Down Under (19 page)

I liked Tanunda and had a very pleasant evening there, but there was absolutely nothing exceptional or eventful in the experience, so I am going to tell you instead a little story related to me by a lovely woman named Catherine Veitch.

Catherine Veitch was my oldest friend in Australia, both in the sense that she was my first chum there and also that she was just about old enough to be my mother. I met her at the Melbourne Writers’ Festival in 1992. I can’t remember the circumstances now other than that she approached me after a reading either to set me straight with regard to some mistake I had made in one of my books on language – she was of a scholarly bent and impatient with sloppiness – or to enlighten me concerning some aspect of Australian life on which I had imprudently commented in the question and answer session. The upshot is that we had a cup of tea in the cafeteria and the next day I took a tram to her house in St Kilda for lunch, where I met most of her family. Her children, of whom she seemed to have a large but indeterminate number, were all grown and living away, but most of them called in at various points in the afternoon, to borrow a tool or check for messages or burrow in the fridge. It was just the kind of household I had always longed to grow up in – happy, comfortable, nicely chaotic, full of shouted conversations of the ‘Try
looking in the cupboard at the top of the stairs’ type. And I liked Catherine very much. She was kind and funny and thoughtful and direct.

So we became great friends – though it was a friendship based almost entirely on correspondence. She had never been to America, and I went to Australia once a year if I was lucky, and not always to Melbourne. But three or four times a year she would send me long, wonderfully discursive letters hammered out on a jumpy and wilful typewriter. These letters seldom took less than an hour to read. In a single page they could range over a galaxy of subjects – her childhood in Adelaide, the inadequacies of certain politicians (actually, of most politicians), why Australians lack confidence, what her children had been up to. Generally she stuck in a wad of cuttings from the
Age
, the Melbourne newspaper. Much of what I know about Australia I learned from her.

I loved those letters. They came from so far away – just getting an envelope from Australia still seemed to me a faintly wondrous event – and described events and experiences that were unexceptional to her but breathtakingly exotic to me: taking a tram into the city, suffering through a heatwave in December, attending a lecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute, shopping for curtains at David Jones, the big local department store. I can’t explain it except to say that, without giving up any part of the life I had already, I wanted intensely to have all that in my life as well. So it was through her letters, more than from almost anything else, that I consolidated my fixation with Australia.

Her letters were always happy, but the last one I received from her was especially sunny. She and John, her husband, were about to sell the house in St Kilda and move to the
Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne, to take up a life of gracious retirement beside the sea, fulfilling a dream of many years’ duration. Just after she sent that letter, to the shock of everyone who knew her, she suffered a sudden heart attack and died. I’d have been on my way to visit her now. Instead all I can offer is my favourite of the many stories she told me.

In the 1950s, a friend of Catherine’s moved with her young family into a house next door to a vacant lot. One day some builders arrived to put up a house on the lot. Catherine’s friend had a three-year-old daughter who naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door. She hung around on the margins and eventually the builders adopted her as a kind of mascot. They chatted to her and gave her little jobs to do and at the end of the week presented her with a little pay packet containing a shiny new half crown, or something.

She took this home to her mother who made all the appropriate cooings of admiration and suggested that they take it to the bank the next morning to deposit it in her account. When they went to the bank, the cashier was equally impressed and asked the little girl how she had come by her own pay packet.

‘I’ve been building a house this week,’ she replied proudly.

‘Goodness!’ said the cashier. ‘And will you be building a house next week, too?’

‘I will if we ever get the fucking bricks,’ answered the little girl.

South Australians are very proud that theirs is the only Australian state that never received convicts. What they don’t often mention is that it was planned by one. In the early 1830s, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a man of independent means and unsavoury inclinations, was in Newgate Prison in London, on a charge of abducting a female child for sweaty and nefarious purposes, when he hatched the idea to found a colony of freemen in Australia. His plan was to sell parcels of land to sober, industrious people – farmers and capitalists – and use the funds raised to pay the passage of labourers to work for them. The labourers would gain ennobling employment; the investors would acquire a workforce and a market; everyone would benefit. The scheme never worked terribly well in practice, but the result was a new colony, South Australia, and a delightful planned city, Adelaide.

Whereas Canberra is a park, Adelaide is merely full of them. In Canberra you have the sense of being in a very large green space you cannot ever quite find your way out of; in Adelaide you are indubitably in a city, but with the pleasant option of stepping out of it from time to time to get a breath of air in a spacious green setting. Makes all the difference. The city was laid out as two distinct halves facing each other across the green plain of the Torrens River, with each half fully enclosed by parks. On a map, therefore, central Adelaide forms a large, plump, somewhat irregular figure of eight, with parks creating the figure and the two inner halves of the city filling the holes. It works awfully well.

I had no special destination in mind, but the next morning as I drove into the city from Tanunda I passed through North Adelaide, the handsome and prosperous zone inside the top half of the figure eight, spotted an agreeable-looking hotel and impetuously threw the car at the kerb. I was on O’Connell Street, in a neighbourhood of old, well-preserved buildings with lots of trendy restaurants, pubs and cafés. After Canberra, I wasn’t going to let a slice of urban heaven like this slip past. So I procured a room and lost not a moment getting back into the open air.

Adelaide is the most overlooked of Australia’s principal cities. You could spend weeks in Australia and never suspect it was there, for it rarely makes the news or gets a mention in anyone’s conversation. It is to Australia essentially what Australia is to the world – a place pleasantly regarded but far away and seldom thought about. And yet it is unquestionably a lovely city. Everyone is agreed on that, including millions who have never been there.

I had been just once myself, on a book tour a few
months before. What remained from that experience was an impression of physical handsomeness coupled with an oddly pleased sense of doom on the part of the inhabitants. Remark to anyone in Adelaide what an agreeable place it is, and you will be told at once, with a kind of eager solemnity: ‘Yes, but it’s dying, you know.’

‘Is it?’ you say in a tone of polite concern.

‘Oh yes,’ confides your informant, nodding with grim satisfaction. Then, if you are very unlucky, the person will tell you all about the collapse of the Bank of South Australia, an event of fiscal carelessness that took years to conclude and is nearly as long in the telling.

Adelaide’s problem, it appears, is geographical. The city stands on the wrong edge of civilized Australia, far from the vital Asian markets and with nothing on its own doorstep but a great deal of nothing. To the north and west lie a million-odd square miles of searing desert; to the south nothing but open sea all the way to Antarctica. Only to the east are there any cities, but even Melbourne is 450 miles away and Sydney nearer a thousand. Why would anyone build a factory in Adelaide when it is so far from its markets? It is a reasonable question, but somewhat undermined by the consideration that Perth is even more remote – 1,700 miles more remote in its lonely outpost on the Indian Ocean – yet has a far more vibrant economy. At all events, the bottom line is that Adelaide seems stuck in an unhappy place, in every sense of the word.

Yet to the casual observer it seems quite as affluent as any other big city in Australia, possibly even more so. Its central shopping district is better looking and at least as well used as the equivalent zones in Sydney or Melbourne, and its pubs, restaurants and cafés appear to be as bustling and lively as any entrepreneur could wish. It has an
outstanding stock of Victorian buildings, an abundance of parks and comely squares, and constant small touches – an ornate lamp-post here, a stone lion there – that give it a dash of classiness and respectful venerability that Sydney and Melbourne all too often discarded for the sequined glitter of skyscrapers. It feels rather like an urban version of a gentlemen’s club – comfortable, old-fashioned, quietly grand, slightly drowsy by mid-afternoon, redolent of another age.

As I strolled downhill past Pennington Gardens, one of the central parks, I became gradually and then overwhelmingly aware of the tide of human activity all moving in a single direction – thousands and thousands of people converging on a stadium in the park. I asked two young men what was going on and was told there was a cricket match between England and Australia at the Oval.

‘What – here in Adelaide? Today?’ I said in surprise.

He considered the question with the bemusement it merited. ‘Well, either that,’ he replied drily, ‘or thirty thousand people have made one pretty amazing bloody mistake, wouldn’t you say?’ Then he smiled to show that he wasn’t being aggressive or anything. It appeared that he and his partner had stopped for a gallon or two of refreshment en route.

‘Do you know, are there still tickets left?’ I asked.

‘Nah, mate, sold out. Sorry.’

I nodded and watched them go. That was another very British thing I’d noticed about Australians – they apologized for things that weren’t their fault.

I found my way along North Terrace, the city’s grandest thoroughfare, to the South Australian Museum, a stately pile devoted to natural and anthropological history. I was
interested to see if it displayed a fossil called
Spriggina
, named for a minor hero of mine called Reginald Sprigg. In 1946, Sprigg, then a young government geologist, was poking around in the blisteringly inhospitable Ediacaran hills of the Flinders Ranges, some 300 miles north of Adelaide, when he made one of those miraculous discoveries in which Australian natural history almost impossibly abounds. You will recall from an earlier chapter the case of the strange and long-lost proto-ant
Nothomyrmecia macrops
found unexpectedly at a dusty hamlet in the middle of nowhere. Well, Sprigg’s find was in much the same general area and, in its way, no less remarkable.

His special moment came when he clambered a few yards up a rocky slope to find a piece of shade and a comfortable rock to lean against to have his lunch. As he sat eating his sandwiches he idly stretched out a toe and turned over a hunk of sandstone. Sprigg left no informal account of the event, but I think we can safely imagine him pausing in his chewing – pausing for a long moment, mouth slightly open – to stare at what he had just turned over, then slowly creeping nearer to have a closer look. What he had just found, you see, was something that wasn’t thought to exist.

For almost a century, since the time of Charles Darwin, scientists had been puzzled by an evolutionary anomaly – that 600 million years ago complex life forms of an improbable variety had suddenly burst forth on earth (the famous Cambrian explosion), but without any evidence of earlier, simpler forms that might have paved the way for such an event. Sprigg had just found that missing link, a piece of rock swimming in delicate pre-Cambrian fossils. He was looking, in effect, at the dawn of visible life – at
something no one had ever seen before or ever expected to see. It was a moment of supreme geological significance. And if he had sat anywhere else – anywhere at all in the infinite baking expanse that is the Australian outback – it would not have been made, certainly not then, possibly not ever.

That’s the thing about Australia, you see. It teems with interesting stuff, but at the same time it’s so vast and empty and forbidding that it generally takes a remarkable stroke of luck to find it.

Unfortunately, in 1946 the world scientific community paid little heed to news from Australia, and Sprigg’s reports of his findings, duly recorded in the
Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia
, languished for two decades before their significance became generally appreciated. But never mind. In the end, credit fell where it was due: Sprigg was immortalized with the name of a fossil, and the epoch he uncovered became known as the Ediacaran, after the hills through which he had tramped.

Alas, the museum was not open when I passed by – closed for the national holiday, I supposed – and so my hopes of glimpsing the dawn of life were dashed. Wandering on through shady side streets, however, I found a second-hand bookshop open and was happy to take that as a consolation prize. Probably because new books have always been expensive in Australia, the country has outstanding second-hand bookshops. These always have a large section devoted to ‘Australiana’ and these sections never fail to amaze, if only because they show you what a remarkably self-absorbed people the Australians are. I don’t mean that as a criticism. If the rest of the world is going to pay them no attention, then they must do it themselves surely. That seems fair enough to me. But you
do find in any trawl through the jumbled stacks the most wondrous titles. One of the first I took down now was called
That’s Where I Met My Wife: A Story of the First Swimming Pool in the National Capital at Canberra.
Nearby was a plump volume entitled
A Sense of Union: A History of Sydney University Football Club.
Beside that was a history of the South Australia Ambulance Service. There were hundreds of titles like this – books about things that could never possibly have been of interest to more than a handful of people. It’s quite encouraging that these books exist, but somehow faintly worrying as well.