Down Under (22 page)

I was looking at it from various angles when I realized that I had wandered into someone’s photograph.

‘Oh, sorry!’ I called.

‘No worries, mate,’ he replied with an easygoing air. ‘You help to give it scale.’

He came up and stood beside me. He was in his early thirties and looked vaguely sad and dorky, like someone who worked in a low-grade job and still lived at home. He was dressed as if for a vacation, in shorts and a T-shirt that said ‘Noosa’ in large letters. Noosa is a Queensland resort. Together we stood and for quite a period silently admired the lobster.

‘Big, isn’t it?’ I remarked at last, for very little escapes me in the world of fibreglass crustaceans.

‘You wouldn’t get a snap of me in front of it, would you?’ he said in that curiously circular way in which Australians beg a favour.

‘Of course.’

He went and stood beside it, a hand perched affectionately on a foreleg.

‘You can tell people it’s an engagement photo,’ I suggested.

He liked that idea. ‘Yeah!’ he said keenly. ‘Meet the fiancée. She’s not much for looks or conversation, but jeez can she scuttle!’

I decided I liked this guy.

‘So do you visit these things a lot?’ I said, handing him back the camera.

‘Only if I’m passing, you know. It’s a pretty good one, though. Better than the Big Koala at Moyston.’

I didn’t feel there was a great deal I could say to this.

‘At Wauchope there’s a Big Bull,’ he added.

I raised my eyebrows in a way that said: ‘Oh yes?’

He nodded fondly. ‘Its testicles swing in the breeze.’

‘It has testicles?’ I said, impressed.

‘I’ll say. If they fell on you, you wouldn’t get up in a hurry.’

We took an extended moment to savour this image. ‘It would make an interesting insurance claim, I suppose,’ I observed at last.

‘Yeah!’ He liked this idea, too. ‘Or a newspaper headline: “Man crushed by falling bollocks.”’

‘“By falling bullock’s bollocks”,’ I offered.

‘Yeah!’

We were getting on like a house on fire. I hadn’t had a conversation this long in days. What am I saying – I hadn’t had this much
fun
in days. Unfortunately, neither of us could think of anything more to say, and so we just stood awkwardly for a while.

‘Well, nice meeting you,’ he said at last and with a shy smile shuffled off.

‘Nice meeting
you,’
I said and meant it.

I went inside and bought a fridge magnet and about fifteen Big Lobster postcards, and returned to the road in a mellow frame of mind. I headed the car towards Warrnambool and the famous Great Ocean Road and drove some minutes in thoughtful silence. Then abruptly I thrust my head out of the window, and in a sweet but robust voice sang:

I spent the night in Port Fairy, and drove on the next day to the Mornington Peninsula along the Great Ocean Road, a tortuous, spectacularly scenic coastal highway built after the First World War as a make-work scheme for veterans. It took fourteen years to construct and you can see why at once because for most of its 187 miles it swoops along an impossibly challenging coastline in a hair-raising manner, barrelling around rocky headlands and clinging to the edges of sheer and crumbly cliffs. So demanding of attention are the endless hairpin bends that you scarcely have a moment to notice the views, but I figured an occasional glimpsed view was better than none. Here and there in the water stand pinnacles of rock created by the tireless erosive might of the sea. There used to be a natural rock arch called London Bridge over which you could stroll to stand above the sea, but in 1990 it collapsed, sending tons of debris into the surf below and stranding two startled but miraculously unharmed tourists on the seaward stub. London Bridge is now London Stacks.

The drive was as gorgeous as the guidebooks had promised: on one side the steep, wooded, semi-tropical hills of the Otway Range plunging straight into the sea, on the other foamy surf rolling onto long, curving beaches framed at either end by rocky outcrops. This stretch of Victoria is famous for two things: surfing and shipwrecks.
With its wild currents and famous fogs, the south Victorian coast was long notorious to mariners. If you took all the water away, you would see 1,200 ships lying broken on the seabed, more than almost anywhere else in the world. I stopped from time to time to get out and take in the views – it really was the only way for a solitary driver to see them – and poked about in one or two of the sweetly old-fashioned little resort communities that lay along the way. These were surprisingly quiet, considering that it was the height of the Australian summer and the day after a national holiday. It struck me, not for the first time, that there seemed to be more places in Australia for tourists to go than there were tourists to fill them.

At a place called Torquay, the Great Ocean Road rejoined the main highway towards Melbourne. Twenty miles to the west, I noticed, was Winchelsea, where Thomas Austin set free the twenty-four rabbits that transformed the Australian landscape. The countryside roundabout looked vaguely arid and unpromising – it reminded me of Oklahoma or western Kansas – but I had no way of knowing, of course, how much of this could be attributed to the voracity of rabbits. Now you would think that people might have learned a lesson from Austin’s experience, but amazingly no. At the very moment that rabbits were eating their way across the countryside, influential people were introducing other species of animals in great numbers – sometimes for sport, sometimes by accident, but mostly in an effort to liven things up a little. Precisely the same impulse that led people to build English-style parks in places like Adelaide led them to try to manipulate the countryside as well. Australia was deemed biologically deficient, its semi-arid plains too monotonous, its forests too silent. Gradually there arose
acclimatization societies that made scores of eager introductions to fulfil a longing for the familiar. Before long it occurred to the societies that there was no reason to stop with British or even European animals. They began to dream of creating an African veldt in Australia, with giraffes, springboks and buffalo grazing the sunny plains. Their aspirations took on an almost surreal quality. In 1862, Sir Henry Barkly, governor of Victoria, called for the introduction of monkeys into the colony’s forests ‘for the amusement of wayfarers, whom their gambols would delight’. Before this could be acted on, Barkly had been replaced as governor by Sir Charles Darling, who said he didn’t want monkeys but would be very pleased to see boa constrictors. He didn’t get his way either, but scores of others did.

‘Acclimatization was one of the most foolish and dangerous ideas ever to infect the thinking of nineteenth-century men,’ writes Tim Low in the improbably gripping
Feral Future: The Untold Story of Australia’s Exotic Invaders
, but infect them it did. Victoria, for some reason, became the hotbed of all this. Despite the experience with rabbits, dozens of other foolish introductions were made. In the 1860s the Ballarat Acclimatization Society loosed foxes into the landscape and they quickly became a scourge, a position from which they have not yet retreated. Other animals escaped or were abandoned and went wild. Camels were used to build the railway from Adelaide to Alice Springs, but were set free when the work was completed. Today 100,000 of them roam the central and western deserts, the only place in the world where one-humped dromedaries exist in the wild. Across the country there are up to five million wild donkeys, a million or more wild horses (called brumbies) and large numbers of
water buffalo, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, foxes and dogs. Feral pigs have been caught in Melbourne suburbs. There are so many introduced species, in fact, that the red kangaroo, once the largest animal on the continent, is now only the thirteenth biggest.

The consequences for native species have often been devastating. About 130 mammals in Australia are threatened. Sixteen have become extinct – more than in any other continent. And guess what is the mightiest killer of all? According to the National Parks and Wildlife Service, it is the common cat. Cats love the Australian wild. There are 12 million of them out there, inhabiting every niche in the landscape from the driest deserts to the tallest mountains. With the fox they have driven many of Australia’s smallest, cutest and most vulnerable native animals to the edge of extinction – numbats, bettongs, quolls, potoroos, bandicoots, rock wallabies, platypuses and many others. Since most of these creatures are nocturnal and rarely seen, most people don’t notice their absence, but they are going fast.

As with animals, so with plants. In the 1850s, Victoria was unfortunate to have as chief botanist a dedicated accli-matizer with the imposing name of Baron Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich Von Mueller. As with animal acclimatizers, Von Mueller couldn’t abide what he viewed as the impoverished nature of Australia’s flora, and he spent much of his free time travelling the country sowing seeds of pumpkins, cabbages, melons and whatever else he thought might flourish. He had a special affection for blackberries, planting clumps of them all over. The blackberry is now Victoria’s most pernicious weed, all but ineradicable and the bane of farmers everywhere. Where unmolested, it takes over whole landscapes. I saw some now as I drove along.

The lesson in this – that exotic species often thrive in
Australia in a way that staggers belief – is one that Australians have had a curiously hard time fully grasping. Prickly pear, a type of pulpy cactus native to America, was introduced in Queensland early in the twentieth century as a potential stock feed and quickly went crazy. By 1925, 30 million acres were overrun with impenetrable groves of prickly pear up to six feet high. It is an almost absurdly dense plant – an acre of prickly pear weighs 800 tons, as against about fifteen tons for an acre of wheat – and a nightmare to clear. For a while it looked as if much of Queensland and beyond would simply become one Europe-sized bed of prickly pear. Fortunately it could be treated effectively with pesticides and a moth whose larvae relished its leaves, but it was a close-run thing and the cost was substantial.

Altogether, according to Low, Australia is now home to more than 2,700 foreign weeds. Interestingly, botanical gardens are among the worst offenders. Three escapees from Darwin’s Botanic Gardens – mimosa bush, leucaena and crutch tree – threaten Kakadu National Park, a World Heritage site, and there have been others elsewhere.

Where these things come from is often a mystery. According to Low, in recent years a biting ant, from the species
Iridomyrmex
, has infested Brisbane. It has become a common nuisance. Interestingly, no one knows where it came from or how it got there. It just one day appeared. Nor, for obvious reasons, can anyone say where it will spread or what quiet havoc it might wreak. One thing alone is certain. As so often, it appears to be doing better in Australia than wherever it came from.

The Mornington Peninsula is a spur of land just south of Melbourne. It is, I suppose, Victoria’s Cape Cod, in that it
is coastal and very pretty and crowded with summer homes. It even has something of the same shape, curling around in a scorpion tail that almost encloses the considerable immensity of Port Phillip Bay, across which, at a distance of some fifty miles, stands Melbourne. I had two particular reasons for wanting to be here: Catherine Veitch had made it sound so appealing in her letters and it was here that Australia’s tragically submersible Prime Minister, Harold Holt, went for his final swim.

Holt’s fateful dip was at Portsea, at the peninsula’s far end, so it was there I directed myself the next morning after overnighting in the little town of Mornington. Though I set off in watery sunshine, of the sort that seemed to promise a fine day later on, Portsea was settled under a heavy sea mist, and the temperature when I stepped out of the car was cooler than it had been twenty miles up the road. Most of the few people out in Portsea, I noticed, were wearing cotton jumpers or jackets.

Portsea is very small – a handful of shops and cafés against a larger backdrop of big houses looking aloof and broody in the wispy fog – but famously well heeled. A beach hut had just sold at auction here for $185,000. Not a beach house, you understand, but a beach hut – a simple wooden shed with no electricity, water or any features at all other than proximity to sand and sea. The purchaser didn’t even actually get to own the hut. All his $185,000 bought him was the right in perpetuity to pay the council several hundred dollars in annual rent. The huts, which only locals are allowed to acquire, are immensely prized possessions. The one that had just been sold had been in the same family for fifty years.

I had coffee to warm up before continuing on to the Mornington Peninsula National Park, which covers the
last nubbin of land before it meets the sea at a hilly outpost called Point Nepean, beyond which lies a notorious swirl of water called the Rip – a narrow passage forming the entrance to Port Phillip Bay. Only recently had this land become public. For a hundred years, the whole of this area – several hundred acres of the most glorious coastal property in Victoria – was off limits to the public because it was owned by the military, which used it as a firing range. Pause with me for a moment while we put this in perspective. Here you have a country of three million square miles, nearly all of it empty and eminently bom-bable. And here, just a couple of hours’ drive from the country’s second city, you have a headland of rare and sumptuous beauty, and of considerable ecological importance, and from this land you bar the public because you are trying to blow it to smithereens. Doesn’t make much sense, what? The upshot is that after many years of wheedling and cajoling, the military was finally prevailed upon to yield a fragment of this land to form a national park. Even so, the army kept about two-thirds of the peninsula and still occasionally lofts bombs into it. In consequence, once you have acquired a ticket of admission at a visitors’ centre on the edge of Portsea, you have to pass through a two-mile-long zone of military land on a road lined on both sides with tall fences bearing severe warnings of unexploded bombs and the folly of trespass. You can take a shuttle bus into the park or walk. I decided to walk, for the exercise, and set off through the cloaking mist. I appeared to have the place pretty much to myself.