Episode 2 (Australia, Part 2 of 4)

The transcript of this episode is available at Buzzsprout.com/1970784.
For photos of the places discussed, see greatmirror.com

Transcript

Walking around Darling Harbor, I knew I was done with tube men. That’s what they’re called—those fan-driven air dancers that car dealers set up to catch your attention. I try not to look at them, but I look at them anyway.

I decided to go to Broken Hill, a town of 15,000 people.

In 1913 Broken Hill produced more lead and zinc than any other mining district on Earth. I went to Broken Hill because mining towns don’t have a lot of time for lipstick and neckties and fake smiles. And now you know why I keep on my desk a short length of rail, the kind that trains run on. It’s just about an inch long, but it weighs about ten pounds and like all rail it is exceptionally honest.

Broken Hill is at the far western edge of New South Wales and about 25 miles shy of the border with South Australia.  Just as I had once driven north from Alice Springs to Darwin, so now I decided to fly not to Broken Hill, which is possible, but instead to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia.  I’d spend a night there, then drive north 300 miles to Broken Hill.

My first impression of Adelaide was of the vaguely threatening sound of tires squealing on concrete.  I was in the airport’s multistory garage.  I rented a car, did my own squealing, and found myself surrounded by commuters heading home.  

I completely missed Adelaide City proper, whose 20,000 people are lost in metropolitan Adelaide, with well over a million­­.  Later, on my way back, I saw that at the center of the metro there’s a Victorian town laid out as a perfect square with mostly gridded streets, many only fifteen feet wide.  At the center of the grid there’s a square plaza, complemented by small square parks at the centers of each quarter of the grid.  The entire grid is wrapped by a muff of park half a mile wide.  

It sounds charming, and I find symmetry reassuring, but the Victorian quest for propriety is strangling.  Still, compared to the suburbs of Dallas, Adelaide City is a triumph.  It’s the work of Richard Light, South Australia’s first Surveyor General.  He laid out the town 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 his niece, Victoria.  Adelaide survived as dowager for a dozen years but never visited Australia.

I stopped that first day about halfway to the northern outskirts of the metro and checked into one of the apartment hotels common in Australia.  They’re spacious and functional but so clean that they make me feel like I’m a walking and talking pathogen-delivery system.  

The next morning I made it through the metro. Because land in Australia is cheap, Adelaide’s outskirts are covered with American-style sprawl. I tried not to look at what my father used to call dreck. H.L. Mencken came to mind with his caustic essay called “The Libido for the Ugly.”

I wouldn’t use the word libido, but I remember a developer who built a small lake on the outskirts of Oklahoma City.  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.  There was no time to adjust the plans.  The restaurant still sits there. It presents a blank wall to the lake and picture windows to a freeway.  Nobody objects.  Nobody even notices. I don’t call them idiots.  I don’t say they lust after ugly stuff.  I think they are mostly stunned as they move through a world made for money.  Being stunned is helpful.  It’s a survival mechanism.

Adelaide’s suburbs yielded to four-wheel-drive tractors pulling gangs of disc plows raising storms of dust.  With five million acres devoted to wheat, South Australia is not far behind Kansas, and it was planting time.

Should I have been appalled?  Perhaps, but I wasn’t.   I know people who are bored or annoyed when they have to stop at a train crossing, but I will happily wait for a passing train.  It’s the same with farm machinery, which is as honest as railroad track.  Instead of objecting to soil erosion, I object to agribusiness killing the 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 today is a statue in a park.  

Good riddance, someone says, perhaps sharing the common disdain for small-town life. I recently reread Huckleberry Finn and was annoyed by Twain’s despising the people in the towns along the river. Perhaps he thought that people in small towns any cretinous or bigoted, but I don’t. Just because famous writers say so doesn’t make it so. 

I passed through Riverton, a town, about thirty miles beyond the northern edge of metropolitan Adelaide.  Riverton has a thousand people, about half as many as it had in 1930.

The highway from Adelaide, the A32, is Riverton’s main street, and it takes about a kilometer to get 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 in wheat.  

It doesn’t sound promising, but Riverton had not only 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. 

Forty miles farther up the road at Burra, I came to the Monster Mine, in operation from 1845 to 1877.  The town then had 5,000 people; now it’s down to one thousand.  The miners left behind a hole shaped like a cucumber about a quarter-mile long, with its sides 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  kalash, a very heavy and almost spherical brass urn that I bought years ago in Delhi.  The  copper in it might have come from this hole in the ground.                      

Shares in the Monster Mine sold for five pounds in 1845 and fifty pounds three years later.  At the peak, about 1870, they were worth over three hundred.  The miners were mostly Welsh, and in 1848, after their wages were cut, 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.  Arriving from England in 1840, he worked briefly as a carpenter, then for five years as a law clerk before, in 1845, becoming the secretary of the company that owned the Monster Mine.  If his name sounds 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 most people as Ayers Rock until its name was officially changed in 1993.

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 immigrant 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.  It’s no surprise: no matter how brutally earned, money as it ages acquires the patina of refinement.  Think of a donor wall in a hospital, museum, or college.  The big names at the top belong either to pirates or to  their genteel descendants.

Burra lies just south of Goyder’s Line.  George Goyder became South Australia’s Surveyor-General in 1861 and held the job for over thirty years.  His 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, when it changes to reddish-brown.  You can continue north a thousand miles, but you’ll have trouble finding more green.  

George Goyder located his line the hard way, by riding two thousand miles on horseback.  Then, in 1872, he secured passage of the Waste Lands Alienation Act, which prohibited the establishment of farms north of the line.  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 was completely gone, and the surviving walls were losing blocks one at a time.  

Do you hear the ghost of George Goyder?  It’s saying 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 adapt 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 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 annual Islamic feasts.  Conditions on the ships ferrying the animals are appalling, and a bit of surreptitious video created a scandal at the time of my visit.

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 is chicken.

The few settlements along the highway 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 rest stop for highway travelers.  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 life out here doing that to a person, but this woman made superlative french fries, crisp on the outside and soft on the inside.  I wish I had gone back inside to compliment her.

Another twenty-five miles up the road, Mannahill boasted an abandoned hotel and almost nothing else except a railroad station wondering when its town would arrive.  Next to it, an old crane with a steel boom had been designed to 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, mining towns another hundred miles to the northeast and just across the border between South Australia and New South Wales.  

Silverton when I visited was down to 50 people, a long way from three thousand in the 1890s.  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 —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 The Worker, the union’s newspaper.  When her politics grew too radical for that paper, Mary Gilmore moved over to The Tribune, published by local Communists.  The amazing thing is that she appears today on the reverse of the Australian ten-dollar bill.  So much for any suggestion that Australians are Americans who talk funny.