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.Well, I think that s kind of spooky,frankly.I appreciate, of course, that this was a filler item at the back I n a S u n b u r n e d C o u n t r y 181of a magazine and one shouldn t read too much into it, so let me of-fer a rather more compelling piece of temporal eccentricity.As I sat at the bar now I pulled out my one-volume historyof Australia by Manning Clark and dutifully plowed into it.Ihad only about thirty pages left and I would be less than candid ifI didn t tell you that I couldn t wait to have Mr.Clark and his ex-travagant dronings out of my life forever.Still, Australia s historyis an interesting one and I had a comfy stool and the prospect of asmuch beer as I wanted, so I wasn t unhappy.So I sat and read the rest of the book, and here s the thing.Itfinished in 1935.After 619 pages of the densest exposition, the bookterminates with the appointment of John Curtin as leader of theAustralian Labor Party on October 1, 1935.This is, let me stress,the standard, current, one-volume history of Australia the one towhich you will be directed in every bookshop in the land and itfinishes in 1935.That s sixteen prime ministers ago!I was so dumbfounded that I actually lifted the book over myhead to see if some pages had fallen out, then looked on the flooraround my barstool.But no.The book finished by design in 1935.Manning Clark died or yielded the final tortured spark of life, asI am sure he would have wished me to put it in 1991, so I wasprepared to excuse him the last decade or so of Australia s eventfulsaga, but I would have thought he would find space for, let us say,World War II.Although his history was written long after the war(specifically, between 1962 and 1987 as a series of six books, ofwhich I held the distilled essence), it contains not one mention ofthe most important event of the twentieth century.There is noteven a hint of gathering storm clouds.Nor does the text find roomfor the Cold War, Aboriginal land reforms, the emergence of amulticultural society, the fall of the Whitlam government, themove to become a republic, or the life and times of Bill Bixby,among rather a lot else.To cover this troubling gap, the publishers had introduced intothe present edition an afterword a coda written by the book seditor and abridger.This condensed the last sixty-five years ofAustralian history into thirty-four pages, which, as you can imag-ine, gave the whole a somewhat breathless and incidental flavor.And until the 1995 edition, it didn t even have that.Well, I find that extremely odd.That s all I m saying. 182 B i l l B r y s o nsighing, i closed my book and realized I was famished.Ac-cording to a sign on a door across the room, the Nambucca hada restaurant, so I wandered over to investigate, but the doorwouldn t open. Dining room s closed, mate, said one of the two guys at thebar. Chef s crook. Crook means ill. Must ve ate some of his own cooking, came a voice from thepokies alcove, and we all had a grin over that. What else is there in town? I asked. Depends, said the man, scratching his throat thoughtfully.He leaned toward me slightly. You like good food? I nodded.Of course I did. Nothin , then. He went back to his beer. Try the Chinese over the road, said his companion. It s nottoo bad. The Chinese restaurant was just across the road as promised,but according to a sign in the window it was not licensed to servealcohol and I couldn t face small-town Chinese food without thesolace of beer.I have traveled enough to know that a chef does not,as a rule, settle in a place like Macksville because he has a lifelongyearning to share the subtleties of 3,500 years of Szechuan cuisinewith sheep farmers.So I went off to see what else there might be inMacksville s compact heart.The answer was very little.Everythingappeared to be shut except one small takeout establishment called,not altogether promisingly, Bub s Hotbakes.I opened the door,briefly enlivening five thousand flies that had dropped by to seewhat Bub and his team were up to, and stepped inside, knowingin my heart that this was almost certainly going to be a regrettedexperience.Bub s had a large range of food, nearly all of it involving brownmeat and gravy lurking inside pastry.I ordered a large sausage rolland chips. We don t do chips, said the amply proportioned servingmaiden. Then how did you get like that? I wanted to say, but ofcourse I suppressed this unworthy thought and revised my order toa large sausage roll and something called a continental cheesecakesquare and went with them outside.I ate standing on the corner. I n a S u n b u r n e d C o u n t r y 183I take nothing away from Bub s culinary prowess, I trust,when I tell you that a large sausage roll and a continental cheese-cake square were not the most satisfying possible culmination to anight on the town even in as remote and challenging a spot asMacksville.Besides it was only seven-thirty in the evening.Iweighed my options TV back in the motel, a sunset stroll alongthe highway, or more beer in the Nambucca and toddled backinto the Nambucca.The two men at the bar had departed, and their place had beentaken by a lone woman who was engaged in some deep and earnestconversation with the barmaid, clearly involving gossip, judgingfrom their pinched and animated faces. Aw, he s all right in hisplace they just haven t dug it yet, I heard one quip dryly to theother.I acquired another beer and retired with it to my favored spotat the bar, where I cracked open my book of maps to see where ex-actly I stood.It had only begun to dawn on me in the last day ortwo just how much of this amazingly vast and ungainly country Ihad still to tackle.I had been driving around almost continuouslynow for four weeks and I had covered only the tiniest portion of it.What s more, I had done the easy parts the parts that are wellpaved and reasonably inhabited.Altogether Australia has 180,000miles of paved highway, enough to keep a dedicated driver occu-pied for about a year, but the great bulk of it is bundled into thepopulous eastern corridor.Elsewhere, over vast areas there is noth-ing.Not an inch of paved road exists along the nearly two thou-sand miles of indented coastline from Darwin to Cairns, whichmust make it one of the longest, not to say comeliest, stretches ofcoastline in the world not touched by highway.Similarly, no roadintrudes on the tropical lushness that stretches for five hundredmiles from just beyond Cairns to the tip of Cape York, Australia snorthernmost point and another area of superlative beauty.In thewhole of Queensland, an area into which you could comfortably fitmost of western Europe, just three paved roads venture into thestate s vast and arid interior, and only one provides an outlet tothe two-thirds of Australia that lies to the west
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