Tramp Royale (39 page)

We left Lone Pine Sanctuary and rode back downtown, where we dismissed the taxi at the corner of Queen and Edward Streets, an intersection equivalent to Broad and Chestnut in Philadelphia. Brisbane is a standard Western city, very proud of its new city hall. It is about the size of San Jose or Mobile, with somewhat similar subtropical climate. It was started as a penal colony a hundred and thirty years ago and relics of the early days are still on display. But no Australian cares to have the convict system mentioned, unless he brings up the subject first. They are still sensitive about it. But there is no real cause for them to be sensitive; the United States and Australia were colonized by the same sort of riff-raff in the main. Australia had a higher percentage of convicts in its early days than we had, but the convict system in Australia was the direct result of the American Revolution; Britain had to find some other place to dump her petty criminals and politically obstreperous after that-the first shipment to Australia was in 1788. Today one may hear matrons of Atlanta, Georgia, boast of ancestors who arrived in Georgia in such-and-such a year in the eighteenth century-when a quick check will disclose that no one but convicts arrived that year. Perhaps in time Australians will acquire the same smug, undiscriminating pride in ancestors, just any old ancestors, which characterizes our South, Philadelphia, and Boston. But they don't have it now.

"Nice" people, the prosperous and respected, hardly ever emigrate; they like it where they are. Colonists are the unsuccessful, the ne'er-do-wells, the outcasts, the indentured, and, quite often, the criminals, where "criminal" means anything from a murderer to a hungry petty thief and includes people who are aggressively dissident in their political or religious opinions. The United States has done very well on such a mixture and so has Australia. It has enriched each country with a very useful anarchistic strain of impatience with officiousness and rebellion against injustice, and has left England and Europe poorer by the loss of those very convicts.

But Australians don't talk about their ancestors.

(I wish we did not. It is a subject always boring to the victim. Worse yet, it contains a veiled insult not easily answered, unless the listener cares to indulge in calculated rudeness.)

It was a hot day in Brisbane and poking around its streets was thirsty work; I started looking for an oasis. I did not find one easily; the street signs by which one spots a cocktail bar in the States were absent. Feeling that a longer wait might endanger our health, I stopped a man on the sidewalk and explained our predicament, adding rather unnecessarily that we were strangers in town.

He was all helpfulness, politeness, and gallantry, with gestures, expressions, and manners like those of W. C. Fields at his ripest. He was not typically Australian, if there is such a thing; he was himself, a unique individual. "Ah, sir! Madame! You are expecting to find a cocktail bar. But this is not Paris, this is not New York. You will not find such here."

I inquired rather blankly what one did about it.

"One goes to a hotel. Not into the bar-oh no! Into the lounge. You will find one just around this corner."

I answered that we had just come around that corner, actively searching, and had spotted no indications. He put up a hand. "Never mind. I will show you. Come."

I protested that we did not wish to take him out of his way.

"Not at all. A privilege. This way, dear lady."

"Uh, look . . . do you have time to spare to have one with us?"

He stopped short, hesitated, and seemed at a loss for an answer. Ticky, by instinct I think, guessed correctly the trouble. "I don't believe we introduced ourselves. I'm Mrs. Heinlein and this is my husband. We are visitors from one of the ships in the harbor."

He immediately relaxed, smiled warmly, and told us his name, Mr. Sheppard. There was no further reluctance about joining us for a drink. He consulted his watch, remarked that he should be back at his office, but added that it was a far, far better thing to spend a few sociable moments with kind people. We marched around the corner with an invisible brass band leading us.

In Australia liquor licenses are granted only to hotels. Each hotel has a bar, but it is strictly stag; if a woman were to walk in, it would create some sort of a major crisis. But near the bar is a lounge, where women are permitted to drink seated at tables, out of sight of the bar itself. These rules are empty formalisms but are strictly observed. Mr. Sheppard took us into such a lounge.

Although we had asked him to have a drink with us, he brushed aside my attempt to pay-we were visitors, guests. Ticky ordered her usual Scotch-and-water, Mr. Sheppard ordered beer, and I decided to try beer myself, for I had heard of Australian beer.

Australians cause beer to disappear faster than an elephant drinks water; I had to hurry to catch up and I again lost a check fumble. I was not really anxious for a third round but, for my country's honor, I had to pay for at least one round; this time by getting my money out in advance and insisting, I managed to pay. In the meantime Mr. Sheppard kept us endlessly entertained with anecdotes. He was a man who had been everywhere and seen everything, and he could talk about it endlessly, with charm and droll humor. Before World War II he had traveled for years on business in Europe; he had returned home and was now a glass wholesaler.

I don't remember his stories too well. Australian beer is good stuff; two bottles of it and you think you are Old Man Kangaroo. Three bottles and you are ready to tear up lamp posts by the roots and bash policemen. I had three bottles.

American beer is a nice cool drink on a hot day, but it does not deserve the name "beer." It is sickly aftermath of Prohibition. I had not been able to understand, before I visited Australia, why it was that Australians were reputed to drink almost nothing but beer. There are three reasons: their beer, imported whisky, and their domestic whisky. Imported whisky is much too dear for any but the wealthy to drink; their so-called domestic whisky is a poor grade of radiator anti-freeze put up in bottles. But their beer is the authentic joy juice, the stuff that made the preacher dance. It helps to explain why the Aussie soldier fought as well as he did and why he was insolent to sergeants.

I never tried it again.

At long last we had to leave Mr. Sheppard. We bade each other good-by warmly and blurrily, and Mr. Sheppard assured us that he was going to use his good offices to get us a steamship booking from New Zealand to the States. I don't remember the ride back. I climbed the gangway with my ears roaring, ate heartily, and went at once to bed.

The inhabitants of Sydney are convinced that they have the most beautiful harbor in the world and the longest bridge. They are wrong on both counts; the Rio Harbor is much more beautiful and the Golden Gate bridge is longer both in free span and in total length. There are several other bridges bigger than the Sydney bridge, no matter how you measure-the Firth of Forth bridge in Scotland, for example, or the George Washington Bridge. Nor is it, in my opinion, an outstandingly handsome bridge, though I admit to a prejudice in favor of suspension bridges. If you want to know exactly what it looks like, take a look at the Hell Gate Bridge, a twin about two-thirds the size of the Sydney bridge.

Don't raise either of these points in a Sydney bar; it would not be safe. Deep in their hearts, they
know
they have the biggest bridge and the most beautiful harbor.

It is in fact a most beautiful harbor and an enormous, handsome, and most impressive bridge. The harbor is a drowned river mouth, most irregular in shape, with a multitude of coves, creeks, and bays. In consequence all of Sydney seems to look out over the magnificent harbor; many residential neighborhoods are right on the water. There are many beaches right in the city, with some of the best surf bathing in the world-possibly the best, if you like big, muscular rollers and don't mind risking sharks. The Sydneyites don't mind either one; they take their chances on sharks (people are killed by them each year) and they prefer the biggest waves. All Sydney swarms to the beach each weekend, to swim, hold surfing carnivals, or just spine-bashing in the sun and the sand.

We got off the ship fairly promptly in Sydney, but from there on nothing went quite right. Immigration formalities were not too lengthy, the port doctor looked at our wrists again (I never did find out why), and we got through customs without too much bother. Brian Salt, who had been right behind us in line, had to wait an extra hour because customs closed for lunch, but we just made it. Most of our fellow passengers got caught by the same ploy, but we were lucky.

This practice of closing customs for lunch, tea, and so forth is one that any country would do well to avoid at all major ports of entry. A visitor's first impression of a country is at customs. He is usually tired, nervous, hungry, at least subconsciously afraid, and often legitimately in a hurry. If he is forced to cool his heels for an hour or more, usually in a most dismal shed, often under a "no smoking" rule, frequently without a place to sit down, while a petty civil service employee goes to lunch, he is likely to wind up with an almost pathological dislike for that country that no later impression will quite replace.

There is no more reason why a customs gate should close for lunch than a gasoline filling station, a telephone exchange, or any other public service. I noticed with interest and pride that, when we finally returned to the United States, we went through customs without delay although we arrived there right in the middle of the lunch hour, 12:30 p.m. I strongly hope that all United States ports of entry operate the same way. It is no harder for a civil service organization to arrange relief rotation of lunch hours than it is for a private firm. Most countries spend large amounts of money trying to build up good will abroad; it is moronically stupid to squander the investment through such petty inefficiency. I do hope the United States customs office we encountered is typical of them all.

Getting through customs just under the wire seemed to use up the last of our luck. We had originally planned to stay in Australia almost a month, but our failure to obtain passage to the Australian west coast had disrupted our schedule and left us with only a scanty nine days before our booked departure for New Zealand. I still wanted time to go outback and see the interior of the country . . . possibly even accept one of the numerous invitations we had received to stay on a sheep station. To do this we needed to swap our booking for New Zealand for one a week or so later.

After we checked in at the Hotel Australia we hurried over to the office of the Union Steamship Company of New Zealand to accomplish the rearrangement. I anticipated no trouble, as two large passenger ships maintained almost a ferry schedule between Sydney and New Zealand, with sailings about every six days.

The booking clerk had our reservation but when I proposed exchanging it for one a week or so later he shook his head. "I can't promise you anything the rest of the season. The best I could do would be to put you on a waiting list."

I thought about it and suggested, "Perhaps you have a couple who wanted to sail the day you have us booked but had to accept the sailing a week later?"

"Well, yes, probably, but I don't see what we could do about it."

"You wouldn't have to do anything, really. If you can give us a list, or let us copy one, I can get in touch with such people and see if they want to swap."

He shook his head. "We don't do it that way. If you give up your booking, someone else from the waiting list for that day will go in your place. You'll just lose out."

"You wouldn't permit us to exchange with someone sailing on the seventh, let us say?"

"Sorry."

I thought about it. There were always the airlines, of course, but I did not want to suggest to Ticky a 1400-mile flight over the ocean; she would rather have a tooth pulled. I knew now that over-water flights really frightened her.

Oh, well! If nine days was the best we could manage, nine days it would be. I knew I could talk her into flights over land; between airplanes and trains we could see quite a lot of Australia. It would be hard work, but we had managed to see a great deal of Africa on a similar tight schedule, and it did not really matter if we were exhausted by the time we sailed. I answered, "We'll keep the reservation we have. Do you have the ship's plan?"

He got it out. "This is your stateroom."

It was an inside room without a bath and seemed rather small. Ticky said, "Don't you have one with a bath?"

"Oh, no, there aren't any."

"But what are these?" I asked, pointing. "Eh? Oh, those are
de-luxe
cabins. I couldn't let you have one of
those
."

"Why not?"

"Why, they are booked. Everything is booked. You got the very last reservation."

His last remark was a gambit I have come to recognize. No doubt it is true one time each for each fully-booked voyage, but it is statistically impossible for it to be true as often as one hears it; what it often means is: "Shut up and consider yourself lucky."

So I pressed the matter. "We made the cash deposit for this reservation by mail from the United States to your main office in New Zealand nearly six months ago. Do I understand that all of those outboard cabins with bath were booked that long ago?"

He shrugged. "I really could not say. All I know is that the home office did not release any of them to me."

So I shut up. "All right, we'll take it." I got out a book of traveler's cheques. "How much is the balance?"

"Oh, I can't issue your ticket today."

"Why not? You have the reservation, I have here the receipt for the deposit, and here is the money for the balance."

"But you haven't made out your income tax. Or have you?"

"Income tax? What do you mean?"

He said patiently, "I can't sell you a ticket out of the country until you have filed your income tax return. Obviously."

"
Income
tax! Why, I'm hardly
in
the country as yet-we got off the ship not two hours ago. How could we possibly have made any money here?"