Authors: Bill Bryson
‘It’s good, is it?’ said Howe.
‘Mister,’ said the man with the greatest sincerity, ‘it’s like Disneyland in there.’
We bought tickets and shuffled through a door into a dim room where the spectacle was to begin. The space was designed to look like an old saloon. In the middle were benches for the audience. Before us, in a deep gloom, we could just make out the shapes of furniture and seated dummies. After a few minutes, the lights dimmed altogether, there was a sudden startling bang of gunfire and the performance began.
Well, call me a Whimp, drop a brick shithouse on me, but I can honestly say that I have seldom seen anything so wonderfully, so delightfully, so monumentally bad as Ned Kelly’s Last Stand. It was so bad it was worth every penny. Actually, it was so bad it was worth more than we paid. For the next thirty-five minutes we proceeded through a series of rooms where we watched home-made dummies, each with a frozen smile and a mop of hair that brought to mind wind-blown pubis, re-enacting various scenes from the famous Kelly shootout in a random and deliriously incoherent way. Occasionally one of them would turn a stiff head or jerk up a forearm to fire a pistol, though not necessarily in sync with the narrative. Meanwhile, around each room lots of other mechanical events were taking place – empty chairs rocked, cupboard doors mysteriously opened and shut, player pianos played, a figure of a boy on a trapeze (and why not?) swung back and forth amid the rafters. Do you know those fairground stalls where you fire a rifle at assorted targets to make an outhouse door
swing open or a stuffed chicken fall over? Well, this reminded me of that, only much worse. The narrative, insofar as it could be heard above the competing noises, made no sense at all.
When at last we were liberated into the sunshine, we were so delighted that we considered going in again – but $45 is a lot of money, after all, and we feared that with repeated exposure it might begin to make some sense. So instead we went and looked at a giant fibreglass Ned Kelly that stood outside one of the souvenir shops. It wasn’t as big or as intimidating as the Big Lobster, and its testicles didn’t swing in the breeze, but it was still a game stab at the genre. Then we had a look around a couple of the shops and bought some postcards, and returned to the car for the next part of our day’s adventure.
This was to see the famous Kelly Tree at a remote spot called Stringybark Creek. This involved a long drive into a strange, spooky valley of abandoned and semi-abandoned farms, nearly all of them half buried under blackberry brambles, then up into dense and verdant rainforest, and finally into crowded groves of towering stringybark trees. Australia has some 700 varieties of eucalyptus trees and they have the most wonderfully expressive names – kakadu woollybutt, bastard tallow-wood, gympie messmate, candlebark, ghost gum – but the stringybark was the first that I could identify by sight. The bark peels off in long strips and hangs from the branches in fibrous tassels or lies in curled heaps on the ground, all the better to burn apparently. It was a handsome tree, too: tall, straight and exceptionally close-growing. Some miles into the woods we came to a parking area beside a sign announcing the Kelly Tree. We were the only visitors; it felt as if we might have been the only visitors in years. The forest was cool
and noiseless, and with all the strands of bark hanging down it had a strange, unwelcoming, otherworldly feel. The Kelly Tree stood along a path through the woods, distinguished from the others by the stoutness of its trunk and by a metal plaque in the shape of Kelly’s famous helmet.
‘And what is the Kelly Tree exactly?’ I asked.
‘Well,’ Alan said with a learned air, ‘as the Kelly gang got more and more notorious the police started hunting them with greater determination, and so they had to hide out in increasingly remote and desperate places.’
‘Such as here?’
He gave a nod. ‘Can’t get much lonelier than this.’
We took a moment to consider our surroundings. Because of the denseness with which the stringybarks grew beside each other, there was almost no space to stretch out or move around, and the air had a kind of dank, organic closeness. It was, I think, the least bucolic forest I have ever been in. Even the light seemed stale.
‘For three years, Kelly and his gang laid low, but in 1878 four policemen tracked them here. Somehow Kelly and his men captured and disarmed the policemen. Then they murdered three of them in a slow and pretty horrible way.’
‘Horrible in what way?’ I asked, ever alert for the morbid detail.
‘Shot them in the balls and let them bleed to death. To maximize the pain and indignity.’
‘And the fourth policeman?’
‘Scarpered. He hid overnight in a wombat’s burrow and the next day he made his way back to civilization and raised the alarm. So it was the murder of three men here that led eventually to the shootout at Glenrowan, as so memorably depicted for us by the robotic wonders of Ned Kelly’s Last Stand.’
‘So how come you know so much about all this?’
He looked at me with a hint of disappointment. ‘Because I know a great deal about many things, Bryson.’
‘You haven’t got a clue about hats, though,’ said Carmel cheerfully.
He looked at her and decided that this was a comment not to be dignified with a response, then turned back to me. ‘Now to Powers Lookout,’ he announced with a certain resolve, and set off in a stately tramp for the car.
‘And how many more Kelly sights will we be visiting?’ I called, trying not to betray too much alarm as I followed him through the woods. I wish no disrespect to Australia’s most treasured thug, nor to imply any disappointment at all in the Kelly Tree – quite the reverse – but we did seem to be hours from anywhere and fast approaching that time of day when one begins to think about the convivial possibilities of food and drink.
‘Just one more and it’s on the way home and you won’t regret it, and then we’ll have a pint.’
He was as good as his word. Powers Lookout was fabulous. A platform of rock hanging high in the sky, it was named for Harry Powers, another storied bushranger, who sometimes shared the view with Kelly and his gang. Some diligent crew had built sturdy wooden walkways up and around the craggy rocks, making it a simple if slightly taxing matter to get from the main body of the cliff to the rocky outcrop that was the lookout. The view was sensational: perhaps a thousand feet below spread the King Valley, a snug and tidy realm of small farms and white farmhouses. Beyond, across air of flawless clarity, rose waves of low mountains, culminating in the distinctive hump of Mount Buffalo some fifty kilometres away.
‘You know, if you put this in Virginia or Vermont,’ I
mused, ‘there would be scores of people here, even at this hour. There’d be souvenir stands and probably an Imax screen and an adventure park.’
Howe nodded. ‘It’d be the same in the Blue Mountains. It’s like I’ve been telling you. This corner of Victoria is a great secret. Don’t put it in your book.’
‘Certainly not,’ I replied sincerely.
‘And wait’ll you see what we’ve got for you tomorrow. It’s even better.’
‘Not possible,’ I said.
‘No, it is. It’s even better.’
What he had for us the next day was a place called Alpine National Park, and in fact it was even better. Covering 2,500 square miles of eastern Victoria, it was lofty, grand, cool and green. If ever there was a portion of Australia remote from all the clichéd images of red soil and baking sun, this was it. They even skied here in winter. Alpine is perhaps a somewhat ambitious term. You will find no craggy Matterhorns here. The Australian Alps have a gentler profile, more like the Appalachians of America or the Scottish Cairngorms. But they do attain entirely respectable heights – Kosciuszko, the tallest, tops out at something over 7,000 feet.
Howe, through one of his contacts, had got hold of a friendly and helpful warden named Ron Riley, who had agreed to show us round his airy domain. A genial man with a dapper grey beard, Ron had the lean bearing and far-off gaze of someone whose world is the outdoors. We met in the little town of Mount Beauty, where we decanted into one of the park’s four-wheel-drive vehicles and set off on the long, twisting drive up Mount Bogong, Victoria’s highest peak at 6,500 feet. I
asked him if Mount Bogong was named for the famous bogong moths, which erupt in vast, fluttery multitudes every spring and for a day or two seem to be everywhere. Along with plump witchetty grubs and long, slimy mangrove worms, they are the delicacies of the Aboriginal diet most often noted by chroniclers – noted because of course they are so unappealing to the western palate. The bogongs are roasted in hot ashes and eaten whole, or so I had read.
Ron acknowledged that this was where they came from.
‘And the Aborigines really eat them?’
‘Oh, yeah – well, traditionally anyway. A bogong moth is eighty-five per cent fat and they didn’t get a lot of fat in their diet, so it was quite a treat for them. They used to come from miles.’
‘Have you ever eaten one?’
‘Once,’ he said.
‘And?’
‘Once was enough.’ He smiled.
‘What did it taste like?’
He thought for a moment. ‘Like a moth.’
I grinned. ‘I read that it has a kind of buttery taste.’
He thought about that. ‘No. It has a moth taste.’
We climbed up a steep, winding road through dense groves of an amazingly tall and beautiful tree. Ron told me they were mountain ashes.
I made an appropriately appreciative face. ‘I didn’t know you had ashes here.’
‘We don’t. They’re eucalypts.’
I looked again, surprised. Everything else about it – its long, straight body, its height, its lushness – was completely at odds with the skeletal gums associated with the lowlands. It really was true that the eucalypts have
filled every ecological niche in Australia. There never was a more various tree.
‘Tallest tree in the world after the California redwoods,’ Ron added with a nod at the ashes, causing me to make another appreciative face.
‘How tall do they grow?’
‘Up to three hundred feet. They average about two hundred.’ Three hundred feet is about the height of a twenty-five-storey building. Big trees.
‘Do you get many bush fires?’
Ron gave a regretful nod. ‘Sometimes. We lost five hundred thousand hectares in this part of the Great Dividing Range in 1985.’
‘Gosh,’ I said, though the figure meant little to me. Later I looked in a book and discovered that 500,000 hectares is equivalent to the area covered by Yosemite, Grand Teton, Zion and Redwood National Parks in America. In other words, it was a natural disaster on a scale almost inconceivable elsewhere. (I also looked in the
New York Times Index
to see what coverage it had been given: none.) Even without being able to conceive quite what 500,000 hectares is, I knew of course that it was a lot, so I added politely: ‘That must have been awful.’
Ron nodded again. ‘Yeah, it was a bit,’ he said.
We passed through a zone of snow gums – yet another niche dominated by the versatile eucalypts – and emerged into a sunny world of high, gently undulant plains, covered everywhere in pale grass and spongy alpine plants, with long views to distant summits. Quite a few visitors were evident, most of them with the springy step and considered apparel of the serious walker. At every group we passed, Ron slowed and called, ‘G’day,’ and asked if they had everything they needed in the way of
information. They always did, but it seemed an unusually welcoming gesture.
And then we had the most marvellous day. Sometimes we stopped and walked a little, and the rest of the time we drove. The weather was gorgeous – cool at these heights but sunny – and Ron was droll and good-natured. He knew every leaf and bud and insect, and seemed genuinely to enjoy showing off all the secret corners of the park. We bumped along overgrown tracks through meadowy vales and skittered up near-perpendicular gravel roads to hidden firetowers. At every turn there was a point of interest or a memorable view. Alpine National Park is immense. It extends to 6,460 square kilometres – the equivalent of about seventeen Isle of Wights – but it is actually vaster still because it is contiguous along its eastern border with the even larger Kosciuszko National Park in the Snowy Mountains just over the border in New South Wales. Ron pointed out Kosciuszko – ‘Kozzie’, he called it – almost exactly 100 kilometres away, but I couldn’t see it even with binoculars.
We finished the day at an imposing eminence called Mount McKay, where there were yet more top-of-the-world views: range upon range of steep hills rolling away to a far-off horizon. He took in the view with the assessing gaze of someone watching for a tell-tale plume of smoke.
‘So how much of all this are you responsible for?’ I asked.
‘A hundred thousand hectares,’ he replied.
‘Lot of ground,’ I said, thinking of the responsibility.
‘Yeah,’ he replied, squinting thoughtfully at the vista before us, ‘I’m very lucky.’
It would of course take something extremely exceptional to match Glenrowan and Powers Lookout and Alpine
National Park, and frankly I am not sure that many other countries could have provided it, but Howe assured me that he had one last special something for us to see – something that existed nowhere else in the world but in one small corner of Victoria. Beyond that he would not be drawn. The next day, to add to the savour of pleasure deferred, we went to a sleepy, old-fashioned coastal resort called Lakes Entrance, where we stopped for the night and had a nice seafood supper and a shuffle around, and the day after set off for our mystery attraction en route to Melbourne.
For quite a spell we drove through flat, sunny, uneventful farming country. I sat in the back in a state of tranquil mindlessness until Alan abruptly steered the car off the highway beside a big sign I couldn’t see well enough to read and parked in a large and mostly empty car park. I unfolded myself from the back seat and stepped blinking from the car. Beside us was a long tubular building – rather like a very large cloche, but made of concrete and painted white.
I looked questioningly at Howe.
‘The Giant Worm,’ he announced.