Life On Mars?

There are many places I want to go to in the world just because I find their names so intriguing. The Isle of Man, Newfoundland, Labrador, Western Sahara, Televideo [sic] to name a few. The vacuum in my knowledge, and indeed the less I hear about these places, only serves to tempt me further. Perhaps that’s why I chose to study in mid-Sweden for a year. Perhaps that’s why I went to Darwin.

It’s actually not that far from southeast-Asia to Darwin. However to take the single short flight from Singapore I wanted would have cost hundreds of pounds more than the 14 hour "u" loop I took from Bangkok to Singapore, Singapore to Sydney, and finally Sydney to Darwin. Despite somehow ending up with my own row of seats on each flight, and the efforts of Singapore Airlines to knock me out with red wine, I was too excited to let myself fall asleep. For the first time in my life I was crossing the equator to the southern hemisphere, to a new continent and, it occurred to me, my first native English speaking country away from home (whatever that meant). My cosy world of darkness, Cabernet Sauvignon, Ferrero Rocher and in-flight entertainment began to slip away as over the wing of my Boeing 777 dawn broke in the new world. For the next hour or so my face was pressed to the window as I scoured the view for the unique and unexpected. What struck me the most was the sparsity of my vista; no sea, no rivers, no lakes, no roads, no signs of civilisation or any variation in the landscape for that matter. For as far as I could see (which at 11,500 metres up on a cloudless day is a very long way), all I could see was red and yellow rocky desert. Why were we flying over Mars? But then I saw something too precise to be a work of nature; a straight line in the desert. Very slowly more lines began to appear on the land. It was as if an alien race had visited millions of years ago, drew up blueprints on the land, boundaries perhaps, then changed their minds. Was it too inhospitable for them? Too much trouble to terraform? Or did they just kill themselves off before the landing parties could make it? Before I could look for patterns in the lines, they disappeared from my view. All I saw for the next 2 hours was desert again. Australia, I realised, is very big and very, very empty. In a way I feel for sorry for the place. In a hundred years or so, when the rest of the world overflows and eats itself alive, everybody will want a piece of this desert if just to use for landfill. At the moment, before we are too desperate, the invasion is a courteous mining operation. I wonder how long this will continue before the land starts to be taken by force?

In the hours I spent at Sydney airport making my way from the international to the domestic terminal, I naturally began to form my first impressions of Australians. What hit me first, and what I immediately dismissed as comparison against Asia that I would have also made had I arrived in London or Berlin, was how much older and fatter everybody was. It wasn’t that I was now seeing more extremes of age and obesity, it was just that the distributions of age and size had suddenly shifted up a few figures. I had forgotten how normal it is in the western world to carry around a few excess kilos and live for close to 100 years. A few hours after making this observation, I discovered that it had probably been amplified by the fact that my flight from Sydney to Darwin was mainly taken up by a large over 60s touring group on their way to Kakadu National Park. Although I might be on the trip of a lifetime, seeing them reassured me that if I miss anything out, like them, I will have plenty of time to fill in the gaps.

My other first impressions did not turn out to be of Australians but of myself. All around me I was pleasantly surprised with how people interacted and behaved. I was surprised to see a woman reading a book, at the friendliness of the customs official, at the warmth and patience a mother was showing towards her children, or at the kind way in which a nurse was treating his two elderly Aboriginal patients. The reason I was so surprised had nothing to do with them. Until this time I had no idea how much prejudice I had towards Australians. My expectations of stupidity, heavy handedness, rudeness and racism were not being met. In a way I was disgusted and embarrassed that a lifetime of jokes and comments had formed such negative stereotypes in my mind. At least as I was now aware of this, and that I was now in Australia, I could form my own first-hand opinions of its people.

Flying back across Australia from Sydney to Darwin only served to echo my earlier thoughts on the size of the country. My initial plan to explore Darwin’s nearby Kakadu National Park, travel across the Northern Territory, then down the east coast in 18 days now felt like a lot more traveling. Yes I might be able to cover those distances in that time, but I would have been stretched to stop, think and take in the world along the way. Not wanting to admit defeat immediately, I checked out Darwin’s hostels and Internet cafés for advertisements for lifts to Cairns on Australia’s east coast. Everywhere I looked I was a week too late or a week to early. I could make the journey by bus, but I wanted the experience of a road-trip through the desert; hot dusty days and cold starry nights. After a day of responding to ads, leaving answer machine messages, and posting to travellers forums, I was anxious to get going and stop wasting time. As I walked past yet another Internet café, an ad in the window for Australia’s east coast caught my attention. I figure that if I can’t see much of Australia, I may as well see the bit of the country I most wanted to see.

And so less than 36 hours after I arrived, I said goodbye to Darwin and flew to Cairns.

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