Down Under (26 page)

There was also the deep odium of the White Australia Policy, which allowed immigration officials to keep out undesirables by requiring them to pass a literacy test in any European language of the authorities’ choosing (including on one famous occasion Scottish Gaelic) and to deport non-whites with little thought of compassion. In the early 1950s, Arthur Calwell, the Minister for Immigration, tried to repatriate the Indonesian-born widow and eight children of an Australian citizen. If Australians have a single radiant virtue, it is the belief in a ‘fair go’ – a sense of the fundamental rightness of common justice – and the case caused an outcry. The courts told Calwell to get real, and the more insensitive side of the exclusion policy swiftly began to erode. Around 1970, as Australia increasingly recognized that it was, at least geographically, an Asian nation and not a European one, the colour bar came down and hundreds of thousands of immigrants were let in from across the region. Today Australia is one of the most multicultural countries on earth. A third of the people in Sydney were born in another country; in Melbourne the four most common
surnames are Smith, Brown, Jones and Nguyen. Across the country as a whole almost a quarter of people have no British antecedents on either side of their families. For millions of people it truly was a chance of a new life – one that, on the whole, was generously extended and gratefully accepted.

In a single generation, Australia remade itself. It went from being a half-forgotten outpost of Britain, provincial, dull and culturally dependent, to being a nation infinitely more sophisticated, confident, interesting and outward looking. And it did all this, by and large, without discord or disturbance or serious mistakes – indeed often with a kind of grace.

By coincidence, a few nights earlier I had watched a television documentary about the immigrant experience in the 1950s. One of the people interviewed was a man who had arrived from Hungary as a teenager after the uprising there. On his first full day in the country he had gone as instructed to the local police station and explained in halting English that he was a new immigrant who had been told to register his address. The sergeant had stared at him for a moment, then risen from his seat and come around the desk. The Hungarian recalled that for one bewildered moment he thought the policeman might be about to strike him, but instead the sergeant thrust out a meaty hand and said warmly, ‘Welcome to Australia, son.’ The Hungarian recalled the incident with wonder even now, and when he finished there were tears in his eyes.

I tell you sincerely. It’s a wonderful country.

Carmel grew up on a farm in eastern Victoria on the southern edge of the Great Dividing Range, in lovely country of green fields set against a backdrop of blue hills. Howe, a lifelong city boy whose notion of the bush was of a monotonous expanse filled with deathly creatures, had gone to visit the family farm out of a sense of husbandly duty and fallen for it at once – so much so that he and Carmel had bought a parcel of land high on a neighbouring hillside, trucked in a jaunty wooden cottage and placed it in a lofty spot giving views over miles of hills, woods and farms. Howe had been telling me about it with a certain repetitive rapture for years and was keen for me to see it. So the next day, after loading up with provisions, we set off in their car for the three-hour drive to their rural idyll.

‘Bush’ is such a vague word in Australia that I wasn’t sure
what to expect, but it became obvious once we had shrugged off the outer suburbs of Melbourne that eastern Victoria was a favoured corner of the world – greener than any part of Australia I had seen before and backed by mountains that attained a wholly respectable eminence. The road wound through meadowy landscapes in a charmingly indecisive manner and through a succession of small and pleasant little towns. With strange, unshakeable pride, Howe wore an arrestingly outsized and touchingly misguided bush hat he had lately acquired, which inclined Carmel and me, when we stopped for petrol or coffee, to signal to staring strangers that he was out on a visit and we’d be taking him back to the home at the end of the week, but otherwise the journey passed without incident or embarrassment.

Alan and Carmel’s house stands in glorious seclusion on the brow of a steep hill. The view, over a snug and restful valley of tobacco fields and vineyards, was expansive and charming in a way that brought to mind a children’s picture book. This was, I realized after a minute, the view from high up the beanstalk.

‘Not bad, eh?’ said Howe.

‘Much too good for anyone in a hat like that. What’s this area called?’

‘The King Valley. Carmel’s old man used to farm over there.’ He pointed to a rolling piece of land nestled against a neighbouring hill. It recalled, almost impossibly, the landscapes of the American artist Grant Wood – gumdrop hills, rolling fields, plump trees – which depicted an idealized Iowa that never actually existed. It existed here.

Howe let us into the house and he and Carmel immediately began moving about in an impressively practised manner, opening windows, putting on the water
heater, packing away groceries. I helped carry stuff in from the car, watching for snakes with every step, and when that was finished ventured onto the broad deck to take in the view. Howe came out after a minute bearing two cold beers, one of which he passed to me. I don’t believe I had ever seen him looking so relaxed. Mercifully he had removed the hat.

He took a sip of beer, then said in an anecdotal tone: ‘When I first met Carmel, she used to talk about one day buying a piece of land out here and putting a house on it and I thought: “Yes, dear.” I mean, why would you want to own a house in the middle of the bush with all the costs and dangers of bush fires and everything? And then one day we came up to visit her family, and I took one look and I said: “Right, where do I sign?” Not long after that the family sold up and moved to Ballarat. So we bought this corner of the property, which they were happy to sell because it’s too steep to farm, and had the house put up.’ He nodded at Carmel, humming away in the kitchen. ‘She loves it here. So do I, come to that. I never thought I’d say I loved the country but jeez you know it’s a nice place to get away to.’

‘Are bush fires a big worry?’

‘Well, they are when they happen. Sometimes they’re colossal. Gum trees just want to burn, you know. It’s part of their strategy. How they outcompete other plants. They’re full of oil, and once they catch fire they’re a bugger to put out. You get a really big bush fire moving across the landscape at fifty miles an hour with flames leaping a hundred and fifty feet in the air and it’s an awesome sight, believe me.’

‘How often does that happen?’

‘Oh, I suppose every ten years or so you get a really big
one. There was one in 1994 that burned 600,000 hectares and threatened parts of Sydney. I was there at the time and in one direction there was this pall of black smoke that completely filled the sky. Burned for days. The biggest one ever was in 1939. People still talk about that one. It was during a heatwave so bad that department store mannequins’ heads actually started to melt in the windows. Can you imagine that? That one burned up most of Victoria.’

‘So how much at risk are you here?’

He shrugged philosophically. ‘It’s all in the lap of the gods. Could be next week, could be ten years from now, could be never.’ He turned to me with an odd smile. ‘You are totally at the mercy of nature in this country, mate. It’s just a fact of life. But I tell you one thing.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It sure makes you appreciate something like this when you know it could all go up in a puff of smoke.’

Howe is one of those people who can’t stand to see anyone sleeping when there is daylight to be utilized, and he rousted me out early the next morning with the announcement that he had a busy day planned for us. For a terrible moment I thought he meant we were going to shingle the roof or dig up boulders or something, but then he noted that we were going to have a Ned Kelly day. Howe was immensely proud that Kelly came from this part of Victoria and wanted to show me several of the sights connected with his short and brutish life. This sounded somewhat more promising.

It is an interesting fact, and one that no doubt speaks much about the Australian character, that the nation never produced a law enforcement hero along the lines of Wyatt
Earp or Bat Masterson in America. Australian folk heroes are all bad guys of the Billy the Kid type, only here they are known as bushrangers, and the most famous of them all was Ned Kelly.

The story of Kelly is easily told. He was a murderous thug who deserved to be hanged and was. He came from a family of rough Irish settlers, who made their living by stealing livestock and waylaying innocent passers-by. Like most bushrangers he was at pains to present himself as a champion of the oppressed, though in fact there wasn’t a shred of nobility in his character or his deeds. He killed several people, often in cold blood, sometimes for no very good reason.

In 1880, after years on the run, Kelly was reported to be holed up with his modest gang (a brother and two friends) in Glenrowan, a hamlet in the foothills of the Warby Range in north-eastern Victoria. Learning of this, the police assembled a large posse and set off to get him. As surprise attacks go, it wasn’t terribly impressive. When the police arrived (on an afternoon train) they found that word of their coming had preceded them and that a thousand people were lined up along the streets and sitting on every rooftop eagerly awaiting the spectacle of gunfire. The police took up positions and at once began peppering the Kelly hideout with bullets. The Kellys returned the fire and so it went throughout the night. The next dawn during a lull Kelly stepped from the dwelling, dressed unexpectedly, not to say bizarrely, in a suit of home-made armour – a heavy cylindrical helmet that brought to mind an inverted bucket, and a breastplate that covered his torso and crotch. He wore no armour on his lower body, so one of the policemen shot him in the leg. Aggrieved, Kelly staggered off into some nearby woods, fell
over and was captured. He was taken to Melbourne, tried and swiftly executed. His last words were: ‘Such is life.’

Not exactly the stuff of legend, one would have thought, yet in his homeland Kelly is treated with deep regard. Sidney Nolan, one of Australia’s most esteemed artists, did a famous series of paintings devoted to Kelly’s life, and books abound on the subject. Even serious historians often accord him an importance that seems to the outsider curiously disproportionate. Manning Clark, for example, in his one-volume history of Australia, devotes just a paragraph to the design and foundation of Canberra, dispenses with federation in two pages, but gives a full nine pages to the life and achievements of Ned Kelly. He also allows Kelly some of his most florid and incoherent prose, which is saying a great deal, believe me. Manning Clark is an extraordinary stylist at the best of times – a man who would never call the moon ‘the moon’ when he might instead call it ‘the lunar orb’ – but with Kelly he was inspired to lofty allusions and cosmic musings of a rare impenetrability. Here is a small part of his description of Kelly’s fateful emergence from the compound after the night-long shootout:

Personally – and this is just a stab in the dark – I think Manning Clark was taking way too much codeine. Here’s another of his well-juiced creations, this the merest
fragment of a much longer passage discussing Kelly’s legacy:

About 2,800 milligrams talking there, I would say.

Today Glenrowan is a one-street town with a couple of pubs, a scattering of houses and a short strip of enterprises dedicated to extracting a little cash from the Kelly legend. On this hot summer’s day there were perhaps a dozen visitors in town, including Alan, Carmel and me. The biggest of the commercial establishments, a place called Ned Kelly’s Last Stand, was covered in painted signs of a semi-professional quality. ‘This is not a place for Whimps,’ said one, promisingly. Another added: ‘It is absolutely absurd that after allowing yourself 10 to 20 minutes to take photos, walk up and down the street and buy some souvenirs and then have the audacity to tell your friends – “Don’t go to Glenrowan, for there is nothing to see.” To be quite honest most visitors to Glenrowan wouldn’t know if the country shithouse fell on them . . .’

The impression one derived from further study was that Ned Kelly’s Last Stand contained some kind of animatronic show. Alan, Carmel and I exchanged happy looks and knew that this was a place for us. Inside, a
friendly man presided over the till. We were mildly staggered to see that they wanted $15 a head for admission.