Friendly, Casual, Talkative, Informal And In Danger Of Invasion

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30883, 16 October 1965, Page 13

Friendly, Casual, Talkative, Informal And In Danger Of Invasion

(Reprinted by arrangement with the "Saturday Review," New York ]

the £ reat sweep of the Pacific separating the two continents the British settled back m 1620 and 1788, the average American, after a week or two in Sydney, will find himself thinking that in no other foreign place could he feel closer to home than in Australia.

Here no language barrier fences him in; citizen of a col Ant Wlt ” myriad “dialects,” he enjoys the Australian accent and idiom. He quickly concludes he is among a people as friendly, open, casually kind, informal, and gregarious as he.

They seem to think and feel and act pretty much like Americans, go to the same movies, watch the same bevy of gangsters, cowboys, doctors and witches—and endure the same commercials on television. He could see Mickey Rooney at the Chevron “Hello Dolly!” at the Majestic, and an American doing a “Tonight” show copied from Johnny Carson.

Like him, Australians are trying to cope with jammed traffic, striking “wharfies.” and Beatle-addicted adolescents. Australians and Americans, he notes, both like aports, beaches and bikinis. Both live in a free and flmir. Ishing sociey, elect a two-body federal legislature, and rather amiably distrust politicians. Both are ambivalent about the British and both are deeply involved in East Asia.

Nevertheless, in spite of all the two peoples have in common, after a few emotionally cosy days or weeks in Australia, the perceptive American begins to realise that his comfortable assumption that the “Yanks” and "Aussies” are near-facsimilies of each other is simply not true, however often Australians affirm it. There are basic, major differences visual, pyschological and institutional

It is at this point, of course, for the jet-age American traveller, as for Marco Polo generations ago, that the fun begins: finding, sorting and fitting together bits and pieces to make the true pattern. This search which incidentally involves some reassessment of what an American is can be as engrossing in Australia as in Sikkim. My love for strong colour does not destroy my feeling

for the subtle. My addiction to the area from Pakistan to Japan simply enriches my effort to understand an egalitarian, stable, Western and deliberately white society on the border of a turbulent Asia.

Country Essentially

Individualistic

Australia is not a blurred replica or uninspired imitation of Britain or America. She is herself, more so than ever before, and visibly, almost dramatically, more mature and self-confident and more an integrated entity than in 1942, when I landed at the pleasant city of Perth, a refugee from Singapore. Now is a good time to explore this newest of the “Western” democracies—after all, the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies, was seven years old when the Commonwealth was formed from six British colonies—covering the world’s most ancient continent.

For one thing, a number of “eggheads” are dissatisfied with the image of the tough, fearless, sun-bronzed Australians roaming the sun-baked ranges, loyal to mates, gallant in war, and are trying to discover who and what they are. Then, too, it is only in the last few years that this “Western” country (because of its W’hite Australia policy, more Western than America) which is about as big as the United. States but has little more population than the State of Illinios, has realised that she is very far away from her two great Western allies and very close indeed to an unsettled, grossly overpopulated Asia. Only about 400 miles separate the closest Indonesian island from Australia, and her White Australia policy may some day be no shield—just a provocation. There is another reason, which I offer only half facetiously, for visiting Australia in the not-too-distant future. Today, anti-Americanism (and

I don't mean honest doubt about our Vietnam policy) does exist, particularly among Left-wing intellectuals and labour unions. For a complex of reasons, it will grow. But for the moment the vast majority of Australians trust the United States as an ally and feel genuinely friendly toward Americans. I find it a little bland but very pleasant for a change, to live in a foreign country where only the Communists march around with “Go home Yank” written on big placards. What surprises many Americans who have thought of Australia in terms of kangaroos, koalas, and boom erangs is that, in spite of the country’s huge size, the great majority of its 11,500,000 people live in cities. Almost five million of them—--40 per cent—live in Sydney and Melbourne, state capitals and chronic rivals.

The traditional Australia does exist in the “real outback”—more than a million square miles of arid and sunparched land with a fascination any desert lover understands. A visitor can cross some of this countryside through an organised 40-day, 7500-mile bus tour of Australia, he can safari from any one of six or eight major cities flourishing on the rim of this oldest of all continents —to fish, hunt crocodiles, wallabies, dingoes, pigs, kangaroos; to see aborigines and the extraordinary pictures their ancestors painted in caves long, long ago.

City Of Sunshine

And Water

He can prospect for fun, on long-abandoned goldfields. He can go alone or with a group on lapidary expeditions, remembering the Australian who sold for about £4 his rock doorstep, which now lies, transformed into a black sapphire, at the Smithsonian Institution. And yet he can—indeed, he must—visit a great sheep or cattle station to get

the feel of a very special sector of Australian life, and meet the men who were once the aristocracy to all Australians and are now aristocrats only to one another and themselves. If I cannot visualise and, however slowly, piece out my own picture of Australia without its sunburned heartland, its aborigines (dispossessed like our own Indians), and its graziers’ stations, I also cannot imagine it without Sydney. Of all Australias highly individual capitals, this is for me the most dramatic reminder that, myths to the contrary, here is one of the world’s great urban countries. The city is sun and water. The great harbour’s generos-

ity of coves and inlets edged with white sand and fringed with trees, gives a view of beauty to hundreds of thousands of conventional suburban homes and some of the world’s best beaches to several million people. It is hard to see on Sydney’s cheerful and sunlit face traces of the brutality and suffering of its not so very distant convict beginnings. I sometimes think it is the agony of those early settlements and the harsh neutrality of the “outback” that have driven Australians unconsciously to virtually an obsession with the soft, cushioning, sun-sparkled sea. There everyone, young or old, rich or poor, can swim, surf, skindive, fish, swim underwater, sail, or simply lie on the beach and bake near another healthy, browning body. In Australia, not to swim well makes me feel I have a serious physical deformity.

I call Sydney “twelve suburbs in search of a city.” Its “down-town” area, not beautiful by day but busy begins about four o’clock to spill from stores and banks and shopping centres hordes of people who hurry in all directions to suburbia. Nobody lives downtown; by night-time, streets, by no means brilliantly lit, feel lonely. If you are a New Yorker you begin to think wistfully of Times Square—vulgar and glittering and crowded and lively. But Sydney seems contented, even a little smug, for everyone forces the visitor clearly to affirm his admiration for the city. After all, its weather is perfect, its bars and beer plentiful, its girls long-limbed and pretty. Its sunsets are magnificent and its twilights magic. It owes its good taste in clothes, its greatly increased sophistication and variety of food and many other tangibles and in tangibles that most Sydneyites take for granted to a 15-year stream of European migrants welcomed by the Australian Government but—as most of these “new Australians” will tell you—always a little scorned by “real” Australians.

These newcomers, Germans, Greek and Spanish, specialise in good little restaurants and keep their excellent delicatessens open on Sunday in an amusing, self-consciously phony section of East Sydney called King’s Cross. I would have loved it earlier than I did if friendly Australians had not kept assuring me it was “just like Greenwich Village.”

Painless Payment By Lotteries

I like Sydney for its old houses, built with sand-colour-ed stone, generous proportions, and 12ft ceilings, delicately moulded. I like its many art galleries, its little lunchtime theatre, its symphony orchestra splendidly conducted by Dean Dixon, an American Negro. I like the strange-looking harbourside structure , with huge, ribbed concrete shells simulating sails. It will event-

ually be the most spectacular and expensive opera house in the world (painlessly paid for with lotteries —one of the many types of betting to which Australians are addicted).

Near Sydney you can visit one of the many forest reserves that protect Australia’s range of exotic flora and fauna. One haven is especially for those lovable little beasts, the koalas, fat and furry little balls cuddled on a tree branch soundly sleeping while nearby emus droop bedraggled feathers, and baby kangaroos slip in and out of their mothers’ pouches. North of Sydney, along Queensland’s Gold Coast, are Australia’s favourite and most lively year-round resort beaches. Northward again, as any coral lover knows, is the famed Barrier Reef, stretching all the way to Papua, with its vacation islands and the fabulous sights of multi-coloured marine life:

These are areas for vacation, important because Australians take them very seriously. But to get acquainted with a really more distinctive and strangely appealing Australia one must fly 2000 miles north-west from Sydney, as I did recently, to what Australians call the “Top End” and visit Darwin.

Darwin Lively,

Neat And New

Bombed by the Japanese, it was almost deserted for years afterward but now it is a neat and lively little city. Its shiny new buildings and a big air base with jet fighter aircraft and defensive ring of Bloodhound ground -to - air missies remind the visitor that an unpredictable Indonesia is only a few hundred miles to the north. Darwin is just as close to Singapore as Sydney. The Australia of Darwin and its vast tropical northern hinterland is an area of roving aborigines, wild buffalo and crocodiles, jungles and mountains, and vast cattle lands bigger than Texas counties. Darwin symbolises Australia north of Capricorn with its scanty population but strange allure. It is an Australia that differs so sharply from the gentler well-watered Australia around the southern coasts.

The place that ties this big continent together, both administratively and psychologically, is Canberra, a Capital that, like Washington and Brazilia, was. created from empty land, a valley where only sheep grazed before within a circle of gently sloping, forested hills. I lived there briefly in 1942, when the

Japanese were sweeping victoriously over the former Dutch East Indies. This was well before the battle of the Coral Sea.

Canberra Growing Rapidly

Guadalcanal and Allied victories in New Guinea had turned the tide of Japanese advance. Australia lay almost totally exposed to the enemy. I felt then —and it is all the more true now—that the Canberra of that time, a new capital just beginning to be a Government centre, gave sense to Australia’s nationhood more than Sydney, where the British first settled.

Today a much bigger Canberra—with nearly 100,000 people and adding thousands more a year—is one of the world’s handsomest capital’s, with impressive new Government • and commercial buildings filling out the original great design of an American architect, Burley Griffin.

Australian-Asian Problem

To see Canberra with its neatness, the quiet beauty of its tree lined streets, the evidence it gives of a stable, progressive democracy is to wonder anew at the future of this prosperous white nation down under, remote from Powers like the United States and Britain with whom it has most in common, living with its vast, still unexploited resources, its growing but still scanty population, and its empty lands under the shadow of aggressive Asian Powers such as Indonesia and Communist China. Will Australia and Asia be able to come to terms without Australia being overrun? To view the life and varied attractions of this big, sunny, southern island-continent is to find a new understanding of what the question conveys.

In this article, PEGGY DURDIN, American freelance writer and wife of Tilman Durdin, chief South - West Pacific correspondent of the "New York Times," gives her frank impressions of Australia and the Australians.