Portrait of Australia (as a Young Man)
Photo: Dhani Muniz
An essay by Dhani Muniz: ‘What is Australia then? The name itself conveys a ruddy blankness. Deserts rising out of ocean like heat from a radiator. Twenty months since I’ve left India and the old-Old World of the East.’
“Enjoy your stay, mate,” says the border security officer in a cursory sort of way. It seems that the arrival of planes here at Melbourne Avalon Airport is nothing more than a distraction; the officers quickly resume their conversations. Who enters the country is of no real importance. Here, there is room.
Room—it hits me like a ton of nothing, all at once. It’s the first time I’ve left India in a year and eight months and the concept of space is a strange one indeed. Everyone makes a big deal out of leaving Europe and arriving in the Americas—such space! Such limitless expanse, every landscape thawing into the next, before the naked eye can even notice!
What is Australia then? The name itself conveys a ruddy blankness. Deserts rising out of ocean like heat from a radiator. Twenty months since I’ve left India and the old-Old World of the East.
Where are all the people?
Descending from dusty webs of sky, I greet the continent in person for the first time. Melbourne leans against the half-moon railing of the bay, a grizzled ex-prospector looking to bum a smoke or a dollar. My tired eyes are forming rings around the paper-flat skyline—the highway—drowsy parades of glow-worms inching along through the spiralling night. Even from above, the place exudes the warm breezy nonchalance that I’ve only ever witnessed in places of fast growth and late colonialism. The moon is hung on its side once more.
That’s the first thing that hits me; between America, India and here, I’ve now seen the moon at almost all its primary angles. This idea is strangely more satisfying to ponder over than the idea of having seen three different continents.
My birthday was a week ago, and this week, right on schedule, things are starting to heat up back home: The air starts to get thick with dust and humidity, the breezes get a little less cool and salty, a little staler and warmer (South Indian summers hit like British beer). Pretty soon getting up in the morning will be a chore, as will everything that involves movement or any form of bodily effort. It seems like the perfect time to switch hemispheres and seasons. A brown leaf, the first casualty of autumn, flutters down to a sidewalk standstill somewhere around Flinders St. Station.
But this doesn’t feel like just an everyday sojourn to visit some family and friends. There is something different at work here. My American side is pondering, quietly and endlessly, Why did they just let us out of the airport? No security check, nothing? Is something wrong? What’s going on? It smacks of the penal colony days. “Couldn’t care who you are, mate, you obviously fucked up somehow, just get in…”
Melbourne leans against the half-moon railing of the bay, a grizzled ex-prospector looking to bum a smoke or a dollar. Even from above, the place exudes the warm breezy nonchalance that I’ve only ever witnessed in places of fast growth and late colonialism.
Too many green lights can make you plenty uncomfortable if you’re not used to it.
RENT IS THEFT- SEIZE THE CITY- SQUAT THE WORLD, screams out a parking lot sign a block from Queen Victoria Market the next morning. I see this is a real hipster town. The CBD (Central Business District) juts rudely into the blue like a chorus of raised middle fingers. An exceptional blue, the blue one sees in south Australia. Maybe it’s the ozone layer—or lack thereof. Queen Vic Market, meanwhile, is an oddly self-contained little world. Tourists mingle with black-tie businessmen, and women in yoga pants and oversize sunglasses jog or walk with small, yapping dogs. Food trucks, hat stalls and bootleg DVD merchants mill around the same vicinity. The pace of the whole operation is multi-layered, and completely sluggish when you compare it to the busy streets just outside, as if someone plopped a regular old farmer’s market right next to a gaggle of skyscrapers.
It’s this constant duality that keeps a city like Melbourne forever teetering on the edge of being a metropolis. Sure, it’s still expanding at huge rates, it’s easily as expensive as your average Big City, and it’s the cultural capital of an entire continent. But the little incongruities keep piling up, until you’re not entirely sure of what you are, let alone where. The size of a place dictates the size you perceive yourself in it, and Melbourne stretches and condenses you like a roomful of funhouse mirrors.
Walking along the main drag is when it really hits me: the feeling, that anonymous city feeling that composes itself in real-time from a multimedia collage. Endless sensory stimulation. At dead eye-level, the flux of humanity that always seems to be walking in the opposite direction, parades of sunglasses, each with two suns apiece, anoraks, baseball hats, bare legs, earphones blasting, laughter, voices. Vietnamese, Greek, Lebanese, Urdu… and the particular hybrid that is Aussie English, a language that could be loosely described as British English stripped of its officiality by the long, open vowels of America. A proper crowd of urbanites, this is, but a waft of small-town breeziness still carries. The wind whistling down the avenues, the crowds, the trams, the traffic, the clouds navigating the narrow strips of sky, they all move with a weird languor. As if even the clouds know the city centre is receding fast into the wild continent.
My father lived here for almost twenty years before I was born. Now he’s used to lounging on a porch along the equator, steadily blowing cigarette smoke over the cashew tree boughs. But the adrenaline of a city he still knows like the palm of his hand is infectious. Streets and sidewalks flowing thick and fast.
“Look at this!” he exclaims, in spite of himself. “Now this is a city… You can feel it, right? A sea of humanity…like Manhattan!”
“Yeah, Manhattan after two and a half beers and a Vicodin maybe,” I correct him. No use getting too carried away. A young fellow from some ex-Soviet republic is on a street corner with an acoustic guitar, singing Radiohead songs. I throw a handful of change in his guitar case.
“So much life! People everywhere just playing music, it’s incredible…hasn’t changed, I tell you… I saw Men At Work busking on Swanson St., before they were even famous…”
So much life, but everyone seems to be driving out of the city as late afternoon approaches. “Why the exodus?” I ask.
“Not many people live in the city,” explains my cousin. She’s lived here her whole life basically.
“They all live in the suburbs… Coburg, Fitzroy, Richmond, Footsgrey…”
“Who lives in the city?” I ask, nonplussed.
She shrugs. “The Chinese.”
Who would want to move to a city just to be shunted to the suburbs? But apparently, it’s the thing to do, at risk of resigning to a small apartment with exclusively Asian neighbours. Apparently, it’s anathema to the average man with the slightest drop of blue English blood in his veins, no matter the criminal record.
See, Australia is simply too big and empty to have a definite identity imposed on it. No white man can come whip the outback into shape, except miners or landscape painters. Whoever risks poking their neck out this far is on their own, and are treated as such. What is Australian culture, besides a pale reflection of the Mother Country? A brighter reflection of its immigrants. America was always convinced of its greatness—Come, one and all!—waiting to welcome the hungry and sick into the fold. We’ll pick your fleas, give you a solid breakfast, and pack you off to the nearest unmanned newsstand! Australia hasn’t chosen anyone to reach out to. Anyone who comes, comes. And bless their soul if they can’t handle their liquor, or try indulging in unsportsmanlike conduct.
Conversation overheard in a Brit-style tea-shop, full Devonshire spread, mirrors on every wall, flowers embroidered on every cloth napkin: “Now you see, these Sudanese fellows are another matter…they have no sense of proper conduct. Heard about what happened down by the port the other day? Bunch of these guys ran after some girl, she had to hide, call the cops. Crazy shit. If this is how people are going to act here, we should just close the borders.”
Echoes of every disaffected white man on the planet, but in places like here and America, this is serious talk, an attack on the brotherhood; he who minds his own business finds friends. The next day, back on Little Lonsdale St. around lunch hour, I’m struck by the demographics of friendship at work. Indians and Chinese businessmen out for lunch together. Back home across the ocean, their respective armies are playing hit-and-run in the Himalaya. Here it’s just chuckling over dirty jokes and Thai food. Real fraternity, dig. A dashing Italian in a dashing Italian suit leads his African girlfriend through the throngs. “I could really go for some sushi,” I hear him exclaim dreamily as they pass.
Narrow alleys lead to markets and shopping plazas, opening on to marble atriums, revolving doors. We’re spat back out on the street. You could get lost here, if you had enough cash on you. We stop to watch another busker right outside H&M, a New Guinean wizard of the panpipes. A crowd is gathering.
Australia hasn’t chosen anyone to reach out to. Anyone who comes, comes. And bless their soul if they can’t handle their liquor, or try indulging in unsportsmanlike conduct.
“Beautiful sound,” a middle-aged blonde exclaims. Everyone else is silent. A tall, young Asian woman who could’ve been fashioned from crushed pearls and calligraphy ink sidles up beside me to watch in a mink coat and Prada heels. I check to see if she’s with anyone: sure enough, she’s arm-in-arm with a short, round man, also Asian, who happens to be one of the most extravagantly-dressed people you can come across in public. Impeccably tailored three-piece charcoal pinstripe suit, diamond chains dangling from his vest pockets, Rolex and patent-leather loafers gleaming dangerously in the sunlight. Walking around in broad daylight with an easy sixty thousand dollars sewn on your body… now that’s confidence. It’s something else too, but I can’t pin it down.
Why such a montage? Why, because the end of the world is always a treat for the senses.
A chill breeze blows in from the Port. A damn calm sea, the Bass Strait, but they say it can get vicious a few miles out. The Spirit of Tasmania is weighing her anchors, ready to make the nine to eleven-hour trawl to Devonport. This is my dad’s old neck of the woods. Small stucco villas and palm trees. Beautiful neighbourhood, but there’s something forced… That thing that confronts you, when you see something that logically should never have been tamed, but was whipped into shape anyway. Only a few kilometres down the Bay Trail (as the shirtless jogger runs), the beach thins out, gives way to craggy spits of ocean-polished rock brim-full of penguins on a good day.
Penguins! Right in the middle of civilization, right next to the suburbs and the high-rises and the empty warehouses, the Triads and the numbers rackets, the Starbucks and the organic supermarkets. St Kilda penguins, forever lounging on the pier for your viewing pleasure. That’s when you see for yourself, that it was all just an act. It was a half-hearted attempt at conquest, this country, and anyone can see who’s going to win out in the end.
Now it makes sense. Melbourne, from above, looks like they just cut and pasted it onto the bay. A loose and restless assemblage of bright lights and big dreams.
“You’ll haveta see Tasmania, too,” says Dad in a far-off voice. “It’s a whole other world… Doesn’t even pretend to be civilized.”
How right he was. Tasmania, the Alaska of the south seas, the last frontier. Hobart, even more of a tent city than Melbourne, the wood houses and dead-end streets climb steep, foggy hills like goats. Everything on a ledge, about to topple. And what clouds! Marauding armies of them, vaporous Huns bearing down on the poor harbour, blowing in from all directions, from the Strait, from Mt. Wellington. In a few minutes we’ll all be surrounded, scrambling blindly around the Wharf, grasping through the fog and bumping into fish-n-chips shops. They advance in looming alien formations, their underbellies reflecting the city with an ominous ruddy light. A mist of sly rain blowing in all directions. The ships are vanishing dots.
“Incredible, isn’t it?” Dad breathes. “When you realize where you really are… it’s like the Last Stop on the Line. You can try and keep going, but you won’t.”
So, we take off, due north. Back to the tropics.
***
Dhani Muniz is an Indo-Brazilian writer and musician. His writings focus on the subversive elements of human cultures and traditions, as well as the unifying elements of nature. Coming from a broad cultural background, and having lived in New York and Alaska as well as India, he strives to communicate a sense of rootlessness in his work—both in writing and music—as well as to effect a cross-pollination between his chosen disciplines. You can find him on Twitter: @suitetheexpatriate and Instagram: @suitetheexpatriate.
