Authors: Bill Bryson
‘But it’s in a flowerpot?’
She gave me a look that I was beginning to think of as the Darwin stare. It was a look that said: ‘Yeah? So?’
‘Well, isn’t that kind of unusual?’
She considered for a moment. ‘Is a bit, I suppose.’
‘And will we be following a horticultural theme throughout the meal?’
Her expression contorted in a deeply pained look, as if she were trying to suck her face into the back of her head. ‘What?’
‘Will the main course arrive in a wheelbarrow?’ I elaborated helpfully. ‘Will you be serving the salad with a pitchfork?’
‘Oh no. It’s just the bread that’s special.’
‘I’m so pleased to hear it.’
Before we could take our relationship to the next stage and ask for drinks or perhaps a menu, she was gone, announcing as she went that she would be back when she could but there was a bit of a rush on.
There then followed the most extraordinary evening in which, each time we hankered for food or additional refreshment or just the sound of an Australian voice, we had to go off and stand by the kitchen doors until we caught someone emerging. Some of the other few diners were doing likewise. During one foray I asked a man with an empty beer glass if he dined here often.
‘Wife likes the view,’ he explained, and we looked across the room to a plump little woman who gave us a small but cheery wave.
‘Service is a bit slow, don’t you think?’
‘Bloody hopeless,’ he agreed. ‘They’ve got some kind of a rush on apparently.’
In the morning a new man was behind the front desk. ‘And how did you enjoy your stay, sir?’ he asked smoothly.
‘It was singularly execrable,’ I replied.
‘Oh,
excellent,’
he purred, taking my card.
‘In fact, I would go so far as to say that the principal value of a stay in this establishment is that it is bound to make all subsequent service-related experiences seem, in comparison, refreshing.’
He made a deeply appreciative expression as if to say: ‘Praise indeed,’ and presented my bill for signature. ‘Well, we hope you’ll come again.’
‘I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.’
His expression wavered, then held there for a long moment. ‘Excellent,’ he said again, but without a great show of conviction.
We went into town to look around. Darwin is in the steamy heart of the tropics, which to my mind imposes certain stylistic requirements – white buildings with verandas, louvred windows, potted palms, lazy ceiling fans, cool drinks in tall glasses presented by obsequious houseboys, men in white suits and Panama hats, ladies in floral-print cotton dresses, a little mahjong to pass the sultry afternoons, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in evidence somewhere looking hot and shifty. Anything that falls short of these simple ideals will always leave me disappointed, and Darwin failed in every respect. To be fair, the place has been knocked about a good deal – it was bombed repeatedly by the Japanese in the Second World War and then devastated by Cyclone Tracy in 1974 – so much of it is necessarily new. Even so, there was almost nothing to suggest a particular climatic affiliation. We could have been in Wollongong or Bendigo or any other moderately prosperous provincial city. The one small local peculiarity was that there seemed to be no one about of professional demeanour. Nearly every person on the streets was bearded and tattooed and scuffed along with a wino shuffle, as if some very large mission had just turned everyone out for the day. Here and there, too, were scatterings of Aborigines, shadowy and furtive, sitting quietly on the margins of sunny plazas as if in a waiting
room. While Allan went off to get some money out of a bank machine, I drifted into the vicinity of three Aboriginal people, two men and a woman, all staring at nothing. I gave them a nod and respectful g’day smile as I passed, but failed signally to establish eye contact. It was as if they were somewhere else, or I was transparent.
We had breakfast in a small Italian café, the only customers, then drove out to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory because I had read that it had a box jellyfish on display. I had expected the museum to be small and dusty, and to detain us for no longer than it took to find and briefly examine the jellyfish display, but in fact it was sleek and modern and quite wonderful. It was improbably large for a provincial museum and chock-full of interesting stuff thoughtfully presented.
One area was devoted to Cyclone Tracy, still the most devastating natural event in Australian history. It all but blew away the town on Christmas Eve 1974. According to a recorded commentary, most people didn’t expect the storm to come to much. A weaker cyclone had passed through a few weeks earlier without doing significant damage, and the leading edge of Tracy brushed over the town without leaving any hint of particular ferocity to come. Most people turned in as if it were a normal night. It wasn’t until Darwin was hit by the back end of the storm system, about 2.30 a.m., that people realized they were really in for it. As the winds whipped up to 160 miles an hour Darwin’s frail tropical houses began to shed pieces and then to disintegrate. Most of the housing was post-war fibreboard homes of a type called the D series, which were cheap and quick to build but could not stand up to a real hurricane. Before the night was out Tracy had blown away 9,000 homes and killed more than sixty people.
Just off the main display area was a small, darkened chamber in which you could listen to a tape recording of the storm that had been made on the night by a Roman Catholic priest. A sign on the door warned that people who had lived through the storm might find the recording distressing, which I thought perhaps a trifle overwrought until I heard it myself. Well, it was an amazingly effective way of making you realize how powerful and terrifying such a storm can be. The recording began with various lively but clearly preliminary wind noises – branches knocking, gates banging – and then rose and rose again till it was a continuous, howling, unearthly fury, with sounds of metal roofs being wrenched from their moorings and other weighty debris flying murderously through the night. Experiencing it in pitch darkness, as the locals would have done, gave it an immediacy that was inexpressibly effective. I actually found myself ducking whenever anything crashed nearby. When it finished, Allan and I exchanged impressed and drained looks, and proceeded on to the visual part of the display with a new appreciation.
On a wall outside, a television endlessly showed the original Australian Broadcasting Corporation footage of what the town woke up to the next day – namely, total devastation. The film, taken from a slow-moving car, showed street after street in which every structure was flattened.
Much of the rest of the museum was given over to cases of stuffed animals illustrating the Northern Territory’s extraordinary biological diversity. Pride of place was given to an enormous stuffed crocodile named Sweetheart, who was for a time the most famous in Australia. Sweetheart – who was, despite the effeminate name, a male – had a
passionate dislike for outboard engines and used to attack any boats that disturbed his peace. Unusually for a crocodile, he never harmed a person, but he crunched at least fifteen boats and their motors, bringing a certain unexpected liveliness to many a fisherman’s afternoon. In 1979 when it was feared that he would do himself some serious harm – he was constantly being clobbered by propellers – wildlife officials decided to move him somewhere safer. Unfortunately, the capture was botched when a cable snagged and Sweetheart drowned. So he was stuffed and put on display in the Darwin museum, where he has been impressing visitors ever since with his very substantial heft: he stretches almost seventeen feet and in life weighed over 1,700 pounds.
Another case answered a question that must have occurred to nearly everyone at one time or another: namely, how exactly do they stuff the animals? I had always assumed they filled them with sawdust or old socks or something. Well, here I learned, by means of a small stuffed animal shown in cross-section, that in fact a mounted specimen is empty but for a spare interior framework of styrofoam balls and wooden dowels. I was touched and grateful that some curator had taken the trouble to provide this insight. Also on display were lots of snakes and reptiles, many of them quite severely murderous, which Allan regarded with particular absorption.
Perhaps the most admirable quality about the museum – and I suspect this is a real Northern Territory thing – is that it didn’t mince words about the dangers of the world outside. Most museums in Australia are at pains to stress the unlikelihood of anything happening to you. The Darwin museum makes it quite obvious, with cold facts and figures, that if something does happen to you out
there, you are really going to regret it. This was most potently displayed in the aquatic creatures section – and here at last we found what we had come to see: a large glass cylinder containing a preserved box jellyfish, the deadliest creature on earth.
It was remarkably unprepossessing – a translucent box-shaped blob, six or eight inches high, with threadlike tentacles several feet long trailing off beneath it. Like all jellyfish, it is all but brainless, but its lethality is unbelievable. The tentacles of a box jellyfish carry enough wallop to kill a roomful of people, yet they live exclusively on tiny krill-like shrimp – creatures that hardly require a great deal of violent subduing. As ever in the curious world of Australian biology, no one knows why the jellyfish evolved such extravagant toxicity.
Alongside were displays of other dangerous sea creatures, of which the Northern Territory has an impressive plenitude – five types of stingray, two of blue-ringed octopus, thirty varieties of sea snake, eight types of coneshell, and the usual roguish assortment of stonefish, scorpionfish, firefish and others too numerous to list and too depressing to dwell on. All these are found in shallow coastal waters, in rock pools and even sometimes on the beaches themselves. It is a wonder to me that anyone goes within a hundred feet of the sea in northern Australia. The sea snakes are especially unnerving, not because they are aggressive, but because they are inquisitive. Stray into their territory and they will come to check you out, all but rubbing against you in the manner of cats seeking affection. They are the most sweet-tempered creatures in existence. But cross them or alarm them and they can hit you with enough venom to kill three grown men. Now
that’
s scary.
As we were studying the display, a man, lean and lavishly bearded in the Darwinian style, said g’day and asked how we were going. He identified himself as Dr Phil Alderslade, curator of coelenterates. ‘Jellyfish and corals,’ he added at once, seeing our expressions of frank ignorance. ‘I noticed you taking notes,’ he added further.
I told him of my devotion to box jellyfish and asked him if he worked with them himself.
‘Oh, sure.’
‘So how do you keep from getting stung?’
‘Basic precautions really. You wear a wetsuit, of course, and rubber gloves, and you just take a good deal of care when handling them because if even a tiny piece of tentacle is left on a glove and you accidentally touch it to bare skin – wiping sweat from your face or brushing away a fly or something – you can get a
very
nasty sting, believe me.’
‘Have you ever been stung?’
‘Once. My glove slipped and a tentacle touched me just here.’ He showed us the soft underside of his wrist. It bore a faint scar about half an inch long. ‘Just touched me, but jeez it bloody hurt.’
‘What’d it feel like?’ we asked together.
‘The only thing I can compare it to is if you took a lit cigarette and held it to your skin – held it there a goodish long while, maybe thirty seconds. That’s what it felt like. You get stung from time to time by various things in my line and I can tell you I’ve never felt anything like it.’
‘So what would a couple of yards feel like?’ I wondered.
He shook his head at the thought of it. ‘If you tried to imagine the worst pain possible, it would be beyond that. You’re dealing with pain of an order of magnitude well past anything most people have ever experienced.’
He did something you don’t often see a scientist do: he shivered. Then he smiled cheerfully through his extravagant facial hair and excused himself to get back to his corals.
We left the museum and headed out of town through Darwin’s sunny, orderly suburbs – white bungalows on tidy lawns – and at the edge of town passed a sign that said: ‘Alice Springs 1479 kilometres’. Ahead, along the lonely Stuart Highway, lay nearly a thousand miles of largely unrelieved emptiness all the way to Alice Springs. We were on our way into the famous and forbidding Never Never, a land of dangerous heat and bone-white sunshine. The road – the Track, as it is still sometimes called – was nearly empty but straight and well maintained. Ask ten people in Sydney or Melbourne whether the highway from Darwin to Alice Springs is paved or not and most will have no idea. In fact, it was paved long before most other outback roads: during the Second World War when northern Australia became a principal staging post for the Pacific campaign. These days it carries a small but growing number of tourists, a very little local traffic and lots of road trains – multi-trailered lorries up to a hundred and fifty feet long, which haul freight between the most distant outposts of Australia. To meet a barrelling road train coming at you at full throttle on a two-lane highway on which it desires all of its lane and some of yours is a reliably invigorating experience – an explosive
whoomp
as you hit its displaced air, followed at once by a consequent lurch onto the shoulder, several moments of hypermanic axle action sufficient to loosen dental fillings and empty your pockets of coins, an enveloping shroud of gritty red dust and the metallic dinks and savage thumps of flying
rocks, some involuntary oral emissions on your part as the dust clears and you spy a large boulder dead ahead; and a sudden, miraculous return to tranquillity and smoothness as the car regains the highway, entirely of its own volition, and continues on its way to Alice Springs.
The only time that this part of the world had any life at all was during the Second World War, when sixty airfields and thirty-five hospitals were built along the highway between Darwin and Daly Waters, and a hundred thousand American troops were stationed in the area. The sites are still indicated with historical markers, and a couple of times we pulled off to have a look. When Alan Moorehead passed this way for
Rum Jungle
, a decade after the war’s end, most of the buildings were still standing. Sometimes he came across abandoned planes and stacks of munitions quietly decomposing in the desert. I naturally hoped we would as well, but there was nothing out there now – nothing but stillness and oppressive heat and a sense of being on the edge of a boundless nullity.