Excerpt
from In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson
Flying into Australia, I realized with a sigh that I had forgotten again who
their prime minister is. I am forever doing this with the Australian prime minister
– committing the name to memory, forgetting it (generally more or less instantly),
then feeling terribly guilty. My thinking is that there ought to be one person
outside Australia who knows.
But then Australia is such a difficult country to keep track of. On my first
visit, some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history
of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling
fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach
in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor
man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly astounding to me – first that
Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that
news of this had never reached me.
The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins
Down Under – not entirely without reason, of course. Australia is after
all mostly empty and a long way away. Its population, just over 18 million,
is small by world standards – China grows by a larger amount each year –
and its place in the world economy is consequently peripheral; as an economic
entity, it ranks about level with Illinois. Its sports are of little interest
to us and the last television series it made that we watched with avidity was
Skippy. From time to time it sends us useful things – opals, merino
wool, Errol Flynn, the boomerang – but nothing we can't actually do without.
Above all, Australia doesn't misbehave. It is stable and peaceful and good.
It doesn't have coups, recklessly overfish, arm disagreeable despots, grow coca
in provocative quantities, or throw its weight around in a brash and unseemly
manner.
But even allowing for all this, our neglect of Australian affairs is curious.
Just before I set off on this trip I went to my local library in New Hampshire
and looked Australia up in the New York Times Index to see how much it
had engaged our attention in recent years. I began with the 1997 volume for
no other reason than that it was open on the table. In that year across the
full range of possible interests – politics, sports, travel, the coming
Olympics in Sydney, food and wine, the arts, obituaries, and so on – the
Times ran 20 articles that were predominantly on or about Australian
affairs. In the same period, for purposes of comparison, the Times ran
120 articles on Peru, 150 or so on Albania and a similar number on Cambodia,
more than 300 on each of the Koreas, and well over 500 on Israel. As a place
that caught our interest Australia ranked about level with Belarus and Burundi.
Among the general subjects that outstripped it were balloons and balloonists,
the Church of Scientology, dogs (though not dog sledding), Barneys, Inc., and
Pamela Harriman, the former ambassador and socialite who died in February 1997,
a misfortune that evidently required recording 22 times in the Times.
Put in the crudest terms, Australia was slightly more important to us in 1997
than bananas, but not nearly as important as ice cream.
As it turns out, 1997 was actually quite a good year for Australian news. In
1996 the country was the subject of just nine news reports and in 1998 a mere
six. Australians can't bear it that we pay so little attention to them, and
I don't blame them. This is a country where interesting things happen, and all
the time.
Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the Times in
1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Section C. In January of
that year, according to a report written in America by a Times reporter,
scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic
disturbance in the remote Australian outback almost four years earlier had been
a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.
It happens that at 11:03 p.m. local time on May 28, 1993, seismograph needles
all over the Pacific region twitched and scribbled in response to a very large-scale
disturbance near a place called Banjawarn Station in the Great Victoria Desert
of Western Australia. Some long-distance truckers and prospectors, virtually
the only people out in that lonely expanse, reported seeing a sudden flash in
the sky and hearing or feeling the boom of a mighty but far-off explosion. One
reported that a can of beer had danced off the table in his tent.
The problem was that there was no obvious explanation. The seismograph traces
didn't fit the profile for an earthquake or mining explosion, and anyway the
blast was 170 times more powerful than the most powerful mining explosion ever
recorded in Western Australia. The shock was consistent with a large meteorite
strike, but the impact would have blown a crater hundreds of feet in circumference,
and no such crater could be found. The upshot is that scientists puzzled over
the incident for a day or two, then filed it away as an unexplained curiosity
– the sort of thing that presumably happens from time to time.
Then in 1995 Aum Shinrikyo gained sudden notoriety when it released extravagant
quantities of the nerve gas sarin into the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve
people. In the investigations that followed, it emerged that Aum's substantial
holdings included a 500,000-acre desert property in Western Australia very near
the site of the mystery event. There, authorities found a laboratory of unusual
sophistication and focus, and evidence that cult members had been mining uranium.
It separately emerged that Aum had recruited into its ranks two nuclear engineers
from the former Soviet Union. The group's avowed aim was the destruction of
the world, and it appears that the event in the desert may have been a dry run
for blowing up Tokyo.
You take my point, of course. This is a country that loses a prime minister
and that is so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts could conceivably
set off the world's first nongovernmental atomic bomb on its mainland and almost
four years would pass before anyone noticed.* Clearly this is a place worth
getting to know.
* Interestingly, no Australian newspapers seem to have picked up on this story
and the New York Times never returned to it, so what happened in the
desert remains a mystery. Aum Shinrikyo sold its desert property in August 1994,
fifteen months after the mysterious blast but seven months before it gained
notoriety with its sarin attack in the Tokyo subway system. If any investigating
authority took the obvious step of measuring the area around Banjawarn Station
for increased levels of radiation, it has not been reported.
© June 2000, Bill Bryson. Used by permission.
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