Everywhere you go in Australia you sample oddity, the sense of whimsy and bloody-mindedness and barefoot carelessness that come out of a few people living in very great spaces and realizing that they can build their own little sub-cultures around them. Nobody’s looking over your shoulder in much of Australia and so, as in the American West, you enter a laconic and often echoing space where tall tales and short stories flower. And though even the cities in Australia seem to mainline this sense of being unbuttoned and free from concern, Broome, not surprisingly, is “so laid back,” as a woman in Perth told me, “it could fall over.”
The settlers who have migrated to this offshore settlement are here to step out of the rat race and live on their own idiosyncratic terms. The cabbie who picked me up after dark one night was a husky-voiced old broad who told me that she cleaned her car every day at 3:00 a.m. Another taxi-driver, who took me down the beach, flourished the tattoos and rowdy memories of one who had lived eleven years on an island in the Philippines, and three years in Indonesia. “Haven’t worn a pair of long pants in three years,” the driver of the town bus shouted back to me after giving me a fair reading of the day’s tides. “Don’t even own a pair of long pants any more.”
The strangeness, the intense beauty of the area, therefore, is offset–complemented and intensified–by the strangeness of its unnatural history, too. In the window of the local bookshop is an ad for a Medium Workshop led by a “clairvoyant spiritual counsellor who works with light-beings from the Angelic, Elemental and Multi-Dimensional realms,” words that have a different, and more shadowy, ring when you see the Abroiginals all around, who themselves seem to live in a parallel dimension, seldom part of the town’s business, rarely encountering a visitor except in a shouting confrontation. The Roebuck Bay Hotel has a “Drive-Thru Bottle Shop” next to it, and a bar that offers gambling and “Live Girls” (from 3-9 p.m. on Fridays only), behind a sign that says, “CLEAN AND TIDY DRESS AND FOOTWEAR REQUIRED.” The local Cineplex doesn’t even open on Mondays, and the town’s public toilets (in off-season, at least) are closed by 3 p.m.
Very soon, therefore, I felt I was living in a parenthesis, in some section of my life that couldn’t even be translated into the world I knew. My first night in town, I stumbled off to see “Phantom of the Opera” at the Sun Picture Gardens. A trip to the movies in Broome involves sinking into a canvas deck chair in an open space, the moon rising between the palms before you and a cat scuffling at your feet. Stir-fry specialties are served up at the concessions stand by Limpopo Gourmet, and until recently even Hollywood films were shown on a 1927 projector that required the young owner to change reels five times in a screening. As a sign in the snack bar will tell you, with characteristic Australian frankness, seating in the place was strictly segregated until 1967 (Europeans in the front rows, Chinese and Japanese in the second-class seats, and Malays and Aboriginals way in the back), and when “king tides” came into town, cinema-goers found themselves wading out into a river when the credits came up, the more gallant ladies among them carrying their men back home.
Deeper than all this, though, Broome marks a meeting, the strange brushing past, of whole visions of the universe; you are at a crossroads here, a convergence point (Roebuck Bay is one of the few places where the Dreamtime includes dinosaur footprints), and I felt myself back, often, in the very dialogue of immigrant seekers and a vast, almost overpowering wilderness that characterized the first moments of modern America. Australia, more than anywhere, is the place where humans still stumble upon, try to settle down in, a land so ancient and rich and unfathomable that there are crocodiles around Broome that go directly back to ancestors 250 million years ago (and the little town once had its own Tyrannosaurus Rex). Something archetypal happens in this place, where so-called civilization meets the wild, and our rational ideas, like the four-square settlements that people build here, come up against the engulfing open spaces of the subconscious.
The Outback begins about five feet after the last bus stop in Broome, and sometimes, getting off the local carrier and walking to the beach, I found myself in an almost vibrating emptiness, tromping across acres of red-dirt space that felt (as I had seen from the plane) like the Grand Canyon laid on its side and pushed in every direction. This is the domain of “tuart trees” and “dry snakeskin rivers,” as the incantatory, brawny Western Australian novelist Tim Winton has it, of boab trees found only in the Kimberley, and flowers shaped uncannily like birds (without the feet). Tsunamis regularly visit the coastline, and up to twelve times a year a cyclone passes through, one leaving the Sun Picture Gardens screen at a 45-degree angle.
People get lost in Broome, lose a hold on themselves, or get swept up by something outside of themselves. When I went into the Tourist Information office, I found the notice-boards full of warnings, and news of roads and resorts closed for the next three months (“ONLY NECESSARY VEHICLES”). At some point, in fact, I noticed that I was moving, in Broome, through a jungle of alarums. This is what to do if you are strung by a box jellyfish, said the signs at Cable Beach, and “Ants are a problem in tropical conditions,” said the notice by the tea-making machine in my motel room. I came to expect “Extreme Caution is Advised” warnings even at a golf club, and the reception desk in my motel closed down at 9:30 p.m., advising guests to contact the Broome Police if something came up after dark. “You’d better take some water when you go to Broome,” a kindly friend in Perth advised me. “The son of a friend of mine just went there, and his car broke down, and he died.”
The Aboriginal I’d met on my arrival was right, I began to think: most of us were never supposed to live in this wasting and magical emptiness. There is a shrill wind blowing through the town that makes one see the loose-limbed, tumbleblown existence of Australia in its essence here, “Closed Until Further Notice” signs put up in the cafes, “For Sale” notices in every other house. Everyone’s in motion here, as if the Aboriginals’ wanderings and Dreamtime had been passed down to the rest of us, and there is a wild sense of stepping out of something and into the archetypal order of the elements.
The meeting of the Outback and the tremulous blocks of human settlements is, famously, the defining theme of Australian mythology, as represented in many of the films that have become part of the global imagination (from The Last Wave and Walkabout and Picnic at Hanging Rock to Japanese Story and Rabbit-Proof Fence and Shame). Kids get snatched off by dingoes, demure little girls in frocks disappear, signs of an alien culture appear in the living-room. And I had never felt this collision so hauntingly as in Broome. The nearest McDonald’s, a local Aussie Vietnam vet told me, was six hours drive away, until the Golden Arches were erected recently not far from Broome’s grassy Oval. On Friday nights, the mayhem continued almost till dawn in the Nippon Inn and Tokyo Joe’s (“The Party End of Chinatown”). There is a startling sense, walking onto the beach or down one of the settlement’s roads, of having stumbled into a minimalist postcard where the only other living things are great swatches of primary colors, dirt-red and white and blue-green.
This is the distinctiveness of Australian life, I thought one day as I walked out of the local bookshop to see heavy black thunderclouds amassing over the ocean, while parts of the sky were still brilliant cobalt (“Usually it just follows the bay,” said the bookstore owner, unconcerned, an exile from New Zealand who had come here to step out of the predictable rut). Life can’t be squeezed into tight compartments; it’s outstretched, unraveled, laid out in the sun to dry. The downpour came down then, like the end of the world, and a few hours later the electrical storms above the mangrove swamps were offering wild illuminated flash prints of the clouds, natural daguerrotypes. I closed my door and went to sleep, and early the next morning stepped out into the hum of the wide-open spaces. You can hear the silences in Broome.