Australia Trip Report (David)

Not so down, and not so under

David Jenness                               December 2014

I have by now travelled to all the continents on earth, save Antarctica.  Having just returned from 10 weeks in Australia, it seems to me the oddest of them all -- in the sense not of being exotic, but subtly strange.  To an American of my age it seems familiar, comprehensible, but slightly occluded, slightly out of register.

It is a large nation but a small continent.  There it rides, on the map a foetal form, rump facing toward South Africa, retracted head pointing towards the South Pole.  A place-keeper between the Indian Ocean and the Tasman Sea, a spacer between Southeast Asia and Antarctica, to both of which it was once attached.  Way down south, to be sure -- austral -- and truly tucked under the landmass of Asia.  On a map, and in one’s mental catalogue, the entire middle portion of this landmass is a vacancy, both topographically and culturally (so long as one ignores indigenous peoples), wrapped in a caul of what we call civilization stretched along the coasts.  Australia is nearly the size of the United States, but has one-tenth the population or less.  Its over-all population density is about 6 or 7 per square mile, one of the lowest in the world.  Only in New South Wales (NSW), the first state to be significantly populated by Europeans, are there towns or natural sites more than a hundred miles or so from the coast that attract visitors, with the exception of the “Red Centre” around Uluru and Alice Springs, to which most travelers make a separate excursion.  Otherwise you drive or hike around the perimeter, along the thousands of inhabited linear miles of gorgeous proximity to the sea, each view more spectacular than the last.

Many have fixed on the immense space of Australia, space without people or incident.   There are no vistas, only vanishing points.  D. H. Lawrence said, “You just walk out of the world and into Australia.”   But there are close-ups too.  The country is a lab of evolutionary biology, a textbook exposition of the concepts of island biogeography.  Only the most insensate visitor would fail to note that it is remarkably full of unique flora and fauna, the result of having broken away from Gondwanaland early and having been isolated thereafter, in terms of natural exchanges.  Some 80 percent of all the species of plants and animals that are found in Australia are found only there -- and ecologists wish to keep it that way.  What this means, to a traveler, is that the countryside is covered with trees that look a bit like poplars or sycamores, but are in fact a hundred or more kinds of eucalyptus (“gum trees”), and with trees that look like small pines called by ethnocentric early settlers “she oaks” or with varieties of small trees called banksias .  The dense stands of trees are often set on rolling tan or green hills that remind one of northern California.  In general, they and the multitude of bushes are not majestic (as in some of New Zealand), but medium-sized, loose, feathery, somewhat shaggy.  Walking among them is like being at a convention of pleasant old codgers wearing carpet slippers and looking generally disheveled.

Even to those who pay little attention to birds, it is obvious that avian life is extraordinary.  Birds with the most remarkable markings and colors zoom around you, perch on low branches and urban balconies, and start singing by or before dawn.  Many of these are various kinds of highly colored and vocally outrageous parrots, but there are also the tinyfairy-wrens, which  are never still, the wagtails, the honey-eaters, and so many more.  The fairy-wren comes in two varieties; if you don’t like the splendid, try the sublime.  (Actually there are more than two subspecies, the others unseen.  My own favorite bird is the irascible kookaburra, a bird sporting a mad hatter’s topknot that sits on a low branch and jeers at you loudly.  An Aussie friend who visits New Zealand remarked that she can never get used to how quiet that neighboring country is: there are fewer bird species, and they keep respectable hours for singing and calling.

To be sure there are less pleasant delightful aspects.  Of the ten most venomous snakes in the world, all are found there, and eight only there.  Ken and I encountered the two top contenders for most venomous, one each separately, but with no harm to us or to them.  It would take a big book to talk about the animals, but they are extraordinary.  I have my own favorites.  Wallabies are more delightful than kangaroos, wombats even cuter than koalas, emus more elegantly designed than African ostriches, the lizards large and fascinating as lizards seldom are.   The echidna is a little self-absorbed slow-moving ball, looking like a furry rather than a spiny porcupine.

These exemplars of oddity depend not just on rarity but on the variegation, the lavishness of the natural scene.   Ken has written more about this, but Australia is remarkable in the number and excellence of its parks, botanical gardens, and natural refuges.  They are everywhere, and beautifully arranged and maintained.  This appears to have been the case for most of Australia’s rather short history.  Early settlers were well aware of, if confused by, the natural endowment, recognized it for its uniqueness, and took steps to mark off huge areas from careless human occupation. Not only are these preserves enormous, taken together, but they have been organized at all levels -- national, state, municipal.  This pragmatic but effective approach to managing the meeting of the natural and human environments is something I shall write about in what follows.

For an American of my age, the other main source of a feeling of familiar but “off” has to do with resemblances, sometimes quite eerie, to the US.  Every traveler comes to feel that the country is somehow like our country 40 years ago.  In New Zealand, one feels that the society is still quite British in feeling; in Australia, quite “American.”  The differences between our two forms of spoken English are no greater than those among regions of the US.   Australia’s history is more compressed than ours, but the pattern of succession is similar.  Early coastal exploration by Europeans (not until the late 1700s for Australia), then a lacuna, a stasis, then gradual settlement from abroad, rather thin on the ground for the first century.  The displacement and destruction of indigenous peoples to make room for Whites.  The intense extraction of minerals from the mid-1800s (they too had a Gold Rush around 1850), leading  to an increased pace of settlement and a new openness to immigration in order to provide workers -- except that the Chinese were funneled into workers’ concentration camps. The creation of great modern cities, urban fortunes, rapid industrialization toward the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries.  Then a retraction, a closing down, the cessation of immigration for half a century.  [Australia’s immigration policy in the 20th c. stipulated Whites Only until 1970.]  A long period of isolationism from the rest of the world, broken by forced involvement in the two world wars.  A recognition of the genocide of indigenous peoples, beginning only toward the end of the past century, and attempts, pathetic but genuine as far as they go, to seek redress.  [Aboriginals were not counted in the census until 1967, could not vote until later; and forced removal of aboriginal children, “re-education,” and linguistic oppression continued until fairly recently. The two societies struggle today, and will continue to do so, with racism and its ruinous  effects.]  A turn toward economic and cultural globalization in the last quarter of the past century, a trend that has an overwhelming but complex force today; for example, now Asians are welcome as immigrants, form much of the labor force in cities, and provide a major share of capitalization and investment.

Anyone who knows the first thing about Aussie history will protest that there are some fundamental differences.  Australia was populated first (among European stocks) by convicts sent out from Britain, and free settlement by non-convicts, English and Irish largely, did not begin for a number of decades.  True enough, but there was a transition in which the convicts (those who survived) served out their terms and became free men, providing a still-evident genetic “founder effect” within the early population.  Many Aussies boast of their origins six generations or so back, but sometimes it sounds like a person admitting to a flaw before someone else points it out.  [Few Americans know the extent to which a significant portion of the early population of their own country were expelled from Britain and exported to be, not in this case convicts, but indentured servants in the new society; and that many others in the 1700s were in effect forced out of their own societies and into America because of their beliefs, cultural alienation, or particular economic condition -- in other words, extruded in one way or another from their European homelands.]  Aussies, in the past, have been hyper-conscious of the difference between ex-convicts and free settlers, but think of the prolonged inferior status of southern European immigrants and of “poor Whites” in our own society.  Some educated and progressive Aussies feel a great sense of shame about their convict beginnings  but I do not see why they should.  It is the British, the sending society, who should feel shame, not today’s Australians.

The other obvious exception to an attempt to draw parallels between Aussies and Americans involves the colonial status and the relationship to England. Unlike ours, Australia’s disengagement from the empire was gradual and psychologically ambiguous.  It is hard to assess the salience of the relationship with England today.  The link to the Commonwealth remains, there is a Governor-General and the Queen’s picture still is to be seen, but it is as theoretical as in Canada and far more tenuous than New Zealand’s.  On investigation, one picks up a degree of cynicism, even hostility, among Aussies about the tie to Britain.  In World War I, a huge proportion of young Aussie males went to war for the Empire in Europe and the Near East -- to be used as cannon-fodder at Gallipoli and elsewhere.  Some 60,000 died, and an additional 100,000 returned maimed or seriously injured, an enormous, socially crippling proportion given the size of the general population. In World War II, Aussies again fought bravely for the Allies and sustained terrible losses, especially in Southeast Asia struggling against the Japanese.  But here too -- one picks this up sotto voce -- Whitehall’s policy was, Thank you very much, but we will not protect you, our priorities are the Burma Road and Singapore, you’re on your own.

The country seems, to a foreigner, a curious blend of natural lavishness and sociocultural circumspection.  A traveler examining the built environment and the way people live their daily lives detects many echoes of Britain in earlier times, but as many echoes of the U.S. also; this due, I think, to the distances involved and to cultural and economic patterns of modern history.  A well-known cultural figure, interviewed on the Australian Broadcasting System, remarked about his growing up in Hobart, in the 1950s, that for him and those of his class the schoolbooks and the stamps and the paper currency were English, but the movies and the radio and the cars were American.  He did not know “the mainland,” and had no sense of “Australia.”  Today, many successful Aussies have never visited some of the states, and know little about far parts of the continent.  It seems to me that the country is now more distanced from either Britain or the US than in the recent past, owing to globalization and its own internal developments, but this is a case that would be hard to document.  Certainly the country is keenly aware of the new China as a potential commercial and military threat.  All one can say, and I shall expand on this in what follows, is that one has, constantly, reminders of both Britain and the U.S., but blurred, desynchronized, out of true.

One other source of perceived oddity in Australia is fundamentally geophysical.  The experienced dimensions tend to be more north/south, like Africa or to some extent South America, than east/west, as one tends to feel about the geography and history of Europe, western Asia, and North America; and this is made more evident by the fact, as I have said, that it is, after all, a rather small continent.  A traveler who sees more than one portion of the country moves quite abruptly from the tropical density of northern Queensland and the Northern Territories to the incredible flat aridity of the Centre, to the balmy subtropical or temperate feeling of the lower eastern Pacific coast, to the somewhat severe aspects of the entire southern coast facing the Bass Strait, where winds normally, maddeningly, blow in from the Antarctic.  And then Tasmania, which is like “the mainland,” as the main portion of the continent is called there, but distinctly different -- rather like the Maritime Provinces in relation to Canada.  [Funny little Tasmania is a small reduplicated Australia, tucked down and under the nuzzling up to its motherland.]  Weather and climate contrasts in North America are considerable, but I think they are less on a given day or in one week than in Australia.   The northern sections generally are more tropical in vegetation and climate than anywhere in the US, with the exception perhaps of southern Florida, and the enormous central to western extreme desert has no counterpart in the US.  Melbourne is famous for having weather that changes, not just daily, but often more than once a day.  In Tasmania, there were times, in their springtime, when we had to take account of serious threats to our physical well-being from wet windy cold.  And there is the peculiarity that some hilly areas only 40 or 50 miles inland (like the Blue Mountains) can be brutally hot.

The geographical pattern of a ring with empty center means that most of Australia’s population is near an ocean, and most Aussies most of the time are at or in or continually affected by the ocean -- the morning mists, the changing tides, the shifting wind, the multitude of fishing boats out for the day.  It is seldom practical to swim on any part of the southern coast or off Tasmania, though devotees do it in wet suits.  The beaches from about Sydney north, for most of the year, are sublime for swimmers and surfers (my all-time favorite was Kingscliff, in northern NWS), except that there are seasons where some of these beaches cannot be safely used owing to danger from sharks, floating jellyfish, saltwater crocodiles, and the like.  The predominant littoral exposure brings the nearly constant experience of great beauty, however, even when one does not get into or on the sea.  (And marvelous seafood; the oysters and crabs and prawns from these cold waters are world-class.)  The famous Great Ocean Road, which runs along the western portion of the Victoria coast, is visually extraordinary, at least equal to the best of the California or the Amalfi coast.  The highway here runs generally along high cliffs over the sea, so that the views of rocks and water, together, are dramatic.

But even more splendid, for me, is the long coast beginning east of Melbourne that turns the corner and runs up past Sydney and up to Brisbane.  Here the edge of the land is not cliffs, but involves a more sloping transition.  The main highway runs a bit inland, much of the time, but  there are long lesser roads that run along the foreshore, so that one gets very close.  The views are thus less spectacular but in a way more exciting, because when you are on a level with the ocean the experience of surf and the awareness of the detailed features of little coves -- the minute scallops, the beach grass, the enticing tracks, the stretch of perfect sand on the beach -- are more immediate.   To gaze at a beautiful ocean is fine, but to be able to hear the waves and feel the spume is more so; and, as is not the case with the Great Ocean Road, you can indeed stop the car and wade right in.  I am always deeply affected by watching the waves, hearing the surf, or being pushed around in the sea.  Australia provided my best exposure in years, including some days when the waves were just strong enough to provide the perfect, slightly scary, challenge.  Portions of this long littoral sweep have their own names; e.g., the Sapphire Coast, well named.  One section of coast, alas, has been spoiled: the so-called Gold Coast south of Brisbane has been ruined by overbearing skyscrapers and vulgar resorts like the worst of southeast Florida.  But even there, I must admit, you can just pop into the water, and the ugliness all fades away.

The enormous, seemingly vacant center -- few travelers experience more than the areas around Alice Springs -- is arid and desolate, but in its way very beautiful, all tan, ochre, and coppery red  like much of the American west.  It is for most an enormous blank.  There are mysterious ranges of long low mountains, with hidden oases and thickets, which are rewarding to hike in, though one must make a great effort, always, to remember that one must drink far more water than seems reasonable, and one has to take the heat seriously indeed.  There is one unfortunate feature, however, that sets the great desert on this continent apart from others.  For reasons unknown to me, there are millions and of flies.  It brings quite a shock to step off the plane in Alice Springs and encounter your first swarm, seeking moisture from your eyes and mouth and nostrils, and to realize that to have any kind of decent day, except when a strong dry wind is blowing, you will have to wear a fly net over your head and look as if you are on a Hazmat mission.  Fortunately they do not bite; if they did, no one could go the centre at all.  It is not just the centre, though: the prevailing winds in Australia are from the west, and at certain seasons the flies are blown in to the eastern regions, including the major cities.  On certain days, it can spoil a pleasant walk in Victoria or New South Wales (hereafter, NSW).  Ken was less bothered by the flies than I, but most Japanese and European travelers would consider him lucky.

What else marks Australia’s distinctiveness?  Presumably owing to their human genetic history, white Aussies look somewhat like white Americans -- but different.  Aussies tend to be big, bluff, boisterous, beefy, beery.  (Australian wines are justifiably famous, but Aussies for the most part drink beer.)  It is an attractive constitution for males, less so for females, many of whom are strapping and healthy looking but just … brawny.  I saw many attractive Aussies, and to be sure some, in the cities, are slim and elegant, but I do not think I ever saw a dapper man or a cute woman.  Like other Caucasian peoples, they tend to become paunchy and heavy-butted in middle age, but they are not obese like so many Americans.  Certainly being fit is important to most Aussies, whatever their age.  I cannot characterize, in terms of a central tendency, the looks of the indigenous peoples, for my sample is far too small; but it seemed to me that their skin color was most attractive, their facial features pleasing when young but flattening out and coarsening thereafter.

It probably isn’t genetic, but Aussies are just plain nice.  They’re friendly, outgoing, helpful, direct, a bit rough-edged, quick to bridle if they think you’re taking the piss (Aussie for “having you on”) but otherwise equable.  There is always a greeting for a stranger, ordinarily the famous “G’day, mate” (said only male to male).  In ten weeks we encountered not one difficult or suspicious soul, and only once observed an encounter that involved raised voices and obscene language, this not involving us.  That has to be more than a statistical anomaly.   I shall write more about the attitude towards life and each other as this account goes on, but it is clear that there is an underlying spirit of egalitarianism and trust.  In Australia, you gas up first, and then go in to pay.

As with climate, I do believe that there is a more intense and rapidly experienced variability of physical features -- topography, vegetation, colors on the ground -- in the eastern half of Australia that we saw than elsewhere in the world.  I would assert that this variability is not regional, as in New Zealand or Europe, but very local.  During the first week or ten days we drove around the countryside, we were constantly remarking, This looks like the central valley in California, or like the Sonoma coast, or This town looks like a Welsh mining village, or a New England fishing town, or It’s like France with the plane trees, or Just like the Devon downs, or Pure Utah!  … and then we stopped because we realized that we were coming forth with all these useless comparisons within the space of a few hours.  I suspect that some of this, if true, reflects the fact that, over the time of habitation by Western peoples, there has been less of an impact, less of a leveling of particular features, than in more densely populated countries.  As I have mentioned, most towns of any size, many cities, and virtually all shires and all states, have taken pains to mark off for preservation and public use sections of parkland, forests, botanical reserves, or simply small display gardens.  All the seashore is publicly accessible; this is true legally in the U.S., but not actually.  You can’t go far without coming upon or into some bit of primeval ecology.  Australians do not find it strange to leave some land unexploited.  (To be fair, much of the interior of Queensland and NSW has been ruined by mining and deforestation.) 

The human scene

Ken’s report has much to say about the natural world, especially.  I tend to be more interested in the built environment and in trying to read the texture of human life -- often to be sure, in relation to the natural context but also as extrapolated to some sense of the general sociopolitical and cultural nature of the society.  Part of the oddity of Australia is the spectacle, the lavishness of the natural world compared with the rational modesty of the human and social landscape.

Towns

In at least 10 towns we drove into, in various states of Australia, there was a sign at the outskirts, next to the name and the population figure, that said: Voted tidiest town in Australia, 19xx or 20xx.  Tidy as a notable virtue: that speaks volumes.  Indeed, the town would be orderly and pleasant, if sometimes a little dull in appearance.  No trash, minimal advertising, but helpful signposting.  It was always easy to find the visitor information, which even quite small towns provided if they had any remotely interesting features.  Visitor centers were sponsored by local government and staffed with volunteers who were uniformly well informed and gracious, going out of their way to suggest things you hadn’t known of, and quite candid about the comparative merits of camp grounds, restaurants, hotels, and the like.  There was always a rack of well done brochures, with detailed maps, suggested itineraries, descriptions of local architectural, historical walks, guides to flora and fauna.  To be sure, some of the attractions seemed hardly worthy of preprinted pamphlets, but better too much than too little, and the level of evident pride in what they had to offer was charming.  [In the large cities, the visitor centers were also superb, for the most part: well staffed and well outfitted with useful material.  I was struck by the report of one Aussie friend, that she had been thrilled by New York on her recent first visit, but that she had been unable to locate any respectable center for visitor information; there had been some so-called, but they all proved to be either sponsored by corporations, pushing boat and bus tours and quick food restaurant chains, with their own slant on what to impart, or else very inadequate.]  The volunteers at visitor centers were pleased to make calls for you, which saved a lot of time and effort.  Every self-respecting town has at least one real bakery, with fresh rolls, pastries, and pasties, and chairs and tables for enjoying them.

The visitors center in a small or medium-sized town will be located, typically, in the town square or park (where generally the courthouse is located ), next to or a part of a complex of the library (free Wi-fi) and sometimes the local historical museum.  Adjoining the center or in the square, always, are public toilets, invariably clean.  And a bubbler (drinking fountain) that worked.  And benches and picnic tables, often covered and sometimes with free gas grilles in case you wanted to cook your lunch.  What a joy to have such amenities available to a traveler!  Bars and restaurants also were cool about letting you use their bathrooms; in Aussie: No worries!

The towns themselves, physically, are often uncannily like the image we all have, if we are of a certain age, of the way American towns were in the 1950s or 1960s, or at least the images we all know from Lee Friedlander or Robert Frank.  Yes, McDonald’s and KFC have made their mark, but only a small one as yet.  There will be a couple of intersecting main business streets along which are distributed several old-style pharmacies, a feed store, a hardware store, a number of modest clothing emporia, more than one book store (more than one book store!), sometimes a record store but in any case a music store for instruments and sheet music, a few competing real estate offices, newspaper and magazine stores (I kept expecting  to see Life and Look on display), law offices at street level., doctors and dentists one flight up.  Occasionally an active movie theater, sometimes even an extant small newspaper.  Small restaurants, more often than not open only for breakfast and lunch, and lots of bars.  Many junk or used-clothing stores.  Dumpsters and litter cans, some divided for recycling, are easy to find.

Not all such towns are Midwestern quaint, in this nostalgic and heart-touching style.  Some that are fortunately situated are very posh, look like Easthampton or Carmel, and boast resort-type hotels of some splendor; if such are present, the hotels have gracious lobbies and verandas and dining rooms, and do not look like RockResorts or Marriotts.  More common, however, are pub-hotels that date from the period 1880 to 1920 or so.  This is a unique and delightful feature.  They are vestiges of the great days of the town, when mining or logging or shipping flourished.  They have wrap-around verandas or wooden walkways along the street edge, are constructed of brick or stone with metal roofs and porch railings with scroll-work, often quite elaborate, sometimes reminding one of New Orleans.  They are uniformly shabby.  So why are they still standing?  I believe it is because the prosperity of the town ended abruptly, and there has subsequently been no pressure for modernization in that locale.  (You can see this from the way many of the larger buildings were once competing banks, long since ceased or merged.)  Consequently, the pub hotels limp along, primarily because the pub is the town social center; it is where you go for a schooner or a pint, for fish and chips (occasionally something a bit more elevated), or for playing pool. It is simply the tradition, begun long ago, that all such establishments have accommodations upstairs, which you can rent by seeking out the barmaid.   This part of the pub hotel is shabby, with dusty carpets and rickety stairs, faded photographs, grimy wainscoting.  But it still is there!  In small towns, there are, generally, no separate pubs: “pub” implies rooms to let.  The rooms are small, intended for workingmen and commercial travelers; sometimes they have an ensuite bathroom or a sink in the room.  Sometimes, reflecting an origin as cheap lodgings, the rooms will open onto a shared veranda, like a hospital ward.  But they are cheap, and they are delightful.  Somewhere in town there will normally be the alternative of a modern, 60s-style motel, but this seldom has anything to recommend it (except attached bathrooms and convenient parking).  There will not be a “good” hotel, that is, something more pretentious or comfortable.   And often there will be no free-standing restaurants open in the evening, and certainly no elegant cocktail bars, just the pub hotel restaurant. 

In major cities there has been an adaptation of the pub hotel, founded in the same era but still economically vital -- still with rooms upstairs, sometimes at a slightly higher level of comfort,  but boasting a real bar and a food service that offers more than fish and chips.  You can understand the social and economic history of this area of a city by studying the photos on the stairs and in the rooms.  There are also, in the interior, some attractive resorts that have taken structures that were once rows of miners’ or loggers’ cabins and made them into free-standing guest rooms.  They are neat but small: inside them, you have a good sense of how mean the housing was for workers and their families, how comfortable for today’s travelers.

One wonders, of course, how these small and medium-sized towns continue to exist, and fears for their future.  However, as suggested, capitalist pressure from “the hospitality sector” is present only in the coastal cities; and as long as local farmers and mechanics can eke out a living, they will need their hardware stores and garages and lunch counters and pub hotels.

Camping and touring

An additional source of pleasure as regards towns and small cities is that as you drive from one to the next you encounter few or no billboards on the roads.  Roads lead through woods and farmlands, with no commercial harassment.  Towns begin abruptly, with little or no sprawl.  At that moment, small signage, paradoxically, will point to each the various business and civic enterprises on the side streets, but discretely.  There are a few medium-sized towns that have clearly grown up in recent decades, which are of no special historical or cultural importance but do provide supermarkets, new and used car dealers, and the like.  These seem interchangeable They do have billboards and hard-sell commercial messages, and these are the towns with ugly edge sprawl.  They seem interchangeable, but they are rare enough so that one is surprised when one comes upon them.   

There is a generally modest approach, or so it seems to me, to commercial campgrounds, called in Australia caravan parks.  At home, RV parks are hideous, with rare exceptions, and if through having no alternative you do secure a patch of ground to raise a tent, that patch will be wedged in between enormous vehicles running their generators and people playing loud rock or country music and hollering at each other.  In the U.S., snobs that we are, we always try to find a state or national park, which are inexpensive, where tenters and hikers feel more at home, and where RVs and tents may be segregated.  In Australia, while there are many, many wilderness parks or reserves with wonderful hiking and splendid scenery, in such locales there are rarely overnight facilities; if such exist, they tend to be just undeveloped sites with, possibly, one pit toilet for many sites. (There are exceptions, but these are extremely expensive.  The most in-demand national or state parks that do provide a range of services but can charge as much as $60 just for a tiny area of grass for one tent.)  The caravan parks are interesting in that they too communicate a commitment to the “tidy.”  Some are operated by the municipality, but most are private enterprises.  They are found in even very small towns, but not out in the vacant countryside. They are well laid out, quiet at night, green, well kept, generally with excellent group kitchens and efficient and capacious toilet blocks -- almost always with free hot showers!

The folks who use them are different from their counterparts in the U.S., in that the caravan park is a routine weekend or brief vacation destination for those in the professional and business class.  My impression is that in this society it is the young people and foreign travelers who do tent camping or car camping; once you have a job and a family, you don’t go camping, you buy a caravan.  The Aussies we met in caravan parks were family-oriented (except for the occasional European tenters), and uniformly friendly, chatty, and considerate. At one of them, it being Saturday night, the owner or operator treated everyone there to a meal of sausage and onions, cooked on the gas grill outside the central shared kitchen -- and threw in free wine.  Caravan parks often occupy highly desirable real estate, since Australia simply does not have a tradition of the very rich buying up the best sites and excluding others.  Thus, the caravan park may have the best view in town.  Even along the most expensive of the developed coasts, the caravan park may be next door to a deluxe apartment house, and equally close to the sea.  An interesting sociological aspect is that caravan parks always have quite a number of once-mobile structures now rooted into the ground, with tiny front gardens and carports.  The reason is that the government will give any retiree who has limited assets but a fixed address a housing allowance.  If you are held to a limited pension, something that would correspond to our Social Security payments, you may not be able to afford a house -- but maybe you can get together 40 or 50 thousand and buy a mobile home, which then becomes immobile.

The “tidy” trope, which seems so prevalent, may have its amusing or even obnoxious aspect.  Yes, there are few highway billboards, but there are instead, continually, signs that communicate a kind of nervous parental concern.  Do you know how fast you’re driving?  Speed kills!  Take a chance, lose your life.  Drowsy? - pull off 3 km ahead.  A moment like this (droopy head) – a lifetime like this (wheelchair).  Every curve is symbolically depicted in advance.  As you ascend a hill, a sign will announce Crest to warn you that another vehicle may suddenly appear on what you think is a vacant roadway.   As you exit a pull-off or viewing area, you will be reminded, Drive on the left in Australia.  Some of this is less urgent than simply a voice for politeness.  Some signs say, Consider those following, and provide lay-bys so that you can do so.  All this is funny, but a bit ridiculous.  Whether or not all this minatory authority has the desired force, who knows?  Cigarette packs are printed over at least 8o percent of their surface with the most dire and gruesome photos and warnings, but lots of people smoke.  In the cities, bike and pedestrian lanes on sidewalks and bridges are laboriously outlined, but no one seems to pay much attention.  Some years ago, in the cities, the police enforced a walk-left rule on sidewalks, as well as roadways, but that seems to have been foregone.

We were even more struck, as we drove through towns and the countryside, at the absolute absence of talk from, to, or about God.  There are simply no religious messages in public spaces. At most, churches in towns will have their own announcement boards on the lawn, including some brief Sabbath-relevant Biblical passage.  To secular or atheist Americans, it is an enormous relief, not to be violated by statements of belief designed to compel or convert others.  I believe that this probably reflects, not that no Aussies are religious (though polls show that they are not so religious as Americans) but that the denominations in Australia have, in its history, been Anglican, Roman Catholic, and traditional Protestant -- Presbyterian, Baptist.  Aggressive, hortatory fundamentalism seems not to be a part of the culture, though perhaps in the rougher conservative interior that may have a presence.  There is, however, something called the Unity Church in both cities and towns.  I take this to be a sort of nondoctrinal, ecumenical system, perhaps like Unitarianism.

Some notable towns and regions

Cairns, in Queensland, is a small city, a gateway to tropical forests and the barrier reefs.  It’s a beachy town, everyone in flip-flops, a rather trashy blend of the South Seas or Caribbean with the buildings of Singapore circa 1900.

Cape Tribulation, almost the extreme northeast of the country, a transition from subtropical to wet tropical forest, is magnificent in its natural variety. We stayed at a delightful farm-stay establishment that grew its own tropical fruits and served them up at “brekkie.”  This was the first place where I became fully conscious of the aural lavishness of bird-song.  Early in the morning they started, with burbles, creakings, scraping, along with the more conventional sets of pure pitched tones. New woodwinds would need to be invented to imitate them, but it would take a clever composer to write them integrally into a piece -- Weber or Berlioz without the bombast.

Port Douglas, a little to the south of the Cape, is a pleasant but complex sort of town.  The center is a resort like Ft Lauderdale or one of the Hamptons, with open-air restaurants and expensive shops, though more laid back. There is a large population of retired people.  At the edge of town, it becomes a place for foreign backpackers and active recreationalists, since it is the jumping-off point for trips to the Great Barrier Reef.  Out by the ocean is the marvelous four-mile beach, with lovely warm water though little surf.  Yet the end of the beach has salt-water crocs, as does the estuarial boat basin, where you want to make sure that when you step off the pier you land in the boat.

Flying into Alice Springs, you descend into a lunar landscape, though it is made of oatmeal, not cheese.  The Centre is hot and arid, to put it mildly, and then there are the flies.  But the town itself is attractive, down-to-earth, unpretentious, looking a bit like Fresno in the 50s.  While we were there, one night there was a near-total eclipse of the full moon, and it seemed as if remote Alice was indeed closer to the moon than to Sydney.  Yes, there are drunken aboriginals in the streets, and a guard at the gate of the restaurant patio we favored.  On the other hand, Alice is the center of the Desert Art movement, discussed later in this essay.

To visit Uluru (no longer Ayers Rock, very often) you must stay at a large and highly developed campground, unless you choose an extremely expensive hotel.  There was a large pool on the premises, very welcome in the 100-degree heat.  While hanging out, I noticed that a number of aboriginal teenagers using the pool, and felt good about that, until they got a bit noisy and a bossy White woman evicted them, delivering a sharp moral lecture.  It seemed to me that they were no more boisterous than any group of kids their age -- but they were dark-skinned.  This is not a casual cheap shot at the benighted: after they were forced out of the pool area, the kids’ reactions were utterly predictable -- bitch, and Why us?  I shall be politically risky and generalize  that young Aboriginals are pretty, with sexy broad faces and full heads of coarse coppery hair.  In middle age, they tend to become squat, and their faces turn into those of Tolkien-like gnomes, or golliwogs. I do not know whether this process is basically physiological or sociological in nature.

Uluru is, of course, over-visited.  Bill Bryson says that “a community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands who come to see how remote it is.”  The famous rock may be, at first glance, a disappointment in that it resembles a sort of ill-formed loaf of banana bread.  You think, after all, it’s not that big.  Mostly it appears coppery red-brown, but in different lights glows red or rusty like a Richard Serra piece.  It seems like a volumetric version of an O’Keeffe painting, an extraordinary expanse of strong color without interesting brush-strokes.  But if you take the 11-km hike around it, easy enough to do since it is a flat track, the brush strokes emerge, and you realize that the surface, which seemed opaque and featureless, actually has plants and trees, ridges and gullies and crevices, and native carving or rock painting.   Uluru is just one of the large granite outcroppings in the area, famous because it is so set apart, because it makes such a good photo.  Nearby, the Olga mountains are a jumble of huge boulders enclosing a large grassy plain like the African veldt, crossed by occasional deep-cut oases with running water.  The dominant tall tree, the she-oak, looks like a droopy cedar; some lower banksias have erect complex blossoms, like a dense stand of toilet brushes.  The Olgas and other desert areas in the center provide excellent hiking: lots of rocky challenges, but also hidden canyons of palms and cyclads, alive with birds.

The town of Penola, South Australia: stone cottages from the 1850s and 60s, with separate stone kitchen houses, a stone village church (Anglican), sweet kitchen gardens.  Lorne, on the Victorian coast, like a prim little English seaside town but with better sea views.

I was ill while we were in Tasmania, so my memories lie behind a scrim.  But clearly, as Australia is to the US, Tassie is to “the mainland” -- about 40 years behind.  Here many of the towns are not just quaint but shabby, like the maritime town of Zeehan on the western coast.  It was once thriving, with a great hotel and an Art Deco theater; now it mostly closed up.  Strahan was once a major port with a large shipbuilding works, now closed.  It has been turned into a showroom for beautiful furniture made from Huon pine, the finest local hardword.  Mainland Australians tend to regard Tassies as economic losers and as mentally backward, like Newfies in Canada.  Yet Tasmania has the best produce, wineries, cheese makers, the tastiest pears and apples.  Eaglehawk Neck, in the southeast, is doubly memorable.  A thin row of houses stretches along a narrow band of land between the two near-islands of the Tasman peninsula, poised over the ocean both on the west and the east. It also, historically, is where the authorities tethered vicious dogs across the neck of the peninsula. If convicts from Port Arthur did get away, they could only try to cross the neck -- or escape by small boat, leading almost all of them to drown in the violent seas.

Though most of the towns seem desperate to hold on, one of them, Sheffield, a regional center in the 1910s or 20s, has taken a fresh and charming tack by turning itself into a self-caricature.  The town has the usual features.  Every other store is a “general store” selling a mélange of items one did not think were still made.  There is a pharmacy with soda fountain, and lots of cafes and pubs and cider shops to choose among.  The bakery serves tea in mismatched cups, together with pastries of doubtful integrity.  But every structure of any size has large murals on the outside walls depicting scenes of life in Sheffield, sometimes reminiscences of that very spot, in its great days.  Farmers still till the fields with wooden harrows, farmer wives still go to market in bonnets carrying baskets, blacksmiths still forge, kids still romp in the middle of the street, families march to church on Sunday and the pastor welcomes them at the door.   Much of the artistic emphasis depends on trompe d’oeil, but the whole effect is utterly delightful, and the artists aren’t bad

In NSW, the perfect drive up to Mt Wilson in the Blue Mountains, to see a little park called the Cathedral of Ferns, through overhanging eucalypts, dense rhododendrons, and mountain views.  And inland from Coff’s Harbor, the Dorrigo hills, semi-tropical with waterfalls; nearer the coast, Bellingen, just a nice old town with the customary pub hotel and old-fashioned stores.  Russell Crowe still keeps his family home there, we’re told.  Bill Bryson says this area is the American Midwest, 1958, and he’s right.

Using the outdoors

Aussies are rough and tough.  It’s a sparsely populated country with a big outdoors, a big outback. In Australia, being in “the bush” doesn’t refer to forest or deep vegetation, but simply being away from the towns, what we would call spending some time in the country.  Walking (hiking) is the cultural norm.  Bill Bryson refers Australia as the sunburnt country, referring to its people, and seems that at one time or another people spend time outside.  The distribution of the population along the coasts brings a nearly universal orientation to water-based recreational pursuits.  All Aussie males, most females, swim, surf, ride paddle-boards, often in waters that would scare the dickens out of most Americans.  Our host in Sydney, aged mid-60s with a week-day office job, swims a couple of miles several times a week before going to work, volunteers as a licensed lifeguard Sundays on Manley Beach, does technical rock climbing (abseiling), bikes often, has traveled to foreign lands specifically to surf.  This is normal; every middle-aged man will tell you about which beach he learned surfing at.  In towns near the coast, employed people may find time for a dip in the ocean two or more times a day.  In the more temperate or subtropical regions, ocean swimmers go out pretty much all year in water at less than 60 degrees or less, though they wear wet suits.  My coldest water was about 62, without wet suit.  It was a thrilling, though brief, swim.

Pretty much everyone is fit into early old age, though often with a beer belly for the men. This may explain why middle-aged women are stocky, with big calf muscles and strong arms.  In cities, virtually everyone gets outside and takes the sun, one way or another.  While in Sydney, at lunchtime, we were abruptly swept aside by large packs of office workers fleeing their worksites and running seriously for an hour or so in the parks -- up and down the hills, along the paths, racing up steep stairs as a routine matter of keeping fit.  These were exercise groups, I think; there were relatively few individual runners or sets of two or three at a time, which would be more typical in our cities at lunchtime or at the end of the day.  This pattern of large-group exercising in herds is rather intimidating, in truth.

At the most famous beaches, in summer at least, lifeguards watch over stretches along the beach between flags, where it is safer to swim, either because the currents are less tricky there or because there is netting, a hundred feet or so into the ocean, against sharks and jellyfish.  In every state, every popular beach has a “Surf Club” with initials denoting that it is the local chapter of a life-saving training club, where young people train to be able to save those in trouble in the water.  My impression is that in our country, municipal services hire individuals to be guards at beaches and public pools, but in Australia the structuring of such oversight involves a nation-wide, self-organized sodality.

And learning to swim is handled in an interesting way, or so I deduce.  As far as l can tell, with us, parents take the lead with their own children, as one would in teaching a child to use a bike.  Otherwise, school classes or neighborhood groups of children may be instructed in the basics of swimming in a municipal pool, a school facility, or at a camp at a lake by hired professionals, and then continue their relationship with water recreation later in life along various trajectories, ranging from never swimming to sporadic swimming to ardent water sport.  In summer, in Australia, there are young adult professionals leading whole shoals of small children, each group dressed in its own set of swimming uniforms with a funny cap held on by an elastic band, a dozen or more boys, a dozen or more girls, into the shallows and teaching them the basics.  Parents may be observing, but they are not doing the instructing: this is a civic enterprise. How socialization toward small-boat sailing is handled, I do not know, but certainly it is not a matter for just the well-off.

Although Australia is quite an egalitarian and down-to-earth society, it is still somewhat conservative along gender lines, I suspect.  My impression is that there comes a time, after adolescence and young adulthood, when women, relatively speaking, cease surfing, stop exercising in large packs at noon, and retreat somewhat into a more domestic pattern, although I suspect serious hiking remains the norm.  You don’t see middle-aged women power-walking, or, in Spandex-clad cadres, going at the machines at fitness clubs en masse.  In the cities, I saw no business women en route to the office in trainers (sneakers), carrying more fashionable shoes in a handbag, as was a common sight in Washington or New York several decades ago.  By contrast, on the sidewalks or in cafes you see clearly well-employed men dressed in recreational shoes, T-shirts, and even what we would call pedal-pushers -- usually with some sort of overshirt or light jacket.  It may be that the kind of public physical activity that grown women engage (or do not engage) in reflects a lag in gender politics.  The country was deeply macho and sexist until just two or three decades ago, and middle-class women may still be hanging back.

I saw mostly men on the golf courses.  Curiously, in my experience, tennis courts all over Australia were pretty empty, which checks with the fact that Australia has not been a serious contender in professional tennis for a long time -- though Evonne Goolagong, the most adorable  of all women tennis players (notable for being the first Aboriginal professional player), is still a national heroine, bless her.

Cities

All of Australia’s major cities were colonial capitals and grew to importance in roughly the same era, the second quarter of the 19th c.  They are: Adelaide, South Australia; Melbourne, Victoria; Hobart, Tasmania; Sydney, NSW; Brisbane, Queensland, visited in that order.  [The separate states were not unified into one nation within the Commonwealth until 1901 (called The Federation), and the capital, Canberra, a new city comparable to Brasilia, was not designated the federal capital until 1911.  We did not visit Canberra, which is said to be quite dull, nor Perth, the capital of Western Australia.]  That means that they all have a similar foundational character, reflecting their original status as the official center of colonies ruled by a regent of the British sovereign. Thus one finds a parliament house, a governor-general’s mansion, a customs house, a treasury building, a fort -- such edifices generally in Regency or pre-Victoria style -- and then a subsequent set of impressive non-official buildings from various stages of the early Victorian or the later Edwardian era.  The latter include government offices and military headquarters, and mansions and gentlemen’s clubs -- sporting, military, maritime -- of the rich and powerful.  Otherwise, the cities differ markedly, as one would expect.

Adelaide.  A small neat city, attractive, simply laid out, calm.  It still has a proper air, as if inhabited by one’s aunties who have lived in the world but on the whole prefer to hew to the old ways.  The authorities have recently ruined the central pedestrian and shopping mall, which had trees and welcoming benches, by over-paving and over-lighting.  On the other hand, they have achieved a fine integration of the city with a green-belt of new towns, a half-circle of environmentally sensitive neighborhoods of town houses (mostly), shared community facilities, parks and bike paths, a meandering river, and dedicated bus lines into the center.  Planning works; and when it does, it’s a joy.  You can get around the city core by free trolley. Those working downtown dress somewhat formally.  They are the uncles and aunts.  There is a beautiful park surrounding Government House and the downtown performing arts center.  Our Adelaide friend remarked that she parks (free) a block away from the arts center for an evening event, and can get back to her car safely and quickly when it’s finished.  Adelaide’s mayor was a Vietnamese boat person, which goes far to explain the rational, non-parochial feel of the place.  The city has also a fabulous central produce market -- which impressed us perhaps unduly, since we did not yet know that most of Australia’s cities have such.

Adelaide has a superb natural history museum, part of one of the South Australia universities.  We were lucky to see their permanent aboriginal art collection as our first exposure to this incomparable body of art, for it has, beautifully displayed, the earliest preserved indigenous art and craft from all over Australia, dating from the days when anthropologists and explorers first began to take notice of it, approximately the mid-19th c.  Thus it shows work that had not yet been much affected by non-indigenous ideals and the influence of the collecting purpose, e.g, painting or sculpture on bark or wood and the decoration of utilitarian or ceremonial objects with stone, feathers, fabric, and the rest.  “Decoration” is hardly the right word, since what the makers did was not extrinsic to the purpose of the artifact in question, but an integral refinement of it.  It is an important question.  Does the decoration, do the optional fine touches, change a piece from “craft” to “art”?  One can argue, rather, that “craft” is art which happens to be useful; and this is not a fanciful notion, since we know, from ethnographers, that there were few if any instances of deliberately utilitarian, non-refined objects of this kind.  Any spear that was made, any carving tool, any head-dress, was something above and beyond the merely useful. So why would one argue that such a piece was, first, craft, and then only secondarily art? In any case, the Adelaide collection is a fine baseline exposure for this work, which began (in our terms) as “vernacular” art, with an impersonal (i.e., non-individualized) motivation and a localized significance, and now has become recognized as a great art of the world. The museum’s collection of now-extinct or rare animals, unique to Australia, is fascinating also.

Hobart.  It too is a compact city, a colonial capital, with much the same feel.  We were there only a few hours, which was scandalous on our part, but still could sense what we were told, that it is a friendly and livable city.  As in Adelaide, here are fine stone Anglican churches, once-elaborate hotels, an imposing Treasury, a lovely central park, and a sense of civic calmness.  The city is small enough (as is Tassie), that if you live in Hobart you can spend a lot of your routine life on the coast or touring the wineries or enjoying the large and lovely Derwent River. (Or revisiting MONA, discussed below.) The dreadful Tassie weather, of course, takes many prisoners, although when a momentary change in the weather -- they tend all to be momentary -- almost drove us inside from our picnic lunch spot, everyone else just bundled up and kept on eating.

Brisbane was fascinating to me as a striking exemplar of secular change, and as an illustration of the way in which the notion of an excluded middle need not be fallacious.  On one edge of its history, it reveals the common colonial foundation: a beautiful small Customs House on river’s edge, now with an elegant restaurant; elegant mansions and clubs from the 1880s, in tropical colonial style, together with more modest houses of timber and tin, set on stilts; an important imperial-era botanical park.  On the other side of its history, Brisbane is the new-to-thrive city, a global city in looks and feel.

You see this most clearly on the campus of the Queensland University of Technology, located right in the center of the city. It is a fearsomely contemporary campus, jam-packed with advanced-construction new buildings (most of which will look dated in 20 years), super-wired, LED-messaged, buzzy, crawling with over-coffeed Asian students.  In the center of the campus, owing to some political trades between the university and city authorities, there remain two mid-19th c. buildings of considerable historical interest.  There is the very large Empire-style (Glaswegian, I would say) parliament building still used, I believe, for the original purpose but seeming rather pompous and artificial in its new context.

There is also, nearby, dating from 1862, Old Government House, the beautifully restored vice-regal seat of the Governors-General, which is well worth a long visit.  It is a compact, sweetly designed rococo house, although I would not be surprised to learn that the builder or architect had been about four feet ten and had a receding chin: the edifice (and it is an edifice) is slightly too low in its proportions, and was rather too small for its official purpose even when new.  The architect-builder was, I believe, originally a convict.  The displays and furnishings are of great interest, nicely curated and explained.  You can really see how the imperial regent and his family lived, what it was like for the children (pictures of the ponies on the lawn), the late-afternoon tea service en famille, the obligatory but crowded receptions for the best of Brisbane (with competitive hats on the ladies), the carriages bringing visiting Royals, the most memorable of whom were the prince who became, unexpectedly, George V, and his Queen Mary.  The house was designed so that the gentry and the servants never interacted except by design (separate quarters, separate staircases), and the masculine functions for the governor and his higher staff were spatially segregated from the women’s and children’s areas.  It is a satisfying house-museum, it captures a bygone but important era.  Today, in its old cellars and store-rooms there is a pleasant café, used not by tourists but by locals.  [In Australian cities, where coffee- and wine-drinking and indulgence in pastries are the norm, there is almost nowhere open to the public, whether large or small, of general or specialized interest, that does not have an excellent café.]  Rooms in Old Government House are also rented for private functions, like parties and weddings.  Can one imagine that being true at Versailles, or Number 10 Downing Street, or even one of our older state capitols?

This blurring of era and function is true all over the city, at every stage of its history.  The imperial Treasury is now a casino, the Mint an expensive hotel, the imperial barracks a military jumble-house. The missing middle concept holds true both temporally and in terms of economic viability.  Queensland for most of its existence was the source of extractive materials, and its capital city never had much of a special regional character.  The splendidly decorated City Hall, a later (turn-of-the-century) building, is still City Hall, but incorporates the city museum and a restaurant that has been much-loved for decades: when it was threatened by the development of its block, the citizens just moved it into City Hall.

The truth is that Brisbane was always a cultural backwater, in the mind of most Australians.  In the middle of the last century, as logging dwindled, the city managers went in for gambling, and Brisbane became known as Bris-Vegas.  It was only 25 years or so ago that stores stayed open past noon on Saturday, and there was no shopping at all on Sunday.

But in 1988, Brisbane decided that it should not cede everything to Sydney.  It organized an international trade expo, which was a great, probably unexpected success.  This entailed tearing down all the warehouses and modest dwellings on the entire south bank of the river in order to locate the expo.  Afterwards, with considerable perspicacity, the authorities did not just leave the expo structures to decay, but took the newly empty space and constructed a long riverbank sequence of cultural institutions: a performing arts center, a state library, two museums (including a more than respectable one for contemporary Australian art, representing both white and aboriginal work) -- together with a Nepalese temple, a big ferris-wheel that dominates the skyline (a big dynamic O), and a fabulously kitschy urban swimming hole, sporting a public pool larger than a football field and a true beach made with trucked-in ocean sand.  It is thronged with children, families, even teenagers who would normally find quite other places, maybe not very healthy ones, to hang out in.

The whole stretch compares favorably to the recent transformation of London’s South Bank, or to the more domestic revision of Portland along the Willamette.  There is a continuous  riverside walkway connecting these various amenities, and the whole area is joined to the older city across the river by a fine pedestrian bridge made of light, taut scintillating metal whose structural members are elaborated so as to look like a forest of masts or some levitation, some vertical turning, of a boat basin.  This exuberant feathery bridge is one of two structures in all of Australia that I found to be of truly notable, as opposed to adequate or merely tasteful, design.  It is of course adored by some, despised by others.

Everything is still in flux, today, in a remarkable way.  The main central-city pedestrian mall, a  clever idea in the 1990s, is a visual and economic disaster, as most such malls are, hideous to look at and depressingly down-market in its retail stores.  Twenty minutes away, however, you are walking through a long stretch of very large, new office towers, all in today’s standard international style, all marked with large corporate logos, a long line of them stretching down the river.  Brisbane is, actually, a fine example of a river city that has been able to grow linearly, by stages, in and around the curves and hooks of its river, without a razing of its center and without the need to create subsidiary conurban “centers” -- rather like, in this regard, Strasbourg or Pittsburgh.  A delightful, frequent, free ferry service travels up and down, dock to dock, dawn to dusk, from what was once the hub of the city to its most recently built sections.

At its worst, this up-to-date emphasis on modernization, beginning just yesterday and wildly accelerating, has produced the depressing spectacle of the overbuilt Gold Coast, just south of the city, which is Miami or Ft Lauderdale with even glitzier towers.  At its best, it is a city jump-started. Urban planners ought to be looking at Brisbane and its hinterland very closely, in recognition both of its achievements and its perils.  For what Brisbane has done, I think, is to accept a priori that, once awakened from its slumber, it could not go back and create a physical or functional city of the 19th and early 20th century, but would have to jump directly into the now-globalized, technologically integrated world, the world of international business, commerce, finance, the Web, and virtual culture.  The fact that it has now become the nation’s third-largest city seems of little significance.  It is not really an Australian city; it emulates, competes with, not with Sydney or Melbourne, but Manchester, Torino, Frankfurt, Kansas City, Shanghai

        Melbourne or Sydney? 

And now the inevitable choice, does Melbourne or Sydney take pride of place?  Aussies insist it’s not a forced choice, but rivalry and resentment have deep roots.  [Man says to Sydney resident, Do you have any children?  Sydneysider replies: Yes, two living, and one in Melbourne.] In Sydney, they will say, I like Melbourne, but there is always a hint of condescension.  Basically, it comes down to old money versus new, or 19th c. wealth versus 20th c. celebrity.  Melbourne’s pre-eminence is 1850 to 1950; Sydney’s, post-1960.  Melbourne reminds you of Chicago or Glasgow in their heyday, the industrial and commercial centers, the places where vast fortunes were made and great institutions endowed.  Sydney is modern, an international Mecca, a mélange today of Vancouver or Hong Kong or San Francisco for the beauty of its natural setting; Los Angeles for its beach-oriented, climate-blessed hedonism; and New York, for its financial vigor.

Once again, what remains visible from the early stages of both cities is quite similar.  Both retain a bit of the colonial, official era, and both have interesting late 19th c. commercial districts (“precincts” in Aussie); these have been renovated and updated in Sydney, not so much in Melbourne. The totemic historical figure in Melbourne would be Sidney Myer, the Jewish immigrant who built a national empire of department stores, funded museums, and in 1932 gave free Christmas dinner to eleven thousand Depression-worn citizens at his mansion.  The cynosure for Sydney would be whoever the equivalent to Bill Gates is, or Jamie Dimon.  The problem for Melbourne is that of keeping the physical and institutional greatness of the city funded, keeping the city vibrant, in a day when it is not economically so productive.  The problem for Sydney is, I think, to keep it distinctive, integral, to keep it from spinning off into the realm of all-purpose glamour and glitz.

Melbourne today is still the center of national (but not international) banking and insurance, of long-established retail business.  Sophisticated Aussies still go there for their best clothes.  It still has the classic restaurants, if not the trendy ones, the best university (Monash, founded in the mid-1800s), the most exclusive clubs, the museums with deepest collections, the strongest medical establishment, the finest musical life, the most famous pubs, the most important national railway hub.  An excellent free trolley circulates continually through the center, carrying not only visitors but shoppers and well-dressed professionals on their daily rounds.  The shoppers and professionals downtown are well-dressed, the men in expensive suits worn without ties but with pricey shirts, the women in tailored business suits, and they all seem to be, not hurrying but moving purposively.  The city is built on the classic grid pattern.  In the center of the grid, reflecting the variegated micro-economic history of the city, most main streets, running in both orientations, have a shadow, a little alley in the middle of the block: hence Bourne Street (fancy shopping), then Little Bourne Street. The latter housed the backstairs workers, small craftspeople, the one-man entrepreneurs, often immigrants: the Jewish tailors, the Chinese metalworkers, the Irish laundries, the hand-made jewelry makers.   Today the main streets are as they were, lined with office buildings, churches, big stores, but the byways now have “ethnic” restaurants, bars, bakeries, pawnshops, and coffee houses.  The last of these are often inserted into a nook or cranny of a larger building.  [If you take coffee seriously, Melbourne is the place for you.]

After its period of the creation of great wealth, the impressive building, the art collecting, Melbourne, I believe, went through a long tired period in the mid-20th c., in which there was little physical or sociocultural renewal.  No doubt, if this is true, this had something to do with, not only the transition to a post-capitalist economy but also to the policy of controls on immigration -- Whites Only, and few of those.  Close to the river stands the amazing Flinders Street Station, which was once the place where all the railroads of south and east Australia converged.  It is intact, and is as imposing an edifice as Kings Cross /St Pancras in London.  But, like those (until Eurostar came into Kings Cross), it has been hollowed out; now it is where suburban trains and trolleys mesh, and the long-distance trains leave from somewhere else.

Melbourne has always been peculiar in the way it turns it back on its main body of water.  Port Philip is a huge estuarial bay, almost the size of one of the Great Lakes, protected from but with an opening to the Bass Strait and the ocean.  Yet the city tucks away its docks and shipyards, which are economically as important as those of Sydney, around the corner of the bay; its commercial skyscrapers do not look at the water; and there is virtually no recreational waterfront, either for small boating or swimming.  In this respect, it reminds one of Toronto, which until recently turned its back on its waterfront.  Unlike Toronto, the arms of Port Philip are prime real estate, where the rich have their homes and beaches abound, so the  bay is embraced but not fronted.  This turning away from a great natural resource is now changing, I believe as part of a more extensive urban revitalization.  Across the Yarra River, which runs through the center of Melbourne is a large docklands area, until recently a dangerous and decayed district.  Now it is being made into a new and trendy tourist zone, with expensive hotels, apartments and restaurants for the young rich, and an enormous convention and exhibition hall which, though not especially attractive, is said to be the “greenest” such building in the world.  As is the case with Amsterdam’s docklands (or, in a sense, San Francisco’s SoMa) it is now where the high tech start-ups locate, where young adults with high incomes and no children will choose to live.  I suspect it is a deliberate attempt, in Melbourne, to loop back, to jump over the development of late 20th c. Sydney, which put the latter ahead as an urban happening.  It reminds me of what Chicago has done recently to take advantage of its lakefront, in a fashion more flexible and venturesome than what New York has been able do with its river and waterfronts.  Certainly an entire new maritime approach is needed.  What is comes down to is that, for a time, Melbourne was the shipping port to and from the Indian Ocean and South Asia, Sydney to and from East Asia and the Pacific countries.   But when tankers and freighters got enormous, Sydney’s deep harbor made all the difference; and, after all, Melbourne faced Antarctica, and Sydney faced the U.S.

This process of catch-up is apparent in the newly fashioned Federation Square, on the river and adjacent to the Station.  For decades, Melbourne’s downtown simply came to stop at the Flinders Street Station and the river; as with Chicago or Glasgow, there was in fact no sense of one focus where people could come together to celebrate, mess around, or protest.  Federation Square has been fashioned in the last decade, and it is splendid.  Conservative Melbourne citizens somehow allowed some far-out architects to construct a whole complex composed of a raked plaza and a group of new buildings, all of which are decidedly fractal in nature -- everything built as irregular polyhedrons and trapezoids with skins of glass stretched over wildly angled metal struts and tie-rods.  It is not really good architecture, but it created an instant urban focus.  [Had it not worked that way, it would have been a hideous and expensive embarrassment.]  Now it is where all visitors converge and mingle with waves of suburban workforce as they pour out of Flinders Street Station.   A splendid visitors center is located there, a film museum with a repertory film theater, several museums of high quality -- and lots of sprawling space for sunning (when Melbourne’s mercurial weather permits), skate-boarding, coffee-drinking, and lolling around.  Directly across Flinders Street is St. Paul’s cathedral, an imposing stone cynosure from 1885; the famous Young and Jacksons pub; and numerous other vestiges of the great period of Melbourne.

This kind of contrast is what successful cities are all about.  Melbourne is certainly full of contrast: the alleys full of trenchant graffiti, right near the fractal dazzle of Federation Square, the sobriety of downtown facing the new model of urbanity, the docklands; the several delightful shopping arcades, like London’s, with galleries of iron fretwork running street to street -- the original form of boutique malls one finds today -- nudging up against big masonry office buildings.   These vestiges of the Commonwealth are generally pleasing.  The devotion to cricket is time-honored.  To some, traditions like the Melbourne Cup, the most important horse racing event in the entire south Asian region, may seem a nostalgic waste of time.  It references Ascot, even down to the hats, and gets as much attention in the media.

Across the river from this newly created center one finds the concert hall, the home of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Australia’s best, a complex of flexibly-sized legitimate theatres, and several distinguished museums.  Further along is the Royal Botanic garden, a world-class conservatory garden of exotic plants from all over the world, and the 19th c. Royal Exhibition Building (with UNESCO World Heritage designation), a floridly wonderful structure that appears to have been inspired by the Baths of Caracalla.  The traditional “fine art” museum does not equal the Art Institute or Boston’s MFA; Australia’s magnates did not travel as easily or as early to Europe.  But it is good, the best of its kind in Australia.  More interesting, perhaps, to a tourist is the exciting museum of Australian art that is part of the modernist phantasmagoria of Federation Square.  The focus is on 19th and 20th c. by Australian painters and sculptors of all aesthetic persuasions.   As we discovered in Canada, it is instructive to visit a comprehensive traditional, i.e., “Western”-oriented, museum in a foreign country and see arrayed before you 19th century realism, the impressionist trope, Cubist art, Art Nouveau and Moderne, early 20th c. social realism, wartime art, fine-art photography, color-field, video, and so on.  In the same way that a good, second-rank piece of music or novel will teach you more about the formal, technical aspects of an art form than does a masterpiece (by definition sui generis), so does a colonial collection bring into relief the temporal sequence of recent art, the relation between collectors and sponsors and artists, the conception of a public museum.  Over and above all this, remarkably, there are beautifully installed rooms of Aboriginal art dating from the period just after that in Adelaide’s ethnographic period to nearly the present day.  [There is a similar museum in Sydney, nearly as good and perhaps more up to date in its selection.  More on this extraordinary art below.]

The invaluable museum, however, may be the Immigration Museum, created out of a fine old plutocrats’ club on Flinders Street, and the only one of its kind in the country.  It shows, in excellent graphics and texts, the peopling of the nation: who, when, where, how.  So much attention is given, deservedly, to the unique convict history of Australia, best presented at the national park and museum in Port Arthur, Tasmania, that it is a good counterbalance to have this superb historical museum in Melbourne.  There is a strong sense of parallelism with the U.S., in that the historical sequence of free immigrants is similar.  In the early years, poor English and Irish, in some sense indentured or at least betting their future lives on the voyage out, mixing then with English yeomen together with some aristocratic younger sons sent out to make their own way in the colonies, and with retired sailors.  Then, with the discovery of gold and other minerals and the construction of railroads, an influx of Asians to do the dirty work, the story of whom is heart-breaking.  Then, with industrialization, the waves of immigrants from southern Europe to work in the factories and mines, in small business, and on the big ships.  In early- to mid-20th c., the baldly racist curtailment of immigration -- Australia for Australians, and Whites Only.  The door opened again as the need for workers arose after World War II and as a certain pan-Commonwealth spirit came into play.  Asians were not re-admitted until 1973, however; after which date they came in multitudes, so that all Aussie cities now abound with those of Asian heritage.

Today, Australia has the second largest proportion of immigrants in the world, after Israel.  It is a great strength of the nation, and the close economic tie to Asia is of vital importance.  Yet, as in the US, the underlying sociopolitical attitudes are complex.  Immigrants are needed, and officially welcomed, yet there is the strong, if tacit, sense that immigrants should not live apart, in enclaves, should not keep to their native languages, but should blend in, become acculturated. There is a prejudice among older Whites residents that strong forms of “multiculturalism” pose a threat to the larger society.  (I wish I knew how this is handled in the universities, where young Asians abound.)  Young people from the rest of the Commonwealth or the U.S. and Europe are welcome to come and work for a while; the young are given a special work visa, and a stay in Australia can be part of their Wanderjahren.   But older foreign Whites have to commit a substantial financial stake to emigrate there. The basic reason is that Australia has a relatively good public health and retirement system, and free-loaders are not wanted, since they would deplete the treasury.

        Sydney

Sydney is spectacular, as all the world knows.  It did not think of itself this way until half a century ago.  It was content to be the second city, the port city facing east across the ocean.  The harbor sides were dull and shabby.  Only in the 1950s, after a Summer Olympics in Melbourne, where many visitors traveled through Sydney, and after the construction of John Utzon’s Opera House did Sydneysiders accept that their harbor setting made Sydney a place where people from all over the world wanted to come -- today, in droves.  There is an irony: Sydney was founded as a penal site, a dumping ground for human refuse.  Now Sydney basks in its starlit fame.

The harbor location is of course the key.  Cities with deep harbors and protective headlands tend to be spectacular, because views do not have to be contrived.  Central Sydney is hilly, like San Francisco, which makes for perilous driving and puts demands on your calf muscles but takes full advantage of the views.  Greater Sydney stretches clear round the bay, not so much as neighborhoods but as a complex of distinct towns, which are administratively separate.  Many ferry lines, with sweet little boats plying back and forth all day long, connect the central core to the famous beach towns, like Manley; to the traditional wealthy residential areas, like Kirribilli, where the wealthy have always lived in large mansions and where the Governor-General’s house sits on its own point; to quiet neighborhoods where there is nothing much but a lovely  little cove and a safe swimming beach; to the inlets that give berth to commercial ships and naval vessels.  The beach towns bring a sort of relaxed Los Angeles hedonism to central Sydney’s sophistication.  It is as if Malibu and Laguna Beach had been moved to a location just outside the Golden Gate, reachable by ferry.  These satellite communities have their own apartment houses, stores, surf clubs, restaurants, all serviceable, none memorable.

Close to the center, just across from the ferry slips, is a version of Coney Island called Luna Park, popular and delightful.  Near the central wharves at Circular Quay, a magnificent Royal Botanical Garden leads, on its uphill side, to a district of high-rises; on the downhill edge, to the Opera House.  The Botanical Garden here, unlike its counterpart in Melbourne, displays only Australian flora; inevitably, as a safe green space, it attracts lots of Australian birds.

The Opera House, pictured the world over, seems smaller in reality than in its photos, in the same way that movie stars do when you meet them.  It is not stark white, as I had thought, but a sort of light tan or taupe, made of lozenge-shaped panels of Bakelite or a similar material.  Thus it has more of an exterior texture than one expects, and a more practical color; had it been sheer white, it would be blinding, impossible to look at, on Sydney’s normally sunny days.   The only unfortunate aspect, visually, of the Opera House design is that the large podium on which the auditoriums rest is made of an ugly colored concrete.  However, the same color and texture are continued down for the walkways and low sea walls that stretch around the perimeter of the site, and these are nicely designed: for example, they include frequent concrete benches, quite comfortable, set into the balustrade like a long continual couch.   The Opera House involves three main, connected structures, two large auditoriums (one now named after Joan Sutherland) and a smaller theater.  Each expresses the concept of a partially deconstructed orange, the sections partially disengaged, or perhaps a more solid artichoke in the process of preparation.  The architect insisted that these elements were not to be perceived as sails referencing boats in the harbor, but as pure geometry, pure elliptical sections.  Yes and no, I would say.

Central Sydney is more various, physically and in the way it reads culturally, than central Melbourne.  It is not flat, and is not organized on a grid.  Although I have maintained that Melbourne was the greater city, earlier, this means that Sydney has more urban variety, since it grew in a more accidental way.  Most obviously, besides the Opera House, Sydneysiders love their Harbour Bridge that divides the north from the center.  The bridge is the acme of what you can do, structurally, with iron.  It is high, pleasing in design (rather reminiscent of the Brooklyn Bridge, though built much later), and its location and form entice you to walk over it.  Its sides are of open mesh, so that you can see the trams and autos passing over it, which is always desirable in bridge design.  Built in the early 1930s, it was a crucial works project for the unemployed in the great Depression.

Very close to the focal Circular Quay are large areas of houses, shops, pubs that were built by convicts, and eventually occupied by convicts who had earned their “tickets of leave” -- that is, had served out their time.  Otherwise, these areas, named The Rocks and Miller’s Point, were lived in by workers, the Irish and Welsh and poor English who immigrated in the mid-19th c.  The structures have been well renovated, and are now quite chic.  In these residential downtown areas, one finds famous wooden-floor, tin-ceiling pubs, like the Wellington, and once again the distinctive old Aussie pub hotels; in Sydney they are kept up more spiffily than in the small towns. On the other side of town from the central quays are residential neighborhoods built a little later in the century, with more pretentious dwellings, often featuring balconies of iron filigree, which are today upper middle-class homes -- in pleasing unbroken blocks, though sometimes with some rather startling post-modern residential nonentities breaking the streetscape.  Another close-in neighborhood, Potts Point, is a now-fashionable shopping area, mixed with some residences, that once was the red-light district and where the sidewalks document a notable number of Irish worker riots. Yet another neighborhood near the shipyards has been, I think, organized later; it is predominantly residential, with obviously expensive, well designed private homes and apartment houses (each unit with a view, I expect) -- the Sydney analogue to San Francisco’s Sea Cliff and the Marina, it seems.  All told, the look of Sydney’s near-in residential areas corresponds to today’s East End in London, while Melbourne’s fine residential blocks are like the West End.

Sydney’s historic portion of historic commercial harborside is, oddly, quite modest.  There are a few warehouses and depots and wharves now being renovated and turned into apartments and restaurants and bars, at Walsh’s Bay, but it amounts to less than one sees in Boston’s harbor renovation or at the docklands in Melbourne.  The contrast with Melbourne depends, I think, on a particular leap-frog motive, where Melbourne decided recently to make something, at least, of its water exposure (there, a river), and to the fact that Sydney’s commercial waterfront was always situated around the corner, relative to the central quay -- and still is. 

Given the basic topography, of hills coming down to a deep harbor, and given all the photos one has seen, the part of the city on and just back from the harbor offers few surprises, though many pleasures.  What was for me unexpected was that, inland from the water and on flat land, is an amazingly dynamic business district.  I did not expect that Sydney had a commercial-capitalist past, but it does.  The central business district is a spatial mess without a central core or crossroads, but it sizzles with activity.  The streets during the day are more crowded than Manhattan’s, and one feels overwhelmed sensing the pace and pressure of well-dressed businessmen and -women  rushing around on cell-phones, engaged in making a living, no doubt a damn good one.  This is the only area in Sydney where a traveler feels out of place, the only area that lacks small parks, courtyards, and places to rest.  One could dismiss this as evidence of Sydney’s recent boom as Australia’s new center of international finance and information-tech enterprise.  But it is more complicated than that, and brings one to question one’s conclusion that Melbourne implies bourgeois, Sydney post-modern.

It turns out that the business district has its own complement of excellent buildings, dating from the turn of the 19th and the early 20th centuries.  350 George Street is a small bandbox skyscraper from 1895, with gorgeous colored marble walls and floors, a lobby staircase with brass finish and fittings that twists, changing direction at landings every 30 feet or so (it’s a narrow building), an open-cage elevator and lobby lanterns with elaborate Art Nouveau metalwork.  It’s uncannily like the wonderful Bradbury building in downtown Los Angeles and dates from the same period.  The architect was American.

The main Commercial Bank building (c. 1930), also by an American firm, is magnificent: huge, with elegant wood and bronze tellers cabins and counters, a stunning bank vault (the second largest in the world, in its time), a high deeply coffered ceiling.  Today a visitor is greeted, on entry, by a beautifully gotten-up roving employee whose business it is to direct you to the proper station; and who, when it becomes obvious that you are just gawking, encourages you to sit in big leather armchair, pick up a copy of The Australian (the Aussie New York Times) and help yourself to fresh water with lemon and a cookie or two.  You feel as if you’d wandered into the Colony Club.  What American bank, concerned with the bottom line, would indulge in such graciousness?

The Grace Hotel occupies an entire city block, entered from all the cardinal directions.  It is c. 1925, in what I call commercial Gothic, modeled after the Chicago Tribune tower.  It’s interesting how the owners and builders back then looked to the U.S. in its Gilded Age.  A large masonry building, nicely designed with little lobbies and mezzanines, was the central post office, and what an edifice it must have been.  Now it incorporates a Hyatt hotel, but the main space is still open to view.  Finally, also occupying an entire block, the amazing Queen Victoria Building, c. 1890, is a huge structure of long arcades set on arches, that is, level after level of small interior stores selling sumptuous soft goods, with sitting areas and tea shops.  One of its central courts, where two axes meet, had a Christmas tree almost as tall as that at Rockefeller Center.  This was the precursor to the most splendid department stores in the world’s cities, though the calculation was not that of comprehensive “departments” (menswear, leather goods) but a plethora of very sophisticated smaller shops -- that is, women’s gloves in one, handbags next door, small luggage next to that, and so on.  With this building, which was almost lost to developers, Sydney has the greatest soft goods “market” in the world, on the same order as Melbourne, which has (I think) the greatest and one of the largest produce markets under one roof in the world.  Elsewhere downtown is a later, more normal exemplar of a department store, David Jones, founded in 1838.  It occupies three old buildings, bridged by catwalks and underground corridors.  It is not distinguished in interior or structural design, but sells some pretty nice and pretty expensive merchandise.  We had been told that it had an astounding basement filled with desirable foodstuffs, but could not locate it, since we were asking for “the food court,” which meant something other than what we intended.  But I take it on faith that it is marvelous, since the entire store seems the equal of Harrod’s or the KDW in Berlin, and far more truly opulent than today’s Bloomingdale’s or Lord & Taylor (though not necessarily more expensive).

There is, as stated, no center to the business district, but near at hand is the large and quite splendid Hyde Park, a bit formal but providing green space and fresh air in the middle of tumult.  It has in it places to stroll, to sit, to sun, to drink wine or tea.  Toward one end is the ANZAC Memorial, dedicated to the memory of the sad young men killed or maimed in World War I (120,000 in all); it now also references WWII and, I believe, losses in Vietnam.  Normally I abhor war memorials, finding them dreadful in design and mawkish and falsely triumphant in tone. This one is different: it is a handsome, cleanly formed, chastely beautiful, a low symmetrically four-sided classical temple made from beautiful stone outside and in.  Constructed in 1934, the design style is like that of Paul Manship or Goodhue & Cram. The central bronze statue is moving.  There is no manipulative emotional message, but one is moved all the same.  The planners did something quite subtle, and very effective: stretching away from the memorial on one side is a long, shallow reflecting pool planted along its sides with rows of non-native poplar trees.  The reference is, subliminally I think, to the countryside of France, the most terrible killing ground of the first world war.

Sydney has its own museum of Australian art (by artists of all ethnicities) and of contemporary art, the latter combining, as Melbourne’s does, Aboriginal art with the fine art derived from European models.  Neither is quite so good as is Melbourne, in my opinion, but the harborside setting for the contemporary art museum is exhilarating.  One of its admirable policies is that, once a work has been at the museum for the period of ten years, it is given away to a regional or university gallery unless someone, in effect, buys it for the permanent collection.  It is in the interest of the artist or her gallery, I assume, to “endow” a piece, but the curators have the choice to decline it.  This policy has several benefits.  It permits the curators to take time to judge whether the work holds up, while, for those pieces that are distributed elsewhere, it gives them exposure to examples of what cutting-edge “contemporary” art amounted to ten years earlier.  There is an aesthetic and a cultural-historical point being made.  It is important to look at new art, but not necessarily to preserve all of it indefinitely. 

There is also, off Hyde Park, a set of nicely converted military barracks that have been made into an historical museum focusing both on the convict experience and on 19th c. European immigration as well.  Neither aspect is as concentrated or deep as the respective expositions of these complex matters at Port Arthur, Tasmania, or at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne.  

Finally I must try to come down on one side or the other of the choice: Melbourne or Sydney?  It’s difficult.  Melbourne remains the national city, while Sydney is transnational in its economic and cultural orientation. Melbourne is less exciting, architecturally, but seems to be committed, in its way, to an organic process of modernization in its Federation Square and Docklands.  It is, of course, firmly land-based, while Sydney is sea-struck.  Melbourne has, on the whole, a deeper set of cultural institutions in its universities, museums, and musical life (in both concerts and recitals) though Sydney is home to the important ballet company.  Melbourne’s fine restaurants and pubs are more intrinsically distinguished, and give better value.  [An expensive  restaurant in one of the beach towns across the bay from Sydney offered diners a Vegemite crème brulée, a truly offensive culinary notion accent.  Sydney is markedly more expensive, but has much the better weather.  Melbourne is solid, comfortable, while Sydney is dazzling and full of buzz.   As with San Francisco, Sydney, to a visitor, may feel a bit too proud of itself, unduly boastful about its fortuitous gorgeousness and its current but not necessarily dependable economic growth.  As an outsider, I would worry whether Melbourne can continue financially to support itself, as well as to keep up with contemporary sociocultural trends.  It may slip back into a sort of second-city complacency.   My worry about Sydney would be that it become too contemporary, too world-oriented, too much a locale created on the Web and by travel blogs.   As a star city, internationally, Sydney is where an incident of theatrical terrorism -- crime with a worldwide political message -- would occur, as it did shortly after we left Australia.  No sensible terrorist would bother in Melbourne; no one outside Australia would pay attention.  There is risk of collapse or deflation some decades down the road.  Rivers of money are running through Sydney.  Apartments with views in the center city and its satellite towns are selling for many millions to rich Asians who spend only a few weeks there.  In this it is like Vancouver or Hong Kong, or Manhattan for the Russian oligarchs.  Where will the Sydneysiders live, and how much income will they need for a good lifestyle?  What happens if Sydney is given over to tourists, and the new young dot.com millionaires decide they can work just as well from, live just as pleasantly in, Kuwait or Kuala Lumpur?

I cannot choose.  Today, foreigners might reasonably visit Sydney without visiting Melbourne; the reverse is unthinkable.  On the other hand, one can get tired of glamour.  Were I to emigrate, I suspect I would end up in Melbourne -- with frequent weekends in Sydney.  It’s a toss-up, but fortunately, at this stage in my life, only a conceptual dilemma. 

        The arts

I did not expect that a trip to Australia would be as memorable for its artistic excellence as would the many scenes of natural beauty, but it proved to be so.  In terms of everyday resources, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation has a 24-hour (I believe) national radio service dedicated to “classical” music, and it is superb.  It plays good works in their entirety, without the sort of sneaky “public service announcements” that our NPR includes.  There are Met broadcasts, live orchestral concerts from all the major cities (the best orchestra, though  not by far, being the Melbourne Symphony under Sir Andrew Davis).  It also has hour-long discussions by musicians and about music, which are more sophisticated and informative than anything comparable I know in the US.  Many of them involve young performers or composers who have left Australia for professional training in London or New York, and have now returned to make careers at home, or at least to visit and concertize there frequently.  Their stories and backgrounds are interesting.  Generally, the guests get to play some of their own recordings or perhaps play music that they particularly value.  While we were there, ABC was doing a long series of concerts in memory of Peter Sculthorpe, Australia’s most distinguished contemporary composer.  Sculthorpe died in 2014, after a long life.  He had just been a name to me, but I came to a deep respect for his work.  It is not especially “advanced” in style, though certainly up to date.  He has many symphonies, 15 or so string quartets, an opera and songs; all of them are very well made and showing a distinctive timbral venturesomeness.  He seems to me a composer worthy of the attention we give to, say, Peter Maxwell Davies or Harrison Birtwistle.

On an upper floor of Old Government House in Brisbane is a permanent exhibit of the paintings of William Robinson (1936-  ).  During his long career he has explored conventional realism, the later phase of impressionism (specifically, Bonnard, Matisse), expressionism, magical realism, a version of Cubism, and color-field styles.  That may seem an unsettled approach, but in truth all the work is excellent.  He knew what he wanted to do, at each stage, and did it well.  This brought back a memory of the trip we made some years ago to Newfoundland, where, in St Johns, we found ourselves mightily impressed by a painter named Christopher Pratt, slightly reminiscent of Rockwell Kent or Edward Hopper.  I became excited by this discovery, only to find that he is famous in Canada, and included in all the major museums there.  One of the very best benefits of travel, for me, is to realize that, in other societies, there are composers like Sculthorpe and visual artists like Pratt, who are, strictly speaking, world-class but simply not in the ken of the critics in New York and London.   It is a good corrective to the ethnocentric habits we all fall into as sophisticated consumers of culture.

In the Yarra Valley, about an hour by car from Melbourne, we found the Heide Foundation and museum.  This is a small, very personal collection by a wealthy couple named John and Sunday Reed in the 1930’s; their motive was to support, in direct subsidies and by buying art, the work of Australian “modernist” artists.  Theirs was an ethic similar to that of Alfred Barnes or Duncan Phillips, though on a lesser scale. Their home was also a salon for avant-garde artists and others in various arts -- an important contribution in a country that most artistic folk knew nothing of.  They wanted the new arts to be appreciated at home.   The collection they formed over many years is fascinating, in that you see the same impulses, the same influences, that one would have been aware of in the US and England at that period.  How fine it is that they focused on their own taste in their own society, and did not try to emulate the fashionable art world of the time.  Moreover, in the main museum space was a large show by a living German artist, Gunther Christmann, unknown to me, who also seems to be world-class.  The show was on a par with what I would expect to see at LACMA.  I find it crucially important to realize that top-quality, revelatory exhibitions take place in many countries in the world, and that serious artists can achieve greatly while staying home.  I think that in the arts there is really no such thing as provincialism. There is simply art and music that has or has not received world exposure.

And how satisfying it is to write a bit about the Museum of Old and New Art, brought into being a decade or so ago on the outskirts of Hobart.  MONA is both, for me, one of the two great pieces of contemporary architecture in Australia, and an extraordinarily challenging, rewarding collection of the art of today.  It is the largest privately funded museum in the nation.  As to the architecture …. You pass through a large park with a functioning vineyard, pretty gardens, walkways, and an attractive set of low buildings -- sheds, a bar, café, and restaurant, platforms to view the Derwent River.  (Many visitors, in fact, approach the site by river boat.)  To reach the museum per se, you enter a conventional low pavilion made of concrete and Corten steel.  Then you then descend an Escher-like Corten spiral staircase or take the elevator 60 feet or so down, issuing into an underground space of some 60,000 square feet.  The museum is, in fact, almost entirely underground, carved out of Triassic sandstone whose unaltered surfaces form the main interior walls.  The colors of these walls range from tan to butterscotch orange to ochre, and the patterning of the rock is simply the geological original.  It is like finding yourself in a great museum within the Temple of Dendur or deep inside an Egyptian pyramid.  Your progress through this wonderful space involves three main levels,  but they are not actually level; they flow into each other via ramps and short staircases, and from these you are able to look up, down, ahead and catch glimpses of what lies in store.  The walking surfaces are made of old weathered oak from an abandoned sheep farm.  All the mechanical systems are somehow contained within this cast negative space, instead of being situated awkwardly on the surface.  For this reason the uppermost ceiling is of a coffered crude concrete a bit like Nervi’s Port Authority building in New York, possibly referring back to the ceiling of the Pantheon. Somehow it feels not heavy, just solid.

As to the art …. It includes some painting, some more or less conventional sculptural pieces, but mostly installation art whose size ranges from the minute to the enormous, and whose materials include wood, stone, metal, wire, video, sand, shaped plaster, and more.  Perhaps it is the incredible setting, but I found that the pieces were nearly all extraordinary: pieces that I spent time really looking at, wondering at the technique, speculating about the artists’ program.  Each new area, each bend in the walkway, exposed something new, conceptually striking, and visually challenging.   It was a rare experience for me.  I am somewhat familiar with this kind of art from contemporary museums in America and Europe, and from Kunsthallen such as Site Santa Fe or Mass MOCA, and I have to admit that normally it bores me, after a time.  Much of this sort of art seems to me pretentious, contentious, didactic, arbitrary, as if the artists are saying, It’s not the realization that matters, it’s the conception.

Perhaps I was unduly impressed that day, but it simply seemed to me that almost all the pieces at MONA, created by artists from Australia and many other societies, were simply more successful as art than what most of what I have experienced.  I wished that I could have had conversations while in the museum with curators from other such art spaces around the world.  I had a hunch they would be mightily impressed, perhaps threatened.  Part of the success of these pieces, in this setting, is that there are no labels whatever; there is on offer no tedious verbiage about the artists’ credos, political-social ideologies, or personal psychologies.  You are, on entry, provided with an iPod that is keyed to your present location as you move through the museum.  After seeing -- really seeing -- a piece, you can tap the screen and find the name and nationality and dates of the artist, its name if any, and a statement of the artistic materials involved.  Then, if you wish, you can “drill down” and learn more about the artist’s career, what collections he is represented in, and what extra-artistic values or intentions she may have.  This should be normal in museums of contemporary art.  It boils down to another important lesson: especially with new art, look first, read later.

There are few pieces of old art in the museum, but they are stunning: some ancient Egyptian statuettes, a severe Cycladic carving, a decorated Benin war-shield, a few others, all beautiful. They demonstrate that great art of whatever period or provenance speaks to other great art, and to viewers any- and everywhere.

MONA is the creation of a great eccentric: David Walsh, an Australian from a lower-class Irish background who became extremely rich by somehow beating the odds at gambling.   Of course this is statistically impossible, but he did it long enough to be barred from casinos throughout the world, not as a crook but as someone they could not afford to deal with.  So he opened his own casinos, and now continues to make pots of money from the house share of money wagered by others less gifted than he.  He is said to have some version of Asperger’s syndrome, and to be difficult to deal with.  He determined not even to try for social status directly, but to create what he himself wanted: a great collection of the newest art, and a magnificent home for it, whose architectural firm was Fender and Katisildis.   

The museum building alone cost $75 million, not including the price of the land, the landscaping, and the outbuildings.  Much of the selection of art has been his, but he has also had the genius to hire good curators and tell them, Follow your instincts, not fashion.   In the end, I would encourage anyone who cares about art and architecture and who may be wondering whether the long trip to Australia is worth it, to do it -- for many good reasons, but also to visit MONA.  There is nothing like it.

For reasons of practicality as well as competence, I cannot write at length about Aboriginal art.   But there was nothing about Australia, in all its fascinating aspects that meant more to me than to see a wide range of this art, from a number of regions and periods.   It is, in my opinion, the most satisfying indigenous (primitive, vernacular, none of the terms quite fit) art of the world, beyond even African art or the art of New Guinea, both of which I admire greatly.  There is something about the earthy coloration and the unique spatial vitality of this art that brings one back to the primordial.  We all know recent dot painting, but there is so much more: vague skeletal figures, whorls and curves, blocks of solid color surrounded by a natural ground.  The sense one gets is not that of motion as imparted by the artist, a hallmark of Western art, but of motion and vitality captured by the artist by the simple devotion to seeing-in-time.  Aboriginal art seems to leap across time as much as space, or more so.  There are also, in addition, utilitarian and craft pieces that partake of this same mysterious reverence for natural forms.  As I mentioned in an earlier portion of this essay, the best way to appreciate this art is to see it from its earliest preserved examples, as in Adelaide’s South Australia Museum, to contemporary realizations by living artists.  It is all of a piece, it is one long recursive story from the Dream Time.

Today’s aboriginal artists live in an ancient and timeless universe.  There are hundreds of aboriginal groups whose members make art, by definition traditional but arising from local inspiration -- which is always, ultimately, the earth and its creatures.  In the Desert Art cooperative galleries in Alice Springs, the pieces are of moderate size, and moderately priced.  The art is minimally commodified.  Whites manage the galleries, document and display the art but take only a small cut; most of the proceeds go back to the group where the art was made.   In the museums, the works tend to be very large and, I think, of very great appraised value.   The governing variable is, I think, whether or not the artist (often a whole group or family of artists) makes art as a part of a normal ongoing activity in daily life or has been accorded, or has achieved, a role in which he or she is regarded as a specialist.  One may make art without being an Artist. I am not sure that the latter enjoys a higher social status than the former.  The brief biographies that are offered in museums and the better galleries seem to give equal weight to both roles.  Whatever the sins of White people vis-à-vis the aborigines, somehow the artistic impulse has been respected ever since the work was first seen and collected.

I am seldom truly stunned, immobilized by even the greatest art of the West.  I know too much about art history, I am too inveterately the informed critic.  The aboriginal art of Australia, much of it, roots me to the spot and takes me into another dimension.  The most interesting cognitive effect is that this aboriginal art completely undercuts our basic distinction between the representational and the abstract or the abstracted.  This is one reason it affects me more profoundly than most African or New Guinean art.  Some of what you see, minimal figures, a bird, a snake, brings an iconic response in which one supplies the name, mentally, for what one sees.  But there is little of this.  All aboriginal art is fundamentally representational, in that it tells a story, spins forward a legend, depends upon a naturalistic universal code, and in that sense is deeply iconic.  The art, which may seem to be just pattern and color and shape to us, represents the reality of humans in nature as experienced through time.  Some degree, some adumbration of this reality is accessible to any human being.  An aboriginal man or woman from another group may not know the particular story exactly, but with a few orienting clues, will understand.  So, more superficially, may we.      

 The social fabric

Australia is a well regulated society; it runs, it works.  Whether the prevailing cultural tone of tidiness and G’day, mate is prior to legislative or regulatory choices or the other way round, is not clear, but I suspect it is the former.  Perhaps things are different in the interior, but most Aussies are sociable, egalitarian, secular, enterprising but above all pragmatic.  There is a good system of public education at all levels, an adequate minimum wage, and a workable health system.  If you are convicted three times of drunk driving, no matter to what degree of impairment, you serve jail time.  No exceptions.  Religion is a private matter, not a public shouting match.  The society is plain-spoken: signs say Toilets not Rest Rooms.  Some years ago, when a crazy person killed 30-some people at the national convict history park and museum at Port Arthur, it caused a national trauma and led, quite directly and without ideological posturing, to a sensible set of laws that did not ban but limited, effectively, the use of guns.

There is a practical level of commitment to ecological preservation, perhaps not sufficient but helpful to the rest of the world as well as to Australia itself.   Humane capitalism, what some call neo-liberalism, is the accepted way forward towards growth and well-being.  How conscious or worked-out these attitudes are is unclear.  Our Aussie friends are appalled by the current Prime Minister, who is in denial on climate change and supports the most destructive extractive industries, and who is now proposing, for the first time, that the poor who use the health system pay significant up-front fees.  But he may not last long, politically.  To be sure, there is some evidence of capitalist greed and boorishness in Sydney and on the Gold Coast, but there is also lively resentment and reaction to it.  There appears a commitment to a decent social life, built on a degree of mutual respect and concern that is not a matter for debate.  We are struck by the lack, as yet, of the impulse to privatize everything for the sake of capturing profit.  To question that municipal parks should be funded adequately (with working bubblers and toilets) or that people should be able to park free along the beaches would seem bizarre to most Aussies.  Shouldn’t everyone have access to basic amenities?

Such sociocultural assumptions about how human beings should treat each other go deep, and change slowly, though of course it may be simply a matter of time until greed and rent-seeking take over. I believe it must have something to do with Australia’s historic encapsulation, its distance, geographical and cultural, from recent political movements in the US and Britain; also, I suppose, to the legacy of resentment against England for its brutal exploitative policies in the era of convict settlement and thereafter.  To be sure, Australia is no isle of the blest.  Many of today’s aborigines are degraded and hopeless, there is homelessness and poverty and some xenophobia in regard to recent immigrants, there is political posturing and corruption.  On the other hand, someone has formed a national chorus of the homeless, which tours the major cities.  It is not so condescending a project as it may sound.

Australia seems non-neurotic, not angry and violent as in our society – which I take to be a reaction formation, the result of feeling afraid or disappointed.  That summary assessment is of course affected by the despair I feel about America, which on nearly all plausible social indicators seems to be on a downward course.  I recognize that my own sense that the US is becoming a mean, sordid, selfish society, dominated by callousness and greed, makes me perhaps credulous about Aussies and the way they live.  But not entirely so.  In ten weeks of travel in Australia we heard voices raised in anger exactly once, and saw no instance of blatant human disregard toward another.  Can you imagine this being the experience of a European visiting American cities?  The afternoon that we arrived back in Los Angeles, while waiting at Union Station to board a train, we observed an angry confrontation, with the potential for deadly violence, between a poor Black man (a veteran, as he kept protesting) and heavily armed police.  And we noted that one of the great halls in the station, painstakingly renovated  in an effort to save part of the cultural past, is dark -- ostensibly because it is under-utilized and electricity costs too much to keep it lit, in reality because it provides shelter for vagrants.  These were abrupt reminders of the reality of public life in the US.

Ken and I remarked to each other, independently, that, had we known what we now know about Australia 25 years ago, we would have considered emigrating.  I am wary of my own critical attitude, knowing that it may be an instance of thinking that the grass is greener elsewhere; and recognizing also that I am quick to deplore the behaviors and attitudes of my fellow-citizens, while being personally ineffective in improving or challenging them.  But I must say that the general observation of American visitors to Australia, that it is like the America of 40 years ago, brings pain and an acute wistfulness.  Years ago, when I returned from travel abroad, I was invariably moved when the customs officer ended with, Welcome home.  Tears would come to my eyes.  When I came through customs at LAX after this trip, the officer said it again -- for the first time in years, actually.  Was I glad to be home from Australia?  Hard to say.