Down Under (40 page)

‘Driving back to Alice Springs.’

He removed his focus to the wider world while he allowed this thought to settle. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘I suppose we’d better go and see if this bloody rock is worth a 600-mile round trip.’

It was.

The thing about Ayers Rock is that by the time you finally get there you are already a little sick of it. Even when you are a thousand miles from it, you can’t go a day in Australia without seeing it four or five or six times – on postcards, on travel agents’ posters, on the cover of souvenir picture books – and as you get nearer the rock the frequency of exposure increases. So you are aware, as you drive to the park entrance and pay the ambitiously pitched admission fee of $15 a head and follow the approach road around, that you have driven 1,300 miles to look at a large, inert, loaf-shaped object that you have seen photographically portrayed a thousand times already. In consequence, your mood as you approach this famous monolith is restrained, unexpectant – pessimistic even.

And then you see it, and you are instantly transfixed.

There, in the middle of a memorable and imposing emptiness, stands an eminence of exceptional nobility and grandeur, 1,150 feet high, a mile and a half long, five and a half miles around, less red than photographs have led you to expect but in every other way more arresting than you could ever have supposed. I have discussed this since with many other people, nearly all of whom agreed that they approached Uluru with a kind of fatigue, and were left agog in a way they could not adequately explain. It’s not that Uluru is bigger than you had supposed or more perfectly formed or in any way different from the impression you had created in your mind, but the very opposite. It is exactly what you expected it to be. You
know
this rock. You know it in a way that has nothing to do with calendars and the covers of souvenir books. Your knowledge of this rock is grounded in something much more elemental.

In some odd way that you don’t understand and can’t begin to articulate you feel an acquaintance with it – a familiarity on an unfamiliar level. Somewhere in the deep sediment of your being some long-dormant fragment of primordial memory, some little severed tail of DNA, has twitched or stirred. It is a motion much too faint to be understood or interpreted, but somehow you feel certain that this large, brooding, hypnotic presence has an importance to you at the species level – perhaps even at a sort of tadpole level – and that in some way your visit here is more than happenstance.

I’m not saying that any of this is so. I’m just saying that this is how you feel. The other thought that strikes you – that struck me anyway – is that Uluru is not merely a very splendid and mighty monolith, but also an extremely distinctive one. More than this, it is very possibly the most immediately recognizable natural object on earth. I’m suggesting nothing here, but I will say that if you were an intergalactic traveller who had broken down in our solar system, the obvious directions to rescuers would be: ‘Go to the third planet and fly around till you see the big red rock. You can’t miss it.’ If ever on earth they dig up a 150,000-year-old rocket ship from the Galaxy Zog, this is where it will be. I’m not saying I expect it to happen; not saying that at all. I’m just observing that if I were looking for an ancient starship this is where I would start digging.

Allan, I noted, seemed similarly affected. ‘It’s weird, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘What is?’

‘I don’t know. Just seeing it. I mean, it just feels weird.’

I nodded. It does feel weird. Quite apart from that initial shock of indefinable recognition, there is also the fact that Uluru is, no matter how you approach it, totally arresting.
You cannot stop looking at it; you don’t want to stop looking at it. As you draw closer, it becomes even more interesting. It is more pitted than you had imagined, less regular in shape. There are more curves and divots and wavelike ribs, more irregularities of every type, than are evident from even a couple of hundred yards away. You realize that you could spend quite a lot of time – possibly a worryingly large amount of time; possibly a sell-your-house-and-move-here-to-live-in-a-tent amount of time – just looking at the rock, gazing at it from many angles, never tiring of it. You can see yourself in a silvery ponytail, barefoot and in something jangly and loose-fitting, hanging out with much younger visitors and telling them: ‘And the amazing thing is that every day it’s different, you know what I’m saying? It’s never the same rock twice. That’s right, my friend – you put your finger on it there. It’s awesome. It’s an awesome thing. Say, do you by any chance have any dope or some spare change?’

We stopped at several places to get out and have a look, including the spot where you can climb up it. It takes several hours and much exertion, which comfortably eliminated it from our consideration, and in any case the route was closed for the afternoon. So many people have collapsed and died on the rock that they close it to climbers when the weather is really warm, as it was this day. Even when it’s not too hot, lots of people get in trouble from fooling around or taking wrong turns. Just the day before a Canadian had had to be rescued after getting himself onto some ledge from which he could not get either up or down. Since 1985, ownership of the rock has been back in the hands of the local Aboriginal people, the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunyjatjara, and they deeply dislike visitors (whom they call ‘minga’, or ants)
clambering all over it. Personally I don’t blame them. It is a sacred site to them. I think it should be for everyone, frankly.

We stopped at the visitors’ centre for a cup of coffee and to look at the displays, which were all to do with interpretations of the Dreamtime – the Aborigines’ traditional conception of how the earth was formed and operates. There was nothing instructive in a historical or geological sense, which was disappointing because I was curious to know what Uluru is doing there. How do you get the biggest rock in existence onto the middle of an empty plain? It turns out (I looked in a book later) that Uluru is what is known to geology as a bornhardt: a hunk of weather-resistant rock left standing when all else around it has worn away. Bornhardts are not that uncommon – the Devils Marbles are a collection of miniature bornhardts – but nowhere else on earth has one lump of rock been left in such dramatic and solitary splendour or assumed such a pleasing smooth symmetry. It is a hundred million years old. Go there, man.

Afterwards we had one last drive around the rock before heading back to the lonely highway. We had been at the site for barely two hours, obviously not nearly enough, but I realized as I turned around in my seat to watch it shrinking into the background behind us that there never could be enough, and I felt moderately comforted by that thought.

Anyway, I’ll be back. I have no doubt of that. And next time I’m bringing a really good metal detector.

So we drove all the way back to Alice Springs. To compensate for our setback at Uluru, we decided to stay at one of Alice’s fancy outlying resort hotels and hang the expense. Imagine then our surprise and gratification when we pulled into the oasis-like splendour of the Red Centre Resort and discovered that it was $20 a night less than we had paid for much less at the town-centre Best Western the night before. This alone, we agreed at once, was almost worth a 600-mile drive.

The Red Centre was really just a very large motel with a bit of landscaping, but it was friendly and welcoming and at its heart was a pool with a terrace and an adjoining bar and restaurant. Needless to say, this is where we were to be found thirty seconds after arrival. There we were told by the kindly staff that we were too late for dinner, but that they could probably rustle us up a couple of
steak sandwiches or something. We told them we would be grateful for whatever they could give us, particularly if it was accompanied with drink, then took a table by the pool’s edge, where we sat watching the tranquil shimmer of the water and savouring the delightfully warm and wholesome desert air, under a sky spread with stars.

Suddenly life seemed pretty good. Our driving was behind us now. We had seen Uluru – too briefly, perhaps, but sufficient to appreciate its wonders. And here at the Red Centre we appeared to have landed on our feet.

Allan announced his intention to spend his final day in Australia sitting in a lounger beside the pool, reading inferior fiction and working on his tan.

‘How very shallow of you,’ I said.

He accepted the criticism with imperturbable equanimity.

‘So you’re not coming to see the desert park?’ I said.

‘Nope. Nor the telegraph station, nor the sand dune hall of fame, nor the fig farm . . .’

‘It’s a date garden.’

A pause to stand corrected. ‘Nor anywhere else. I’m going to sit right here beside this pool and pass my day in a vain and idle manner. And you?’

‘I’m going to see the sights, of course.’

‘Well, then I will meet you afterwards and you can tell me all about it, no doubt in excruciatingly boring detail.’

‘You can count on it.’

And so the following morning I emerged from my room in a clean summer shirt, clutching a notebook with a pen tucked into the spiral, and went off in a dutiful frame of mind to see what Alice had to offer. I called first at the telegraph station, on a patch of sunny high ground a mile or so outside town. In its early days Alice Springs was a
repeater station, one of twelve between Darwin and Adelaide, which were needed to boost signals on their way across the country. What a forlorn and tedious existence that must have been, stuck in the middle of a suffocating nowhere, endlessly tapping out second-hand messages involving people you would never see or know, living in places you could only dream about. Outside the station was the reedy pool of water from which Alice Springs takes its name. The Alice in question was the wife of the director of telegraphs in Adelaide, and originally it was only the station that was called Alice Springs. The town that slowly rose in the valley below was called Stuart, after the explorer. For some reason people found this confusing, and in 1933 the whole became known as Alice Springs. So the most famous town in the outback is named for a woman who had no connection with it and, as far as I know, never saw it.

This done, I made a tick beside ‘Telegraph Station’ on my list of things to do, then drove on to the Alice Springs Desert Park. My expectations frankly were not high, but in fact it was splendid. It’s run by the Parks and Wildlife Commission of the Northern Territory. What they have done is recreate over a large area three primary desert habitats – one that is very dry, one that gets a little moisture, and one that is normally dry but occasionally is swept by flash floods. This alone provided a worthwhile lesson – it makes you realize that deserts in their quiet, arid way are as varied as other environments – but I was also grateful to find various shrubs and other plants labelled and explained. It was a pleasure to be able to say: ‘Ah, so
that’s
kangaroo paw. Well, I never. And let’s see if this spinifex really does hurt as much as Ernest Giles said. Why, yes, it does!’

Scattered at intervals were large walk-in enclosures containing birds and other small desert animals – bandicoots and bush-tailed possums and so on – with labels detailing their habits. Best of all was a large nocturnal house where all manner of night creatures endlessly prowled and hopped and sniffed the air in a succession of night-time dioramas. The display area was so faintly illuminated that it was actually possible to walk into walls and glass panels, but as my eyes slowly adjusted I was able to pick out an amazingly diverse and rewarding range of small marsupials – potoroos and bettongs and bilbies and numbats and quolls and much more.

Because Australia is so vast and arid and difficult a landscape to study, and because the modest population base produces comparatively few scientists for the amount of ground to be covered, and because, above all, the animals within it are often small, furtive, nocturnal and sometimes mysterious, even now nobody really knows quite what is out there. Any list of Australian wildlife is arrestingly punctuated with qualified comments like ‘possibly extinct’ or ‘thought to be endangered’ or ‘may survive in some remote areas’. The difficulties are well illustrated, I think, by the uncertain fate of the oolacunta, or desert rat kangaroo. Nearly everything that is known about this interesting creature is owed to two men. The first was a nineteenth-century naturalist named John Gould, who studied and described the animal in 1843. It had, according to Gould, the shape and manner of a kangaroo but was only about the size of a rabbit. What particularly distinguished it was that it could move at very high speeds for unusually long distances. Since that one initial report, however, the oolacunta had not been seen. Enter Hedley Herbert Finlayson.

Finlayson was a chemist by profession, but devoted much of his life to searching for rare native animals. In 1931 he led an expedition that travelled on horseback deep into the interior, to the perpetual furnace that is Sturt’s Stony Desert. Upon arriving, Finlayson was surprised to discover that the little desert rat kangaroo, far from being on the verge of extinction or possibly gone altogether, was both visible and clearly thriving. The animal’s speed and endurance were just as Gould had reported. Once when Finlayson and his colleagues gave chase on horseback a desert rat kangaroo ran twelve miles without pause through the searing heat of day, exhausting three horses in the process. Ounce for ounce, the little oolacunta may well have been the greatest runner (or bouncer, actually) the animal kingdom has ever produced. Returning to society, Finlayson reported his exciting find and naturalists and zoologists everywhere dutifully amended their texts to account for the desert rat kangaroo’s rediscovery. Over the next three years Finlayson made further expeditions, but in 1935 when he returned once more he was nonplussed, as you may imagine, to discover that the little desert rat kangaroo had quietly vanished – as utterly as it had after Gould’s single sighting in 1843. It hasn’t been seen since.