In a Sunburned Country, page 33
Thrilled to my cloaca, I followed the path around and back into the park proper, where I came after some time to a long, lovely avenue of tall white gum trees planted long ago to commemorate the fallen of World War I. Each tree bore a small plaque giving bare details—unexpectedly moving when read one after another down a long walk—of an abbreviated life. “In honour of Capt. Thomas H. Bone, 44th Batt.,” said one. “Killed in action Passchendaele 4th October 1917 aged 25. Dedicated by his wife and daughter.” It is a fact little noted outside Australia—and I think worth at least a mention here—that no other nation lost more men as a proportion of population in World War I than Australia. Out of a national population of under 5 million, Australia suffered a staggering 210,000 casualties—60,000 dead, 150,000 injured. The casualty rate for its soldiers was 65 percent. As John Pilger has put it: “No army was as decimated as that which came from farthest away. And all were volunteers.” Only a few days earlier, in one of the weekend papers I had read a review of a new history of World War I by the British historian John Keegan. In passing, the reviewer had noted, with an all but palpable sigh, that Keegan’s five hundred pages of densely observed text had failed to include a single mention of the Australian forces.
Poor Australia, I thought. Other countries produce unknown soldiers. It produces unknown armies. (Weeks later, in London, I checked the Keegan book and it was full of references to the Australian army. The conclusion to draw from this, I guess, is that Australians so expect to be overlooked that they sometimes overlook not being overlooked, so to speak.)
Beyond this somber avenue lay the much perkier and sunnier realm of the botanical gardens, and this I approached now with unusual devotion, for Australia’s plants are exceptional and there is no place where you will find them more handsomely displayed. Australia really is the most amazingly fecund country. It is thought to contain something on the order of 25,000 species of plants (Britain, for purposes of comparison, has 1,600 species) but that’s really only a guess. At least a third of what is out there has never been named or studied, and new stuff is turning up all the time, often in the most unlikely places. In 1989, in Sydney, for instance, scientists found an entirely new species of tree called Allacasuarina portuensis. People had been living around these trees for two hundred years, but because they weren’t very numerous—just ten have been found—no one had noticed them before. In much the same way, in 1994 in the Blue Mountains some botanist out for a walk happened on another of those unexpected relic species long presumed to be extinct. Called wollemi pines, these were not modest shrubs hidden among tall grasses, but stout and imposing trees up to 130 feet tall and 10 feet around. It’s just that with such a lot of land to survey and only so many botanists to go around, it took a while for the two to intersect. Nobody can guess, of course, what else might be out there awaiting discovery. This is, of course, what makes Australia such a fundamentally exciting place to engage in the natural sciences. In Britain or Germany or America you might with great luck find a new strain of mountaintop lichen or some sprig of previously overlooked moss, but in Australia take a stroll through the bush and you can find half a dozen unnamed wildflowers, a grove of Jurassic angiosperms, and probably a ten-kilo lump of gold. I know where I’d be working if I were in science.
The question that naturally occurs in all this is why Australia, which so often seems singularly hostile to life, has produced such an abundance of it. Paradoxically, half the answer lies in the very poverty of the soil. In the temperate world most plants can prosper in most places—an oak tree can grow as productively in Oregon as it can in Pennsylvania—and so a relatively few generalist species tend to predominate. In poor soils, on the other hand, plants are driven to specialize. One species will learn to tolerate soils containing, say, high concentrations of nickel, an element that other plants find distasteful. Another will become tolerant of copper. Yet another might learn to tolerate nickel and copper, and perhaps prolonged drought as well. And so it goes. After a few million years, you end up with a landscape filled with a great variety of plants each favoring very specific conditions and each master of a patch of ground that few other plants could abide. Specialized plants lead to specialized insects, and so on up the food chain. The result is a country that seems on the face of it hostile to life but in fact is wonderfully diversified.
The second, more obvious factor in Australia’s variety is isolation. Fifty million years as an island clearly sheltered indigenous life-forms from a great deal of competition and allowed certain of them—eucalypts in the plant world, marsupials in the animal world—to prosper uncommonly. But no less important in terms of species diversity is the isolation that has long existed within Australia. In general terms, Australia comprises scattered pockets of life separated by great zones of harshness. And nowhere is all of this more true than in southwestern Australia. According to David Attenborough (in The Private Life of Plants), this one corner of Australia “contains no less than twelve thousand different plant species and 87 per cent of them grow nowhere else in the world.”
Which makes it alarming to report that many of these singular plants are in trouble from a terrible and little-understood malady called dieback. Dieback comes from a fungus genus called Phytophthora, which is related to the fungus that caused the potato blight in Ireland. It has been in Australia for a century and has affected plants all over the country, though the source wasn’t identified by science until 1966. It is especially a worry in southwest Australia, partly because it thrives there as nowhere else and partly because the southwest has such a density of rare and vulnerable plants. I discovered now, from an informative signboard, that even banksias are under threat. The banksia (named for its discoverer, Joseph Banks) is perhaps the most adored flower in Australia. It’s a bit of an oddity—the flowers look uncannily like toilet brushes—but Australians love it because it is striking and it is everywhere and it is theirs alone. So it was discouraging to read that seven species of banksia are on the endangered list and could well become extinct in the wild in the next few years. Twelve more species are under threat. Perhaps it’s my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can. The most disturbing thought of all, I suppose, is that with so much still unrecorded many plants could disappear before they are even found.
All of this was of some moment because I was about to go off on a small botanical quest of my own. First, however, I had a day at leisure in Perth. I had nothing very particular in mind, but a few minutes later as I sat on the shady terrace of the park’s central café, decorating my face with a chocolatey froth of cappuccino and reading the West Australian newspaper, I came upon a news article that planted the possibility of an idea.
The article was to do with a man named Lang Hancock, about whom I had lately been reading. Hancock was a rancher in the remote north of Western Australia who had the exceptional good fortune to be at the heart of one of the greatest mineral booms in modern history. Anyone who doubts that Australia truly is a lucky country has only to review the story of the country’s mineral discoveries in the 1950s and a little beyond. Up until that time, conventional wisdom held that Australia was deficient in almost all natural resources. Iron ore, for instance, was considered to be in such short supply that for two decades it was illegal to export it. Then in 1952 Lang Hancock made an important discovery. While piloting a light aircraft over the trackless emptiness of the Hamersley Range near the north coast he lost his bearings in a sudden storm and made a forced landing in a zone of flat rock known to geology as the Western Shield. Stepping from his airplane, he realized that he was standing on almost solid iron. Looking into the matter further, he discovered that he owned a hundred-kilometer-long block of nearly solid iron ore. From almost nothing in 1950, Australia’s estimated reserves of iron ore rose to 20 billion tonnes in 1960. By the end of the 1960s Hancock alone controlled iron ore reserves greater than those of the United States and Canada combined. That is a lot of iron ore.
But it was only the beginning. In dizzying succession mineral deposits were found all over the place—bauxite, nickel, manganese, uranium, copper, lead, diamonds, tin, zinc, zircon, rutile, ilmenite, and many others that most of us have never heard of. Almost overnight, people with mining interests made fortunes that were embarrassing to contemplate and impossible to spend. The stock markets went crazy as investors scrambled to grab a piece of the action. In Sydney one broker lost an ear—an ear!—in the frenzied trading that accompanied the constant reports of new discoveries. It was a heady period, and it transformed Australia’s fortunes. From a sleepy, good-natured producer of wool, it became a mining colossus, the world’s biggest exporter of minerals. As many of the biggest finds were in Western Australia, much of the wealth settled in Perth, the state capital, which is what accounts for all its skyscrapers.
Lang Hancock, the man who started it all, was called to the great iron mountain in the sky in 1992, but in his dotage, it appears, he did that thing that brings dread to the hearts of rich children everywhere: he married his housekeeper, a lady from the Philippines named Rose. According to the morning paper, Hancock’s daughter had filed a lawsuit alleging that the widow Rose and the late Mr. Hancock had “lavishly and improperly spent money that was not their own.” Helpfully the article provided a sidebar in which Mrs. Hancock’s principal assets were listed. These included a A$35-million house in a Perth suburb called Mosman Park, complete with the address. It was apparently the grandest residence in the city; the chandeliers alone had cost A$3 million. Looking at my map of the city, I realized that Mosman Park was at the far end of a clutch of famously well heeled suburbs running all the way to Fremantle, and as it was a fine day and I was feeling perky, I decided to walk out.
Well, it’s a long way from central Perth to Mosman Park and beyond, that’s all I’m saying. I walked for hours, through the leafy sprawl of the University of Western Australia campus, and around the sunny foreshore of the Swan River estuary, tracing the sweep of sunny bays and yacht-cluttered coves, and made my way at length into residential zones of startling, showy wealth—Nedlands, Dalkeith, Peppermint Grove—where palatial houses basked in the penetrating sunshine. These neighborhoods went on for miles—just street after foot-wearying street of trophy homes, with big gates beside broad drives, patios adorned with Grecian urns on ornate plinths, and garages for fleets of cars. It was a stunning demonstration of the proposition that money and taste don’t always, or even often, go together. These were the houses of lottery winners, of retailers of the sort who appear in their own television commercials, of people for whom the words “Peppermint Grove” in an address would not be an embarrassment. I would not suggest for a moment that Australia’s nouveaux riches are more distant from refinement than the people of other lands, but the absence of a distinctive architectural vernacular in Australia does mean that people can take their styles from a wider range of sources—principally drive-in banks, casinos, upmarket nursing homes, and ski lodges. To see it massed over a spread of miles as in the western suburbs of Perth is certainly an absorbing experience.
I had been walking for nearly three hours when I arrived at a landmark called Chidley Point and realized I had found Mosman Park. I delved in my bag for the newspaper to check the address and discovered that I had evidently left it on the table at the café in Kings Park. Never mind. I had walked eight or nine miles by now and had seen enough extravagant real estate to last me a lifetime. I vaguely recalled the Hancock house as being on Wellington Street, so I found my way to this sedate thoroughfare and strolled along it. En route I saw perhaps eight houses that looked as if they might contain many million dollars’ worth of bricks, mortar, garden ornaments, and tinkling chandeliers, but nothing that announced itself unequivocally as the grandest pile in the metropolis. As I stood there, a young woman in shorts and a matching top—a professional dog walker, I supposed—came along behind a frisky dog not much smaller than a pony. She wasn’t so much walking the dog as skiing behind it on the soles of her shoes. I stepped into the street to keep from being eaten, but asked as she passed if she knew the Hancock house and she pointed to a place about three doors up. I went and had a look. Considering the cost, I have to say I had expected rather more—a sort of San Simeon meets Liberace’s dream mausoleum is what I believe I had in mind—but this was on a smallish lot and was neither particularly tacky nor outstandingly ornate. I studied it for a few minutes, struck by the somewhat tardy thought that although I had voluntarily invested a good deal of exertion to get here, I didn’t actually care in the tiniest degree where Rose Hancock dwelled. This notion absorbed, I turned with a thoughtful countenance and continued on my long march to the sea.
Although Fremantle (pop. 24,000) is now effectively just a coastal suburb of Perth, historically it is a separate community and ferociously defends its independent identity. You will even sometimes see it characterized as Perth’s sister city. Certainly it has a quite separate feel to it. In gold rush days it was a port of cosmopolitan liveliness, but then it sank into a long period of decrepitude. In the 1970s it underwent a gentrifying revival as people realized the commercial potential of its large stock of neglected Victorian buildings. So today it is a trendy hangout, a place of latte and gelato and little shops selling things of an arty nature. Everybody is fond of Freo, as they call it. So am I normally, though my enthusiasm was wilting swiftly this day. The afternoon was uncomfortably warm, with no sign of the ameliorating ocean breeze they call the Fremantle Doctor (because it makes you feel better, of course). I had already walked far enough to make my feet smoke when I realized that I still had a good four miles to go, nearly all of it along the busy, charmless, mercilessly shadeless Stirling Highway.
By the time I flopped into central Fremantle, it was late afternoon and I was comprehensively bushed. I went into a pub and downed a beer for medicinal purposes.
“You all right?” said the barmaid.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Why?”
“Seen your face?”
I knew at once. “Am I sunburned?” I asked bleakly.
She gave a frank, sympathetic, but essentially deeply amused nod.
I peered past her into the mirror behind the bar. Looking back at me, mockingly attired in clothes to match my own, was a cartoon character called Mr. Tomato Head. I allowed myself a small sigh. For the next four days I would be a source of concern to every elderly Western Australian and of amusement to all else. Then for three days more, as my skin flaked and peeled and I took on the look of someone just escaped from a leprosarium, the mood would change to universal horror and revulsion. Waitresses would drop trays; gawkers would walk into lampposts; ambulance drivers would slow as they passed and look me over carefully. It would, as always, be a quiet ordeal. In another three or four hours I would be in tender pain. Meanwhile, I was already a small wreck. My feet and legs hurt so much that I wasn’t sure that they would ever be of service to me again. I was as dirty as a street urchin and rank enough to be buried. And all of this so that I could see a house I had no actual interest in seeing and then walk on to a place that I was now too tired to explore.
But I hardly minded at all. And do you know why? I had seen a monotreme. Life could throw nothing at me that would diminish the thrill of that. Sustained by this thought, I drained my beer, lowered myself gingerly from the barstool, and limped through the staring crowds to see if I could find a taxi to take me back to the city.
IN THE MORNING I TOOK CUSTODY of another rental car and set off on the penultimate of my Australian quests. I was on my way to the great jarrah and karri forests of the southwest peninsula. If that sounds a trifle dull, then bear with me please, for these are exceptional trees. They are to the Australian arboreal world what the giant worm of Gippsland is to invertebrates: large, underappreciated, and mysteriously occurring in only one small area, the southwest corner of Western Australia below Perth. Karris are Australia’s sequoias. They attain heights of over 250 feet, but it is their amazing girth—they can be up to 50 feet around and scarcely taper on their climb to their distant crowns—that gives them their majesty. Think of the mightiest, most graceful sycamore you have ever seen, then triple it in every dimension and you have pretty well got a karri.
The dominant species of the region, however, is the handsome and noble jarrah, slightly less massive than the karri, but still enormous and arresting. It is something of a miracle that jarrahs are left at all, for it is just about the unluckiest tree alive. The specialization that allowed it to flourish in the first place was also its tragic undoing, for jarrah has the poor luck to thrive in soils rich in bauxite, and bauxite is a very valuable mineral. In the 1950s mining companies discovered the connection and came almost simultaneously to the exhilarating realization that they could knock down and sell the jarrah for quite a lot of money, then dig out all that gorgeously commercial bauxite underneath, thus getting two lots of income from one plot of land. Life doesn’t get much better than that—so long, of course, as your conscience can bear the thought of removing large stands of prime forest of a type that occurs nowhere else and replacing them with large, unsightly gashes. Mining engineers—these people are so ingenious—got around this problem by having no consciences at all. Brilliant!
In this they were long aided by their colleagues in the forestry industry. Australian foresters, it must be said, do rather like to chop down a tree. You can’t entirely blame them—it is, after all, how they make their livelihood—and unquestionably they are less reckless than in former times, but they were allowed to get away with so much for so long that they still need the most attentive watching. These are people, you must understand, who could describe clear-cutting as “the full sunlight method of regeneration” and not blush. Just to ease you into a sense of perspective here, Australia is the least wooded continent (Antarctica excluded, of course) and yet it is also the world’s largest exporter of wood chips. Now, I am no authority, and for all I know this is all managed with the most exacting care (that is certainly the impression the Australian Department of Conservation and Land Management strives to create), but it does seem to me that there is a certain mathematical discrepancy between having very few trees on the one hand and the world’s liveliest chip exporting industry on the other. Anyway, there is much less jarrah forest than there once was, and even a good deal less of the rare and clearly irreplaceable karri forests. According to William J. Lines, between 1976 and 1993 Australia lost a quarter of its karri forests to woodchipping. To woodchipping! I repeat: these people need watching.
