Down Under (28 page)

I stared at him in wonder and admiration.

‘Not as in the famous giant worms of south-west Gippsland?’

‘The same. You’re familiar with them then?’

I gave the hollow laugh that such a question deserved. I had been reading about these behemoths of the underworld for months, albeit mostly in footnotes and other passing references. I had never expected to find a shrine to them.

Even in a land of extraordinary creatures, the giant worms of Gippsland are exceptional. Called
Megascolides
australis
, they are the world’s largest earthworms, growing up to twelve feet in length and more than six inches in diameter. So substantial are they that you can actually hear them moving through the earth, with a gurgling sound, like bad plumbing. What it is about this one small corner of Victoria that led to the evolution of extremely outsized worms is a question that science has yet to answer – but then, it must be said, very few of the world’s best minds are drawn to questions of earthworm physiology and distribution. However, Howe promised, such knowledge as the world holds was contained within the tubular structure before us.

We procured three tickets and stepped eagerly into the display areas. On the wall facing us as we entered was a blown-up photograph, taken early in the twentieth century, showing four ridiculously pleased-looking men holding a droopy twelve-footer, little thicker than a normal earthworm but clearly ambitious in the length department. This I studied with great interest until Carmel drew my attention to a display of living giant worms. These were in a large glass panel, half an inch thick and filled with earth, rather like a very large ant farm, which hung on the wall. According to a label, the case contained a pair of giant worms. In a couple of spots where the earth had come away from the glass, we could see a millimetre or two of living giant worm, but as they weren’t moving or doing anything
(Megascolides
is extremely devoted to rest, it seems) the experience was, I confess, a trifle anticlimactic. I had rather hoped there would be a petting corner or perhaps a tamer with a whip and a chair getting them to go through hoops. Alan and I tried to enliven the worm by tapping lightly on the glass, but it declined to respond.

Beside the panel were two long glass tubes filled with
formaldehyde and containing a pair of preserved giant worms, each of normal earthworm circumference but about four or five feet long – not exactly titans but long enough to impress. Worms don’t preserve terribly well and the formaldehyde had horrible little bits of worm skin floating in it as if somebody had been shaking the tubes or, more probably (as Alan and I conclusively established by tapping on them), by tapping on them. It was hard to look at them without growing a little queasy.

In the next room was a short film that told all that was known about the giant earthworm, which is to say almost nothing. They are reclusive, delicate, not terribly numerous and deeply uncooperative creatures, and thus not easy to study, even assuming you had a mind to. As you may recall from childhood experiments, earthworms really don’t wish to come out of their holes, and if you pull they tend to snap. Well, imagine trying to tug a twelve-foot-long worm out of its burrow. Nearly impossible.

The one thing the Giant Worm Museum establishes beyond question is that you can only get so much mileage out of giant worms. Recognizing this, the proprietors had provided many other displays. Next door were some glass cases containing live snakes, including the famous and fearsome taipan, Australia’s deadliest snake. Alan and I conducted some further glass-tapping experiments, then retreated four yards together in a platonic embrace when the taipan snarled at us (or possibly just yawned), opening its jaws wide enough to swallow a human head, or so it seemed. Deciding that henceforth we would keep our hands in our pockets, we followed Carmel outdoors where there was a compound containing yet more animals – kangaroos and emus, a forlorn-looking dingo, some caged
cockatoos, half a dozen curled and dozing wombats and a couple of koalas, also dozing. It was a very hot, still afternoon and evidently siesta time, so the enclosures had an air of profound inertness – even the cockatoos slept – but I strolled among them with fascination, delighted to see so much native exotica brought together in one place. I peered with particular interest at the wombats – ‘a squat, thick, short-legged and rather inactive quadruped, with great appearance of stumpy strength’, as the first Englishman to see one recorded in 1788 in words that could not be bettered. (The man, David Collins, was a little less reliable with the kangaroo, which he described as ‘a small bird of beautiful plumage’.) Alan and Carmel looked on with the tolerant amusement with which an American might view a display of raccoons and chipmunks, for most of these were animals that they saw regularly in their natural state, but to me every one was a novelty, even the dingo, which is after all just a dog. I made two complete circuits of the menagerie, then with a look of satisfaction I gave a nod and we set off once again for Melbourne.

We went to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond, on a street lined seemingly for miles with exotic restaurants, and Alan made the point, with which I could not argue, that Melbourne is an infinitely better city than Sydney for dining out in. In the course of conversation Alan asked if I was going to the Great Barrier Reef, a place for which he had a special fondness. I said I wasn’t on this trip, but I was when I came back in a few weeks.

‘Just be careful they don’t leave you out there.’ He gave a thin smile.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There was a story here recently. An American couple were left out on the reef.’

‘Left?’ I said, puzzled but intrigued.

Howe nodded and speared at some pasta. ‘Yeah. Somehow the boat went back to port two passengers short. Bit of a pisser for the people left behind, wouldn’t you say? I mean, one minute you’re swimming around looking at coral and fish, having the time of your life, and then you surface and discover that the boat has gone and you are all alone in a very large and empty ocean.’

‘They couldn’t swim to shore?’

He smiled tolerantly at my ignorance. ‘Barrier Reef’s a long way out, Bryson – something over thirty miles where they were. Long way to swim.’

‘And there were no islands or anything?’

‘Not where they were. They were effectively out to sea. Apparently there were a couple of things they could swim to – a big moored pontoon that the dive company used and some kind of a coral atoll, both a couple of miles away. So presumably they started swimming towards those. What they didn’t know – couldn’t know – was that they were swimming across a deep-water channel. And guess what lurks in deep-water channels?’

‘Sharks,’ I said.

He nodded at my perspicacity. ‘So imagine it. You’re miles out to sea, stranded. You’re tired. You’re swimming towards a coral outcrop and it’s hard going because the tide is coming in. The light is fading. And you look around and see fins circling you, maybe halfa dozen of them.’ He gave me a moment to form a picture in my mind, then fixed me with a deadpan expression. ‘I don’t know about you, but I think I’d ask for my money back.’ He laughed.

‘So nobody came back to rescue them?’

‘It was two days before anyone noticed they were missing,’ said Carmel.

I turned to her in wonder. ‘Two days?’

‘By which time, of course, they were long gone.’

‘Eaten by sharks?’

She shrugged. ‘No way of knowing, but presumably. Anyway, they were never seen again.’

‘Wow.’

We ate in thoughtful silence for a minute, then I mentioned that every time there was an odd story in Australia, it seemed to come out of Queensland. My favourite of the moment concerned a German man, recently detained outside Cairns, who had arrived on a tourist visa in 1982 and spent the past seventeen years wandering on foot through the northern deserts living almost exclusively off road kill. I was also extremely partial to the story of a group of illegal immigrants who were brought from China on an old fishing boat, which dropped them in shallow water a hundred yards off a beach near Cairns. They were caught when one of their members, carrying a suitcase, dripping water conspicuously from sodden trousers and squelching with every step, presented himself at a newsagent’s shop and politely asked the proprietor if he would order a fleet of taxis to take him and some associates to the railway station at Cairns. Nearly every day, it seemed, the papers had a story of arresting improbability under a Queensland dateline.

Alan nodded in accord. ‘There’s a reason for that, of course.’

‘What’s that?’

‘They’re crazy in Queensland. Madder than cut snakes. You’ll like it up there.’

In the morning, Alan ran me to the airport by way of his office. While he went off to hold the front page, or do whatever editors do, he left me to sit at his big desk and play in his swivel chair. When he returned he was carrying a folder, which he passed to me. ‘I dug out some stuff on that American couple that disappeared. I thought it might be of use to you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, quite touched.

‘It should give you some tips on how not to get left on the reef. I know what a dozy bugger you are, Bryson.’

At the airport he jumped out of the car and helped me haul my bag out of the back. He shook my hand. ‘And remember what I said about watching yourself up north,’ he said.

‘Madder than cut snakes,’ I repeated, to show that I had been listening.

‘Madder than a sack of them.’

He smiled, then jumped back in the car, waved and was gone.

It is possible, I suppose, to construct hypothetical circumstances in which you would be pleased to find yourself, at the end of a long day, in Macksville, New South Wales – perhaps something to do with rising sea levels that left it as the only place on earth not under water, or maybe some disfiguring universal contagion from which it alone remained unscathed. In the normal course of events, however, it is unlikely that you would find yourself standing on its lonely main street at six thirty on a warm summer’s evening gazing about you in an appreciative manner and thinking: ‘Well, thank goodness I’m here!’

I was in Macksville owing to the interesting discovery that Brisbane is not three or four hours north of Sydney, as I had long and casually supposed, but the better part of a couple of days’ drive. Well, if you look on the television
weather map Brisbane and Sydney are practically neighbours, their little local suns and storm clouds all but bumping on the chart. But in Australia neighbourliness is of course a relative concept. In fact, it is almost 1,000 kilometres from Sydney to Brisbane, much of it along a cheerfully poky two-lane road. And so, in mildly confounded consequence, I was in Macksville for the night.

I don’t wish to disparage a community that 2,811 people proudly call home (and what a miraculous notion that is), but as I had rather had it in mind that I would be dining on fresh-caught barramundi and watching a sunset emblazon the Pacific on Queensland’s storied Gold Coast rather than stuck in an obscure backwater barely halfway there, my disappointment was real. My immediate preoccupation was that I was running out of time on this trip. I had a commitment of long standing to take part in a fund-raising hike in Syria and Jordan for a British children’s charity. In three days I was to fly home from Sydney, to collect hiking gear and see how many of my children still recognized me, before flying off again to London and onward to Damascus. It was clear that I wasn’t going to see as much of the northern reaches of the Boomerang Coast as I had hoped.

So my mood as I strolled into town from my motel was, let us say, restrained. Macksville wasn’t so bad really. Set on the bank of the swift and muddy Nambucca River, it was essentially just a pause in the highway: a tentacle of neatly gardened bungalows and small office buildings leading to a very compact town centre. Though the road through town is the Pacific Highway, the main artery connecting Sydney and Brisbane, only two cars passed as I followed its dusty margin into town. At the heart of the
modest community stood the large and fading Nambucca Hotel, and I stepped in, glad to escape the heat. It was a roomy place but nearly empty. Two older guys in singlets and battered bush hats propped up one end of the long bar. In a side room a man and a woman sat in silent absorption amid the soft, mechanical glow of pokies. I procured a beer, stood long enough to establish that no one was going to take any interest in me that might lead to a conversation, and retired to the central portion of the bar where I parked myself on a stool and idly watched the evening news on a silent TV mounted on the wall.

Somewhere police were out in the bush with a pack of straining sniffer dogs; there was no telling what the dogs were looking for, though if it was red clay soil they were doing extremely well. Somewhere else there appeared to be a fresh outbreak of Ross River fever – yet another previously unknown malady for me to worry about. Then there was Paul Keating, the former Prime Minister – he of the deeply expressive vocabulary, as you may recall from the Canberra chapter – standing on the steps of an office building answering questions from reporters and looking testy. It was impossible to determine what he was saying, but I imagined he was telling all those present that they were nongs and maggots. I decided I quite liked watching the news with the sound off.