Down Under (35 page)

In fact, there is quite a lot of odd life out there. This is one of the few remaining areas where you can hope to see cassowaries. They look much like emus except that they have a bony growth on their head called a casque and the infamous murderous claw on each foot. They attack by jumping up and striking out with both feet together.
Fortunately, this doesn’t happen very often. The last fatal attack was in 1926, when a cassowary charged a sixteen-year-old boy who had been taunting it and sliced open his jugular as it bounded across him. The reason attacks are so few is that cassowaries are exceedingly reclusive and now, alas, very few in number. No more than a thousand of them survive. The Daintree is also one of the last homes of the celebrated tree kangaroo – which, as its name suggests, is a kangaroo that lives in trees – but it is even shyer than the cassowary and almost never seen. So dense is the jungle, and so remote from the centres of academia, that much of it remains unstudied. The first scientific study of cassowaries, for instance, was begun only about a decade ago.

At length the road ended at a sunny clearing in the jungle with, incongruously, a takeaway food stand and a phone booth. Tucked away in the extravagant foliage was a campground, and beside it an arrowed sign pointed the way to the beach. This led to a boardwalk through mangroves. Little creatures plinked unseen into the swampy water as we approached. After a few minutes we emerged onto the beach. It was remarkably beautiful – a great sweep of soft white sand strewn with driftwood, palm fronds and other natural clutter, standing before a very bright blue bay. Ahead of us loomed a towering headland cloaked in green.

The spot was sunnily pristine, exactly as it must have appeared to James Cook when he first laid eyes on it more than two centuries ago. He called it Cape Tribulation because it was here that the
Endeavour
disastrously lodged on coral some twelve miles off the coast. Severely holed, it was in imminent danger of sinking, but Cook had with him a seaman who had once been in similar straits on a
ship that had been saved by an unusual process known as fothering – in effect bandaging its underside by running a sail beneath it and pulling it tight to cover the hole. It was a desperate and improbable measure, but miraculously it worked.

Cook nursed the ship to shore a few miles around the headland from where we were now. The crew spent seven weeks making repairs before sailing off to England and glory. Had the
Endeavour
sunk, and Cook failed to get home, history would of course have been very different. Australia would very likely have become French – an eerie thought, to say the least – and Britain would have had to adjust its colonial ambitions accordingly. No part of the world would have escaped the effects. Melbourne might now stand on African plains. Sydney could be the capital of the Royal Colony of California. Who can possibly say? What is certain is that the global balance of power would have changed in ways beyond imagining. On the other hand, we would almost certainly have been spared
Home and Away
, so it’s not as if it would have been an unmitigated disaster.

Allan and I explored along the beach for half an hour or so, then walked back to the clearing where the food stand was, and had a look at where the road continued on to Cooktown. Beyond the food stand it became at once a rough and rocky track, which climbed steeply up into the lush hills. It looked like something Harrison Ford would struggle to negotiate in an adventure movie. I had learned only the day before that the track is dangerously and unnervingly tippy even in good weather, so perhaps it was as well that Allan and I hadn’t been let loose on it. In any case, it was impassable now.

Still, it did look awfully inviting in an adventuresome
sort of way. Cooktown, a former gold-mining town that had once had a population of 30,000 and has just 200 now, lay seventy-five kilometres away on the other side of the mountains. It is the last town in eastern Australia. Beyond it there is nothing but a scattering of Aboriginal settlements along the 600-kilometre track to Cape York, Australia’s northernmost point. But this was as far as I was going to get here.

I turned around to discover that Allan had slipped off. He reappeared after a minute from the direction of the food stand bearing two cans of Coke, one of which he passed to me.

‘They didn’t have urine,’ he said, and we both had a good laugh over that.

And so to the top end. We bounced into Darwin through the outer strands of two minor cyclones that were bumping along the north coast, and acquired another rental car – a sleek and powerful Toyota sedan that looked as if it could cover the 1,500 kilometres to Alice Springs in a single rocket-like burst. We dubbed it the Testosterone.

The Northern Territory has always had something of a frontier mentality. In late 1998, the inhabitants were invited to become Australia’s seventh state and roundly rejected the notion in a referendum. It appears they quite like being outsiders. In consequence, an area of 523,000 square miles, or about one-fifth of the country, is in Australia but not entirely of it. This throws up some interesting anomalies. All Australians are required by law to vote in federal elections, including residents of the Northern Territory. However, since the Northern Territory
is not a state, it has no seats in Parliament. So the Territorians elect representatives who go to Canberra and attend sessions of Parliament (at least that’s what they say in their letters home) but don’t actually vote or take part or have any consequence at all. Even more interestingly, during national referendums the citizens of the Northern Territory are also required to vote, but the votes don’t actually count towards anything. They’re just put in a drawer or something. Seems a little odd to me, but then, as I say, the people seem content with the arrangement.

Personally, I feel that the Territorians should not be permitted to take full part in national affairs until they get friendlier hotel staff in Darwin. This might seem a curious basis on which to found a political philosophy, but there you are. Darwin’s hoteliers are seriously deficient in the charm department and if it takes the withholding of certain civil liberties to get them to address the problem then I think that is a small charge to exact, frankly.

Our troubles began when we went looking for our hotel. We were booked into a place called the All Seasons Frontier Hotel, but no such establishment appeared to exist. The guidebook mentioned a Top End Frontier Hotel, and a tourist leaflet I acquired at the airport listed a Darwin City Frontier Hotel, and yet another listed an All Seasons Premier Darwin Central Hotel. All of these we spied, distantly, as we drove around for the next forty minutes, squabbling quietly in the manner of a fractious married couple. We stopped about half a dozen pedestrians, but none had heard of an All Seasons Frontier Hotel, except one man who thought it was at Kakadu, 200 kilometres to the east. With the aid of a small, inadequate map I directed Allan down a series of streets which proved
always to end at a pedestrianized zone or a cul de sac of loading bays, to his increasing exasperation.

‘Can you not read a simple map?’ he asked in the peevish tone of a man whose happy-hour needs are going unmet, reversing into cardboard boxes and wheelie bins.

‘No,’ I replied in kind, ‘I cannot read a simple map. I can read a good map. This map, however, is useless. Less than useless. It is the print equivalent of your driving, if I may say so.’

Eventually we stopped outside a large hotel on the seafront and Allan ordered me to go inside and seek professional guidance. At the front desk a young man who had evidently invested a recent pay cheque in a very large tub of hair gel stood with his back to me regaling two female colleagues with some droll anecdote. I waited a long minute, then went: ‘Ahem.’

He turned his head to give me a look that said, without warmth: ‘What?’

‘Could you point me to the All Seasons Frontier Hotel?’ I asked politely.

Without preamble he reeled off a series of complex directions. Darwin is full of strange street names – Cavenagh, Yuen, Foelsche, Knuckey – and I couldn’t begin to follow. On the counter was a pad of maps, and I asked him if he could show me on that.

‘It’s too far to walk,’ he said dismissively.

‘I don’t want to walk. I’ve got a car.’

‘Then ask your driver to take you.’ He rolled his eyes for the benefit of the girls, then continued with his story.

How I longed for a small firearm or perhaps a set of industrial tongs with which to clamp his reedy neck and draw his head close to me, the better to hear what I next had to say. It was: ‘Do you think if I had a driver I would
be asking directions of you? It’s a rental car, you snide, irksome, preposterously glossy little shit.’ I may not have said the words precisely in that order, or indeed at all, but that was certainly the emotional gist of it.

With sullen gaze and a long sigh, he took a pen and rapidly but vaguely sketched the route on the map, tore it from the pad and handed it over as if giving me a voucher to which I had no right. Ten minutes later we pulled up outside a hotel that announced itself, in large letters, as the Darwin City Frontier Hotel. We had passed it several times already, but I had confidently rejected it on each occasion. I stalked through the front doors.

‘Is this the All Seasons Frontier Hotel?’ I barked from an unsocial distance.

The young woman behind the counter looked up, and blinked. ‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Then’ – I came much closer –
‘why don’t you put a sign up saying so?’

She regarded me levelly. ‘It says it on the side of the building.’

‘Well, it doesn’t.’

She favoured me with a thin, metallic, supremely condescending smile. ‘Yes, it does.’

‘Well, it doesn’t.’

Torn between her training in customer relations and her youthful certitude, she hesitated, and in a soft voice said: ‘Does.’

I held up a finger in a way that said: ‘Don’t move. Don’t go anywhere. I’m going to check this out and then come back and throttle someone. You, actually.’

I went out and ranged around the hotel in the manner of a demented building inspector, examining it from every angle and from various distances, held up a silencing
finger to Allan, who watched bewildered from the driver’s seat, then came back in and announced: ‘It doesn’t say All Seasons on it anywhere.’

She looked at me and said nothing, but I could see she was thinking: ‘Does.’

I am happy to let the record show that by whatever name it goes, the Darwin City Frontier Hotel was a wondrously disappointing establishment. It was overpriced, charmless and inconveniently sited. The TV in my room didn’t work, the pillows were concrete slabs and the receptionist was irritating. This was not the Australia I had come to respect and adore.

To get to the hotel bar, we discovered after much blind experimentation and a further interview with our young friend at the front desk, it was necessary to descend by a back stairway to the basement, find our way through some storage areas, leave the building and present ourselves at a pair of automatic sliding doors, which weren’t working. Allan, who is not a man to let any impediment stand between him and his evening beverage, yanked them open with a vehemence that was impressive, and we squeezed through. The bar was liberally, not to say unexpectedly, arrayed with rough, boisterously drunk and dangerous-looking fellows, all with copious tattoos, long hair and beards like mattress ticking – not exactly the patrons you would expect to find drinking in the bar of a business hotel.

‘Like a fucking ZZ Top convention,’ Allan muttered darkly but correctly.

We procured a couple of beers and sat primly in a corner, like two old maids at an inner city bus station, and watched as two of the burlier fellows played a game of pool in which each disappointing shot – and there seemed
to be almost no other kind – was accompanied by a whack of cue across something metallic or unyielding: the pool table, a chairback, the swinging light above the table. It seemed only a matter of time before flesh and bone came into the equation. We decided to repair to the rooftop restaurant on the seventh floor in search of a more serene and composed environment. The restaurant was a large room with big windows giving expansive views over Darwin by twilight. Of the perhaps fifty tables in the room no more than three or four were occupied, so it came as a surprise when the hostess informed us, with a look of stark panic, that no tables were available at the moment.

‘But it’s practically empty,’ I pointed out.

‘I’m sorry, but we’ve got a terrible rush on.’ As if to underline the urgency of the situation she flew off.

We took a seat at the bar and had two more beers, which we coaxed out of a cheerful Indonesian fellow who sometimes wandered past, and may actually have been an employee. After another thirty minutes and further enquiries we were finally granted a table by a far window. There we sat for ten minutes more until a waitress came out and plonked in front of each of us a small standard terracotta flowerpot in which had been baked a little loaf of bread.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘It’s bread,’ she replied.