Gold Kangaroo
24 - 29 Nov, Ian
Last Thursday late in the afternoon as the sky
was starting to thicken we boarded the Overland train that runs from Melbourne
to Adelaide. The journey takes 10.5 hours and covers 828 km. If you add in the
onward journey up to Darwin we will have racked up 3007 km on the train by the
time we arrive in Darwin late this
afternoon.
We're travelling on the Gold Kangaroo service, which is the local denotation for first class. The fare to Adelaide is about 70 quid, though by the time you add in the other segments and multiply it out for the whole family it comes to a large figure. But the journey to Adelaide is affordable for many and the Gold Kangaroo dining coach was full of non-business types. The meals on the train are pretty good - much better than airline meals - and two people can share a comfortable compartment with pull-down bunks and a small bathroom with a pull-down loo and a pull-down sink; it also has a shower that you could use if you had to. And the sheets are soft. I've shared a compartment with Heidi, and Paula and Zoe have had the adjacent one. When you're lying in your little bed at night it's very cosy and the motion is, well, train-like. I didn't sleep too well on the first night but I enjoyed it anyway. The blinds weren't totally effective and occasionally bright red, green and white lights would flash through them; it reminded me of Leaving Las Vegas, though my memory of the film is very imprecise.
Breakfast was time-tabled for 5:30 but most of us were there half an hour earlier than that due to a 30 minute time difference as you cross the state line from Victoria to South Australia - they usually announce it but the PA was apparently broken and the girl who came round to run through the form never thought to say.
We arrived in Adelaide on Friday morning more or less on time and were met at the station by Chris, whom we'd met (together with his wife, Rachel) in The Galapagos Islands. Chris had very generously offered to move his work around (he's a GP) and show us the city for the day before we had to re-board the train. First, we went over to the central market to get a coffee with Rachel before she went to work, and also to meet their two year old daughter, Georgia, who hadn't been with them on the Santa Cruz. The coffee was good, the atmosphere in the market was very buzzy and it was, of course, nice to meet up with Rachel again. When Rachel and Georgia had to leave we bought lunch supplies at the market, which has excellent stalls for cheese, meats, fruit and veg and so forth.
From central market Chris drove us round for a quick tour of the town and then up to a look-out point, Mount Lofty, where there's a fine panoramic view across the city and out all along the coastline. Adelaide is on a peninsular and there's another peninsular that drops down alongside it; both were visible. And then we went on to the main business of the day: visiting some of the wineries in McLaren Vale. It was a treat to be able to do this without driving, although I didn't actually drink too much. In each place I sampled only two or three wines, with my plan being to do a side-by-side comparison of two reds, maybe slotting in a white at the start. At the first two wineries the reds I compared were both shiraz, which I drink much less of now than I used to. The wines differed markedly between the two wineries but the relationship between the two wines in each pair was the same, like two pairs of numbers sharing the same ratio. In each case the premium shiraz of the pair was darker (in taste as well as colour), less approachable, more complex: in a word, better.
Initially Paula and I were letting the girls take a little taste of some of the wines. No one said anything but I was starting to sense that the staff were not entirely relaxed about it. At the D'Arenberg winery the uncertainty was dispelled by a sign detailing the charges of up to AUD 5,000 that can be incurred for serving any alcohol to anyone under the age of 18. So that was that. We had our picnic there on the lawn outside with a cold bottle of white.
The tour was less of a luxury for Zoe and Heidi than it was for Paula and me and they were getting a little fractious in the back of the car. Since we left Rangiroa they haven't really had much chance to be on their own or to talk individually with people who are particularly interested in them, so this is not their easiest segment. In the afternoon after we'd done as many wineries as we needed to Chris had the sensible idea of returning to Adelaide and taking a trip to the zoo.
Paula and the girls have always liked zoos and I've always been a bit less keen (though when we lived next to Regents Park it was fun to be able to hop in the zoo there from time to time). So this time, as you might guess, I found the Adelaide zoo to be pretty good as zoos go - it's a real zoo with lions and tigers, and very nicely laid out - whereas after eight months of less staged animal encounters Paula and the girls didn't have quite their usual enthusiasm. But while it may not be Etosha, it was a perfect way to spend a couple of hours in a week that's largely being passed on a train. While we were in the reptile house I heard the radio paging one of the keepers from his back pocket, instructing him to go and check out another gap that had appeared in the wire. Shortly after that we left...
The train that runs between Adelaide and Darwin is a different (though connecting) service, called The Ghan. It's named after the "Afghans", which was the name given to the cameleers who managed the camels that were imported to Australia for freight haulage across the desert before the trains were here. I don't know how many of the Afghans came from Afghanistan - the camels were brought over from Peshawar. One of the main achievements of the camels was in fact to transport the tracks and sleepers for the trains that would make them redundant. When the train was up and running the cameleers were ordered to destroy the animals, but they refused, instead releasing them into the outback. Today there are somewhere between 700,000 and 1,000,000 in the wild. Three different people have proudly told me that Australia now exports camels to the Middle East for breeding. The actual export figures, though, reveal that the numbers so exported are tiny and that most camel exports (such as they are) are to the US, where they're presumably bought by zoos.
The guests on The Ghan - at least on the Gold Kangaroo service - are less diverse than on the Overland: apart from us, they all seem to be over 50 and most of them are over 60. They don't look too active either. On the first evening we were surrounded at dinner by a party of loud elderly Swedes. After dinner they took their drinks and squeezed themselves, sheep-like, into the only narrow passageway on the train and looked in bewilderment at the knot of people that accumulated at either end of them unable to come through. A crew member explained to them that they were causing an obstruction and that they must move, which eventually they did.
Virtually all of the other Gold Kangaroo passengers are Australians, the only exception being a couple from northern England. They sat near to us on the first night; I heard the lady of the couple telling the elderly Aussies sitting opposite them that they had been on a cruise of the Caribbean, where the pineapples were much superior to those we get at home. While I was assessing whether this was likely to be true I heard her go on to reveal that the pineapples she had at home were tinned.
So our fellow passengers are not the same as the other travellers we've met this year. They're Alan Wicker people. Years ago he has shown - on Wicker's World - that these people can be interesting, or at least entertaining in a not unkind way. I'm sure we could get on with them, but it would be hard and we stayed in our compartments instead.
As dusk fell on Friday night all we could see out of the windows were plains planted with crops. When we awoke the next morning we were travelling through the red centre. It's not so much red as orange, the colour of salmon sashimi. There's more greenery than we'd expected, and more variety in the vegetation. I'd had an image of Australia as being akin to an atoll (now that I know about atolls), with a perimeter populated in broken stretches and a monotonous interior; this metaphor was now looking questionable. In a real atoll the small islands that are found occasionally in its lagoon are called motus. Well, our motu equivalent here was Alice Springs and we left the train there on Saturday and picked up a hire car to drive out to Uluru. The taxi driver who had dropped us off at the car hire place had recommended that we stop off on the way to Uluru at "Jim's Place", where we could see a dingo play the piano. To my astonishment, Paula thought that this sounded like a good idea. After grumbling for a while I agreed, partly because the girl at Europcar confirmed that we'd get a decent lunch there and partly because there might be few or no real lunch time alternatives en route. So 90 km out of Alice in the middle of nowhere we parked at Jim's Place and went in to get something to eat.
Jim himself was, thankfully, towards the end of a recitation of the history of his bar/restaurant, which he was addressing to a little party of travellers passing through. He did indeed have a dingo - Dinky - at his side and called upon Zoe or Heidi to come and play the piano, or at least strike a few notes. Gamely, Zoe went up and banged some keys while Dinky climbed onto the keyboard and wailed. Rather her than me. The food was simple and satisfactory.
A few hours later we were in the Ayer's Rock Resort and at our hotel. Paula had read on the web that the place was very pricey, and, holding a monopoly, you'd imagine that the resort (a complex of accommodation and shops) might be so. But since the hotel was the only one we've visited this year that offers a package for kids rooming with their parents (can this be so rare?) and since the buffet restaurants are free for kids it turned out more than fine.
In the morning we got up early enough to avoid the worst of the heat, drove to the rock and walked around it. It's a very pleasant walk of 9.4 km, and away from the main car park it's quite quiet. As walking so often is, this circuit is an excellent way to enjoy the atmosphere of the place.
More people seem to do the climb, despite the fact that everywhere you look (including the guide you're given when you enter the park and big sign boards at the foot of the rock) there are notices asking you not to do it because it offends the sensitivities of the rock's "owners". This seems emblematic of the relationship between the Aboriginal people and white Australians. As far as I can tell the Aborigines have absolutely no standing in Australian society. Apart from the fact of residential separation, which is not unique to Australia, I can't think of any instance where I've encountered a full-blood Aborigine in any position of reasonable political or social power. White Australians don't harbour the racial resentment that underachieving whites sometimes feel elsewhere and that can lead to race hatred: rather they seem to think of their Aboriginal compatriots, if they think of them at all, as sad human failures. With poor diet, a tendency not to exercise, alcohol issues and a disposition to suffer from diabetes, Aborigines are seen (if they're noticed at all) hanging around under trees in the park trying to scam themselves some grog (notices warn us not to buy it for them, as if they were children, in areas where the sale of alcohol is racially controlled). Every white Australian I've asked has opined fatalistically that the Aborigines have not successfully transitioned to modern life and/or they have failed to integrate (in contrast to the Maoris in New Zealand, I was told this week).
And so it is at the rock. We now call it Uluru instead of Ayer's Rock and it's nominally owned by the Aboriginal people and leased back to the state. Several areas around the rock are fenced off since they are of special cultural significance, and visitors are asked not to photograph them. And we're asked not to climb up the rock. But you can climb it and people still do, and once you've done it you can go and buy yourself a certificate to attest to the fact from the tourist centre at the resort.
I find all of this unsettling and I'd like to know more about how the Aboriginal people themselves feel about life in Australia. I had high hopes of getting some sort of insight from the Cultural Centre inside the Uluru Park so we went there straight from the rock. Lonely Planet's Australia guide has nothing satisfactory to say, IMHO, on these social questions but I did find a whole LP book on Aboriginal Australia, which gives a great write-up to the Cultural Centre. But when we went every single person working there - all of the rangers, all of the people selling the Aboriginal art and artefacts, all the people working in the insight rooms attending to the displays - every one of them was white. The main display room had a set of Design Museum-style explanatory boards artily describing Aboriginal myths and a theatre where there were some low quality movie clips of a couple of old dears putting on half-hearted dances for a bunch of white guys in big hats. This is in complete contrast to our experiences in Africa, where most of the culture scene away from the big hotels seemed locally owned and run. The guy showing us round the petrified forest in Namibia, for example, could answer all of our questions about the local languages (we were particularly interested in the local click language). I left Uluru not really believing anything that I was told about it - nothing there carried any authenticity. Our truest cultural epiphany this week was watching Kath and Kim in the hotel room before dinner (with cameo appearances from Barry Humphries, Michael Boublay and The Wriggles).
We also did a short walk through the Olgas, which have also been re-christened (if I can say that) with an Aboriginal name, and which are equally impressive as a geological phenomenon. Later we made an impromptu decision to sign up for a couple of trips: in the afternoon Heidi and Paula flew round Uluru and the Olgas in a helicopter and in the early evening Zoe and I set off to see the sunset on a camel. Both rides were fun.
The guy who led the camel trip was the first person I've met round here who had anything sincere and positive to say about the Aboriginal People and we learned a lot. Apparently, the Aborigines burned the scrub on a 15~20 year cycle and some of the woods on a 50~60 year cycle, which kept them in good shape. When pastoralists came along and booted them out these burnings stopped, and since then the scrub has deteriorated badly: in 70 years there were 19 mammal extinctions, 12 of which were local and 7 of which represented the total loss of a species from the planet.
The dunes that we rode over were the oldest on earth, dating back around 20,000 years. Despite the loss of so many mammals the reptiles seem to be getting on okay - it's possible to find 50 different flavours of lizard on a single dune. (Our best lizards sightings, strangely enough, were all on the road on the way out of town in the morning, although the lizards we saw then were very photo shy.) There are scorpions on the dunes, too.
I mentioned that the landscape was greener than I'd expected with plenty of plant colour offsetting the ferrous orange of the sand. Equally surprising was that the greenery here was not in the form of eucalypts - rather the trees were desert oaks (which can be up to 10,000 years old) and various forms of acacia, and spinifex was everywhere.
I'd been a little apprehensive of getting on a camel after my horse luck in Argentina but I fortified myself with the thought of how much cooler Peter O' Toole is than John Wayne. It was actually very agreeable: the ride was smooth, although the breath of the camel behind us (Zoe and I rode together on a two-in-line-seater dromedary) was getting just too stinky by the end. Being Aus, they served us camel meat when we got off.
The next morning we drove back to Alice (it's about 450 km), returned the car, had lunch and re-boarded The Ghan. As we'd taken a couple of days out we had a new set of travelling cohorts: this lot looked a decade or two older on average and even less healthy. If you don't want to shell out for the Gold Kangaroo there's a cheaper service that also has some sort of sleeping couch (Red Kangaroo), though if I was travelling alone I'd be tempted to check into coach for the prospect of meeting more (and more interesting) people. The main drawback with coach might be that you can't turn off the "entertainment" - but that's what iPods are for, I guess.
Incidentally, continuing with a series that I kicked off in a previous blog I'd like to propose ad hoc travel tip #7: Fully load your iPod. I have a great selection on mine (1200+ songs, not to mention every photo I've taken since I've been away) but there are still songs that I miss. Where they're on vinyl it's a drag to get them on the iPod but if I were doing this again I'd invest the time in loading all of my CD's before I set out, even those I don't play much. Then I could have listened to Don't Call me Darling by The Fall whenever I wanted to this past week. The track could have been written for Australia, although it's not so formal here and they call you Darl or Dar instead.
Last night was our third and final one on the train. Before I turned out the light I was reading Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, which features murders on trains. I admire these books so much - they're my sort of genre fiction. The transparent, powerful writing style is a good antidote both to the "As told to..." clumsiness of The Lonely Planet Story and to the laboured writerliness of Paul Theroux. It's only the second Ripley novel I've read: I read The Talented Mister Ripley a long time ago. Then I found it very uncomfortable to the point where I didn't like it, but since it's had a haunting quality and I've wanted to go back and read more for a while; and the three thousand km train journey seemed like the perfect moment.
I was also ruminating on people who have slipped out of my life. In the night I was woken by Heidi who wanted me to turn the green night light back on (I'd turned it off after she fell asleep). She had interrupted a dream I'd been having which had thriller-esque metaphors of loved ones disappearing. If I ever come to write up that beliefs thing you'll see that I have fairly specific views on how dreams can provide revelatory content about our psychic lives. And that this stuff really matters if we want to repair all the damage that life inflicts upon us. At the Marie-Celeste Cultural Centre in Uluru the value that the Aboriginal peoples place on dreaming is prettily posterized. I don't find any resonance in the quaint descriptions of the myths about emus and turtles but I can believe that speeding through the deserted outback on a train you might be enriched as you sleep by glimpses of fragments of secret psychic maps.
For similar reasons our cabin in Maine has turned out to be a slow-burn place to which we want to return. Heidi now rates it as her top return-to place. And I miss the benevolent ghosts.
Our final day on the train included a stop-over at Katherine. Even though this is arguably the didgeridoo capital of Australia we resisted the temptations of the town and signed up for a boat trip along the river through a series of gorges. We were taken to the boats on a coach (my least favourite mode of transport) driven by a jolly Brummie who couldn't stop cracking bad jokes. More of them were about death than seemed appropriate for a party whose median age was about the same as the life expectancy here. He also told us that the spear grass could be seen growing round abouts explained the lack of sheep: the spear grass can grow an inch overnight and entangles the sheep by hooking into their wool. They either then die of dehydration or the spear grass grows further and gouges into their intestings. Nice tale.
We didn't see crocodiles from the boat but we did see trees full of large hanging flying foxes; they occasionally flitted out from the branches, revealing their impressive size. On another part of the boat trip we had to walk a couple of hundred yards from one boat to another to pass a section that's currently not navigable, and the possibility of one of the old dears expiring in the heat seemed all too real. Later, in the coach that shuttled us from the train to the hotel, I heard an SOS tune beeped out - it was almost certainly a mobile phone, which I would usually have known without thinking, but today my first thought was of medical equipment. The driver of this coach was an old Aussie who'd been pulled out of retirement in his seventies. He was more what we wanted here: passing the Charles Darwin park he referred to Darwin as, "an explorer - or whatever he was, he did a lot. He was a brainy bloke."
I'm finishing this off in our suite hotel in Darwin. It's larger than the nice apartment we rented in Chile and (even though they have no internet access) we wish we could stay longer.
Finally today I'm going to congratulate myself. I noticed after I'd finished it that my previous blog (Why not?) was the 100th on Out to Lunch. I'm having a drink to me!
We're travelling on the Gold Kangaroo service, which is the local denotation for first class. The fare to Adelaide is about 70 quid, though by the time you add in the other segments and multiply it out for the whole family it comes to a large figure. But the journey to Adelaide is affordable for many and the Gold Kangaroo dining coach was full of non-business types. The meals on the train are pretty good - much better than airline meals - and two people can share a comfortable compartment with pull-down bunks and a small bathroom with a pull-down loo and a pull-down sink; it also has a shower that you could use if you had to. And the sheets are soft. I've shared a compartment with Heidi, and Paula and Zoe have had the adjacent one. When you're lying in your little bed at night it's very cosy and the motion is, well, train-like. I didn't sleep too well on the first night but I enjoyed it anyway. The blinds weren't totally effective and occasionally bright red, green and white lights would flash through them; it reminded me of Leaving Las Vegas, though my memory of the film is very imprecise.
Breakfast was time-tabled for 5:30 but most of us were there half an hour earlier than that due to a 30 minute time difference as you cross the state line from Victoria to South Australia - they usually announce it but the PA was apparently broken and the girl who came round to run through the form never thought to say.
We arrived in Adelaide on Friday morning more or less on time and were met at the station by Chris, whom we'd met (together with his wife, Rachel) in The Galapagos Islands. Chris had very generously offered to move his work around (he's a GP) and show us the city for the day before we had to re-board the train. First, we went over to the central market to get a coffee with Rachel before she went to work, and also to meet their two year old daughter, Georgia, who hadn't been with them on the Santa Cruz. The coffee was good, the atmosphere in the market was very buzzy and it was, of course, nice to meet up with Rachel again. When Rachel and Georgia had to leave we bought lunch supplies at the market, which has excellent stalls for cheese, meats, fruit and veg and so forth.
From central market Chris drove us round for a quick tour of the town and then up to a look-out point, Mount Lofty, where there's a fine panoramic view across the city and out all along the coastline. Adelaide is on a peninsular and there's another peninsular that drops down alongside it; both were visible. And then we went on to the main business of the day: visiting some of the wineries in McLaren Vale. It was a treat to be able to do this without driving, although I didn't actually drink too much. In each place I sampled only two or three wines, with my plan being to do a side-by-side comparison of two reds, maybe slotting in a white at the start. At the first two wineries the reds I compared were both shiraz, which I drink much less of now than I used to. The wines differed markedly between the two wineries but the relationship between the two wines in each pair was the same, like two pairs of numbers sharing the same ratio. In each case the premium shiraz of the pair was darker (in taste as well as colour), less approachable, more complex: in a word, better.
Initially Paula and I were letting the girls take a little taste of some of the wines. No one said anything but I was starting to sense that the staff were not entirely relaxed about it. At the D'Arenberg winery the uncertainty was dispelled by a sign detailing the charges of up to AUD 5,000 that can be incurred for serving any alcohol to anyone under the age of 18. So that was that. We had our picnic there on the lawn outside with a cold bottle of white.
The tour was less of a luxury for Zoe and Heidi than it was for Paula and me and they were getting a little fractious in the back of the car. Since we left Rangiroa they haven't really had much chance to be on their own or to talk individually with people who are particularly interested in them, so this is not their easiest segment. In the afternoon after we'd done as many wineries as we needed to Chris had the sensible idea of returning to Adelaide and taking a trip to the zoo.
Paula and the girls have always liked zoos and I've always been a bit less keen (though when we lived next to Regents Park it was fun to be able to hop in the zoo there from time to time). So this time, as you might guess, I found the Adelaide zoo to be pretty good as zoos go - it's a real zoo with lions and tigers, and very nicely laid out - whereas after eight months of less staged animal encounters Paula and the girls didn't have quite their usual enthusiasm. But while it may not be Etosha, it was a perfect way to spend a couple of hours in a week that's largely being passed on a train. While we were in the reptile house I heard the radio paging one of the keepers from his back pocket, instructing him to go and check out another gap that had appeared in the wire. Shortly after that we left...
The train that runs between Adelaide and Darwin is a different (though connecting) service, called The Ghan. It's named after the "Afghans", which was the name given to the cameleers who managed the camels that were imported to Australia for freight haulage across the desert before the trains were here. I don't know how many of the Afghans came from Afghanistan - the camels were brought over from Peshawar. One of the main achievements of the camels was in fact to transport the tracks and sleepers for the trains that would make them redundant. When the train was up and running the cameleers were ordered to destroy the animals, but they refused, instead releasing them into the outback. Today there are somewhere between 700,000 and 1,000,000 in the wild. Three different people have proudly told me that Australia now exports camels to the Middle East for breeding. The actual export figures, though, reveal that the numbers so exported are tiny and that most camel exports (such as they are) are to the US, where they're presumably bought by zoos.
The guests on The Ghan - at least on the Gold Kangaroo service - are less diverse than on the Overland: apart from us, they all seem to be over 50 and most of them are over 60. They don't look too active either. On the first evening we were surrounded at dinner by a party of loud elderly Swedes. After dinner they took their drinks and squeezed themselves, sheep-like, into the only narrow passageway on the train and looked in bewilderment at the knot of people that accumulated at either end of them unable to come through. A crew member explained to them that they were causing an obstruction and that they must move, which eventually they did.
Virtually all of the other Gold Kangaroo passengers are Australians, the only exception being a couple from northern England. They sat near to us on the first night; I heard the lady of the couple telling the elderly Aussies sitting opposite them that they had been on a cruise of the Caribbean, where the pineapples were much superior to those we get at home. While I was assessing whether this was likely to be true I heard her go on to reveal that the pineapples she had at home were tinned.
So our fellow passengers are not the same as the other travellers we've met this year. They're Alan Wicker people. Years ago he has shown - on Wicker's World - that these people can be interesting, or at least entertaining in a not unkind way. I'm sure we could get on with them, but it would be hard and we stayed in our compartments instead.
As dusk fell on Friday night all we could see out of the windows were plains planted with crops. When we awoke the next morning we were travelling through the red centre. It's not so much red as orange, the colour of salmon sashimi. There's more greenery than we'd expected, and more variety in the vegetation. I'd had an image of Australia as being akin to an atoll (now that I know about atolls), with a perimeter populated in broken stretches and a monotonous interior; this metaphor was now looking questionable. In a real atoll the small islands that are found occasionally in its lagoon are called motus. Well, our motu equivalent here was Alice Springs and we left the train there on Saturday and picked up a hire car to drive out to Uluru. The taxi driver who had dropped us off at the car hire place had recommended that we stop off on the way to Uluru at "Jim's Place", where we could see a dingo play the piano. To my astonishment, Paula thought that this sounded like a good idea. After grumbling for a while I agreed, partly because the girl at Europcar confirmed that we'd get a decent lunch there and partly because there might be few or no real lunch time alternatives en route. So 90 km out of Alice in the middle of nowhere we parked at Jim's Place and went in to get something to eat.
Jim himself was, thankfully, towards the end of a recitation of the history of his bar/restaurant, which he was addressing to a little party of travellers passing through. He did indeed have a dingo - Dinky - at his side and called upon Zoe or Heidi to come and play the piano, or at least strike a few notes. Gamely, Zoe went up and banged some keys while Dinky climbed onto the keyboard and wailed. Rather her than me. The food was simple and satisfactory.
A few hours later we were in the Ayer's Rock Resort and at our hotel. Paula had read on the web that the place was very pricey, and, holding a monopoly, you'd imagine that the resort (a complex of accommodation and shops) might be so. But since the hotel was the only one we've visited this year that offers a package for kids rooming with their parents (can this be so rare?) and since the buffet restaurants are free for kids it turned out more than fine.
In the morning we got up early enough to avoid the worst of the heat, drove to the rock and walked around it. It's a very pleasant walk of 9.4 km, and away from the main car park it's quite quiet. As walking so often is, this circuit is an excellent way to enjoy the atmosphere of the place.
More people seem to do the climb, despite the fact that everywhere you look (including the guide you're given when you enter the park and big sign boards at the foot of the rock) there are notices asking you not to do it because it offends the sensitivities of the rock's "owners". This seems emblematic of the relationship between the Aboriginal people and white Australians. As far as I can tell the Aborigines have absolutely no standing in Australian society. Apart from the fact of residential separation, which is not unique to Australia, I can't think of any instance where I've encountered a full-blood Aborigine in any position of reasonable political or social power. White Australians don't harbour the racial resentment that underachieving whites sometimes feel elsewhere and that can lead to race hatred: rather they seem to think of their Aboriginal compatriots, if they think of them at all, as sad human failures. With poor diet, a tendency not to exercise, alcohol issues and a disposition to suffer from diabetes, Aborigines are seen (if they're noticed at all) hanging around under trees in the park trying to scam themselves some grog (notices warn us not to buy it for them, as if they were children, in areas where the sale of alcohol is racially controlled). Every white Australian I've asked has opined fatalistically that the Aborigines have not successfully transitioned to modern life and/or they have failed to integrate (in contrast to the Maoris in New Zealand, I was told this week).
And so it is at the rock. We now call it Uluru instead of Ayer's Rock and it's nominally owned by the Aboriginal people and leased back to the state. Several areas around the rock are fenced off since they are of special cultural significance, and visitors are asked not to photograph them. And we're asked not to climb up the rock. But you can climb it and people still do, and once you've done it you can go and buy yourself a certificate to attest to the fact from the tourist centre at the resort.
I find all of this unsettling and I'd like to know more about how the Aboriginal people themselves feel about life in Australia. I had high hopes of getting some sort of insight from the Cultural Centre inside the Uluru Park so we went there straight from the rock. Lonely Planet's Australia guide has nothing satisfactory to say, IMHO, on these social questions but I did find a whole LP book on Aboriginal Australia, which gives a great write-up to the Cultural Centre. But when we went every single person working there - all of the rangers, all of the people selling the Aboriginal art and artefacts, all the people working in the insight rooms attending to the displays - every one of them was white. The main display room had a set of Design Museum-style explanatory boards artily describing Aboriginal myths and a theatre where there were some low quality movie clips of a couple of old dears putting on half-hearted dances for a bunch of white guys in big hats. This is in complete contrast to our experiences in Africa, where most of the culture scene away from the big hotels seemed locally owned and run. The guy showing us round the petrified forest in Namibia, for example, could answer all of our questions about the local languages (we were particularly interested in the local click language). I left Uluru not really believing anything that I was told about it - nothing there carried any authenticity. Our truest cultural epiphany this week was watching Kath and Kim in the hotel room before dinner (with cameo appearances from Barry Humphries, Michael Boublay and The Wriggles).
We also did a short walk through the Olgas, which have also been re-christened (if I can say that) with an Aboriginal name, and which are equally impressive as a geological phenomenon. Later we made an impromptu decision to sign up for a couple of trips: in the afternoon Heidi and Paula flew round Uluru and the Olgas in a helicopter and in the early evening Zoe and I set off to see the sunset on a camel. Both rides were fun.
The guy who led the camel trip was the first person I've met round here who had anything sincere and positive to say about the Aboriginal People and we learned a lot. Apparently, the Aborigines burned the scrub on a 15~20 year cycle and some of the woods on a 50~60 year cycle, which kept them in good shape. When pastoralists came along and booted them out these burnings stopped, and since then the scrub has deteriorated badly: in 70 years there were 19 mammal extinctions, 12 of which were local and 7 of which represented the total loss of a species from the planet.
The dunes that we rode over were the oldest on earth, dating back around 20,000 years. Despite the loss of so many mammals the reptiles seem to be getting on okay - it's possible to find 50 different flavours of lizard on a single dune. (Our best lizards sightings, strangely enough, were all on the road on the way out of town in the morning, although the lizards we saw then were very photo shy.) There are scorpions on the dunes, too.
I mentioned that the landscape was greener than I'd expected with plenty of plant colour offsetting the ferrous orange of the sand. Equally surprising was that the greenery here was not in the form of eucalypts - rather the trees were desert oaks (which can be up to 10,000 years old) and various forms of acacia, and spinifex was everywhere.
I'd been a little apprehensive of getting on a camel after my horse luck in Argentina but I fortified myself with the thought of how much cooler Peter O' Toole is than John Wayne. It was actually very agreeable: the ride was smooth, although the breath of the camel behind us (Zoe and I rode together on a two-in-line-seater dromedary) was getting just too stinky by the end. Being Aus, they served us camel meat when we got off.
The next morning we drove back to Alice (it's about 450 km), returned the car, had lunch and re-boarded The Ghan. As we'd taken a couple of days out we had a new set of travelling cohorts: this lot looked a decade or two older on average and even less healthy. If you don't want to shell out for the Gold Kangaroo there's a cheaper service that also has some sort of sleeping couch (Red Kangaroo), though if I was travelling alone I'd be tempted to check into coach for the prospect of meeting more (and more interesting) people. The main drawback with coach might be that you can't turn off the "entertainment" - but that's what iPods are for, I guess.
Incidentally, continuing with a series that I kicked off in a previous blog I'd like to propose ad hoc travel tip #7: Fully load your iPod. I have a great selection on mine (1200+ songs, not to mention every photo I've taken since I've been away) but there are still songs that I miss. Where they're on vinyl it's a drag to get them on the iPod but if I were doing this again I'd invest the time in loading all of my CD's before I set out, even those I don't play much. Then I could have listened to Don't Call me Darling by The Fall whenever I wanted to this past week. The track could have been written for Australia, although it's not so formal here and they call you Darl or Dar instead.
Last night was our third and final one on the train. Before I turned out the light I was reading Ripley's Game by Patricia Highsmith, which features murders on trains. I admire these books so much - they're my sort of genre fiction. The transparent, powerful writing style is a good antidote both to the "As told to..." clumsiness of The Lonely Planet Story and to the laboured writerliness of Paul Theroux. It's only the second Ripley novel I've read: I read The Talented Mister Ripley a long time ago. Then I found it very uncomfortable to the point where I didn't like it, but since it's had a haunting quality and I've wanted to go back and read more for a while; and the three thousand km train journey seemed like the perfect moment.
I was also ruminating on people who have slipped out of my life. In the night I was woken by Heidi who wanted me to turn the green night light back on (I'd turned it off after she fell asleep). She had interrupted a dream I'd been having which had thriller-esque metaphors of loved ones disappearing. If I ever come to write up that beliefs thing you'll see that I have fairly specific views on how dreams can provide revelatory content about our psychic lives. And that this stuff really matters if we want to repair all the damage that life inflicts upon us. At the Marie-Celeste Cultural Centre in Uluru the value that the Aboriginal peoples place on dreaming is prettily posterized. I don't find any resonance in the quaint descriptions of the myths about emus and turtles but I can believe that speeding through the deserted outback on a train you might be enriched as you sleep by glimpses of fragments of secret psychic maps.
For similar reasons our cabin in Maine has turned out to be a slow-burn place to which we want to return. Heidi now rates it as her top return-to place. And I miss the benevolent ghosts.
Our final day on the train included a stop-over at Katherine. Even though this is arguably the didgeridoo capital of Australia we resisted the temptations of the town and signed up for a boat trip along the river through a series of gorges. We were taken to the boats on a coach (my least favourite mode of transport) driven by a jolly Brummie who couldn't stop cracking bad jokes. More of them were about death than seemed appropriate for a party whose median age was about the same as the life expectancy here. He also told us that the spear grass could be seen growing round abouts explained the lack of sheep: the spear grass can grow an inch overnight and entangles the sheep by hooking into their wool. They either then die of dehydration or the spear grass grows further and gouges into their intestings. Nice tale.
We didn't see crocodiles from the boat but we did see trees full of large hanging flying foxes; they occasionally flitted out from the branches, revealing their impressive size. On another part of the boat trip we had to walk a couple of hundred yards from one boat to another to pass a section that's currently not navigable, and the possibility of one of the old dears expiring in the heat seemed all too real. Later, in the coach that shuttled us from the train to the hotel, I heard an SOS tune beeped out - it was almost certainly a mobile phone, which I would usually have known without thinking, but today my first thought was of medical equipment. The driver of this coach was an old Aussie who'd been pulled out of retirement in his seventies. He was more what we wanted here: passing the Charles Darwin park he referred to Darwin as, "an explorer - or whatever he was, he did a lot. He was a brainy bloke."
I'm finishing this off in our suite hotel in Darwin. It's larger than the nice apartment we rented in Chile and (even though they have no internet access) we wish we could stay longer.
Finally today I'm going to congratulate myself. I noticed after I'd finished it that my previous blog (Why not?) was the 100th on Out to Lunch. I'm having a drink to me!
Posted: Thu - December 1, 2005 at 11:10 PM
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Published On: Dec 01, 2005 11:15 PM
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Published On: Dec 01, 2005 11:15 PM