Swimming to the Moon Read online

  9. If a pub or club has a sign saying ‘No Thongs’, the bouncer is required to check you’re wearing acceptable underwear. Please assist by removing outerwear before reaching the head of the queue.

  10. If you’ve been left out of the conversation in a pub, tell the whole bar it’s your time to speak by yelling: ‘Excuse me everyone, but it’s my shout.’

  11. Australia is a fashion-conscious country. In the far north, the sign ‘Danger – Crocs!’ refers to colourful rubber sandals considered so unstylish that onlookers are warned to avert their gaze.

  12. The red and yellow flags on the beach are provided to mark the place you left your towel. Feel free to move them.

  13. WA ensures a fair go for foreigners. If, when enjoying the ocean, a siren is heard, this is when locals must leave the water so visitors can have a turn in the surf. Wave enthusiastically and constantly to the lifesavers, so they’ll know exactly where you are.

  14. WA is short of fruit. Make sure you bring plenty when you fly into Perth airport. West Australians are sensitive about their inability to grow it, so it’s polite to leave it hidden in your bag.

  15. West Australians love animals. A friendly dog may sniff you on arrival at the airport. Keep handy some exotic snacks from your own country to feed him.

  16. Vegemite is a dessert much like chocolate mousse, best eaten from the jar with a spoon.

  17. A red stripe on the back of a cute little spider means its pet registration fee has been paid. Also, it costs $2 to take a photograph of a kangaroo. If you only have notes, you’ll find change in their pouch.

  18. If visiting from America, express surprise and correct us when told we fought alongside you in Afghanistan, Iraq and Vietnam.

  19. If an Australian tells you to ‘slip, slop, slap’, it’s meant as a sexual inducement.

  20. Australians know they haven’t been speaking English for as long as the British or Americans. Farmers, labourers and sportsmen, in particular, will be grateful if you interrupt them mid-sentence and explain how one speaks correctly.

  Oh, one important addition for late-night revellers: Where you see road signs marked ‘P’, these indicate streets where it’s considered acceptable to relieve yourself. Have a good stay.

  IDIOTS

  In my annual roundup of Australian stupidity, the question soon occurred: Why are idiots, drunks and religious fanatics so attracted to crocodiles? I once asked the original Crocodile Man, the late Malcolm Douglas, why this was so. He’d just pointed out that the height of the cages in his Broome crocodile park wasn’t so much to keep the crocs inside, but these categories of people out.

  Malcolm said it was ‘something psychological’ and was on constant alert for cage-invaders, some armed with Bibles and babbling about ‘leviathans’.

  The question definitely cropped up when a man named Michael Ambrose Williams scaled the fence in Douglas’s park one July night, and climbed into the pen of the biggest croc, the five-metre-long, 800-kilogram Fatso.

  ‘I’d been dreaming of crocodiles for several weeks,’ he told the media from his hospital bed. ‘I just wanted to play with one, to experience something I’d never experienced. I know they’re dangerous animals and stuff, but people – don’t they go and feed them in the pens? I named this big one Artisian. I talked to him through the fence. I thought to myself, “I’ll jump the cage and be friendly and sit on Artisian’s back.” ’

  Alas, it grabbed him by the leg, shattering his kneecap and slashing his shin. ‘It all happened in a split second. I thought, “I’m in trouble here.” ’ Fortunately it was winter, Fatso/Artisian was sluggish and not hungry, and Mr Williams was able to climb out and limp to the pub. ‘I’ll never go near a crocodile again and will tell other people to do the same,’ he advised. ‘I’ll say, “No, you’re not doing it, because you’ll end up in heaven.” ’

  Hmm. The other dozen recorded cases last year of people doing stupid things in the vicinity of crocodiles – including girls drinking champagne and posing in bikinis on baited crocodile traps, and youths climbing inside the traps with the stinking bait, in a croc-infested river – mostly happened in the Northern Territory, where alcohol is a factor in most events.

  But my own area, let’s be frank, is not idiot-free. Take the local motel receptionist before the court for stealing $1000 from the motel safe. She was filmed by the same security camera she’d helped set up. As her lawyer said, ‘There are possible psychological impulses at play here.’

  Then there was the fellow who smashed in his wife’s head with a lump of timber after arriving home drunk. As he told the arresting police, ‘I’m not trying to run. I’m not that sort of bludger. I always do the right thing. I came home to watch Underbelly and be a bit of a family.’

  Also on the list is the fisherman who phoned police and helpfully reported himself as the intending murderer of the bridegroom at a wedding reception. Arriving then at the celebrations in camouflage gear and armed with a speargun, he was surprised to be met by police and tasered alongside the wedding cake.

  But my favourite recent example of stupidity concerned the two blokes in Horsham, Victoria, who, after a few beers, thought it would be interesting to take turns to shoot each other in the buttocks with an air rifle ‘to see if it hurt’.

  ‘Other than experiencing quite a bit of pain’ the men thought they were fine. Two days later they weren’t, and presented at hospital, wanting the slugs removed. Doctors said they were buried so deep they had to stay there. Police said when the men’s condition improved they’d face firearms charges. Mensa said don’t bother to call.

  BEST BEACHES

  I was asked by a British newspaper, rather brusquely, why I thought Australia had the best beaches in the world. The paper had run a story based on a National Geographic article on The World’s Ten Best Beaches, and I disagreed with it.

  Their list began with the Seychelles at No. 1; then the Maldives; Bora Bora, Tahiti; The Hamptons, New York; Lanikai Beach, Hawaii; Nantucket Island, Massachusetts; St Bart’s, Caribbean; Langkawi, Malaysia; and Kauna’oa Bay, Hawaii. The only Australian beach on the list was Queensland’s Fraser Island, at No. 7. (Fraser Island? Nice white sand, starving dingoes – it wouldn’t be in my first fifty.)

  All pretty spots, especially the tropical islands, but they’re rich people’s resorts. For sheer consistency, no country can come up with as many good beaches as Australia.

  Australia’s mainland coastline stretches for 35,877 kilometres. Add the coastlines of Tasmania and our other 8221 islands (23,859 kilometres), and this amounts to a national outline of 59,736 kilometres. You don’t have to be a coastal geomorphologist to see that’s a lot of beaches. Perhaps Russia has more, but it’s doubtful whether any swimmer or sunbather would consider the Arctic Ocean shoreline as a beach in the usual sense.

  Sydney University’s Coastal Studies Unit defines a beach as ‘a stretch of sand longer than twenty metres and remaining dry at high tide’. Using this definition, the Unit has counted 10,685 beaches in Australia. The marine scientist Professor Andrew Short and the coastal conservationist Brad Farmer, who have visited and documented every beach, put the number even higher, at 11,761.

  No other country has such a varied shoreline, from the wave-battered southern shores to the mangrove-fringed beaches of the tropical north. And let’s not forget the world’s biggest coral reef. After visiting the 11,761 beaches, Short and Farmer say in their book 101 Best Australian Beaches that the reasons for Australia having the best in the world are four-fold.

  Firstly, the coastline is made up of thousands of small bays, coves, caves, headlands, islets and reefs, thereby creating differing and appealing seascapes and shorelines. Over time, winds and breaking waves have eroded remarkable formations, such as the Twelve Apostles limestone stacks on the Victorian coast.

  Secondly, there’s the sand itself, usually a clean white to yellow quartz colour, made up of a silica mixture derived from ancient granite rocks of the interior and, especially in WA,
crushed limestone and coral and pulverised shells from the sea.

  The type of the individual sand grains helps determine the colour, slope and width of the beach, as well as the nature of the surf zone and its rips and bars. Sand and silt deposits have built the biggest coastal dunes in the world and vast sandy beaches – and caused much argument as to which is the longest beach. Is it Ninety Mile Beach in Gippsland (152 kilometres), or Eighty Mile Beach between Broome and Port Hedland (actually 140 miles or 220 kilometres)? What about South Australia’s Coorong (222 kilometres, depending on who’s doing the measuring)?

  Thirdly, with few rivers to dump silt into the ocean and onto the beaches, our dry climate aids seawater clarity and keeps beach sand in a pristine condition. And fourthly, most of the beaches are still in a natural state thanks to the foresight of early governments: they’re protected by national parks, or in the case of city beaches, council reserves.

  I have a fifth reason. There are no privately owned ocean beaches. They’re open to everyone. This isn’t the case of the rest of the list. Moreover, the Australian beach is a great social and physical equaliser. As Geoffrey Dutton wrote in Sun, Surf, Sea and Sand – The Myth of the Beach: ‘There is a democracy of the body on the beach, an absence of shame. On every beach there are thousands of old, fat, plain people, happily wobbling down to the forgiving water.’

  I recall a particular evening, after a scorching, exhausting day, that I dived into the ocean at South Beach. All around me, hot and weary people of many races and ages were plunging into the sea, too, and then surfacing revitalised, snorting with pleasure, like so many seals. As we caught each other’s eye, we could tell what the other was thinking. Regardless of wealth, occupation, background, gender or politics, at that moment we were of one mind: ‘This is as good as it gets.’

  JUST DESERTS

  Along a road of flattened lizards, around slippery tropical bends and through dripping foliage, drove my youngest son, hands gripping the steering wheel, his new driver’s licence snug in his wallet, his eyes – and mine – fixed on the wet, twisting road ahead.

  In my barely masked anxiety at his new accomplishment, I found myself hankering after desert driving – a long, straight, dry, safe road where a father could relax while a new P-plater took the wheel. I’ve seen a lot of these roads recently in the West Australian goldfields and north-west: a road stretching to a red-earth-meets-azure-sky horizon so sharply and evenly defined it looked like the flag of an emerging nation.

  Seeking locations for a film, I came to a new appreciation of the West Australian desert. Part of this enthusiasm goes with the territory: that of the literary novelist optimistically hoping for the momentary financial security that follows book-to-film, and buys time to write. But I’ve also experienced a definite shift in attitude.

  As a boy in Perth I was a coast lover: of the ocean, the river. I associated deserts with the boring past. At school it always seemed to me that Australian history was largely the study of the desert. Australian history was a sandy blur and our historical figures, almost to a man, were desert explorers.

  Most of those desert-seekers bring to mind the words of Peter O’Toole’s T. E. Lawrence to Claude Rains’ Mr Dryden when accepting a certain desert mission in Arabia: ‘Of course I’m the man for the job … What is the job, by the way?’

  Back in history classes – instructed variously over the years by ‘Duck’ Drake or ‘Taffy’ Wall or ‘Sluggo’ Shields to fill in all those maps of Australia with crisscrossing dotted lines in different coloured pens – our desert explorers gave me the impression of dismal, overdressed and poorly equipped losers, too Britishly superior to accept help when offered it by the Aborigines they stumbled across.

  Later, however, I began to see deserts themselves as varied and complex, and to affect and reflect the characteristics and culture of their particular continent. The Sahara, for instance, was a desert of Boys’ Own Adventures. It evoked images both romantic and violent and not always accurate. The French Foreign Legion. Bedouins. Sandstorms. Oases. The Dance of the Seven Veils.

  And what was it about the American desert that even its most desolate reaches had a gritty glamour not granted to many other pieces of real estate? A sort of desert noir. Western movies forged the way; it was then easy to see this landscape as quintessentially American, a place where the culture was clarified and defined.

  And westerns begat the road movie. Those scenic buttes and mesas, lone diners and swinging saloon doors came to stand for all sorts of primary emotions and longings. The American desert is an unbeatable backdrop for terse lyricism. Think of it and you hear guitar music: Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas theme. It was also perfect antihero and misfit territory, and has remained so.

  Not so, the Australian desert. From the first white settlement it was a place of heroes – that very Australian sort of hero – the heroic failure. Our explorers, while usually failures, nevertheless succeeded in convincing successive generations of writers and teachers that they were heroic in defeat, and that their endurance – if they actually survived – was of more lasting importance than the original goals of their expeditions.

  It’s interesting that when we think of the American desert in books or movies we think of the present as much as the past. The American desert continually adapts to the here and now. When we think of the Australian desert, however, we tend to think of the past. I know I do.

  But then I think of such accomplishments as those of my own hero, C. Y. O’Connor, who had already blasted Fremantle Harbour out of rock, and created the biggest colony’s port and railway system. I think of him managing to carry water uphill from the coast to the goldfields, and of his pipeline that defied physics and political scepticism and savage newspaper libels, and which still brings water to the desert more than a century later. Then I think not only of heroism but of genius.

  THE BEER SPOON

  Welcome to tea (not ‘dinner’) in the Perth suburbs of the 1950s. Tonight the meal is lamb chops, mashed potato and diced carrots, as well as beans and brussels sprouts cooked so long they’re a muted grey, with just a hint of green: the shade of an olive-drab army uniform.

  Beneath its crisp, well-grilled surface, the meat is also grey. Actually, only the carrots have retained their original colour, if not their consistency. It’s only 7.00 p.m. but the meal has been ready for ages.

  Dad is late home from work again, via the pub, necessitating much maternal sighing and clockwatching. But frankly there’s no surprise involved: he gets home at 7.00 p.m. every night. For some reason, however, ‘tea’ is always well cooked and ready by 6.30, so the first minutes of the finally served meal are rather strained with – depending on the parent – either an air of martyrdom or guilt hovering over the table.

  This tense atmosphere lasts right up to the sudden paternal exclamation, following his second or third mouthful, and after he has smothered his serving with salt, pepper and a tradesman-like plastering of hot English mustard: ‘Very tasty, dear!’

  Then he opens a bottle of Swan Lager and pours my mother a mollifying glass of beer, and one for himself, and the mood eases. We watch how cleverly he tilts the glasses so the froth at their rims is limited to half an inch. He performs this act with a debonair flourish and then raises his full glass. ‘Cheers, dear,’ he says.

  ‘Cheers,’ she says.

  We children have glasses of water.

  ‘Cheers,’ we say loudly, and clink glasses.

  ‘Elbows off the table,’ says our mother.

  As for the meal, our meat, doused in tomato sauce, is eaten first. And some, but not all, of the mashed potato. Interestingly, although extensively boiled, the beans have lost none of their fibrous quality. In fact, they seem botanically transformed by the act of chewing into clumps of sisal, gaining a stringiness that renders them impossible for a child to swallow without tears and threats of punishment.

  At this stage, one or both of the parents will mention the unfortunate African children whose ghostly presence a
ccompanies every evening meal and whose situation, oddly, can only be assuaged tonight if my brother Billy, sitting at a formica-topped table in the kitchen nook of a suburb of Perth, Western Australia, eats his sprouts.

  Our keenness to solve the African problem by offering, ‘Well, they can have mine then,’ is not favourably received.

  To hear my father’s stern declaration now, and to see his serious expression, you’d think it was the most inspirational saying of all time, up there with ‘Beauty is truth, and truth beauty.’ For perhaps the thousandth mealtime, he says, ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’

  Alas, the sprouts-hidden-under-the-remaining-potato ruse is losing its effectiveness. Only diversionary tactics still work. It’s time for some child to reach for the big red plastic tomato inside which the Rosella is wittily contained. When vigorously squeezed, this can be relied on to make a satisfactory farting noise, upon which our mother says, ‘That’s enough!’ and gathers up the plates.

  At last, normally the best part of the whole meal: dessert, which is not called dessert, but ‘sweets’. At this juncture, with a self-righteous air, my father says, as he does every evening, ‘None for me, thanks, dear,’ and refills his beer glass.

  We aren’t released this easily, for this night it’s creamed rice, a cement-like substance with a crusty burnt skin on top. Where are the Africans when you need them? This could sustain whole villages. It could be used to build them.

  Surveying our barely nibbled rice, our mother will then sigh and say, ‘All right. Eat two spoonfuls each, then you can have some ice-cream.’ This is a fair deal. Her home-made ice-cream is delicious, crunchy, with minute specks of ice. We have it with tinned peaches, or perhaps a sprinkle of Milo.

  Everyone is replete. My father opens and pours himself another beer, then performs a mysterious rite. He puts a teaspoon in the neck of the beer bottle and puts it the fridge for tomorrow, its bubbly freshness to be magically retained. In this certainty he has the utmost faith.