Down Under (41 page)

The chronicles of Australian fauna are amazingly full of stories such as this – of animals that are there one moment and gone the next. A more recent casualty of the phenomenon was a frog called
Rheobatrachus silus
, which was around for such a short time that it didn’t even manage to attract an informal name. What was extraordinary about
R. silus
(and it almost goes without saying that there would be something) was that it gave birth to live young through its mouth – something never
before seen in nature inside Australia or out. It was discovered by biologists in 1973 and by 1981 it had disappeared. It is listed as ‘probably extinct’.

My favourite animal disappearance story, however, harks back to a somewhat earlier age. It concerns a nineteenth-century naturalist named Gerard Krefft, who in 1857 caught two very rare pig-footed bandicoots. Unfortunately for science and for the bandicoots, Krefft soon afterwards grew hungry and ate them. They were, as far as anyone can tell, the last of the species. Certainly none has been seen since. Krefft, incidentally, was later appointed head of the Australian Museum in Sydney, but was invited to seek alternative employment when it was discovered that he was supplementing his salary by selling pornographic postcards. I am sure there must be a moral in there somewhere.

From the Desert Park, I went to the Strehlow Aboriginal Research Centre. This was a quietly boring display concerning a man born on the Hermannsburg Mission, an Aboriginal reserve outside Alice, who devoted his life to studying Aborigines. He collected a huge stock of spiritual artifacts, but because they are sacred and not allowed to be seen by the uninitiated, they cannot be put on display. What you get instead are lots of old photographs of life at Hermannsburg and more detail on the life and work of Theodore Strehlow than a reasonable person could wish.

However, as I was walking back to the car, I noticed a small aviation museum in an old hangar next door. Curiously, no one was in attendance, but the door was open so I stepped inside and had a look around. The museum had a fairly predictable assortment of old engines
and walls of yellowing photographs, but in a separate building there was something I had no idea still existed and certainly never expected to see. No guidebook I have ever seen draws attention to it; even the local tourism literature contained no hint that it is there. But for a few fretful days in 1929 it was the most famous and sought-after object in Australia – and here it was in a small aviation museum in Alice Springs, of all places. I refer to the remains of a light aircraft known as the Kookaburra, which went down in the desert while searching for a lost pilot named Charles Kingsford Smith.

Kingsford Smith was not only the greatest Australian aviator of his age, but possibly the greatest aviator ever. He held more records than anyone else and tackled infinitely more daring challenges. Just a year after Charles Lindbergh made his historic solo flight across the Atlantic, Kingsford Smith became the first to cross the Pacific – a far more ambitious enterprise, not simply because the scale was greater but because flying conditions were much, much tougher and far less well understood. At the time of his Pacific attempt, only ten months had passed since the first aeroplane had successfully flown to Hawaii in a race sponsored by a Hawaiian pineapple magnate – and that event had claimed the lives of ten airmen. So when, in 1928, Kingsford Smith set off with a crew of three from San Francisco aiming to reach Brisbane by way of Honolulu and Suva in Fiji, the undertaking was widely held to be impossible and insane, and so it nearly proved. Six hundred miles out from Hawaii, Kingsford Smith flew into a belt of meteorological liveliness known as the intertropical convergence zone – an expanse of boiling clouds, towering storms and the sort of winds that could blow a moustache off. As his small craft began
to bounce about like some kind of elasticated toy, Kingsford Smith had no idea what to expect, or when it might end, because no pilot had ever flown into such a system before.

This was, bear in mind, in a frail, spruce-framed, cloth-covered 1920s Fokker so elemental in design that the seats weren’t even bolted down. For hours Kingsford Smith fought to hold the plane steady and in one piece. When at last it popped into clear air, he and his men were perilously low on fuel and faced with the problem of finding Fiji – a dot in an all but infinite ocean – before their engine ran dry and they fell into the sea. This and a hundred other alarming obstacles Kingsford Smith tackled with courage, skill, resolution and wit. Crossing the Pacific was possibly the most daring organized feat of aviation ever.

Kingsford Smith always flew with a co-pilot, and generally with a navigator and radioman as well, so it is unfair to compare his achievements with the solitary heroics of Charles Lindbergh. None the less it is fair to observe that Lindbergh never flew through anything as ferocious as Kingsford Smith’s Pacific storm. Indeed, after 1927 Lindbergh scarcely made another notable flight. Kingsford Smith, on the other hand, flew on and on, establishing records all over. He became the first to fly the Atlantic from east to west (again much tougher because it was against the jet stream), first to fly from Australia to New Zealand and back again, and first to cross the Pacific in the other direction. He also held a fistful of records for fastest flights between Australia and England, and for various legs along the way.

Which brings us to the Kookaburra. In March 1929, with a crew of three, Kingsford Smith set off to fly from
Sydney to England. Over north-west Australia, along the Kimberley coast, they hit bad weather, grew hopelessly lost (not altogether surprisingly: for guidance they had only a couple of admiralty charts and a map of Australia torn from a standard
Times Atlas)
and made a forced landing on a coastal mudflat, with almost no fuel left and hopelessly short of supplies. Almost all they had was a flask of coffee and some brandy, which could be combined to make a drink called a coffee royal. Thus what followed became known, somewhat darkly, as the Coffee Royal Affair.

Luckily for Kingsford Smith, he and his men were in an area with plentiful fresh water and some adequate if unappealing sources of food (mud snails mostly). However, because the plane’s radio was broken, they had no way of telling the outside world where they were. When news of the disappearance reached Sydney, two of Kingsford Smith’s associates, Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock, decided to mount a rescue. In the little Kookaburra they took off from Mascot Airport in Sydney, flew by stages to Alice Springs, and finally set off from there on what was supposed to be the final leg early on the morning of 12 April 1929. Soon afterwards, while crossing the parched emptiness of the Tanami Desert – the area that Allan and I had skirted in the car on our drive from Daly Waters to Alice Springs – the engine began to sputter and backfire and they were forced to make an emergency landing in the desert. In their haste to depart they had packed no food and only three litres of water. Unlike Kingsford Smith, they landed in a place that offered no succour.

They were dead by the third day. That is how unimaginably murderous the outback is. I don’t wish to
seem obsessive about this, but they drank their own urine, too. Nearly everybody does who gets stuck in the outback. (It’s actually counterproductive because the salts in urine accelerate thirst.)

At almost the moment when Anderson and Hitchcock were wretchedly expiring, Kingsford Smith and his cronies were rescued by someone else. They returned to civilization looking so fit and rested that some people began to suspect (and some newspapers to speculate) that it had all been a publicity stunt. The whole thing grew rather ugly. Kingsford Smith was subjected to the humiliation of a public inquiry into his character (he was ultimately exonerated). Meanwhile, the nation waited breathlessly for news that Anderson and Hitchcock had been found alive. Alas, they were not. In late April, a search plane spotted the downed Kookaburra with their bodies nearby, and a few days later a rescue party recovered the remains and brought them back to civilization. Hitchcock’s family opted for a quiet funeral in Perth, but Anderson was given a state funeral of the most grave and magnificent pomp in Sydney. For days beforehand people in their thousands stood in line for hours to view the coffin. On the day of the funeral, thousands more lined the streets to watch the cortège or gathered at the burial site. It was the biggest funeral in Sydney to that time, possibly the biggest ever.

Today, it almost goes without saying, Anderson and Hitchcock are completely forgotten, inside Australia as well as out. So, too, for a long time was the Kookaburra. It sat in the desert, rusting and unnoted, for half a century before it was finally collected and taken to Darwin for restoration. About ten years ago, it was placed in a special small building at the aviation museum at
Alice Springs, where it appears to attract no attention whatever.

Kingsford Smith returned to flying, setting yet more records. In 1935, while flying home from England, his plane crashed into the sea off Burma, taking him with it. Today, he is fitfully remembered in Australia (Sydney’s airport is named after him) and not at all elsewhere. In 1998, the American writer Scott Berg produced a 600-page doorstop biography of Charles Lindbergh, which naturally ranged over the whole story of aviation’s early days. Of Charles Kingsford Smith it contained not a mention.

Allan and I dined that evening on the patio of the Red Centre, where I told him in great detail about my many exciting discoveries of the day. As we sat enjoying the warm evening and lazily finding our way to the bottom of our second bottle of very nice Western Australia Cabernet Sauvignon, as if on cue a wallaby hopped up to the perimeter fence on the far side of the swimming pool, regarded us for a moment with a general air of unconcern, and began nibbling the shrubs that were planted there. It was the first time since my crossing of the country on the Indian Pacific many weeks earlier that I had seen a distinctive Australian animal in the wild. It was the first time Allan ever had, and he was thrilled.

Whether for this reason or some other, he announced that he thought Australia a very fine place.

‘Do you?’ I said, pleased, but just a little surprised for he had seen little of it but desert.

He leaned towards me very slightly and said, as if sharing a confidence: ‘It’s very roomy.’

I looked at him. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘It’s a very roomy country.’

On reflection, I think it may have been our third bottle.

In the morning I drove him to Alice’s small but handsome airport, where we had a cup of coffee and sat quietly, for we were both a trifle hung over. I saw him to his gate, where we exchanged the usual rushed and fatuous expressions of thanks and goodwill, and he disappeared down the walkway. I watched him go, then turned and walked back to the car. I had a day to kill before flying on to Western Australia, and I wasn’t at all certain how I was going to fill it. I headed into town for the business district to find a bank machine and buy a newspaper, but en route I passed a sign for the School of the Air, down a side street, and impetuously I decided to have a look.

I didn’t expect a great deal, but it was terrific. What a lot of nice surprises Alice Springs was throwing up. The School of the Air was in an anonymous building on a residential street. It consisted of a reception area where the children’s work was displayed on tables and around the walls, two small studios, a large meeting room and that was about it. Although there are seventeen schools of the air in Australia now, Alice Springs is the grandmother of them all and still covers the largest and emptiest area. It was a Saturday, so no lessons were in progress, but a very nice man was happy to show me around and tell me how it worked.

The idea was simple enough: to provide formal schooling and some sense of classroom experience for kids growing up on cattle stations or other lonely spots – something it has been dutifully doing since 1951. Lonely is certainly the key word here. With a catchment area of 468,000 square miles – that is an area roughly twice the
size of France – the Alice Springs school has just 140 pupils spread between kindergarten and the early teens. I retain a strangely vivid and influential memory of watching a film about it at school when I was eight or nine, and of being extremely taken with the notion of being hundreds of miles from your teacher, entrusted with your own microphone and shortwave radio set, and free to sit there buck naked with a plate of cookies if you chose since no one could see you. All of these seemed incalculable improvements on the situation that prevailed at Greenwood Elementary in Des Moines, Iowa. So the romance of radio learning has never quite left me. I was disappointed, therefore, to discover that the radio portion has only ever been a tiny and incidental part of the programme. The School of the Air is and always has been essentially a correspondence course, which doesn’t sound anything like as appealing.

Even so, the place had a very real charm and air of goodwill. The noticeboards were filled with illustrated essays from kids of about eleven describing life on their stations and what a typical day was like for them. I read every one with absorption.

‘Would you like to listen to a lesson?’ the man in charge asked me.

‘Very much,’ I said.

He took me into a side room and put on a tape recording of a day’s lesson for five-year-olds. It consisted mostly of a perky teacher going through the roll-call, saying: ‘Good morning, Kylie. Can you hear me? Over.’

After a moment there would be a faint crackle, as of a transmission from a very distant galaxy, and sounds almost recognizable as human speech but much too indistinct to be deciphered.

‘I say good morning, Kylie. Are you there? Can you hear me? Over.’

This time there would be a pause and no response at all, just a rather poignant interval of dead air. Then: ‘Well, let’s try Gavin then. Good morning, Gavin. Are you there? Over.’

More crackle and then a small, tinny voice would come back: ‘Good morning, Miss Smith!’

And so it went, with some voices coming in loud and clear, but many others fading in or out or proving totally unreachable. As I listened to this, I also read a little booklet I had bought where I was frankly taken aback to discover that each child spends only half an hour a day (actually, ‘up to half an hour a day’) on the radio, plus ten minutes a week in a private tutorial with their teachers – hardly a lavish amount of personal attention. For the rest, they are expected to spend five to six hours a day working under the supervision of a parent or nanny. The students also make use of televisions, VCRs and personal computers, but I didn’t see any sign of them. The conclusion to which you are reluctantly but inescapably drawn is that it is forever 1951 at the School of the Air.