A Van Called Erasmus.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Having said our goodbyes to Honourable Rod and his wife Ann we started out for Monkey Mia, one of the most internationally famous out-of-the-way places in Australia. It’s famous as being a place where people can interact with wild dolphins while still standing on the land with wet ankles. A day’s driving brought us to nowhere identifiable and we stopped for the night in a car park atop a big mesa at the side of the road. From up there we saw the worst example of land degradation so far. From the foot of the mesa a fence ran away in front of us for as far as the eye could see. On one side of it was low unattractive dried up looking ground cover but on the other side there were nothing but animal tracks and sand. The area covered by the destruction was so immense that we couldn’t see the end of it and a kilometre away two cows slowly made their way across our field of vision. A West Australian registered four wheel drive and caravan pulled up behind us and the driver got out and came up to me.
“It’s a big country isn’t it?”
“Sure is. We were just looking at how much land’s been ruined down there by grazing”
“That’s right it has. And as soon as there’s some rain and half an inch of feed on it they’ll truck in thousands of cattle to eat it and mess it up some more”
“D’you think grass will grow on it again?”
“Maybe not much grass but there’ll be something cattle can eat even if it’s only wild flowers. Over here they talk about one sheep to ten acres sometimes, all farming means is an annual round up. They’ll get rid of them as soon as the feed’s gone and wait until it rains again”
“ Doesn’t seem very sustainable does it?”
“Sustainable? That’s the last thing on their minds. It’s time to give the whole bloody lot back to the Abbos if they’ll accept it in its present condition. I don’t think even they could restore it now though”
It was a short conversation but depressing. It was profound and nothing more needed to be said. We just stood there and gazed at it for a while.
Monkey Mia is on the Peron Peninsula which juts out into the World Heritage listed Shark Bay which is a huge chunk out of the Indian Ocean. Or is it a huge chunk out of the land? It’s a huge chunk of Indian Ocean that’s occupied the land... it’s bloody big anyway. As soon as we turned off the highway to head down the peninsula everything turned yellow. Thousands of hectares of yellow everlasting daisies lined the roadside and went off into the bush as far as we could see. If God couldn’t have finished his scrambled eggs one morning and had scraped off his breakfast plate over Western Australia this is what it would have looked like. Like, if he’d been having Weetbix that morning there would have been rock formations instead.
Monkey Mia was at the far end of the peninsula but at the landward end closest to the main road was Hamelin Pool and the stromatolites which sounds like a nineteen sixties rock group or one of those persecuted Russian religious sects that moved to America a century or two ago. It’s neither. Stromatolites are the earth’s earliest life forms and they’re shaped like a wart on a stalk that my dad had on his neck that Doctor Ford killed by tying a piece of cotton around to starve its blood supply much in the same way that some farmers castrate bulls.
They’re sort of bulbous mounds thicker on top that the stem they sit on. They’re made by cyanobacteria which are slimy little devils you wouldn’t want to move into your electric kettle because they secrete mucus that traps sediment. They go on doing this for thousands of years and in this way they actually build stone structures out of sediment and ooze. They only grow in highly saline water and they were unusual to look at. They looked a bit like a tribe of pygmy elephant men had been buried up to their necks on the seashore.
The ones in Hamelin pool were growing slower that George Bushes knowledge of Islam. They were only a couple of feet high and were 3,500 years old! Most of them had conveniently chosen to live under a wooden walkway from where they could be photographed. They weren’t pretty and didn’t make for pictures anybody would want to put on their walls but nobody fails to photograph them. After all, how many people do you know who have a stromatolite holiday snap?
They are actually the only ancient structures made from stone here in Australia and it’s a shame that they couldn’t have been built by us humans. They are the closest things we have to ancient stone statues and they’ve still retained their original shape which most statues don’t because they get broken. I was once in museum in Sofia Bulgaria where I was walking around looking at a collection of Roman statues all with missing noses. It was back in 1990 when Bulgaria was still under communism and westerners seldom ventured there except to go to the Black Sea resort at Varna. I heard someone behind me say in a cockney accent:
“Wot 'appened to 'is 'ooter? They're all like it, look at 'em. It's the bit that sticks out most init, their noses. That's why they're all broken look”
The sound of a couple of cockneys in a Sofia museum was the last thing I expected to hear and I turned around to get a look at them. A pretty young Bulgarian girl dressed in a uniform was showing around a bloated lobster of a man in his mid twenties dressed in shorts, socks and sandals and a black T Shirt with a white slogan on it. It said “I don’t have a drinking problem. I get pissed, I fall over, no problem.” Beside him in a stylish, figure hugging, blue summer dress stood his stunningly attractive wife, guide book in hand, next to a statue of Octavian "sans 'ooter". I approached the lobster and he invited me to walk around with them on their guided tour, for which they'd already paid the young Bulgarian guide. Before we could get started he turned to me and asked.
“Ere, wot's necrofilleeyer?”
“Yeh, said his wife. -Wot is it? - she won't tell us”
I asked how the subject had arisen and they told me that there had been a statue in the previous room which the young guide had said was "necro summfin" and that in trying to explain the story which went with it, she'd mentioned the word necrophilia but wouldn't explain what it meant. I wasn't sure how I should explain it either but began by saying “Necro? - from the Greek? - it means dead”
“Yeh?”
“Yes, necropolis? - a place for dead people, a cemetery”?
“Yeh?”
The pretty young Bulgarian was now blushing.
“Necromancy? - communication with the dead?...Necrosis - dead skin?”
“Oh yeh? so wot's necrofilleeyer then - dead somefin'?”
The pretty young Bulgarian guide was now standing twenty feet from us. I drew him to one side.
“It means fucking dead people” I said.
“Ow dyah you mean fucking dead?”
“You must have heard the expression - I'll just slip into something cool?”
“Do what?”
“Ok. I don't mean the people are fucking dead in that sense. Necrophilia means people having it off with people who are dead.”
“Jesus Christ. Hey Shirl' jew 'ear that? It means rumpy bumpy with corpses”
“Wot does?”
“Necrofilleeyer - it means bonkin' dead people”
“Oh, that's understandable then”
“Understandable? wot jew meen understandable? – shit!”
“No, I mean it’s understandable why she didn't want to tell us wot it meant..... ere, where's she gone?”
Den' and Shirl' were a great laugh and I enjoyed there company for the next couple of hours over lunch in their hotel where I asked them why they'd chosen Bulgaria for their holiday. It had been advertised at a discount in a Shepherds Bush travel agent's window. It was a tour centred in Sofia with day excursions to places of archaeological interest. They found as soon as they got on the plane that their fellow vacationers weren't as much fun as the crowd they'd been to Spain with the year before and so were walking around Sofia on their own. The travel agent had, upon Den's enquiry, assured him that Bulgaria was sunny and Den', assuming all sunny places to be Spain, or at least similar, had booked on the spot. Neither of them knew where Bulgaria was and they were disappointed because there was no swimming pool in their hotel. “Not much of a place really is it?” Shirl said. “No” said Dennis. It ‘asn’t really ‘appened ‘ere yet ‘as it?”
With our stromatolite pics safely inside the laptop we drove off towards Monkey Mia. Further down the Peron Peninsula was a cattle grid flanked at either side by a wire mesh fence and as we went past it a fierce dog barked loudly. I looked in the mirror but couldn’t see the animal and we both wondered what a big dog was doing so far from civilisation. Soon after this we turned right into Shelly Beach where Clare read an information sheet which said that the dog’s bark we’d heard was a recording designed to scare off cats and foxes. The electrified fence was across the narrowest part of the Peron Peninsula and was there to keep feral animals out. I suppose the recorded dog’s bark must have worked but the likelihood of a cat all the away out there ever having heard a dog in its life would have been rather remote. Perhaps cat’s born and raised in a place where there are no dogs are still wary of them even though they’ve never heard or seen one. Perhaps cats are all pre programmed with auto avoidance mechanisms like I was with Chiko Rolls and Vegemite.
So many of Australia’s native animals are becoming extinct so quickly that the Department of Conservation and Land Management in Western Australia had to find an urgent solution to the problem. Fencing off this peninsula is what they came up with. When the fence was complete they killed off as many introduced animals as they could find and then populated the land behind it with endangered native species. These endangered native animals will probably never be reintroduced to Australia again unless a way is found to wipe out the cats that predate upon them. Project Eden, as it’s called, will always have to be a work in progress. Every year they still lay 50,000 baits for foxes and cats. Then they have to trap the goats that won’t take the baits.
The introduced cat has turned out to be Australia’s supreme predator and can live in places so hostile that even native animals can’t exist. They can catch and eat just about anything including rabbits, insects, birds and lizards. No indigenous animals can survive like that and the only way to keep the moggies from killing native wildlife is to fence it off. I talked to a ranger in the area and asked him if anybody was working on a specific disease to kill cats. He told me that the rabbits would all have to go first because the cats were the only really effective thing keeping the rabbits down. If my memory serves me correctly I believe he told me that they had killed 12,000 cats so far.
Abutting the fence on the good guys side was Shelly Beach which is entirely composed of brilliant white cardiid cockles sea shells each the size of a ladies thumb nail and all identical to the naked eye unless you are another cardiid cockle. The brilliant white of the shells hurt our eyes and made it difficult to take photographs but what was astounding about them was that they were ten metres deep in places. The weight of them over the millions of years they’ve been there has compressed them to such an extent that at the bottom they’ve become virtual sedimentary rock. In the little town of Denham we saw a building, now in use as a restaurant, made from large blocks of the stuff. The shells were clearly visible and could easily be picked out with the restaurant cutlery or one of those things that has a spike on it for getting boy scouts out of horses hooves.
Denham shire or town council (I can’t remember its name) provided a service to campers like us that in our experience was unique. They actually set aside three or four campsites that are on the beach and FREE! It’s not easy to get into them though as you have to telephone the council or call at their offices to book a place. Even then there’s only room for four campervans at each spot and you are only allowed one night at one site and have to apply again. This was the only council we encountered in the whole of our travels that offered us anything like this. All the rest were willing for us to spend our money within their jurisdictions but offered us nothing in the way of free overnight parking and threatened us with fines if we were caught doing so.
North east of Denham by twenty minutes we pulled up in the Monkey Mia car park after being told by the ticket vendor that we’d missed the dolphin feeding time. We had an early lunch at the restaurant and strolled down to the beach to see where we should return to for the next day’s feeding. We were in luck. Three bottlenose dolphins had been hung over from a long night on the sardines and had turned up four hours late for breakfast. Sometimes so many people turn up for the dolphin feeding that all you may get is a glimpse of a dolphin between shoulders but we had them nearly all to ourselves.
The image of Monkey Mia that was in my head was out of date. The days where you clambered out of your tent in the morning, grabbed a fish finger and headed for the beach are gone, if indeed they ever existed. These days it’s a well supervised affair that’s designed to protect both the dolphins and their human visitors. Dolphins, we were told, can become too familiar with humans when they’re fed and have their bellies scratched on a regular basis and they begin to take liberties. People have been injured by tail slaps and butting and dolphins have been injured by nasty people striking them with a variety of different objects. Some people we met complained that Monkey Mia is too commercial but we didn’t find it so and given that so many bus loads people want to see so few dolphins up close I couldn’t think of a better way of managing things. Only a limited amount of free fish is given to each dolphin so they won’t come to depend on it and loose their natural fish hunting skills. The place itself is a good place to be. It has a resort and a restaurant and, from a booth, rangers constantly monitor the beach in case anyone assaults any stray dolphin that happens to rock up unannounced after hours. I read on an information sheet that one much loved dolphin regular was killed by a stingray barb to the heart. The unkindest cut of all. I bet the stingray was Japanese. “Sionara Fripper take that.”
Out from Monkey Mia the waters of Shark Bay are home to the world’s largest sea grass meadows which, in turn, are home to 6,000 turtles and 10,000 dugongs. Dugongs are related to elephants - although it’s hard for the lay observer to pick this - but they do live for seventy years which, I suppose is a bit elephant like. These are the things that, a couple of centuries ago, are said to have been spotted by horny, short sighted seamen and thus to have given rise to the legend of mermaids. They certainly didn’t give me any rises of any kind. Just didn’t do it for me. They’re overweight, have bristly moustaches and no boobs. I think any sailor who gets turned on by one of these things, pissed or not, is a danger to old ladies and little girls alike and should be locked up. There’s probably a joke in there about seamen and semen…. maybe about discharged semen and naval bases…………I’ll work on it.
Within sight of the Peron Peninsula, in the year 1616, more than a century and a half before Captain James Cook “discovered” Australia, a Dutch sailing type called Dirk Hartog – who no doubt always had an eye out for the main chance with a mermaid - nailed a pewter plate to a wooden post on what’s now called Dirk Hartog Island. The Aborigines, who didn’t seem to have found it or did and couldn’t care less about it, left it alone. Then, in 1696, another Dutch sailing type called William de Vlamingh landed on the island and, following the footprints left by Dirk Hartog’s size nine clogs, tracked him up the beach and stole the plate. In its place he put another pewter plate and took the old one back to be cleaned. It now hangs in a museum in Holland and in the town of Denham on the Peron Peninsula there’s a replica of Dirk Baby’s original plate hanging in the council offices.
What is it with these Dutch sailing people carrying plates around in boats? In how many places around the world did they indulge in this peculiar plate nailing habit of theirs? Did they have a regular changeover policy every eighty years and who kept a record of where they all were? I wonder what the local Aborigines thought of it. “Oooh look, there’s another one of those Dutch pewter plates.” I think a boat load of Aborigines should sail up the canal in Amsterdam and demand Dirks plate back. After eighty years with no other Dutch sailors turning up to eat their dinner off the bloody thing I reckon it should have become their property. It was a different matter in Mauritius where a group of Dutch sailors in 1681 ate the Dodo birds into extinction. They would have used their plates there.
One night on the Peron Peninsula we stayed at a beach called Whalebone Bay and a New Zealand couple arrived in a campervan with “Just Married” writ large in yellow poster paint on the back window. After their dinner he came out and threw the washing up water away and then went around to the front of their van and untied a kangaroo tail from the bull bar. In the morning the empty kangaroo tail skin was hanging on the bull bar without the inside. I didn’t know what to think. We stocked up with food and bottled water in Denham before leaving the area and I was walking out of the supermarket when a girl came flying out of a telephone box like she’d just been king hit by Wilson Tuckey. Two grey haired nomads went to her assistance and lifted her back on her feet again. I saw one of the guys a few minutes later at the service station and asked what had happened. He said she’d been leaning back, supporting her weight with the telephone cable as she talked and it had suddenly given way. “Serves her bloody right” he said “if I’d have had my way I would have strung her up with it.”
Our next stop after an uncannily non boring drive was Kalbarri, another small coastal town. On the way we were treated to another amazing display of Western Australia’s wildflowers. I found it astonishing that such a harsh and uninteresting environment should support such an array of different colours. We stopped occasionally to photograph them and would have liked to have stopped many more times than we did but for the road. While its surface was good it was a no frills job; only a lane each way with soft shoulders and few places to pull in without the chance of causing an accident. What we found when we did stop though, was that quite a few flowers were identical in shape and colour although they were on plants with totally different leaves. We picked a bloom each from two different plants and couldn’t tell the difference between them. This situation, I deduced, must have been brought about by a shortage in the types of insects. The plants had evolved with similar flowers to attract the insects which, being unadventurous, only fancied familiar colours and shapes. Of course it’s only a theory but you try thinking of something better. Perhaps it was the plants that were unadventurous and non creative and they just copied the flowers the plant next door had. Or perhaps the dinosaurs ate all the good tasting plants and then there was nothing…… sod it…..I dunno.
Kalbarri is a lucky place. It’s on the Murchison River and on the Indian Ocean and it’s backed by a national park which in season is covered in wildflowers. There are no tyre, brake and exhaust specialists or wreckers yards, MacDonald’s, carpet sales shops or any other of that Great Australian Ugliness that greets the visitor at the entry into so many other towns. Kalbarri’s services are all tucked away out of sight. It’s a fabulous place with lots of natural things to do and places to go. We were lucky enough to get a park in a friend’s back yard where we had power and the use of the house toilets. We stayed there for a whole month without becoming bored.
At eight forty five every morning there’s a free pelican feeding show on the foreshore better than many paid attractions in other towns. An entertaining woman with “Joyce Pelican Lady” written on a bucket turns up a quarter of an hour after the pelicans and throws sardines in the air. Great fun. The show lasted for about twenty minutes but if the council had her trained as a sardine juggler they’d possibly have got half an hour out of it.
Where the wide river runs parallel to the sea before breaking out there’s a long spit with fine clean beaches and rock pools and the guy who runs the boat hire business will take anybody across there for five bucks. There’s a bell on the other side and all you have to do is ring it when you’ve had enough and he’ll come and collect you. It made me feel like I was quarantined in a leper colony ringing to tell people that another one of us had died. I “shouted unclean, unclean” as I rang it and on the way back we passed two men with a four wheeled motorbike pushing it across on two sailboards.
We went for a lunch cruise up the river one day in a flat bottomed boat. There were two boats offering the same service and we bought the tickets at the visitors centre. The girl behind the counter told us we’d made a good choice because “they have rather a nice lunch on board I’m told.”
As soon as we sat down on the boat the skipper told us that this was his maiden voyage and then hastily explained that he had operated the boat before but not with paying passengers on it. He kicked off his spiel with “please don’t stand on the seats. Tim [the owner] has just bought new cushions and they cost him a packet and the bank manager’s already chasing him”. Tim was standing on the shore waiting to push us off and I saw him wince. Our first problem was getting off the beach which took a long time as the novice skipper swung the tail of the boat this way and that and revved the guts out of the twin outboards as a worried looking Tim pushed. We’d boarded the boat at ten fifteen and at ten thirty the first course of the advertised three course lunch came around. It was a cup of powdery tasting packet soup.
Sitting opposite us was a couple in their mid thirties dressed “expensive bush walker” with expensive watches, expensive cameras and expensive German walking boots. I couldn’t tell what nationality they were but knew they were from somewhere else because they didn’t react to our skippers spiel. The husband took a sip of his soup and said in Polish “this is shit” to which his wife replied “all the food in this country’s shit I told you to expect that.” He said, “I know, but packet soup?” “They’re basically English here and you know what English food’s like” she replied. I didn’t let on that I spoke Polish in case there was a chance to embarrass them with it later on when they called me an idiot or something.
The skipper was nervous and we could all sense it but after the first ten minutes of weaving his way up river he told us. “Sorry about this folks but I’m shitouse on the old PR at the moment. I know about boats though. I’ve been stacking cray pots on a cray boat for the last five months and then I thought to meself I should venture into a new adventure type thing.” He wasn’t used to the microphone and looked from side to side while he talked so that his words were only projected our way as he went past it. He went on. “You got your tailer and your mulloway in your river here and they run out about your 3 kilos.” The Polish couple looked at each other totally mystified. As we passed Kalbarri’s small out of season fishing fleet he said “these are all wet line boats.” We all looked at each other totally mystified.
“Up here it’s shallow and that’s where your horses will cross later this afternoon at low tide.” Said the skipper.
“What did he say? Did he say we’re getting the horses?” Said the Polish guy.
“I think so.”
“I don’t want horses I can’t ride. They didn’t say anything about horses did they?”
“Maybe it’s just the way he speaks.”
“No, he said YOUR horses. That means us doesn’t it?”
“Yes, we can always stay on the boat or go for a walk. We don’t have to go on the horses.”
“Did we pay for horses?
“I’ll look at the brochure”
“It doesn’t say anything about horses?
“No, nothing”
Further up the river the skipper pointed to a big rock atop a hill and said “that’s Observation Rock. We’ll be stopping there on the way back and we’ll crank up the barbie. We got kangaroo and beef snags today folks.” The Polish couple looked at each other.
As we approached Observation Rock on the way back the skipper said. “Now Observation Rock youse can walk up if youse want. It’s a bit of a climb. If any of youse have dodgy tickers youse wouldn’t wanna do it. Well, youse would be advised not to do it, put it that way. So…..if youse wanna climb up there folks, take a bit of a perv at the old town an’ that youse do so at your own…….ah…..own…………ah…discrepancy.”
I looked at the Polish guy, he looked at me and we both burst out laughing. His wife leant across and whispered in English
“Tell me please, where do you think he’s from?”
“Right here I would think.”
“Have you ever been to other countries where they don’t speak English but you have the English speaking tour?”
“Yes”
“Have you ever had a guide speak how you couldn’t understand him like that?”
“No”
“No. We go all over the world but we never heard the English like this. And you see the way he’s dressed. A guide couldn’t dress like this fashion anywhere else. He’d have to have a look like Navy man with the white shirt.”
Until then I hadn’t taken any notice of the way the skipper was dressed but now I looked at him as if through the eyes of a foreign tourist. He was shabby. His hair was long and in need of washing. He wore ill fitting tracksuit bottoms that were dirty and stretched and made him look as though had no bum. His trainers were worn and filthy with fish scales on them and his top, dirty around the neck, had a small hole in it. Did these people deserve to succeed? They’re attitude didn’t seem much different to the “she’ll be bloody right mate” roadhouse operators.
I instantly recalled the skipper on the trip we’d been on when we went out to the Ningaloo Reef at Exmouth. He wasn’t much better, neither was his commentary much more professional. The guide we’d had on the Victoria River was dressed like a big boy scout too. I was tempted to think that Australia needed to lift its game in this regard if it wanted more international tourists but perhaps foreigners like to get home and tell their friends that they’ve been to Australia and roughed it. There was certainly no bullshit about any of it as there would have been in the USA.
When the barbie was “cranked up” we found the main course to be a sausage in a roll. That was it – no butter, onion or anything else but tomato sauce. The Polish couple didn’t even bother collecting theirs and we wished we’d followed suit. The third course was a narrow wedge of “home made” supermarket frozen apple pie with a squirt of aerosol cream on it. It was followed by warm, but not hot, tea bag tea or instant coffee.
The lady who’s fault the lunch was told us that that the local sheep station, through which the river Murchison flowed, occupied an area of 500,000 hectares and that 36,000 feral goats had been trapped on it over the past five years. She told us that the station owner exports them to somewhere in the Middle East and gets $31 each for them. Goat flesh is the only meat that crosses all cultural and religious boundaries. People who can’t eat pork or sacred cows are all allowed goat meat.
What strikes many overseas visitors to Australia is how martial we appear to be as evidenced by so many memorials to those who fell in so many wars. After our trip on the mighty Murchison we came across the Polish couple we’d met on the boat. They were standing in front of the hideously ugly Kalbarri War Memorial where the Unknown Soldier is honoured by a white cement planter pot with a two foot high stunted cypress tree in it.
They told us that they were fed up with hearing about wars at home. They had a history of wars stretching back centuries. They’d had wars of aggression, wars of liberation, wars in which they had been attacked without provocation; they’d fought just about everyone on the block since the Middle Ages when the Teutonic knights decided they needed Christianising and had invaded Poland for the first time.
The Poles had fought the Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Lithuanians and, at Vienna, even the Turks. All this was aside from being the first country to be invaded by the Germans in WWII. The couple on the boat said that in Australia they had seen more statues to fallen soldiers than in their own country. They had visited a memorial in Canberra where almost every war we’d participated in was commemorated. The husband was shocked to learn that in our two hundred year white history, we’d been involved in more wars than they had. Even then he didn’t know about any of the many small encounters we’d been in such as fighting Maoris in New Zealand or fighting alongside the Japanese in Singapore to help put down an Indian Sepoy troop rebellion on behalf of Britain.
Of course the subject came around to the number of Anzac memorials which proliferate in almost all Australian towns that have a population numbering a hundred or more. I didn’t bother to get into it but, like the founding myths of most nations, it’s well over eighty percent bullshit. What I find the most fascinating about the Anzac legend though is that we totally and completely ignore the part the Japanese played in it which was considerable. The Japanese escorted our Anzacs to Gallipoli and were responsible for Australia’s coastal defence during WWI, Of course, we don’t like to hear it; in fact we refuse to hear it, but anybody can take a trip to the library and look at the Official War Records of the period and have the facts stare them embarrassingly in the face. Even my history tutor at The University of Tasmania in 2002 hadn’t heard about it until I showed him the war records written by the Australian war historian.
I first became alerted to the Japanese participation in 1990 when I was the proprietor of a restaurant in Eceabat in Turkey which is the closest town to the Gallipoli battlefields. It was the 75th anniversary of Anzac Day and we found ourselves being approached by TV crews from France, India, Australia and Britain to ask if they could hire the restaurant during the day to conduct their interviews in. It came as a surprise to me to learn that almost twice as many Frenchmen had died there as Australians but nobody in France had ever heard of this little nation building skirmish.
A Japanese American lady journalist called on us one evening and asked if she could hire the restaurant for an afternoon and we booked her in. She duly arrived with a TV crew and five old Japanese men in naval uniforms which I though a bit odd. They filmed for a while and then stoped for a break during which I asked her why they were here in Turkey filming these old guys.
“Because they took part in this war on behalf of the Australians.”
“Did they? I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, they did.”
“I wonder why that was?”
“Probably it was at the request of Britain but the request could have come from Australia. I’m not quite sure but we have the historian travelling with us if you really want to know.”
“Did we invite you to take part in these celebrations?”
No, we are an embarrassment to Australia. That’s what my program will be about.”
Using the journalist as translator I managed a five minute conversation with the historian. He told me that these men had served on the Japanese warship HIJMS Ibuki that had escorted the Anzacs from New Zealand and Australia to Gallipoli and that they had been present when the small Australian ship HMAS Sydney on her maiden voyage had sunk the German cruiser the Emden. I wasn’t inclined to believe it but he was very convincing and I made up my mind to find out more about it one day,
When the TV crew left with their old men a party of Australians in their fifties and sixties were impatiently waiting outside to get in. When I unlocked the door they behaved abominably, sneering and snarling. The old Japanese men kept their dignity and walked past them without looking right or left.
One Australian yelled out “What are them cunts doin’ here?” Another said “we fuckin’ had you cunts in New Guinea.” Yet another chimed in with “They got no fuckin right bein’ ‘ere. This is for remembering our lads not the bastards who killed ‘em.” As they walked in and sat down there was much discussion about the fact that we could’ve beat the Turks just like we beat the Japs if they’d given us enough time to do it. I had the feeling that if I’d told them the story I’d just heard from the Japanese historian I would have been lynched. They certainly wouldn’t have bought another beer from me.
It wasn’t until eleven years later that I had a chance to sight the Australian War Records and confirm the veracity of the Japanese historian’s claim. Upon returning to Australia I was to read Humphrey McQueen’s book Japan to the Rescue in which he told of the circumstances leading up to the event which can’t seem to speak is name. In 1902 Britain had signed the Anglo Japanese Alliance in which Britain granted Japan “most favoured nation” status. From Britain’s point of view it was aimed primarily at the Russians who the Japanese were managing to keep out of Manchuria. In 1905 The Japanese fought two great naval battles with Russia in which they soundly defeated them by making use of better and more modern ships, better trained seamen and the use of radio as opposed to semaphore flags.
Come the outbreak of WWI Britain told Australia that it needed to withdraw its warships to fight Germany in the northern hemisphere. However, they said, don’t worry that you only have the one ship and can’t look after your coast line. Our best friends, the Japanese, have kindly agreed to look after your coastal defence for you. What’s more, they’re so anxious to please that they won’t charge you a penny for it
The Imperial Japanese Navy were given an anchorage in Jurien Bay in Western Australia and from there they escorted Anzacs to Gallipoli. They did a lot more for Australia too – they cleaned up the German military presence throughout our area because we couldn’t. Australia now had itself a small credibility problem. Our government had been telling us for years that the Japanese were not to be trusted, and indeed, had an immigration policy, parts of which were specifically aimed at keeping them out of Australia. So quiet did the government keep the news of our coastal defence being take care of by these “little yellow monkeys, as they were oft referred to, that when one of the Japanese ships on patrol came into Fremantle to refuel, a shore battery fired on it. The Governor General had to leg it over to Fremantle hot foot to apologise.
I related the story about the Japanese having responsibility for our coastal defence during WWI and the Ibuki escorting our Anzacs to Gallipoli to my Australian history tutor at university. He hadn’t heard about it but wasn’t in the least bit surprised. He simply said “if it happened it will be there in the Official War Records in the university library.” It was – and anybody I told about it didn’t want to know. I took to photocopying the relevant page from the War Records and showing fellow students but they didn’t want to know either. On Anzac Day 2003 the ABC in Hobart had a program about whether the Anzac story was a myth, a legend, and did it matter or not anyway. People were invited to call in. I did and they wouldn’t give me air time because they didn’t believe me. I volunteered to pop over to their studios and give them a copy of the War Records but was told they didn’t require them.
All this made me read more about the Anzac story. I found that by far the majority of it was pure invention started by a journalist called C.W. Bean in order to sell his ANZAC magazine and earn money for him and his brother. The government liked what he wrote so much that he was made a war historian. Bean’s inventiveness knew no bounds and his lies have spawned a sect of jingoistic ignorami that follow each other from generation to generation without recourse to the facts.
It’s interesting to look at this from the viewpoint of the Turks. When I lived there I found the whole Anzac thing to be a great laugh among the Gallipoli Peninsula locals who are the only Turks that have ever heard of it. They told me repeatedly that the Australians turned up on their shores without even declaring war on their country and then acted like cowardly girls who ran away when the going got tough. Turkey, it must be remembered had an empire which, in its day, was the biggest the world had ever seen. They hung onto their empire for five hundred years as opposed to the British who held theirs for a mere two hundred. The Turks told me they’d seen “real wars.” They’ve had twenty with Russia alone! Guys I knew in Turkey used to take Australians on unofficial tours of the battlefields for thirty dollars and after telling them how bravely the Australians soldiers fought they’d bring them back to the restaurant. By this time the Australians had fallen in love with their guide and bought him a meal. Then they’d go drinking at night at the expense of the Australian tourists. When they’d gone they’d all kill themselves laughing and tell each other tales about what outrageous things they’d said. They had a trade in rusty bullets too which were supposed to have been found at the battlefields and were sold to unsuspecting Aussies. I have a friend there who makes really good ones with genuine rust on them.
We said our goodbyes to the Polish couple there at the Kalbarri War Memorial. They were off to Kakadu. I knew they’d love it. The wars that went on up there would be familiar to the citizens of an occupied country such as Poland was for four hundred years. The sky was undercast on the day we left Kalbarri. Every day was the same - perfect winter weather. We were heading for Geraldton where we hoped to be able to find a decent supermarket. We’d been in Kalbarri for three weeks and had loved it but we’d gone right through the menus of edible comestibles at their two tiny supermarkets. It was time to go.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Having said our goodbyes to Honourable Rod and his wife Ann we started out for Monkey Mia, one of the most internationally famous out-of-the-way places in Australia. It’s famous as being a place where people can interact with wild dolphins while still standing on the land with wet ankles. A day’s driving brought us to nowhere identifiable and we stopped for the night in a car park atop a big mesa at the side of the road. From up there we saw the worst example of land degradation so far. From the foot of the mesa a fence ran away in front of us for as far as the eye could see. On one side of it was low unattractive dried up looking ground cover but on the other side there were nothing but animal tracks and sand. The area covered by the destruction was so immense that we couldn’t see the end of it and a kilometre away two cows slowly made their way across our field of vision. A West Australian registered four wheel drive and caravan pulled up behind us and the driver got out and came up to me.
“It’s a big country isn’t it?”
“Sure is. We were just looking at how much land’s been ruined down there by grazing”
“That’s right it has. And as soon as there’s some rain and half an inch of feed on it they’ll truck in thousands of cattle to eat it and mess it up some more”
“D’you think grass will grow on it again?”
“Maybe not much grass but there’ll be something cattle can eat even if it’s only wild flowers. Over here they talk about one sheep to ten acres sometimes, all farming means is an annual round up. They’ll get rid of them as soon as the feed’s gone and wait until it rains again”
“ Doesn’t seem very sustainable does it?”
“Sustainable? That’s the last thing on their minds. It’s time to give the whole bloody lot back to the Abbos if they’ll accept it in its present condition. I don’t think even they could restore it now though”
It was a short conversation but depressing. It was profound and nothing more needed to be said. We just stood there and gazed at it for a while.
Monkey Mia is on the Peron Peninsula which juts out into the World Heritage listed Shark Bay which is a huge chunk out of the Indian Ocean. Or is it a huge chunk out of the land? It’s a huge chunk of Indian Ocean that’s occupied the land... it’s bloody big anyway. As soon as we turned off the highway to head down the peninsula everything turned yellow. Thousands of hectares of yellow everlasting daisies lined the roadside and went off into the bush as far as we could see. If God couldn’t have finished his scrambled eggs one morning and had scraped off his breakfast plate over Western Australia this is what it would have looked like. Like, if he’d been having Weetbix that morning there would have been rock formations instead.
Monkey Mia was at the far end of the peninsula but at the landward end closest to the main road was Hamelin Pool and the stromatolites which sounds like a nineteen sixties rock group or one of those persecuted Russian religious sects that moved to America a century or two ago. It’s neither. Stromatolites are the earth’s earliest life forms and they’re shaped like a wart on a stalk that my dad had on his neck that Doctor Ford killed by tying a piece of cotton around to starve its blood supply much in the same way that some farmers castrate bulls.
They’re sort of bulbous mounds thicker on top that the stem they sit on. They’re made by cyanobacteria which are slimy little devils you wouldn’t want to move into your electric kettle because they secrete mucus that traps sediment. They go on doing this for thousands of years and in this way they actually build stone structures out of sediment and ooze. They only grow in highly saline water and they were unusual to look at. They looked a bit like a tribe of pygmy elephant men had been buried up to their necks on the seashore.
The ones in Hamelin pool were growing slower that George Bushes knowledge of Islam. They were only a couple of feet high and were 3,500 years old! Most of them had conveniently chosen to live under a wooden walkway from where they could be photographed. They weren’t pretty and didn’t make for pictures anybody would want to put on their walls but nobody fails to photograph them. After all, how many people do you know who have a stromatolite holiday snap?
They are actually the only ancient structures made from stone here in Australia and it’s a shame that they couldn’t have been built by us humans. They are the closest things we have to ancient stone statues and they’ve still retained their original shape which most statues don’t because they get broken. I was once in museum in Sofia Bulgaria where I was walking around looking at a collection of Roman statues all with missing noses. It was back in 1990 when Bulgaria was still under communism and westerners seldom ventured there except to go to the Black Sea resort at Varna. I heard someone behind me say in a cockney accent:
“Wot 'appened to 'is 'ooter? They're all like it, look at 'em. It's the bit that sticks out most init, their noses. That's why they're all broken look”
The sound of a couple of cockneys in a Sofia museum was the last thing I expected to hear and I turned around to get a look at them. A pretty young Bulgarian girl dressed in a uniform was showing around a bloated lobster of a man in his mid twenties dressed in shorts, socks and sandals and a black T Shirt with a white slogan on it. It said “I don’t have a drinking problem. I get pissed, I fall over, no problem.” Beside him in a stylish, figure hugging, blue summer dress stood his stunningly attractive wife, guide book in hand, next to a statue of Octavian "sans 'ooter". I approached the lobster and he invited me to walk around with them on their guided tour, for which they'd already paid the young Bulgarian guide. Before we could get started he turned to me and asked.
“Ere, wot's necrofilleeyer?”
“Yeh, said his wife. -Wot is it? - she won't tell us”
I asked how the subject had arisen and they told me that there had been a statue in the previous room which the young guide had said was "necro summfin" and that in trying to explain the story which went with it, she'd mentioned the word necrophilia but wouldn't explain what it meant. I wasn't sure how I should explain it either but began by saying “Necro? - from the Greek? - it means dead”
“Yeh?”
“Yes, necropolis? - a place for dead people, a cemetery”?
“Yeh?”
The pretty young Bulgarian was now blushing.
“Necromancy? - communication with the dead?...Necrosis - dead skin?”
“Oh yeh? so wot's necrofilleeyer then - dead somefin'?”
The pretty young Bulgarian guide was now standing twenty feet from us. I drew him to one side.
“It means fucking dead people” I said.
“Ow dyah you mean fucking dead?”
“You must have heard the expression - I'll just slip into something cool?”
“Do what?”
“Ok. I don't mean the people are fucking dead in that sense. Necrophilia means people having it off with people who are dead.”
“Jesus Christ. Hey Shirl' jew 'ear that? It means rumpy bumpy with corpses”
“Wot does?”
“Necrofilleeyer - it means bonkin' dead people”
“Oh, that's understandable then”
“Understandable? wot jew meen understandable? – shit!”
“No, I mean it’s understandable why she didn't want to tell us wot it meant..... ere, where's she gone?”
Den' and Shirl' were a great laugh and I enjoyed there company for the next couple of hours over lunch in their hotel where I asked them why they'd chosen Bulgaria for their holiday. It had been advertised at a discount in a Shepherds Bush travel agent's window. It was a tour centred in Sofia with day excursions to places of archaeological interest. They found as soon as they got on the plane that their fellow vacationers weren't as much fun as the crowd they'd been to Spain with the year before and so were walking around Sofia on their own. The travel agent had, upon Den's enquiry, assured him that Bulgaria was sunny and Den', assuming all sunny places to be Spain, or at least similar, had booked on the spot. Neither of them knew where Bulgaria was and they were disappointed because there was no swimming pool in their hotel. “Not much of a place really is it?” Shirl said. “No” said Dennis. It ‘asn’t really ‘appened ‘ere yet ‘as it?”
With our stromatolite pics safely inside the laptop we drove off towards Monkey Mia. Further down the Peron Peninsula was a cattle grid flanked at either side by a wire mesh fence and as we went past it a fierce dog barked loudly. I looked in the mirror but couldn’t see the animal and we both wondered what a big dog was doing so far from civilisation. Soon after this we turned right into Shelly Beach where Clare read an information sheet which said that the dog’s bark we’d heard was a recording designed to scare off cats and foxes. The electrified fence was across the narrowest part of the Peron Peninsula and was there to keep feral animals out. I suppose the recorded dog’s bark must have worked but the likelihood of a cat all the away out there ever having heard a dog in its life would have been rather remote. Perhaps cat’s born and raised in a place where there are no dogs are still wary of them even though they’ve never heard or seen one. Perhaps cats are all pre programmed with auto avoidance mechanisms like I was with Chiko Rolls and Vegemite.
So many of Australia’s native animals are becoming extinct so quickly that the Department of Conservation and Land Management in Western Australia had to find an urgent solution to the problem. Fencing off this peninsula is what they came up with. When the fence was complete they killed off as many introduced animals as they could find and then populated the land behind it with endangered native species. These endangered native animals will probably never be reintroduced to Australia again unless a way is found to wipe out the cats that predate upon them. Project Eden, as it’s called, will always have to be a work in progress. Every year they still lay 50,000 baits for foxes and cats. Then they have to trap the goats that won’t take the baits.
The introduced cat has turned out to be Australia’s supreme predator and can live in places so hostile that even native animals can’t exist. They can catch and eat just about anything including rabbits, insects, birds and lizards. No indigenous animals can survive like that and the only way to keep the moggies from killing native wildlife is to fence it off. I talked to a ranger in the area and asked him if anybody was working on a specific disease to kill cats. He told me that the rabbits would all have to go first because the cats were the only really effective thing keeping the rabbits down. If my memory serves me correctly I believe he told me that they had killed 12,000 cats so far.
Abutting the fence on the good guys side was Shelly Beach which is entirely composed of brilliant white cardiid cockles sea shells each the size of a ladies thumb nail and all identical to the naked eye unless you are another cardiid cockle. The brilliant white of the shells hurt our eyes and made it difficult to take photographs but what was astounding about them was that they were ten metres deep in places. The weight of them over the millions of years they’ve been there has compressed them to such an extent that at the bottom they’ve become virtual sedimentary rock. In the little town of Denham we saw a building, now in use as a restaurant, made from large blocks of the stuff. The shells were clearly visible and could easily be picked out with the restaurant cutlery or one of those things that has a spike on it for getting boy scouts out of horses hooves.
Denham shire or town council (I can’t remember its name) provided a service to campers like us that in our experience was unique. They actually set aside three or four campsites that are on the beach and FREE! It’s not easy to get into them though as you have to telephone the council or call at their offices to book a place. Even then there’s only room for four campervans at each spot and you are only allowed one night at one site and have to apply again. This was the only council we encountered in the whole of our travels that offered us anything like this. All the rest were willing for us to spend our money within their jurisdictions but offered us nothing in the way of free overnight parking and threatened us with fines if we were caught doing so.
North east of Denham by twenty minutes we pulled up in the Monkey Mia car park after being told by the ticket vendor that we’d missed the dolphin feeding time. We had an early lunch at the restaurant and strolled down to the beach to see where we should return to for the next day’s feeding. We were in luck. Three bottlenose dolphins had been hung over from a long night on the sardines and had turned up four hours late for breakfast. Sometimes so many people turn up for the dolphin feeding that all you may get is a glimpse of a dolphin between shoulders but we had them nearly all to ourselves.
The image of Monkey Mia that was in my head was out of date. The days where you clambered out of your tent in the morning, grabbed a fish finger and headed for the beach are gone, if indeed they ever existed. These days it’s a well supervised affair that’s designed to protect both the dolphins and their human visitors. Dolphins, we were told, can become too familiar with humans when they’re fed and have their bellies scratched on a regular basis and they begin to take liberties. People have been injured by tail slaps and butting and dolphins have been injured by nasty people striking them with a variety of different objects. Some people we met complained that Monkey Mia is too commercial but we didn’t find it so and given that so many bus loads people want to see so few dolphins up close I couldn’t think of a better way of managing things. Only a limited amount of free fish is given to each dolphin so they won’t come to depend on it and loose their natural fish hunting skills. The place itself is a good place to be. It has a resort and a restaurant and, from a booth, rangers constantly monitor the beach in case anyone assaults any stray dolphin that happens to rock up unannounced after hours. I read on an information sheet that one much loved dolphin regular was killed by a stingray barb to the heart. The unkindest cut of all. I bet the stingray was Japanese. “Sionara Fripper take that.”
Out from Monkey Mia the waters of Shark Bay are home to the world’s largest sea grass meadows which, in turn, are home to 6,000 turtles and 10,000 dugongs. Dugongs are related to elephants - although it’s hard for the lay observer to pick this - but they do live for seventy years which, I suppose is a bit elephant like. These are the things that, a couple of centuries ago, are said to have been spotted by horny, short sighted seamen and thus to have given rise to the legend of mermaids. They certainly didn’t give me any rises of any kind. Just didn’t do it for me. They’re overweight, have bristly moustaches and no boobs. I think any sailor who gets turned on by one of these things, pissed or not, is a danger to old ladies and little girls alike and should be locked up. There’s probably a joke in there about seamen and semen…. maybe about discharged semen and naval bases…………I’ll work on it.
Within sight of the Peron Peninsula, in the year 1616, more than a century and a half before Captain James Cook “discovered” Australia, a Dutch sailing type called Dirk Hartog – who no doubt always had an eye out for the main chance with a mermaid - nailed a pewter plate to a wooden post on what’s now called Dirk Hartog Island. The Aborigines, who didn’t seem to have found it or did and couldn’t care less about it, left it alone. Then, in 1696, another Dutch sailing type called William de Vlamingh landed on the island and, following the footprints left by Dirk Hartog’s size nine clogs, tracked him up the beach and stole the plate. In its place he put another pewter plate and took the old one back to be cleaned. It now hangs in a museum in Holland and in the town of Denham on the Peron Peninsula there’s a replica of Dirk Baby’s original plate hanging in the council offices.
What is it with these Dutch sailing people carrying plates around in boats? In how many places around the world did they indulge in this peculiar plate nailing habit of theirs? Did they have a regular changeover policy every eighty years and who kept a record of where they all were? I wonder what the local Aborigines thought of it. “Oooh look, there’s another one of those Dutch pewter plates.” I think a boat load of Aborigines should sail up the canal in Amsterdam and demand Dirks plate back. After eighty years with no other Dutch sailors turning up to eat their dinner off the bloody thing I reckon it should have become their property. It was a different matter in Mauritius where a group of Dutch sailors in 1681 ate the Dodo birds into extinction. They would have used their plates there.
One night on the Peron Peninsula we stayed at a beach called Whalebone Bay and a New Zealand couple arrived in a campervan with “Just Married” writ large in yellow poster paint on the back window. After their dinner he came out and threw the washing up water away and then went around to the front of their van and untied a kangaroo tail from the bull bar. In the morning the empty kangaroo tail skin was hanging on the bull bar without the inside. I didn’t know what to think. We stocked up with food and bottled water in Denham before leaving the area and I was walking out of the supermarket when a girl came flying out of a telephone box like she’d just been king hit by Wilson Tuckey. Two grey haired nomads went to her assistance and lifted her back on her feet again. I saw one of the guys a few minutes later at the service station and asked what had happened. He said she’d been leaning back, supporting her weight with the telephone cable as she talked and it had suddenly given way. “Serves her bloody right” he said “if I’d have had my way I would have strung her up with it.”
Our next stop after an uncannily non boring drive was Kalbarri, another small coastal town. On the way we were treated to another amazing display of Western Australia’s wildflowers. I found it astonishing that such a harsh and uninteresting environment should support such an array of different colours. We stopped occasionally to photograph them and would have liked to have stopped many more times than we did but for the road. While its surface was good it was a no frills job; only a lane each way with soft shoulders and few places to pull in without the chance of causing an accident. What we found when we did stop though, was that quite a few flowers were identical in shape and colour although they were on plants with totally different leaves. We picked a bloom each from two different plants and couldn’t tell the difference between them. This situation, I deduced, must have been brought about by a shortage in the types of insects. The plants had evolved with similar flowers to attract the insects which, being unadventurous, only fancied familiar colours and shapes. Of course it’s only a theory but you try thinking of something better. Perhaps it was the plants that were unadventurous and non creative and they just copied the flowers the plant next door had. Or perhaps the dinosaurs ate all the good tasting plants and then there was nothing…… sod it…..I dunno.
Kalbarri is a lucky place. It’s on the Murchison River and on the Indian Ocean and it’s backed by a national park which in season is covered in wildflowers. There are no tyre, brake and exhaust specialists or wreckers yards, MacDonald’s, carpet sales shops or any other of that Great Australian Ugliness that greets the visitor at the entry into so many other towns. Kalbarri’s services are all tucked away out of sight. It’s a fabulous place with lots of natural things to do and places to go. We were lucky enough to get a park in a friend’s back yard where we had power and the use of the house toilets. We stayed there for a whole month without becoming bored.
At eight forty five every morning there’s a free pelican feeding show on the foreshore better than many paid attractions in other towns. An entertaining woman with “Joyce Pelican Lady” written on a bucket turns up a quarter of an hour after the pelicans and throws sardines in the air. Great fun. The show lasted for about twenty minutes but if the council had her trained as a sardine juggler they’d possibly have got half an hour out of it.
Where the wide river runs parallel to the sea before breaking out there’s a long spit with fine clean beaches and rock pools and the guy who runs the boat hire business will take anybody across there for five bucks. There’s a bell on the other side and all you have to do is ring it when you’ve had enough and he’ll come and collect you. It made me feel like I was quarantined in a leper colony ringing to tell people that another one of us had died. I “shouted unclean, unclean” as I rang it and on the way back we passed two men with a four wheeled motorbike pushing it across on two sailboards.
We went for a lunch cruise up the river one day in a flat bottomed boat. There were two boats offering the same service and we bought the tickets at the visitors centre. The girl behind the counter told us we’d made a good choice because “they have rather a nice lunch on board I’m told.”
As soon as we sat down on the boat the skipper told us that this was his maiden voyage and then hastily explained that he had operated the boat before but not with paying passengers on it. He kicked off his spiel with “please don’t stand on the seats. Tim [the owner] has just bought new cushions and they cost him a packet and the bank manager’s already chasing him”. Tim was standing on the shore waiting to push us off and I saw him wince. Our first problem was getting off the beach which took a long time as the novice skipper swung the tail of the boat this way and that and revved the guts out of the twin outboards as a worried looking Tim pushed. We’d boarded the boat at ten fifteen and at ten thirty the first course of the advertised three course lunch came around. It was a cup of powdery tasting packet soup.
Sitting opposite us was a couple in their mid thirties dressed “expensive bush walker” with expensive watches, expensive cameras and expensive German walking boots. I couldn’t tell what nationality they were but knew they were from somewhere else because they didn’t react to our skippers spiel. The husband took a sip of his soup and said in Polish “this is shit” to which his wife replied “all the food in this country’s shit I told you to expect that.” He said, “I know, but packet soup?” “They’re basically English here and you know what English food’s like” she replied. I didn’t let on that I spoke Polish in case there was a chance to embarrass them with it later on when they called me an idiot or something.
The skipper was nervous and we could all sense it but after the first ten minutes of weaving his way up river he told us. “Sorry about this folks but I’m shitouse on the old PR at the moment. I know about boats though. I’ve been stacking cray pots on a cray boat for the last five months and then I thought to meself I should venture into a new adventure type thing.” He wasn’t used to the microphone and looked from side to side while he talked so that his words were only projected our way as he went past it. He went on. “You got your tailer and your mulloway in your river here and they run out about your 3 kilos.” The Polish couple looked at each other totally mystified. As we passed Kalbarri’s small out of season fishing fleet he said “these are all wet line boats.” We all looked at each other totally mystified.
“Up here it’s shallow and that’s where your horses will cross later this afternoon at low tide.” Said the skipper.
“What did he say? Did he say we’re getting the horses?” Said the Polish guy.
“I think so.”
“I don’t want horses I can’t ride. They didn’t say anything about horses did they?”
“Maybe it’s just the way he speaks.”
“No, he said YOUR horses. That means us doesn’t it?”
“Yes, we can always stay on the boat or go for a walk. We don’t have to go on the horses.”
“Did we pay for horses?
“I’ll look at the brochure”
“It doesn’t say anything about horses?
“No, nothing”
Further up the river the skipper pointed to a big rock atop a hill and said “that’s Observation Rock. We’ll be stopping there on the way back and we’ll crank up the barbie. We got kangaroo and beef snags today folks.” The Polish couple looked at each other.
As we approached Observation Rock on the way back the skipper said. “Now Observation Rock youse can walk up if youse want. It’s a bit of a climb. If any of youse have dodgy tickers youse wouldn’t wanna do it. Well, youse would be advised not to do it, put it that way. So…..if youse wanna climb up there folks, take a bit of a perv at the old town an’ that youse do so at your own…….ah…..own…………ah…discrepancy.”
I looked at the Polish guy, he looked at me and we both burst out laughing. His wife leant across and whispered in English
“Tell me please, where do you think he’s from?”
“Right here I would think.”
“Have you ever been to other countries where they don’t speak English but you have the English speaking tour?”
“Yes”
“Have you ever had a guide speak how you couldn’t understand him like that?”
“No”
“No. We go all over the world but we never heard the English like this. And you see the way he’s dressed. A guide couldn’t dress like this fashion anywhere else. He’d have to have a look like Navy man with the white shirt.”
Until then I hadn’t taken any notice of the way the skipper was dressed but now I looked at him as if through the eyes of a foreign tourist. He was shabby. His hair was long and in need of washing. He wore ill fitting tracksuit bottoms that were dirty and stretched and made him look as though had no bum. His trainers were worn and filthy with fish scales on them and his top, dirty around the neck, had a small hole in it. Did these people deserve to succeed? They’re attitude didn’t seem much different to the “she’ll be bloody right mate” roadhouse operators.
I instantly recalled the skipper on the trip we’d been on when we went out to the Ningaloo Reef at Exmouth. He wasn’t much better, neither was his commentary much more professional. The guide we’d had on the Victoria River was dressed like a big boy scout too. I was tempted to think that Australia needed to lift its game in this regard if it wanted more international tourists but perhaps foreigners like to get home and tell their friends that they’ve been to Australia and roughed it. There was certainly no bullshit about any of it as there would have been in the USA.
When the barbie was “cranked up” we found the main course to be a sausage in a roll. That was it – no butter, onion or anything else but tomato sauce. The Polish couple didn’t even bother collecting theirs and we wished we’d followed suit. The third course was a narrow wedge of “home made” supermarket frozen apple pie with a squirt of aerosol cream on it. It was followed by warm, but not hot, tea bag tea or instant coffee.
The lady who’s fault the lunch was told us that that the local sheep station, through which the river Murchison flowed, occupied an area of 500,000 hectares and that 36,000 feral goats had been trapped on it over the past five years. She told us that the station owner exports them to somewhere in the Middle East and gets $31 each for them. Goat flesh is the only meat that crosses all cultural and religious boundaries. People who can’t eat pork or sacred cows are all allowed goat meat.
What strikes many overseas visitors to Australia is how martial we appear to be as evidenced by so many memorials to those who fell in so many wars. After our trip on the mighty Murchison we came across the Polish couple we’d met on the boat. They were standing in front of the hideously ugly Kalbarri War Memorial where the Unknown Soldier is honoured by a white cement planter pot with a two foot high stunted cypress tree in it.
They told us that they were fed up with hearing about wars at home. They had a history of wars stretching back centuries. They’d had wars of aggression, wars of liberation, wars in which they had been attacked without provocation; they’d fought just about everyone on the block since the Middle Ages when the Teutonic knights decided they needed Christianising and had invaded Poland for the first time.
The Poles had fought the Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Lithuanians and, at Vienna, even the Turks. All this was aside from being the first country to be invaded by the Germans in WWII. The couple on the boat said that in Australia they had seen more statues to fallen soldiers than in their own country. They had visited a memorial in Canberra where almost every war we’d participated in was commemorated. The husband was shocked to learn that in our two hundred year white history, we’d been involved in more wars than they had. Even then he didn’t know about any of the many small encounters we’d been in such as fighting Maoris in New Zealand or fighting alongside the Japanese in Singapore to help put down an Indian Sepoy troop rebellion on behalf of Britain.
Of course the subject came around to the number of Anzac memorials which proliferate in almost all Australian towns that have a population numbering a hundred or more. I didn’t bother to get into it but, like the founding myths of most nations, it’s well over eighty percent bullshit. What I find the most fascinating about the Anzac legend though is that we totally and completely ignore the part the Japanese played in it which was considerable. The Japanese escorted our Anzacs to Gallipoli and were responsible for Australia’s coastal defence during WWI, Of course, we don’t like to hear it; in fact we refuse to hear it, but anybody can take a trip to the library and look at the Official War Records of the period and have the facts stare them embarrassingly in the face. Even my history tutor at The University of Tasmania in 2002 hadn’t heard about it until I showed him the war records written by the Australian war historian.
I first became alerted to the Japanese participation in 1990 when I was the proprietor of a restaurant in Eceabat in Turkey which is the closest town to the Gallipoli battlefields. It was the 75th anniversary of Anzac Day and we found ourselves being approached by TV crews from France, India, Australia and Britain to ask if they could hire the restaurant during the day to conduct their interviews in. It came as a surprise to me to learn that almost twice as many Frenchmen had died there as Australians but nobody in France had ever heard of this little nation building skirmish.
A Japanese American lady journalist called on us one evening and asked if she could hire the restaurant for an afternoon and we booked her in. She duly arrived with a TV crew and five old Japanese men in naval uniforms which I though a bit odd. They filmed for a while and then stoped for a break during which I asked her why they were here in Turkey filming these old guys.
“Because they took part in this war on behalf of the Australians.”
“Did they? I didn’t know that.”
“Yes, they did.”
“I wonder why that was?”
“Probably it was at the request of Britain but the request could have come from Australia. I’m not quite sure but we have the historian travelling with us if you really want to know.”
“Did we invite you to take part in these celebrations?”
No, we are an embarrassment to Australia. That’s what my program will be about.”
Using the journalist as translator I managed a five minute conversation with the historian. He told me that these men had served on the Japanese warship HIJMS Ibuki that had escorted the Anzacs from New Zealand and Australia to Gallipoli and that they had been present when the small Australian ship HMAS Sydney on her maiden voyage had sunk the German cruiser the Emden. I wasn’t inclined to believe it but he was very convincing and I made up my mind to find out more about it one day,
When the TV crew left with their old men a party of Australians in their fifties and sixties were impatiently waiting outside to get in. When I unlocked the door they behaved abominably, sneering and snarling. The old Japanese men kept their dignity and walked past them without looking right or left.
One Australian yelled out “What are them cunts doin’ here?” Another said “we fuckin’ had you cunts in New Guinea.” Yet another chimed in with “They got no fuckin right bein’ ‘ere. This is for remembering our lads not the bastards who killed ‘em.” As they walked in and sat down there was much discussion about the fact that we could’ve beat the Turks just like we beat the Japs if they’d given us enough time to do it. I had the feeling that if I’d told them the story I’d just heard from the Japanese historian I would have been lynched. They certainly wouldn’t have bought another beer from me.
It wasn’t until eleven years later that I had a chance to sight the Australian War Records and confirm the veracity of the Japanese historian’s claim. Upon returning to Australia I was to read Humphrey McQueen’s book Japan to the Rescue in which he told of the circumstances leading up to the event which can’t seem to speak is name. In 1902 Britain had signed the Anglo Japanese Alliance in which Britain granted Japan “most favoured nation” status. From Britain’s point of view it was aimed primarily at the Russians who the Japanese were managing to keep out of Manchuria. In 1905 The Japanese fought two great naval battles with Russia in which they soundly defeated them by making use of better and more modern ships, better trained seamen and the use of radio as opposed to semaphore flags.
Come the outbreak of WWI Britain told Australia that it needed to withdraw its warships to fight Germany in the northern hemisphere. However, they said, don’t worry that you only have the one ship and can’t look after your coast line. Our best friends, the Japanese, have kindly agreed to look after your coastal defence for you. What’s more, they’re so anxious to please that they won’t charge you a penny for it
The Imperial Japanese Navy were given an anchorage in Jurien Bay in Western Australia and from there they escorted Anzacs to Gallipoli. They did a lot more for Australia too – they cleaned up the German military presence throughout our area because we couldn’t. Australia now had itself a small credibility problem. Our government had been telling us for years that the Japanese were not to be trusted, and indeed, had an immigration policy, parts of which were specifically aimed at keeping them out of Australia. So quiet did the government keep the news of our coastal defence being take care of by these “little yellow monkeys, as they were oft referred to, that when one of the Japanese ships on patrol came into Fremantle to refuel, a shore battery fired on it. The Governor General had to leg it over to Fremantle hot foot to apologise.
I related the story about the Japanese having responsibility for our coastal defence during WWI and the Ibuki escorting our Anzacs to Gallipoli to my Australian history tutor at university. He hadn’t heard about it but wasn’t in the least bit surprised. He simply said “if it happened it will be there in the Official War Records in the university library.” It was – and anybody I told about it didn’t want to know. I took to photocopying the relevant page from the War Records and showing fellow students but they didn’t want to know either. On Anzac Day 2003 the ABC in Hobart had a program about whether the Anzac story was a myth, a legend, and did it matter or not anyway. People were invited to call in. I did and they wouldn’t give me air time because they didn’t believe me. I volunteered to pop over to their studios and give them a copy of the War Records but was told they didn’t require them.
All this made me read more about the Anzac story. I found that by far the majority of it was pure invention started by a journalist called C.W. Bean in order to sell his ANZAC magazine and earn money for him and his brother. The government liked what he wrote so much that he was made a war historian. Bean’s inventiveness knew no bounds and his lies have spawned a sect of jingoistic ignorami that follow each other from generation to generation without recourse to the facts.
It’s interesting to look at this from the viewpoint of the Turks. When I lived there I found the whole Anzac thing to be a great laugh among the Gallipoli Peninsula locals who are the only Turks that have ever heard of it. They told me repeatedly that the Australians turned up on their shores without even declaring war on their country and then acted like cowardly girls who ran away when the going got tough. Turkey, it must be remembered had an empire which, in its day, was the biggest the world had ever seen. They hung onto their empire for five hundred years as opposed to the British who held theirs for a mere two hundred. The Turks told me they’d seen “real wars.” They’ve had twenty with Russia alone! Guys I knew in Turkey used to take Australians on unofficial tours of the battlefields for thirty dollars and after telling them how bravely the Australians soldiers fought they’d bring them back to the restaurant. By this time the Australians had fallen in love with their guide and bought him a meal. Then they’d go drinking at night at the expense of the Australian tourists. When they’d gone they’d all kill themselves laughing and tell each other tales about what outrageous things they’d said. They had a trade in rusty bullets too which were supposed to have been found at the battlefields and were sold to unsuspecting Aussies. I have a friend there who makes really good ones with genuine rust on them.
We said our goodbyes to the Polish couple there at the Kalbarri War Memorial. They were off to Kakadu. I knew they’d love it. The wars that went on up there would be familiar to the citizens of an occupied country such as Poland was for four hundred years. The sky was undercast on the day we left Kalbarri. Every day was the same - perfect winter weather. We were heading for Geraldton where we hoped to be able to find a decent supermarket. We’d been in Kalbarri for three weeks and had loved it but we’d gone right through the menus of edible comestibles at their two tiny supermarkets. It was time to go.
