manager, was waiting for us.
He helped us up – it’s a long way up onto a train whenyou haven’t got a platform to start with – and we half fell in. Looking up, I discovered with a start that we were in the forbidden coach section. I have never felt so stared at in my life. As we followed David through the two coach carriages, 124 pairs of sunken eyes sullenly followed our every move. These were people who had no dining carriage, no lounge bar, no cosy berths to crawl into at night. They had been riding upright for two days since leaving Sydney, and still had twenty-four hours to go to Perth. I am almost certain that if we had not had the train manager as an escort they would have eaten us.
We arrived in Perth at first light and stepped from the train, glad to be back on solid ground and feeling disproportionately pleased with our achievement. I know that all that was required of us to get there was to sit passively for a total of seventy-two hours, but still we had done something that lots of Australians never do – namely, cross Australia.
It is a lame and obvious conclusion to draw, but Australia truly does exist on a unique scale. It’s not just a question of brute distance – though goodness knows, there is plenty enough of that – but of the incredible emptiness that lies within all that distance. Five hundred miles in Australia is not like 500 miles elsewhere, and the only way to appreciate that is to cross the country at ground level.
I couldn’t wait to see more.
Part Two
CIVILIZED AUSTRALIA
(The Boomerang Coast)
You wouldn’t think that something as conspicuous, as patently there , as Australia could escape the world’s attention almost to the modern age, but there you are. It did. Less than twenty years before the founding of Sydney it was still essentially unknown.
For nearly 300 years explorers had been looking for a conjectured southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita – some commodious mass that would at least partly counterbalance all that land that covered the northern half of the globe. In every instance one of two things happened: either they found it and didn’t know they had or they missed it altogether.
In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle. Thirty-six years later the DutchmanAbel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon. Eventually he bumped into Tasmania (which he called Van Diemen’s Land after his superior at the Dutch East India Company), and went on to discover New Zealand and Fiji, but it was not a successful voyage. In New Zealand, Maoris captured and ate some of his men – not the sort of thing that looks good in a report – and he failed to find anything in the way of riches. On the way home he passed within sight of the north coast of Australia, but, disheartened, accorded it no importance and sailed on.
That isn’t to say that Australia had never felt a European footprint. From the early seventeenth century onwards mariners occasionally fetched up on its northern or western shores, often after running aground. These early visitors left a few names on maps – Cape Leeuwin, the Dampier Archipelago, the Abrolhos Islands – but saw no reason to linger in such a barren void and moved on. They knew there was something there – possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies – and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent.
Because of the random and casual nature of these visits, no one knows when Australia first fell under a
He helped us up – it’s a long way up onto a train whenyou haven’t got a platform to start with – and we half fell in. Looking up, I discovered with a start that we were in the forbidden coach section. I have never felt so stared at in my life. As we followed David through the two coach carriages, 124 pairs of sunken eyes sullenly followed our every move. These were people who had no dining carriage, no lounge bar, no cosy berths to crawl into at night. They had been riding upright for two days since leaving Sydney, and still had twenty-four hours to go to Perth. I am almost certain that if we had not had the train manager as an escort they would have eaten us.
We arrived in Perth at first light and stepped from the train, glad to be back on solid ground and feeling disproportionately pleased with our achievement. I know that all that was required of us to get there was to sit passively for a total of seventy-two hours, but still we had done something that lots of Australians never do – namely, cross Australia.
It is a lame and obvious conclusion to draw, but Australia truly does exist on a unique scale. It’s not just a question of brute distance – though goodness knows, there is plenty enough of that – but of the incredible emptiness that lies within all that distance. Five hundred miles in Australia is not like 500 miles elsewhere, and the only way to appreciate that is to cross the country at ground level.
I couldn’t wait to see more.
Part Two
CIVILIZED AUSTRALIA
(The Boomerang Coast)
You wouldn’t think that something as conspicuous, as patently there , as Australia could escape the world’s attention almost to the modern age, but there you are. It did. Less than twenty years before the founding of Sydney it was still essentially unknown.
For nearly 300 years explorers had been looking for a conjectured southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita – some commodious mass that would at least partly counterbalance all that land that covered the northern half of the globe. In every instance one of two things happened: either they found it and didn’t know they had or they missed it altogether.
In 1606, a Spanish mariner named Luis Vaez de Torres sailed across the Pacific from South America and straight into the narrow channel (now called the Torres Strait) that separates Australia from New Guinea without having the faintest idea that he had just done the nautical equivalent of threading a needle. Thirty-six years later the DutchmanAbel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over the left-hand horizon. Eventually he bumped into Tasmania (which he called Van Diemen’s Land after his superior at the Dutch East India Company), and went on to discover New Zealand and Fiji, but it was not a successful voyage. In New Zealand, Maoris captured and ate some of his men – not the sort of thing that looks good in a report – and he failed to find anything in the way of riches. On the way home he passed within sight of the north coast of Australia, but, disheartened, accorded it no importance and sailed on.
That isn’t to say that Australia had never felt a European footprint. From the early seventeenth century onwards mariners occasionally fetched up on its northern or western shores, often after running aground. These early visitors left a few names on maps – Cape Leeuwin, the Dampier Archipelago, the Abrolhos Islands – but saw no reason to linger in such a barren void and moved on. They knew there was something there – possibly a biggish island like New Guinea, possibly a mass of smaller islands like the East Indies – and they called this amorphous entity New Holland, but none equated it with the long-sought southern continent.
Because of the random and casual nature of these visits, no one knows when Australia first fell under a
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