A Whole Lot Of Nothing
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.