David Robbins - Walking to Australia

WALKING TO AUSTRALIA

To Dylan, Grant and Carla

WALKING
TO
AUSTRALIA

21st century excursions into humanitys greatest migration

David Robbins

To know, to get into the trut h of anything, is ever a mystic act.
Tho mas Carlyle

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by

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Copyright 2018 David Robbins

The right of David Robbins to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 978 1912575 497

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents

David Robbins has written extensively on South Africa, as well as on the continent beyond. His travel writing has also taken him to northern Europe, and for Walking to Australia he travelled in Ethiopia and Djibouti, the Middle East, India, South East Asia, Indonesia and Western Australia. He has published more than twenty books, and has won several major awards.

On the cover

Study for Herders in the Rain

Pam Gehrs-Carr

2012

Oil, tar and lime on canvas

50 x 50 cm

The artist was born in Malawi and raised in Zambia in one of Africas prolific wildlife areas, the Luangwa valley. This environment has informed her work on multiple levels as she draws on its history, indigenous cultures and biodiversity. Some of her black and white tar images are inspired by her research of the rock paintings of eastern Zambia.

Acknowledgments

The bulk of the extensive travel necessary for the writing of this book was made possible by funds generously provided from the estate of the authors close friend, Dr Kathleen D Gordon-Gray (1918 2012).

In 2016, a grant from the Academic and Non-fiction Authors Association of South Africa enabled the author to devote a month to the writing of the final sections of the manuscript.

Part one

The idea arises

Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly

than men who think that they are wiser by experience.

Henry David Thoreau

IT SURPRISED ME that my first contact with Australia, a place lying far away across the formless ocean, should have induced my urge to write about humanitys most fundamental adventure. I was no longer young: my head was not too easily turned. Nevertheless, there it was, like a freshly risen full moon, oddly enlarged and unavoidable, my desire to explore this one adventure in particular the fateful migration of modern humanity from the African cradle to the wider world.

Two distinct elements fed my fascination from the start. On one side lay the unfamiliarity of this new land, and the long distance I would have to travel if I chose the earliest routes from my own milieu in Africa. On the other stood a young boy, my grandson, and the depth of his remoteness. He lit my new ideas in an alluring glow. Indeed, my specific interests in journey and boy became almost immediately entwined. The journey presented itself as subject, the boy as a means by which the subject might be treated, and through which it might be illuminated. I began to understand how the slow movement of people from Africa to Australia and beyond stood on many levels as a prototype for every other human journey, not least the boys. Especially the boys, perhaps, because he was autistic. I imagined the rush of sensations he experienced without much hope of interpretation being similar to the problem of humanity itself when confronting the unknown.

These thoughts would expand with time. At first though, it was simply the glimpse of specific subject and specific treatment that comprised the roots of my entanglement: it was the thought of a journey through the ancient lands and the introverted boy.

I HAD FELT ambivalent when my first Australian visit was mooted. The place had seemed so far outside my habitual range. Indeed, it had sometimes struck me as not much more than a retreat where people went when they had grown tired of the rigours of other places more particularly, in my case, those rigours and periodic desperations pertaining to life at the southern end of Africa.

In the darker days of the 1980s, many thousands of South African families sold up and moved out, winging their way over the Indian Ocean and descending upon that far-removed continent with a thirst for new prospects and more importantly for overwhelming white majorities. Bumper stickers appeared in South Africa that referred to the chicken run Down Under. Reciprocal slogans in Australia advised newcomers to go away because were full. The mood in South Africa changed after the advent of democracy in 1994, but the flow of emigrants hardly slowed. Only their motivation for the ocean crossing changed. They were now not so much worried by political instability as by escalating crime. Many South Africans in Australia could look back on some atrocity a car hijacking, an armed robbery, a murder or rape of someone close that had contributed to their decision to make the move.

Having so far escaped this sort of harm, I had never toyed with uprooting myself and trying to replant in Australia. I therefore had no sense, when I finally visited, of winging my way from endemic uncertainty to the portals of a promised land. The purpose of my journey was more prosaic. It was to visit a son and his family, moved recently from Scotland to Western Australia. So I confess my enthusiasm was not particularly marked. I must even admit to a certain resignation: I would endure Australia for the sake of kith and kin.

THIS UNFAMILIAR WORLD had always seemed too peripheral to my perceptions of the structure of the world at large. At the centre of my personal view, to begin with, had been my birthplace on South Africas eastern seaboard. In my teens the entanglements between Africa and Europe, particularly as colonialism began to unravel, had occupied a central position. There was not much room for another continent entirely. I had read a few things about it though, and seen a few interesting films, and Perth seemed not too intimidating as we drove through flat suburban scenes and half-empty streets. Gardens contained patchy lawn struggling in poor soil; eucalyptus trees stood statuesque on open ground, their trunks peeling in white-and-tan streaks. Occasionally we glimpsed the broad expanses of the river as we drove, and sometimes boats with big outboard motors stood on trailers in the driveways or under trees on the larger properties. More noticeable was that the streets were clean: no hawkers at the intersections, no cabbage leaves and banana skins in the gutters, and no sign of any beggars.