Nos voisins du dessous : Chroniques australiennes

' Seashells will kill you ?' he said. ' They've got lethal seashells here ? '
' There are more things that will kill you up here (in Cairns) than anywhere else in Australia, and that's saying a lot, believe me.'

' So which is better, ' I asked, ' Canberra or Surfers Paradise ? '
' Oh, Surfers by a mile. '
I raised an eyebrow. ' It's that good, is it ? '
' Oh, no, ' she said emphatically, amazed that I has misread her. ' Canberra's that bad. '

Although inland Australia has never been exactly verdant, much of the marginal land once experiences periods of relative lushness, sometimes lasting years, occasionally lasting decades, and it enjoyed a natural resiliency that let it spring back after droughts. Then in 1859 a man named Thomas Austin, a landowner in Winchelsea, Victoria, a little south of where I was now, made a big mistake. He imported twenty-four wild rabbits from England and released them into the bush for sport. It is hardly a novel observation that rabbits breed with a certain keenness. Within a couple of years they had entirely overrun Austin's property and were spreading into neighbouring districts. Fifty million years of isolation had left Australia without a single predator able even to recognize rabbits, much less dine off them, and so they proliferated amazingly.
[...]
The rabbits ate so much of everything that sheep and other livestock were forced to extend both their range and their diet, punishing yet wider expanses. As sheep yields fell, farmers perversely compensated by increasing stocking levels, adding to the general devastation.
The problem would have been acute enough, but in the 1890's, after forty unusually green years, Australia fell into a murderous, decade-long drought - the worst in its recorded history. [...]
The rabbits, meanwhile, hopped on. By the time science finally came up with a solution, almost a century had passed since Thomas Austin tipped his twenty-four bunnies out of the bag. The weapon deployed against the rabbits was a miracle virus from South America called myxomatosis. Harmless to humans and other animals, it was phenomenally devastating to rabbits, with a mortality rate of 99.9 per cent. Almost at once the countryside filled with twitching, stumbling, very sick rabbits and then with tens of millions of little corpses. Although just one rabbit in a thousand survived, those few that did were naturally resistant to myxomatosis, and it was resistant genes that they passed on when they began to breed again. It took a while for things to get rolling, but today Australia's rabbit numbers are back up to 300 million and climbing fast.
At all events, the damage of the landscape, much of it irreversible, had already been done. And all so some clown could have something to pot at from his veranda.

My one tip for you if you ever go to Canberra is don't leave your hotel without a good map, a compass, several days' provisions and a mobile phone with the number of a rescue service. I walked for two hours through green, pleasant, endlessly identical neighborhoods, never entirely confident that I wasn't just going round in a large circle. [...] I never saw another soul on foot or anyone watering a lawn or anything like that. Very occasionally a car would glide past, pausing at each intersection, the driver looking around with a despairing expression that said : " Now where the fuck is my house ? ».

So in 1891, the six colonies (plus New Zealand, which nearly joined, but later dropped out) met in Sydney to discuss forming a proper nation, to be known as the Commonwealth of Australia. It took some years to iron everything out, but on 1 January 1901 a new nation was declared.
Because Sydney and Melbourne were so closely matched in terms of pre-eminence, it was agreed in a spirit of compromise to build a new capital somewhere in the bush. Melbourne, meanwhile, would serve as in interim capital.
Years were consumed with squabbles about where the capital should be sited before the selectors eventually setled on an obscure faming community on the edge of the Tidbinbilla Hills in New South Wales. It was called Canberra, tough the name by then was often anglicized to Canberry.

Perharps it was the oxygen deprivation, but I was rather lost in my own world when Deirdre grabbed my arm just before I was about to go under again and said in a husky tone: "Look out ! There's a bluey".
Glenn took on an immediate expression of alarm. " Where ?"
"What's a bluey ?" I asked, appalled to discover that there was some additional danger I hadn't been told about.
"A bluebottle, " she explained and pointed to a small jellyfish of the type (as I later learned from browsing through a fat book titled, if I recall, Things That Will Kill You Horridly in Australia: Volume 19) known elsewhere as a Portuguese man-of-war. I squinted at it as it drifted past. It looked unprepossessing, like a blue condom with strings attached.
"Is it dangerous?" I asked.
Now before we hear Deirdre's response to me as I stood there, vulnerable and abraded, shivering, nearly naked and half drowned, let me just quote from her subsequent article in the Herald:

«While photographers shoots, Bryson and boogie board are dragged 40 metres down the beach in a rip. The shore rip runs south to north, unlike the rip further out which runs from north to south. Bryson doesn't know this. He didn't read the warning sign on the beach. Nor does he know about the blubottle being blown in his direction- now less than a metre away- a swollen stinger that could give him 20 minutes of agony and, if he's unlucky, an unsightly allergy reaction to carry on his torso for life.

"Dangerous? No, " Deirdre replied now as we stood gawping at the bluebottle. " But don't brush against it."
"Why not ?"
"Might be a bit uncomfortable".

Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline. I left Los Angeles on 3 January and arrived on 5 January. For me there was no 4 January. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn't tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of Earth, it appears I had no being.
I find that a little uncanny, to say the least. I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said : "Passengers are advised that on some crossings twenty-four-hour loss of existence may occur" (which is of course how they would phrase it, as if it happened from time to time) you would probably get up and make enquiries, grab a sleeve and say "Excuse me". There is, it must be said, a certain metaphysical comfort in knowing that you can cease to have material form and it doesn't hurt at all, and, to be fair, they do give you the day back in return journey when you cross the dateline in opposite direction and thereby manage somehow to arrive in Los Angeles before you left Sydney, which in its way, of course, is an even neater trick.

Ceux qui prétendent que les Anglais ont inventé le cricket uniquement pour rendre intéressante et palpitante toute autre forme d’activité humaine ont tort. Loin de moi l’idée de dénigrer un sport qui fait le bonheur de millions de gens – dont certains arrivent même à rester éveillés et à garder les yeux ouverts pendant les matchs – mais, franchement, c’est un jeu bizarre. C’est le seul sport qui inclut une pause pour le thé. C’est le seul sport qui porte le même nom qu’un insecte. C’est le seul sport où les spectateurs brûlent autant de calories que les joueurs (et même plus, s’ils sont un brin enthousiastes)

Je ne sais pas combien de fric vous auriez dû me proposer pour me persuader de devenir résident permanent de White Cliffs – sûrement pas loin du milliard, j’imagine –, mais ce soir-là, assis dans les superbes jardins en terrasses du motel en compagnie de Léon Hornby, le propriétaire, dégustant une bière fraîche et admirant le crépuscule naissant, j’aurais été prêt à vous faire un petit rabais.

J’avais lu des tas de récits sur des gens égarés ou ensablés dans l’outback, par exemple la mésaventure arrivée à l’explorateur Ernest Giles. Le malheureux avait passé des jours à errer, à demi mort de faim, sans une goutte d’eau, avant de rencontrer un bébé wallaby tombé accidentellement de la poche maternelle. « Je lui ai bondi dessus, relate Giles dans ses Mémoires, et je l’ai dévoré vivant, tout cru, encore palpitant – les poils, la peau, les os, la cervelle et tout. »
Et là je ne vous cite qu’une histoire qui finit bien. Non, croyez-moi, il vaut mieux éviter de se perdre dans l’outback