The Happy Isles of Oceania Page 4

My idea was that my trip, beginning as a publicity tour on which I would be speaking – or more properly, waffling on – about my own work, would end as a trek in the wilderness. Perth was the first of the five Australian cities I had agreed to visit, to give lectures at literary lunches and submit to interviews. For me, it was total immersion from the first, because Australia is a country of readers and viewers, among the best informed and most outward-looking people in the world, and with the most predatory journalists in the business – they rejoice in being “journos” and hacks in a place that is saturated in newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Australia is full of news media but generates very little national news; so the media are hungry, they retail the world’s news and culture and any newcomer – author, actress, politician, fellow hack – is pounced upon. Anyone is fair game – anyone from beyond the Great Barrier Reef.

  And it was total immersion for another reason: Australians have the American habit of greeting most outsiders as though they are potential immigrants. They reserve some of their most picturesque mockery for such people, referring to Jewish refugees as “refujews,” Italians as “ding-bats,” “eyetoes,” “spiggoties,” and “spagies.” New Zealanders are “pig islanders,” and the English are “poms,” “pommies,” or “pongos.” They seem to have invented the word “chink” for Chinese – they were certainly the first to use it, in 1879, twenty-two years before it was recorded in America; but they also refer to Chinese as “canaries,” “dinks,” and “chow-chows.” Americans are universally “yanks” or “yank wogs,” and the English are occasionally “porn wogs.” This distinguishes them from the real McCoy, known in Australia as “wog wogs.” This is not to be taken as abuse, but rather as an obscure but none the less genially Australian form of hospitality.

  Here I was among the “sandgropers” – the term the rest of the country uses to describe Western Australians – in Perth, a big brand-new boom city surrounded by empty bush, tall buildings in the middle of nowhere, with the scale and optimism and much of the brightness of a place like Portland, Oregon. It was a good place to start a life in, which was what a lot of the people I met seemed to be doing – they had come from South Africa, from Europe, even from America.

  Australia is the only country in the world I have visited where Americans in large numbers have made serious efforts to put down roots. Thirty years ago, when the so-called White Australia Policy was in full swing, they – and other nationalities – set sail because it was a country of white exclusionists; and any number of pale jug-eared boofheads were eager to become migros and have their passage paid by a desperate government grateful for white workers. Now they go for the opposite reason, because Australia seems politically even-handed and has become, racially, a free-for-all. Many Americans there said to me, “I consider myself an Australian.” Not once in eighteen years of living in Britain did I ever hear a transplanted American say, “I consider myself British.”

  I traipsed around Fremantle harbor, right next door to Perth, wondering whether I should launch my collapsible kayak. But the wind blasting off the Indian Ocean was much too strong for me. Out past the surf zone the strangely shaped sheep-carrier ships toppled in the heavy swell. They were like floating ten-storey buildings, and packed closely into open wire cages were thousands of live sheep, off to the Persian Gulf to be slaughtered by the halal method-throat-slashed, facing Mecca. It is a fact that most of the mutton in Arabia comes from Meganesia. Australia supplies the jumbucks for stews; and the majority of New Zealand lambs end up on shish-kebab skewers in Iran and Iraq.

  My books made a sea voyage to Australia, and two editions had just arrived, a novel and a travel book. I was beginning my Australian tour by publicizing both of them. And so I did the rounds of interviews.

  “What’s your opinion of the Chinese people?” a woman journalist in Perth asked me on behalf of her magazine, and I reminded her that this was not an easy question, as there were one billion Chinese people.

  “How long does it take to write a book?” was another question I pondered over until I realized that I did not have the answer.

  The supplementary question to this was, “Do you respect the main character in your novel?”

  That puzzled me. Was this a sample of the sort of question I could expect in the rest of Australia? I said yes, I respected all the characters in my books, and I thought: Even you, digger, if ever you become a character.

  But there were questions I could easily answer.

  “What’s the main difference between a novel and a travel book?” a man asked me over lunch in Fremantle, holding a tape recorder under my chin.

  It seemed to me an easy matter to be a journalist in this part of Australia. For example, one day I was wakened from a nap in Fremantle (I had been having a nightmare about suffering from cancer), and hurried to a Perth newspaper, an easy-to-remember tabloid called the Daily Mail, for it had made itself famous by printing a big beefcake picture each day, entitled “Your Daily Male.”

  I was asked to wait for ten or fifteen minutes, and then I was escorted to a cubicle where an eighteen-year-old boy was sitting at a tidy desk. One feature of this cubicle interested me: there were little snipped-out pictures of Elvis Presley taped to his blotter, his noticeboard, his calendar, and even on the dial of his telephone.

  “Been in Perth long?”

  No, I said. I had just flown at great expense and enormous personal inconvenience from America via New Zealand to join him at his desk here in a big building off the Mitchell Freeway, on the outskirts of Perth, Western Australia. He made no comment on this, didn’t even make a note on his clean pad; so I asked him about the Elvis pictures.

  He smiled – glad that I had asked. He said, “I just fell for him.”

  He turned his gaze onto the snipped-out and yellowing pictures of the doomed American singer. In the long silence that ensued I wondered whether I should ask another question. Then the boy looked at me, as though remembering where he was.

  “Well, where shall we begin?” he said smoothly.

  It was not a rhetorical question, so I said, “Have you read anything I’ve written?”

  “No,” he said with hearty confidence – it was as though he was boasting.

  “Perhaps you saw the movie of The Mosquito Coast?”

  “Oh, yes. I liked that.” And he doodled on the pad.

  “Now you can read the book!” I said, and felt I had made a breakthrough.

  “No. I’ll never read that book. Because I really liked the movie. I mean, I liked it too much. What if I read the book and didn’t like it?”

  I was staring at him, but he had leaned over urgently to divulge a confidence.

  “Then the movie would be spoiled for me,” he said, and tapped his pad. “It’s too much of a risk.”

  “Too much of a risk. I see.”

  We got nowhere. Perhaps there was nowhere to get? I turned the conversation to Elvis, and we chatted about him.

  The young man saw me to the door and asked me the only literary question of the interview.

  “How do you get your characters? You just think them up?”

  “Sometimes I think them up,” I said. “And sometimes they appear before my eyes.”

  “Good on yer!”

  These clumsy encounters sometimes left me feeling alienated and depressed. That night I was the guest speaker at a literary dinner at the Fremantle Town Hall, a lovely gilded building – like many in this beautifully preserved harbor town – put up to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Jubilee in 1896. I felt wobbly with sleeplessness and I began to worry that I would burst into tears if anyone mentioned my wife.

  Almost the first thing anyone asked me at the Town Hall was, “So you didn’t come with your wife!”

  I went to the men’s room and sighed and almost sobbed, and then I washed my face and joined the others at the head table. I thought, I am the shakiest person in this entire room and I’m the one who has to get up and speak.

  The woman on my left said,
“Roald Dahl was here last month with his wife.”

  I went quiet. The meal was served. Four hundred and fifty people, all talking at once, and drinking, and having a wonderful time. Looking at them and hearing their laughter I lost my appetite.

  The woman on my right said that she worked in a bookstore and that I was one of her favorite authors. She said, “You should write some short stories!”

  Was this another Australian leg-pull? I said, “I’ve written some.”

  “Why don’t you publish them?”

  Australians are famous for being familiarly sarcastic in this obvious way, but in my solemnity I became very literal.

  “I did.”

  “I mean publish them in a book.”

  “I’ve published four collections. About eighty stories.” The woman on my left said that she had lived in Perth for about fifteen years.

  “It seems very nice,” I said. “Fremantle is very pretty, and Perth reminds me of an American city in the Pacific Northwest. All this clean air.”

  “I hate it,” she said. “This is like another planet. The people in Perth are so strange. I can’t describe it. I felt happier in Africa, among Africans.”

  The next sound I heard was a man clearing his throat loudly into a microphone, and enthusiastically introducing me.

  I did not have a prepared speech. I made some, remarks about traveling in general and I spoke anecdotally about China, which was the subject of one of the books I was supposed to be promoting. This sort of speechifying is an awkward business. You feel you are being scrutinized, like someone looking for work. You feel that you are standing here talking your head off so that at the end of it they will say, He seems an awful nice bloke, Fred. Let’s buy his book.

  As I stood there, speaking, I noticed a large man lurch out of his chair at a table at the back of the hall. He still had a glass in his hand, but he put it down as he staggered forward. He was well over six feet tall and very heavy – fat as a paddy, as he himself might have put it. He wore a long overcoat, and there was anger in the way he moved towards me – for that indeed was his direction. The hall was so spacious that it was quite a while before anyone else saw him. I watched him advancing upon me, as I spoke about the death penalty in China. And now a woman, much smaller than he, took hold of his arm and tried to restrain him. The way he tipped her over and dragged her told me that he was an engine of determination.

  Was he going to throw up? Was he going to shout? Perhaps he was going to attack me?

  I faltered and stopped speaking when he broke free of the woman and stood menacing me before all the diners. He thrust his fingers at me, making obscene gestures and gargling, while the woman – surely an embarrassed companion? – heaved herself at his coat.

  “You’re a wanker, mate!” he said. “You’re a fucking wanker!”

  There were hisses of distress and clucks of disapproval from the uneasy audience. Yet no one rose to eject him. Only that tiny tenacious woman was doing anything – now she was dragging him sideways, as he fought to shake his fat fingers at me.

  By this time I had abandoned any pretense of continuing my talk, and I simply waited for him to rush forward and bash me and throttle me in front of the Fremantle Literary Dinner. I prayed that the woman tugging at him would be strengthened. My prayer was answered, as she pulled the huge brute to the door. Then he was gone. But not for long. A moment later, like the corpse that springs alive to scare you in the horror movie, he lurched powerfully through the door and shouted, “You fucking wanker!” And he was dragged away once again.

  “People like that call the Chinese ‘chinks’ and say they have awful manners,” I improvised nervously. I mumbled some more and then I abandoned the effort.

  He was just drunk, people said later. Probably hates books. His missus made him come to the dinner. Probably thought you were boring. Couldn’t take any more of it.

  One recent migrant explained to me, They’re pretty frank, the Aussies. They don’t mind telling you to fuck off if they don’t like you. I mean, they’ll just look at you and say, “Get stuffed” – right to your face.

  Another said, I had my eye on that big bloke. I was watching him. Hey, I could have handled him. I’ve done martial arts.

  I did not dare to confess that I had been afraid, and that I had fully expected him to attack me. His being drunk didn’t seem like much of an explanation in a country where most of the men seemed drunk most of the time.

  I heard even odder things, as I sat at a table and signed copies of my books. It is impossible to anticipate the oblique and nervous utterances of readers jostling. I thought you were taller, they say. I thought you were younger. When did you shave off your beard? or My husband and I are going to India next month – can you recommend an inexpensive hotel in Darjeeling? or You should use a word processor, or You’re my mother’s favorite author – will you come to her birthday party? It’s Tuesday.

  A scowling woman, with the face of an emu, stared me down at Fremantle Town Hall and shook a copy of my book at me.

  “I’ve never read anything by you,” she said. “This better be good.”

  Another peered at me pityingly and said, “Why do you hate Australians?”

  And while more people filed past, with books for a signature, or with non sequiturs, a man stood just behind me and breathed into my ear, “You’re pissed off, aren’t you? Admit it – go on. You hate doing this. You hate these people. You’re pissed off.”

  I turned to him and said, “Friend, this is my living.”

  When I was done I walked the windy streets of Fremantle, and it did seem to me a very precarious place, half a town on a little surfy strand, between the ocean and the desert. White Australia.

  “Where are the Aboriginals?” I asked any number of people in the days that followed.

  Most of them shrugged, some of them jerked a thumb in the direction of the outback.

  “In Woop Woop,” one said, explaining that it was the generic name for the uttermost place in Australia.

  After that, whenever anyone asked me where I really wanted to go in Australia, I said, “Woop Woop.”

  But first I had to finish visiting these cities. I went to Melbourne by plane, two thousand miles away, across the great Australian emptiness, where Australians say nothing at all lives.

  They call this the Paris end of Collins Street, someone said to me in Melbourne. Many people told me how European-looking it was: the brownstone churches, the venerable railway stations and the marshaling yard and the trams and the soot.

  But no, I didn’t think so. It was more spacious, much younger, and had more the aspect of a city in the American Mid-West. European cities have a damaged and repaired look. Melbourne’s most American feature was that it was obviously a city that had never been bombed.

  My various encounters in Perth had given me pause, just as though I had been stung. I became wary. And after that, my overriding feeling, facing a large seated crowd of people in Australia, any gathering at all, or dealing with these people in banks or restaurants or on street corners or in taxis – buying something or just passing the time of day – my feeling, as I say, or to be more precise, my fear, was that they were not being polite to me but simply restraining themselves. Nothing personal. They just wanted to hit me.

  Australians (it seemed to me) were people who appeared to be at ease when in fact they were simply controling their emotions, and being on good behavior, because the slightest relaxation of this stiffened vigilance would have them howling. They were like people who had only recently been domesticated, like youths in their late teens sitting among adults, rather upright and formal and wooden, because as soon as they loosen their grip or have one beer too many they slip into leering familiarity and all hell breaks loose. What you took to be good manners was simply the forced, self-conscious behavior of someone holding on. Much of the time they had the exaggerated and unconvincing manners of drunks pretending to be sober.

  A friend of mine had emigrated in the six
ties to Monash(“The Farm” – it was a country of fond nicknames), a university near Melbourne. He told me, “Australians are aggressive and envious, but they’ll end up liking you.”

  In Melbourne I saw my first Aboriginal. He was at a street corner, pushing the button at a crosswalk, waiting for the Walk sign to click on before he could venture across. I watched him from a little distance and wondered why I found this solitary man so strange. It was not his smooth face or matted hair, his lopsided posture or broken shoes. It was the very fact of his being there on the curb. Because there were no cars on the street. Because it was his country. Because this nomad was seeking permission to walk.

  “They hate the Abos, really hate them,” a newish immigrant from the north of England said to me. “The things they say amaze me – the hate, I mean. Me, I don’t care one way or the other. Sometimes I look at them and feel really sorry for them, though –”

  People talked about them; and I looked for them; but they seemed not to exist. They were less than shadows. They were lost in the crowd, and those Aboriginals who had become city-dwellers lived in locations that were given a wide berth by everyone else.

  My question, “Are there many Aboriginals here?” was usually answered by an Australian saying, “Too bloody many.” But where were they?

  Meanwhile, I was the one who was supposed to be answering the questions.

  “With all this traveling of yours doesn’t your wife miss you?”

  My wife and I are calling it quits.

  “Yes, I think she does,” I said.

  “You go to such strange places, how do you stay so healthy?”

  As a matter of fact, I might have cancer.

  “I never drink the water,” I said.

  “Don’t you ever get diarrhea in these countries?”

  Constantly.

  “No. Usually constipation,” I said.

  “You’re so cheerful. But your books are so depressing at times.”

  Exactly. Because I feel alienated and depressed. Particularly now.

  “Are you planning to write a book about Australia?”