Adventures in Correspondentland (38 page)

A woman claiming to be her auntie, who had promised to take her over into India so she could experience the novelty of riding on a railway locomotive, sat alongside. Questioned in the hut by the side of the road, however, she was quickly found out to have no familial connection with the perplexed young girl. She did not even know her name. Realising she had been rumbled by the spotters, the woman ran out of the hut and disappeared into the crowd.

Later on, the young girl was taken back to her village, still oblivious to the fact that she had been saved from becoming the latest victim in one of the world's fastest growing crimes. Other girls were much less fortunate. For them, that decorated arch on the border between India and Nepal became the gateway to a wretched life in the cages of Mumbai.

By now, two Diwalis on, I could report progress in my search for an Indian bride. Help on the matchmaking front had come from my best friend from college, a British-Indian whose father had survived the post-partition journey from Pakistani Punjab to Delhi, where he had trained as a doctor before falling in love with a British nurse and settling in the UK.

Over for his cousin's wedding, an extravagant four-day bash with the usual brass bands, thrones, turbans, white stallion and whisky, my friend introduced me to one of his relatives, a delightful woman called Madhu. Madhu ran a fabrics company and suggested I meet one of her clients, an attractive young woman who made regular visits to the capital on business – a lingerie designer, I was sure she said.

Our first introduction came at a trendy new restaurant that was a favourite haunt of the Bollywood glitterati and that could hardly have been more beautiful: a rustic former boarding house on the edge of the ancient city, with whitewashed walls and ornate ironwork, which was illuminated by what looked like a thousand tea lights and candles. At its heart was a stunning courtyard, with antique furniture configured around the twisted roots of a giant banyan tree.

In Hindu culture, the banyan tree is seen as wish fulfilling and divine. For Buddhists, its habit of supplanting host trees is viewed as a metaphor for the overpowering strength of human desire. Unfortunately, however, our evening followed more closely the words of the southern Indian proverb that nothing grows under the banyan tree.

Dispensing with routine conversational ice-breakers, we ended up arguing over the Iraq war, of all things, and the quality of
the pre-war intelligence. Here, I trotted out my usual formulation that Saddam Hussein had duped everyone over the existence of weapons of mass destruction, not least his own commanders, who were led to believe that there was a stockpile of such weapons. She, however, would have none of it, and she immediately wrote me off as an apologist for the Bush administration and a callow, America-loving blowhard. Then she launched into a tirade against the media, and how reporters had given George W. Bush a ridiculously easy ride in the run-up to the war. It was at this point that I volunteered, tentatively, that I had been one of those self-same reporters.

‘Nice guy, shame about his politics,' she told her colleague, rather unfairly, as they left the restaurant that night. For my part, I went home that night thinking she was beautiful, feisty and smart as a tack, but woefully misguided.

Happily, other dinners followed, where the chat strayed beyond weapons of mass destruction and steered clear of other potential minefields. Eventually, she latched onto the fact that I was neither a neo-conservative nor even a recovering neo-conservative. We started to get on better. We found there were areas of common ground – a deep love of all things Indian, for a start. Perhaps there was even a flicker of mutual interest. Why, it might even have qualified as a spark. Still, the dear woman who introduced us was always in attendance, which meant our get-togethers were always heavily chaperoned affairs. We also tended to meet in that outdoor restaurant, where our table fell under the sprawling banyan tree. Under its shadow, there seemed little likelihood that our friendship would ever blossom into romance.

Then came our first unchaperoned dinner, which went better
than either of us had expected. We met again the following night, on what could only be described as a date. Later that weekend, there was even the old-fashioned
Brief Encounters
-style romance of a railway-platform farewell as she boarded an overnight train to Dharamsala in the Himalayas. As the guard blew the whistle, a hawker tried to pinch her bottom and I tried to steal a kiss – and hopefully I benefited from the comparison.

After the train disappeared into the Delhi night, we did not catch sight of each other again for another ten weeks, but there were texts, emails, long-distance phone calls and flowers. Lots of texts, emails, long-distance phone calls and flowers. We started to lay plans on how we could share holidays together; on how we could live together; on how we could make a life together. At the start, our chances of success seemed remote, but in a country where astrologers are often the ultimate arbiters of the viability of a relationship, the stars were falling into something at least nearing alignment. I was prepared to make my move.

Back in London, I told my then boss that my search for an Indian bride had taken a wholly unexpected turn. While I had upheld the tradition of finding love in India, my journey into matrimony had strayed much further afield. The object of my affections came not from Delhi, nor Bombay or Chennai. In fact, she did not hail from anywhere in South Asia. Instead, I had fallen in love with an Australian: a beautiful blonde Sydneysider who regularly travelled to Delhi on business – ‘the Aussie knicker lady', as she had become known to friends and colleagues, even though, as I had learnt by now, she was actually a full-blown fashion designer.

Sydney would be my next move, I boldly told him, even if it meant inflicting irreparable damage on my BBC career. My
boss, however, could hardly have been more accommodating. For the first time in over a decade, the Sydney posting was about to become vacant. Better still, I managed to land the job.

The next time we returned to South Asia together was to get married 18 months later, although we chose Sri Lanka over India. No country in the world does nuptials with more colour or panache, but we feared that the digestive systems of our overseas guests might not be robust enough to withstand the traditional four-day curry-athon. Sri Lanka became our India-lite alternative. The Blessed Land came with its own problems, not least the resurgence of the Tamil Tigers, who, in the run-up to the 60th anniversary of Sri Lankan independence, carried out a string of attacks on Colombo. But the plan was to get married in Galle on the far south-western tip of the country, which, as we tried to assure nervous guests, was akin to attending a wedding in Penzance at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Fortunately, they were an adventurous crowd, and they were ready to disregard a plethora of official travel warnings that placed a blanket ban on the entire island. Not one of our guests pulled out.

Held in the faded Romanesque splendour of the Anglican church in Galle, which had been given a lick of fresh paint the day before, the wedding could hardly have been more perfect. True, the electric organ that we had hired arrived only a matter of minutes before the bride, but fortunately Nik was on hand to untangle the soundman trying to plug in the wires. Ideally, the elderly vicar would have stuck with the vows we had agreed on beforehand rather than improvising with the
Book of Common Prayer
– my beloved wife never expected to utter the words ‘honour and obey' at her wedding, though there have been numerous occasions since on which I've reminded her that she did.

Likewise, we could have done without the threat of industrial action from the tuk-tuk drivers ranked outside our hotel, but once again Vivek's famed negotiation skills forestalled an escalation of the strike. The temperature also soared to over 45 degrees, which made it feel as though we were getting married in an exquisitely designed blast furnace.

Yet these small setbacks were immediately forgotten once the ceremony was over, and a cavalcade of decorated bullock carts, tuk-tuks and elephants set off in procession through the streets of old Galle. It marched to the brassy strains of a local wedding band led by a trumpeter who had seemingly modelled his technique on Dizzy Gillespie, right down to the near-exploding cheeks. Cocooned in this coastal citadel, the troubles of Sri Lanka seldom impinged. Just about the only time the Tamil Tigers entered the reckoning was ahead of the fireworks on our wedding night, in the strictly literal meaning of that phrase. The hotel had to warn the local army unit about the planned pyrotechnics, lest they be misconstrued as a seaborne attack from the Tamil Tigers.

Our honeymoon in the Maldives is worthy of mention if only because of the correspondent blagging that helped make it happen. Told that all the flights between Colombo and Malé had sold out, I suggested out of desperation that my travel agent mention to the booking clerks at Sri Lankan Airlines that I was a personal friend of the president's. This was a brazen lie, of course, but it helped make sense of the red-carpet VIP treatment lavished upon us at the airport after two premium seats miraculously opened up. Not only were we rushed through immigration and customs, which usually presented something of an obstacle course for departing journalists, but we were ferried everywhere in our very own golf buggy and treated in the executive lounge with near-regal deference.

On our return, however, it appeared that we had been rumbled when an officious-looking member of the ground crew boarded the special minivan that had arrived to take us from the tarmac to the terminal building and demanded that we identify ourselves. Trepidatiously, we raised our hands, fully expecting to be frogmarched off. Instead, the woman barked at the other business-class travellers to immediately exit the bus so we could complete the 30-metre journey in unencumbered luxury.

‘South Asia always delivers' used to be our unofficial motto, as we went from country to country and from story to story. Never was that phrase more redolent with meaning than on the day that I married my wife, and the search for an Indian bride came to such happy fruition.

Never before had I arrived in a country with such a clear and resolute sense of how I planned to report on it. Determined to avoid ravenous sharks, randy koalas and rampant cane toads, I decided there would be no Antipodean animal stories. Nor would Crocodile Dundee-like characters force their way onto our airwaves, however many times they cried strewth, crikey or bonza. Rather than shoring up Australia's creaky stereotypes with more buttressing, I would attempt to target them with a wrecking ball.

Then, within days of touching down in Sydney in September 2006, a stingray lanced Steve Irwin in the heart, and his memorial service in Queensland became my baptism.

The setting was his beloved Crocoseum at Australia Zoo on the Sunshine Coast, where thousands had gathered to celebrate the adventurer's outsized personality and underdog success. Zoo hands lined the edge of the arena, cradling an assortment of Antipodean creatures in their arms – koalas, baby crocs and goannas. An elder from the local Gubbi Gubbi people, flanked by her two sons, whose bare chests were smeared with tribal decorations, delivered a eulogy in her native tongue and then led mourners in an ancient ‘Coo-ee' wail.

John Williamson, the great outback balladeer, sang his most famous anthem, ‘True Blue', with the back of a ute serving as his stage; while a member of The Wiggles, who was sombre by his own standards but frenetically upbeat nonetheless, sprang forward wearing his trademark sky-blue skivvy to announce himself as the master of ceremonies. Thousands of mourners, bathed in brilliant white sunlight, watched from the terraces of the outdoor stadium, wearing mirror shades, zinc cream, open-neck shirts and safari fatigues. Khaki had temporarily become the new black.

Beamed in from New York – another hostile environment that held no fear for the Crocodile Hunter – the movie star Russell Crowe spoke first. ‘You were headline news on CNN for a week,' said Crowe, conferring upon him that most treasured of Australian accolades: international recognition. ‘There's not many zookeepers who could command that sort of attention, mate.'

Then, with their own video tributes, came other Hollywood celebrities. ‘America just flipped for him,' opined the actress Cameron Diaz. The singer Justin Timberlake testified both to the warmth of Irwin's personality and the cold commercial calculation of the television executives who had put together the service. ‘I may have only really spent a day with you guys,' he said, confessing to only the briefest of acquaintances, ‘but it was a day I'll never forget.'

Stepping before the Crocoseum, Prime Minister John Howard could boast a deeper friendship and spoke of a patriotic, hardworking, brave, family-orientated model citizen, a ‘remarkable man' and a ‘remarkable Australian'.

But the men who knew Steve Irwin best, from the days when he was a local oddball rather than a global sensation, were his mates – brave men now struggling to contain their emotions. His
best friend, Wes Mannion, wept as he described the moment that sealed their mateship: the day when Irwin saved him from the gaping jaws of a monster croc in the swamplands of northern Queensland. ‘I'll miss you, mate,' said Mannion, before breaking down.

Then came Steve's father, Bob, the founder of what was then called the Beerwah Reptile Park and the animal lover who imbued his son with such a fierce spirit of adventure. ‘Please don't grieve for Steve,' he said, battling back tears. ‘He's at peace now. But I'd like you to grieve for the animals. The animals have lost their best friend they ever had – and so have I.'

All this served as prelude for Steve Irwin's eight-year-old daughter, Bindi, who appeared with her hair tied in pigtails and a jagged crocodile tooth dangling on a chain around her neck. With her finger gently tracing the words printed on her script, and a Madonna-style microphone amplifying her already confident young voice, the pint-sized Bindi described a surely unique father– daughter relationship in which they ‘filmed together, caught crocodiles together and loved being in the bush together'. Then came her pay-off: ‘When I see a crocodile, I will always think of him.'

As the service came to its set-piece end, John Williamson reprised ‘True Blue', while Irwin's mud-splattered ute was loaded up with his crocodile net, an olive-green sleeping mat and his surfboard. Then, the vehicle was driven at hearse-like pace out of the arena through an honour guard of zookeepers standing with their heads bowed. With that, other members of the Australia Zoo family converged on the arena, carrying wreaths of bright-yellow sunflowers, which they placed on the ground as Williamson reached his coda. Finally, a boom-mounted camera swept from
ground-to roof-level, like some woozy giraffe aroused from its sleep, enabling viewers to see what the sunflowers spelt out: the Crocodile Hunter's raucous catchcry, ‘CRIKEY'.

As the mourners streamed out of the Crocoseum, past a tribute wall festooned with flowers, stuffed animals, national flags, rugby balls, inflatable crocodiles and a washing line full of khaki shirts daubed with felt-tip tributes, I asked them to share their thoughts. ‘It's a bloody shame. We've lost a really good bloke,' said a local man bedecked in the national colours, with two flags in his grasp, one fastened on his black cowboy hat and three transferred onto his maudlin face. ‘This has been the most emotionalist day of my life.'

Next to him was a pair of identical twins, who spoke with near-perfect synchronicity: ‘The animals have lost a beautiful icon. We broke down when we saw his white truck being driven out.'

A young mother chirpily recalled the day her young toddler managed to perform potty duties without mishap. In celebration, she told her boy he could call anyone in the world. ‘I want to call the Croc Hunter!' came his exultant cry.

Finally, we interviewed a woman who had queued for 20 hours for her ticket, who had come wearing a safari hat decorated with the words ‘Crocs Rule'. ‘I'm hoping this will be closure,' she said, adopting the modern-day argot of collective grief, ‘but I don't think so.'

If initially I had viewed Irwin's death as something of a personal affront, the three weeks between his death and his memorial could hardly have been more useful for such a tenderfoot correspondent. There was the character of the public mourning. Not being the type of people to dwell too long on bereavement,
the reaction when the news first came through from northern Queensland, where Irwin had been filming the latest instalment of
The Ocean's Deadliest
, was measured and fairly muted. No Diana-style overreaction here.

Over the next 48 hours, however, the public mood shifted discernibly, as news came through from abroad of a stronger reaction in America and Britain, where Irwin was arguably a much bigger star. As the Australian public watched foreign fans in an advanced state of sorrow, Irwin's death became a much more emotionally significant event in his homeland. Perhaps Australia's competitive instincts might even have been aroused.

The pilgrimage to Australia Zoo also gathered pace, with the tribute wall starting to take up more of the car park. Little-known country and western singers brought out Steve Irwin tribute songs – much to the annoyance of his rights-conscious management team – and a trail of mutilated stingrays, at least ten of them, were found along the Queensland coast, killed in an apparent string of revenge attacks.

Television channels changed their schedules to accommodate his death, the current-affairs shows mounted live broadcasts from Australia Zoo (one featured a presenter resplendent in a safari suit with a lizard perched on her shoulder) and the networks enjoyed a ratings bonanza. Indeed, the only program that week to outperform the fast-assembled Irwin tribute programs was the fly-on-the-wall documentary
Border Security: Australia's Frontline
, which hinted at a quite different story altogether.

The main reason why Irwin's death became so engrossing, however, was that it fast became an intellectual event: part of that perennial debate, long-running and anguished, over Australia's national identity. Arguably an even more confronting figure
in death than he was in life, the question of his contribution to Australian life became the subject of an ever more rancorous quarrel. It began as an argument between those who saw him as the living embodiment of some of Australia's most celebrated values – courage, resilience, humour, larrikinism and mateship – and those who bridled at how this caricature of a man had become Australia's most bankable global brand ambassador.

In the hours after his death, Russell Crowe had set the ball rolling by describing him as ‘the Australian we all yearn to be'. But then came a counterblast from London from one of the country's cultural castaways, and a woman who could once have laid claim, like Irwin, to being the world's most famous Australian. In the pages of
The Guardian
, Germaine Greer launched a ferocious attack on Irwin for spawning ‘a whole generation of kids in shorts seven sizes too small' who would ‘shout in the ears of animals with hearing ten times more acute than them'. Deliciously, there was also a political edge to Greer's assault. Irwin had not only lauded John Howard as ‘Australia's greatest ever prime minister', she complained, but only a few months before had also enjoyed a ‘gala barbecue' with George W. Bush.

Now, posthumously, the wildfire warrior had become a cultural warrior, and his fellow Queenslander, the author John Birmingham, leapt, Irwin-like, to his defence. Birmingham started by savaging Greer – a ‘feral hag' and a ‘poorly sketched caricature of a harridan'. Then he skewered the ‘inner urban elite', which had viewed Irwin as just a ‘fucking moron' and, worse, a ‘cashed-up bogan'.

Birmingham predicted that Irwin's death ‘may become our very own Kennedy moment', and that he would take ‘his place in the mass cultural afterlife next to JFK and Princess Di'.

The writer found an echo on the floor of the New South Wales parliament, during a debate on a motion condemning Germaine Greer for her anti-Irwin tirade. According to the Liberal MLC Charlie Lynn, she was nothing more than a ‘radical, left-wing, hairy-armpitted feminist' on the hunt for publicity. ‘It was a sad and sorry day for the left-wingers and the terrorists,' he added, to be confronted with the groundswell of sympathy for an authentic Australian hero. ‘They hate anything to do with Australia, and they cannot understand what it is to be Australian.'

The argument over Irwin had fast become a proxy battle between the urban elites and, seemingly, everyone else. Andrew Bolt, a columnist at Melbourne's
Herald Sun
, spoke witheringly of a ‘cultural class that feels threatened by blokes in work boots who shout “crikey”'.

But the urban elites hit back. ‘Irwin's death provided a trigger for a gratuitous outpouring of hatred directed at the “elites” who found his antics embarrassing, especially when they were represented as authentically Australian,' opined Clive Hamilton, the then head of the Australia Institute. ‘It's the new face of the cultural cringe – we canonise anybody who makes it in the US or Britain no matter how lowbrow the performer.'

Perhaps this was precisely the kind of verbal stoush that Steve would have wanted, and a fitting requiem. Unknown to most, three years before his death he had declared himself to be a conservationist not only of Australian wildlife but also of the country's colloquialisms. His grandfather and great-grandfather had fought and died for Australia, he had said back in 2003. He uttered each crikey, strewth and fair dinkum in their honour. ‘They didn't fight on the frontline and get shot at by the enemy for us to forget who we are,' he declared. ‘They weren't saying
holy smokes or goddamn. They were saying crikey, strewth, fair dinkum, have a go ya mug. That's what they were saying, mate.' Evoking the Anzac spirit, the most solid of sentimental buttresses, he concluded, ‘I want to speak Australian, mate, because I believe that's what they fought for.'

What I was witnessing, then, was Australia's very own clash of civilisations: not so much the bush against the big cities but the battlers against the elites, and the lowbrow against the high. For a newly arrived foreign journalist, it was hard to think of a more instructive initiation. The stereotypes I had set out to avoid had become the subject of feisty debate. The stereotypes
were
the story.

Admittedly, not much of this dissonance came across in our coverage. The bosses in London, whose kids were traumatised by the death of their beloved Crocodile Hunter, saw Steve Irwin as a great Australian hero, and his memorial service as a fittingly Antipodean send-off. They especially liked the idea of Diana-lite mourning, and the sight and sound of hardbitten Australian cobbers temporarily succumbing to their emotions. On television especially, we pretty much delivered the consoling certainties that were expected, from the elephants sauntering into the Crocoseum to the tribute wall of khaki shirts. Like the rest of the world, we loved this orgy of Australiana.

By the time we drove back to Brisbane along a road that would soon be renamed the Steve Irwin Way, even the memorial service had become a matter of contention. The debate centred on whether it could be described as authentically Australian at all. In its big box office staging, there was a showiness, even a brashness, that was at odds with the usual preference for understatement and muted ceremony. The ute and exotic animals became props
in a production choreographed with an American audience in mind. Unlike the funeral, say, of Sir Donald Bradman, the service was not even televised in its entirety on free-to-air channels in Australia, since the global rights were held by the US behemoth Animal Planet.

Besides, this paean to the bush had been put together by Irwin's business partner, the Brisbane-based television impresario John Stainton, who admitted during his oration at the service to being a self-confessed ‘city slicker'. Arguably, then, it owed more to Oprah than to the outback. Then came the counter-argument: the easy embrace of imported idioms, the idolatry of the bush from inhabitants of the cities, and the desire to impress audiences in America and Britain were the very things that made the memorial so faithfully Australian.