By the second week in Australia, I had found and embraced my routine. Every morning we awakened at dawn, made cowboy coffee off the tailgate of Reggie's truck, struck the tents and took off. The beauty of it was we never had any destination. It didn't matter. We were in no hurry. We had 'no worries.'

    I learned that "no worries" was practically an Aussie Motto--wherever we went, the advice and admonition was always the same. "No worries, mate," and they did their best to live up to their words.

     Words, however, often kept me a bit confused and bewildered. It's like...those Australians have a different word for everything. "Cookies" are "biscuits" and "trucks" are "utes" and--get this--a "dust devil" is a "willy willy."  I once heard an ABC Radio news reader solemnly announce that "a willy willy has struck the North Perth area with damaging consequences."

     Once a grizzled old trucker with yellow teeth told us he was taking his last road train across the Oodnadata Track and asked us to wish him luck. I said, "We'll be rooting for you." The bloke stopped suddenly, spun around on his work boots and said, "Hey mate, you root for yourself, ok? I don't need any bloody Yank to do my rooting for me!" As he stomped off and climbed into his rig, I turned to Reggie and said, "What the hell was that all about?"

     "Having a 'root' means having sex, you idiot.

     Likewise, I made the mistake of asking the guy at the petrol station where the "rest room" was.

     "Rest room? Do you need a rest, mate?" he deadpanned.

     "No," I stammered, "I need to urinate, to tell you the truth."

     "Ah...you got a drain the ol' dragon, eh? Well, I don't know where you Yanks go to syphon the python but we Aussies use a toilet ...it's around the back."

     Relieved and relaxed, we made our way slowly down the coast. Very slowly, in fact. Reggie is probably the world's most dedicated and consistent conservationist (he's cheap) and never lets his vehicle exceed 80 km/hour (about 48 mph). But we were in no hurry with "no worries," so our tortoise-like forward movement was only occasionally annoying.

     "NO WORRIES!" Reggie would exclaim regularly. "No Davey Murrays! No wuckin' furries!"

     Gubbins, the historian/economist, insisted that we listen each morning to the ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) and he was always trying to explain complex political issues to me. Like Malaysian monetary policy. In great detail.

     "That's fascinating," I would yawn.

     Every three hours we stopped for tea. Reggie would not patronize the occasional roadhouses we passed, not after he discovered the cost to be more than a dollar per cup (and no refills). Gubbins calculated he could brew the tea himself for less than 13 cents a serving. I'm sure he was right. To the penny.

     "Besides," he explained, "the Australians really don't know how to brew tea. They never prepare it quite the way I like it."        The truth is, I came to look forward to tea time, almost as much as Reggie, although I couldn't consume the massive quantities that Reggie gulped down.

     Or "quaffed," as Reggie liked to say. "Ahhh...this is the perfect quaffing temperature," he'd moan contentedly as he finished his fourth cup of the morning.

     No worries.

     But what about all these wuckin' flies?

     I'd never seen anything like it. I'd heard the stories, seen the bush hats with the dangling corks that Aussies supposedly wear to keep the flies at bay, heard the rumors that the bush fly was the national bird, and that those same flies had gained access via his ear canal to the brain of Prime Minister Howard and eaten all his compassionate parts, but then I experienced it for myself.

     The horror. The Horror.

     On a four day backpack trip into the Budawang Mountains, the flies found us and never said goodbye. Over the next few weeks, as they physically and mentally wore me down, I began to wonder if the continent was really inhabited by trillions of these evil insects, or if it was the same five to seven thousand that had "discovered" me back in New South Wales and stayed with me for the entire journey.

     But I hated them and they hated me. I have never seen such persistent living entities. Once, walking in to a strong headwind along the Southern Ocean coast near Melbourne, I thought I'd lost them. Then I looked behind me and saw that they were actually tacking in the wind to stay with me. No horror film I've ever seen measured up to the Reality of the Flies.

     Of course, the Australians, the white Aussies, that is, have no one to blame but themselves. When the Brits first laid claim to the continent, flies hardly had a foothold, simply because most of the native fauna possessed very efficient kidneys in this hot and hostile climate and their pellet-like feces were poor hosts for flies to lay eggs.

     But when the "bloody Pommes" arrived (to borrow a popular derisive description of their ancestors), they brought their Holstein cows along too, and with them, subsequently, billions of wet, soft, mushy meadow wafer breeding areas. The flies were ecstatic and have been for 200 years. Add to the more than suitable environment for eggs, a temperate climate where it rarely freezes and flies may some day control the Parliament. Some think that might be an improvement.

     Still, the flies did go away at night, although I never figured out just where they went, and to be fair, not all of Australia was as bad as most of it.

One glorious evening, we camped nearly fly-free just down the coast from a small community called Bateman's Bay. Reggie prepared one of his curry dishes and after dinner, he went for a stroll along the beach, while I performed my specialty, washing the dishes.

     Afterwards, I found him with four guys from town. They all had fishing poles and cans of a beer called Toohy's Old, kept cold in their little neoprene stubby holders. Jeff was nursing a beer himself. I introduced myself to Ted, Bobbie, Dougie and Larry. Ted said, "Hey Little Man, do you want a beer?"

     Well...yes I wanted a beer, I thought, but why is he calling me Little Man? I'm not so short as to incur that kind of abuse. I mean, 5 feet 8 inches is a respectable height. Who is this jerk, I wondered? We've barely met.

     Then Ted turned to Larry and said, "Hey Little Man, are you ready for another beer too?"

     "Sure Little Man," said Larry to Ted, "But give me a Fosters this time."

     Dougie walked up. "Did Little Man drink the last Fosters, Little Man?"

     Ted started to answer. Although it was hard to tell, I think Dougie was talking to him. But Larry jumped up and said, "Yeah, Little Man, what are you going to do about it?"

     Dougie laughed and said, "You're lucky I'm in a good mood Little Man."

     It became apparent that we had fallen in with a group known among themselves at least as the Little Men, although they varied in height by more than a foot. All of them were cordial and interested in our trip. One of them, Bobbie, had been to the States recently, to Boise, Idaho, in fact. And it was plain to see that Ted, Dougie, and Bobbie were there to fish and drink and have a good time.

     I came to appreciate the casual way many Aussies embrace their pastimes. An activity like fishing is a social experience more than anything else. They haven't been seduced by the very American "You must have the outfit" Syndrome. They don't care if they look silly or don't have top notch gear. They're not there to impress anybody; they just want to enjoy themselves and drink massive quantities of beer.

     Product marketing, the packaging of fun itself, is slowly making its way into Aussie Life, but it doesn't own them yet. They still have a little time left to be human.

     Back to the Little Men...

     But what was the deal with Larry? He'd been examining us closely, I'd noticed. Almost squinting at us, it seemed. Finally he said, "So what do you think of the aboriginal situation over here? Do you think they're a bunch of dole bludgers? Or are you a couple of bleedin' hearts?"

     Every Eden has its dark sides. I'd just found one of Australia's.

     The story of the Aboriginal people of Australia since 1788 is as tragic and brutal a tragedy as anyone can imagine. Its parallels to the plight of the Native Americans in the United States during the last half of the 19th century are striking.

     When James Cook sailed into Botany Bay under the Queen's flag in 1770, it is believed that as many as half a million Aboriginals occupied the Australian continent. More than 600 scattered tribes lived in remarkable harmony with each other, despite significant language and cultural differences, for more than 40,000 years. They were a spiritual people, tied to the land by their own belief that they came from the land. Having been descended from a plant or an animal, they knew they would return to that state some day. And so they treated the land with the love and reverence they might give their mothers and fathers. Indeed, the land they nurtured and loved might well be their parents.

     Cook saw something in the lifestyle of the Aboriginal people that no one else even considered at the time. Reporting to the Queen, several months later, Cook made a remarkably progressive observation:

     "They may appear to some to be the most wretched people upon the earth: but in reality they are far more happy than we Europeans: being wholly unacquainted not only with the superfluous but the necessary Conveniences so much sought after in Europe, they are happy in not knowing of them. They live in Tranquility which is not disturbed by the Inequality of Condition: The Earth and the sea of their own accord furnishes them all the things necessary for life; they covet not Magnificent Houses, Household stuff, they live in a warm & fine climate and enjoy a very wholesome Air...

     In short seems to set not value upon anything we gave them nor would they ever part with any thing of their own for any article we could offer them. This in my opinion argues that they think themselves provided with all the necessarys of Life and that they have no superfluities."  

     Cook's comments were met with derision and ridicule by the British press. And the newly arrived white Australians regarded the Aboriginals with contempt. Considered lazy and shiftless by the British (somehow they had managed to survive quite nicely for the last 400 centuries), the whites set out to destroy the Aboriginal way of life, and did a pretty good job of it. By the last quarter of the 19th Century, barely a hundred years after Cook's discovery, the Aboriginal population had been decimated by poverty, disease, disillusionment, and random acts of violence. From a stable population of almost half a million people, fewer than 20,000 Aboriginals still inhabited the Australian continent by 1860.

     Conditions remained deplorable. Aboriginals were confined to missions and reservations. Many were used for cheap labor. Still others clung to the edges of white society, with little or no hope of being assimilated into it.

     The Aboriginal people were only allowed to vote in federal elections in 1962 and it wasn't until 1967 that they were included in the census. Until then, just 30 years ago, they were not even counted.

      "So," Larry persisted, "Do you think they're a bunch of dole bludgers? It's a fair question."

     "Larry," I said, "I'm new here and I don't know this country's history that well. But why do you think they're a bunch of 'dole bludgers'?"

     "You should see them. They lay around drunk all the time, on the government dole. Why don't they work like I do?"

     I thought about his complaint for a minute. I'm not a bleeding heart, really. And I can appreciate how annoying someone like me can be, a tourist of all things, lecturing to Larry about his morals and those of his countrymen. But I was not prepared to capitulate. Not yet.

     "OK, Larry. Think about this for a minute. Imagine that you and all the whites that came to Australia are horses. And all the Aboriginals are kangaroos."

     "What are you talkin' about, mate? I ain't no horse."

     "No. I know that," I said. "This is just an analogy. Bear with me."

     Larry hunkered down in the sand and tried to understand.

     "Imagine that all the Aboriginals were kangaroos. For 40,000 years they had been living the life of kangaroos on the Australian continent and they were very good at it. Their culture flourished under those conditions.

     "Then the Whites came along and said, 'Look. We're horses and that's much better than being a kangaroo. From now on you must all give up your kangaroo ways and learn to live as horses.'

     "Well, the Aboriginals were superb kangaroos but they made lousy horses. They couldn't do it. That's what the Whites have been demanding of the Aboriginals for more than 200 years. We did the same to our Native Americans. We invaded their country, destroyed their culture, took away their livelihood, and then told them they were worthless. Do you see what I'm trying to say?"

     Larry poked at the ground with a stick, stared off to sea for a moment....

     "I'll tell you what I think. If I'm a horse, you're a horse's ass. I don't have any idea what you're talking about."

     "Well," I sighed, "then let's have another beer."

     I gave up beating my head against walls several years ago. Larry, I concluded, was a hopeless case.

     The beer did its job. The conversation dwindled as the fading light of this beautiful night and the Toohy's Old mellowed the mood. Finally, Ted announced it was time for the Little Men to head home. We stood to shake hands all around. Ted, Bobbie and Dougie had remained conspicuously quiet during the Larry Debate. But each of them nodded to us as we said our farewells and Ted said, "Don't pay any mind to Larry. You made some good points."

     Larry had wandered off to drain a few quarts of brew but wanted to bid us good luck as well.

     He took my hand and said, "Can I ask you one more question?"

     Good god, I thought. Now what?

     "Sure Larry. What's on your mind?"

     "You and your friend, Reggie...are you a couple of poofters?"

     "A couple of what?" I asked.

     "You know...poofters."

     "Larry," I said, "I don't even know what a poofter is."

     Ted cringed. "He's asking you if you two guys are homosexuals."

     I shook my head slowly and tried to laugh. "No, Larry, we're not,' I said, 'but we're certainly willing to learn."

    

NEXT TIME: Going to the Red Center...and Beyond.