Down Under (21 page)

What struck me in all this was not how much better off Australians are today, but how much worse they feel. One of the oddest things for an outsider to do is watch Australians assessing themselves. They are an extraordinarily self-critical people. You encounter it constantly in newspapers and on television and radio – a nagging conviction that no matter how good things are in Australia, they are bound to be better elsewhere. A curiously large proportion of books on Australian life and history bear grave, pessimistic titles:
Among the Barbarians, The Future Eaters, The Tyranny of Distance, This Tired, Brown Land, Fatal Impact, The Fatal Shore.
Even when the titles are neutral (they are never positive), they often contain the oddest, most startling conclusions. In
A Shorter History of Australia
, a thoughtful and unexceptionable survey of the country’s considerable achievements over the past 200 years, the author, Geoffrey Blainey, finishes by noting that Australia
has nearly completed its first century under peaceful federation. Then, out of the blue, he concludes with these words: ‘Whether it will last for two centuries is not certain. In the sweep of human history no political boundary is permanent.’

Now is that very strange or what? You could understand a Canadian writing those words, or a Belgian or a South African. But an Australian? Please. This is a country that has never had a serious civil disturbance, never jailed a dissident, never shown the tiniest inclination to fray at the edges. Australia is the Norway of the southern hemisphere. And yet here is the country’s foremost living historian suggesting that its continuation as a sovereign nation is by no means assured. Extraordinary.

If Australians lack one thing in their lonely eminence Down Under, it is perspective. For four decades they have watched in quiet dismay as one country after another – Switzerland, Sweden, Japan, Kuwait and many others – has climbed over them on the per capita GDP table. When news came out in 1996 that Hong Kong and Singapore had also squeezed ahead, you’d have thought from the newspaper editorials that Asian armies had come ashore somewhere around Darwin and were fanning out across the country, appropriating consumer durables as they went. Never mind that most of these countries were only marginally ahead and that much of it was to do with relative exchange rates. Never mind that when you take into account quality-of-life indicators such as cost of living, educational attainments, crime rates and so on Australia bounds back up near the top. (It ranks seventh on the United Nations’ Human Development Index, a little behind Canada, Sweden, the United States and one or two others, but comfortably ahead of Germany, Switzerland,
Austria, Italy and several other countries with stout economies and higher GDPs.) At the time of my visit, Australia was booming as never before. It was enjoying one of the fastest rates of economic growth in the developed world, inflation was invisible and unemployment was at its lowest level in years. Yet according to a study by the Australian Institute, 36 per cent of Australians felt life was getting worse and barely a fifth saw any hope of its getting better.

These days, it is true, in terms of gross dollars accumulated per head, Australia is no longer near the top. It comes in at number twenty-one, in fact. But I ask you, which would you rather be – third richest and thrilled because you have an electric jug and at least one radio, or twenty-first richest and living in a world where you can have everything a person could reasonably want?

On the other hand, in very few of these other countries do you run the slightest risk of being eaten by an estuarine crocodile, a thought that occurred to me now as I pulled out my second purchase,
Crocodile Attack in Australia
by Hugh Edwards, and waded chest deep into its 240 pages of gruesome, violent attacks by this most cunning and unsporting of creatures.

The saltwater crocodile is the one animal that has the capacity to frighten even Australians. People who would calmly flick a scorpion off their forearm or chuckle fearlessly at a pack of skulking dingoes will quake at the sight of a hungry croc, and I had not ventured far into the pages of Mr Edwards’s chilling chronicles before I began to understand why. Consider this tale of an afternoon at play in north-western Australia:

In March 1987, a motorcruiser with five people aboard was making its way along the Kimberley coast when it
detoured up the Prince Regent River to visit Kings Cascade, a remote beauty spot where a tropical waterfall spills picturesquely over a granite outcrop. There they moored and went off variously to clamber over the cascades or have a swim. One of the swimmers was a young American model named Ginger Faye Meadows. As she and another young woman stood waist deep on a rock ledge under the waterfall, one of them noticed the cold, steady eyes and half-submerged snout of a crocodile coming towards them. Now imagine it. You are standing with your back to a rock wall much too steep and slippery to climb, with nowhere to retreat, and one of the deadliest creatures on earth is coming towards you – a creature so perfectly engineered to kill that it has scarcely changed in 200 million years. You are, in short, about to be killed by something from the age of the dinosaurs.

One of the two women took off a plastic shoe and threw it at the crocodile. It bounced off his head, causing him to blink and hesitate. In the same instant, Meadows decided to make a break for it. She dived into the water and tried to swim the twenty-five yards to safety. The friend stayed put. Meadows swam with strong strokes, but the crocodile followed on a line designed to intercept her. About halfway across it caught her round the middle and jerked her beneath the water.

According to the boat’s skipper, Meadows stayed under for several seconds, then surfaced with ‘her hands in the air and a really startled look on her face . . . She was looking right at me . . . but she didn’t say a word.’ Then she went under again and was seen no more. The next day would have been her twenty-fifth birthday.

This is probably the most famous crocodile attack in Australia in the last twenty-five years because it involved a
well-known beauty spot, a luxury cruiser and a victim from America who happened to be young and very good looking. But here’s the thing: there have been
lots
of others. What’s more, Meadows’s death was atypical because she saw it coming. For most people a crocodile attack comes completely unexpectedly. The chronicles of crocodile killings are full of stories of people standing in a few inches of water or sitting on a bank or strolling along an ocean beach when suddenly the water splits and, before they can even cry out, much less enter into negotiations, they are carried away for leisurely devouring. That is what is so scary about them.

Now I ask you. Who gives a stuff how much money people are making in Hong Kong or Singapore when you’ve got matters like that to worry about? That’s all I’m saying.

I would happily have stayed another day or two in Adelaide, but I had tracks to make. It was almost time to meet my friends in Melbourne, but first I had a promise to myself of long standing to visit the Mornington Peninsula, a coastal area of beauty and charm just south of Melbourne. As ever in Australia, it would take some getting to. I left Adelaide early and was dismayed to discover, within an hour or so of setting off, that I was facing yet another long day of driving on empty roads through a featureless expanse. This seemed particularly unfair because, in the first place, I had supposed that I was heading back into civilization and, second, I had had quite enough of this sort of thing already and, third, I had intentionally chosen a slightly longer route along a coastal highway to avoid the prospect of overland visual tedium.

The road I was on was called the Princes Highway. The
map showed it running in a graceful arc along the edge of a vast bay identified as the Younghusband Peninsula, and indeed it did present hours of sunny coastal views, but the tide was miles out, leaving the sea as a distant thread of bright blue on the far side of a million painfully reflective acres of saltpans. The inland side presented an equally featureless blankness filled with a single, infinitely repeated species of low shrub. For 146 kilometres the road was perfectly empty.

To pass the time, I sang Australia’s unofficial national anthem, ‘Waltzing Matilda’. It is an interesting song. It was written by Banjo Paterson, who was not only Australia’s greatest poet of the nineteenth century but also the only one named for a stringed instrument. It goes (and I think the record should show that these are the words precisely as set down by Paterson):

The main distinguishing feature of ‘Waltzing Matilda’, you will notice, is that it makes no sense. Obviously it makes no sense to anyone not familiar with bush lingo – that part was intentional – but even when you understand the words it makes no sense. A
billabong
, for instance, is a waterhole. So a question that immediately arises, before you have even concluded the first line, is: Why was the swagman camped
in
it? I would camp beside it myself. You see what you are up against? The only possible conclusion is that Paterson had had a few when he grabbed his inkpot and dashed off the words. Anyway, just to keep you
fully informed, a
swagman
in Australian parlance is an itinerant traveller. The term comes from the rolled blanket, or
swag
, that he carried. Another name for a swag was a
Matilda
, evidently from the German
Mathilde.
(Don’t ask me; my interest in this goes only so far.) A
billy
is a can for boiling water and a
coolibah tree
is a coolibah tree. There you have the terms. Why the swagman is a-waltzing with his bedroll and why above all he desires someone or something (in the second verse it’s a sheep, for goodness’ sake) to join him in this bizarre and possibly depraved activity are, of course, questions that cannot be answered.

On the other hand, it has a lovely tune (it’s borrowed from an old Scottish air, ‘Thou Bonnie Wood O’ Craigielea’), which I render particularly melodically, if I say so myself, especially with my head out of the window to achieve that warbly effect that comes from singing into an onrush of air at speed. The problem with knowing only one verse, of course, is that it gets a trifle repetitive after a time. So you may conceive my satisfaction when I realized that if you changed ‘billy boiling’ to ‘willy boiling’ it put an entirely new slant on things, and I was able to come up with approximately forty-seven new stanzas, which not only extends the song to a length suitable for long bus journeys, but brings to it a dimension of coherence that it has lacked for almost a century.

I might have got the verse total even higher except that as I rounded the last sweep of bay and followed the road inland through a stretch of scrub, I came upon a sign announcing ‘The Big Lobster’ and in the excitement I abandoned my musical interests. The Big Lobster, you see, was something – or more properly a species of something – that I had longed to see ever since I had hit the road.

One of the more cherishable peculiarities of Australians is that they like to build big things in the shape of other things. Give them a bale of chicken wire, some fibreglass and a couple of pots of paint and they will make you, say, an enormous pineapple or strawberry or, as here, a lobster. Then they put a café and a gift shop inside, erect a big sign beside the highway (for the benefit of people whose acuity evidently does not extend to spotting a fifty-foot-high piece of fruit standing beside an otherwise empty highway), then sit back and wait for the money to roll in.

Some sixty of these objects are scattered across the Australian landscape, like leftover props from a 1950s’ horror movie. You can, if you have sufficient petrol money and nothing approaching a real life, visit a Big Prawn, a Big Koala, a Big Oyster (with searchlights for eyes, apparently), a Big Lawnmower, a Big Marlin, a Big Orange and a Big Merino Ram, among many others. The process, I am patriotically proud to tell you, was started by an American named Landy who built a Big Banana at Coff’s Harbour, on the New South Wales coast, which proved so magically attractive to passing vehicles that it made Mr Landy, as it were, the big banana of the business.

Generally these objects are cannily set along a stretch of highway so astoundingly void and dull that you will stop for almost anything – as of course I did now when the road bent once again and I found looming before me a monstrously large, reddish pink, commendably lifelike lobster rearing up beside the road as if about to dine on a morsel of passing traffic. Owing to the peculiar shape of a lobster, the owners had decided (I imagine after quite a lot of thought) not to try to accommodate a gift shop and café
inside, so the Big Lobster sat on the front lawn, secured with guy wires, while the retail facilities were in a separate building behind. I got out and approached for a closer look. It was impressively outsized. I learned from subsequent enquiry that it is fifty-six feet from the ground to the tip of its feelers – a good size even in the ambitious world of giant objects.