Australia: Mirage and Reality

...But to the untrained eye almost every gum tree is like another, and it is only in the primeval rain forests of Queensland, where more ancient trees edge out the gums, or where conifers have been planted, that the blue-green sameness of the landscape is relieved...

...I found it a country more conscious of class lines—and in this sense more akin to England—than any anglophone society outside the British Isles...

...Beyond that the desert begins and carries on with no real oases to the far western coast, where the cultivated region is even slighter and the new prosperity is due almost entirely to mineral riches...

...I doubt if there has been a people since the Greeks of antiquity more wholeheartedly devoted to sports than the Australians, and sooner or later, one expected, they would in their turn be winning the world's most prestigious prizes...

...We read the newspapers and the magazines, watched the television, listened to the radio, talked to everyone we met and in the process realized that the Australians are one of the most garrulous peoples in the world, a people afraid of silence except for those rare men who retreat far into the bush to escape the noise of civilization...

...I think it is mostly because they have been taken in by the forthright and breezy self-assurance Australians tend to display in their dealings with the outside world, the pose of a simple and direct people who know exactly where they are going and mean to get there...

...The gums are astonishing trees, nonetheless...

...The latter-day Australians, meanwhile, maintain that the "dinkum Aussies" spend their time swilling away their earnings in the pubs and resenting the newcomers, who work hard, save their money and contribute to the beneficial variegation of Australian life...

...The immense wheat crop of this year was pretty much ruined by excessive damp in areas where a year before the sheep had been denuding the ground by gnawing the very roots of the pastures...

...It is true that Australia is largely self-sufficient in basic foods, but its industrial base, with a stubborn 10 per cent unemployment rate, is hampered by an obsolete plant and outmoded practices...

...Its people will doubtless continue to be a little less well-housed and well-paid than their North American counterparts, but also a little more free from the fear of being involved in warlike adventures...

...I suspected that statement owed much to Gallic romanticism...

...The current appearance of bounding prosperity is largely deceptive, for it is really based on the great mineral deposits now being exploited in West Australia and on the uranium of the Northern Territory, a politically sensitive metal that is sorely dividing the ruling Labor Party...

...The salt water is never far away and a hilly contour hides characterful districts, such as the miniature Montmartre of King's Cross and the terraced artist's quarter of Paddington, where restored Victorian houses are balconied with the graceful "iron lace" made by 19th-century Australian craftsmen...

...We wandered unaided over the country, never meeting a public figure, never attending an academic seminar or a party of fellow writers, but encountering hundreds of ordinary inhabitants as we traveled by the excellently run local airlines and coach services and, within the cities, moved about on foot or by public transport...

...Even the pines and other alien trees that stand like propped-up corpses are eventually enveloped by the phoenix gum trees...

...Perth's St...

...After two hours I'd wake up and look out...

...Was Australia really, as L'Express further said, "the last dream of the decade, the end of the voyage, certainly the last frontier...

...Equally profound is the conflict between the native-born—the "dinkum Aussies"— and the new Australians, mainly those who have arrived since World War II...

...Patrick White, Joan Sutherland and Germaine Greer have been without serious Australian rivals in their fields, and George Woodcock, a frequent NL contributor, has written extensively on his travels, among many other topics...

...The world seems to need some place that it can attach its unfulfilled dreams to, and very often the choice it makes is an unlikely one...

...It can lead to absurd statements like the one made to me by a Perth airline agent, who—conveniently forgetting history —said Australia was virtually devoid of crime until the great waves of immigration from non-British countries began in the 1940s...

...Most of Australia—the vast outback— is desert of various kinds, unlikely ever to be redeemed...

...Robert Morley, the British actor, earned Australian resentment 30 years ago by saying the identical thing in a slightly different way: "It's so empty and featureless, like a newspaper that has been entirely censored...

...The very political configuration of the country, with its surprisingly regular alternation of Labor Party and National Party governments, reflects a conflict between property-owning and proletarian elements that goes back to the days of the convict settlements...

...In addition, the areas of bush and farm are subject not only to the forest fires that periodically sweep over large areas, but to alternations of drought and deluge as well...

...In desert lands like Australia such visions may exist as mirages, never as actuality...

...We'd seem to be in the same spot as before...

...These respond to the desire Australians share with neighboring New Zealanders to possess their own homes, however small, perhaps as places of refuge in the generally outgoing Australian life that still responds to the bush traditions of mate-hood...

...Although the claim stands no chance of being met, it shows a vast change in both aboriginal hopes and white tolerances compared with the situation a generation ago, when the aborigines did not have voting rights and were treated as merely the wards of white governments...

...The trees in its path turn black and look dead, yet in a few weeks green buds begin to break through, and in a couple of years, after the burned bark has fallen, it will seem as though a fire had never passed through...

...He stepped into the role of Prime Minister 'from the presidency of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, the country's biggest labor organization, having reached the position not as a blue-collar worker but as a labor lawyer who had been a Rhodes scholar...

...Hawke is a nimble-witted man, devoted to sports and matey enough to be approved (as Gallup polls show) by members of opposing parties...

...Families tend to hang together more than in North America, and clubs are important at every level in a society that retains a great deal of English class consciousness...

...He seems to be steering Australia on at least a promising survival course...

...The classic Australian resentment, stemming from inferiority feelings generated in the convict days, was against the British-born "Pommies...

...He described to me how in the 1940s, just after he arrived, he set off with a friend on an exploratory drive from Sydney into the outback and across the desert to Perth in the West...

...Indeed, the present myth of Australia, which made the French news magazine, L'Express, declare recently that "no other country, no other eldorado in the world can express or incarnate to such a point the hopes, the aspirations of the old world," is more than the sum of Australia's accomplishments, more even than the sum of its potentialities...

...many of its streets, lined with large old plane trees, have a flavor of Haussmann's Paris...

...We toured the Snowy Mountains and the Blue Mountains and the jungle-clad ranges of Queensland...

...Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, is the most aristocratic of Australian cities...

...A TRAVELER'S NOTEBOOK Australia: Mirage and Reality BY GEORGE WOODCOCK Every generation has its land of promise, its real country that acquires mythical status and seems to hold out the fulfillment of our unrealized desires...

...But it had become strong enough to stir my curiosity and lead me, along with many other people these days, to visit there and see for myself...

...George's Terrace, looking out over the broad blue expanse of the Swan River estuary, is lined by the best-architected series of office towers I have seen anywhere in the world...

...That is the charm of Australia...

...The Australian novelist Patrick White—whose writing style is as far from his native vernacular as Henry James' was from the American—was awarded the Nobel Prize...

...When he was nominated to the leadership of the Australian Labor Party in 1983 and went on to take the party to an election victory that March, he had been a member of Parliament for only three years...

...For beneath the image of Australia as a country of supreme masculine confidence setting off into an assured future, there lies the reality of an Australia deeply divided in the present and still afflicted by a past it has long tried to ignore...

...So also was Arabia in the days of Doughty and Thesiger, before its mirages were replaced by oil rigs...

...What I did recognize with some caution was that all these friends had gone for relatively short periods...

...Yet why have so many visitors been led to proclaim that the 1900s will end up as Australia's Century...

...one could well class them as the single swallows that do not necessarily make summers...

...Other great export items— wheat, meat and wool—are as dependent on volatile markets as on the unpredictable weather...

...Immigration policy, until recently dominated by the concept of white Australia, has similarly shifted so far that this year—apart from Britain—Hong Kong will provide the largest number of newcomers...

...So I was resolved to go, as I have usually gone to strange countries, without prearrangements, and prepared to make use of the clutch of introductions I carried only if my wife or I needed help in some emergency...

...We visited the farmlands and the vineyards, the sheep stations and the cattle ranges, the old mining districts and the small towns on the edge of the bush that are commemorated in the Aussie saying, "If you've seen Dubbo, mate, you've seen 'em all...

...He is not a professional politician...

...Men wear gray toppers to the races...

...of the old world...

...The United States was once such a never land for downtrodden Europeans...

...the last dream of the decade...

...These achievements in themselves were not entirely surprising...

...After the influx first of continental European and then of Asian immigrants, this became diffused into a generalized xenophobia...

...Add to this a victory in the America's Cup, followed by winning the Davis Cup and preceded by Patrick White's Nobel Prize, and the idea begins to appear convincing—despite its embodying an oddly archaic image of a land devoted to the good clean manly sports that dissipate evil thoughts...

...So, in the age of Robert Louis Stevenson and Gauguin, were the islands of the South Pacific...

...Whatever the justice on either side, the conflict between the old and new Australians runs deep, and it is complicated by the rising arguments between aborigines and whites over land and profitable mineral rights...

...There are no perfect societies, and there never have been any...

...We went to all the six states of the Commonwealth and to every region except the heart of the desert, which was deluged during our trip by a rare rainstorm that wholly disrupted road, rail and air transport for a couple of weeks...

...Aside from Canberra, the handsome and spacious Commonwealth capital that is an artificial political creation devoted entirely to government, the capital cities, the centers of culture, commerce and industry, are all on the sea-coast—from subtropical Brisbane southward to cool Hobart facing the Antarctic, and westward to remote Perth on the Indian Ocean...

...Recently the National Aboriginal Council put in a claim for the whole of West Australia and its waters up to the 200-mile international limit...

...By the end of our stay in Australia I was certain that this great fringed desert, with its tentative artistic flourishes and an economy hardly superior to those in the rest of the Western world, had no better title than any other middle power to being regarded as the country of the future...

...The marginality of Australian life is obvious when one glances at the map...

...The great rainstorms of early 1984 were the peak of a wet season that terminated almost five years of drought...

...Perhaps Australia could at this time have no better Prime Minister than Bob Hawke to guide it through its social disunities and economic perplexities toward a more stable, if not a more just or prosperous, future...

...There are 700 species of eucalyptus along the way, a botanist told me, and one might think they make for immense variety in the landscape...

...Sydney is one of the world's great harbor cities, in the same league as Vancouver and San Francisco...

...The light of Australia, like the light of southern California in the early days of Hollywood, is perfectly fitted to combine with an awakening sense of the country's past in producing a good plein-air film industry...

...A Norwegian long resident in the country understood my feeling...

...We used to drive for miles, always expecting that round the next corner there would be something to look at, and there never was...

...For me the three most striking features of Australia as a land and as a society were its marginality, its urbanization, and—outside the blessed variety of its cities—its devastating monotony...

...Elsewhere in the East the cultivated land pushes 100 or 200 miles back to the Great Dividing Range...

...Australia, in fact, is marginal in more than its patterns of seacoast settlement, since economically the country remains, rather like Canada, dominated by primary industry...

...like New Zealand, Australia has suffered from the agricultural policies of the European Common Market and from the difficulties of selling meat to fundamentalist Islamic countries like Iran...

...But it is hardly the land of the future that incarnates "the hopes...

...Australians snatched the America's Cup for yachting out of American hands, and won the Davis Cup for tennis and the World Marathon...

...In what is apparently the first arrangement of its kind, China has become a partner in a consortium to mine iron ore in West Australia for use in mainland steel plants...

...When a forest fire breaks out, it is an explosion rather than a conflagration, for the air that is often hazily blue with the volatile oil exuded from them will ignite and the fire will run as a burning wind through the forest at 25 miles an hour...

...And so, in a more mysterious way because of its inaccessibility, was Tibet when explorers like Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein were scouting around its borders...

...We stayed in each of the capitals—Canberra, Sydney, Hobart, Adelaide, Perth, Melbourne, and Brisbane...

...Australia's reversal of image has been partly the result of an impressive concatenation of events...

...Once one understands the dimensions of this ubiquitous machismo, then everything Germaine Greer has said or done becomes not merely understandable but justified...

...If the suburbs, which in Sydney and Melbourne stretch 20-30 miles in every direction, are uniformly hideous, the metropolises themselves are often congenial, partly because of the casual, open-air feeling the Mediterranean climate of Australia encourages...

...Fortunately, we did not...

...Monotony engulfs the whole countryside, from the verges of the cities to the crests of the mountains—actually big scrub-covered hills...

...The best we can hope to do is evolve a steadily more humane pattern of relationships, and here, welcoming Asian immigrants and listening at last to the claims of aborigines, Australia is doing as well in its piecemeal way as any Western society...

...The need to expand and to diversify trade, as much as the need for mutual defense arrangements, explains why in foreign affairs Australia has moved away from a Commonwealth and a subsequent American orientation toward an Asian one...

...that as architects, film makers and academics they had been involved in the areas where modern Australia happens to excel...

...Today's country of the future is perhaps the most unlikely of all: Australia, which for generations had seemed to everyone, except "dinkum Aussies," the epitome of distant dullness...

...A recent report of the Geneva-based European Management Forum rated Australia 18 th in terms of industrial efficiency among the leading 22 industrialized nations of the Western world...

...I'd give up the wheel to my friend," hesaid, "and go to sleep in the rear seat...

...The single completely fertile state is the relatively small island of Tasmania...

...It has strengthened links with Malaysia and Singapore, with Indonesia and Japan, and of late with mainland China...

...Adelaide in South Australia is a compact Aristotelian little capital, its square-mile plan unchanged from the one Colonel Light drew up in the colonial 1830s, and standing within an unbroken belt of parks that separates it on every side from the suburbs...

...Australian films suddenly began to gain credit in international circles, and an Australian publisher presumed to buy up the London Times...

...Still, I was impressed by the views of acquaintances of mine, individuals of undoubted taste and intelligence who had returned from Australia with glowing reports of the vitality of the culture and the confidence exhibited by the people...

...and that they had been the guests of those who showed them the best the country had to show...

...The drift to the cities—where the adjacent seacoast is always available for relaxation—is understandable in view of the country's physical extremities...

...The Australian singer Joan Sutherland became one of the world's leading opera stars, and Junoesque Germaine Greer one of its most controversial feminist spokeswomen...

...It originates, like all myths of this kind, in the mind of the observer as much as in objective reality...

...Although Australia has a reputation for devotion to the outdoor life, the vast majority of its people live in the cities, with their immense suburban sprawls of little houses on small lots...

...The proportions of Asians in the population will reach 3 per cent, enough to set off a Yellow Peril scare 10 years ago...

...and this is complemented by the elegant light-oriented architecture of the downtown shopping plazas, where money speaks loudly...