Rock of ages
Henrietta Bredin
Irecently made my first visit to Australia. What can one hope to make of a country so enormous within a limited period of time? With three weeks at my disposal I decided to focus on three cities, Sydney, Adelaide and Melbourne, while making selective lightning raids from each.
At whatever level of comfort you can afford to travel, there is no getting round the fact that Australia is a staggeringly long way away, and spending hours on end inside a flying metal tube, breathing other people's air, has very little to recommend it. When you do eventually get there, however, it is immensely pleasing to find that every natural thing you see is startlingly different, new and usually bigger than anything you tend to encounter in the UK. Just stepping off the plane I spotted a bird that is probably the Australian twitcher's equivalent of an LBJ (little brown job) but which had a jaunty black Zorro-ish mask across its eyes and a flash of brilliant yellow beneath its beak. I soon became quite used to seeing flurries of sulphur-crested cockatoos flying up from the branches in shouting clouds of white and lemon. I never tired of them, though, nor of the red and blue rosellas, their plumage so vividly coloured it hardly seemed natural, the little bright green parakeets and the more rare, intensely dramatic black funereal cockatoos.
I never managed to see a koala but was wildly excited by my first kangaroo, bounding through the bush and looking infinitely more graceful than any creature getting about by such a ridiculous method of locomotion has any right to do. While keeping a vague lookout to sea when walking with friends along the clifftops from Bronte to Bondi Beach, a couple of whales obligingly disported themselves in front of us, two great glistening backs heaving up from the water, followed by a flash of white as one of them leaped upwards, landing with a thwack that we could hear from where we were standing. And the trees — the wonderfully named scribbly gums, their bark covered with marks disconcertingly like handwriting; Moreton Bay figs with intertwined trunks like a mass of writhing limbs; paperbark trees, the rough warm bark of which gives way, slightly and squashily, against the pressure of your hand.
Sydney is best viewed from the water. Catching a ferry from Rose Bay to Circular Quay shortly after I arrived. I was caught completely unawares when the boat casually swung round a headland and suddenly, boom, there was the familiar coat-hanger shape of the Harbour Bridge and, arching up in front of it, the pale curving shells of the Opera House.
From Adelaide I made a foray into the Barossa Valley, spending a hugely enjoyable and gently inebriated day being taken to visit various wineries. Not having a car at my disposal, I signed up for a tour that went by the wince-inducing name of 'Life is a Cabernet'. There should have been five other people on the trip but they all cancelled at the last minute and, to his eternal credit and my great good fortune, the company's owner honoured my booking and took me around in solitary splendour. He wore alarmingly tight jeans, a pair of flamboyantly decorated cowboy boots and was, as I discovered during the course of the day. Adelaide-born, Texas-raised, had a Westphalian Catholic mother, a Serbian Muslim father and used to work as a roadie for Roy Orbison. Fortunately for me he
was also extremely obliging and quite happy to reroute his proposed trip to take in a visit to the Veritas winery, which had been highly recommended by a bibulous friend of mine. Here I was teased relentlessly while being given extraordinary things to taste by its brilliant owner and master-blender. Rolf Binder; I discovered that port. which I have always considered to be a blinding headache in a glass, does not have that effect when taken at 11 in the morning; and I encountered a man on his tea-break chortling over a copy of The Spectator and his favourite columnist. Deborah Ross.
One thing that each city I visited had in common was an array of the most spectacular food markets. Sydney's fishmarket had trays piled high with livid green and purple crabs next to heaps of prehistoriclooking Balmain bugs (somewhere between a crayfish and a lobster, and utterly delicious). There was a deeply tempting kitchen supply shop by the main entrance, bristling with super-sharp Japanese knives and implements for every possible sort of piscine contingency, from scaling and gutting to cracking of claws. The Adelaide market was full of men looking as if they were about to burst into a song-and-dance routine, hurling huge boxes of bananas about as if they weighed next to nothing; and in Melbourne's East Prarhan market I was sold a dense brown squashed loaf called a cowpat which was studded with almonds, dried figs and quince and tasted sensationally good with hard salty cheese.
For some reason I never managed to get used to the sound made at Australian traffic lights, telling pedestrians when it's safe to cross. It's a sort of rising whuup noise, like the yelp that an electronic dog would make if you trod on its tail, and it made me jump every time.
Maybe I had my rose-tinted spectacles firmly in place throughout, but I've seldom encountered such a slew of nice, funny, warm people, many of them complete strangers. After an exhilarating wave-battered swim on a deliriously empty Bondi Beach, I stopped at a beachside juice bar and ordered something called a Zinger, involving ginger, celery. apple and beetroot. When I fished in my bag for a $5 note to pay the man who whipped it up for me, I accidentally produced my bra instead. He considered it for a moment, then said, 'Well, I reckon that certainly qualifies you for a free juice — maybe two.' And he refused to take my money, once I managed to find it. But one thing soars above every one of the wonders that I managed to cram into three weeks, and that is the biggest, reddest rock in the world. Ayers Rock — Uluru. I got up at five in the morning to drive from Alice Springs through mile after mile of empty scrub and bush, passing a handful of other cars until, unmistakably, there it was, an enormous striated lump rearing up against a brassy blue sky. Walking around the base was breathcatching, red dust path underfoot, even redder slabs of rock towering overhead, occasionally riven by long cracks and fissures or strange gouged-out holes, like giant mouths or nostrils. At one point I walked out of the sun into grey-blue shadow and found myself beside a still pool of water, a sudden dead silence reverberating against my ears.
At the end of the day, after watching the sun set and the colour gradually leach from the landscape, night came in a rush, a pale sickle moon hung low in the sky and I stood in the darkness and tipped my head back to look up into the spray of stars. The nearest were pinprick-sharp and the furthest away, fathoms deep, were smudged and milky. I have never felt tinier, alone in the dark vast heart of the biggest island in the world.
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