Down Under (23 page)

I had gone no more than a dozen feet when I was joined by a fly – smaller and blacker than a housefly. It buzzed around in front of my face and tried to settle on my upper lip. I swatted it away, but it returned at once, always to the
same spot. A moment later it was joined by another that wished to go up my nose. It also would not go away. Within a minute or so I had perhaps twenty of these active spots all around my head and I was swiftly sinking into the state of abject wretchedness that comes with a prolonged encounter with the Australian fly.

Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguish themselves by their very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him. Somewhere on an exposed portion of your body is a spot about the size of a shirt button that the fly wants to lick and tickle and turn delirious circles upon. It isn’t simply their persistence, but the things they go for. An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ears that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue. Get thirty or forty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow.

And so I proceeded into the park, lost inside my own little buzzing cloud of woe, waving at my head in an increasingly hopeless and desultory manner – it is called the bush salute – blowing constantly out of my mouth and nose, shaking my head in a kind of furious dementia, occasionally slapping myself with startling violence on the cheek or forehead. Eventually, as the flies knew all along I would, I gave up and they fell upon me as on a corpse.

At length the flies and I reached the end of the military zone and the beginning of the park proper. Just inside this transition area was a signposted path leading up a
medium-sized eminence called Cheviot Hill. This is what I had come to see, for it was at Cheviot Beach, on the other side, that Harold Holt went for the Swim That Needs No Towel. I followed the path upward through misty groves of low bushy trees – moonah, milkwort and tea trees, according to helpful noticeboards posted at intervals. At the top of the hill a stiff breeze was running, forceful enough to make me totter when I neglected to brace for it, and here at last the flies gave me a tiny bit of surcease. I stood with the wind full in my face, happier than I can tell you just to be left alone.

The view from the top of Cheviot Hill is said to be one of the finest in coastal Victoria, though I cannot vouch for this as I could see almost nothing. Across a grey-green vale, a mile or so distant, rose another hill at Point Nepean, covered in lazy cloud. Beyond was the notorious Rip, invisible from here. Below me, things were no less impenetrable. I appeared to be perhaps a hundred feet directly above Cheviot Beach, but it was like peering into a cauldron. All I could see through the drifting soup were some vague outlines of rocks and an indeterminate expanse of sand. Only the sounds of unseen waves flopping onto an unseen shore made it evident that I had found the sea.

Still, I felt a frisson of satisfaction at having reached the place of Holt’s fateful swim. I tried to imagine the scene as it must have been, though it wasn’t easy. On the day Holt waded into the surf, the weather was windy but fine. Things were not going very well for him as Prime Minister – his skills lay more in kissing babies and making the ladies tingle (he was evidently a bit of a hottie) than in running affairs of state – and we may safely assume that he was glad to be out of Canberra for the long Christmas
break. Holt came to this beach because he had a weekend home at Portsea and the army let him stroll on its grounds for the sake of his privacy. So there were no lifeguards, members of the public or even security guards in attendance when, on 17 December 1967, Holt went for a breezy stroll with some friends among the rocks and pounding waves just below. Although the sea was lively and the tide dangerously high, and although Holt had almost drowned there six months earlier while snorkelling with some chums, he decided to go for a swim. Before anyone could react he had whipped off his shirt and plunged into the surf. He swam straight out from the beach a couple of hundred feet and almost instantly vanished, without fuss or commotion or even a languorous wave. He was fifty-nine years old and had been Prime Minister for not quite two years. His body was never found.

Cheviot Beach remains closed to the public, and in any case there was no way down to it from the clifftops, so I amused myself for a few minutes prowling through a complex of pillboxes and murky concrete bunkers left over from the Second World War until I walked into a large cobweb and, with an echoing shriek and a few moments of caroming about between walls, low lintels and other unyielding impedimenta, returned in subdued form to the open air. Rubbing my head and calling round the flies again, I followed the path back down to the road. At the bottom of the hill was a large and straggly cemetery, a relic from when this was a quarantine station. I tried to have a look around, but the flies would give me no peace. I had intended to stroll out to the headland where there was a nineteenth-century fort, but the thought of having the flies as my companions for another hour was more than I
could endure, so I set off back along the empty road by which I had come.

At the visitors’ centre I stopped in to have a look at the displays and got chatting with the park ranger. I asked him how dangerous this stretch of coastline was.

‘Oh, very,’ he said cheerfully. He showed me on a marine chart how the currents ran – which is to say all over the place. If they got hold of you, I gathered, they would pass you around like an unwanted parcel. Even the strongest swimmer would soon be exhausted by the fight. It was mostly to do with the Rip, where massive volumes of water rush through an opening only a few hundred yards across each time the tide rolls in or out. I hadn’t realized until I saw the chart just how proximate Cheviot Beach was to this zone of watery turmoil. Even on a map it looked supremely foolhardy.

‘So it wasn’t a good idea for Harold Holt to go swimming out there?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t go swimming out there,’ he replied. ‘You know, there’s about a hundred shipwrecks just along here.’ He indicated an absurdly modest stretch of shoreline in the vicinity of Cheviot and the Rip. ‘I think you can take it as read that when you’ve got a stretch of sea that sinks a hundred ships, it’s probably not the most placid environment for a dip, you know?’

‘Isn’t it odd that they never found his body?’

‘No.’ This was said without hesitation.

‘Really?’ I don’t understand the dynamics of the sea, but if driftwood and Coke cans are anything to go by, then I thought most buoyant objects ended up on a beach somewhere.

‘Not to be too blunt about it, if you die out there it doesn’t take too long to become part of the food chain.’

‘Ah.’

‘The thing you’ve got to remember,’ he added with a sudden thoughtful air, ‘is that the only thing unusual about the Harold Holt drowning was that he was Prime Minister when it happened. If it hadn’t been for that the whole thing would have been completely forgotten. Mind you, it’s pretty well forgotten anyway.’

‘So you don’t get a lot of people coming here in a kind of pilgrimage?’

‘No, not at all. Most people barely remember it. A lot of people under thirty have never even heard of it.’

He broke off to issue tickets to some new arrivals and I drifted away to look at the displays of seagrasses and life in rockpools. But as I was leaving he called to me with an afterthought. ‘They built a memorial to him in Melbourne,’ he said. ‘Know what it was?’

I indicated that I had no idea.

He grinned very slightly. ‘A municipal swimming pool.’

‘Seriously?’

His grin broadened, but the nod was sincere.

‘This is a terrific country,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he agreed happily. ‘It is, you know.’

Throughout my childhood on Friday nights whenever my father was away, which was often (he was a sportswriter who travelled a lot for his work), my mother and I had an arrangement whereby I would take a bus downtown to meet her (she also worked for the local paper) and we would go to dinner at a cafeteria called Bishop’s and then to a movie.

I don’t wish to suggest that my mother abused the trust I placed in her with regard to the selection process, but it did seem uncanny that the movies I favoured had always just left town and that we ended up seeing something involving murder, passion and betrayal, usually starring Jeff Chandler, for whom my mother had a strange admiration, usually in a part that required him to spend a good deal of time bare-chested.

‘Oh,’ she would tut in a tone of shared chagrin,
‘Twenty
Thousand Leagues under the Sea
has just gone. But the Orpheum has the new Jeff Chandler movie,
Tame Lust.
Shall we go see that?’

I don’t know if through the passage of time these movies have blurred into one in my memory or whether they actually were all identical, but they seemed always to have the same elements – way too much talking, lots of steamy embraces with Lana Turner or some other hard-looking blonde, very occasional gunfire resulting in a clutched belly, a staggered walk and a disappointingly modest seepage of blood, and a part for Chandler that put him frequently on a speedboat or lifeguard’s stand dressed only in swimming trunks. (Without even looking at the screen you could tell which were the swimming trunks scenes because of the avidity with which my mother would begin to suck her lemon drops.) If a Jeff Chandler movie wasn’t available – and amazingly sometimes whole weeks passed in which he didn’t produce a picture – we would have to see something else.

Thus it was that one week when I was about nine we went to see
The Sundowners
, a Technicolor epic starring Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr in the story of a lovably feisty and indomitable couple making a life for themselves in the Australian bush. It was a memorable movie in many ways, not least in that it provided the endearing spectacle of Robert Mitchum doing an Aussie accent, and that it dealt with Australia at all, which made it, in Hollywood terms, essentially unique. Nearly forty years after the event I don’t recall much of the detail of the film other than that Mitchum and Kerr spent every waking moment herding armies of sheep and fighting one discommoding peril of antipodean life after another – bushfires, dust storms, drought, locust infestations and
pub brawls mostly. It was also evidently very hot in Australia: Mitchum never spoke without first taking off a dusty hat and running a forearm across his brow. Since my plans for myself, even at the age of nine, were to spend my adulthood driving an open-topped sports car through Europe with Jean Seberg at my side, I concluded that Australia was of essentially zero interest and did not actively think about it again for thirty years.

In consequence, when finally I made my first trip Down Under, to attend the 1992 Melbourne Writers’ Festival, I was actually able to be astounded to find it there at all. I clearly recall standing on Collins Street in Melbourne, so freshly arrived that I still smelled of (possibly even glistened from) the insecticide with which the flight attendants sprayed the plane before arrival, watching the clanging trams and swirl of humanity, and thinking: ‘Good lord, there’s a country here.’ It was as if I had privately discovered life on another planet, or a parallel universe where life was at once recognizably similar but entirely different.

I can’t tell you how exciting it was. Insofar as I had accumulated any expectations of Australia at all in the intervening years, I had thought of it as a kind of alternative southern California, a place of constant sunshine and the cheerful vapidity of a beach lifestyle, but with a slight British bent – a sort of
Baywatch
with cricket, as I thought it. But this was nothing like that. Melbourne had a settled and gracious air that was much more European than North American, and it rained, rained the whole week, which delighted me inordinately because it was so totally not what I had expected.

What’s more, and here we come to the real crux of things, I liked it, straight off, without quibble or doubt, in
a way I had never expected to. Something about it just agreed with me. I suppose it helped that I had spent half my life in America and half in Britain because Australia was such a comfortable fusion of the two. It had a casualness and vivacity – a lack of reserve, a comfortableness with strangers – that felt distinctly American, but hung on a British framework. In their optimism and informality Australians could pass at a glance for Americans, but they drove on the left, drank tea, played cricket, adorned their public places with statues of Queen Victoria, dressed their children in the sort of school uniforms that only a Britannic people could wear without conspicuous regret. I felt extremely comfortable with this.

Almost at once I became acutely, and in an odd way delightedly, aware of how little I knew about the place. I didn’t know the names of their newspapers or universities or beaches or suburbs, knew nothing of their history or private achievements, couldn’t tell a policeman from a postman. I didn’t even know how to order coffee. It appeared that you had to specify a length (principally long or short), a colour (black or white) and even an angle of orientation to the perpendicular (flat or not), and these could be put together in a multitude of permutations – ‘long black’, ‘short black’, even ‘long short black’. My own preference, I discovered after many happy hours of experimentation, was ‘flat white’. It was a moment of the sublimest happiness.