Authors: Bill Bryson
I had been walking for nearly three hours when I arrived at a landmark called Chidley Point and realized I had found Mosman Park. I delved in my bag for the newspaper to check the address, and discovered that I had evidently left it on the table at the café in Kings Park. Never mind. I had walked eight or nine miles by now and had seen enough extravagant real estate to last me a lifetime. I vaguely recalled the Hancock house as being on Wellington Street, so I found my way to this sedate thoroughfare and strolled along it. En route I saw perhaps eight houses that looked as if they might contain many million dollars’ worth of bricks, mortar, garden ornaments and tinkling chandeliers, but nothing that announced
itself unequivocally as the grandest pile in the metropolis. As I stood there, a young woman in shorts and a matching top – a professional dog walker, I supposed – came along behind a frisky dog not much smaller than a pony. She wasn’t so much walking the dog as skiing behind it on the soles of her shoes. I stepped into the street to keep from being eaten, but asked as she passed if she knew the Hancock house and she pointed to a place about three doors up. I went and had a look. Considering the cost, I have to say I had expected rather more – a sort of San Simeon meets Liberace’s dream mausoleum is what I believe I had in mind – but this was on a smallish lot and was neither particularly tacky nor outstandingly ornate. I studied it for a few minutes, struck by the somewhat tardy thought that although I had voluntarily invested a good deal of exertion to get here, I didn’t actually care in the tiniest degree where Rose Hancock dwelled. This notion absorbed, I turned with a thoughtful countenance and continued on my long march to the sea.
Fremantle is an interesting and likeable place. In gold-rush days it was a port of cosmopolitan liveliness, but then it sank into a long period of decrepitude. In the 1970s, it underwent a gentrifying revival as people realized the commercial potential of its large stock of neglected Victorian buildings. So today it is a trendy hangout, a place of latte and gelato and little shops selling things of an arty nature. Everybody is fond of Freo, as they call it. So am I normally, though my enthusiasm was wilting swiftly this day. The afternoon was uncomfortably warm, with no sign of the ameliorating ocean breeze they call the Fremantle Doctor (because it makes you feel better, of course). I had already walked far enough to make my feet smoke when I realized that I still had a good four miles to go, nearly all
of it along the busy, charmless, mercilessly shadeless Stirling Highway.
By the time I flopped into central Fremantle, it was late afternoon and I was comprehensively bushed. I went into a pub and downed a beer for medicinal purposes.
‘You all right?’ said the barmaid.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Why?’
‘Seen your face?’
I knew at once. ‘Am I sunburned?’ I asked bleakly.
She gave a frank, sympathetic but essentially deeply amused nod.
I peered past her into the mirror behind the bar. Looking back at me, mockingly attired in clothes to match my own, was a cartoon character called Mr Tomato Head. I allowed myself a small sigh. For the next four days, I would be a source of concern to every elderly Western Australian and of amusement to all else. Then for three days more, as my skin flaked and peeled and I took on the look of someone just escaped from a leprosarium, the mood would change to universal horror and revulsion. Waitresses would drop trays; gawkers would walk into lamp-posts; ambulance drivers would slow as they passed and look me over carefully. It would, as always, be a quiet ordeal. In another three or four hours I would be in tender pain. Meanwhile, I was already a small wreck. My feet and legs hurt so much that I wasn’t sure they would ever be of service to me again. I was as dirty as a street urchin and rank enough to be buried. And all of this so that I could see a house I had no actual interest in seeing and then walk on to a place that I was now too tired to explore.
But I hardly minded at all. And do you know why? I had seen a monotreme. Life could throw nothing at me that would diminish the thrill of that. Sustained by this
thought, I drained my beer, lowered myself gingerly from the bar stool and limped through the staring crowds to see if I could find a taxi to take me back to the city.
In the morning, I took custody of another rental car and set off on the penultimate of my Australian quests. I was on my way to the great jarrah and karri forests of the south-west peninsula. If that sounds a trifle dull, then bear with me please, for these are exceptional trees. They are to the Australian arboreal world what the giant worm of Gippsland is to invertebrates: large, under-appreciated, and mysteriously occurring in only one small area, the south-west corner of Western Australia below Perth. Karris are Australia’s sequoias. They attain heights of over 250 feet, but it is their amazing girth – they can be up to fifty feet around and scarcely taper on their climb to their distant crowns – that gives them their majesty. Think of the mightiest, most graceful sycamore you have ever seen, then triple it in every dimension and you have pretty well got a karri.
The dominant species of the region, however, is the handsome and noble jarrah, slightly less massive than the karri, but still enormous and arresting. It is something of a miracle that jarrahs are left at all, for it is just about the unluckiest tree alive. The specialization that allowed it to flourish in the first place was also its tragic undoing, for jarrah has the poor luck to thrive in soils rich in bauxite, and bauxite is a very valuable mineral. In the 1950s mining companies discovered the connection and came almost simultaneously to the exhilarating realization that they could knock down and sell the jarrah for quite a lot of money, then dig out all that gorgeously commercial bauxite underneath, thus getting two lots of income from
one plot of land. Life doesn’t get much better than that – so long, of course, as your conscience can bear the thought of removing large stands of prime forest of a type that occurs nowhere else and replacing them with large, unsightly gashes. Mining engineers – these people are so ingenious – got around this problem by having no consciences at all. Brilliant!
In this they were long aided by their colleagues in the forestry industry. Australian foresters, it must be said, do rather like to chop down a tree. You can’t entirely blame them – it is after all how they make their livelihood – and unquestionably they are less reckless than in former times, but they were allowed to get away with so much for so long that they still need the most attentive watching. These are people, you must understand, who could describe clear-cutting as ‘the full sunlight method of regeneration’ and not blush. Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world’s largest exporter of woodchips. Now I am no authority, and for all I know this is all managed with the most exacting care (that is certainly the impression the Australian Department of Conservation and Land Management strives to create), but it does seem to me that there is a certain mathematical discrepancy between having very few trees on the one hand and the world’s liveliest chip-exporting industry on the other. Anyway, there is much less jarrah forest than there once was, and even a good deal less of the rare and clearly irreplaceable karri forests. According to William J. Lines, between 1976 and 1993 Australia lost a quarter of its karri forests to woodchipping. To woodchipping! I repeat: these people need watching.
Even without its singular forests, the south-west corner
of Australia would be an area of interest. Stretching for about 180 miles from Cape Naturaliste on the Indian Ocean to Cape Knob on the Southern Ocean, it is another of those unexpected intrusions of comparative lushness that occur in Australia from time to time. It’s rather like the Barossa Valley of South Australia, but so obscure and unassuming that it doesn’t even have a name. Nearly everywhere you go in Australia you are provided with a handy label to fix your bearings – Sunshine Coast, Northern Tropics, Mornington Peninsula, Atherton Tablelands – but the zippiest appellation I saw for this region was ‘the Southern corner of Western Australia’. I think they need to work on that a little. However, of the land itself and the seas beyond, no improvements are necessary.
Perhaps it was because my Australian adventure was nearly at an end and I was feeling consequently affectionate, or maybe because I had spent so much of the previous couple of weeks at large in arid landscapes, or perhaps simply because I knew almost nothing of the area (hardly anyone outside Western Australia does) and thus had no expectations to disappoint, but I was charmed at once. It was as if it had been assembled from the most pleasant, least showy parts of Europe and North America: lowland Scotland, the Meuse Valley of Belgium, Michigan’s upper peninsula, Wisconsin’s dairyland, Shropshire or Herefordshire in England – nice parts of the world but nothing you would normally travel vast distances to savour. This wasn’t a world-class landscape, but it was an engagingly snug and wholesome one. I dubbed it – and offer it here for free pending the invention of something better – the Pleasant Peninsula. (‘Where everything is . . .
rather nice!’)
So I spent an agreeable day – a pleasant day – motoring through woods and rolling fields, past orderly orchards and bottle-green vineyards, on winding country roads forever running down to a blue and sunny sea. It was a blessed little realm. I stopped often in the country towns – Donnybrook, Bridgetown, Busselton, Margaret River – to sit with a cup of coffee or browse through stacks of secondhand books or take a walk along a wooden pier or duney foreshore.
I stayed the night in Manjimup, on the edge of the southern woodlands, and in the morning rose early and refreshed, and set off without delay in the direction of Shannon and Mount Frankland National Parks. Within minutes I was in cool, green forests of erect and stately grandeur. This was very promising indeed. I was headed for a place called the Valley of the Giants, to a recently developed tourist attraction that I had been told not to miss. It’s called the Tree Top Walk, and as the name suggests it is an elevated walkway that wanders through the canopy of a grove of tingle trees – yet another of the rare outsized species of eucalypts unique to the region. I had assumed it was essentially a gimmick, but in fact I discovered that tingle trees, for all their immensity, are quite delicate and reliant on the few nutrients to be found in the soil at their bases, and that the constant trampling of visitors’ feet was interfering with the breakdown of organic matter, imperilling their well-being. The Tree Top Walk thus not only provided visitors with a novel diversion and an unusual perspective, but also kept them conveniently out of harm’s way.
The Tree Top Walk stands a mile or two into coastal forest near the small town of Walpole. I arrived at opening time, but already the car park was crowded and filling fast.
A lot of people were gathered by the entrance and milling around in the little shop. The whole thing is run by the Department of Conservation and Land Management and, like the Desert Park at Alice Springs, it was an impressive example of a government department doing something innovative and doing it extremely well. We could do with these people back in the Known World.
Well, all I can say is that the Tree Top Walk deserves to be world famous. It consists of a series of cantilevered metal ramps, like industrial catwalks, wandering at exhilarating heights through the uppermost levels of some of the world’s most beautiful and imposing trees. The Tree Top Walk is an impressive erection. It runs for almost 2,000 feet and at its highest point stands 120 feet above the ground – a goodly height, believe me, when you are peering over the edge of a waist-high railing. Since the walkway surface is an open grid that lets you look straight down – indeed, more or less compels you to – there is a certain element of rakishness and daring in proceeding along it. I loved it. There are larger trees than the tingle (even the ashes of eastern Australia grow a little higher) and doubtless there are more beautiful trees than the tingle, but I cannot believe that there are any trees in the world that are both. Redwoods may reach giddier heights, but their canopy is nothing – like a broom handle with nails hammered into it. Tingles, because they are broad-leafed, spread out with luxuriant profusion. Makes all the difference. You simply won’t find a better tree.
I went around twice, charmed and appreciative. It wasn’t until I was halfway around the second time that I realized that actually it was quite crowded and that, like everyone else, I was sharing the experience with those around me, pointing out things to strangers and in turn allowing them
to point things out to me. I am seldom drawn to strange children but I found myself now talking to two young boys – bright young brothers, about ten and twelve, on holiday from Melbourne with their parents – trying to decide between us whether there were koalas in Western Australia and whether we might therefore spy any up here in the treetops. Then their father joined us and we discussed it with him. Then the mother came along and took one look at me. ‘You know, you’re awfully sunburnt,’ she said with concern, and offered me some cream from her bag. I declined, but was touched nonetheless.
It was oddly heart-warming to realize that we were all having this experience together, sharing our observations and pharmaceutical products. It reminded me very much of my stroll through the parks of Adelaide on Australia Day when hundreds of people seemed to be – effectively were – picnicking together. This had that same spirit of shared undertaking. In the most interesting and elemental anthropological sense, this was a social occasion.
Even then, it didn’t quite register with me how important a component this is in Australian life until I descended to ground level and strolled through an area called the Ancient Empire. This consisted of a protective boardwalk path that made a large and inviting loop through another part of the same woods. It was in its way nearly as diverting as the Tree Top Walk – to stand at the foot of a circle of tingle trees, head craned to take in their impossibly remote heights, is an experience almost as dizzying as wandering on foot through the leafy canopy – but because the boardwalk wasn’t novel and lofty, no one came here. I had it entirely to myself, but rather than feeling pleased to have found solitude, as I normally would, I felt suddenly quite lonely. ‘Hey, everybody!’ I
wanted to call. ‘Come down and see this! It’s great. Come down and be with me! Somebody! Please!!’