Down Under (4 page)

‘What’s a bluey?’ I asked, appalled to discover that there was some additional danger I hadn’t been told about.

‘A bluebottle,’ she explained and pointed to a small jellyfish of the type (as I later learned from browsing through a fat book titled, if I recall,
Things That Will Kill You Horridly in Australia: Volume 19
) known elsewhere as a Portuguese man-of-war. I squinted at it as it drifted past. It looked unprepossessing, like a blue condom with strings attached.

‘Is it dangerous?’ I asked.

Now before we hear Deirdre’s response to me as I stood there, vulnerable and abraded, shivering, nearly naked and half drowned, let me just quote from her subsequent article in the
Herald:

‘Dangerous? No,’ Deirdre replied now as we stood gawping at the bluebottle. ‘But don’t brush against it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Might be a bit uncomfortable.’

I looked at her with an expression of interest bordering on admiration. Long bus journeys are uncomfortable. Slatted wooden benches are uncomfortable. Lulls in conversations are uncomfortable. The sting of a Portuguese man-of-war – even people from Iowa know this – is
agony.
It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

‘Hey, there’s another one,’ said Glenn.

We watched another one drift by. Deirdre was scanning the water.

‘Sometimes they come in waves,’ she said. ‘Might be an idea to get out of the water.’

I didn’t have to be told twice.

There was one more thing that Deirdre felt I needed to see if I was to have any understanding of Australian life and culture, so afterwards, as late afternoon gave way to the pale blush of evening, we drove out through the glittering sprawl of Sydney’s western suburbs almost to the edge of the Blue Mountains to a place called Penrith. Our destination was an enormous sleek building, surrounded by an even more enormous, very full car park. An illuminated sign announced this as the Penrith Panthers World of Entertainment. The Panthers, Glenn explained, were a rugby league club.

Australia is a country of clubs – sporting clubs, workingmen’s clubs, Returned Servicemen’s League clubs, clubs affiliated to various political parties – each nominally, and sometimes no doubt actively, devoted to the well-being of a particular segment of society. What they are really there for, however, is to generate extremely large volumes of money from drinking and gambling.

I had read in the paper that Australians are the biggest gamblers on the planet – one of the more arresting statistics I saw was that the country has less than 1 per cent of the world’s population but more than 20 per cent of its slot machines – and that between them Australians spend $11 billion
^*2
a year, or $2,000 per person, on various games of chance. But I had seen nothing to suggest such risky gusto until I stepped inside the World of Entertainment. It was vast and dazzling and immensely well appointed. The club movement in Australia is huge. In New South Wales alone, clubs employ 65,000 people, more than any other industry, and create an additional 250,000 jobs indirectly. They pay over $2 billion in wages and $500 million in gaming taxes. This is huge business and it is nearly all based on a type of slot machine popularly called a pokie.

I had assumed that we would have to bend the rules to get admitted – it was a club, after all – but in fact I learned that all Australian clubs allow instant membership to anyone, so keen are they to share the diverting pleasures of the poker machine. You just sign a temporary members’ book by the door and in you go.

Surveying the crowds with a benign and cheerful eye was a man whose badge identified him as Peter Hutton, Duty Manager. In the manner of nearly all Australians, he was an easygoing and approachable sort. I quickly learned from him that this particular club has 60,000 members, of whom 20,000 will turn up on busy nights, like New Year’s eve. Tonight the figure would be more like 2,000. The club contained bars and restaurants almost beyond counting,
sports facilities, a children’s play area, and nightclubs and theatres. They were just about to build a thirteen-screen cinema and a crèche big enough to hold 400 infants.

‘Wow,’ I said, for I was impressed. ‘So is this the biggest club in Sydney?’

‘Biggest in the southern hemisphere,’ Mr Hutton said proudly.

We wandered into the vast and tinkling interior. Hundreds of pokies stood in long straight lines, and at nearly every one sat an intent figure feeding in the mortgage money. They are essentially slot machines, but with a bewildering array of illuminated buttons and flashing lights that let you exercise a variety of options – whether to hold a particular line, double your stake, take a portion of your winnings, and goodness knows what else. I studied from a discreet distance several people at play, but couldn’t begin to understand what they were doing, other than feeding a succession of coins into a glowing box and looking grim. Deirdre and Glenn were similarly unacquainted with the intricacies of pokies. We put in a $2 coin, just to see what would happen, and got an instant payout of $17. This made us immensely joyful.

I returned to the hotel like a kid who had had a very full day at the county fair – exhausted but deeply happy. I had survived the perils of the sea, been to a palatial club, helped to win $15 and made two new friends. I can’t say I was a great deal closer to feeling that I had actually seen Sydney than I had been before, but that day would come. Meanwhile, I had a night’s sleep to get and a train to catch.

I believe I first realized I was going to like the Australian outback when I read that the Simpson Desert, an area bigger than some European countries, was named in 1932
^*3
after a manufacturer of washing machines. (Specifically, Alfred Simpson, who funded an aerial survey.) It wasn’t so much the pleasingly unheroic nature of the name as the knowledge that an expanse of Australia more than 100,000 miles square didn’t even
have
a name until less than seventy years ago. I have near relatives who have had names longer than that.

But then that’s the thing about the outback – it’s so vast and forbidding that much of it is still scarcely charted. Even Uluru was unseen by anyone but its Aboriginal
caretakers until only a little over a century ago. It’s not even possible to say quite where the outback is. To Australians anything vaguely rural is ‘the bush’. At some indeterminate point ‘the bush’ becomes ‘the outback’. Push on for another 2,000 miles or so and eventually you come to bush again, and then a city, and then the sea. And that’s Australia.

And so, in the company of the photographer Trevor Ray Hart, an amiable young man in shorts and a faded T-shirt, I took a cab to Sydney’s Central Station, an imposing heap of bricks on Elizabeth Street, and there we found our way through its dim and venerable concourse to our train.

Stretching for a third of a mile along the curving platform, the Indian Pacific was everything the brochure illustrations had promised – silvery sleek, shiny as a new nickel, humming with that sense of impending adventure that comes with the start of a long journey on a powerful machine. Carriage G, one of seventeen on the train, was in the charge of a cheerful steward named Terry, who thoughtfully provided a measure of local colour by accompanying every remark with an upbeat Aussie turn of phrase.

Need a glass of water?

‘No worries, mate. I’ll get right on ’er.’

Just received word that your mother has died?

‘Not a drama. She’ll be apples.’

He showed us to our berths, a pair of singles on opposite sides of a narrow panelled corridor. The cabins were astoundingly tiny – so tiny that you could bend over and actually get stuck.

‘This is it?’ I said in mild consternation. ‘In its entirety?’

‘No worries,’ Terry beamed. ‘She’s a bit snug, but you’ll find she’s got everything you need.’

And he was right. Everything you could possibly require in a living space was there. It was just very compact, not much larger than a standard wardrobe. But it was a marvel of ergonomics. It included a comfy built-in seat, a hideaway basin and toilet, a miniature cupboard, an overhead shelf just large enough for one very small suitcase, two reading lights, a pair of clean towels and a little amenity bag. In the wall was a narrow drop-down bed, which didn’t so much drop down as fall out like a hastily stowed corpse as I, and I expect many other giddily experimental passengers, discovered after looking ruminatively at the door and thinking: ‘Well, I wonder what’s behind
there?’
Still, it did make for an interesting surprise, and freeing my various facial protuberances from its coiled springs helped to pass the half hour before departure.

And then at last the train thrummed to life and we slid regally out of Sydney Central. We were on our way.

Done in one fell swoop, the journey to Perth takes nearly three days. Our instructions, however, were to disembark at the old mining town of Broken Hill to sample the outback and see what might bite us. So for Trevor and me the rail journey would be in two parts: an overnight run to Broken Hill and then a two-day haul across the Nullarbor. The train trundled out through the endless western suburbs of Sydney – through Flemington, Auburn, Parramatta, Doonside and the adorably named Rooty Hill – then picked up a little speed as we entered the Blue Mountains, where the houses thinned out and we were treated to long end-of-afternoon views over steep-sided vales and hazy forests of gum trees, whose quiet respirations give the hills their eponymous tinge.

I went off to explore the train. Our domain, the first class section, consisted of five sleeping carriages, a dining
carriage in a plush and velvety style that might be called
fin de siècle brothelkeeper
, and a lounge bar in a rather more modern mode. This was provisioned with soft chairs, a small promising-looking bar and low but relentless piped music from a twenty-volume compilation called, at a guess, ‘Songs You Hoped You’d Never Hear Again’. A mournful duet from
Phantom of the Opera
was playing as I passed through.

Beyond first class was the slightly cheaper holiday class, which was much the same as ours except that their dining area was a buffet car with bare plastic tables. (These people apparently needed wiping down after meals.) The passage beyond holiday class was barred by a windowless door, which was locked.

‘What’s back there?’ I asked the buffet car girl.

‘Coach class,’ she said with a shudder.

‘Is this door always locked?’

She nodded gravely. ‘Always.’

Coach class would become my obsession. But first it was time for dinner. The tannoy announced the first sitting. Ethel Merman was belting out ‘There’s No Business Like Show Business’ as I passed back through the first class lounge. Say what you will, the woman had lungs.

For all its air of cultivated venerability, the Indian Pacific is actually an infant as rail systems go, having been created as recently as 1970 when a new standard-gauge line was built across the country. Before that, for various arcane reasons mostly to do with regional distrust and envy, Australian railway lines employed different gauges. New South Wales had rails 4 feet 8½ inches apart. Victoria opted for a more commodious 5 feet 3 inches. Queensland and Western Australia economically decided on a standard of 3 feet
6 inches (a width not far off that of amusement park rides; people must have ridden with their legs out of the windows). South Australia, inventively, had all three. Five times on any journey between the east and west coasts passengers and freight had to be offloaded from one train and redeposited on another; a mad and tedious process. Finally, sanity was mustered and an all-new line was built. It is the second longest line in the world, after Russia’s Trans-Siberian.

I know all this because Trevor and I sat at dinner with a pair of quiet middle-aged teachers from rural north Queensland, Keith and Daphne. This was a big trip for them on teachers’ salaries, and Keith had done his homework. He talked with enthusiasm about the train, the landscape, the recent bush fires – we were passing through Lithgow where hundreds of acres of bush had been scorched and two firefighters had lost their lives recently – but when I asked about Aborigines (the question of land reforms had been much in the news) he grew suddenly vague and flustered.

‘It’s a problem,’ he said, staring hard at his food.

‘At the school where I teach,’ Daphne went on, hesitantly, ‘the Aboriginal parents, well, they get their dole payment and spend it on drink and then go walkabout. And the teachers have to . . . well,
feed
the children. You know, out of their own pockets. Otherwise the children wouldn’t eat.’