Getting to Know Australia – Part 2
After my last posting I immediately heard from readers who spoke of the pleasure of visiting family and friends who are living in Australia. That goes without saying. Whether they live in the coldest or hottest of climates, the most exotic or altogether boring of locations, spending time with people you love can be a joy, and well worth whatever it takes to get there. Indeed, I know from experience that if they have a beautiful home, luxurious swimming pool, and spacious guest suite, there may not even be any desire to explore the great beyond!
However, unless steeped in history or a culture altogether different than our own, one city is very much like any other, with little to offer that we cannot experience closer to home. This is often the case in Australia, as we shall see.
One of the 20th century’s most famous and distinctive buildings, the Sydney Opera House is a multi-venue performing arts centre at Sydney Harbour in New South Wales. This structure is perhaps what Australia is best known for, and beyond that Sydney looks much like any other city.
Moving clockwise around the coast, we come to the capital of Australia. In 1911 a competition was launched for the design of Canberra, and was won by the American architect, Walter Burley Griffin (1876–1937). His vision included an artificial lake in the centre of the city, but extensive political disputes resulted in the lake not being built until the 1960s. Griffin’s contribution was commemorated posthumously when the lake was named Lake Burley Griffin. It appears that those who named it didn’t realize that Burley was his middle name, not part of his last name.
The lake contains what travel writer Bill Bryson describes as “an engineering wonder, the wonder being why they bothered.” It is called “The Captain Cook Memorial Jet, a plume of water that shoots a couple of hundred feet into the air in a dazzlingly unarresting manner, then catches the prevailing breeze and drips in a fine but drenching spray over the bridge and whatever is on it.”
In his book “In a Sunburned Country” Bryson goes on to suggest some suitable city mottos: “Canberra…there’s nothing to it.” Or “Canberra… why wait for death?” Or his favourite, “Canberra… gateway to everywhere else.” As one former resident of Canberra replied when asked, “I reckon if you were going to rank things for how much pleasure they give – you know? – Canberra would come somewhere below breaking your arm.”
Melbourne, according to thecrazytourist.com, is known for “its many laneways, its cultural diversity, excellent dining options for all budgets, and amazing street art.” The same, and much more, could be said of many cities.
In Bryson’s opinion Adelaide is the most overlooked of Australia’s principal cities, probably because of its geography. “The city stands on the wrong edge of civilized Australia, far from the vital Asian markets and with nothing on its own doorstep but a great deal of nothing. To the north and west lie a million-odd square miles of searing desert; to the south nothing but open sea all the way to Antarctica.” Enough said.
Perth is even more remote. “Behind you stretches seventeen hundred miles of inert red emptiness all the way to Adelaide; before you nothing but a featureless blue sea for five thousand miles to Africa.”
Darwin is the capital of Australia’s sparsely populated Northern Territory, and a gateway to massive Kakadu National Park. It is 3848 km from Perth, and 3426 km from Brisbane, with little of interest in between.
Brisbane, capital of Queensland is famous for its amazing climate that is near perfect all year round, and its proximity to many major tourist destinations, including the Gold Coast, which is Australia’s Florida. For those of us who live in or relatively close to the USA, this begs the question…
Fortunately, Bryson’s travel across Australia encompassed not just its cities, but the vast outback, which he describes as “an odd and unfathomable place. … It is almost not possible to exaggerate the punishing nature of Australia’s interior.” Experiencing it vicariously is quite enough for me. However, if you have an insatiable and indomitable spirit of adventure mixed with a touch of masochism you should probably visit that part of the world sooner than later.
As Bryson writes, “… it seems an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things when you still can.” Recent events make those words even more true today than when they were penned twenty years ago. Shortly after my recent trip to the Mediterranean, severe flooding left much of Venice under water. Two months later low tides left canals in that Italian city almost dry! Several weeks thereafter a pandemic was unleashed, and those who less than a year ago had considered accompanying me on my travels may never again have the chance to see those parts of the world. In the words of Geoffrey Chaucer, “Time and tide wait for no man.”
Of course, there are some things perhaps best left undone. Snorkeling is on my bucket list, but Bryson says he is told that because snorkelers lie in the posture known as the dead man’s float, “It’s only when the whistle blows and everyone gets out except for one oddly inert and devoted soul that they know there will be one less for tea.”
Australia is both vast and barren. Western Australia alone has some 7800 miles of coastline, and only about three dozen coastal communities, even including those along the southwestern peninsula. There are almost 23,000 miles of Australian coastline in total. The map shows 180,000 miles of paved highway, not an inch of which exists along the nearly two thousand miles of indented coastline from Darwin to Cairns, or the five hundred miles from Cairns to the tip of Cape York. In the whole of Queensland, just three paved roads pass through the state’s huge and hot interior, and only one provides access to the two-thirds of Australia that lies to the west.
The outback does have 300,000 miles of dirt tracks, but standard rental cars aren’t allowed on them, and venturing out in even a fully equipped off-road vehicle would be foolhardy because of the ease with which one can get lost or stranded.
The punishing heat in the outback involves temperatures so high it is possible to begin to cook, from the inside out. There are places in the Northern Territory where as far as the eye can see, in every direction, the earth is covered with spinifex, a brittle grass which grows in clumps so closely packed as to give an appearance of lush green vegetation. In fact, spinifex is useless, the only wholly nonedible grass in the world. Bryson says, “It is also murder to travel through because its needle-sharp points, tipped in silica, break off when brushed and become embedded in the skin, where they fester into small but horrible sores.”
Bryson tells of Australia’s some seven hundred varieties of eucalyptus trees with names like kakadu woolly butt, bastard tallow-wood, gympie messmate, candle-bark, ghost gum, and stringybark. He describes the giant worms of Gippsland, pictured below, which average three feet in length but can grow to nine.
The Daintree forest is a remnant of a time when the world was a single landmass, the whole covered in steamy growth. In 1972 scientists discovered twelve types of angio-sperms in the forest, the family of plants which was thought to have vanished from the earth long ago, and from which all flowering plants are descended.
The forest is also one of the few remaining areas where you can hope to see cassowaries, the world’s most dangerous bird. A cousin of the emu, cassowaries attack by jumping up and striking out with both feet together, each of which have three murderous claw-tipped toes.
Perhaps you are familiar with the Australian sense of humor portrayed over 5 seasons of the 2010 television series Rake, available for binge-watching on Netflix. In a similar vein, Bryson describes the lonely “madhouses” he encountered in his travels across Australia as, “a gas station with an attached café of the sort known in the happy vernacular of Australia as a chew and spew.”
Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk is an .8 km loop trail 40 meters above the ground in the state of Western Australia, amid the tingle forest canopy. I will concede that is something I would be interested in seeing were it not so difficult to reach, and had I not access to Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island, and the Greenheart TreeWalk at UBC Botanical Garden.
The Bungle Bungles in Purnululu National Park might also be of interest, except that it is difficult to access (twelve hours from Darwin) and the video I watched shows large snakes slithering inside, which is a deal breaker for me! I note also that equally intriguing rock formations can be seen much closer to where I live.
So, in the diplomatic parting words of Bryson, “Australia is an interesting place. It truly is. And that really is all I’m saying.”