Walkabout

 

 

Ask white Australians what 'walkabout' means and they will tell you it is an Aboriginal's furious fugue, shambling off the job or out of the shelter of the humpy, and heading into the outback. It is a sudden departure, a bout of madness almost — after which the Aboriginal chases his tail. But is it so?"

I was surprised to read Paul Theroux's description of the Australian movie "Walkabout" in his book "The Happy Isles of Oceania. He writes:

"No one I met in Australia or elsewhere who had seen [it] had forgotten the film's power or denied that they had been enchanted by it. After being released in 1969, it soon vanished, and had never been re-released ... Yet it still existed as a notable conversation piece in the 'Did-you-ever-see?' oral tradition among movie buffs, and it endures that way, because it has a simple tellable story. Those who have seen 'Walkabout' always speak of their favourite scenes — the opening, a salt-white tower block in Sydney with its swimming-pool smack against the habour; the frenzied picnic in the outback where the father tries and fails to kill his two children; the father's sudden Suicide againts a burning VW; the desperate kids faced with an immensity of desert; the girl (jenny Agutter, aged sixteen) peeling off her school uniform; the shot of an ant made gigantic in front of tiny distant kids — and every other creature in the putback crossing their path — snakes, lizards, birds, beetles, kangaroos, koalas, camels; the discovery of water under the quondong tree, after which the ordeal turns into a procession into paradise, as they all swim naked together in the pools of sunlit oases; the close call with the rural ockers; the wrecked house and its curios; the lovestruck Aboriginal's dance, ending in his suicide; the madman in the dainty apron in the ghost town howling at the children 'Don't touch that!' — and no rescue, no concrete ending, only a return to the tower block (it seems to be years later) on a note of regret."

The movie ends with a poem taken from A. E. Housman's collection "The Shropshire Lad", which explores the idea of nostalgia and growing old:

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again.

 

Paul Theraux wrote his book in 1992 which explains why he wrote, "... it soon vanished, and had never been re-released", when in fact the movie was re-released as a restored "director's cut" in 1997 and on DVD the following year. Jenny Agutter, who starred in many more movies, inclduing my favourite, "The Riddle of the Sands", is now 73 years old.

 

 

David Gulpilil, the first Aboriginal to star in a feature film, had had no training as an actor and had probably never seen a film in his life before "Walkabout" when he was about 15 years old. He then starred in "Mad Dog Morgan", "Storm Boy", "Crocodile Dundee", "The Tracker", "Rabbit-Proof Fence", "Ten Canoes", "Australia", "Satellite Boy", "Charlie's Country", "Goldstone", and a 2019 remake of "Storm Boy". And that's not counting the many documentaries and TV series. He died in 2021, sixty-eight years old. The things you remember when you read a book.

 

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What is halcyon?

 

 

Happiness was a red plastic chair when my "home" was a 9x9-ft donga tastefully decorated with PLAYBOY centrefolds of girls waxed to the point of martyrdom, when all my wordly possessions easily fitted into a 2ft-wide metal locker, and when my needs for comfort were satisfied by a red plastic chair on a shady porch (okay, a cold beer helped!)

 

Camp 6 Loloho, Bougainville Island
Click on image to go to the Bougainville Copper Project website

 

That was in the early 1970s when I lived and worked on Bougainville Island where it all began, the dreaming of a bigger and better future and the searching for wider and farther horizons. More than fifty years later, my needs for comfort are still satisfied by an old bleached-out red plastic chair on my jetty (under the OSASCOMP-rules, is "bleached-out" a colour-adjective or an opinion? Somebody put me out of my misery!)

Colour or opinion (or coloured opinion) aside, I sit on it and dream of the past, with my horizon no farther away than across the river. Right now my dreams are helped along by still reading Paul Theroux's book "The Happy Isles of Oceania" - after all, it's all of 730 pages thick, and I'm drawing it out by reading it slowly and chewing on every word.

It's an old habit of mine to have a dictionary beside me as I settle down to a quiet read. It's how I started to learn English over sixty years ago, and it's how I still learn English today. When I encounter an unfamiliar word, I don't just guess its meaning from the context: I want to know its precise meaning; its etymology, and how it can be used in a sentence.

Padma never bothers with a dictionary. She knows she has me. Just now she came out of the house where she'd been watching something on television, and called out to me from the verandah, "What is 'halcyon'?"

I spread out my arms towards the river, and replied, "This is halcyon!"

 

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Three Men in a Boat

 

 

Jerome K. Jerome's hilarious story of what is probably the worst holiday in literature has an air of delightful nostalgia and is still laugh-aloud funny more than a hundred years after it what first published with this preface:

 

 

And yet, it is full of wisdom as well, "... not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha'pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with - oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all! - the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal's iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

It is lumber, man - all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment's freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment's rest for dreamy laziness - no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o'er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombre-waving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the forget-me-nots.

Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.

You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water. You will have time to think as well as to work ..."

There is so much insight packed into this little book - useful information indeed, to say nothing of the dog! - that you almost regret having come to their final toast, "Here's to Three Men well out of a Boat!"

But that's a whole 184 pages later, so sit back and enjoy! - or lean back, close your eyes, and listen to the audiobook read by Hugh Laurie:

 

 

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Reading by the light of a kerosene lamp

 

 

I've just awoken from a peaceful night in "Melbourne", reading Paul Theroux's "The Happy Isles of Oceania", gazing at the slowly burning flame of a kerosene lamp, occasionally listening to the sounds of nature outside the door, and finally answering the call of nature before tucking myself under the doona for the night.

As I was reading by the slowly burning flame of a kerosene lamp, it gave me the strange feeling that this was the way people had read for almost all of the time that people have been reading: in darkness, slowly, and with full concentration. They didn't end each paragraph thinking it would be a good time to check their emails. Their phones didn't ring. The ambient hum of fridge and television was gone.

 

 

There was no distraction whatsoever except for the occasional pause to angle the book to catch the shifting shine of the light from the flame. The words themselves seemed less fixed and self-evident, as if I could read the same sentence countless different ways just by tipping the book forwards and back. It all had a curious and lovely intensity.

Reading by the light of a kerosene lamp is an experience of strange reverence. It is how I would like to read all my book all my nights.

 

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The fork in the road

 

 

In old age, Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" has become a bit of a regretful dirge for me, and it takes very little to make me go and recite "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference."

 

 

After countless detours in my life, there are no more forks ahead of me, except this one which I found on the way to the front gate. Padma must have dropped it on her way to the recycle bin, which is where she goes every so often with a box full of what she deems to be surplus stuff.

 

 

On closer inspection, I recognised is as the small fork I had kept when I flew Egypt Air. At the time I thought it small recompense for the ordeal of sitting aboard an ageing Boing 707 which, judging by the broken food tray and broken arm rest, should never have got off the ground in the first place, let alone with so many homeward-bound Egyptians nursing television sets and sewing machines on their laps as "cabin baggage".

I took the airline less travelled by and, luckily, survived it.

 

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