"Do you happen to know where I'd get a bit of labouring to do?" asked the burly Australian. I was standing in one of Adelaide's pleasant squares wondering which of the many parked cars was the one I had hired, and wishing I had noted its registration number.
"I'm sorry, I don't," I said.
"Wouldn't it make you bloody sick!" he ejaculated. "Our bloody Government bloody-well importing all these bloody 'refos' when Australians can't get work!"
Australia’s unemployment is as low as anywhere in the world, but I have frequently observed how unlucky some of the unemployed contrive to be. I once gave a lift to a man who was heading for Scotland to see if there was any pea-picking. This was in December, and he was in Evesham where he had missed the fruit season by a bare three months. No doubt, in June, he would be doggedly pursuing snow-shifting jobs in London. How many of us, I wonder, would be prepared to try as hard?
"Refos?" I queried.
"Refugees, mate," he explained. "New Australians they're called now. You'd think somebody'd give a returned serviceman a break. Look, mate - you can see I'm no 'bum', but I've used my last money on a telegram to my sister in Perth. Could you let me have a few shillings for a meal?"
I handed him two twenty cent pieces.
"Can you spare another one and I can have a drink too:" I doled out one more.
"Give me your address so I can let you have it back."
"That's all right", I said, adding the magic phrase which I have always found much appreciated by self-respecting mendicants: "You'd do as much for me!"
"Too bloody right, mate," he cried, grasping my hand. "Look, you're a 'pom' aren't you? Well, as soon as I'm in funds, I'll give this to some other pommie be- bloke, that is. How will that be?"
This incident was completely exceptional. Australians are an independent race who refuse tips, and do not cadge or beg. The same trait makes the "dinkum Aussie" untrainable to jobs involving personal service. An Australian asked to wait at table is as nervous and uneasy as a racehorse in the shafts of a cart. He will grimly slap a plate of steak and eggs in front of the diner, mutter: "There y'are mate," and stump off. Hotel service has now been taken over by New Australians, to the relief of all parties. Similarly, the Aussie barber who talked fishing as he sheared his cobber with a few deft strokes learned in the shearing-sheds, is almost defunct. In his place stands the Italian hair-stylist, who is prepared to turn out his teen-age clients looking like Beatles, if that is what they want, and will use the occasion to practise his English.
Adelaide, I had read, is the "Athens of the Southern Hemisphere", and the "City of Light" - a punning-reference to its founder, Colonel Light, though when I tried this "City of Light" tag on an inhabitant, it failed to register.
It is a gracefully attractive city, lying between the lovely Adelaide Hills and the sea, and has one of the best climates on earth - about 2,500 hours of sunshine yearly, low humidity, and most of its 25 inches annual rainfall in the mild, short winters. I found, however, that the people there like to believe that the winters are particularly vicious, and from two separate sources I heard of a Scots girl who said she had never felt so cold in Scotland as here. The third time I heard the story, it was a girl from Alaska, and had I stayed, no doubt I would have heard of an Eskimo dying of exposure there.
North of Adelaide is the desert from which on occasion hot winds sweep down like a blast from a furnace. This is a region of scrub and rock in which the eye looks for something green to rest it from the shimmering expanses of red, yellow and blue - but does not find it; and where lakes contain no more water than the seas of the moon. Yet across this waste, as fearsome as any in the world, the ubiquitous Holden Utility (or "Ute") ploughs its way, raising dust clouds from the tracks, which linger in the oven-hot air long after the vehicle is out of earshot. The driver and his companions may be heading a thousand miles across the interior, to or from Queensland. Motorists have died when their cars broke down, because they had not let it be known that they were travelling there or because they failed to stay with the car and wandered off into a trackless wilderness.
This, of course, no more deters the adventurous than the occasional fatality stops mountaineering or spear-fishing - perhaps it is the secret of their popularity.
In this region are Woomera (the rocket range) and the largest fields of opals in the world. As in many parts of Australia, place names are of Aboriginal derivation and are pleasantly euphonious, suggesting this sort of verse:
Lyric.
In Andamooka's opal fields
My love and I did lie.
We lay the whole night long beneath
An opalescent sky.
We left as lights of Woomera
Waned with the desert dawn;
Coober-Pedy, Oodnadatta
Beckoned us that morn.
Now on the Birdsville Track we speed, I and my love - my beaut!
My cobber, mate, my all-in-all –
My dusty Holden "Ute."