A JOURNEY ACROSS AUSTRALIA.
For five weeks in mid '93, I drove round the south coast of Australia. My starting point: Sydney. My destination: Perth. Mission: find work in Western Australia as a videomaker. Result: unemployment. However, a wise man once said "It is better to travel than to arrive." This proved true, and I've never regretted the slow irresponsible pace of that crossing. The journey itself revealed wonders, and yielded fruit too, since when you're travelling through the winter, and the nights are falling early, you are off the road by 6 o'clock. You quickly find there's nothing else to do in all those isolated bleak motels but hit the desk and write...
Wednesday, May 26th, 1993 - SALE (Victoria)
My favourite place so far has been Eden. I actually started a travel diary there- on the back of a McDonald's napkin... Hang on. Here's the napkin...
"I am writing this in Eden, at the far south-east corner of New South Wales, where the south-east forests roll into the sea. Come August, whales and dolphins will be swimming through the bay. I had to drive through two dozen National Parks to get here. I've been reading a book called The Killers of Eden, about the pod of killer whales who for more than a century helped the local whalers kill the Humpbacks, right here in Twofold Bay. Amidst all this nature, inter-species communication! It just blows you away. I know this is a cliche but Eden seems aptly named. It really does feel like the mythical garden where all life began."
That's as far as it goes. Pity. It was just getting interesting.
The coast down here is peppered with harbours and bays, and every little town thinks theirs is the best. But I have to say that compared with Jervis Bay, Twofold Bay, the Mallacoota Inlet, even the Gippsland Lakes, the most spectacular inlet I've seen on this coast is still good ol' Port Jackson. Sydney Harbour Rules! (Oi !!)
Next week I'll be driving the Great Ocean Road west of Melbourne. I'm going to stop at Moonlight Head: the tallest sea cliff in the world. You've probably never heard of Moonlight Head. Neither had I till last night when I saw it on telly. Yet it's the tallest in the world! Australians don't know their own country. It's crazy! This continent we live on is just so magnificent and just so gigantic: the more you look around, the more you see. The thing that stands out to me most is the wilderness of it. Outside the cities, there's nothing but nature. Australia at the end of the 20th Century is what America was at the middle of the 19th: a nation with a vast frontier. A country a man can get lost in.
A couple of days ago I took a wrong turn in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains. I didn't think I'd be in any danger: after all, according to statistics, the south-east corner is the most heavily populated part of the country. Every Newtown greenie (including myself) knows the south-eastern forests have been reduced to mere remnants by logging, so I was sure there'd be a service station just around the corner. I drove for six hours. The road turned to dirt. Three hundred kilometres passed beneath the wheels, and I encountered not another human soul. All I encountered was trees. Trees in their millions! Row after row, ridge after ridge, range after range. Nothing but nature wherever I looked. Now, this was not a National Park. Just empty land.
By 3 o'clock I was running out of fuel. My head ached from driving. The weather was closing. And still the trees went on. I honestly thought I was going to die out there. A litre less fuel and I would have been stranded, but fortunately I reached a roadhouse just before my petrol tank went dry.
That experience taught me the true meaning of wilderness. Nature in its pristine state is not something cuddly and cosy and sweet, as we city folks so often think. It is something huge and terrifying, utterly impassive, and will kill you if you give it half a chance.
"Police Search Finds No Trace Of Missing Hiker" is a pretty common headline in this country. How often do we read such stories? Weekly? Subconsciously, I always thought those missing hikers must have fallen foul of other people... Murderers, muggers and such. Now I realise that most of them simply get lost. This wilderness we call Australia kills them.
God, it's good to be out on the road! These once-a-year "Driveabouts" always re-confirm my sense of mission. Unlike America, the filmic potential of Australia has barely been scratched. There are so many images, sounds and ideas that have never been properly filmed in this country. Australia is a frontier land artistically as well as environmentally.
Friday, June 4th, 1993 - MOUNT GAMBIER
Two and a half weeks into my journey, I hadn't made it to Perth, or even to Adelaide. I was still in the cloudy south-east, in the town of Mount Gambier. It would have to be from here that I would watch the eclipse of the moon.
Over in W.A, according to Radio National, amateur witches were gathering all over the city in covens to conduct pagan masses celebrating the final lunar eclipse of the second millennium. Apparently Perth has more covens per head of population than any other city in Australia. (Who collects this information?) And clear skies too, I bet... I should have been there!
Nevertheless, with the help of young Danni the motel receptionist, I'd found myself a suitably mystical vantage point. It was the highest in the area: a lookout on the edge of the Mount Gambier volcano (extinct). The waters of the Blue Lake lay 200 feet below. Across the crater, silhouetted pines were whispering in the wind. It seemed the kind of place a Sorcerer would go to, to commune with cosmic forces.
Initially, the sky was solid cloud. Then, just before the moment of totality, a great gash appeared in the clouds. It was as if Nature had drawn back her curtain of mist for a moment to offer a peek- just a peek. That aperture swept across the unpolluted sky, revealing bright constellations beyond. And then, a weird shape...
In the valley below, a dog bayed at the moon that was only half there. The left edge was illuminated blue (because the shadow of the earth had not yet reached it), the centre was dark, and the right edge was fireglow red (from the sunlight passing on through the earth's atmosphere).
The sense of 3-D was incredible! Under that lighting, the moon was no longer a disc but a ball, unmistakably! And it suddenly appeared to be much closer than the stars, whereas before it had always sat out there among them on the same seemingly flat visual plane. Even looking away and looking back again, I couldn't shake the impression that the moon was a balloon about a hundred feet up in the air. It really felt as if I could have reached up, put my hand around it, and pulled it down out of the sky. It didn't look spherical either: it looked kind of lumpy, like a plasticine blob in a child's diorama, lit by a blue light on one side and a red one on the other. It looked like a special effect... a bad special effect... I half expected to see a wire holding it up.
Presently, the cloud-gap passed. An hour later, Mother Nature gave another glimpse. This time, the moon was red all over- not a fiery red, but more the red of dying embers. It looked like a Christmas bauble hung in space. The clouds passed over once again, and soon it started raining. That was it. I wonder where I'll be in the year 2000 for the next one...
Monday, June the 7th, 1993 - ADELAIDE
You know, sometimes I really get on my own nerves. Somewhere in that Commodore of mine is a postcard I bought in East Gippsland last week. I'll probably locate it as soon as this diary is finished, but for now it seems lost.
What the postcard depicted, in glorious colour, was an architectural masterpiece a hundred and fifty metres long. It came looming up out of the paddocks as I drove down Highway One, the Flags of All Nations fluttering proudly at its gates. At first I couldn't believe my eyes. I blinked... but the vision remained. Here at last was proof that everything you've ever thought about Australia's lack of culture and artistic taste... is TRUE! Forget the Big Banana, Big Merino, Big Lobster, Big Pineapple etc. etc. etc. Australia has a new tacky tourist landmark. Feast your eyes on...
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T H E B I G W O R M B a s s , V i c t o r i a
...Built as a shrine to the Gippsland Giant Earthworm, and containing a museum, gift shop, restaurant, worm enclosure and many other facilities, the whole sprawling construction is coloured earthworm brown. It really does look like the World's Biggest Dog Turd. Wish I could find the damn postcard- you really have to see it to believe it.
Apart from that, the only other truly strange experience I've had was here in Adelaide, last night. Adelaide, by the way, must be the prettiest of Australia's capital cities. It's not spectacular like Sydney, but it's pretty in that Olde Worlde English way. Especially now in the Autumn. The whole CBD is surrounded by trees that are shedding their leaves into great golden sheets, and they blow through the streets and you feel like you're walking through "Doctor Zhivago"... Remember the falling leaf motif?... This whole Adelaide hills area, including the city itself, is one big work of 19th Century art: a little piece of England painted on the bottom of Australia.
Colonel William Light R.N. is the man who designed it, and his statue looks down on the centre of town from a place called "Light's Vision". Back in 1838, on that spot, Light envisioned an English village in the woods... and by golly, there it is! His statue now points at the vision come true. The CBD is surrounded by parkland on all four sides. Walk up any city street and you'll be strolling toward a glade of English trees. Even the Adelaide Hills- which begin only 6 kilometres out of the city- look as if they were shipped out from Britain intact. At this time of year they are bright with the reds and the golds of the oaks and the elms and the plane trees, alongside the dark mystic green of the pines. Sherwood Forest lives again!
Back in town, all the Heritage buildings- they number hundreds- have been scrupulously preserved. Through the middle of it all, between an avenue of willows, flows the Torrens. Like the tranquil upper reaches of the Thames, it rings with the chatter of birds and the paddling of rowers and the gentle talk of gentle folk who wander along its banks. Add to that the arts scene, the restaurants and the riverside University, and you have an idealised time capsule of England circa 1838. This was Systematic Colonisation at its best. Well-planned, gracious, artsy, elegant and English, Adelaide is everything Melbourne claims to be but isn't... Melbourne, I maintain now more than ever, is a hole.
Anyway, I was walking to my Adelaide motel after a very nice meal of Kangaroo Fillet and chips- roo tastes like beef, by the way, just a little bit springier- when who should come running up behind me yelling "David!" loud enough to alert the whole street but Jac McKenzie! She caught up and gave me a big, kind of actressy, hug, and I said the first thing that came into my head which was "This is very strange!"
Jacqui explained that she'd just driven in from the airport. Her friends were "in that car up there, and... Oh shit! We've been pulled over by the cops! David, when are you getting to Perth?"
I said "About a week from now- week and a bit."
She said "I'll write ya!" and ran off.
And that was that. Oh well, that's Jacqui for you. Nice girl. Crazy life... Actress.
God knows what the food will do to Jacqui Mac in Adelaide. Apart from Emu Steak, which at $11 a serve was too expensive for my ever-shrinking wallet, there is the edible hot chips container just about to be released down here. And then there's Cowley's Famous Pie Van. An Adelaide institution. A rusty old trailer that's been rolled into place at the General Post Office every night for as long as anyone can remember. People come from miles around to buy the one and only thing it serves: the venerable Floater with Sauce, mate.
Adelaide's famous pie floater looks like a kitchen accident: as if someone had knocked a soggy meat pie face-first into a bowl of pea soup, then spilled tomato sauce all over it. Come to think of it, that's exactly how it's done. The "cooking" takes three seconds flat and is done right in front of you- Slip, Slop, Slap- then you eat it at the counter of the trailer next to all the other regulars. It's amazing how many people are out looking for Pie Floaters at 1 a.m. on a weeknight. I think the Pie Van functions as a halfway house between the pubs and home. In fact, folk wisdom holds that the Floater tastes best when you're blind drunk, as I was. Pea soup, meat pie, tomato sauce... it's one big bowl of carbohydrate stodge. Sits in your stomach like a brick, kind of anchors you down. Cures alcoholic dizziness like nothing else I know. I could really go one now as a matter of fact.
Thursday, June 10th, 1993 - NULLARBOR
The Nullarbor sneaks up on you. You drive so long to reach it- through a thousand kays of soporific wheatbelt- that you fall into a trance until your brain says "Wait a minute!" and you look around and realise that the world has disappeared. No hills. No trees. No sense of distance. Nothing. You are flying along on the surface of a waterless, waveless sea. It feels unreal.
The classic Nullarbor- this billiard table flat expanse of grey-black saltbush plain- is not that big. It only lasts a couple of hours, then your brain says "Wait a minute!" and you look around and realise that the trees are all around you once again. First they're dotted on the landscape, then they're clumped, and then you're driving through a 20-foot high woodland of the things. It's called the Mallee Scrub and that's what you drive through for days, all the way across Western Australia.
Crossing this country, you never see desert. That surprised me. A bigger surprise, though, lay right near the heart of the Nullarbor nothingness. Whales.
In front of the Nullarbor Roadhouse there stands an incongruous sculpture: a Southern Right Whale. Beneath it appear the words "Welcome to Nullarbor- Southern Right Whale Capital Of The World". As endless as the Plain looks from the road, it actually ends just a few kilometres to the south. And it doesn't just end: it drops vertically 300 feet to the sea. You have to be careful. The land drops away without warning, and people occasionally walk off the edge by mistake. But by golly, the danger is worth it. Here, at the Head of the Bight, is the huge ancient edge of our huge ancient continent. It is the most dramatic place I've ever seen.
I was allowed in by the grace of the Yalata aboriginal people: the permit cost $2. Now I understand what "sacred site" means. White folks would've put a motel here, swimming pools and drive-ins. But even a sealed road would be a travesty. This is a natural cathedral. Awesome. Perfect. To move a single rock would be wrong.
A place like this will quickly turn your mind toward the infinite. Behind you lies the endless horizontality of the Nullarbor Plain, before you the endless horizontality of the Southern Ocean. ( I could actually see tomorrow's weather blowing up from the Antarctic: isolated storms punctuated by patches of sun.) The two realms are divided by those awesome vertical cliffs, stained red and black from aeons of exposure, stretching in an unbroken wall to the western horizon, while to the east stand rows of gloss-white sand dunes hundreds of feet high, swept by the centuries into giant arching hills. Then, as if to complete the hugeness of the scene, there come the Giants Of The Deep: those hundred-tonne Southern Right whales who swim up here from the Antarctic every year to mate and calve.
At the time I was there, there were three whales, though it took me a couple of minutes to see them. At first, all I saw was a big rock formation a hundred feet out from the shore. Moving closer, I noticed the angle at which it stuck out from the water: I thought maybe this was the prow of an old shipwreck: it didn't seem to move and it was far too big to be a whale. I moved a little closer, and by golly, that thing was a whale! Or rather, the tail of a whale, held like a sail to catch the wind. Slowly, the huge creature rolled over, surfaced and blew. What a sound! It echoed off the cliffs: an enormous, low, resonant tone, like a note on the biggest pipe of a cathedral organ. It wasn't just white noise, like a crashing wave... it was a living sound. A victorious sound- a massive blast of life.
Beside her surfaced Junior, then behind her surfaced another adult, slightly smaller (Dad?). These were big, big barrels of blubber- noticeably bigger than the Hervey Bay humpbacks- much, much rounder. When Mother rolled over to suckle her baby, the width between her flippers was incredible. Each time that broad back broke the surface, it looked like a rock shelf revealed by the waves.
The leviathans swam by at the edge of the Sea as I walked down the edge of the Land, and we could hear each other breathe. I felt at one with Planet Earth. I realise how goofy that probably sounds, but I like to believe the Yalata would know what I mean.
- David Williams, 1993
(continued in Part 2)