Australia: The Culture of Distance - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 283

Figure 19.1. Map of Australia
Australians are famous for their breezy, informal manners and their gift for slang: bar-
bie for barbeque, roo for kangaroo, mossie for mosquito, arvo for afternoon, Oz for Aus-
tralia, and, of course, Aussie for Australian. Australia is also famous for its beliefs and
myths. Australia is an urban and suburban nation where white-collar workers outnumber
blue-collar. Even so, Australians cherish the idea that theirs is still a frontier society, where
hardy folk brave the rigors of the outback and the bush and where, at heart, most every man
is the movie hero, Crocodile Dundee. [251]
Everything runs backward in Australia, goes the old saying. The platypus is a mammal
that lays eggs. Summer in London is winter in Australia. The white swans of Europe are
black in Australia. In most of the world, trees shed their leaves in the autumn; in Australia,
trees keep their leaves but shed their bark. Australia has birds that cannot fly and flowers
that have no scent.
Eons ago, Australia was part of a huge land mass that geologists call Gondwanaland.
Sometime between 350 and 200 million years ago, the land mass broke up and Australia
drifted away, taking along plants and animals found nowhere else in the world: the
kangaroo, the wallaby, the platypus, the wombat, and the eucalyptus. Ayers Rock, near
Alice Springs, dates from the Gondwanaland epoch. It is the oldest and largest monolith
on the planet. Sacred to Australia's first people, the Aborigines, it is also an awesome tour-
ist site. Ayers Rock (returned to native jurisdiction) now carries its original name, Uluru.
Uluru rises as tableland to 318 feet above the desert floor and has a circumference of eight
kilometers, or almost five miles. A sandstone formation laced with feldspar, Ayers Rock
changes colors during the day and in different weather, shifting from blue to glowing red.
Seeing the color change makes it easy to understand why native Australians imbued it with
sacred powers and status.
AUSTRALIA DISCOVERED
Long before Australia was discovered by Europeans, the idea of a great, unknown continent
had been surmised. But for all the wrong reasons! Terra Australis Incognita (“unknown
land of the south”) was presumed to exist in order to balance the weight of continents in the
northern hemisphere. Chinese traders may have ventured to the city of Darwin in the early
1400s. Europeans began arriving two centuries later. In 1644 Abel Tasman (whose name-
sake is Tasmania), flying the flag of the Dutch East India Company, explored the coast of
northern Australia, naming it New Holland. But pride of place among the early navigators
belongs to James Cook, an extraordinary man. He was born in 1728 to a father who was a
foreman on a large estate. At 17, James was apprenticed to a shop owner and taught himself
mathematics, navigation, and the running of a sailing ship. He soon qualified as a ship's