Falling Off the Map (24 page)

At the same time, Australia, like many a colony, has never entirely left behind the country that abandoned it here. As the relentlessly clever Tasmanian-born critic Peter Conrad points out in his half-autobiography,
Down Home
, Australians wistfully tried to assuage their homesickness by reinventing the motherland here—Tasmania alone has “a cliffless Dover, a beachless Brighton, an unindustrial Sheffield.” A local newspaper may have no qualms about describing the visiting Duchess of York as “astonishingly frumpish,” yet still her befreckled visage adorns at least three magazine covers in a single week. And even as the tattoo-and-bare-skin crowd is crowding in to see Mick Jagger (who once acted as the country’s favorite outlaw, Ned Kelly) perform at the National Tennis Center, hundreds of well-behaved families are lining up to visit Prince Andrew’s boat, docked down the coast in Tasmania.

In all these respects, as in many others, Australia still revels in the paradox of its mongrel origins, the contradictory features of a place of English institutions and American life-styles (reflected even in the name Crocodile Dundee—a Scotland in the wilderness!). And if modern Australia is often gazing over one shoulder at the land that gave it birth, it is looking over the other at the land it most resembles: here, after all, is a British parliamentary system with a Senate and a House of Representatives.
The divided loyalties are everywhere apparent: in Hobart, the Doctor Syntax guesthouse is just down the street from Mister Pizza; in a Reptile World not far from Darwin, two snakes repose the vigorously contemporary and curiously Victorian names of Rocky and Rowena. While Melbourne high society dresses up in top hats and tails for the local version of Ascot, the Melbourne Cup, many others dress down—in almost nothing at all—to spoof the solemnity.

Of all the legacies of its English, and its castaway, roots, in fact, perhaps the strongest is the country’s sardonic and seditious wit. Australia has a sly sense of irony that gives an edge to its sunshine, makes it something more than just a pretty face. That air of wry mischief is apparent in the Club Foote Cabaret, or the ad for a “Top Tourist Attraction” that features nothing but the photo of a sage-bearded man under the title “The Opal King.” The comment in a museum’s visitors’ book is as dry as the Outback: “Could be worse.” And the man who is being acclaimed as Australia’s Woody Allen is a thirty-two-year-old writer-director whose name alone—Yahoo Serious—places him a fair distance away from the Bergman of the Upper West Side. Nothing, it seems, is sacred: at the Collins Baptist Church in Melbourne, Reverend Ham is discoursing on the theme “God is Parked Outside your Front Door.”

In many ways, the country seems to mainstream, and mainline, its idiosyncrasies: the touristy stores around Sydney’s refurbished Rocks area feature adorable koalas done up in convict suits, pineapples sporting shades, Punk Panda T-shirts. And the roadsides of Australia are lined with enormous absurdities: a fifteen-foot metal cheese, a thirty-foot dairy cow, a thirty-two-foot fiberglass banana. The little town of Mildura sells itself as the home of the most of the biggest, a title that apparently includes having the longest deck chair in the world, the longest bar, and—great apotheosis!—the largest talking Humpty-Dumpty.
Alice Springs hosts a regatta each year, in a dry riverbed, and Darwin responds with such inimitably Australian festivities as a Beer Can Regatta, the Froggolympics, and the World’s Barefoot Mud Crab Tying championship.

Recently, the Northern Territorians have discovered that the biggest growth industry of all is in crocodilians. Arrive at Darwin Airport, and you will be greeted by Crocodile Attack Insurance policies and brochures describing Alligator Airlines, which runs float planes down to Bungle Bungle. Drive into town, and you will find Crocodile Motors, the Crocodile Lodge, croc pizza at Crocodile Corner, and stores selling nothing but croc bags, croc water pistols, huge inflatable crocs, and croc T-shirts (in forty different designs). The Sweethearts piano bar at the local casino serves—inevitably—“crocktails,” and one life-size croc has been created entirely out of beer cans; on the road into Kakadu National Park, some shrewd entrepreneurs have even erected a twenty-foot tall crocodile, cruelly equipped with boxing gloves. Not long ago, the Four Seasons hotel chain opened up, nearby, the world’s first hotel shaped entirely like a crocodile, a 750-foot, $11 million monstrosity with evil yellow eyes and a huge gray spine. When one croc decapitated a fisherman last year, in front of a transfixed group of tourists, it was rumored that a tour operator promptly demanded more of the same.

Thus Australians seem at once to play up, and play down, to tourist expectations; theirs is as much a subversive as a supplicant air. On a Qantas flight into Sydney, a cabin attendant mimes along with the safety announcement, while one of the tour guides at the Opera House is as floridly self-amusing as any guide this side of Key West. The Jolly Swagman show of Australiana in the quaintly renovated 150-year-old Argyle Tavern in Sydney suddenly causes its laughing visitors to blanch when it stages an actual sheep-shearing on stage, followed by an impromptu lecture from a bearded Bushman over his bald,
still bleeding victim. And as a shuttle bus pulls out of Alice Springs train station, its passengers dazed from twenty-four hours in tiny compartments, the beefy driver unexpectedly bursts into tour-guide patter: “Directly in front of us,” he begins, “we have the K mart.”

This fondness for drollery, and its attendant suspicion of all stuffiness, breathes constant life and surprise into the country’s culture. Folksingers stroll with guitars around the lovely main reading room of Adelaide’s old Mortlock Library, and the country’s museums are scarcely cathedrals of orthodoxy. The Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney devotes an entire floor to plastic bags, embellished with videos of people banging bags together and a guide denoting “Points in Plastic History.” The National Gallery in Melbourne fills one display case, rather surprisingly, with a pig’s head and offers, in alarming proximity, specimens designated as “Lamb Brains,” “Calves Livers” and “Spring Lamb Chops.” (The stained-glass ceiling that is the museum’s centerpiece can be appreciated only by visitors supine on the floor.) When the Opera House, financed largely by lotteries and partly by kissing contests, staged its first performance, koalas and kangaroos bounded across the stage in front of the visiting Queen.

It is common, of course, to hear people claim that Australian culture is a contradiction in terms: Bronte is a beach here, they say, and the country’s unofficial national anthem, “Waltzing Matilda,” was written by a man named Banjo. Certainly the feeling that the world lies outside the country’s borders has propelled many rare minds to find themselves in exile: Germaine Greer, Clive James, and Robert Hughes all evince a uniquely Australian mix of erudition and iconoclasm, yet all are features now of the Anglo-American scene; and the brief wave of tasteful Masterpiece Movies that put Australia on the world’s screens at the beginning of the eighties subsided when the
directors of
Breaker Morant, Gallipoli
, and
The Devil’s Playground
transported their Australian myths to America. Australians have so flexible a sense of home, perhaps, that they can make themselves at home anywhere.

Nonetheless, the culture still has a native vigor constantly quickened by its unforced sense of free speech. The Old Parliament House in Adelaide reserves an entire room that any group can take over for a month, and a bulletin board on which visitors respond to the displays set up by euthanasiasts, conservationists, or just plain Liberals. And the excellent Migration Museum around the corner likewise maintains a “Community Access Gallery.” Far from sanitizing the country’s rocky history of migration, moreover, the museum delivers some unpretty home truths (“Racist attitudes towards Asians have a very long history in Australia”) and does not shy away from asserting that the aboriginals were “hunted and herded like animals.” Provocative and hard-hitting, this is a fresh kind of art form: the museum as radical documentary.

The first-time visitor, indeed, may well be surprised at how conspicuous is the aboriginal presence. Though their numbers once sank to almost 60,000, the original guardians of the continent now constitute a subculture of more than 228,000, and many non-aboriginal Australians are aware that the usurpation of a people who regarded the land itself as their sacred text and mythology represents, in a very particular sense, a kind of desecration. It is this position that finds the Bicentenary most irrelevant. “Why celebrate two hundred years old when society here is forty thousand years old?” challenges a thoughtful young Australian. “And why call it our party when it should be theirs?”

The other most striking feature of Australia today is the prominence of the “New Australians,” the latest wave of immigrants, who have turned cities like Melbourne into a clash of alien tongues as piquant and polyglot as New York, where nothing
seems outlandish except standard English. The signs for public toilets in Melbourne are written in Greek (as well as English and Italian), churches solicit worshipers in Korean script, and when the Prostitutes Collective recently put out a multilingual pamphlet urging customers to use condoms, one of the tongues they employed was Macedonian. Though Australian voices still sound blond, their heads are increasingly dark: at the stately old Windsor Hotel in Melbourne, one of the last great relics of Victorian elegance, the maître d’ is Vietnamese, the waiters are Sri Lankan, the owners are Indian, and the courtly man serving drinks comes from Bangladesh.

Inevitably, such developments have been somewhat tumultuous in a country whose leading magazine, as recently as 1960, ran with the slogan “Australia for the White Man.” For decades isolation bred ignorance, and ignorance intolerance. Even today, the country whose ghost lurks at the edge of many a conversation in Australia is South Africa. “Australia is a very racist country,” says a conservative English immigrant. “If you just scratch the surface, you come upon it. England’s bad too, of course, but at least they’ve had to face up to the problem. Here it’s still simmering.”

The unease felt by some Australians as Vietnamese and Chinese have streamed down the golden brick road to Oz has only deepened as the new “Austr-aliens” have flourished through such imported virtues as seriousness and unrelenting hard work. For decades, as Donald Horne argued in
The Lucky Country
, his scathing attack on Aussie complacency, the country languished in a kind of lottery consciousness, content to believe that success was more the result of luck than of industry (in a single year, the estimated turnover from betting was three times the defense budget). Now, however, the determination of the immigrants, bolstered by the entrepreneurial energy of such controversial types as Rupert Murdoch and Alan Bond,
has begun to invest Australia with a new sense of dynamism and to raise fresh questions about its identity as an Asian power. Twenty-four years after the publication of Horne’s attack, the country may be less prosperous, but it is decidedly more promising.

Today, in many ways, Australia seems to reflect the eccentric ways of a Western European society set down in the middle of a Lonely Place: hotels as imaginatively designed as pavilions in some world’s fair; cities that offer Balkan, Burmese, Mauritian, Uruguayan, and Seychellian cuisine; casinos that are typically down-home affairs where neither solemnity nor discretion is held in high regard (“Not a Poker Face in Sight,” promises the Adelaide casino). Nearly all the heads in Australian bars are frothy, and tattooed bikers down 3.3-pint “stubbies” of Foster’s in dusty outposts like the Humpty Doo Bar, where a bulletin board advertises pigs and a sign warns customers tersely, “Don’t Ask for Credit as Refusal Often Offends.” Australian entertainment, in fact, is nothing if not straightforward: a slim tourist brochure in Melbourne includes twenty-two full ads for escort agencies.

For the historically minded traveler, the main lure of the place may well be Tasmania, the oldest convict settlement after Sydney, and one of those out-of-the-way places that many people want to visit because of their vague sense that no one has visited them before. With its blustery skies and lowering, snow-capped Mount Wellington, Tasmania is in some respects an inversion of the mainland, itself an inversion of England, and so ends up a little like the mother country. But its green and pleasant land is scarred with the remnants of its gloomy penal past: the gutted gray buildings at Port Arthur, the graves on the Isle of the Dead, and all the other grisly mementos of a place once known as “Hell on Earth.”

By contrast, the social history of modern Australia—and of many places like it—is summarized most tidily in the main shopping street in Adelaide, the wondrously compact little town laid out in a square by a man named Light. The thoroughfare begins life as Hindley Street, a rough-and-tumble desolation row of sailors’ haunts—video arcades, take-away joints, and tawdry souvenir shops. The names say it all: the Box Adult Book Shop, Joynt Venture smoking paraphernalia, For Roses Tattoo Studio, the Sweetheart cocktail lounge, the Pop-in Coffee Lounge, and Crazy Horse Striptease Revue. Then, downtown, it turns into Rundle Mall, a gleaming, pedestrian-only monument to civic order, the sort of middling Middle Australian area you expect to find in any suburban center: Florsheim Shoes, Thomas Cook Travel, Standard Books, Woolworth’s, and—on both sides of the central intersection—the Golden Arches.

Finally, on its eastern edge, Rundle Mall opens up into Rundle Street, a SoHoian anthology of today: the Appar-allel boutique, Known Space books, the Campari bistro, Al Fresco gelateria, the Australian School of Meditation, Bryan’s Hairdressers, the Bangkok restaurant, Kelly’s Grains and Seeds—one long neon-and-mannequin line of vintage clothes stores and veggie restaurants, culminating (as it must culminate) in the New Age Emporium. This street alone, it seems, tells the story of how the twenties became the fifties became the eighties, or how raffishness turned into Standard Shopping Center and then was reborn as Authentic Renovated and Redecorated Raffishdom.