were spreading into neighbouring districts. Fifty million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator or parasite able even to recognize rabbits, much less dine off them, and so they proliferated amazingly.
Collectively their appetite was essentially insatiable. By 1880, two million acres of Victoria had been picked clean. Soon they were pushing into South Australia and New South Wales, advancing over the landscape at a rate of seventy-five miles per year. Until the rabbits came, much of the countryside where I was driving now was characterized by lush groves of emu bush, a shrub that grew to a height of about seven feet and was in flower for most of the year. It was by all accounts a beauty and its leaves a boon to nibbling creatures. But rabbits fell on the emu bush like locusts, devouring every bit of it – leaves, flowers, bark, stems – until none was to be found. The rabbits ate so much of everything that sheep and other livestock were forced to extend both their range and their diet, punishing
yet wider expanses. As sheep yields fell, farmers perversely compensated by increasing stocking levels, adding to the general devastation.
The problem would have been acute enough, but in the 1890s, after forty unusually green years, Australia fell into a murderous, decade-long drought – the worst in its recorded history. As the earth cracked and turned to dust, the topsoil – already the thinnest in the world – blew away, never to be replenished. In the course of the decade, some 35 million sheep, more than half the nation’s total, perished; 16 million went in a single pitiless year, 1902.
The rabbits, meanwhile, hopped on. By the time science finally came up with a solution, almost a century had passed since Thomas Austin tipped his twenty-four bunnies out of the bag. The weapon deployed against the rabbits was a miracle virus from South America called myxomatosis. Harmless to humans and other animals, it was phenomenally devastating to rabbits, with a mortality rate of 99.9 per cent. Almost at once the countryside filled with twitching, stumbling, very sick rabbits, and then with tens of millions of little corpses. Although just one rabbit in a thousand survived, those few that did were naturally resistant to myxomatosis, and it was resistant genes that they passed on when they began to breed again. It took a while for things to get rolling, but today Australia’s rabbit numbers are back up to 300 million and climbing fast.
At all events, the damage to the landscape, much of it irreversible, had already been done. And all so some clown could have something to pot at from his veranda.
Just as you plunge into emptiness with startling abruptness in Australia, so you plunge out of it again. Shortly
after crossing into South Australia in mid-afternoon, I found myself entering rolling hills of orange groves. It was so startling I got out and had a look. On one side lay arid emptiness – a plain of stretched hessian spattered with clumps of mallee. But before me, filling the view to the distant horizon, spread a biblical-looking promised land – citrus groves and vineyards and vegetable patches in every lush shade of green. As I pushed on, the balance between orchards and vineyards tipped increasingly in favour of the latter until eventually there was nothing but vineyards and I realized I had reached the Barossa Valley, a quite spectacularly pretty corner of South Australia, with rolling hills of abundant green that gave it, literally and metaphorically, a Mediterranean air.
It was mostly settled by German farmers, who started Australia’s wine industry here. Today Australians are among the most wine-savvy people on earth, but that development is quite recent. A story often recounted is how the British wine expert Len Evans, on a visit to the country in the 1950s, asked for a glass of wine in a country hotel. The hotelier regarded him narrowly for a long moment and asked: ‘What are you, some kind of poof?’ Even now the wines for which the Barossa is celebrated – Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon and Shiraz – are all recent arrivals. Into the 1980s, the government was paying growers to uproot Shiraz vines and produce sticky sweet Rieslings. I’ve never quite understood why tourists from the more prosperous end of the market are so drawn to wine-growing areas. They wouldn’t, presumably, want to go and see cotton before it became Gap slacks or caviar being gutted from sturgeon, but give them a backdrop of vines and they appear to think they have found heaven. Having said that, the Barossa Valley is awfully appealing,
particularly after a couple of days on the lonely and far-flung Sturt Highway.
I stopped for the night in Tanunda, a handsome and well-touristed little town, mostly built along one very long street, fetchingly shadowed with leafy trees. Given its popularity with tourists and its Germanic beginnings, I had rather feared that Tanunda would be themed accordingly, but apart from one or two restaurants with ‘Haus’ in their titles and the odd mention of wurst in shop windows, there was mercifully little attempt to exploit its heritage. It was the eve of Australia Day, the big national holiday, and Tanunda was busy with people who had come for a mini-break.
I found a room, not without some difficulty, then wandered to the main street for a stroll before dinner. It was crowded with people who, like me, were trying to fill that empty hour between the shops’ closing and the moment when one might with propriety start to drink. I walked among them, happy to be back in civilization – happy, above all, to be able to eavesdrop on conversations that didn’t involve sheep dip, temperamental machinery, new wells or land clearance. (Or rumps, sumps, pumps and stumps, as I had begun to think of it.) It was clear from the conversations that I had landed in Yuppieville. Most were engaged in the interesting middle-class pastime of identifying all the objects in shop windows that looked like objects belonging to people they knew. Wherever I lingered I could hear someone observing, ‘Oh, look. Sarah’s got a bowl just like that,’ or ‘Your mother used to have a tea service like that one. I wonder whatever became of it. You don’t suppose she gave it to Samantha, do you?’ A few couples were playing a slightly edgier version of this game, which involved supplementary
comments like ‘No, the one
you
broke was
much
nicer’ and ‘But how many pairs of pearl earrings do you
need
, for God’s sake?’ and ‘Well, if she did give it to Samantha, I’m going to be extremely pissed off, frankly, because she promised it to me. You’ll just have to have a word with her.’ These were the people, I guessed, who had driven the furthest to get here and most needed a drink. Or possibly were just assholes.