Going Back to the Nation

The Question on the customs form was, at first glance, rather puzzling. "Do you have any semen to declare?" Perhaps it was because I had just spent 24 hours or so strapped into the seat of the aircraft and my mind was numb from the experience. My immediate reaction was to assume that someone had hit upon a novel if unorthodox solution to the Australian problem of underpopulation. I imagined for a moment that we would be led into cubicles when we landed and there, under the scrutiny of state geneticists, we would be mated with specimen bottles. Then I read the form again and realized they meant animal semen, so I wrote no and tightened the seat belt. A sunlit tapestry of red roofs and greenery, bordered on the east with yellow beaches and the deep-blue expanse of the Pacific, tilted beneath our wings; we were over the suburbs of Sydney—the first city we had seen since crossing the continent at a point about 2000 miles to the northwest.

After two centuries of European occupation, Australia is still one of the biggest empty spaces in the world, covering an area almost the size of the continental United States but inhabited by no more than 13,000,000 people, most of whom live in the southeast quarter of the mainland in coastal towns and cities. Sydney contains nearly a fourth of the total population, and Melbourne, Australia's second city, some 450 miles south, has almost as many. A popular demographic cliché maintains that if you stand on top of the highest buildings in both cities, you can see the homes of more than half the populace. The rest of the country, by contrast, is virtually deserted: Queensland, where the first prize in a 1971 charity raffle was 5000 acres of land, is bigger than Alaska and has less than 2,000,000 inhabitants; the adjacent Northern Territory is almost twice as big as Texas and has 85,000, while Western Australia, largest of the six states—its boundaries could accommodate France, Japan, Italy, the British Isles and both Germanys, with ample room left over for California, Florida and much of New England—has little more than a million residents, most of whom live in Perth, the west-coast capital.

Though much of the land is useless for agriculture and more than a third of it lies in the tropics, geographers have calculated that with more efficient conservation of water resources, Australia could feed and support a population of 450,000,000. Yet current projections envisage a figure no higher than 50,000,000 by the year 2073. In the second quarter of last year, departures surpassed arrivals by 12,000; the government attributed this to the introduction of cheap air fares to Europe, but the fact remains that the country faces a continuing decline in immigration, and for the past two years a national survey team has been trying to find out why more than a third of the 2,500,000 immigrants since 1945 have packed up and left. Despite this evidence of what may appear to be disillusionment with the new New World, millions of foreigners think Australia would be the ideal place to start a new life; a 1971 Gallup Poll, for instance, showed that more than 8,000,000 Americans would like to live there. About 50,000 have taken the plunge since 1964, but at least 20 percent of these, according to the latest figures available for American migrants, didn't like what they found and came home.

My own reason for going was to see as much as I could and to write about it. I knew very little about the country; I had no itinerary, no plans and no commitments. Nor did I have a list of names and contacts on which to draw for social sustenance. Not knowing anyone and not knowing what to expect, I planned simply to write about what happened to me. I assumed there would be familiar landmarks because of the country's roots in Britain and its ties with the United States; but I had the vague feeling that, aside from these, everything would be somehow new, completely different from anything I had known before.

After a drive from Sydney's airport through a suburban landscape of red-brick bungalows, neat front lawns, shopping centers, used-car lots, gas stations and supermarkets, I checked into a large air-conditioned hotel in the main business district, which, with its tall office buildings, congested traffic and the clatter of new construction, might have been the center of any typical American city of medium size. I felt as though I had traveled halfway around the world in search of the last frontier, only to find myself in a sunnier, cleaner version of Pittsburgh. Perhaps after I had slept for nine hours to make up for the jet-lag trauma of a full day's flying, Sydney would look different. With that thought in mind, I slumped into the hotel elevator with my baggage, escorted by a bellboy whose name tag identified him as Bernard.

Bernard informed me, before the doors closed, that he had moved to Sydney from London six years before and was very happy with his new life, although he missed snow. He was a diminutive, cheerful youth whose speech betrayed not a trace of Australian inflection but was still unmistakably Cockney, and I was about to ask him more about Australia, what he liked or didn't like, when his amiable face was suddenly distorted by a spasm of such violent intensity that it appeared every facial muscle must have been employed in its production. He came out of it shaking his head like a man with water in his ears. We didn't speak for the remainder of the elevator ride. Bernard seemed to be in deep thought, nodding frequently and earnestly engaged in the solution of an intricate dilemma.

There was a convention of ASTA—the American Society of Travel Agents—meeting in Sydney that week and many of the delegates were staying at my hotel. A few had been checking in when I arrived. I was reminded of this, indirectly, by Bernard's next remark, delivered when he unlocked the door to my room.

"You must be wiv the Ascot conviction," he said. "One of the gelignites, are you?"

Without waiting for an answer to this cryptic inquiry, he dumped the luggage inside the door and immediately switched on the TV, rubbing his hands in the expectant manner of a gourmet anticipating a banquet. He then began to demonstrate the procedure for operating a television set.

"See this knob 'ere, then, the one marked 'On'?" he asked, favoring me with the appraising look a skilled craftsman might bestow upon an apprentice. "This is wot makes it work. Put it to 'On'—like this, see?—and when it warms up, you get your picture. Wunnerful, innit?" He beamed proudly.

"If you wannit louder, turn this 'ere, where it says 'Volumes'—'urts yer ears, dunnit?—and for soft, it goes the uvva way. Four channels in Sydney—oo, look, 'ere's the picture." The image crackled onto the screen and Bernard sat down heavily on the end of the bed. "One of my favorites, this is," he said contentedly, and proceeded to chew his fingernails and spit the discards onto the carpet.

There was something unusual about Bernard's attitude toward his work. I had tipped him and he hadn't left. I began to entertain the fantasy that someone in authority would miss him and come and take him away before it got dark. I tried running a bath to draw his attention to my not unreasonable wish to be alone. It didn't work. I took off my shirt and laid out fresh clothes. Bernard sat there transfixed by the sight of cowboys flashing across the screen. "Aaargh, oo's that bloke?" he cried, leaning forward and disengaging a thumb from his teeth. "Oh, yeah, issole wossname, innit?—that geezer oo comes in from wotsitcalled and finds this fing inna woods. You remember."

I had decided to resort to more direct persuasion when Bernard switched off the set and strode rapidly to the window and slid it open, admitting a blast of wind that scattered all the papers I had unpacked.

"Akcherly, you don't need to open this," he said, closing it again. "We're fully air commissioned 'ere. That fing on the wall is yer automated fermistack." He began darting around the room, pointing at things. "Ashtrays. This one could do wiv a polish"—dribbling into the bowl and wiping it with his jacket sleeve—"Bible in 'ere, look. Extra pillers, coat 'angers, spare blanket. It's all 'ere." He patted each object as he went by.

"Menu. It's got food on it."

"That's good. I'll look later. I'm really tired."

"Free matches, phone book."

"Right."

"Light switches. Up and down, see?"

"I'm going to take a bath and go to bed, Bernard," I said. "Thanks for everything."

"Telephone," he said with a dramatic gesture. "Go on, try it. Speak into that end. Bloody marvelous, innit?"

"Wonderful. I'll definitely call if I need anything. Got to catch up on some sleep now."

We had reached the door. Bernard hovered at the threshold, casting a speculative squint at the lock. "Doorknob," I said, guessing it first.

He looked pleased. "You'll be all right," he said. "What you should do now you've got the 'ang of everything is 'ave a nap. You look all worn out."

The encounter with Bernard, my first prolonged meeting with a resident, was reassuring. The fact that he was employed in a useful capacity in the front line of service to the community implied one of two things to me: Either the hotel labor shortage was on the dark side of critical or public tolerance of the less conventional members of society was extremely high. I hoped it was the latter, because it indicated that the rest of the population would be easygoing and kind to strangers. I remembered a man I had seen on the way to the hotel. He wore a sort of Teddy Roosevelt Roughrider's uniform and carried a handwritten sign around his neck proclaiming that psychiatrists were criminal lunatics. I was to see him frequently while I was in Sydney, but the expression on his face suggested that his grievance was an issue he didn't care to discuss, and so we never spoke.

I rented a car the following morning and started to explore the city, setting out with the hope that each new turn would bring me face to face with something foreign and unfamiliar. But as the day wore on, the hope diminished and faded with the realization that however pleasant and unhurried a place Sydney might be, and however agreeable the climate, there was nothing one could do there that one couldn't just as easily do somewhere else. That night I went to Kings Cross to see what made it "a colorful blend of Soho, the Left Bank and Greenwich Village," which is how the Cross is described in a guidebook written by a local enthusiast. An intensive tour of the neighborhood led me to the suspicion that this vision of bohemia was conceived by someone not closely acquainted with London, Paris or New York. The district's most prominent feature, apart from a small contingent of streetwalkers, is a short block of souvenir stores, fast-food stands, strip shows and boutiques, with a few sedate restaurants and a couple of luxury hotels to lend tone to the neighborhood. By midnight I had the street to myself, except for a soldier who was being violently sick at the entrance to the Texas Tavern and two stoned youths who sat on the curb outside the locked doors of a head shop.

Although the newspapers were filled with night-life announcements—Sydney has more than a dozen legitimate theaters and hundreds of bars, discothèques, night clubs and cabarets—I got the impression after making the rounds for several evenings that most Sydneysiders prefer other forms of entertainment after dark, which is borne out by the fact that the biggest crowds are found in social clubs such as the local equivalent of the Rotarians and the Returned Soldiers' League, where members can drink beyond the legal hour of ten P.M. It's not impossible for tourists to gain admission to these establishments (if they know a member), but it's questionable whether people who have traveled halfway around the world to come to Australia would consider the privilege of drinking after ten o'clock an irresistible enticement.

During the next few days, in my search for something—anything—unique and memorable, I drove across the city a half-dozen times, taking a different route on each occasion. I toured the magnificent harbor by boat twice, enjoyed some excellent meals in local restaurants and broke even at the Randwick race track. I walked for miles, saw all the mandatory landmarks, listened to the public speakers in the park on Sunday and went up a couple of towers to look at hazy panoramas of suburbia. If it had been winter (which corresponds to our summer months), I could have gone skiing in the Snowy Mountains, which lie some 200 miles to the south. The skiable terrain there, I learned, is larger than Switzerland, and one of the peaks is higher than 7000 feet, which tops anything in New England. Unfortunately, it was summer. Though Sydney is abundantly endowed with facilities for outdoor recreation, one really needs a yacht, surfboard, powerboat, water skis or camping and fishing gear, all of which I lacked.

By the end of the week, I was in a state of advanced readiness to leave, having by then formed the notion that I was trapped in a time machine with the control dial stuck at Recent Past. When I switched on the radio, I heard an authentic replica of vintage American AM, complete to the finest nuance, with the booming, confident thunder of supergenial disc jockeys, a string of bad jokes and jingles, too much echo on the announcements, and news bulletins delivered in strident doomsday style. It came as no surprise to read a newspaper editorial that inveighed against pornography (which in this instance referred to nonsexual nudity in a magazine) as an "insidious force eating away at the moral health of the nation." The phraseology was perfect; it was, if memory serves, the apocalyptic response of an era when defiant youth was James Dean in a fast car and the novel Peyton Place was a national scandal. It wasn't hard to understand the reasons given by George Farwell, an Australian author, for his decision to move to Mexico. "Australia is a fine place," he said in a Sydney newspaper interview that appeared during my stay, "but you've got to get the hell out of it every few years to get some real stimulus. The complacency drives me mad." But that's the trouble with writers; they're never satisfied.

• • •

Early one sun-bright morning, I flew north to spend a few days at Surfer's Paradise on the Queensland Gold Coast, which is a 25-mile stretch of beach towns situated about an hour's drive south of Brisbane, the state capital. The coast is as beautiful as its counterpart on the opposite side of the Pacific. Any natural defects that may have existed before it became the biggest and most popular resort in the country have been cleverly disguised by man, whose genius for this sort of thing is lavishly advertised on highway billboards for motels (Free TV in Every Unit), Marineland (where you'll See Squirt, Te Only Trained Whale In The Southern Hemisphere) and the African Lion Safari and Zoo (With Curio Shop and African Village).

I didn't stay long enough to take in all of these delights, but I did visit a bird sanctuary where the visitors paid a nominal entry fee for the honor of feeding ravenous parrots amidst a fairly steady deluge of droppings. And I went to the Broadbeach Hotel to see the floorshow, which, I was told, was one of the most popular ever to appear on the coast, having been held over for some years. The show was performed by an enthusiastic cast who mimed the words to the recorded songs of Ethel Merman and Broadway melodies of respectable vintage. Singer and record sometimes failed to finish simultaneously. There was also a male stripper, with recently acquired mammary glands, whose appearance created a fervor of excitement in the packed house. Another trouper drew an ovation when he came onstage wearing a pair of plastic breasts illuminated from within by light bulbs.

The best show of all in Surfer's was free: watching the sun climb out of the Pacific at dawn. It appeared as a pink ridge along the top of the world, deepening to a red glow that burned the darkness out of the night and gave a rosy edge to the pearl-gray breakers rolling into the beach. Groups of surfers huddled by their cars waiting for the first chill to evaporate. Looking inland from the balcony of my hotel one morning, I saw mile after mile of blue hills that lay under drifting banks of smoke from bush fires. By the time the lower rim of the sun had risen over the horizon, the surfers were riding back to shore with the first heat of the day on their backs.

From Surfer's, I drove a rented car into the hills to a place called Mudgeeraba to meet Loren Hawes, one of the 70,000 Americans who have settled in Australia since the end of the Second World War. He arrived in the mid-Fifties. As a U.S. citizen, Hawes worked at Los Alamos Nuclear Research Laboratory and helped make atom bombs. He is now an Australian national and runs a small factory that manufactures boomerangs. A large, barrel-chested man of about 40, he speaks in the droll tone of an urbane professor of chemistry (which is how he began in Australia) and looks back at his past with an air of restrained disbelief. He was at Los Alamos in 1953, when Robert Oppenheimer, the laboratory's former director, was embroiled in his troubles with Washington.

"McCarthy was riding high at the time," Hawes recalled. "Some of us at Los Alamos signed a telegram of petition on Oppenheimer's behalf and, as a reward, those of us who were eligible were drafted into the military. I did two years at the Atomic Weapons Training School in Albuquerque, fooling around with H-bombs, and when I got out of the Service, they gave me an acute security clearance, which meant I was forbidden to leave the country for ten years. I mulled this over and decided it was preposterous. Six days after I got out of uniform, I was in Sydney."

He told me he has no strong desire to return to the United States. "Things have changed too much over there—all that militarism, tension, waste and hatred. It's nothing to do with me anymore." He has other things on his mind these days. Did the family's pet wombat, which burrowed its way to freedom some time ago, find true happiness? And will the new owners of the adjacent property do something terrible over there? "They might graze cattle after they've cleared the trees," said Hawes moodily, indicating a nearby wooded hill. "Then they'll subdivide. New houses will go up and civilization will move a little closer. I'm not sure if I relish the prospect."

• • •

Townsville, with a population of around 60,000, is the biggest city in the Australian tropics and is Queensland's main sugar port. It looks like an American frontier town with its shaded sidewalks, wrought-iron balconies on wooden buildings and railroad crossings on wide dusty streets. The heat when I arrived was dry and intense. Two or three cattle that had apparently died of thirst lay scattered in the dust on the approach to the local airport. North of town, the highway leading to Cairns, my next destination, 200 miles up the coast, ran parallel to the railroad tracks. The air was thick with smoke from bush fires on both sides of the narrow road; dense, sullen clouds of smoke collected in the nearby hills and shreds of burning foliage were blown now and then across the car, setting alight untouched patches on the other side. Flames crackled brightly in the undergrowth and at one point licked at the base of one of the wooden trestle bridges that supported the road. The sun was invisible hours before it set, obscured by smoke from burning groves of eucalyptus. Sometimes, through stretches of mangrove, the road became an elevated causeway across brackish swamps. No vehicles passed or approached during the first 70 miles.

At Ingham, the first town, I went into the police station to ask directions; the road divided there and I couldn't find the signpost for Cairns. It was about five P.M. on a weekday. Before I could open the police-station door, a middle-aged sergeant came from behind the desk inside and irritably waved me backward. I pushed open the door and started to explain what I wanted, but he refused to listen. "Closed," he said. "How many times do you have to be told? Out." A man on the street showed me the route I wanted and I drove on, checking finally into a motel in (continued on page 142)Going Back to the Nation(continued from page 134) Innisfail, about 100 miles farther north.

The receptionist was a very pretty girl of about 17. I asked her if much happened in Innisfail at night.

"Nothing," she said. "Absolutely nothing. No music, no dancing. On Saturdays we have a cabaret show next door to the police station."

I started to say, "Too bad if____;" and she interrupted:

"If you have to live here?"

"No. If you're young."

She smiled. "Oh, we get by."

• • •

Cairns came into view the next morning, not long after I had stopped to pick up a hitchhiker, a Frenchman from Madagascar who was working on a radar-and-television installation in the mountains. He was meeting friends in Cairns, he said, to arrange an expedition later in the month for blue meanies and gold tops, psychedelic mushrooms that are found along the Queensland coast. He said you had to eat 30 to get off.

As we approached town, we crossed the Blackfellow, Skeleton and Chinaman creeks. I dropped off the Frenchman and drove over to the Cairns police station to ask about Queensland's famed black trackers, aborigines who have been employed all over Australia to track fugitives in the bush and for less dramatic tasks requiring a bushman's skills. A young blond constable told me that helicopters, and radios had replaced the trackers, though there were still a few left in Cape York, the huge peninsula extending north from Cairns. "We don't need 'em anymore," the young constable said. "They never were much use anyway. The old ones drink too much and the young ones are wasters. Maybe you'll find one up in the Cape." He grinned. "If they haven't killed 'em off. Thieving bunch of niggers. They've got the right idea up there, mate—shoot the bastards and bury 'em." He suggested that I drive up to Laura or Coen. "You better get a move on," he said, as I left. "That's a dying race you're looking for."

While I was walking around Cairns that day, I had noticed a large number of drunken aborigines in the waterfront bars. Several offered to fix me up with women for the price of a glass of beer; one of the women was lying under a pool table, apparently unconscious. When I remarked on this to an official of the local branch of the state Aboriginal Affairs Department, who had granted me an interview on the condition that I would not identify him, he said that if I wanted to talk about drink and aborigines, I should get in touch with his head office in Brisbane. I mentioned medical reports that had recently been published by various Australian authorities, one of which stated that the infant mortality rate among aborigines was 200 in every 1000, which is believed to be the highest in the world. Another report showed that half the aborigine children in one community of Queensland needed treatment for anemia, while the other half suffered from ear and nasal infections, dental decay and intestinal parasites. In other areas, there was a high incidence of malnutrition, respiratory diseases and gastroenteritis. Would he care to make an unattributed comment on all this? He was polite and apologetic. Getting up from his desk, he led me to the door. "You'll have to talk to Brisbane," he said.

There were—depending on the source consulted—between 150,000 and 400,000 aborigines in Australia when the first settlers came from Britain in the 1780s. They had been there for at least 20,000 years and their way of life, as depicted by modern anthropologists, was extraordinary and idyllic, even among the tribes that lived in the harsh environment of the interior regions. They had a seminomadic, nonacquisitive society that neither farmed nor raised domestic livestock, and because they lacked material possessions and believed that all natural features of the universe were originally human, they concentrated their attention on relations between man and his surroundings and on his social relationships. They were bound to their territories by religious ties and, though they kept no written records, they passed their knowledge of history and tradition from one generation to the next by means of song, dance, art, ritual and legend. In their system of tribal kinship, there was no such category as an unrelated stranger.

The subtleties of this culture were beyond the comprehension of the convict settlers and their masters, who regarded the ceremonies and stories as pagan mumbo jumbo and concluded that the aborigines were uncivilized heathens. Accordingly, they set out to obliterate that which they couldn't or wouldn't understand and tried to replace it with something else: Christianity. Aborigines who resisted the new faith or failed in other ways to conform to white standards of civilization died by the thousands. In what is now the island state of Tasmania, they were hunted and shot down in packs like vermin. Today there are no Tasmanian aborigines.

On the mainland, their relatives were poisoned by flour, fruit and animal carcasses laced with strychnine, a plant native to tropical Australia. The settlers' sheep and cattle moved inland to tribal hunting grounds, fouling the water holes and stripping the land of edible vegetation. The game animals died of thirst and the human beings who depended on the game, the water and the vegetation starved or moved elsewhere.

There are about 140,000 aborigines in Australia today, most of them of mixed blood. The majority live in some form of government housing, either in towns or in settlements. Those who still lead the traditional life probably number no more than several hundred. It's difficult to obtain precise statistical information about aboriginal affairs in Australia, since it wasn't until 1967 that they were included in national census returns. However, they constitute a little over one percent of the total population and provide ten times their due proportion to Australian prisons. By the end of 1971, there had been a recorded total of three aboriginal graduates from Australian universities.

While I was in Queensland and later, in the Northern Territory, there were indications that black Australians were becoming impatient with their allotted role. Conceivably, this has something to do with the fact that only one third of one percent of the Australian budget is reserved for aboriginal advancement. Whatever the cause, there was a demonstration in late 1971 outside the Aboriginal Affairs office in Brisbane in which nine people were arrested and one policeman was injured. And a group of 15 youths attracted considerable publicity when they ran away from a Queensland settlement and complained of filthy housing and brutal treatment at the hands of the white staff. In Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, a tribal organization raised a flag in front of the courthouse to dramatize a land-claim case shortly after the court had announced that it could find insufficient evidence that such a tribe had ever existed. The claim was dismissed. In another decision, delivered in Darwin a few months previously, Mr. Justice Richard Blackburn reminded claimants from the Yirrkala tribe that when the British first occupied the continent, the prevailing philosophy was that the human race had "a right and duty to develop the earth's resources. The more advanced peoples were therefore justified in dispossessing if necessary the less advanced." Claim dismissed.

There is an Australian joke concerning a meeting between an early settler and an aborigine. The settler pointed at a strange, leaping animal that covered the ground in a series of hops. "What's that?" he asked, in English. The aborigine, replying in his own language, said, "Kangaroo," meaning, "I don't understand what you're saying." It's one of the few jokes ever enjoyed at the white man's expense in Australia and, like the justice accorded to aboriginal land claims, it is believed to be apocryphal.

From inquiries I made in Cairns, I learned that there were possibly two black trackers in Laura, a 125-mile drive into Cape York, on dirt roads through (continued on page 208)Going Back to the Nation(continued from page 142) jungle and open wilderness. The route went through Carbine, where one recent landlady of the Wolfram Hotel was said to have kept a stock whip under the counter for unruly customers, and through Mount Molloy, a dusty collection of wooden buildings set on a wide unpaved street. A few horses and cattle wandered about in the shade of gum trees, picking at brown grass. Two women stood at the door of the post office and general store, staring blankly at the nothingness and fanning themselves with magazines. I reached Laura about seven hours after setting out from Cairns.

The town consisted of a few battered houses and sheds, a post office and store and the Peninsula Hotel. There was also a railroad depot that, I was told, had been used only once, because the bridge connecting Laura to the world had been knocked down by a flood soon after the line opened and service had never been restored. I parked outside the Peninsula, a long, low wooden building with a raised sidewalk under a low veranda. Two white men in cowboy hats were slumped against the wall by the door to the bar, their bare feet propped against posts. I asked one of the men what the population was. "Dunno, never counted," he said, without looking up.

"It's about fifty, not counting the abos," said his companion.

I checked in and left my duffel bag in a small, windowless cubicle and asked one of the customers in the bar where I could find the police station. He winked at the landlady.

"Not in Laura, son. He's probably gone to Cooktown. Works there. He won't be back for weeks."

This struck me as an unusual way of running a police station, but while I was in Laura, it was obvious that the maintenance of law and order was something that more or less took care of itself. I saw only four vehicles in town, and two of them left the first day. The third driver was supposed to have left the previous week but had drunk himself into a stupor and now lay on the bar floor, snoring. The fourth car was mine. The most important event on the calendar in Laura is Race Week, in July, when cowboys from ranches all over the state pile into town for seven days of festivity, some of which is provided by contests in which two opponents get down on their hands and knees in the bar and butt each other with their heads.

I crossed the square to the police station, a big house behind a large empty lot. A very tall, white-haired aborigine came out from a rusty tin shack at the rear and introduced himself as Jerry Shepherd, one of the black trackers whose names I had obtained in Cairns. He said he was 72, but I may have misunderstood this and everything else he said, as Jerry had no teeth and was so bombed that he could hardly stand up. We walked back to his shack, where I met four other aborigines—a man and three women—and two white men. Jerry was obviously not a solitary drinker.

He seemed to be under the impression that I had come to Laura specifically to resolve a grievance about his wages. Apparently (or so Jerry insisted), all but four dollars a month was being held back by the local policeman and Jerry said four dollars just wasn't enough to support the Shepherd family, which included Rosie, his young and diabetic wife, two daughters and a number of dependent relatives. With some difficulty, I persuaded Jerry that I had come to see him on another errand and was in the midst of explaining what this was when one of the white men, who was lying with his head in a woman's lap, interrupted.

"He's dead right, mate, that copper is a bloody robber. He uses these poor buggers to keep his house clean. You think slavery's finished? Not up here it's not." He lifted his head from the woman's lap and stood up. "Come and have a look inside their house and see how these people live. I've lived in Australia for twenty years—London, originally—and this is about the worst I've seen." We went into the dim interior of the shack. Two girls, Jerry's daughters, lay on a single bed wedged next to their parents' bed. Sheets of corrugated iron flapped in the breeze. "When it rains, they might as well be outside," the Londoner said. "The kids are in bed with colds most of the time and Christ knows what else. It's the same with all the abos around here."

Jerry asked me if I would drive him and his family to see some relatives who lived nearby, so we all packed into the car and took a track leading into the bush. Two old men sat outside the first hut we visited. One of them was shaking with what seemed to be Parkinson's disease. He complained about the taste of the local water, which, his wife said, had to be drawn from a river some 500 yards away and was the only water available. She said the household lived on a monthly food allowance of one can of meat, a can of fruit and a few pounds of flour, sugar and tea. They also received a pension of $30 a month, half of which was banked—she said—by the authorities. "The water's better in Cooktown," her husband said. "Why can't we go back to Cooktown?"

We drove away. "He won't see Cooktown again," the Londoner said. "He'll be lucky if he sees Christmas."

We went to two other huts. Crowds of children sat in the dust, their bellies swollen, their faces pitted with sores and streaked with dirt and snot. Hunks of salted meat covered with flies hung on racks. A listless old woman dragged herself to her feet and approached the car, pushing an adolescent girl in front of her. "You can help yourself," the Londoner said. "Cheapest fuck in the world next to getting it for nothing." I remembered a government booklet. "Australia in Brief," which I had picked up in the Immigration Department in Sydney. On page 24, it says: "Few Australians are so rich that they need not work, but none is so poor that he cannot afford a reasonable living standard." It would appear that the book was in need of revision.

We drove back to Jerry Shepherd's shack and I returned to the hotel.

About two hours later, Jerry's wife, Rosie, came running across the square, screaming at the top of her voice and closely followed by Jerry with a crowbar. They disappeared into the trees.

"Noisy sods," said a man at the bar.

• • •

Dinner was served in the hotel kitchen at a table that accommodated the owner's family and two other guests, one of them a teacher at the local school. We ate beef stew, cooked on an old wood-burning stove and served with huge loaves of home-baked bread. When I returned to the bar, the man who had been asleep on the floor was gradually coming around. He had a friend with him, a young Hungarian who identified himself as Walter. Walter said that the two of them were on a crocodile expedition. They had been trying to leave Laura for the past two weeks, but the older man kept drinking. "I don't think he's very interested in crocodiles," said Walter. Later that night, when I was trying to sleep, I heard them stamping up and down the corridor. Walter was telling his companion to shut up, but the older man wasn't having any of that. "I'm going to fuck some living thing in this place," he shouted. "I don't care if it's got two legs or four. I want to fuck."

In the morning, the truck belonging to Walter and his friend was gone. I went over to the police station to ask Jerry Shepherd about his work as a tracker and to see if Rosie showed any sign of battle fatigue. The two of them were lying out in the morning sunshine, cuddling. There was no sign of Jerry's guests from the night before.

"Black tracker," the old man said when I brought up the subject. "That's me. Black tracker. Damn good black tracker, the best. Black tracker."

He repeated the phrase several more times and then asked if I'd buy some beer for him and a few sugar-free soft drinks for Rosie. When I returned from the hotel, they had gone into their shack. I left the bottles outside and went back to the hotel to pay the bill for food and lodging. It came to about three dollars.

• • •

I hadn't driven far from Laura when I saw an elderly white man trudging along the side of the road. His khaki shirt was black with flies. As I drew level, I slowed down and asked him if he wanted a lift. With some difficulty, he shook the blanket roll off his back, unhooked two smoke-stained mess cans and emptied them of water, removed a shabby old wide-brimmed hat, climbed into the car and stretched his legs under the dashboard. His sneakers had hardly any uppers, exposing a fine crop of mature bunions on his bare toes. When he had driven the last of the flies through the open window, the old man thanked me for stopping and said he was heading for Daintree, near the coast, where he hoped to meet some friends—"old-timers like me"—to go prospecting in the mountains south of Cooktown.

He introduced himself as Jim Mullane and said he had been on the road since the Depression of the Thirties. "I'm looking for alluvial tin, gold, mica, or anything else I can find in rivers. Bit dry now, but after the wet finishes, she should be all right." He said he had lost most of his equipment when he got a lift two years earlier. It had rolled off the back of a truck.

"All I've got now is these," he said, holding up both hands. "What I'd like to find is a nice big quantity of tantalite. That's what they use in jet engines. Takes a lot of heat. That's where the money is, mister."

We drove on along the empty road, leaving a plume of red dust behind us. Jim looked out the window, sometimes craning his neck when we passed boulders or large rock formations. When we rattled over a bridge on the McLeod River, the only one of about 20 we had passed with any water, we stopped and dug in the sandy river bed. Jim found a few tiny particles of mica. "You'd have to follow this a long way up," he said. "Mica's no good except in sheets. It's all broken down by the time it gets here." We drove on.

Apart from the clothing he was wearing and two spare shirts and another pair of pants, Jim's personal estate amounted to one blanket, a knife, fork and spoon (which he also used for digging), shaving gear, mess cans, a can opener and 14 cents. "I don't need much," he said. "Getting a bit ancient these days—sixty-five next birthday. You can always find something to eat out here. Sometimes I get a bit of wallaby that something has killed, and maybe a bit of pork, if I'm lucky. Most of the time, it comes out of a tin."

I asked him if he had ever been bitten by poisonous snakes or spiders, which abound in the Queensland jungle. "Never. You go for weeks without seeing a snake, and then you might see half a dozen in one day, but they don't bother me. Flies and mosquitoes, that's all. They never stop biting you, but you don't notice it after a time. I've seen a few crocodiles nearer the coast, up along the Gulf of Carpentaria, but they won't trouble you if you leave them alone."

When I asked Jim if he missed company, he said he had never spent a lonely hour in his life. "I haven't got enough time, that's the problem. I've got a mental timetable. It's sort of fixed in my mind every day, like an agenda of things that have to be done. Wherever I am, I just consult the timetable to see what's next. Poetry readings, concerts, lessons. Everything I've ever learned is up here"—pointing to his head—"and I'm always learning more. If I go into a town, I might spend two weeks in the library reading room, or I'll find someone who's got a radio, so that I can listen to music and see what's going on. I like to think about things I know about, especially technical problems, so that I can work out theories. I spent two months working out how the astronauts to the moon would keep their oxygen pure and what sort of difficulties they might have with their electronics and instrumentation." He laughed to himself. "I don't place much importance on working out correct theories. I just like to use my mind. It's good for you."

He said that his current project concerned waste—how to reuse cars and appliances by scrapping them on arbitrary dates and manufacturing new ones. No mention of words like recycling, ecology, environment and pollution. Jim was also interested in the notion of local governments' establishing central trust funds, using the profits from mineral sales to start the funds. Small communities would be able to draw on them to build hospitals, roads, bridges and schools. They would provide loans for farmers and subsidize low-cost housing for young people in rural areas. "It sounds like socialism or communism," he said, "but it's not. We don't want that here, anyway. We want common sense. It's not right when you've got wealthy ones flaunting it in front of poor unfortunates."

He sounded angry only once, and that was on the subject of the law against vagrancy. "I don't know how freethinking men can tolerate it," he said, his voice shaking with rage. "Three months' liberty lost. You don't hear of it in civilized countries like India and China. Disgraceful. I've got a terrible hatred for that law, mister. The cops in this country pick you up and you've got no say in it. Bastards." For a time we drove in silence, with Jim staring at the monotonous dust-coated foliage along the road.

"I don't like this part of the country too much," he said. "Colors are depressing—all that gray boxwood. I like timber country and jungle, a long way off the road. That's where you find colors. I do my best thinking in there. Get out my Shakespeare or Emerson from the upstairs library and settle down for a couple of hours."

He said that he had read nothing new for the past year because he had lost his glasses, which was a nuisance because he had been reading a story about the Donner family and was unable to finish the magazine, which he had also lost. "You wouldn't happen to know about the Donners, would you?" he said. I told him that I knew only the vaguest details, that the Donners (a historic American pioneer family) had died while crossing the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and that some of the last survivors had been obliged to eat the flesh of previous victims. Jim took the news as though I had told him of the death of a close relative. "What a cruel and terrible thing to happen," he said. "I always thought they'd make it."

Later on, he said he had always wanted to go to America when he was younger and had visited San Francisco when he was a stoker on the Matson Line. "My real ambition was to get a job with Douglas or Boeing or one of those big aircraft companies," he said wistfully. "Aviation design—anything to do with aeronautics—was my biggest passion. I wanted to study stress conditions in planes operating at high speed, but I just couldn't meet the sort of people who could help me. It's a shame, the things that don't happen."

We reached the town of Mossman about seven that evening and Jim, noticing the green riverbank on the north side of town, said he would get out and camp there for the night. As this was some miles short of his destination. I said I didn't mind taking him on, but he had made up his mind. "That's a nice river," he said. "I can bathe in her tonight and get on the road first thing." I offered to send him some back issues of National Geographic, which he had said was his favorite magazine, but he seemed doubtful. "If you sent them to one place, I might be gone when they got there," he said. "A man wouldn't know when he'd be that way again. But they would certainly come in handy: they're fine people, those Geographics. I'd like to read their stories about the moon landings and lunar geology. Been giving those subjects a lot of thought. Oh, yes."

The old man unrolled his blanket on thick grass in a grove of tall trees on the riverbank. Fat black fish hovered in the clear, rippling current and darted between the green stems of swaying reeds. The only sounds were the movement of the river and the soft, fluting music of a butcherbird in the trees. I gave Jim a plastic water container that he had admired, and some needles and thread. When I offered him money to replace his lost glasses, he refused it, politely but firmly. We shook hands and I got back into the car. For a moment I was tempted to take my duffel bag out of the trunk and abandon the car. The rental agency would get it back eventually, and even if it didn't, it'd have a job finding me. I'd be lost and anonymous in the wildest corners of this strange continent, sleeping under an open sky in the Cape York jungles, trekking across the empty desert of Western Australia or waiting for the snow to thaw in the mountains of New South Wales. The old man might have been reading my thoughts. "The only thing I've got against cities is that you get too many people doing your thinking for you," he said. "People start to forget who they are when that happens. You end up working for someone else and you spend your entire life helping to keep a bank open. That's not the kind of responsibility I like, mister."

• • •

Karumba is a shrimping port on the southwest coast of the Cape York Peninsula. It stands in a landscape of salt flats, open scrub and jungle, and occupies very little space on the banks of an oily brown river that flows sullenly past mangrove swamps and empties into the Gulf of Carpentaria. Occasionally, man-eating crocodiles have been shot from the lawn of the Karumba Lodge, a huming-and-fishing resort that is virtually the only public building in town. But Karumba isn't really a town; it's a dusty group of trailers and woebegone houses inhabited mainly by people employed in the shrimp-processing factories along the river front. The main street is a wide avenue of dirt with a thin, soft layer of fine powder that stings the eyes.

"Karumba means soul or spirit of an old man," an employee of the lodge told me soon after I arrived. "The abos don't like to come near the place. Most of them reckon it's bad luck. We've had a dozen deaths in the last fifteen months, none of them natural, if you know what I mean. There was a receptionist at the lodge who poisoned herself, and we had a man who drove out to the airstrip and ran a hose from the exhaust into his car. Some other bloke just wandered off into the bush and an engineer jumped into the river. People get very lonely here."

I wanted to interview some professional crocodile hunters in Karumba, one of whom was a girl who was reputed to be as good as any of the men, but she had moved to a mining town to work in a restaurant. Somebody suggested I talk to Billy Durban, who lived with his wife and son in a trailer a few hundred yards from the lodge. Durban said he would prefer that his real name not be used, because salt-water crocodile hunting, though it was still permitted in Queensland, was attracting attention from state conservationists, and he didn't want to be identified with a profession that might soon be declared illegal.

He was a small, dark man in his early 40s, with the lithe and sinewy build of a veteran jockey. He looked as though he didn't laugh very often, and when we sat at the kitchen table in the trailer, he kept his hat on. He talked steadily, sipping at a can of beer, while his wife, a very attractive young blonde, leaned against the doorframe, rarely taking her eyes off him.

He began by saying that he had stopped shooting for the time being, because the price of skins had dropped too low to make it worth while. "When I'm working, I'll hunt a croc for three or four days," he said. "I get to know his habits and wait. He might stay down in a cold-water hole for days on end and I'll sit on top in the dinghy. We live like dogs when we're out—on the go for weeks, sometimes. Camping on cow shit when we go ashore. You can never get clean. Then you get fed up with it and go home. Get a job, laboring—anything that's going. For a while you're happy. But after a couple of weeks, you're busting to get back to all the trouble and excitement, stalking up that bloody river. They call that croc fever around here."

Durban said that in the beginning he had enjoyed hunting. "I used to get a kick out of it. You think you're going to miss and you get all excited when you hit one. Then you think—poor old bugger, he never really stood a chance, and you start wondering about it, feeling guilty. I've killed hundreds of the poor damned things. Sometimes I think maybe one will get me one of these days or I'll get punished somehow. I don't mean the police, but some sort of trouble." He gestured to his wife for two more beers. When he began talking again, he kept his eyes on a small, stuffed crocodile on the table between us.

"Just over a year or so ago, I was out hunting," he said. "Me and the family. It was supposed to be their last trip, because it was too much for them, all that time on the river. I had seen this big male crocodile and I waited four days for him to come to the top. On the last day, he surfaced and I shot him, right in the ear. He was a nineteen-footer, an old one. When I got back to our boat, she"—indicating his wife—"told me that our four-year-old boy had fallen into the river. We found his body two days later. That was about eighteen months ago, wasn't it, love?" His wife nodded. Durban drained his beer. "I haven't been hunting since," he said. "The prices they're paying for skins these days, it's not worth the trouble."

It was getting late. Durban said he didn't want to talk anymore, so I went back to the lodge, where I had taken a room. About a dozen grimy, barefoot men sat around the bar arguing loudly and jeering a foursome at the pool table. A matronly barmaid pushed a can of beer across the counter and said it was on the house.

"You won't get any story out of this lot up here," she said. "Everyone who comes to Karumba, well, nearly everyone, is riffraff—deadbeats and nohopers, the bloody lot. If the police want anyone, this is where they look, not that they'll ever find you if you don't want to be found."

One of the pool players, a tattooed youth with no teeth in his upper jaw and who looked as though he had just crawled through nine miles of oil pipe, invited me to join his four mates at the other end of the bar. He said they all crewed on the same shrimp boat. Their skipper introduced himself as Walkie. Talkie. "It's because I can't sit still and won't shut up," he explained.

"How about Noel?" he said, suddenly turning to his friends. "Got the pox after making it with six girls in a week."

"Lucky bastard."

"Jesus wept, look at that!"

A young woman with a child crossed the patio. The men stared at the mother. "It'll take you a week to get your feathers straight if I get to you, missus," said one of them, raising his beer can in a toast. The woman shrugged helplessly at the bartender, a thickset Irishman who was glaring at the man responsible for the last remark. Walkie-Talkie stood up and announced that he was going to siphon the python.

"On your way there," said one of his crew mates, fixing the bartender with a steady gaze, "why don't you leap over the bar and piss on that Irish bastard? He could do with a wash."

I went to bed.

• • •

It's about 1000 miles in a northwesterly direction from Karumba to Darwin, in the Northern Territory. No direct air service was available and no passenger flights were scheduled out of Karumba for three days, so I chartered a bush pilot's Cessna and flew 250 miles south to Mount Isa to make the Darwin connection. We left in the early evening and maintained a height of 2000 feet, weaving and bucking between huge anvil-shaped storm clouds that formed a cavernous black tunnel illuminated by an occasional shaft of sun and stabs of lightning. "It's a great day for walking." the pilot shouted after a particularly abrupt drop of several hundred feet. He seemed as relieved as I was when we finally broke through the clouds and saw the smoke from Mount Isa's smelters and slag heaps.

The Mount Isa Mines are Australia's biggest copper producer and are on the way to becoming the world's leading supplier of silver, lead and zinc. Mount Isa itself—or the Isa, as it's known—has a population of more than 20,000, and it's the only city of this size in the northern interior of Queensland—an area bigger than Italy, France and Britain. Like other boom centers in Australia, the Isa claims to be the fastest-growing city in the country. It has several men's clubs, including the Rotary and the Lions, a theatrical society, sports facilities, a race track, a man-made lake and a library. Television came in 1969. For a change of scenery, the miners and their families sometimes drive to Townsville. 500 miles to the east, or to the Gold Coast beaches, 1000 miles southeast. At home, the milk they drink is shipped in from dairy country more than 800 miles away.

I acquired this information from a brochure in the lobby of the Barkly Hotel, where I took a room for the night to await the next day's jet service to Darwin. There was a night club in the hotel and a couple of hundred miners were sprawled at long tables around the stage, ignoring the entertainers while occasionally bursting into song in a variety of European languages. The only time they paid attention was when a comedian minced onstage in drag and announced with a heavy lisp that the band would play a selection from the classical repertoire of Bityerkokoff. Afterward, I went into the hotel restaurant to order dinner and was told to go away and put on a necktie.

• • •

A couple of days later, I was in the Northern Territory, driving along the highway out of Darwin to Alice Springs, in the center of the continent, 1000 miles south, and the only town of substance—other than Darwin—in all the Territory's half-million square miles. Darwin and Alice between them contain most of the Territory's 85,000 inhabitants. A handful of the rest live in a place called Humpty Doo, which is where I was headed when I stopped the car to pick up an aborigine woman and a white man who were walking along the side of the road. They were both barefoot and carried grubby, bulging pillowcases over their shoulders. The man was unshaven and wore a torn bandanna around his head. As soon as they were seated in the back, he told me that his name was Paddy and that he had come out from Liverpool ten years ago and was now mining for tin at Hayes Creek. The woman, Lizzie, was his wife, a title that in certain parts of Australia can mean anything from legal to common-law status between whites and blacks, though it's usually the latter. Paddy said he was about to make a big strike at his diggings, but meanwhile was strapped for ready cash.

"Just been to see the quack in Darwin," he explained. "Something wrong with me pisser—hurts all the time." He leaned over the front seat. "You couldn't spare some change, could you, mate, just to tide us over?" I gave him two dollars and drove on until I reached the turnoff to Humpty Doo, where I stopped to let them out. Paddy whispered something to his wife and then said, "Listen, mate, if you'd like to borrow the missus for a few minutes, she's game if you feel like a jump-up. Up with the skirt, in with a squirt. You can have it for a dollar."

Lizzie sat directly behind me, giggling. It was the first time I had taken a close look at her. She had only two teeth visible in the uppers and none in the lower gums. Her rheumy eyes swiveled madly in deep-set sockets; a thin trickle of saliva ran down her chin, and she was eating the remains of a fat red moth, cramming the pulpy abdomen into her mouth, wings and all.

"I know it's not looking its best today." Paddy apologized, "but it's a fair old banger, cheap and clean, and it knows how to do it, don't you love?" Lizzie wriggled her enormous bottom, releasing a powerful odor that filled the car's interior.

Trying not to sound ungrateful, I said that I didn't have the time.

"Sure you won't change your mind? Half a dollar?"

"No, thanks."

They clambered out with their pillowcases and Paddy extended a thumbless hand for a shake. "Suit yourself," he said. "You can always change your mind if you see us on the way back."

As I made the turn off the highway, I watched them in the rearview minor. They had squatted by the road, staring along its deserted length, and Paddy's arm was draped over his wife's shoulders.

• • •

By the time I got back to Darwin, I had been in Australia six weeks and had spent nearly all of it outside the cities and towns where approximately eight out of ten Australians live. This meant I hadn't seen much of the "real" Australia, the urban /suburban world of nine-to-five, credit cards, steak dinners and skyscrapers. But I had already spent most of my life in the original models for this world, and since I found nothing remarkably dissimilar in the down-under version, there seemed little point in experiencing it all over again. On the Darwin peninsula, however, you can taste a life that modern civilizations discarded thousands of years ago. There, as in many northern parts of Australia, you can find out what it was like at the very roots of mankind, in the days when men hunted in packs, carried no food except that which they killed with spears or dug up with sticks, and slept by open fires inside a circle of half-wild dogs.

• • •

There were seven in our party, five of them of pure aborigine blood: men with prehistoric faces, whose splayed nostrils sniffed the air constantly for food or a change in the weather or an unexpected and possibly hazardous scent. The sixth man was part aborigine, and he had invited me along because in a rash moment I had expressed an interest in going walkabout, which is what outback aborigines do when they get fed up with cattle-station life in the white man's Australia.

It rained every afternoon around 4:30. We could see it coming from 20 miles away, rolling across the treeless plain in a black mass of billowing cloud that spanned the horizon and blotted out the sky. Jagged streaks of lightning flickered across the underside. Families of buffalo, alerted by the distant growl of thunder, pulled themselves from their water holes and lumbered across the grassland toward the tree line at its edge. Great flocks of birds—magpies, geese, egrets and parrots—rose in shrieking swarms and fled from the storm's approach. Once, some wild horses crashed through the bushes near us, led by a stallion with a scarred head who broke into the clearing where we sat, screamed a warning and veered off into the brush.

We were on foot and, except for a bag of black tea, carried no food, bedding or other supplies. For weapons, the six others had spears and throwing, sticks and one of them carried a crude ax with an edge like a razor. I had nothing and consequently spent a good deal of the time in the trees, worrying, and wondering when the aroused buffalo or pig or snake or whatever had forced me into the branches would go away so that I could climb down.

Our main armament and defense were three mad dogs that looked as though they had been bred from wild dingoes crossed with Dobermans and German shepherds. All three were lacerated from earlier encounters in the jungle. One of them, a bitch that had been wounded by an enraged sow on the first day out, kept her distance from us, licking the bleeding hole behind her shoulder and snarling if anyone moved too close.

The men were scarred, too, though not from this expedition. Three of them had been gored by pigs and one walked on deformed legs that had been crushed by a bull buffalo. Tom, the part aborigine leader of the group, had suffered four fractured ribs and had had an arm, ankle and collarbone broken by a buffalo during the previous wet season. One of his mates, who was supposed to have joined us, was in a Darwin jail on a drinking charge. His left leg had been amputated from the knee after he had been gored by a boar and the wound had become gangrenous.

We sat under the darkening sky. Gusts of wind tugged at the smoke from the fire and the first heavy drops of rain sizzled in the embers. Tom, who had been rolling the shaft of his spear in the ashes to smooth the knots and bumps in the wood, threw the remains of a haunch of wallaby to the dogs, but they weren't interested. We had all filled our bellies and, even if we hadn't, it would have been difficult to concentrate on eating in the remaining minutes before the storm reached us.

It arrived in a crackle of thunder that rippled across the sky and burst over our heads, simultaneous with a stab of lightning that was so bright it burned its image on the cloud face. The first rain fell in a blinding, almost suffocating sheet that drowned the fire. The air temperature, which had been in the mid-90s only a few minutes earlier, felt as though it had dropped 20 degrees. As we were almost naked, we ran from the clearing and jumped into a pond, men and dogs together, submerging ourselves in the hot water and waiting for the worst of the storm to pass.

We moved through the trees and brush abreast of one another, keeping a space of about 50 yards between us. The dogs stayed in the lead. They were always the first to pick up the scent or to warn us of danger. There was no shouting and nobody called another man's name when we were on the move, in case it was overheard and stolen by the malignant entities that live in the jungle. Tom's mixed ancestry gave him an ambivalent perspective on tribal beliefs; he didn't share the fears of the other men and sometimes he joked about it—but he never pushed it too far.

"Munga Mala woman get you this night, eh, George?" he said one evening. "She jump you and suck your milk."

The other men sniggered and glanced uneasily beyond the light of the fire, enjoying the joke at George's expense but worried about the sacrilege.

"No Munga Mala suck my milk," George muttered, moving closer to the flames.

During the early part of the day, we walked for as long as the heat permitted. The rest of the time, we slept, ate or hunted. If we heard the dogs howl, we ran toward the sound, usually to find a large hairy black pig surrounded by snarling muzzles. If we weren't hungry, we drove the dogs off and let the animal escape, but if we needed food, the first man on the scene would spear the pig, aiming for an artery in the neck. Then we skinned it with spears, examined one of the glands for signs of disease and, if the animal was clean, cut away the edible meat, fed the dogs and cooked the remainder on the spot.

When there was no game, we dug up roots or ate the local equivalents of grapes and apples, which were small, pithy fruits that left an acrid taste. The rain that fell every day was quickly absorbed into the soil or evaporated in the heat of the surface. Sometimes we walked for many miles without finding water. Some of the water holes had been fouled by animals and the murky contents were fetid and repulsive. But if there were hoofprints around the edges, they would sometimes hold unpolluted water and, after we had skimmed the frog spawn off the top, it tasted as good as anything out of a tap.

We also got water from the paperbark tree, making a gash with the ax and drinking the bacon-flavored liquid that spurted from the trunk. The bark of the same tree supplied us with mattresses and blankets, cigarette papers, bandages, towels, fuel and clothing. We made hats from it and capes to protect us from the rain, as well as fans to get the fire going; and if we were starving, we chewed the wood and sucked the nourishment out of the fibers.

We saw hundreds of wallabies but seldom got close enough for a kill. They could run at about twice the speed of the dogs, covering the open ground in long gliding hops and sometimes leaping over the dogs, who ran around in crazy circles, snapping at thin air. When we caught one, we made an oven out of an anthill, slicing off its conical top and breaking it into large chunks that were placed around the meat after we singed off the fur. The meat tasted like a mixture of veal and lamb.

At night we slept around three fires that we kept burning until daylight. We went to sleep to the chorus of several million frogs after shaking our paperbark bedding to dislodge the green ants whose bites felt like red-hot needles being plunged into the flesh. Sometimes a couple of buffaloes would wander around the camp perimeter, but at night the dogs, who never left the glow of the fire, contented themselves by growling. At dawn we awoke in a barrage of farts and belches and split up into parties to fetch water and wood. Everyone knew what he had to do without being told. Nobody gave any orders.

Through Tom, who spoke their language (some of the men were fluent in several tribal dialects), they would repeatedly ask me the same questions: Was the wallaby hunting good in my country? Was there plentiful water? Buffalo meat? Forests of paperbark and sharp spears? I don't think they believed the answers, and I got the impression that they regarded a people who had no wallabies as an underprivileged race that ought to have had a better break in life. None of the men had any curiosity about America, because, apart from Tom, none of them knew what it was. It was enough to know that America was a land without wallabies.

• • •

If it can be said that there is such a thing as a real anywhere, perhaps the real Australia is to be found in that remarkable land that lies a long way from the urban gloss of Sydney: in the desert, jungle and plains—the outback—where the survivors of the earliest Australians still cast their shadow, clinging to the vestiges of a memory and a civilization that was doomed before they were born. In the Darwin peninsula and in other parts of the northern interior, when black men go on walkabout, they sometimes say they are "going back to the country," where the bird can see you but you can't see the bird. Or they say they are "going back to the nation."

It was once all their nation. Now they live on the outside of a society that grew rich from its buried wealth. They share none of this prosperity—or almost none—and they are losing the means and forgetting the knowledge by which they might survive in traditional ways. The old life dies, and the new one was not built for them. Were they to apply for admission as immigrants to this alien, barely accessible nation, they would almost certainly be rejected because they were the wrong color. At the end of 1972, the leader of the newly elected Australian government promised to restore certain areas of tribal land to the original owners, an action he said was "demanded by the conscience of the Australian people." Whether this conscience can be aroused after lying dormant for nearly two centuries remains to be seen. Other governments in other countries have made similar pledges. Some of the beneficiaries of these promises are still living on reservations, where they weave carpets and dance for tourists.