Falling Off the Map (23 page)

The light in Australia is like nothing else on earth—as befits, perhaps, a country that feels as if it has fallen off the planet. “Australia’s like an open door with the blue beyond,” wrote D. H. Lawrence. “You just walk out of the world and into Australia.” And the startled intensity of the heavens hints at all
the weird paradoxes of this young old land of sunny ironists, a British California caught between a world it has abandoned and one it has yet to colonize. In the vast open blueness of Australia, the only presiding authority, it often seems, is the light.

Australia is, of course, the definitive—perhaps the ultimate—
terra incognita
, its very name derived from the Latin phrase
terra australis incognita
, or unknown land of the south. Captain Cook first bumped into the land of anomalies while trying to observe a transit of the planet Venus. And even today the world’s largest island seems to occupy a huge open space in the mind, beyond the reach of our sights. Australia, for one thing, borders nothing and is on the way to nowhere. It feels, in every sense, like the last place on earth. Colonized originally by the British as a place for posthumous lives—a kind of Alcatraz on an epic scale—Australia has always seemed the natural setting for postapocalyptic imaginings, from Lawrence’s utopian visions to Nevil Shute’s nuclear wasteland to the haunted death-scape of
Mad Max.

What little we know of this tabula rasa, moreover, has generally sounded like fiction. “In Australia alone,” as Marcus Clarke wrote, “is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of Nature learning to write.” The flattest and driest of the continents defies all the laws of probability with its natural—or unnatural—wonders: not just the world’s only egg-laying mammals (the echidna and the duckbill platypus) but the wombat and the wallaby, the koala, the kangaroo, the kookaburra and the quokka. A land of extremes, it is also one of inversions, an antipodean place where Christmas is celebrated in midsummer and the water goes the wrong way down the drain, a looking-glass world in which trees lose their bark but not their leaves, and crows, it is said, fly backwards (to keep the dust from their eyes). Even the country’s social origins are the stuff of Restoration comedy, a down-underworld in which
convicts were known as “government men” and thieves were appointed as magistrates—less the Promised than the Threatened Land.

Yet it is in the nature of Lonely Places to attract people, in large part because of their loneliness, and in this, the year of its Bicentenary, Providence has conspired with promotion to render Australia suddenly ubiquitous. Sports fans watch Pat Cash at Wimbledon and the America’s Cup dominate the headlines; Americans flock in record numbers to sit at the feet of the new Paul Bunyan, Paul Hogan in
Crocodile Dundee
; MTV gave nearly all its recent awards to an Aussie band with the typically over-the-top name of INXS; and the highest literary award in the English-speaking world, the Booker Prize in Britain, went this autumn to the Australian novelist Peter Carey.

Two million foreigners are visiting Australia this year, to take in a “shriek opera,” a camel race, and the other unlikely props of an intensely laid-back Bicentenary. Yet the greatest reason of all for Australia’s sudden appeal is, in the end, the very thing that has outlawed it for so long: the tyranny of distance. Suddenly, people are realizing that Australia is so far from the world that it is the ideal place for people who wish to get away from the world, do nothing, and watch others do the same. The quietness, and unhurried spaciousness, of the Empty Continent can make one feel as if one has all the time in the world—indeed, as if time and the world have both been annulled: “rush hour” is not a term in common currency here. And though irreverence is an Australian article of faith, the most urbanized society on earth (70 percent of Aussies live in eight major cities) is increasingly endowed with all the gentrified accoutrements of a brunch culture: hotels so untouched they feel like resorts, towns that are drawing-board models of clean lines and open spaces, people who are devoted to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Not the least of the ironies governing a nation
whose founding fathers were convicts is, in fact, that it is now most noted for its air of freedom, safety, and civic order.

Australia’s achievement, in that sense, is to conflate, or overturn, the very notions of urban and pastoral: its biggest city enjoys 342 days of sunshine a year; and even drizzly, Victorian Melbourne has a hundred beaches in its vicinity. The pastel-perfect new hotels are less than a day away from barrier reefs, crocodile forests, and sere spaces: even the high-flying elegance of Sydney’s Opera House is shadowed by the rooted, runic magic of Ayers Rock. Some of the popular myths about Australia may be little more than myths (a visitor can spend three weeks in the country without seeing a ’roo or meeting a Bruce), but some are undoubtedly true. They do play lagerphones here, made entirely of beer-bottle caps; the long
a
is an endangered species; and in the “Red Centre,” fat flies do drop like men.

Though Australia appears on the map of
Gulliver’s Travels
, nobody has determined whether it is Brobdingnag, Lilliput, or the land of the Yahoos. The overwhelming fact about the place is its size: cattle stations the size of Massachusetts, an Outback so vast that doctors make their house calls by plane; a land so outstretched that Perth, capital of a state ten times the size of Great Britain, is as close to the nearest big city, Adelaide, as London is to Leningrad. The terms themselves insist on grandeur: the Great Dividing Range, the Great Barrier Reef, the Great Artesian Basin; the Great Western Plateau, the Great Ocean Road, and the Great Victoria Desert.

Yet what strikes one most forcibly upon landing in Australia is, in a sense, how small it is, how empty; here, one feels, is a small town built on a giant scale, like Montana blown up to the size of a continent. Even the cities resound with an eerie quietness: a third of central Melbourne is parkland; in the capital of Canberra, kangaroos hop across the golf courses; and even
in Sydney itself there is no sense of urgency or pressure. On a mild spring morning in the heart of the city, there is nothing but palm trees, a soft breeze, and the song of birds. Here one can hardly imagine, let alone keep up with, a world that seems more than a day away.

And though Sydney is technically larger than Los Angeles County or Greater London, it is the focus for an air of neglectedness that haunts much of Australia, its sense of having been finished (or half finished) only yesterday. The solitary skyscrapers in the city are huddled in an unprepossessing bunch beside the harbor; its Greenwich Village, Paddington, lies mostly along a single street; and its center of red-lit nightlife, Kings Cross, can be seen in a mere ten minutes. The sense of an uninhabited, an inchoate land continues through the suburbs. Drive along the Pacific Highway (a modest, two-lane road), and you pass through town after lonely town of cheerful toy-box buildings, bright against a dizzy blueness, a depleted succession of cheerful one-street, one-story townships in silent Edward Hopper rows. Here, in a sense, is Rockwell’s America—or, more precisely, Reagan’s: a placid, idealized small-town world of village greens and local churches, an oasis of sunlit optimism suspended in a sleepy haze of laissez-faire conservatism and lazy tolerance.

The apogee of this sense of bright tranquillity is, of course, the synthetic capital, Canberra, a leafy, landscaped monument to spotlessness that even the Duke of Edinburgh called “a city without a soul” (though in fact it feels less like a city than a work of art: a stunning sculpture garden on a giant scale, its government offices and embassies placed like so many architectural conceits amidst its huge and empty lawns). Canberra is a place where nothing plays except the fountains—it has the haunting quietness of a de Chirico landscape of long shadows and lonely colonnades, a Lonely Place institutionalized. Yet at
the same time, there is no denying the beauty of this Forest Lawn of designer splendor, its clean horizons undisturbed even by TV antennae or garden fences (both of which are banned). And the sense of uncreatedness that informs much of Australia here finds its pinnacle in the spacey new Parliament House. Its seats prettily designed in the pale greens and pinks of gum trees, its chambers flooded with natural light, the new center of government looks like nothing so much as another of the country’s sparkling new hotels.

This disarming sense of openness extends, not surprisingly, to the citizenry, and Australians often seem as sunny and breezy as the world around them. Taxi drivers, airline officials, and waiters go about their work in shorts. Conversations are as common as people, and just about as casual. The prime minister here is a “bloke” known as Bob, who is still admired for drinking his way into the
Guinness Book of World Records
; a local Scientology proselytizer is a bearded man who leans against a wall and drawls lackadaisically, “Excuse me, mate.”

“Everyone is happy-go-lucky, and one couldn’t
fret
about anything if one tried,” complained the congenitally fretful D. H. Lawrence in a letter back home. Mohawked boys may chew their girlfriends’ lips in the beery rockabilly bars of Melbourne, and Australia may still exalt the outcast, but generally this seems an exceptionally unaggressive place: the graffiti on Melbourne’s picturesque streetcars is artistically applied at government behest. Here, remember, is a country that did not have to work or fight for independence but simply backed into it, a little halfheartedly—and then let circumstance turn the Fatal Shore into the Lucky Country.

In Australia’s laid-back sense of come-as-you-are palliness, many foreign observers have found a model of democracy in action, a natural kind of Whitmanic fraternalism free of ideological baggage. Calling a spade a spade is a national habit, after
all, and nothing seems to anger the Australian but pretension. Though Lawrence may have been merely being Lawrence when he claimed that Australians were such natural democrats that they did not even like to go upstairs, it is certainly true that a visitor is more likely to be called “mate” than “sir.”

Yet if Australians’ customs are often as unbuttoned as those of the American West, their manners are generally a little more reserved; touched with
le vice anglais
of self-containment, theirs is still a place of semidetached men in semidetached houses. And even though its feeling of space and ease, like its gold rush past and its sense of limitless future, gives Australia a somewhat Californian air, it feels more provisional, more pressureless than the frontier states of America, less troubled by introspection or ambition. Here, in fact, is a world that makes California seem positively frantic by comparison. In his novel
Bliss
, a typically Australian compound of irony, fancy, and profanity, Peter Carey shrewdly depicts his homeland as a mythic Eden “on the outposts of the American Empire … [with] business more or less done in the American style, although without quite the degree of seriousness the Americans liked.”

Australia, moreover, still holds to its fondness for the piratical, a sense that distinction lies not in the flaunting but in the flouting of refinement. The country delights in the marginal, glories in its freedom from convention, is determined to be different. There is a store in Sydney (as in London) exclusively for left-handers, and the sign in the Melbourne bookshop canvasses members for a
Lost in Space
club. And Australia’s traditional images of rowdy nonconformity are still in constant evidence. The larrikin lives on in the eleven-year-old busker in earrings and rattail haircut who plays drinking songs in front of Sydney harbor while his Fagin looks on from the shadows; the convict and prospector are remembered in the dark humor of
the names that overbrood the landscape—Lake Disappointment, Cape Grim, Double Crossing Creek; and the ocker asserts his skeptical down-to-earthiness with the bumper sticker
EVERYBODY NEEDS TO BELIEVE IN SOMETHING. I BELIEVE I’LL HAVE ANOTHER BEER
. In this seriously macho culture, you see more men in earrings than anywhere else—less a statement of fashion, one senses, than a badge of defiant rebelliousness.

To some extent, too, the myths of frontier still animate the culture. Many young Australians continue to take off around the world, treating jobs as way stations and anywhere as home, while many retirement couples take to their mobile homes and circumnavigate the land. And though the country feels less restless than America, it is surely just as mobile. Everywhere there are dreams of long horizons: a concierge is studying Chinese to expand his prospects; a cabbie is working sixty hours a week in the hope of visiting South America; a waiter at an exclusive French restaurant simply picks up his camera and guitar and heads off for a new life in the Outback.

Mike, a rugged, long-breeched man who runs a riding stable outside Melbourne, recalls how he came here alone on a boat at the age of fourteen, propelled by grand dreams awakened by Zane Grey. “There was a feeling that I could do nothing in England; and no matter how well I did at school, I could never go to university. That was just something that people like me didn’t do. But over here, anything is possible. No way I could start up a place like this in England.”

Besides, with its reverence for unorthodoxy and its sense of being away from it all, Australia remains an ideal retreat for odd men out. At times, in fact, one has the impression that it is less a culture than an aggregation of subcultures, a society of fringes—of surfers, cowboys, boozers, and hippies. Alternative life-styles are the norm in many places, and the prospect of starting a new life has natural appeal for those committed to
Rebirthing. The lush rolling hills known as the Rainbow Region, an hour east of the Gold Coast, have become a perfect haven for back-to-the-land purists and hypnotherapists, and the local bulletin board offers all the Oriental arts, from tai chi to tae kwon do. (The Breath of Life Relaxation and Healing Centre promises “Reiki healing” and “Lazaris videos”—all of this next to Woolworth’s!) Still, mellowness here takes on a decidedly Aussie twang: “Shoplifting gives you bad karma!” advises a trendy Asian boutique in Sydney. “And if I catch you, I’ll make sure you get it in this life—you Rat Fink! Sincerely, Sandi.”