Down Under (45 page)

But of course I said no such thing. Instead I had a long and respectful look around. It struck me in a moment’s idle thinking that this forest was quite an apt metaphor for Australia. It was to the arboreal world what Charles Kingsford Smith was to aviation or the Aborigines were to prehistory – unaccountably overlooked. It seemed amazing to me, in any case, that there could exist in this one confined area some of the rarest and mightiest broad-leafed trees on earth, forming a forest of consummate and singular beauty, and hardly anyone outside Australia has even heard of them. But that is the thing about Australia, of course – that it is packed with unappreciated wonders.

And with that thought in mind, I set off now for what was, in its quiet way, one of the most amazing wonders of all.

Earlier on this trip, while driving back to Sydney from Surfers Paradise, I stopped for coffee in a pleasant college town called Armidale in north-eastern New South Wales. Indulging myself in a brief amble through its attractive streets, I happened on an official-looking building called the Mineral Resources Administration and – I don’t know why exactly – I went in. I had long wondered why there is such an abundance of mineral wealth in Australia and not, say, in my back garden, and I went in thinking maybe somebody could tell me. One of the delights of poking about journalistically in a cheerful and open society like Australia’s is that you can just turn up in places like the Mineral Resources Administration with nothing very particular in mind, and people will invite you in and answer any questions you care to put to them.

The upshot is that I spent a half hour with an obliging
geologist named Harvey Henley who told me that in fact Australia is not really fantastically overendowed with mineral resources – at least not on the basis of mineral wealth per square metre. It’s just that Australia has a lot of square metres, relatively few people and a short history, so that much of the country is still unexplored and unexamined. To put matters in perspective for me, he took me through to his work area to show me what he does for a living. He makes geological maps, large, impressively detailed ones, rolled like blueprints, which he spread across a table with a certain respectful care, as if they were old prints. Even an untrained eye could see that they recorded every lump and ruffle on the landscape, with particular emphasis on pools of mineralogical splendour. Each, he explained, covered a portion of New South Wales sixty kilometres long by forty wide and took ten to fifteen man-years to produce. The Armidale team was in the process of surveying eighty such blocks.

‘Big job,’ I said, impressed.

‘You bet. But we’re finding new stuff all the time.’ He drew back one map to expose the one beneath. ‘That,’ he said, tapping a portion of the map shaded in a restful pastel tone, ‘is a new mine at a place called Cadice Hill near Orange. It contains about 200 million tonnes of mineral-bearing sands.’

‘And that’s good, is it?’

‘That’s very good.’

‘So,’ I said thoughtfully, trying to get a grasp on all this, ‘if it takes ten to fifteen man-years to produce one map covering a block of land sixty kilometres by forty, and if there are eight million square kilometres in Australia, then how much of the country has been properly surveyed?’

He looked at me as if I had asked a very basic question.

‘Oh, hardly any.’

I found this quite an arresting thought. ‘Really?’ I said.

‘Sure.’

‘So,’ I went on, still thoughtful, ‘if you parachuted me into some random spot in the outback, into the Strzelecki Desert or something, I would be landing on a patch of land that had never been surveyed?’

‘Formally surveyed? Almost certainly.’

I gave a moment to taking this aboard. ‘So just how much mineral wealth might be left out there to be discovered?’

He looked at me with the happy beam of a man whose work will never be completed. ‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘Impossible to say.’

Now hold that thought just for a moment while I take you with me onto the lonely coastal highway from Perth north towards Darwin, 4,163 kilometres away. Here, near the coast, there are a very few towns and quite a lot of visible farming, but head inland over the low, pale green hills to the right and with amazing swiftness you will find yourself in a murderous and confusing emptiness. And nobody really knows what is out there. I find that a terribly exciting thought. Even now people still sometimes make the sort of stupefying, effortless finds that can only happen in uncharted country. Just recently, some beaming fellow had come in from the western deserts cradling a solid gold nugget weighing sixty pounds. It was nearly the largest such nugget ever found, and it was just lying in the desert. Goodness!

Mining experts may study satellite images and the sort of charts generated by repeated aeroplane passes at low altitudes (‘fantasy maps’ as Harvey Henley termed them
for me, just a touch dismissively), but up-close investigations, the kind that involve wandering through dried riverbeds and taking rocks away for later analysis, have barely begun. The problem lies not just in the vastness of Australia – though that is daunting enough, goodness knows – but in the risks involved in wandering into unknown country. As the British palaeontologist Richard Fortey has written: ‘Tracks appear briefly, only to disappear into ambiguous washes, where the bewildered and anxious passenger is instructed to hang out the window to look for broken twigs which might indicate where a vehicle has passed before . . . It is appallingly easy to get lost.’

In such an environment rumours of fabulous, unexploited finds naturally proliferate. The most famous story concerns a man named Harold Bell Lasseter, who in the 1920s claimed to have stumbled on a gold reef some ten miles long in the central deserts thirty years before, but for various reasons beyond his control had neglected to return to claim it. Although it seems an unlikely tale, the story evidently had greater plausibility than a bare description would suggest. In any case, Lasseter managed to persuade several sceptical businessmen and even some large corporations (General Motors, for one) to underwrite an expedition, which set off from Alice Springs in 1930. After several weeks of confused and fruitless tramping around, Lasseter’s backers began to lose confidence. One by one his team members abandoned him, until Lasseter was on his own. One night his two camels bolted. Lost and on foot, he died a lonely and wretched death. I dare say he drank some urine. In any case, he never found the gold. People are searching for it yet.

Although Lasseter was almost certainly either sorely deluded or a charlatan, the idea of there being a vast reef of gold just sitting in the desert is not at all beyond the bounds of reasonable possibility. Nor is it as implausible as it seems that people might make such a fabulous find and then, as it were, mislay it. Others far more meticulous and attentive than Lasseter have misplaced important discoveries in the desert. Such was the case of Stan Awramik, a geologist who was poking about in the low, irregular, exceedingly hot hills of the Pilbara, a region of north-western Australia still largely unexplored, when he came upon an outcrop of rocks bearing tiny fossilized organisms called stromatolites dating back to the dawn of life some 3.5 billion years ago. At the time of Awramik’s discovery they were the most ancient fossils yet found on earth. From a scientific point of view, these rocks were the equivalent of Lasseter’s elusive gold reef. Awramik collected some samples and made his way back to civilization. But when he returned to the Pilbara to pursue his searches, he couldn’t find the rock outcrop again. It had just vanished into an endless sameness of low hills. Somewhere out there those original stromatolites still wait to be rediscovered. It could as easily have been gold.

Since that time other stromatolite beds of similar or greater venerability have been found elsewhere, both in Australia and further afield. Meanwhile, however, in the warm, shallow waters of Shark Bay, on a lonely stretch of the Western Australian coast, scientists found something no less extraordinary, and even more unexpected. They found a community of
living
stromatolites – colonies of lichen-like formations that quietly but perfectly replicate the conditions that existed on earth when life was in its infancy. It was this that I was on my way to see.

It’s about an eight-hour drive from Perth north to Shark Bay. In early afternoon, near a place called Dongara, the road curved down towards the sea and I began at last to get glimpses of blue ocean. This section of Western Australia is called the Batavia Coast, which, as it happens, was something else I was interested to look into. At Geraldton, the only town worthy of the name (certainly the only place with more than one set of traffic lights) for 600 miles, I stopped for coffee and parked by chance outside a small maritime museum in the town centre. I hesitated by the door, torn between the need to keep moving and a curiosity to see what was in there, then impulsively stepped in, and how glad I was I did, for the museum was devoted in large part to the little-known story of the ship that gave the coast its name – a forgotten merchant vessel called the
Batavia
, which blundered onto Australian shores in 1629 and in so doing set in motion one of the more bizarre and unlikely episodes in the annals of maritime affairs. Most Australian histories give it no more than a footnote (Manning Clark does not mention it at all), which is a little surprising because it was the first sojourn by Europeans on Australian soil, and it remains the greatest slaughter of white people in Australian history. But I get ahead of myself.

In 1629, when our story begins, Dutch mariners had only recently discovered that the swiftest way to the East Indies from Europe was not to make a beeline across the Indian Ocean after rounding Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, but to drop down to the fortieth parallel – the famous Roaring Forties – and let those lively winds convey you eastward. The approach worked well so long, of course, as you managed not to crash into Australia. Alas, this was the
fate that befell Captain Francisco Pelsaert, two hours before dawn in early June 1629, when the
Batavia
ran aground on some sandy impediments called the Abrolhos Islands off Australia’s west coast. Almost at once the ship began to break up.

Many of the 360 people aboard drowned in the confusion, but 200 or so managed to struggle ashore. As the sun came up, they found themselves on a desolate sandbar with a few salvaged provisions and exceedingly dim prospects. They were 1,500 miles from Batavia (now Jakarta). Pelsaert ruminated for a while, then announced that he would take a party of men in a longboat and try to row to Batavia – a faint hope but their only one.

He left in charge a man named Jeronimus Cornelisz. What happened next is not entirely certain, but it appears that Cornelisz was both a madman and a religious fanatic – always a dangerous combination. What is certain is that over the next few days he and a few faithful followers slaughtered the bulk of the survivors – 125 men, women and children in all. The few they spared became their slaves – the women to cook and provide sexual favours, the men to fish and toil – except for a small group who escaped to another sandbar a couple of hundred yards away across a difficult channel. There they made such weapons as they could fashion from shells and driftwood, and built a fort to stave off the attacks that Cornelisz and his men occasionally flung at them.

Pelsaert, unaware of the turmoil he had left behind and with quite a lot on his mind already – he had, after all, wrecked a brand new ship, the pride of the Dutch merchant fleet – rowed on to the Timor Sea and miraculously reached Batavia. There his dumbfounded
superiors listened to his tale, gave him another ship and ordered him to return at once for survivors.

Five months after all his troubles started, Pelsaert arrived back at the Abrolhos Islands. There, the ever-blundering captain, finding the survivors engaged in a civil war, came within a whisker of supporting the wrong side and losing his ship to the crazed Cornelisz and his desperate band. Eventually, however, he managed to sort out what had happened and to introduce order and justice to the murderous little sandbar. Cornelisz and six henchmen were swiftly hanged. Most of the others were whipped or keelhauled and clapped in chains to be taken back to Batavia for further corrective treatment. But for reasons unknown, Pelsaert decided to go to the considerable trouble of having two of the miscreants – a marine named Wouter Looes and a cabin boy named Jan Pelgrom – rowed to the mainland and marooned there.

On 16 November 1629, they were set down at a place called Red Bluff Beach. What became of the two Dutchmen after that no one knows, but two things are certain. They were the remotest Europeans in the world and the first white Australians.

Red Bluff Beach, I learned from the helpful museum staff, is at a place called Kalbarri, a couple of hours further up the coast, and since it was on the way to Shark Bay I decided to stop there for the night. Kalbarri lies about forty miles down a side road off the North West Coastal Highway, across a green plain covered to every horizon in heathery scrub. It was getting on for evening when I arrived – too late to go looking for the Dutchmen’s landing place – so I got a room in a motel near the beach and contented myself with a stroll around the town. Kalbarri was an appealing little place. It dates only from
1952, when some fishermen discovered that the waters offshore teemed with lobster. Until the mid-1970s, when the road in from the North West Coastal Highway was paved, it was essentially cut off from the outside world except by sea. Today fishing remains at the heart of community life, but it has also grown into a small resort. The two seem to coexist very well.