Into Thick Air (7 page)

“If you think along the lines of big time scales, it's easy to get worrying about things. I mean, the Romans—they didn't last.”

He squints out into the desert, at the things that last. “Just look at calculators—what if the people who make them were all stricken by some disease and they died? And then where would we be?”

I'd never thought of it quite that way, I say. He leaves before I can decide if he's a sage or simply addled by the sun.

Out here in the heart of the continent, without a Roman or calculator in sight, the desert seems ferociously resistant to all forms of civilization that involve staying in one place. There simply isn't water enough. No rivers pierce the drylands, because there are no interior mountains big enough to push up and cool the air and wring out the moisture. In contrast, every state in the arid American West holds mountains over 11,000 feet. They are islands of wet in a sea of aridity, and from them flow the Colorado and the Snake, the Missouri and the Rio Grande.

Australia has no big mountains. For 200 million years during the tectonic dance of the continents it has been the wallflower, sitting out the bump-and-grind routine that shoves mountains up from the plains. Australia instead drifted away from its neighbors—first Africa, then India, and finally Antarctica and New Zealand. The continental plate Australia sits on did eventually ram Asia, but New Guinea took the blow and ended up with all the mountains. Australia got nothing but wind and rain and sun, wearing down the land into its present topographic stupor.

This is the flattest continent on the planet. Forget the brilliant parrots and cockatoos; for Australians, they're like very loud pigeons. A truly big rock is what they hunger for. Moby Rock. Something that lasts.

 

AT DAWN THEY COME by the thousands, in tour buses and little airplanes, in concussive waves of helicopters and Harley-Davidsons. Nobody appears
to notice the blue sleeping bag tucked between the sand hills; nobody sees me swatting the first fly of the day and spilling my coffee. All eyes, mine included, are on Uluru, also known as Ayers Rock, or simply The Rock.

They're mad about this lonesome block of arkosic sandstone rising clean and smooth above the desert. Twelve hundred feet high and five miles around, its solitary mass generates its own gravity. It's just a petrified lump that could easily be lost in the Grand Canyon. But it's not in the Grand Canyon. It swells from the plain, a ribbed dome of rock the height of the Empire State Building and the size of Central Park.

Thirty miles to the west are the Olgas, a huddle of domes even higher than Uluru. But because the Olgas are too steep to climb unaided, the action is here. With my binoculars I see a line of dawn-patrol tourists inching up the rock's flank, the midget forms of what the Aborigines call the “ants.” They're aiming for the top, shuffling up a stripe others have worn into the rock, a route made possible by a safety chain running along posts drilled into the stone.

Not every tourist is game for the climb. Some sit beside folding tables draped in linen and set with champagne flutes. Others simply gaze at the monolith from their suite in the Sails in the Desert Hotel, where the bushhatted staff is forever cleaning the expanse of windows or tallying up your bill on the touch pad of the Micros Hospitality Management System. But for the young or the ambitious, the climb's the magnet, and I pack up early to join the flock.

A stop at the “culture center” crimps my plans. The ranger woman tells me that the local landowners, the Anangu, don't want anyone to climb the rock. “They let the tourists climb it only because of a compromise between the Anangu and the government. The Anangu got title to the land, but only if they agreed to lease back Uluru for ninety-nine years. The government's not keen on limiting such a big tourist draw as climbing the rock. But the Anangu . . . Here, read this.”

It's a pamphlet explaining why “we never climb.” For the Anangu the rock isn't a morning scoot and hoot. It's a “sacred site.”

Like most white guys, I like diversity—until it gets in my way. I pedal on to the rock, which by now is faintly quivering in the heat, looking like a
successful experiment with the world's largest Jell-O mold. With the arc of the sun, the rock changes flavor throughout the day and has already turned from predawn plum to tangerine. The closer I get, the farther my head tilts back to take it all in, until I reach the parking lot at the base of the climb. People pour from an Ayers Rock Plus tour bus and head straight for the climb. Others are descending in a mincing, hesitant step, safety chain in one hand, disposable camera in the other.

Here, as I feared, there's a small sign asking you not to climb the rock. I corral a few exhilarated folk who have just finished the climb and ask them about the view (“Tremendous!”) and then about the native taboo on the climb. “Stuff that!” says an Aussie man in a burgundy polo shirt. “This is a tourist attraction, and the Aborigines are making a fortune off of it. They get their ten dollars a head; we get to climb it.” His climbing friend adds, “If we did everything the Aborigines asked, we would all have to pack up and leave Australia, wouldn't we?”

He's right. But after a cloud of diesel fumes drifts over from the Down Under Tours bus, I'm thinking that leaving may not be such a bad idea. I'm not a sacred sort of guy, yet the idea is easy enough. For the Anangu the rock means water, the currency of life. With a single storm every runnel and gully of Uluru carries the runoff into plunge pools. For most tourists money is the currency of life. I wouldn't want my bank account PIN passed around. The Anangu don't want the rock's secrets casually thrown to the masses.

I suppose that includes me, so I reluctantly turn from the climb. It's true that this is a national park, so the rock belongs to all Australians longing for the big view. Let them climb it. I go for a walk around the base of Uluru instead, and am glad for it.

The rock is skirted with fig and gum trees that deepen the shade of the alcoves. Up in the branches sit kingfishers, thuggish birds with bills like chisels. A lady is watching them, a lady wearing a remarkable anti-fly hat, with a curtain round its brim of wine corks hanging on strings. A tourist from New Jersey, she too elected not to climb. “I know the Australians do it, but they don't like the blacks telling them what to do. It's a racial divide, just like the States.”

It's as good a time as any to ponder the racial divide, the flies, and the sandstone arching into the light. The Rock is a model of geologic complacency. Even the Aborigines seem a pin-drop in time. The lady with the anti-fly hat heads back to the parking lot, leaving me with the enduring words, “My husband's in the car. He says you've seen one rock, you've seen them all.”

 

MY TRICK OF packing a beer in my sleeping bag—so I'll have a cold one for the sunset—finally backfires at my Uluru camp. The bag I pull from my stuff sack reeks of Victoria Bitter. A down sleeping bag doesn't dry quickly, and my clammy night is made worse by a damp wind. I've been camping for five days straight, and the beer bag, night wind, and sweat have me dangerously close to decomposing into human mulch.

In the morning I peel off the bag, skip coffee, and immediately set off in pursuit of a hot shower. I find one at the home of Scott Medhurst, a friend of a friend of a friend. Scott works for the Ayers Rock Resort, where, among other things, he's the official reptile remover. “People freak out when a goanna gets in their house,” he says while serving up some Weetabix and a cup of Moccona instant coffee. “That's a physical animal, mate. They scratch and bite and shit on you. It stinks.”

I'm grateful for his hospitality and his fully plumbed staff home, and don't mention my aversion to scaled creatures. The truth is that I'd rather spend time with most any bird—say, a gray-crowned babbler or a gibber chat—than with a death adder.

Thanks to my training as a professional biologist, I knew that life lasts longer when you don't die, and that birds are unlikely to kill me. The silent reptiles I've left alone—until, after breakfast, Scott brings me out to the desert to release a yellow-faced whip snake he captured yesterday. Scott wears his “hard yakka” shorts, government-issue King Gee brand, whereas I would feel safer in Kevlar waders. No need to worry, he soothes. “The whip snake is dangerous, very painful, but it's not nearly as bad as a king brown snake. That's a snake with enough venom to put away about 300,000 rats. I caught a five-footer in someone's backyard. It's a very muscular animal—all muscle, and it wants out of the bag.”

How does the whip snake rate in rat power?

“I'm not sure—maybe three thousand rats.”

Yesterday, the whip snake cruised past someone working under his car. Scott caught it with the snake tongs, bagged it, then left it outside last night so the cold would slow it down. Now, as I stand by with my camera and notebook, he unties the noose around the black bag. He seems relaxed enough, and I ask him how long he's been a snake expert.

“I'm not. It's an adrenaline rush, and they pay me $10 a day for being on call and $30 per call.”

I take two steps back.

“Also, it's interesting and a challenge. I'm learning as I go along.”

The whip snake drops out of the bag and onto the sand, as lively as a noodle and not much fatter than my thumb. “Now is your chance for a photo, because when the sun hits him he' ll be moving.” I'm ready to jump like a roo, but don't have to. The whip snake is dazed by the circumstances. Like most wild things, it shows no urge to tangle with people. It warms in the light and elegantly slides off in the direction of Uluru. It moves towards freedom as well as tour buses, and for the first time I am faintly glad it is poisonous and will be left alone.

 

THE OODNADATTA TRACK looks like a good place to be left alone. Nobody else is turning off the highway onto the 280 miles of unpaved road to Lake Eyre. It's nicely graded, for the quarter mile I can see; beyond that, who knows? The prudent explorer, I carefully examine the Landsmap Tourist Guide before setting off. A bit of text in four-point font had earlier escaped my eye, but now I see the “Tips for Tactful Travellers.”

1. Take your time—
you are on holiday

2. Plan ahead—Don't forget drinking water, hat, sunscreen

It appears I'm set. Onward, and downward. Nobody passes all morning, leaving me free to weave from side to side in search of smoother riding. The road changes color as it dips and climbs through different strata, from eye-squinting white clays to crumbling green shales to sands the thick red of spaghetti sauce. There are no roadkills, but instead the clawed tracks
of sand goannas dragging their tails. The trees manage a living only along the dry creek beds, and the plains are free and open. I see my first emus, big birds with little wings that are as useful for flight as the tail fins of a 1958 Cadillac. They tear off in a cloud of dust, jinking and dodging like soccer players.

The emu's relative, the ostrich, lives in Australia, too, but Africa is its native home. It was introduced to Australia, as were rabbits, cats, and foxes. Like the cane toads, all have proved more successful than anyone imagined. The carnivorous cats and foxes are busy dismembering the increasingly rare native marsupials. The rabbits came from England in 1859, a couple of dozen hopping targets for sportsmen. The lucky survivors encountered few natural enemies. Like college students on spring break, there was nobody to control them. They bred like mad, and by 1940, 600 million rabbits were nibbling the landscape down to the dirt.

People tried gassing the underground warrens and blasting at them with guns, but Australians could not slow the European bunnies until 1950, when they unleashed a rabbit virus from Uruguay. The number of rabbits plummeted, then bounced back to a diminished but still very hungry population of a hundred million or so.

Aussie biologists found hope in the sudden deaths of 64 million European rabbits in Italy in 1986, and immediately went to work on achieving the same results. The killer—or savior, depending on your viewpoint—was a rabbit hemorrhagic virus from China. The pathogen was brought to an isolated island off South Australia for testing, yet in 1996 managed to escape the supposedly bio-secure laboratory. It's heading for the Oodnadatta Track.

Trouble is, rabbits are considerably cuter than many of their victims—the voiceless plants and the myriad animals that depend on those plants for food and home. Ranchers and ecologists might agree that the rabbit is the devil with floppy ears, but rabbit lovers smell a conspiracy in the “escape” of the virus. It's no accident, they say—it is cruel bunny-cide condoned by the same government whose PR campaign insists that the “benign virus” is painless, and the infected rabbits “go quietly” in the privacy of their warrens.

Meanwhile, there is a push to eliminate the traditional Easter Bunny and replace it with the Easter Bilby—a long-eared critter otherwise known as the bandicoot. It's neither ugly nor poisonous, but its long nose gives it the look of an Easter Rat, so the Easter Bunny and the Euro-rabbits will probably win.

Repeated invasion seems to be Australia's fate, from the Aborigines to the British, the dingoes to the sheep. I'm part of the tourist invasion, and I'm glad someone got here before me—I need to fill my water bottles just as I pass the Copper Hills homestead.

Hugh Fran is a rancher, hobby painter, and hospitable geezer who seems to have been expecting me all along. He gives me a slow tour of his little bungalow, pausing to hitch up his pants now and then. He gladly lets me try out his remarkable solar-powered telephone. When I succeed in connecting the computer, he hoots to his wife, “Honey, look, we're on the Internet!” Laurel ambles over from the living room and says, “I'm not sure what that means.” I explain that it's all the information you need, and more, before you even knew you needed it. Laurel listens politely, then says, “I'm going back to my ironing. Tell me if something interesting happens.”