Jason Devitt

I first heard about Easter Island when I was ten or eleven years old. An English teacher had us read Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki in class. Heyerdahl believed that the island´s enigmatic statues - the moais - were evidence that people from an ancient South American civilization had sailed west across the Pacific to occupy this, the most remote inhabitable island on earth (and not Polynesian people who sailed east from Tahiti, as everyone else thought). To prove that this was possible, he sailed a little wooden boat several thousand kilometers from Peru to Easter Island. Millions of romantics and armchair explorers were enthralled.

Later I remember a show on British TV called Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, a series of documentaries on ´unexplained phenomena´. This show had a ball with Easter Island. Why were many moais half buried in the hillside? How were they moved around? They weigh many tons, but there are no trees on the island to make equipment, and no large animals. What happened to the people who built them? When Europeans arrived the moais had been abandoned, many of them had been torn down, and there were just two thousand poor and badly nourished people living here, who could only offer folktales about how they were built. The segment ended with a story that the moais were men and women who had been turned to stone. Cue spooky music.

And then was Erich von Daniken, who proposed that aliens got stranded on Easter Island, built the moais for some unfathomably alien reason, and were finally rescued, by aliens.

I have always wanted to go.

In five days we got to see almost every square inch of the island, in a 4WD or on horseback. Even now there are very few trees here, and only one town, so that from the highest point on the island you can see the Pacific stretching all the way to the horizon in every direction. The nearest inhabited land is two thousand kilometers away, and that´s Pitcairn Island.

But this tiny, barren place has more to see than you expect - soft rolling hills, wild horses grazing everywhere, caves formed by lava tubes, cave paintings and rock carvings, a volcanic crater filled with rainwater with a ceremonial village and altar on its lip. And the moais.

There are almost nine hundred moais, half of them mounted on platforms like those in the first photo above, half of them scattered around a quarry in the crater of an extinct volcano called Rano Raraku, in various stages of completion, as if the builders downed tools one day a few hundred years ago and just walked away. Or vanished. It is a haunting place. Damn, now I´m doing it.

We know a lot more now than Heyerdahl did thanks to new techniques in archaeology, genetic testing, and pollen analysis (pollen from core samples reveals what used to grow here). At one point there may have been over ten thousand people living on Easter island, growing a wide variety of crops, catching sea birds, fish, and porpoises, and producing enough of a surplus to support a complex social hierarchy, including a caste of sculptors. The moais probably represented ancestors, and they and the platforms or ahus on which they are mounted are more refined forms of structures that have also been found in Tahiti - from which Easter Island was first colonized around 400 A.D., according to both genetic and linguistic analysis. When they got here the island was covered in palm trees, strong enough for scaffolding and hoists and rollers for moving the moais around, as well for building boats.

And then it all went horribly wrong. The trees slowly disappeared. The soil eroded. Crops failed. Half of the native flora and fauna went extinct, including most of the seabirds. Without large trees, the islanders could no longer make fishing boats and harpoons sturdy enough to catch porpoises, much less go on erecting moais. Remains of weapons suggest that a war followed, for control of whatever resources remained. Most controversially, there is evidence that the survivors turned to cannibalism for a time.

Jared Diamond (here and in more detail I think in his recent book Collapse) sees Easter Island as a clear example of our ability to destroy ourselves through mismanagement of the environment. He may be right, but understandably the people of Easter Island would rather focus on the high points of their ancestors´civilization, rather than the theory of a self-inflicted disaster. And they would rather emphasize the irrefutable damage done later by contact with Europeans: disease, slavery, destruction of the culture, colonial misrule. A theory that the Little Ice Age may have triggered the original collapse lets their ancestors off the hook completely.

Still, on our last day here it was ironic to see a little street fair in Hanga Roa on the theme of environmentalism. Schoolkids mounted exhibits on the evils of litter, and local organizations discussed recycling, marine conservation, and efforts to restore some of the native flora and fauna.

Sadly we saw no aliens.

The stingrays come so close to shore that you can pet them without even dropping your plastic cup of rum punch.

When we learned that in order to fly from Australia to South America, we´d have to stop over in Tahiti, our first reaction was not "oh no, is there no direct flight?"

I always thought that the problem for Tahiti was not that people don´t want to go there but that, as Captain Bligh learned, they don´t want to leave. I was wrong. Only 200,000 tourists go to Tahiti each year, roughly one tourist for each resident. Almost 7 million go to Hawaii - six tourists per resident. (The highest ratio in the world? With 200 visitors per resident, Venice is essentially a theme park.)

What this means is that Tahiti is relatively unspoilt.

I should be precise. Firstly, the name of the country is French Polynesia and it consists of 118 little islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Most people live on the island of Tahiti, which is the largest and most famous - French Polynesia is often referred to as ´Tahiti and her islands´ - but it is not the prettiest and a lot of visitors skip it altogether. Many of the other islands have white sand beaches and are surrounded by lagoons. Of these Bora Bora is best known and it´s covered in luxury resorts as you would expect. But other travelers told us that Maupiti, just west of Bora Bora, is just as beautiful and almost deserted. We spent most of our time on Moorea, a 30-minute ferry ride from Tahiti, but still underdeveloped.   

Secondly, relatively unspoilt means almost destroyed by contact with Europeans, colonized, used as a test site for nuclear bombs, and now desperately seeking mass tourism, but not as spoilt as you might think, because they haven´t succeeded. It means relative to Ko Phi Phi or Ibiza or Cancun or Bali.

It does not mean cheap, which is odd, because when demand is less than expected prices ought to be low. Why I am not sure, but I think the reason is that half of the government´s revenue comes from France.

Tahiti was a subsistence economy until the mid sixties, when France, which had just lost its colony in Algeria, suddenly remembered that it owned a little paradise in the Pacific and could blow that up instead. France started paying a very large amount of money to Tahiti each year in return for testing nuclear weapons on some of the more remote atolls. (Quiz: how much would you ask for?) This went on for thirty years in the face of mounting international protests - you may remember that the French secret service blew up a ship belonging to Greenpeace - until tests finally stopped in 1996. The French decided to go on paying Tahiti a large amount of money, to help them ‘adjust’ their economy.

It appears that a lot of that money has been poorly spent, if not squandered. The tourist market is not as big as it ought to be and other sectors are struggling. I think that much money has to have fostered both corruption and inflation, so that everything costs more than it should. And it can´t help that half of all imports come from France; the next biggest source is New Zealand (less than 10%). Tahiti is effectively a member of the EU, but it´s hard to imagine that getting a lot of cheap butter from the other side of the planet is better than trading with your neighbors. Unless trading with France is the price of getting the subvention.

But it is beautiful. And relatively unspoilt. And it´s only two and a half hours further than Hawaii if you are flying from the US. Go. 

Summer and I are getting addicted to scuba diving. From Sydney we flew to Cairns and spent three days diving off the Great Barrier Reef. The highlight was swimming alongside two beautiful green-backed turtles, the first time we’d seen these animals underwater. This photograph was taken by one of our fellow divers, Don Cantlon.

It was also the first time that we dived without a guide. At the end of our last dive I was heading back in the general direction of the boat, quite happily watching my compass, when Summer tapped me on the shoulder. She pointed in a completely different direction, and then took out a slate and wrote "Are you sure we’re on right side of reef and know where boat is?"

Next time you and your spouse get lost in the car and start arguing, picture yourselves having exactly the same row while 30 feet underwater and running out of air.

Chris Barns´ Kangaroo Rescue Centre is one of a handful scattered around Australia. The kangaroos are rescued from roadkill; even if its mother is run over and killed, a joey in her pouch may survive. If it´s at least one month old, it can be raised by hand.

Guilt-stricken drivers and passers-by bring the tiny joeys to Chris. They are wrapped in swaddling clothes and bottle-fed, cuddled, and kept warm for about twelve months, after which they can be released into the wild. This one is called Albert, and he likes to suck his tail.

Like lambs, kangaroos are not just cute, they taste great too. Kangaroo is a lean, gamey red meat, which I first tried in New York at Aussie restaurant Eight Mile Creek.
The reds and the grays are not at all endangered - they are seen as a pest in some parts. And scientists like Tim Flannery have long argued that it´s better to eat kangaroos than to destroy their habitat in favor of raising cattle and sheep.

But they can’t be farmed economically, because they can jump a three-meter fence.

Even Uluru, the Rock formerly known as Ayer’s, is diminished by mass tourism. There are crowds of chattering tourists at the designated scenic photo spots, who just flew in for the day from Sydney or Tokyo, and ask each other loudly what all the fuss is about.

For it is, undeniably, just a big old rock.

To appreciate Uluru’s splendid isolation, you need to take your time getting there. After a few thousand kilometers of nothing, the largest rock in the world can’t help making an impression. Context is everything.

There is also an easy way to escape the crowd, and that is to walk around the rock. Perfectly flat but ten kilometers long, the hike is too much for most visitors, and for part of it we seemed to have Uluru to ourselves. If you take your time, there really is something magical about the size and the solitude and the endless patterns in the surface of the rock, patterns that appear and disappear and change color with the light.

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Uluru was handed back to its traditional owners in 1985, and the visitors’ center has a good overview of the local Aboriginal culture and the traditions that surround the rock. But there is no explanation of the geology. In a 36-page guide to Uluru, one half of one page contains a brief account of current thinking, along with a reminder that this is just the ‘western’ account of Uluru.

As Uluru is unique, the geology is fascinating: it involves a collision between India and Australia, an ancient inland sea, and a hell of a lot of erosion. Our tour guide made an excellent attempt to explain all this by drawing a map of Australia in the dirt, scooping up soil to illustrate mountain formation and pouring a bottle of water over his model to suggest the inland sea.

Unfortunately, we had two people in our group whose Christian faith led them to question conventional geology, and who were armed with stock lines like "that’s a theory, not a fact, right?" Our guide lacked the scientific training to deal with questions like these, and many people were left confused.

You can make the case that Uluru is one of the few places where indigenous people can tell their stories to the exclusion of all others - including Genesis. But most people have a very limited understanding of science, and I believe that’s a much bigger problem for all of us - because it leads to poor decisions by individuals and by governments on issues like education, healthcare, and the environment, as well as economic planning. The traditional owners of Uluru are squandering an opportunity to educate millions of people. I guess that is their right.

For six days we zig-zagged north from Adelaide to Alice Springs. It’s about 1,500 kilometers, but our scenic route took us over 3,000. Amid all the nothingness there’s quite a lot to see - the Flinders and McDonnell mountain ranges, the underground town of Coober Pedy, King’s Canyon, Kata Tjuta, and Uluru. But there is an awful lot of nothing.

Although there are landscapes like this in America, there is nowhere so vast and so thinly populated. Every 100 km or so we’d encounter a roadhouse, basically a service station with a bar attached, some of which boasted communities of up to 30 - yes 30 - people living around them. They have all merged into one in my mind.

In the store, three elderly ladies are run off their feet trying to serve five customers. "It’s like Grand Central Station in here," says one. It isn’t. Stuck for something to read, I browse the magazine rack. My choices are Just Trucks, Truckin’ Life, Big Rigs (which is not a porn magazine but ought to be), and Barely Legal (which is not a magazine about unroadworthy trucks but ought to be). A self-published book by a local preacher explains Australia’s contribution to the founding of Israel, which will assure her children their place in heaven. Inside Spuds - the restaurant cum bar - the truckers dine alone. They are potato-shaped men: round, tapered at one end, white where their skin is peeling, wearing shapeless t-shirts and tight shorts, cut to the groin. A notice says that five of the eleven local residents are barred from the pub for three months. Out back there is a giant wooden echidna. And everywhere there are flies, flies that have all mislaid something valuable inside your left nostril and need to find it, urgently.

Australia and the U.S. have a lot in common. Britain used to transport convicts to America until the Revolution, and only then switched to Australia. Australia is roughly the same size as the lower 48. Both countries were colonized by mainly English-speaking people, starting with the east coast. But today there are fifteen times more people living in the U.S. than Australia.

In both countries, the 19th century was a period of westward exploration and expansion. Pioneers in both countries dreamed of finding an inland sea, navigable rivers, and fertile land. Those who travelled west of the Mississippi found a land of incredible bounty. Those who travelled west of New South Wales found an awful lot of this.

The iconic explorers of the American west are Lewis and Clarke: travel overland to the Pacific and back, map the American West, describe 300 new species of plants and animals.

The iconic explorers of the Australian outback are Burke and Wills: march north from Melbourne with too much equipment, abandon it as you go, leave most of your team camped in the middle of nowhere and strike out alone with no real plan, fail to reach the sea, bungle all attempts to communicate with the rest of the team, run out of food and water, and die, miserably, in the desert.

Which is not to say that there’s no life here. There’s spinifex and salt bush and gum trees. There are more species of reptile than anywhere else on earth, and dozens of birds. There are marsupial versions of mice, rats, and rabbits, and even more of their placental cousins. We saw wild emus and kangaroos, feral camels and horses, and domestic sheep. But before the Europeans arrived, the indigenous life supported an indigenous human population of only half a million, and the best technology that Europeans could bring from elsewhere has raised that to just twenty million.

Geography is (manifest) destiny.

At the Ian Potter Centre in Melbourne, there is a large collection of Australian landscape paintings. An environmental group has produced a pamphlet that uses these paintings to show how drastically European settlers have altered the landscape in 200 years, by clearing forests and introducing many new species of plants and animals. That’s very interesting, but incidentally the pamphlet also shows how people’s appreciation of the Australian landscape has changed over the same period. The first artists painted fields and gardens full of European trees and flowers, planted by homesick settlers. The bush and the gum trees show up indistinctly in the background. Later they started painting the native plants, but made the eucalypts look more graceful, like good European trees. Finally, in the middle of the last century, artists began to celebrate the great emptiness for its own sake, and so did everyone else.

The sublime is the eye of the beholder.

We have gone without TV, newspapers, or Internet access for several days, so we only learned about the earthquake in Yogyakarta today. We were there at the beginning of April, and the city was clearly suffering from the downturn in tourism. Our guide at Prambanan hoped that things would improve soon. Instead, things couldn’t have gotten any worse. More than 5,000 dead, Prambanan and the royal palace heavily damaged, and Merapi is still rumbling. Please help if you can: Oxfam is one of many agencies providing emergency relief.

A winery in the Yarra Valley, just outside Melbourne, on the sunniest day we spent in Victoria.

Melbourne is a graceful Victorian city with a temperate climate. That is to say, it felt like we were spending a cold, wet week in London. Great food, wine, and beer, friendly people who call you mate all the time, shopping, theatre (their International Comedy Festival was on), fine architecture, a veteran’s parade (it was ANZAC day), the Queen’s head on all the coins, dull skies, chills, and a little drizzle. If it weren’t so spread out - Melbourne, like most American cities, grew up in the age of motorized transport - I’d have sworn we were in London.

We started our Aussie trip in Melbourne at random; it was the first flight available when we decided to leave Indonesia. We loved the Aquarium, and Federation Square, and the Aboriginal art at the Ian Potter Centre, and strolling up and down Brunswick Street. But after five months in South-East Asia Melbourne was such a first-world oasis that I soon wanted to get out. It felt as if we’d come home early. Summer did not miss the mosquitoes, squat toilets, and bird flu as much as I did, but she was 10°C/18°F colder than she had been in Indonesia, and that’s well below her recommended operating temperature.

We decided not to travel up the densely populated east coast. That seemed too much like an American road trip. Instead we wanted to head west into the outback, to see a landscape that is unique to Australia. So we booked an ‘adventure tour’, a coach trip that promised a meandering ten-day journey to the centre of the continent, with lots of stops along the way for hiking and sightseeing. I thought that it would be more of an adventure to drive ourselves but Summer objected on a technicality: she did not want to die in the desert.

Two pieces of advice if you are ever go to Melbourne (which you should). One, go in summer - theirs, not ours. And two, as we discovered while waiting for our bus out of town, if you need a transvestite hooker, go to Carlisle street in the suburb of St. Kilda’s. But go early, they quit at 7 a.m.

The first thing that we noticed when we travelled from South-East Asia to Australia was a quite remarkable drop in the number of Asian people.

Everywhere you see European faces, English street names and pubs and meat pies, Greek restaurants, and Italian cafes. 30% of Australians claim Irish ancestry. John Howard visited Dublin this week and said "coming [to Ireland] is part of the journey of being an Australian Prime Minister."

It only takes a few days to sail from Indonesia to Australia. Intrepid researchers have shown that the first Australians could have drifted there from Timor on bamboo rafts. Aboriginal Australians had been trading with people from Macassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for a thousand years before Europeans stumbled across the great southern continent. Some Aboriginal people may have been living in Indonesia in 1788, when the First Fleet arrived.

But today there are no passenger ships that sail from Indonesia to Australia. There aren’t any cheap flights either. Terrorism is one factor, but that’s a relatively recent phenomenon and not confined to Indonesia.

Here’s another way of looking at it. About 8 million people migrated from Mexico to the U.S. between 1990 and 2002, just counting the ones who filled in a census form. In the last ten years, only thirty thousand people have migrated from Indonesia to Australia. Allowing for the big difference in total population, that’s still twenty Mexicans entering the U.S. for every Indonesian who entered Australia.

I am not suggesting that America’s current relationship with Mexico is a model for Australia to follow (much less the EU’s relationship with Turkey and North Africa). I am just pointing out that the cultural distance between Australia and her nearest neighbors is much, much greater.

A celebrated book, The Tyranny of Distance, claims that the history of Australia has been driven by its sheer remoteness; geography is destiny, etc. etc. As if the country had only recently moved in next door, Indonesia is not mentioned until page 224. I asked a bookseller in Melbourne if he could recommend any books on Australia’s relationship with Asia. He laughed, and said nobody has written such a thing. (He was wrong, but there isn’t much. One book is simply titled The White Tribe of Asia.)

Australia - or at least its current administration - sees America as its most important partner in the world. By sending just 6,000 troops to Iraq, John Howard has minimized political risk at home while winning himself a state dinner at the White House. That’s a big deal - the Chinese President only got lunch.

But most Americans know less about Australia than they do about Europe, and that’s not much. Australians seem to realize that their most important relationships in the future will be with South-East Asia and China. But the gulf seems a lot wider than the Timor Sea.