Down Under (12 page)

I bought a morning newspaper and found my way into a café. It always amazes me how seldom visitors bother with local papers. Personally, I can think of nothing more exciting – certainly nothing you could do in a public place with a cup of coffee – than to read newspapers from a part of the world you know almost nothing about. What a comfort it is to find a nation preoccupied by matters of no possible consequence to oneself. I love reading about scandals involving ministers of whom I have never heard, murder hunts in communities whose names sound dusty and remote, features on revered artists and thinkers whose achievements have never reached my ears, whose talents I must take on faith. I love above all to venture into the colour supplements and see what’s fashionable for the beach in this part of the world, what’s new for the kitchen, what I might get for my money if I had $400,000 to spare and a reason to live in Dubbo or Woolloomooloo. There is something about all this that feels privileged, almost illicit, like going through a stranger’s drawers. Where else can you get this much pleasure for a trifling handful of coins?

At this time I was following with some devotion a libel trial in which two government ministers were suing a publisher over a book containing scurrilous and, as it proved, groundless allegations implying sexual indiscretions in
times gone by. With each passing day the trial had taken on the most exhilarating air of farce. Just recently a former leader of the opposition had taken the stand and, for no reason that any sane person could deduce, had begun recounting lively stories of alleged sexual improprieties by other ministers who were not remotely connected to the book or trial. But what had attracted me to the case in the first place, and what made it all seem particularly special, was the simple happy coincidence that the two ministers at the heart of the affair were named Abbott and Costello.

So I was sitting happily absorbed in this when I heard a familiar voice say, quite loudly and in a discontented tone: ‘This isn’t strawberry jam. It’s blackcurrant.’

I looked up to see my two little old friends from the day before. They were looking much smaller and frailer with their hats and coats and scarves off. These items, neatly folded, were stacked high on the chairs beside them, as if awaiting transfer to a linen cupboard. I wondered if perhaps they wore all those clothes not so much for warmth as because all the dressing and undressing helped them fill their days.

‘They haven’t got strawberry, dear,’ said the wife in a quieter voice. ‘The lady explained. They only have blackcurrant or marmalade.’

‘Well, I don’t want either.’

‘Then don’t have either.’ This said with just a hint of weariness.

‘But it’s on my toast.’

‘No, dear, that’s my toast. I ordered you a jam doughnut.’

‘Jam doughnut?
Jam doughnut?
Are you mad? I don’t like jam doughnuts. This tea is cold.’

I lowered myself back into my paper, but on the way out
I stopped to bid my elderly friends good day. The man clearly didn’t have any very real notion who I was. The jam doughnut, I noticed, had been devoured; only a small purple dollop gleamed on the plate before him.

‘It’s the young man from Echo Point,’ the woman explained, but her husband was too busy chasing the dollop of jam with a spoon to pay me any heed.

‘I see the weather’s cleared,’ I observed cheerfully.

‘Often happens like that,’ the man said in a small shout, without looking up. ‘I said it wouldn’t last thirty-six hours.’

‘We had an experience just like it at Bunbury once,’ the wife said to me. ‘Terrible fog and then all of a sudden it came out all lovely and clear. Do you remember that, dear?’

‘Quite,’ said the old man distractedly. Coaxing the elusive jam aboard with a forefinger, he lifted the spoon and bunged it in his mouth with a look of immense satisfaction. ‘Quite.’

And so once more to the wandering road. Beyond Blackheath the highway began a steep and curvaceous descent towards Lithgow, where it skirted along the hem of the mountains before striking off cross country through grassy plains, towards the country town of Bathurst. I was now in the rural heartlands, in an area known to geology as the Murray-Darling Basin. The fields on all sides were filled with tall blond grass, which waved in a languid manner, and there were buttercups in the verges, the whole bathed in the sweetest, brightest sunlight. Here and there stately trees shaded a white farmhouse. There wasn’t a gum tree in sight. I could almost have been in the American Midwest.

The welcoming world I was passing into now wasn’t
quite as virginal as Blaxland and his cronies had supposed when they first gazed down on it from the heights behind me. When the first settlers stepped from the wooded mountains they were startled to find herds of cows, numbering in the hundreds, grazing contentedly on the tall grasses – all offspring of the ones that had wandered off from Sydney Cove all those years before. The cows, it transpired, had gone
around
the mountains, through an open pass to the south. Why it had not occurred to a human being in twenty-five years to try to do likewise is a question that is rarely asked and has yet to be satisfactorily answered.

Nor were the fertile plains quite as boundless as had at first been supposed. Good grazing land extended only a few score miles inland from the coast and even that was subject to the dispiriting vagaries of nature. It still is. A hundred miles or so north of where I was driving now, on the edge of this grassy zone, stands the little town of Nyngan. In 1989, 1990, 1992, 1995, 1996 and 1998 it was devastated by torrential flash floods. For five years during this same period, while Nyngan was repeatedly inundated, the town of Cobar, just eighty miles to the west, recorded not a drop of rain. This is, if I haven’t made it clear already, one tough country.

And yet the striking thing about this area was how thoroughly delightful and accommodating it appeared. The farms were neat and trim, and the towns I passed through gave every appearance of a comfortable prosperity. It was impossible to believe that a metropolis of four million people lay just over the hills behind. I felt as if I had stumbled into some forgotten, magically self-contained world. There were things out here I hadn’t seen in years. Petrol stations with old-fashioned pumps and no canopies over
the forecourt, so that you pumped your petrol in full sun, as I am sure God intended it. Metal pinwheel windmills of the sort that used to stand in every Kansas farm field. Little towns with people in them – people going about their business, greeting each other with a smile and a nod. It all had a familiarity about it, but the familiarity of something half forgotten. Gradually it dawned on me that I
was
in the American Midwest – but it was the American Midwest of long ago. I was, in short, in the process of making the marvellous and heart-warming discovery that outside the cities it is still 1958 in Australia. Hardly seems possible, but there you are. I was driving through my childhood.

Partly it was to do with that dazzling light. It was the kind of pure, undiffused light that can come only from a really hot blue sky, the kind that makes even a concrete highway painful to behold and turns every distant reflective surface into a little glint of flame. Do you know how sometimes on very fine days the sun will shine with a particular intensity that makes the most mundane objects in the landscape glow with an unusual radiance, so that buildings and structures you normally pass without a glance suddenly become arresting, even beautiful? Well, they seem to have that light in Australia nearly all the time. It took me a while to recognize that this was precisely the light of Iowa summers from my boyhood, and it was a shock to realize just how long it was since I had seen it.

Partly, too, it was to do with the road. Almost all Australian highways are still just two lanes wide, and what a difference that makes. You’re not cut off from the wider world, as you are on a motorway, but part of it, intimately connected. All the million details of the landscape are there beside you, up close, not blurred into some distant, tediously epic backdrop. It changes your whole outlook.
There’s no point in hurrying when all it’s going to do is put you in the feathery wake of that old chicken truck half a mile ahead. Might as well hold back and enjoy the scenery. So there’s none of that mad, pointless urgency – gotta pass this guy, gotta keep pushing, gotta make some miles – that makes any drive on a motorway such an exhausting and unsatisfying business. When you come to a town on such a road it is an event. You don’t fly through at speed, but slow down and
glide
through, in a stately manner, like a float in a parade, slow enough to nod to pedestrians if you wish and to check out the goods in the windows on Main Street. ‘Oh, that’s a good price on men’s double-knit shirts,’ you observe in a thoughtful tone, or ‘Those lawn chairs were cheaper in Bathurst,’ for, needless to say, you are talking to yourself by now. Sometimes – quite often, in fact – you stop for a coffee and a browse round the shops.

Afterwards you return to the open road and naturally at first you go a little too fast, for speed is an instinct, but then – whoops! – you round a bend to find yourself fast approaching the back of a tip lorry kicking out smoke and labouring heavily up a slope. So you drop back and take it easy. You lean an arm on the windowsill, lay a finger on the wheel and cruise. You haven’t done this for years. You haven’t been on a drive like this since you were a kid. You’d forgotten motoring could be fun. I loved it.

As if to underscore the agreeably retro nature of the driving experience in Australia, I began to discover that radio stations in country towns specialize in songs from yesteryear. I don’t mean songs from the sixties and seventies, but much earlier. This may be the last country in the world where you can turn on a car radio and stand a more than passing chance of hearing Peggy Lee or Julie London, possibly
even Gisele McKenzie, whose popularity in the 1950s can only be attributed to a winning smile and the luck to live in an undiscriminating age. It would be intemperate to make a sweeping generalization about rural Australian radio stations because I listened to no more than six or seven thousand hours of them in the time I was there, so I might have missed something good, but I will say this: when our modern monuments have crumbled to dust, when the careless hand of time has worn away all traces of the twentieth century, you can be certain that somewhere in an Australian country town there will be a disc jockey saying: ‘And that was Doris Day with her classic hit “Que Sera Sera”.’ I even loved that too.

For a week or so.

And so by such happy means did I proceed through Lithgow, Bathurst, Blayney and Lyndhurst, and finally, in mid-afternoon, fetched up in Cowra, a compact and tidy community of 8,207 people in the Lachlan Valley on the Lachlan River – both named, of course, for our old friend Mr Macquarie. I knew nothing about Cowra, but I quickly learned that it is well known to Australians as the site of the infamous Cowra breakout.

During the Second World War, a large prisoner-of-war camp stood just outside Cowra. One side held 2,000 Italian POWs; on the other were 2,000 Japanese. The Italians were model prisoners. Overcoming the mortification of finding themselves taken from the front lines and transported to a distant, sunny land far from the roar of guns, they settled down and made the best of things. So gamely did they cover their disappointment that one might almost have thought they welcomed their new situation. They worked on local farms and were only lightly
guarded. Their officers – I just love this – weren’t guarded at all. They were free to come and go as they pleased, and asked only to close the door behind them to keep out the flies. Regularly they could be seen strolling into Cowra for cigarettes and newspapers, possibly an aperitif at the Lachlan Hotel.

The Japanese presented a sombre contrast. They refused to undertake work or offer any measure of cooperation. Most gave false names, so painful was the shame of capture. Ridiculously and tragically, in August 1944, in the middle of the night, 1,100 of them staged a suicidal mass breakout, bursting from their barracks with a banzai cry and charging en masse at the guard tower clutching baseball bats, chair legs and whatever other weapons they could contrive. The startled guards poured bullets into the mass but were quickly overwhelmed. Within minutes, 378 prisoners had escaped into the countryside. Quite what they expected to do out there is anyone’s guess. It took nine days to round them all up. The furthest any of them had got was fifteen miles. The Japanese casualties were 231 killed and 112 wounded. The Australians suffered three killed on the night, and a fourth during the hunt afterwards.

All this is commemorated in photographs and other displays at Cowra’s visitors’ centre, which in itself was excellent, but in a room at the back was a small audiovisual theatre that was one of the most enchanting things I believe I have ever seen – certainly ever seen in a small country town in the middle of nowhere.

Behind glass on a kind of small stage were objects saved from the POW camp: some books and diaries, a couple of framed photographs, a baseball bat and glove, a medicine bottle, a Japanese board game. As I entered, the lights
automatically dimmed in the room. A little introductory music played and then – this was the enchanting part – a young woman about six inches high stepped
out
of one of the framed photographs and began moving around among the objects and talking about Cowra in the 1940s and the prison breakout. My mouth fell open. She didn’t just move about but interacted with the objects – stepped around books, idly leaned on a shell casing – as she went through her presentation. As you can imagine, I got up and had a closer look and I can tell you that no matter how close you got to the glass (and I had my head pressed up against it the way children do when they wish to be amusing) you couldn’t see the artifice. She was a perfectly formed, full-colour, charmingly articulate, rather dishy three-dimensional person right in front of me and only six inches high. It was the most captivating thing I had seen in years. It was obvious that it was a film projected in some way from beneath, but there wasn’t a stutter or bump, no scratchy lines or wriggly hairs. It was as real as an image can get. She was a perfect little hologram. The narrative, it is worth noting, was sympathetic and informative – a model of its type. I watched it three times and couldn’t have been more impressed.