The Places Where We Belong (Australia)

Sydney, Adelaide, north to Broken Hill, Broken Hill, and Uluru.  

For a transcript, see 
https://www.buzzsprout.com/1970784\

For photos, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

Part 1.  Sydney

          In 2018 I quit.  Well, that’s not quite right.   I was 75 years old, and I had been teaching geography for 50 years, so I retired with a pension and a semi-golden parachute.  The university was happy.  It wanted, as the vampirish idiom goes, to hire new blood.   That wasn’t all.  One of my brightest students told me—on paper, not to my face—that it was time to go.   Perhaps she was right: in the last year I had gotten so angry in the middle of one class that I had without a word left the room.  I think I did it three times that semester in the same class.  It felt good, but the students who were pissing me off were still there the next day, and they weren’t pissing me off any less.  Funny that after half a century I couldn’t control them.  They weren’t even bad students; just rowdy.  

Retiring may have been overkill, but it did fix the problem.  It even made things better, because I still loved geography and was now, more or less, or sort of, or comparatively, free.  I decided to spend most of the next year travelling.

 For no particular reason I began with Australia.  I bought an Economy ticket for a nonstop flight from LAX to Sydney.  Once, many years ago, I got a double upgrade from Delhi to Chicago.  That’s as good as free upgrades get, but at LAX my luck ran out.  Walking down the jet bridge, I thought of Venice and its Bridge of Sighs.  

Anyway, it wasn’t my first time in Australia, and on my first visit I had skipped Sydney and gone straight to Alice Springs.  Most Australians have heard of Alice but never seen it.  It’s in the dead center of the country, far from the coasts where nearly everyone lives, so my going there was like an Australian skipping Los Angeles and Yosemite and going straight to Wichita.  Not many people would do that—most people would think it was weird or, if they were polite, unusual—but I think it would be a good way to meet the United States.  After a few days in Alice, I drove north a thousand miles, and the grim towns along the highway to Darwin were a better introduction to Australia than a tour of Sydney’s famously famous opera house.  

          On this more recent visit, I checked into a high-rise hotel close to a stop on the airport subway line and even closer to surprisingly good coffee.   

I decided to skip the nearby business district, even though it has some fine old government buildings whose ornaments celebrate the European discovery of Australia.  I know I’m supposed to look forward to the day when the statues of these dead white guys are pulled down and tossed into Sydney Harbor, but I don’t.  I admire and even envy some aspects of indigenous societies, but I also enjoy the journals of Lewis and Clark and their Australian equivalents.  Still, I wasn’t eager this day to admire statues of dead white guys.  I didn’t want to go to my favorite place in Sydney, either.  That’s Gap Bluff, where on sunny days translucent waves surge and break against the cliffs on both sides of Sydney Harbor’s narrow mouth. Getting to Gap Bluff would have required riding a bus for maybe half an hour, and after 15 hours on a plane even half an hour was too long. 

 Sydney Harbor is shaped like a tree ten miles tall whose branches broke when the tree fell inland, toward the west, and on this day I decided to walk to Darling Harbor, one of Sydney Harbor’s many branches.   I already knew Miller’s Point, where Darling Harbor, the branch, meets Sydney Harbor, the trunk.   Victorian townhouses on a high bluff once overlooked the busy docks there.  The city’s elite lived atop the bluff until an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900 induced them to move in a hurry.   

The townhouses were taken over by a public agency and leased to working stiffs.  A century later, the docks were obsolete, and shipping had moved to Botany Bay, about ten miles to the south.  Yes, this is the same Botany Bay where Captain Cook landed in 1770.  I have no idea whether he would be dazzled or horrified if he saw Sydney today.  Perhaps both, just as I am marginally dazzled and definitely horrified when I contemplate the future.    

The government of New South Wales woke up and realized there was money to be made from the old townhouses, which are almost in the shadow of the city’s famous harbor bridge.  The renters didn’t go quietly.  I saw one window with a sign reading “Resist!”  Another had a poster of a skull with a top hat and a lit cigar.   A third had a sign that said simply, “My home, 1976-2016.”   I hate to say it, but bet on the money.  It’s almost as irresistible as the ocean.

On this more recent visit, I left my hotel and threaded a path through a thicket of high rises down to a point on Darling Harbor about as far as you can get from Sydney Harbor.  Call it the tip of the branch.  I found myself remembering Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., a long-dead boss of General Motors.  Tight-collared Sloan had built the company’s lineup—Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac—and had perhaps also coined the company’s slogan of the day: “A car for every purse and purpose.”  I was thinking of Sloan because I was looking across Darling Harbor to a Sofitel.  It was flanked on one side by a Novotel and on the other by an Ibis.  

All three flags—luxury, midscale, economy—belong to Accor, France’s equivalent to Marriott and Hilton.  Rooms for every purse and purpose. The hotels flanked a conference center, an exhibition hall, and Australia’s national maritime museum.  On my side of the water, the Sydney Aquarium stood next to Oceania’s only Madame Tussauds wax museum.  Wow!  Darling Harbor had evidently made the difficult jump from derelict industrial district to thriving entertainment venue, complete with a crowded yacht harbor.   How many cities with derelict industrial districts dream of this?  All of them, I suppose, at least in rich countries.  It’s a long list, and most people would say that Sydney has managed the transition exceptionally well.  

Set back a block from my side of the water was the thirty-two-story tower of the Commonwealth Bank, Australia’s largest.  Next to it were towers occupied by Dutch-owned Rabobank, Germany’s insurance giant Allianz, and the British accountancy giant PwC.  The four of them looked over the harbor like a gang of  thieves checking out their next heist.  Unlike most gangs, this one didn’t lie low.  You don’t have to lie low if you’ve more or less written a country’s laws and can buy all the justice you need.

On this weekend morning lots of people were strolling along the waterside promenades.  Nobody paid the money towers much attention, which is fine, but from a certain perspective is also odd.  I mean that if we were about to cross a raging river somewhere in the Himalaya, and if the bridge in front of us was made of rough wooden planks lashed to cables braided from vines, we’d stop for a minute.  We’d tug at the cables.  We’d stamp on a plank or two.  

Yet here, spanning Darling Harbor, was the Pyrmont Bridge.  About 1,200 feet long, the bridge opened in 1902.  Ninety years later, it was downgraded to pedestrian-only use, like an elephant demoted from teak logs to cotton candy.  The bridge’s central section weighs a thousand tons and, on command, rotates on a central pier.  I waited a bit, hoping to see it swing, but it never did.  

If I had handed out leaflets warning of the bridge’s imminent collapse, people would have looked at me for a moment, sized me up as a crank, and moved on.   It’s the same with the money towers.  If my leaflets warned of financial disaster, nobody would have bothered reading them, even though those same people would know nothing about the condition of the companies.  That trust is even more surprising than our trust in bridges, because, at least in theory, any of us can learn enough metallurgy and engineering to judge the condition of a bridge.  Outsiders will never learn the secrets of the world’s money companies. 

I find our blithe trust slightly disturbing, but I’m not scolding anyone.  I have bank accounts and insurance policies with companies I know very little about.   I have doctors, too.  I depend on them and trust them, more or less.  Are they the best doctors available to me?  I have no idea, which is why I joke that there’s a reason we’re called patients.  Still, failing to exercise our power of judgment touches a nerve, and that nerve brings us to the mother of all problems, which I take to be the relationship between technology and freedom.  

For most of the last 5,000 years, the history of that relationship has been the history of organizing people into the hierarchies needed to build things like the Egyptian pyramids.  It’s the story of the thing Lewis Mumford half a century ago called the megamachine, his name for what anthropologists call complex societies.  It’s a story usually told as a triumph, as in that phrase we all grew up with—the rise of civilization—but Mumford’s point was that the benefits provided by these societies come at a terrific cost in regimentation, which is to say in freedom.  It’s hardly a revolutionary insight—I imagine that it goes back to laborers thousands of years ago wondering why they had to spend their lives breaking rocks for some king they had never seen—and the word “megamachine” never took root.  Still, I like it because it captures the terror lurking, usually ignored, in what we call progress.

In the 19th century or a bit earlier, machines composed of human parts began to be supplemented by machines driven by steam and internal-combustion engines.  Electric motors came along.  More recently, we’ve moved on to what we are pleased to call “high tech.”  The phrase is embedded in our language, even though for the last two centuries every generation has had its own high technology.  We’re no different, except in our arrogance.  The phrase also annoys me because it echoes the phrase High Culture, as if a handful of brilliant billionaires belong next to Michelangelo and Mozart.  They certainly come to mind more often.

With these new technologies, freedom itself changed.  Until about 1800, it had been what people wanted when they found themselves abused by landlords and money lenders, bandits and thugs, bosses and tyrants, owners and husbands—a plethora of pharoahs.  Freedom is still that, but alongside that kind of freedom, which for simplicity’s sake we might call social freedom, we now have—or more often don’t have—environmental freedom, which I define as life in an environment suited to human beings.  I assert that environmental freedom does not exist at Darling Harbor.  I’ll go farther and say that environmental freedom does not exist in any place built with modern technologies.   

Most smart and successful people will dismiss this as nonsense.  They will say they have no problem working in a building where they rarely or never see the sky.  They will say they are happy to own a condo whose windows do not open or which provide a view only of other windows.  They may ask who am I to say that such buildings are unfit for human beings.  After all, Dostoyevsky survived a Siberian prison camp and later wrote that human beings can adapt to almost anything, and most of us, living in a place for years and seeing everyone around us living the same way, eventually think of that place as normal.   I know what I’m talking about, too, because I’m recording this in an office on the sixth floor of one such building—sealed windows and a view of a parking lot—and I’ve made peace with the place. 

Yet nearly everyone agrees with me at least some of the time.  Yes, I have heard people say that they would jump at the opportunity for a one-way ticket to Mars, but even people who recoil at that prospect, as I do, are usually excited by their first electric car or some new, chip-enabled device for house or hand.  At a bare minimum, almost everyone welcomes the advance of medical science.   I do, too, perhaps because I wouldn’t be alive without it.  I am also very grateful for hot water on demand.  I sometimes wonder how Michelangelo and Mozart managed to live their whole lives without it.  

A moment later, however, we’re watching a movie.  The hero is a cop whose only phone is a rotary-dial joke.  He hears people talking about “social media,” but he has nothing to do with it.   He lives in a broken-down trailer by the beach, flouts rules, infuriates his superiors, and of course always catches the bad guys.  He wants social freedom (no bosses) and environmental freedom (fresh air and the sea), and the movie invites us to admire him.  Sometimes we even imitate him a bit.  We call it our vacation, and it’s when we try to make our escape.  I say “try” after reading that some national parks in 2021 were so crowded that visitors had to get timed-admission tickets.  

Or we listen to country and western music, which by definition is almost oblivious of the modern world.  That’s not all.  Millions of people vote for candidates who act as though the world is as simple as the lyrics in those songs.  Many of these voters know--and so do the politicians they vote for--that the world isn’t big enough for eight billion people to live on fish from the creek and peaches from the backyard.  These voters don’t even really want to live that way, but still they vote for what the historian Jacob Burckhardt long ago called terrible simplifiers.   I think they vote this way, at least in part, because they feel cheated by a society that promises something called the Good Life but which turns out to be, at best, a safe, soft, and even entertaining prison without bars.  Many of them, especially those for whom the prison is not at all safe or soft or entertaining, feel so cheated that they’re ready to vote for a candidate who just might bring the whole thing down.  It isn’t the finest hour for Homo sapiens, but there’s a Samsonesque logic to it.  Watching the mighty pyramid crumble—the global edifice, the whole freedom-crushing shebang—would be satisfying until it became terrifying.

So there’s nothing out of the ordinary if I criticize the powers that be while a moment later I enjoy coffee from a machine so complicated that, if it breaks, the barrista has to call a technician.  You can’t say I’m a hypocrite, either, because hypocrisy rests on pretense.  I don’t pretend.  I man up to the out-and-out contradiction of welcoming technology in one breath and condemning it in the next.  You could say I’m confused, though I’d prefer ambivalent.  In any case I’ve got lots of company.  I’ll even bet that astronauts returning to Planet Earth look forward to a fishing trip. 

The obvious question at this point is what’s wrong with the world we’ve built.  The short answer is that, given the chance, nearly any animal captured in the wild will leave its cage and not return.  We, on the other hand, though conceding that we are animals in some archaic and now irrelevant way, believe we are no longer like animals.  I hesitate to say that we prefer living in cages, but we certainly pride ourselves on being smart enough to have replaced the natural world with one that’s more comfortable and secure.  For most of the people who live in what we cheerily call advanced economies, we have succeeded in making life less “nasty, brutish, and short.”  It’s a great accomplishment—I’m not being sarcastic—and vanishingly few people want to return to country music’s homespun simplicity, even if it was logistically possible, which, as I’ve said, it isn’t.

At the same time, denying our animal selves tends to reduce us to a combination of consumer and working stiff, the first implying that we exist to consume and the second implying that we’re already dead.  People don’t want to think of themselves like that, but many years ago someone told me that our bosses see us the way plumbers look at pipe. He acted it out with his hands: measure, cut, solder.  I thought he was exaggerating, but now I would go him one better and say that, treated like pipe, we become pipe.

Think of an impala running for its life and feinting brilliantly.  The cat in pursuit is equally quick-witted, adapting instantly to the impala’s every maneuver.  Both animals are amazingly clever, though no more so than an owl on the hunt or the mouse I’ve been trying to catch.   Then think of a driver stuck in traffic and reduced to an irritated drudge.  Another consumer, another working stiff heading home, another piece of pipe.

Of course we do what we can to escape being pipe, which is why, if I’m stuck in traffic, I listen to the radio.  If I can afford it, I live in an amazing house on the beach, and of course I have a hideaway in the mountains.  Maybe a Swiss chalet or some place in the south of France.  If I can’t afford those things, then on the weekend I’ll head to the beach or maybe the mountains.  I’ll engage in what, without thinking about the word too much, we call recreation.  

Minimally, I might turn on the TV and watch athletes as gifted as impalas and cats and owls and mice, but there’s a problem here, because spectator sports teach us that only a few people are physically gifted.  I disagree.  As Exhibit One, I declare that I can stand up.  I don’t know how I do it.  Yes, I can approximately work out the major muscles and bones involved, but I know nothing about what I suppose are hundreds if not thousands of nerve impulses running up and down my spine before I’m up, usually on two feet but sometimes just on one.   In the same way, I can ride a bicycle.  I’ve never known a mathematician who could calculate those tiny right and left turns as quickly as I make them with hardly a thought.

Nobody’s impressed, of course, partly because nearly everyone can do these same things but also because these skills are so far short of what we need to survive.  Owls know what they need to survive, and people, too, once possessed most or nearly all of the skills known in their society.  That’s no longer true.  If my television fails, I certainly can’t fix it.  The technician who can fix it is almost certainly unable to do anything with my air conditioner, and the technician who’s brilliant with air conditioners won’t touch my dishwasher, which insists on running for hours on end.  I once knew a potato farmer in Maine who prided himself on being able to fix his own equipment.  He was one of the happiest people I’ve ever known—I mean genuinely, deeply happy—but he died of old age about twenty years ago, and farmers today use equipment stuffed with electronics that nobody can repair.  Come to think of it, if my TV or AC or dishwasher break, I’m generally time it’s time to buy a new one.

We celebrate the people who have invented this equipment, but their machines make us not only dependent on specialists but—and more importantly-- physically and mentally detached or separated from the world where our ancestors acquired and passed on to us our natural gifts.  Separated from that world, we begin to ignore our gifts, and at that point we begin to forget what we are.  This is probably not the best recipe for happiness.  

Some smart people will tell me to hang on a minute.  Sure, they will say, we are profoundly ignorant of the world we have created.  Few people know that plate glass is made by floating it on molten metal—usually tin—and even fewer know the recipe for the coating that is sometimes applied to reduce the penetration of sunlight through that glass.  But, these same people will say, few people know how water defies gravity and rises from a tree’s roots to its leaves.  Of the few who do, even fewer understand the mid-latitude cyclone that brought yesterday’s rain to those roots.  In other words, we’re no more detached or separated from the engineered world than we are from the natural one. 

My reply is that environmental freedom doesn’t require knowledge: it only requires an environment in which we can, or at least could in theory, survive on our natural abilities.  I say “only,” but it’s not a modest requirement, not when those abilities are grossly inadequate for survival in the modern world.  

I think of a dermatologist’s office where I was studying a poster showing in splendid color some of the things in our skin.  I was drawn to the Pacinian corpuscles, which tell us when we touch or bump into things.  You might think we understand how these obviously important parts of our bodies work, but I certainly don’t.  How many Pacinian corpuscles do I have?  I have no idea.  Presumably, they can be traced back, evolutionary branch by evolutionary branch, to the beginnings of life on Earth.   No wonder I’m comfortable with them.   I trust them the way a cat trusts its whiskers.  

I can stretch a bit and behave naturally with the hammer I hold as my fist’s extension.  Because I have hands, I’m at ease with pliers and wrenches.  Because I have teeth, I’m comfortable with saws and axes.  I can stretch a bit more and use a screwdriver, though the helical curve of a screw is a subtle devil. 

Nearly everything invented in the last hundred years, however, exceeds our intuitive understanding.  Strictly, the trouble began a million years ago when some brave soul captured fire.  Greek mythology reminds us that the gods were not amused, but I’m glad that this paleolithic Prometheus acted as he or she did.  Since then, we’ve had the entire span of our existence as a species to get used to this first and perhaps greatest non-intuitive technology.  That’s why I have a vague understanding of an incandescent light bulb.  Not so fluorescent tubes and LEDs, both of which remain an utter mystery.  And this is serious.  Not one person in a thousand understands, let alone appreciates the elegance, of Maxwell’s Equations, which underlie most everything electronic in our lives.  So the exhaust fan in my ceiling makes an unusual noise.  Maybe it’s a bad bearing, but I’m not really sure if the motor has bearings.  I bought the fan.  It’s mine, but the fan is a stranger.

I don’t want to begin to count all the strangers I live with, from my phones, my laptop, my desktop, my printer, my modem, my range extenders, my televisions—plural—to the raft of appliances that have turned my kitchen into a machine room.  Yes, these strangers make life wonderfully comfortable, but they demand that I accept their terms and conditions.  

So it is that I mutter at the seat-belt warning buzzer or chime or whatever it is.  I also curse the tangles of wires sprouting from my electronic thickets.  I consciously try not to notice the LEDs busy at my bedside.  I grant that these things are trivial, but on calm mornings I often step out on my front porch and through the darkness hear what sounds like a newspaper printing press roaring maybe two doors down the street, but it’s not a printing press.  It’s Interstate 35. A visitor might guess that the road was five hundred feet away, but it’s actually well over a mile away.  It’s astonishing how far that sound carries and how thoroughly it spoils my enjoyment of the morning.  Then I think how the noise from ships at sea today must drive whales and dolphins to utter distraction.  I at least can go back inside.

I tell myself that these and other terms and conditions are a fair price to pay for comforts unknown to Michelangelo and Mozart, but I also worry.  I have almost come to believe that I am the thing, the object, the mass that steps on my bathroom scale.  No more and no less.  I faintly remember that there are moments when I have felt or recognized that I was part of something bigger.  I understand now that these were the moments when I sensed environmental freedom.  These were the moments I was somewhere I belonged.

So here I am at Darling Harbor.  I’m walking around, a little disappointed that nobody is applauding.  If a toddler looks at me, I smile, and if the toddler stumbles, I purse my lips in sympathy.  With that, I’m about done with my natural gifts and am ready for learned behavior.  My mother taught me not to urinate in public.  Childhood friends taught me that if I pick a fight, I can lose.  More recently, and more than once, I’ve almost been killed learning that Australians drive on the left.   

I’m also running on the superabundant knowledge of all the things I don’t know.  We’re back to the condition of the Pyrmont Bridge and the financial companies in those towers.  I neglected to say earlier that I’m a member of Accor’s loyalty program.  I’m happy to chat about other hotel brands, too.  These companies usually prefer managing hotels to owning them.  I grow uneasy if I think about this, because the owners are almost always unidentified.  If I knew that a certain hotel owner was wicked, I’d try to sleep somewhere else.  Instead, I delegate my judgment to the management company, which regularly thanks me for my loyalty.  As to whether the management company itself is wicked, you might as well ask me how a cell phone works. 

All in all, here at Darling Harbor, and at almost any settled and prosperous spot on the planet, I’m walking around not in the world for which I am naturally gifted but in a space shaped by people trying to make money by providing something that somebody is willing to buy.  I could say I’m alienated, but Marxists and existentialists will tell me to stop trespassing.  I like the phrase “deprived of my birthright,” but it belongs to the Bible.  I’m left with “detached” or “separated,” simple words but accurate ones.  Better still, if I pay attention they will point me to what I really want, which is their mirror opposite.  

2. From Sydney to Broken Hill via Adelaide

           I ended the last episode by saying that I wanted the opposite of detachment and separation, but that’s the wisdom of hindsight.  At the time, the only thing I wanted was an end to falseness.  Nothing against Sydney: I mean the falseness of cities everywhere, whether on the part of fastfood restaurants dishonestly dressed up in a décor that evokes a time before credit cards and global supply chains or in the speech of politicians who cannot speak at all except in soundbites or in the flood of advertising that almost make one long to be illiterate.  I’m not sure how I’d feel if I washed ashore in a place where everyone and everything was honest, but, for the moment at least, I was done with tube men.   That’s what they’re called—those fan-driven air dancers that car dealers put out on the sidewalk to wave frenetically.  I’m embarrassed to say that tube men always catch my eye.  I suppose it’s the owners of the things who should be embarrassed, but I might as well wish for the moon.

I thought I’d try Broken Hill, a town that in 1913 produced more lead and zinc than any other mining district on Earth.  Broken Hill was also in second place that year for silver production.  It’s true that these rankings have not made Broken Hill a major tourist attraction, but for me Broken Hill had the virtue, shared with every mining town, of not pretending, or not pretending very much.  Mining towns are strictly functional, or nearly so, which makes them honest, or nearly so.  They’re nearly as honest as railway tracks.  No lipstick, no necktie, no fake smile.  I have a short piece of rail on my desk, and half the reason I like it is that there’s no such thing as a dishonest piece of rail.

I could have flown nonstop to Broken Hill, which is about 600 miles west of Sydney—or about a third of the way across Australia to Perth, but just as I had once driven north from Alice Springs to Darwin, now I would fly to Adelaide, then drive the three or four hundred miles northeasterly to Broken Hill.   I’d never been to South Australia and wanted to see a bit of it 

Adelaide City, I would later discover, is laid out as a perfect rectangle with mostly gridded streets, many only fifteen feet wide.  There’s a central plaza, complemented by small parks at the exact center of each quarter of the grid.  The entire rectangle is wrapped by a muff of park half a mile wide.

It sounds charming but it’s too Victorian to be beautiful, too strangled by the quest for propriety.  Still, compared to the suburbs of Phoenix, it’s a triumph.  For this, we can thank Richard Light, South Australia’s first Surveyor General.  He laid out the town plan in 1837 and named it for the wife of King William IV.  The king died that year, and all his children with Adelaide had died young, so William was succeeded by Victoria, his niece.  Adelaide survived as dowager for a dozen years but never visited Australia.

The trouble is that Adelaide City, with 20,000 people, is lost in metropolitan Adelaide, which has well over a million­­.  Light’s city is so lost in urban sprawl that a visitor could easily come and go without ever discovering its existence.  That’s what happened to me.  I did discover it on my way home, but my first impression of Adelaide wss of a dark garage with the vaguely threatening sound of tires squealing on concrete.  I rented a car, did my own squealing, and then found myself surrounded by commuters heading home.  They boxed me in for an hour as I found a path through a network of crowded arterials with lots of traffic lights.  About halfway to the northern outskirts of the metro, I bailed at one of the apartment hotels common in Australia.  They’re spacious and functional but so sterile that, entering your room, you feel like a pathogen.  

The next morning I made it to the northern edge of the metro, about twenty-five miles north of Light’s Adelaide City.  Those last miles were the usual mosaic of new boxes built by people hoping to make money and old boxes whose owners are hoping to do the same thing by spending as little money as possible while waiting for their property to appreciate.  I kept my eyes on the road, not only to stay alive but so I didn’t have to look at what my father used to call dreck. 

H.L. Mencken comes to mind, particularly with a diatribe he wrote called “The Libido for the Ugly.”  Mencken wasn’t attacking strip malls and neighborhood shopping centers—his was a generic attack on the American cultural landscape of the 1920s—but a century later we still seem to lust after appalling places.  They’re new.  They’re shiny.  We hardly have to walk, and they’re full of stuff we want.  End story, until you think about our choosing to move from a world of infinite complexity into a world of boxes, a world without surprises but surpassingly convenient if we need a plastic bucket or some toothpaste.  I remember an urban developer who made a small lake.  He hoped to get some restaurants around it and was reduced almost to tears when the architect for the chain restaurant that finally came to the site said he had to be in Kansas on Thursday.  No time to adjust the plans.  The restaurant got built, but it presents a blank wall to the lake.  

The good news for me was that metro Adelaide yielded to four-wheel-drive tractors pulling gangs of disc plows and raising storms of dust from huge fields.  With five million acres devoted to wheat, South Australia is not far behind Kansas, and it was planting time.  That’s exciting, like any activity involving big machines.   I know people who are bored or even annoyed when they have to stop at a grade crossing.   Not me: I detest traffic lights but will happily wait for a train to pass. I’m even sorry if I clear the track just before the train comes.  As for big farm machines, my only objection is that, because they reduce the need for farm labor, they have killed thousands of towns born in the era of muscles.  Whether in Australia or Kansas—or Uruguay or most of South Africa—very nearly the only man walking with his hand on a plow these days is a statue in a park.  

 I’m not arguing in favor of mules, but I would say a word in defense of those vanished or vanishing towns.  I recently reread Huckleberry Finn and was upset to see Twain despising the people in the towns along the river.  I love Mark Twain, but were the people who lived along the Mississippi really grotesques out of Goya?  I think not, or at least I think they were no worse than people anywhere else.  Just because famous writers say so doesn’t mean it is so.   

I was reminded of this literary calumny about thirty miles beyond the northern edge of metropolitan Adelaide.  I had landed in Riverton, a town of a thousand people.  That’s half as many as Riverton had in 1930, and from this statistic alone I anticipated a wreck.

The highway from Adelaide, the A32, is Riverton’s main street, and it stretches for about a kilometer before reverting back to wheat.  There is hardly any town east of the highway, because growth in that direction is blocked by a railway track.  The last train left in 1988, but more than 30 years later the rusting rails are still in place, and the only road crossings are at the north and south ends of town.  To the west, the town fills a street grid about five blocks long and three blocks deep.  Farther west, you’re back to wheat.  

Yet Riverton was not a wreck. It not only had a gas station but a supermarket, a pharmacy, a bakery, a diner, and a pizzeria.  It had a bank, a hardware store, a dress shop, a hairdresser, a real-estate office and two hotels, one mostly a pub.  It had both an elementary and a high school, a post office, a police station, a public library, a lawn-bowling club, and an art gallery.  It had no chain stores except for the supermarket and bank.  It had no shopping center in the American sense of a group of businesses leasing space in a building owned by an anonymous real-estate investment trust a million miles away.  

How many towns of a thousand people in the United States have so much economic vitality?   If I hadn’t been blasting through, I would have stopped and asked for the recipe.  I probably should have stopped.  Americans, after all, have mostly abandoned the word community to politicians, activists, and real-estate developers.  Recognizing what people want, the developers draw up and the politicians approve plans advertising so-called communities with so-called curated amenities.  Everybody knows it’s a hustle.  Museums have curators; real-estate developers don’t.  

Riverton’s railroad station was now a B&B, solidly built with two stories of locally quarried slate called bluestone, which despite its name weathers to rust or gray.  Later, up in Broken Hill, I learned that the station had been the scene of several murders one day in 1921. 

 Two blocks away and back on the A32, the Hotel Central, built in 1908, had a bluestone façade fitted with an ornate, two-story iron veranda and balcony.  The building looked across the road to the Riverton Institute, built in 1879 as the original home of the town library.  Like the hotel, the Institute was a two-story stone cube, but its windows had true arches, and the building had a central balcony projecting from the upper floor, a fine place a hundred years ago for important visitors making a speech.  About half a mile to the north, and just beyond the edge of town, the Holy Trinity Anglican Church, built in 1858, was hiding behind tall bluegums that didn’t quite obscure a crenellated parapet atop a Norman tower.  

Best of all were the old bluestone bungalows along the highway or just off it.  They had spacious verandas with sheet-metal roofs rolled at the bottom edge in the curve that Australians call bullnosed.  The verandas overlooked well-tended and unfenced gardens, a sign of real community.  The newer homes on the western edge of town devoted a large part of their façades to a one- or two-car garage, or at least to a carport.  So much for the wisdom of the old stone bungalows, where parking was behind the house on the principle that houses are for people, not machines.  The new homes had no porches either.  Their absence was an indicator of air conditioning but also a sign of community in decline.  With no porches came no gardens, except the kind euphemistically called xeriscapes.  Ironically, these expanses of gravel were fenced with sheet metal or woven wire screens.  

Many newer houses had solar panels.  People tell me that I should put them on my own house to save money and the planet.  That’s a powerful combination, but I balk at adding another stranger to my collection.  Someday I may capitulate, but it will probably be because I’ve succumbed to the combined forces of bribery (I mean subsidies) and clever marketing.   I know I’m vulnerable.  I recall an advertising executive who once said that people who eat Grape Nuts are eating advertising.  And I like Grape Nuts.

Riverton, as I say, had lost of half its population, but 40 miles farther up the road Burra had lost 80 percent of its population, which had peaked at 5,000 in 1870.  Burra had been the home of the Monster Mine, which produced copper from 1845 to 1877.  There’s still a hole in the ground.  It’s shaped like a cucumber about a quarter-mile long, with a background of gently rolling hills covered in grass and scattered acacias.  The hole is obviously manmade, because its sides are stepped in terraces dropping more than a hundred feet to a green pool.  For a while, Burra was the chief supplier of copper to India.  I myself have an old, very heavy, and almost spherical copper urn, a water pot or lota that I bought years ago in Delhi.  I’ve never thought, until now, that all twenty pounds of it might have come from this hole in the ground.                                        

The Monster Mine was the chief property of the South Australian Mining Association.  Shares in this company sold for five pounds in 1845 and fifty pounds three years later.  At the peak, about 1870, they were worth over three hundred.  During that period the miners’ wages were cut.  The miners were mostly Welsh, and in 1848 they initiated Australia’s first big industrial action.  The strike was broken, and work went on.  The mine’s managing director moved to Adelaide and went into politics.  He was Henry Ayers, who had arrived from England in 1840 as a carpenter, worked for five years as a law clerk, then in 1845 become the secretary of the mining association.   If his name sounds faintly familiar, it’s probably because until recently it was applied to Australia’s most famous natural feature, the mountain now called Uluru but known to Whites from 1873 until 1993 as Ayers Rock.

Still in his mid-thirties, Henry Ayers was elected to the upper house of  South Australia’s state parliament, and he spent the next thirty-seven years there, including five short stints as premier.  At his death in 1897 he left behind a forty-room mansion at the northeast corner of the Adelaide City grid. The architect was an Irish emigrant who had served as Richard Light’s assistant on the survey of Adelaide City.  I mention this because the house is available now as a wedding venue.  My point is that money, no matter how brutally earned, acquires with age the patina of refinement.  Don’t believe me?  Think of a donor wall in a hospital, museum, or college.  The names at the top are either of pirates or of their genteel descendants.

Burra also lies just south of Goyder’s Line.  George Goyder was South Australia’s Surveyor-General for over thirty years in the late nineteenth century.  Roughly parallel to the coast, Goyder’s Line separates arable land on the south from rangeland on the north.  The change is obvious on satellite images, where in Spring the country north of Adelaide is green for a hundred miles, until, just past Burra, it changes to reddish-brown.  You can continue a thousand miles, but you’ll have trouble finding more cropland.  

Lacking satellites, George Goyder located his line the hard way, by riding two thousand miles on horseback.  In 1872 he secured passage of the Waste Lands Alienation Act, which prohibited the establishment of farms north of the line.  This was sound policy, but the rains were unusually good that year, and frustrated settlers excoriated Goyder as “the king of the Lands Department.”  They succeeded in getting the legislation repealed.  The result is still on display north of Goyder’s Line, where I passed abandoned houses built of cut-stone blocks neatly put together.  I took a picture of one such building, with a semi-elliptical brick arch over the doorway.  The roof is completely gone, and the surviving walls are losing blocks one at a time.  Do you hear the ghost of George Goyder?  It’s muttering something like “damned fools.” Goyder reminds me of John Wesley Powell, the explorer of the Grand Canyon who was similarly frustrated in his effort to push Congress to change the public-land laws of the United States to fit the arid West.       

North of Goyder’s Line, the real king is Atriplex, the humble but mighty saltbush.  This shrub supports a South Australia sheep industry whose products—wool, sheep, lambs—are worth about a billion Australian dollars annually, about the same as the state’s wheat crop.  Australians don’t eat much lamb or mutton these days—annual consumption per capita has collapsed from fifty pounds in 1960 to less than one pound today—but there’s always wool.  There’s also the Middle East, a big market for sheep shipped live every year for the great Islamic feasts.  Conditions on the ships ferrying the animals are appalling.

North of Burra, I passed a half-dozen bands of sheep, but there were no herders and no sheepdogs, just fenced saltbush and sheep looking for shade under occasional trees.  I saw emus, too, sometimes solitary but often in small groups.  Emus don’t eat saltbush, but they find plenty of bugs and acacia seeds.  Unlike the sheep, the emus took off like oversized roadrunners.  And if you wonder what Australians eat today, the answer of course is chicken.

The few settlements along the highway now were studies in desolation.  There would be a gas station with an attached convenience store.  A nearby trailer might be subdivided into rooms for a few workers, and a few trees would mark a designated rest area.  Always, there was ghost-town detritus: scattered steel barrels and buckets, rusted cast-iron stove tops, and truck tires worn down to their casings.  I’m thinking of Yunta, population 85 and about a hundred miles north of Burra.  The center of town was a BP gas station catering to the triple-trailer rigs known in Australia as road trains.  The tractors are usually fitted with six fuel tanks, each holding a hundred gallons, and if that’s not impressive try this: the rigs have a weight limit of 200 tons.  That’s five times the weight limit on America’s interstate highways.  Stand with your hands in your pockets on the side of an Australian highway, and a passing road train will take your hat off.  

In the heat I craved something salty.  I almost bought a bag of potato chips at the convenience store, but the clerk said I should try the chips, by which he meant french fries.  I’m glad he did.  The cook was a middle-aged woman who looked as though she had forgotten how to smile.  I can imagine that life out here might do that to a person, but this woman made superlative french fries, crisp on the outside and soft on the inside.  I should have gone back inside to compliment her.

Another twenty-five miles up the road, Mannahill boasted an abandoned hotel and almost nothing except a railroad station wondering when the town would arrive.  Next to it, an old crane with a steel boom had been designed to rotate on a fixed base and hoist bales of wool onto railcars.  Rusted chains and cables were still linked to reduction gears and a hand crank, but South Australian Railways hadn’t come this way for wool.  It had come for Silverton and Broken Hill, towns another hundred miles to the northeast and just across the border with New South Wales.  That’s where I was headed, of course.

Silverton in the 1890s had three thousand people, but when I saw it the population had fallen to fifty.  The most interesting story in town was not the old schoolhouse, now a museum.  Not the old churches, one converted to a residence and the other reduced to foundations.  Not the town’s abandoned railroad, stripped of its rails but still discernible from a slightly elevated roadbed winding through the saltbush.  It wasn’t even that parts of Mad Max 2 were filmed here.  The most interesting story was that Mary Gilmore taught here for two years in the late 1880s.   

I don’t know why she came here—she already had a job teaching school five hundred miles away in the farming town of Wagga Wagga—but she had a heart and a brain, and the mining camp radicalized her, as mining camps often do.  She became the first woman to join the Australian Workers’ Union, and she wrote for its newspaper, The Worker, until her politics grew too radical.  No problem.  Mary Gilmore moved over to the Communist Party and its paper, The Tribune.  The amazing thing is that she appears today on the reverse of the Australian ten-dollar bill.  No American woman with Mary Gilmore’s politics will ever appear on American money.  So much for the suggestion that Australians are just Americans who talk funny.

 Part 3.   Broken Hill

I really wasn’t doing half-badly.  I mean here I was, heading to Broken Hill to escape Big City falseness, and I had already gotten a snoot full of honesty.  There had been the miner’s strike broken at Burra, the grim life of a cook at Yunta, a schoolteacher turned radical at Silverton.  If I thought about it I could even add the renters kicked out of their homes at Miller’s Point, close to Sydney’s Harbor Bridge.   I had gotten such a dose of honesty that when I got to Broken Hill I was happy to see the grand clock tower of the Post Office and the ornate Italianate faced eof the Town Hall next door.  

Mark Twain and H.,L. Mencken might laugh at the pretensions of these buildings, but in 1900, when they were built, Broken Hill was the second most populous place in New South Wales.  Today, down from 30,00 to 15,000 residents, it ranks 24th.

The city’s leaders in 1980 hired consultants to help them prevent Broken Hill’s becoming a ghost town, and in 1986 Broken Hill become the first town to be listed on Australia’s Register of the National Estate, today called the National Heritage List.  Iron verandas were restored and sometimes added to old buildings that had never had them.  An old hardware store once specializing in mine equipment became an art gallery.  Many downtown street corners got signs with historic photographs for comparison with the streetscape today.   The Town Hall had been nearly demolished in the 1970s, but the façade remains intact and now protected, a grand screen in front of a parking lot.

I don’t mean to say that on my quest for honesty Broken Hill let me down.  A few months before I arrived, one of the two remaining mining companies, Chinese-owned Perilya, laid off a hundred workers, and in 2020, the other survivor, Japanese-owned CBH, laid off another seventy.  Perhaps a few people are old enough to remember when the Broken Hill Proprietary Company shut down its huge but exhausted mine in 1939.  The company went on to become the world’s biggest mining company, measured by capitalization, but it was permanently gone from Broken Hill and eventually it even changed its legal name to the alphabetical abstraction BHP Group.

          I’m pretty sure that the miners who lost their jobs wouldn’t disagree if I said that the bosses saw them as pieces of pipe to be measured, cut, and soldered, but I wanted to see honesty in the landscape.  It wasn’t hard to find, because the city’s streets are a grid laid out not to the compass points but to the Line of Lode.  That’s the ore body trending from northeast to southwest under what was literally the Broken Hill before that hill was replaced by a beveled pile of tailings about two miles long.  From the center of that ore body, the Broken Hill Proprietary Company over a period of fifty years extracted some 5,800 tons of silver.  When the silver was depleted, the company went on to extract 600,000 tons of zinc and 1.3 million tons of lead.  Compared to all that digging, one brick clock tower and one Italianate facade are insignificant.

The Line of Lode is shaped like a boomerang standing on its points.  The central section, where the ore body is closest to the surface, has been mostly mined out and is very quiet, so the Chinese and Japanese operators today are left to work at the Lode’s northern and southern ends, where the ore is deepest underground.  I went by the Perilya Mine, which is at the Line of Lode’s south end.  Each morning a hundred men descend a mile in a cage hanging on a cable strung over a headframe as tall as a container-port gantry.  Other men enter the mine in electric vehicles that zigzag down past the mine’s twenty-six levels.  Blasting takes place at night, and the men come back in the morning to load broken rock.  The hoist that lowered some of the men at the start of their shift now begins bringing up that rock.  From outside the mine’s perimeter, I watched the spoked wheels—as big as those on a stage coach—turning so slowly that the spokes weren’t a blur.  The ore saw daylight for the first time in hundreds of millions of years, then it rode on a belt to the end of a boom where it fell into a black pile as symmetrical as the sand in an hourglass. It would later go to a concentration mill producing a dust rich in lead and zinc.  The dust would be shipped by rail to the coast, and the waste would join the ever-growing tailings pile that has replaced the Broken Hill.                             

It was an almost bucolic scene, though I’d decline to spend a day underground with the miners.   I got something closer to a shiver at the defunct Junction Mine, which opened in 1886 and operated sporadically until 1972.  The main shaft of the mine is called the Browne Shaft after Sylvester John Browne, who controlled the mine for a while.  I walked right up to the Browne Shaft’s hoist and touched its open-sided elevator, hardly more than a perforated bucket into which a half-dozen men squeezed before being lowered to one of a dozen levels from two hundred to sixteen hundred feet underground.  The men walked through tunnels up to two miles long to reach a working face.  A metal sign posted at the elevator still listed the signal code: one bell for stop, two for lower, three to hoist, and twelve for accident.  The shiver came when I noticed some tiny print that said, “No Liability.”  How’s that for honesty?                    

Close to the hoist an engine shed sat alongside a solid-rock outcrop.   A historic marker pointed out that this dark rock was the only surviving bit of the original surface of the Broken Hill.   In the days before the discovery of silver, miners dismissed the rock as “mullock,” worthless stuff.  In 1883 it became “gossan,” rock that indicates valuable ore nearby.   

That was the year Charlie Rasp came by.  Rasp was a German immigrant with some education as a chemist.  He came to Australia for his health, and found himself working as a boundary rider for George McCullough, a British immigrant who managed the Mount Gipps Station, a sheep ranch of about half a million acres including what Rasp was apparently the first to call the Broken Hill.   McCullough had laid down the law that he’d fire any man who prospected on the job, and Rasp figured he’d be collecting his time when he went to tell McCullough that he thought he had found tin.  To the contrary.  Within a few days Rasp and McCullough, along with five other station employees, had formed the Syndicate of Seven.  They staked six claims, each covering forty acres and clustered near the apex of what would soon be identified as the Line of Lode.  Lucky for them: that’s where the ore body is closest to the surface.  

A few months went by with disappointing results.  Then the mine’s general manager, William Jamieson, had a visitor.  In a massive company history, self-published in 1935, the Broken Hill Proprietary Company recalled what happened next:

a man named Low handed Jamieson a specimen of ore, remarking: ‘I found it near your claim.’  The stone was impregnated with silver chlorides.  Some bargaining ensued before Low consented to point out where he had found the stone.  Jamieson judged from the water-worn condition of the specimen that it had been washed down from higher on the hill.  Accompanied by a black boy, Harry Campbell, who carried a 16-lb. sledge hammer, he climbed towards the crown of the hill.  A great block smashed by the boy revealed the presence of rich chlorides.  Subsequent assays, showing over 1000 ozs. to the ton, confirmed the belief that the stone was superlatively rich.

That's a hard passage to read.  On the one hand, it identifies the moment McCullough and Rasp sensed the enormous value of their property. On the other, it suggests that at a time when Broken Hill had given many people the comfort and status that come with wealth, benign racism was perfectly acceptable.  

The Syndicate floated what it named the Broken Hill Proprietary Company.  Sixteen thousand shares were issued at a nominal value of twenty pounds each, with fourteen thousand of them going to the members of the syndicate.  Over the next three years, the company earned over one and a half million pounds sterling, of which more than a third was paid as dividends.  A twenty-eighth share in the company is said to have traded in 1888 for eighteen hundred pounds and to have traded ten years later for one and a half million.  In 1905, after twenty years of operation, a financial statement revealed total revenues of almost twenty-seven million pounds and dividends just shy of eight.  That’s equivalent to almost a billion pounds today.

Charlie Rasp retired to Adelaide, where he married and acquired a mansion on the north side of town.  He called it Willyama, the Aboriginal name for the neighborhood of Broken Hill.  It still stands: an estate agent recently called it “arguably the most gracious Blue Stone residence in the state with some fourteen main rooms of elegance and inherent charm.”  That’s a nice example of straddling the fence between honesty and promotional guff.

George McCullough retired to London.  On his way out of Australia, he stopped in Melbourne to see Mary Smith, the daughter of one miner and the widow of another.  She had worked for McCulloch as his housekeeper at the Mt. Gipps Station, but in Melbourne he proposed.  She accepted, and the couple left Australia for good.  In London, the McCulloughs moved into a mansion at 184 Queen’s Gate, a block or two from the Royal Albert Hall. They turned their home into a private museum of recent British art.  An old photograph shows the McCulloughs sitting comfortably in a room plastered with paintings including Frederic Leighton’s “The Garden of the Hesperides,” now held by the Lady Lever Art Gallery near Liverpool. McCullough commissioned a portrait of himself by John Singer Sargent.  It’s held now by the Boston Athenaeum.

William Henry Corbould, a mining engineer who had known McCullough in Australia, dropped by.  In a memoir, Corbould recalls that at Mt. Gipps McCullough had been a “dour Scots”.  Guests, Corbould wrote, had eaten off “tin plates and tin mugs, nor was there any such thing as a tablecloth.”  The menu was “boiled or roast mutton and a few potatoes, all washed down with tea.”   In London, by contrast, McCullough and his wife were “attended by a retinue of servants.  Then one ate off silver and not its poor relation, tin.  And McCullough was lavish in his entertainment of old friends.”  Still, a photograph of the McCulloughs in their mansion suggests that part of them remained in the back of beyond.  McCullough wears a smoking jacket but sits casually, with his legs extended and feet crossed as if he doesn’t give a damn if his manners offend anyone.  His wife sits with her feet on a short stool and her hands in fists on her lap.  She looks as though she could teach the entire station crew a thing or two, including George McCullough. 

George McCullough and the other founders of BHP were smart enough to want the best engineers money could buy, and so in 1889 they sent their manager to the United States to hire his own replacement.  He went straight to Nevada’s Comstock Lode and poached William Henry Patton, superintendent of the Consolidated Virginia Silver Mining Company.   The Broken Hill mine needed a smelter manager, too, so the manager-recruiter continued to Colorado and hired H.H. Schlapp, superintendent of the Pueblo Smelting and Refining Company. 

Years later, an obituary described Patton as “an ardent lover and devoted student of physics and mechanical science… [who] always came to the front in case of an emergency.”  Arriving in Broken Hill, Patton put his knowledge to work by showing the miners how to build square-set timbering.  This was the method developed in Nevada to keep mined-out voids from collapsing: it filled the space with a framework of stout wooden squares that could be stacked like hollow blocks.  Perhaps gulping at the cost, BHP had timbers for the squares shipped from Oregon.

Schlapp, the smelter manager, was described by one of the men who worked for him in Colorado.  “There never was a squarer and better man to work for.  He was an indefatigable worker and a man of great ability, and with all that, very simple and lovable, but we had to attend to our duties conscientiously, or, in his mild way he would deliver to the sinner a lecture that was not easily forgotten.”  Born in Iowa and educated as a metallurgical engineer at the University of Freiberg, Schlapp realized that fuel costs in Broken Hill were so high that it would be better to convert the on-site smelter to a concentration mill, then ship the concentrate by rail two hundred miles west to Port Pirie.  A new smelter there could run on coal sent inexpensively by sea from Newcastle, north of Sydney.

Patton fell ill after two years and was forced to return to the United States, and Schlapp retired in 1893, but both men were quickly replaced.   John Howell arrived from the United States via a mine in New Zealand and oversaw the excavation of a trench four thousand feet long and three hundred feet deep, dug not to reach ore but to lighten the weight of earth bearing down on the tunnels below.  His successor, Alexander Stewart, began the recycling of tailings rich in zinc.

The most important man in the history of BHP arrived in 1899.  He was Dutch-born Guillaume Delprat, and he came from the mines of Andalusia.  The personnel merry-go-round stopped, and Delprat stayed put until 1923.  A metallurgist by training, Delprat helped develop the Potter-Delprat froth-flotation process, which gave BHP an efficient way to process the mine’s deep ores, which were sulfides instead of oxides.  More fundamentally, Delprat recognized that even the sulfides wouldn’t last forever.  Thinking about the company’s long-term prospects, he oversaw the development of iron mines near the smelter at Port Pirie, and by 1915 the company’s main business was a steel mill at Newcastle.  By the time operations at Broken Hill stopped in 1939, the Newcastle mill was thriving.  Forty years later, it, too, closed, but by then BHP was busy elsewhere.   Thank Delprat or curse him.   

I mostly thank him because my old Crown Vic P71 won’t start without twenty pounds of lead in its battery, but I also think of the Miner’s Memorial dedicated in 2002 atop the Line of Lode.   It consists of a simulated tunnel made of rusted steel plates faced with large sheets of plate glass into which have been etched the names and causes of death of the eight hundred men who over the decades died in these mines.   The descriptions are laconic.  Andrew Frederick Bolam,  “crushed by chute door.”  Thomas Roy Parkin, “suffocated.”  Alexander Hillock, died in “rock fall.” 

Some of the monuments in Broken Hill’s very large cemetery say a bit more..  One stone, twelve feet tall and paid for by the miners’ union, marks the grave of Horace Sterling Taylor, who was “accidentally killed at Silver Ring Mine by falling down a shaft, December 23, 1889.”  From a newspaper obituary, we learn that Taylor, who was 34 years old, slipped off a ladder and dropped one hundred and thirty feet.                                                    

The cemetery also holds the grave of the man who tried to stop the murderer at Riverton, the first town I had passed after leaving Adelaide.  He was Percival “Jack” Brookfield, an immigrant from Lancashire who had spent his adolescence at sea and then come to Broken Hill as a miner.  He became active in the miners’ union and helped lead a strike in 1916 which led to a reduction of the work week to forty-four hours.  He fought against conscription and was fined for this, with an extra fine for cursing the British Empire.  Elected to the New South Wales legislature, Brookfield supported the IWW and the Bolsheviks.  He also chanced to be at the Riverton station when a man fatally stabbed two people.   Brookfield’s tombstone says that he “forfeited his life at Riverton, South Australia, on March 22nd, 1921, in a gallant effort to save the lives of others.”  The stone, paid for by public subscription, is a tall column with a globe at the top and the still faintly echoing phrase from those times: “Workers of the World, Unite!”  The cemetery was deserted when I came by at sunset.  A family of browsing kangaroos stopped, looked up, and waited to see who would blink first.  They won.

Part 4. Uluru

For reasons I don’t understand, kangaroos make me happy.  It’s odd because I have no reason to believe that I make them happy.  Still, they do, and by making me happy in the Broken Hill cemetery that evening they nudged me toward understanding that it was a mistake to wander around the planet in search of honesty.  I have no idea what Diogenes got from his search, but mine had produced only the sour advice to bet on the money.

And so I headed west until, eight hundred miles later, I was forced to stop at the foot of a dune of fine red sand, clean as water.  Another few feet and I’d have been praying that the car’s toolkit included a shovel.  

I got out.  Almost at once, tiny flies began buzzing around my head.  I kept brushing them away from my mouth and nose and ears and eyes.  Later, I asked somebody what people around here called the flies.  He didn’t want to say, but I pried it out of him, and he finally said, “Little bastards.”   I like that name.  Sometimes you just have to make a joke out of nuisances you cannot avoid.                                               

I walked up to the top of the dune, but the view was more dunes, so I got back in the car and drove back a mile or so to pavement.  This was the Lasseter Highway, named for Harold Lasseter, a prospector who died in 1931 while hunting for the gold reef or vein that he said he had discovered some thirty years earlier.  By accident, I had seen his grave in Alice Springs on my first visit to Australia.  A ton of sandstone had been carved into the shape of a man squatting in the dirt.  You could hardly see his face, lost under a slouch hat and behind an immense beard reaching from his cheekbones down to his big belly.  In his hands there was a gold-miner’s pan.

To the east of the dune where I had stopped, the Lasseter Highway links up in a hundred and thirty miles with the Stuart Highway, which traverses the continent north to south and is named for John McDouall Stuart (there’s no ‘g” in McDouall), possibly the first person—certainly the first White person—to make that journey.  Stuart survived, barely, and died four years later in London, in 1866.  To the west of the dune and its flies, the Lasseter Highway downshifts in about thirty miles to the unpaved Great Central Road, which leads west in nine hundred miles to the gold-mining town of Kalgoorlie.  There are easier ways to get there, including scheduled flights from Perth.

With one exception, the Lasseter Highway has no hotels or settlements along its entire length of one hundred and fifty miles.  The exception is a cluster of five  hotels a few miles from the dune where I had stopped.  It was Darling Harbor all over again, with these hotels, too, flying the flags of Accor, the French chain.  They were part of a master-planned tourist center called YulAra, which also has a gas station, an IGA grocery, a bookstore, and several souvenir shops.  Almost a thousand visitors arrive daily by air at YulAra, where they are corralled into the Accor hotels.  I found no bargains, with rooms running between three hundred and five hundred U.S. dollars a day—and often the place is sold out weeks or months in advance.  When I left a few days later, a flight attendant looked over the sea of silver hair in front of us.  She said, “They’ve ticked off one more item on their bucket lists.”  She had been to YulAra many times and knew what the visitors had come for, but she had never stepped off the plane.

A few miles west of YulAra a dead-end road branches off and heads south from the Lasseter Highway.  The road is heavily signed warning motorists where they can and cannot park.  It was midday, and the flies and heat were bad.  I parked next to a sign telling me not to.  I got out of the car, and the interior word stream stopped.  Sometimes I think I live for that rare silence. 

Antonio Canova, the sculptor, once said in pique that people see with their ears.  He meant that, rather than judging things hemselves, they rely on what they have heard from others.  Perhaps I too was doing that, seeing with my ears.  After all, I had been told—not only in words but in images—that Ayers Rock, or Uluru, is breathtaking.  It reminds me of a girl I knew at Berkeley who was almost vibrating, breathless an hour or two after by chance finding herself just for a moment a few feet from Jack Kennedy.  I wonder where Judy Miller is now.

On the other hand, the first Europeans to see the rock were also stopped cold, and they couldn’t have been seeing with their ears.  They were either Ernest Giles in 1872 or William Gosse a year later.  If Giles saw Uluru, he saw it from a distance.  In Australia Twice Traversed, he recalls that "after a long and anxious scrutiny through the smoke and haze, far, very far away, a little to the west of south, I descried the outline of a range of hills, and right in the smoke of one fire an exceedingly high and abruptly ending mountain loomed.”  Giles was more effusive about the Olgas, a cluster of mountains about twenty miles west of Uluru.  Seeing them up close, he called them “one of the most extraordinary geographical features on the face of the earth, like the backs of several monstrous kneeling pink elephants.”  Giles named the Olgas for the Duchess Olga, a sister of Czar Nicholas II.  She was a serious mineralogist, so naming the mountains for her was not as absurd as it sounds.  Still, the Olgas today are almost always called by their Aboriginal name, Kata TJuta.

William Gosse, on the other hand, definitely saw—and named—Ayers Rock.  As leader of the Central and Western Exploring Expedition, Gosse kept a diary.  In it he wrote: “When I got clear of the sandhills, and was only two miles distant, and the hill for the first time coming fairly in view, what was my astonishment to find it was one immense rock rising abruptly from the plain…  I have named this Ayers Rock.”  Gosse, after all, was an employee of the government of South Australia, which in those days claimed sovereignty over the Northern Territory, and Henry Ayers of the Monster Mine was enjoying a stint as the state’s chief secretary.  

It does not appear from his diary that Gosse spoke to the local Aboriginal group, the PitjandJara, or learned that their name for the mountain was Uluru.  That name appears in print for the first time in 1914 on a map drawn by Herbert Basedow, a geologist on the North-West or Wells Expedition of 1903.  (Basedow, by the way, was more than a geologist, and in The Australian Aboriginal, a book published in 1925, he writes of “racial homicide.” This was decades before the first appearance of the word “genocide.”)

The William Gosse diary continues: 

This is a high mass of granite, the surface of which has been honeycombed and is decomposing.  It is 1,100 feet above the surrounding country, two miles in length east and west, and one mile wide.  This seems to be a favourite resort of the natives, judging from the numerous camps in every cave.  The caves are formed of large pieces breaking off the main rock and falling to the foot.  This rock is certainly the most wonderful natural feature I have ever seen.  What a grand sight it must present in the wet season with waterfalls in every direction….  

Gosse was thirty-one when he saw Uluru and thirty-eight when he died of a heart attack.  Henry Ayers attended his funeral.  So did Gosse’s more immediate boss, George Goyder, the surveyor-general who had demarcated Goyder’s Line.                      

There’s no fence around Uluru, so you can walk up to it, take a key out of your pocket, and scratch to your heart’s content.  No problem: Uluru is hard and smooth.  The key won’t do anything.  

Perhaps Gosse should have known better than to call it granite, because even from the point where I stopped to stare, the rock’s sedimentary layering, like magazines upright on a shelf, is obvious.  In Gosse’s  efense, the rock often does look and feel like granite.  Like true granite, for example, it casts off onion-like exfoliation shells.  Not only that: though Uluru is sandstone, the sandstone is composed of grains of granite from long-gone mountains.  The erosional debris from those mountains formed a thick alluvial fan in an inland sea.  The fan was subsequently caught in a mountain-building episode that left the beds standing almost upright.  Erosion has stripped away everything in the neighborhood except Uluru.  Water and wind are still at work, deepening the grooves between Uluru’s granitic, if not granite, beds.                                    

Until the 1950s, Uluru had few White visitors, and the Administrator of the Northern Territory went so far as to declare that there was “no future in tourism in the Northern Territory, least of all Ayers Rock.”  In 1952, however, an enterprising tour operator named Leonard or Len Tuit bused a dozen hardy tourists about 300 miles from Alice Springs to a camp he set up just east of the rock and near what is now the Aboriginal settlement of MutitJulu, posted as off-limits to park visitors.  His guests slept in tents and were grateful that Tuit had dug a well to supply a bathhouse. 

In 1958, the government withdrew Ayers Rock from the South West Aborigine Reserve and designated it as a special reserve.  A pilot named Eddie Connellan, who had previously flown passengers from Alice Springs on aerial tours circling the Rock, got permission that year to land on a strip half a mile from the Rock’s northeast-facing side.  (The strip is still visible on satellite imagery.)  Edna Bradley, working as a waitress at Tuit’s camp, recalled that “the pilot proposed a toast: ‘To the future of aerial tourism.’  Then he looked around the room, ‘Ya know, this could be a goer.’  He sat down, nodded his head and said, ‘You know we’re really going for the international tourists for this.’  ‘Ya won’t get that many,’ said Malcolm.”  Malcolm was another Tuit employee.

Tuit sold his camp in 1960, and it was rebuilt as the Red Sands Motel.  The neighboring Boomerang opened eighteen months later, followed by the Inland Motel and the Uluru Motel.  In 1977 the reserve was renamed as the Uluru (Ayers Rock-Mount Olga) National Park.  By then, fifty thousand visitors were arriving annually.  Fearing the growth of a tourist slum, the government shut down the airstrip, cancelled the ground leases for the hotels, and demolished them.  A dozen miles to the north and outside the park boundary, a new airport opened in 1982.  Three years later, the new tourist center of YuLara opened.  The government transferred ownership of the park to the Aboriginal Uluru-KatatJuta Land Trust, which then leased the park back to the park service for ninety-nine years. 

          In 1987, UNESCO, the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, added Uluru to its World Heritage List.  That list had begun in 1978 with the designation of a dozen sites.  By 1987, there were about two hundred and fifty places on the list, and today there are over a thousand.  That sounds like a lot, but crowds of visitors are loving many of these places to death. 

The great majority of the passengers arriving at the YuLara airport don’t want to drive, so agencies provide buses and offer two-night tours scheduled to the minute.  At sunset, when the rock is especially colorful, hundreds of these visitors are delivered to a viewing spot restricted to buses.  It has room for twenty or thirty of them, maybe more. When I came by, crowds congregated politely, quietly chatting to fill the time before the rock achieved its maximum luminosity.   

Energetic visitors hike the pedestrian path, about five miles long, that circles the rock; some make it into a jogging track.  Others pay a fee, join a group, and whiz around the path on rented Segways, those self-balancing so-called “personal transporters” you sometimes see in big airports.   I also saw a dozen or more visitors ignoring the signs pleading with them not to insult Aboriginal culture by climbing Uluru.  Edna Bradley, the waitress from the 1950s, recalled that climbing the rock had been difficult and that people in Len Tuit’s camp had said, “‘What they should have here, is something to hang onto, like a chain.’  But others said that would be terrible, ‘just imagine how ugly it would look.’”  The chain was installed in 1964.  Repeat after me: bet on the money. 

In 2019, the admonition against climbing graduated to a legal prohibition. What would future visitors miss?  Here’s William Gosse’s answer, from his diary for July 20, 1873: 

 I rode round the foot of rock in search of a place to ascend.  Found a waterhole on south side, near which I made an attempt to reach the top, but found it hopeless.  Continued along to the west, and discovered a strong spring coming from the centre of the rock, and pouring down some very steep gullies into a large deep hole at the foot of the rock.  Seeing a spot less abrupt than the rest of the rock, I left the camels here, and after walking and scrambling two miles barefooted over sharp rocks, succeeded in reaching the summit, and had a view that repaid me for my trouble.  

The pools from which Gosse attempted to climb are today called MutitJulu and Kantju, and with these names we bump into the tricky business of understanding Uluru as it is understood by the people who were here first. 

The visitor-friendly version begins with William Edward or "Bill" Harney, who in 1958 was appointed as the park’s first “keeper.”   Harney writes that two old men

were brought to join me on my first sojourn at the 'rock'.  They had been born and initiated there over fifty years before.  As we wandered along the base of the mountain, they decided to tell me its story.  I would say nothing, for asking too many questions would upset their thinking.  After a time, we would pause at a certain place in front of or below a rock, the sight of which symbol refreshed their memories and soon they would begin chanting in a low voice which slowly increased in volume as they remembered it. 

Other people have written similar accounts.  Charles Mountford, a geologist who grew fascinated with Aboriginal culture, writes in Ayers Rock of “Moanya, stern and reticent, but always willing to instruct me in the lore of his people.”  

          The obstreperous Ted Strehlow now enters the conversation.  A professor of linguistics at Adelaide University, Strehlow was born in 1908 to Lutheran missionaries from Germany.  He grew up near Alice Springs with local children for playmates, and so he spoke a local Aranda language as a mother tongue.  Contrary to Harney and Mountford, Strehlow writes bluntly that instruction in Aboriginal beliefs is restricted to initiates who have undergone mutilations the thought of which would make most non-Aboriginal men change the subject.  If you’re doubtful, check “subincision” on Wikipedia.  I suggest doing it while you’re sitting down.

In 1969 Strehlow wrote that “ultra-inquisitive intruders are commonly fobbed off with untrue stories,… as can be readily seen in the large amount of fictitious rubbish that is already being retailed by tourist guides (and others) to an unsuspecting and gullible public.”  Strehlow dismissed “the wholesale production of worthless mythological accounts written by the uninformed for the ignorant.”  Strehlow went further and dared to write that Uluru was not an especially sacred place.  He put it this way: 

         ...it is wrong to imagine that only The Centre's more striking natural features had ever been places of sacred eminence for the surrounding tribal territory.  It is much nearer the mark to state that, until the coming of the white population the whole of Central Australia, in a very real sense, was a sacred land for its original inhabitants. 

         In Central Australia, every landscape feature was associated with some mythological episode or some sacred verse.  Hence mythology was validated by the geography of the whole countryside… not merely by a few major waters or prominent mountains.  Some of the greatest episodes commemorated by the Central Australian traditions are, in fact, associated with sites in which no modern sight-seeing tourist would be interested….   [Certain places…] that few tourists would bother to notice, outranked by far Ayers Rock, despite the spectacular scenic magnificence of the latter which rightly evokes the admiration of all white visitors, regardless of its old tribal significance.  

So were Harney and Mountford getting the truth or "rubbish"?  Here, at about ten o’clock on a map of the rock, is an exfoliation shell that “symbolises the Dreamtime ana (digging stick) of the Inma ritual.”  That’s Harney.  Along comes Mountford, who writes that the same rock is a knife that a poisonous snake used to kill a young carpet snake.  Which is it?  I have no trouble believing that it could be both, but I fear it might be neither.  Circling Uluru and with maps and competing texts in hand, I got more and more confused.  

I went over to MutitJulu, formerly called Maggie’s Spring.  The waterhole is easy to find, because it has a big parking lot and signs advertising Segways.   At the base of the rock there’s also a multi-ton rock fragment that, according to both Harney and Mountford, is the nose of a venomous snake—a nose cut off by the angry mother of an injured non-venomous carpet snake.  It certainly looks like a nose, and it hasn’t slipped more than a few feet from its original home.                                       

An easy path leads from here to the spring, which lies at the base of one of Uluru’s erosional wrinkles.  My biggest challenge was finding a time to visit when I didn’t have to share the path with visitors having a good time.    

Was I at an important place?  Harney leaves no doubt.  “MutiJula [sic] is an important rock hole…. To the UluRitdja, the mountain symbolizes their tribe and held the essence of life in the rock pool… sacred to the ‘all knowing and everlasting’ serpent, Wanambi.”  Harney explains that when the water failed, the people of the Rock would come to its base.  They would beg for “meat,” and the serpent high up atop the Rock would disgorge water from its body.   Mountford, unfortunately, tells a different story: “The aborigines believe that, when the water is getting low, they can, by standing at the head of the gorge and shouting “Kuka-kuka” in a loud voice, entice the spirit of the dead Kunia man, who is resident in the upper rockholes, to send a stream of water to the MutitJula waterhole beneath.”   

I decided that I wasn’t going to get anywhere near the truth of what this place meant to the PitjanJara.  True, about two miles to the east there’s an Aboriginal settlement.  I might have gone there, but Strehlow had as much as told me what to expect.  Besides, the approach road was signed “Off Limits.”  I don’t mind parking where I’m not supposed to park, but I’m not about to barge into a community that I suppose has had more than its fill of outsiders.

Instead, I did a quick survey of the black lichen around the pool, which indicated that the water level was two feet below its seasonal maximum.  The stream channel above me was not only black but dry.  Patches of greenery suggested that there were several pools between the base and top, and flocks of small and very fast birds zoomed back and forth both at my level and around the greenery high above.  They were wonderfully agile and seemed to be havin

I walked over to a place where the base of the rock flared like a cake whose frosting has begun melting.   I don’t know how erosion has produced that skirt, but I found myself patting the rock—technically, it’s an arkose sandstone—the way I might pat a friendly dog.  

I think back to the Aussies who went to Wichita.  They’d see a major aerospace industry, because Wichita is the birthplace of Cessna and Beechcraft.  The city is also the home of Pizza Hut, which is huge in Australia.  Maybe the Aussies would visit the world’s first Pizza Hut, which is now a Wichita museum.  Perhaps they’d visit a Walmart super center.  Australia doesn’t have any yet, and Wichita has half a dozen.  I’m flexible about these recommendations, but I’d make sure to tell the Aussies to visit Yosemite.  I’d want them to see that the United States, too, has places where visitors can feel at home when they’re a world away from home.  

That’s such a good feeling.   It’s like the way I felt a few months ago when summer was turning to fall.  I was lying on a bed next to a double-hung window old enough to rattle a bit in its frame.  I lifted it a few inches and for the first time in months cold air poured over my face.  There was a similar moment this morning, when I woke to discover that the world had turned white.  I got up to turn the furnace on, then went back to bed for half an hour.  I lay there feeling the icy air on my face and trying to decide if snow has a scent.  I decided that it does, just as silence has a sound.