Down Under (6 page)

Although by this time expeditions into the interior were hardly a novelty, this one particularly caught the popular imagination. Tens of thousands of people lined the route out of Melbourne when, on 19 August 1860, the Great Northern Exploration Expedition set off. The party was so immense and unwieldy that it took from early morning until 4 p.m. just to get it moving. Among the items Burke had deemed necessary for the expedition were a Chinese gong, a stationery cabinet, a heavy wooden table with matching stools, and grooming equipment, in the words of the historian Glen McLaren, ‘of sufficient quality to prepare and present his horses and camels for an Agricultural Society show’.

Almost at once the men began to squabble. Within days, six of the party had resigned, and the road to Menindee was littered with provisions they decided they didn’t need, including 1,500 pounds (let me just repeat that: 1,500
pounds)
of sugar. They did almost everything wrong. Against advice, they timed the trip so that they would do most of the hardest travelling at the height of summer.

With such a burden, it took them almost two months to traverse the 400 miles of well-trodden track to Menindee; a letter from Melbourne normally covered the same
ground in two weeks. At Menindee, they availed themselves of the modest comforts of Maidens Hotel, rested their horses and reorganized their provisions, and on 19 October set off into a blank ghastlier than they could ever have imagined. Ahead of them lay 1,200 miles of murderous ground. It was the last time that anyone in the outside world would see Burke and Wills alive.

Progress through the desert was difficult and slow. By December, when they arrived at a place called Cooper’s Creek, just over the Queensland border, they had progressed only 400 miles. In exasperation Burke decided to take three men – Wills, Charles Gray and John King – and make a dash for the gulf. By travelling light he calculated that he could be there and back in two months. He left four men to maintain the base camp, with instructions to wait three months for them in case they were delayed.

The going was much tougher than they had expected. Daytime temperatures regularly rose to over 140 degrees F. It took them two months rather than one to cross the interior, and their arrival, when at last it came, was something of an anticlimax: a belt of mangroves along the shore kept them from reaching, or even seeing, the sea. Still, they had successfully completed the first crossing of the continent. Unfortunately, they had also eaten two-thirds of their supplies.

The upshot is that they ran out of food on the return trip and nearly starved. To their consternation, Charles Gray, the fittest of the party, abruptly dropped dead one day. Ragged and half delirious, the three remaining men pushed on. Finally, on the evening of 21 April 1861, they stumbled into base camp to discover that the men they had left behind, after waiting four months, had departed only that day. On a coolibah tree was carved the message:

DIG

3 FT. N.W.

APR. 21 1861

They dug and found some meagre rations and a message telling them what was already painfully evident – that the base party had given up and departed. Desolate and exhausted, they ate and turned in. In the morning they wrote a message announcing their safe return and carefully buried it in the cache – so carefully, in fact, that when a member of the base party returned that day to have one last look, he had no way of telling that they had made it back and had now gone again. Had he known, he would have found them not far away, plodding over rocky ground in the impossible hope of reaching a police outpost 150 miles away at a place called Mount Hopeless.

Burke and Wills died in the desert, far short of Mount Hopeless. King was saved by Aborigines, who nursed him for two months until he was rescued by a search party.

Back in Melbourne, meanwhile, everyone was still awaiting a triumphal return of the heroic band, so news of the fiasco struck like a thunderbolt. ‘The entire company of explorers has been dissipated out of being,’ the
Age
reported with frank astonishment. ‘Some are dead, some are on their way back, one has come to Melbourne, and another has made his way to Adelaide . . . The whole expedition appears to have been one prolonged blunder throughout.’

When the final tally was taken, the cost of the entire undertaking, including the search to recover Burke’s and Wills’ bodies, came to almost £60,000, more than Stanley had spent in Africa to achieve far more.

Even now, the emptiness of so much of Australia is startling. The landscape we passed through was officially only ‘semi-desert’, but it was as barren an expanse as I had ever seen. Every twenty or twenty-five kilometres there would be a dirt track and a lonely mailbox signalling an unseen sheep or cattle station. Once a light truck flew past in a bouncing hell-for-leather fashion, spraying us with gravelly dinks and a coating of red dust, but the only other lively thing was the endless shaking flubbity-dubbing of the axles over the corduroy road. By the time we reached White Cliffs, in mid-afternoon, we felt as if we had spent the day in a cement mixer.

Seeing it today, it is all but impossible to believe that White Cliffs, a small blotch of habitations under a hard clear sky, was once a boom town, with a population of nearly 4,500, a hospital, a newspaper, a library and a busy core of general stores, hotels, restaurants, brothels and gaming houses. Today central White Cliffs consists of a pub, a launderette, an opal shop, and a grocery/café/petrol station. The permanent population is about eighty. They exist in a listless world of heat and dust. If you were looking for people with the tolerance and fortitude to colonize Mars this would be the place to come.

Because of the heat, most houses in town are burrowed into the faces of the two bleached hills from which the town takes its name. The most ambitious of these dwellings, and the principal magnet for the relatively few tourists who venture this far, is the Dug-Out Underground Motel, a twenty-six-room complex cut deep into the rocks on the side of Smith’s Hill. Wandering through its network of rocky tunnels was like stepping into an early James Bond movie, into one of those subterranean complexes where the loyal minions of SMERSH are preparing to take
over the world by melting Antarctica or hijacking the White House with the aid of a giant magnet. The attraction of burrowing into the hillside is immediately evident when you step inside – a constant year-round temperature of 67 degrees. The rooms were very nice and quite normal except that the walls and ceilings were cavelike and windowless. When the lights were off, the darkness and silence were total.

I don’t know how much money you would have to give me to persuade me to settle in White Cliffs – something in the low zillions, I suppose – but that evening as we sat on the motel’s lofty garden terrace with Leon Hornby, the proprietor, drinking beer and watching the evening slink in, I realized that my fee might be marginally negotiable. I was about to ask Leon – a city man by birth and, I would have guessed, inclination – what possessed him and his pleasant wife Marge to stay in this godforsaken outpost where even a run to the supermarket means a six-hour round trip over a rutted dirt road, but before I could speak a remarkable thing happened. Kangaroos hopped into the expansive foreground and began grazing picturesquely, and the sun plonked onto the horizon, like a stage prop lowered on a wire, and the towering western skies before us spread with colour in a hundred layered shades – glowing pinks, deep purples, careless banners of pure crimson – all on a scale that you cannot imagine, for there was not a scrap of intrusion in the forty miles of visible desert that lay between us and the far horizon. It was the most extraordinarily vivid sunset I believe I have ever seen.

‘I came up here thirty years ago to build reservoirs on the sheep stations,’ Leon said, as if anticipating my question, ‘and never expected to stay, but somehow the place gets to you. I’d find these sunsets hard to give up, for one thing.’

I nodded as he got up to answer a ringing phone.

‘Used to be even nicer once, a long time ago,’ said Lisa, Steve’s partner. ‘There’s been a lot of overgrazing.’

‘Here or all over?’

‘All over – well, nearly. In the 1890s there was a really bad drought. They say the land’s never really recovered, and probably never will.’

Later, Steve, Trevor and I went down the hill to the White Cliffs Hotel, the local hostelry, and the appeal of the little town became more evident still. The White Cliffs was as nice a pub as I have ever been in. Not to look at, for Australian country pubs are nearly always austere and utilitarian places, with linoleum floors, laminated surfaces and glass-doored coolers, but rather for the congenial and welcoming atmosphere. Much of this is a tribute to the owner, Graham Wellings, a chipper man with a firm handshake, a matinee-idol hairstyle and a knack for making you feel as if he settled here in the hope that one day some folks like you would drop by.

I asked him what had brought him to White Cliffs. ‘I was an itinerant sheep shearer,’ he said. ‘Came here in ’59 to shear sheep and just never left. It was a lot more remote back then. Took us eight hours from Broken Hill, the roads were that bad. You can do it in three now, but back then the roads were rough as guts every inch of the way. We tumbled in here gasping for a cold beer, and of course there were no coolers in those days. Beer was room temperature – and room temperature was 110 degrees. No air conditioning either, of course. No electricity at all, unless you had your own generator.’

‘So when did you get electricity in White Cliffs?’

He thought for an instant. ‘Nineteen ninety-three.’

I thought I had misheard him. ‘When?’

‘Just about five years ago. We have telly now, too,’ he added suddenly and enthusiastically. ‘Got that two years ago.’

He seized a remote control unit and pointed it at a television mounted on the wall. When it warmed to life, he ran through their choice of three channels, turning to us at each with an expression that invited staggered admiration. I have been in countries where people still ride waggons and gather hay with forks, and countries where the per capita gross domestic product would not buy you a weekend at a Holiday Inn, but nowhere before had I been invited to regard television as a marvel.

He switched off and put the remote back on the shelf as if it were a treasured relic.

‘Yeah, it was a different world,’ he said musingly.

Still is, I thought.

In the morning Steve and Lisa escorted us back along the lonely dirt track to the paved highway at Wilcannia, where we parted ways – they to go left to Menindee, Trevor and I to go right to Broken Hill, 197 kilometres away down a straight and empty road, thus completing a large and irregular circle.

We had an afternoon in Broken Hill and spent it seeing the sights. We drove out to Silverton, once a rowdy mining town, now virtually derelict but for a big pub, which is said to be the most photographed and filmed in Australia. It’s not that there is anything wildly special about the pub; it’s more that it gives the appearance of being in the middle of nowhere while actually being conveniently handy to the air-conditioned amenities of Broken Hill. It’s been used as a film location 142 times – in
A Town like Alice, Mad Max 2
and about every Australian beer commercial ever made. It
now gets by, evidently, on the visits of film crews and of occasional tourists like us.

Broken Hill has had tough times, too. Even by Australian standards, it is a long way from anywhere – 750 miles from Sydney, the state capital, where all the decisions are made – and its citizens have an understandable tendency to think of themselves as neglected. As recently as the 1950s it had 35,000 people, against just 23,000 now. Its history dates from 1885, when a boundary rider checking fences chanced upon a lode of silver, zinc and lead in sumptuous proportions. Almost overnight Broken Hill became a boom town and gave birth along the way to Broken Hill Proprietary Ltd, still Australia’s mightiest industrial colossus.

At its peak in 1893 Broken Hill had sixteen mines employing 8,700 miners. Today there is just one mine and 700 workers, which is the main reason for the population decline. Even so, that one mine produces more ore than all sixteen mines together at their peak. The difference is that whereas before you had thousands of men crawling about in poky shafts, today a handful of engineers with explosives blow out cathedral-sized chambers up to 300 feet high and the size of a football pitch and, when the dust has settled and everyone’s ears have stopped ringing, a team of workers on giant bulldozers come along and scoop up all the ore. It’s so vastly efficient that in only a decade or so all the ore will be gone, and quite what will become of Broken Hill is anyone’s guess.

Meanwhile, it’s a nice little town with an air of busyness and prosperity that brings to mind one of those establishing shots you’d see in a 1940s Hollywood movie featuring Jimmy Stewart or Deanna Durbin. Its main street is lined with handsome buildings in a modestly exuberant
Victorian style. Seeking refreshment, Trevor and I ventured into one of the many imposing hotels – and I should just note that in an Australian context ‘hotel’ can signify many things: a hotel, a pub, a hotel
and
pub – that stand on nearly every corner. This one was called Mario’s Palace Hotel, and it was very grand from without – it covered half a block and had a large wraparound balcony employing a lot of intricate ironwork – though inside it had an under-lit and musty air. The bar seemed to be open – a TV was playing silently in the corner, the signs were illuminated – but there was no one in attendance and no sounds of anyone nearby. Leading off the bar were several large rooms – a ballroom, a dining room, perhaps another ballroom – all looking as if they had been decorated at considerable expense in 1953 and not used since.