Authors: Bill Bryson
Well, the murmurs were prodigious, the buzz electric. What Caldwell was announcing with such elegant pith was that he had found platypus eggs and they were unquestionably reptilian in nature. In the end, Caldwell’s
find didn’t make a lasting difference. The monotremes ended up in the mammalian camp, though for a while it was a close-run thing.
I mention all this to give a little context to the very real excitement I felt the following day when, freshly arrived in Perth, I happened upon a monotreme of my own: an echidna crossing a path in a lonely corner of Kings Park. I was already, I have to say, in pretty high spirits. Perth is a lovely city and one of my favourites in Australia. I have perhaps an inflated fondness for it because on my first visit there, in 1993, I arrived by way of Johannesburg, where I had just been robbed in a fairly hair-raising manner, in broad daylight in the city centre, by a party of cheerfully menacing youths with twitchy knives, and it was such a relief to find myself in a city where I could wander without fear that I might be bundled into an alley, liberated of my possessions and liberally incised with sharp instruments.
Even without arriving fresh from an incident of criminal excitement, Perth is a cheery and welcoming place. There is first of all the delight in finding it there at all, for Perth is far and away the most remote big city on earth, closer to Singapore than to Sydney, though not actually close to either. Behind you stretches 1,700 miles of inert red emptiness all the way to Adelaide; before you nothing but a featureless blue sea for 5,000 miles to Africa. Why 1.3 million members of a free society would choose to live in such a lonely outpost is a question always worth considering, but climate explains a lot. Perth has glorious weather,
good-natured
weather – the kind that sets the postman to whistling and puts a spring in the step of delivery people. Architecturally, Perth has no particular distinction – it is a large, clean, modern city: Minneapolis
down under – but its sharp and radiant light makes it a beauty. You will never see bluer city skies or purer sunlight bouncing off skyscrapers than here.
But what especially sets Perth apart is the possession of one of the world’s largest and finest parks, Kings Park. Spread across a thousand comely acres on a bluff above the broad basin of the Swan River, Kings is all those things a city park should be – playground, sanctuary, strolling area, botanical garden, vantage point, memorial – and so big that you can never feel as if you have seen it all. Most of it is arrayed in a conventional manner – undulant lawns, paths, flower beds – but a substantial corner, constituting perhaps a quarter of the whole, has been left as unimproved bush. It was while strolling down a sunny path through this little-visited zone that I saw a small furry hemisphere, rather like the brush portion of a floor polisher, emerge from the undergrowth on one side of the path and proceed with a stately lack of haste towards identical undergrowth on the other side.
Sensing me, it stopped. It had glossy black quills pointing straight back and had curled itself roughly into a ball so I couldn’t see its pointy snout, but it was clearly an echidna. It could be nothing else. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. It was a little pathetic, I grant you, when you consider that this was my most exciting moment of engaging a creature in the wild in Australia. In a country filled with exotic and striking life forms my high point was finding a harmless, animated pincushion in a city park. I didn’t care. It was a monotreme – a physiological anomaly, a wonder of the reproductive world, an oddity from the loneliest branch on the mammalian tree. When the echidna sensed that I had retreated to a respectful distance, it unfurled and continued on its waddling way into the bush.
Thrilled to my cloaca, I followed the path around and back into the park proper, where I came after some time to a long, lovely avenue of tall white gum trees planted long ago to commemorate the fallen of the First World War. Each tree bore a small plaque giving bare details – unexpectedly moving when read one after another down a long walk – of an abbreviated life. ‘In honour of Capt. Thomas H. Bone, 44th Batt.,’ said one. ‘Killed in action Passchendaele 4th October 1917 aged 25. Dedicated by his wife and daughter.’ It is a fact little noted outside Australia – and I think worth at least a mention here – that no other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in the First World War than Australia. Out of a national population of under five million, Australia suffered a staggering 210,000 casualties – 60,000 dead, 150,000 injured. The casualty rate for its soldiers was 65 per cent. As John Pilger has put it: ‘No army was as decimated as that which came from farthest away. And all were volunteers.’ Only a few days earlier, in one of the weekend papers I had read a review of a new history of the First World War by the British historian John Keegan. In passing, the reviewer had noted, with an all but palpable sigh, that Keegan’s 500 pages of densely observed text had failed to include a single mention of the Australian forces.
Poor Australia, I thought. Other countries produce unknown soldiers. It produces unknown armies.
*8
Beyond this sombre avenue lay the much perkier and sunnier realm of the botanical gardens, and this I approached now with unusual devotion, for Australia’s
plants are exceptional and there is no place where you will find them more handsomely displayed. Australia really is the most amazingly fecund country. It is thought to contain something of the order of 25,000 species of plants (Britain, for purposes of comparison, has 1,600 species) but that’s really only a guess. At least a third of what is out there has never been named or studied, and new stuff is turning up all the time, often in the most unlikely places. In 1989 in Sydney, for instance, scientists found an entirely new species of tree called
Allocasuarina portuensis.
People had been living around these trees for 200 years, but because they weren’t very numerous – just ten have been found – no one had noticed them before. In much the same way, in 1994 in the Blue Mountains some botanist out for a walk happened on another of those unexpected relic species long presumed to be extinct. Called wollemi pines, these were not modest shrubs hidden among tall grasses but stout and imposing trees up to 130 feet tall and ten feet around. It’s just that with such a lot of land to survey and only so many botanists to go round, it took a while for the two to intersect. Nobody can guess, of course, what else might be out there awaiting discovery. This is what makes Australia such a fundamentally exciting place to engage in the natural sciences. In Britain or Germany or America, you might with great luck find a new strain of mountaintop lichen or some sprig of previously overlooked moss, but in Australia take a stroll through the bush and you can find half a dozen unnamed wildflowers, a grove of Jurassic angiosperms and probably a ten-kilo lump of gold. I know where I’d be working if I were in science.
The question that naturally occurs in all this is why Australia, which so often seems singularly hostile to life,
has produced such an abundance of it. Paradoxically, half the answer lies in the very poverty of the soil. In the temperate world, most plants can prosper in most places – an oak tree can grow as productively in Oregon as it can in Pennsylvania – and so a relatively few generalist species tend to predominate. In poor soils, on the other hand, plants are driven to specialize. One species will learn to tolerate soils containing, say, high concentrations of nickel, an element that other plants find distasteful. Another will become tolerant of copper. Yet another might learn to tolerate nickel
and
copper, and perhaps prolonged drought as well. And so it goes. After a few million years, you end up with a landscape filled with a great variety of plants each favouring very specific conditions and each master of a patch of ground that few other plants could abide. Specialized plants lead to specialized insects, and so on up the food chain. The result is a country that seems on the face of it hostile to life but in fact is wonderfully diversified.
The second, more obvious factor in Australia’s variety is isolation. Fifty million years as an island clearly sheltered indigenous life forms from a great deal of competition and allowed certain of them – eucalypts in the plant world, marsupials in the animal world – to prosper uncommonly. But no less important in terms of species diversity is the isolation that has long existed
within
Australia. In general terms, Australia comprises scattered pockets of life separated by great zones of harshness. And nowhere is all of this more true than in south-western Australia. According to David Attenborough (in
The Private Life of Plants)
, this one corner of Australia ‘contains no less than twelve thousand different plant species and 87 per cent of them grow nowhere else in the world’.
Which makes it alarming to report that many of these singular plants are in trouble from a terrible and little-understood malady called ‘dieback’. Dieback comes from a fungus family called
Phytophthora
, which is related to the fungus that caused the potato blight in Ireland. It has been in Australia for a century and has affected plants all over the country, though the source wasn’t identified by science until 1966. It is especially a worry in south-west Australia, partly because it thrives there as nowhere else and partly because the south-west has such a density of rare and vulnerable plants. I discovered now, from an informative signboard, that even banksias are under threat. The banksia (named for its discoverer, Joseph Banks) is perhaps the most adored flower in Australia. It’s a bit of an oddity – the flowers look uncannily like toilet brushes – but Australians love it because it is striking and it is everywhere and it is theirs alone. So it was discouraging to read that seven species of banksia are on the endangered list and could well become extinct in the wild in the next few years. Twelve more species are under threat. Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can. The most disturbing thought of all, I suppose, is that with so much still unrecorded many plants could disappear before they are even found.
All of this was of some moment because I was about to go off on a small botanical quest of my own. First, however, I had a day at leisure in Perth. I had nothing very particular in mind, but a few minutes later as I sat on the shady terrace of the park’s central café, decorating my face with a chocolatey froth of cappuccino and reading the
West Australian
newspaper, I came upon a news article that planted the possibility of an idea.
The article was to do with a man named Lang Hancock, about whom I had lately been reading. Hancock was a rancher in the remote north of Western Australia who had the exceptional good fortune to be at the heart of one of the greatest mineral booms in modern history. Anyone who doubts that Australia truly is a lucky country has only to review the story of the country’s mineral discoveries in the 1950s and a little beyond. Up until that time, conventional wisdom held that Australia was deficient in almost all natural resources. Iron ore, for instance, was considered to be in such short supply that for two decades it was illegal to export it. Then in 1952 Lang Hancock made an important discovery. While piloting a light aircraft over the trackless emptiness of the Hamersley Range near the north coast he lost his bearings in a sudden storm and made a forced landing in a zone of flat rock known to geology as the Western Shield. Stepping from his aeroplane, he realized that he was standing on almost solid iron. Looking into the matter further, he discovered that he owned a 100-kilometre-long block of nearly solid iron ore. From almost nothing in 1950, Australia’s estimated reserves of iron ore rose to 20 billion tonnes in 1960. By the end of the 1960s, Hancock alone controlled iron ore reserves greater than those of the United States and Canada combined. That is a lot of iron ore.
But it was only the beginning. In dizzying succession mineral deposits were found all over the place – bauxite, nickel, manganese, uranium, copper, lead, diamonds, tin, zinc, zircon, rutile, ilmenite and many others that most of us have never heard of. Almost overnight, people with mining interests made fortunes that were embarrassing to contemplate and impossible to spend. The stock markets went crazy as investors scrambled to grab a piece of the
action. In Sydney one broker lost an ear – an ear! – in the frenzied trading that accompanied the constant reports of new discoveries. It was a heady period, and it transformed Australia’s fortunes. From a sleepy, good-natured producer of wool, it became a mining colossus, the world’s biggest exporter of minerals. As many of the biggest finds were in Western Australia, much of the wealth settled in Perth, the state capital, which is what accounts for all its skyscrapers.
Lang Hancock, the man who started it all, was called to the great iron mountain in the sky in 1992 but in his dotage, it appears, he did that thing that brings dread to the hearts of rich children everywhere: he married his housekeeper, a lady from the Philippines named Rose. According to the morning paper, Hancock’s daughter had filed a lawsuit alleging that the widow Rose and the late Mr Hancock had ‘lavishly and improperly spent money that was not their own’. Helpfully the article provided a sidebar in which Mrs Hancock’s principal assets were listed. These included a $35-million house in a Perth suburb called Mosman Park, complete with the address. It was apparently the grandest residence in the city; the chandeliers alone had cost $3 million. Looking at my map of the city, I realized that Mosman Park was at the far end of a clutch of famously well-heeled suburbs running all the way to Fremantle, and as it was a fine day and I was feeling perky, I decided to walk out.
Well, it’s a long way from central Perth to Mosman Park and beyond, that’s all I’m saying. I walked for hours, through the leafy sprawl of the University of Western Australia campus and around the sunny foreshore of the Swan River estuary, tracing the sweep of sunny bays and yacht-cluttered coves, and made my way at length into residential zones of startling, showy wealth – Nedlands,
Dalkeith, Peppermint Grove – where palatial houses basked in the penetrating sunshine. These neighbourhoods went on for miles – just street after foot-wearying street of trophy homes, with big gates beside broad drives, patios adorned with Grecian urns on ornate plinths and garages for fleets of cars. It was a stunning demonstration of the proposition that money and taste don’t always, or even often, go together. These were the houses of lottery winners, of retailers of the sort who appear in their own television commercials, of people for whom the words ‘Peppermint Grove’ in an address would not be an embarrassment. I would not suggest for a moment that Australia’s nouveaux riches are more distant from refinement than the people of other lands, but the absence of a distinctive architectural vernacular in Australia does mean that people can take their styles from a wider range of sources – principally drive-in banks, casinos, upmarket nursing homes and ski lodges. To see it massed over a spread of miles as in the western suburbs of Perth is certainly an absorbing experience.