Nos voisins du dessous : Chroniques australiennes

Lorsque j’ai posé la question des Aborigènes (un grand projet de réforme agraire était à la une de l’actualité, justement), il s’est soudain montré évasif et un peu gêné.
— C’est un problème, a-t-il commenté en fixant son assiette.
— Là où j’enseigne, a timidement hasardé Daphne, les parents aborigènes, euh… reçoivent leur allocation chômage puis ils la dépensent immédiatement pour s’acheter de l’alcool et disparaissent dans la nature. Et c’est nous, les enseignants, qui devons… euh… qui devons nourrir leurs enfants. De notre poche. Sinon les gosses n’auraient rien à manger.
— C’est un problème, a répété Keith les yeux toujours fixés sur sa nourriture.
— Mais vous savez, a renchéri Daphne, ce sont des gens adorables, en fait. Du moins… euh… du moins quand ils ne boivent pas

Nous sommes partis à pied vers le musée de Sydney, un établissement récent aux lignes pures et élégantes qui parvient à donner l’impression d’être à la fois intéressant et instructif tout en n’étant ni l’un ni l’autre. C’est le genre d’endroit où vous déambulez devant des vitrines mal éclairées, bourrées d’objets remontant à la première vague d’immigrants, dans des salles tapissées de pages de journaux populaires des années 1950, sans savoir très nettement ce qu’il faut en conclure.

Depending on which sources you consult, the Great Barrier Reef covers 280,000 square kilometers or 344,000 or something in between ; stretches 1,200 miles from top to bottom, or 1,600; it is bigger than Kansas or Italy or the United Kingdom. Nobody can agree really on where the Barrier Reef begins and ends, though everyone agrees it's awfully big. Even by the shortest measure, it is equivalent to the west coast of the United States. And it is of course an immensely vital habitat- the oceanic equivalent of the Amazon rainforest. The Great Barrier Reef contains at least 1,500 species of fish, 400 types of coral and 4,000 varieties of molluscs, but those are essentially just guesses. No one has even attempted a comprehensive survey. Too big a job.
Because it consists of some 3,000 separate reefs over 600 islands some people insist that it is not a single entity and therefore can not accurately be termed the largest living thing on earth. That seems to me a little like saying that Los Angeles is not a city because it consists of lots of separate buildings. It hardly matters. It is fabulous.

Flies are of course always irksome, but the Australian variety distinguish themselves by their very particular persistence. If an Australian fly wants to be up your nose or in your ear, there is no discouraging him. Flick at him as you will and each time he will jump out of range and come straight back. It is simply not possible to deter him. Somewhere on an exposed portion of your body is a spot about the size of a shirt button that the fly wants to lick and tickle and turn delirious circles upon. It isn't simply their persistence, but the things they go for. An Australian fly will try to suck the moisture off your eyeball. He will, if not constantly turned back, go into parts of your ear that a Q-tip can only dream about. He will happily die for the glory of taking a tiny dump on your tongue. Get thirty of fourty of them dancing around you in the same way and madness will shortly follow.

Despite the experience with rabbits, dozens of other foolish introductions were made. [...] Camels were used to build the railway from Adelaide to Alice Springs, but were set free when the work was completed. Today 100,000 of them roam the central and westerns deserts, the only place in the world where one-humped dromedaries exist in the wild. Across the country there are up to five million wild donkeys, a million or more wild horses (called brumbies) and large numbers of water buffalo, cows, goats, sheep, pigs, foxes and dogs. Feral pigs have been caught in Melbourne suburbs. There are so many introduced species, in fact, that the red kangaroo, once the largest animal on the continent, is now only the thirteenth biggest.

No, the mystery of cricket is not that Australian play it well, but that they play it at all. It has always seemed to me a game much too restrained for the rough-and-tumble Australian temperament. Australian much prefer games in which brawny men in scanty clothing bloody each other's noses. I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bat to hit each other.
And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it.

There were shops here of types that I hadn't seen in years- fix-it shops ans little electrical shops, bakeries, cobblers, tea rooms- and sometimes they sold the most extraordinary combinations of goods. At the far end of the main street, I came across one place so exceptionnal in this respect that it stopped me in my tracks.
It was a shop that sold pet supplies and pornography. I am quite genuine. I stood back to stare at the sign, then peered through the window and finally stepped inside. It was a smallish shop and I was the only customer. On a raised platform about halfway bat sat a man beside a cash register, reading a newspaper. He didn't say hello or make any acknowledgement, which seemed odd - very un-Australian - until I realized he was being discreet. I imagine most of his customers do what I was doing now: wander around showing an unwonted interest in catnip and flea powders, pausing from time to time to study the labels on canisters of fish flakes and the like, before ending up, entirely by accident, at the back of the shop, in the heavy breathing section. Remarkably, this is what happened to me now.

Two of the leading explorers of the nineteenth century were called Sturt and Stuart and their names are all over the place, too, so that you have constantly to stop and think, generally at busy intersections where an instant decision is required, "Now did I want the Sturt Highway or the Stuart highway ?" Since both highways start at Adelaide and finish at places 3,994 kilometres apart, this can make a difference, believe me.

[Sydney's] capacity for mediocrity cannot be better illustrated than by the fact that where the Opera House now stands, on as fine a situation as water and land can afford, was then the site of a municipal garage.

For nearly 300 years explorers had been looking for a conjectured southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita- some commodious mass that would at least partly counterbalance all that land that covered the northern half of the globe. In every instance one of two things happened : either they found it and didn't know they had or they missed it altogether.
[...]
The Dutchman Abel Tasman was sent to look for the fabled South Land and managed to sail 2,000 miles along the underside of Australia without detecting that a substantial land mass lay just over left-hand horizon. Eventually he bumped into Tasmania (which he called Van Diemen's Land after his superior at the Dutch East India Company), and went on to discover New-Zealand and Fidji, but it was not a successful voyage. In New Zealand, Maoris captured and ate some of his men- not the kind of things that look good in a report- and he failed to find anything in the way of the riches. On the way home he passed within sight of the North Coast of Australia, but, disheartened, accorded it no importance and sailed on.