know a hawk from a handsaw.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
T he swaggie was an icon of my childhood, an archetype who represented an Australian trait: in his case the urge to wander. Close behind in the ranks of national types came the military veteran, the Digger, followed by the humorless moralist, or wowser, represented by those people who gelded the statues in Centennial Park.
To these, we added another, more disreputable figure: the ratbag.
A ratbag has been defined as “a troublemaker or someone causing havoc.” This misses the element of manic excess that makes him more treasured than deplored. For Australians, he’s proof that regulations made for the convenience of the many do not necessarily apply to the dissident few.
I owed my first trip away from Australia to a classic ratbag. A few Europeans “go native” when they encounter Australia’s limitless horizons, but I’d never seen the process up close until Ian, a young English academic friend, started acting oddly. With his wife, I watched in astonishment as he announced to startled colleagues that he was no longer a professor but instead the university’s resident wizard, a modern Lord of Misrule like those appointed at medieval festivals to make mischief and mock the sacred. At commencement, instead of joining the other academics solemnly precessing in academic robes, he turned up in a striped neck-to-knee Edwardian swimsuit and jumped into a vat of green Jell-O. After this and other excesses, his wife decided to return to Europe without him. I went with her.
I n 1987, British writer Bruce Chatwin published a book about walking in Australia. Called The Songlines , it was an instant critical and financial success.
Chatwin had that far-seeing thousand-yard stare I remembered from Ian, as well as the capacity to speak for hours, in flawlessly syntactical sentences, of matters about which he knew nothing at all. He had impeccable credentials as a pedestrian. He’d crossed Patagonia and written a book about it. Not a very accurate one, but an exhilarating read. He was also a tireless, mesmeric, and charming self-promoter who, socially, sexually, and intellectually, shared many characteristics with Lawrence of Arabia. Both were closet homosexuals with itchy feet and a casual way with the truth. For years, Lawrence maintained he’d been flogged and sodomized by a Turkish official during one of his clandestine expeditions in Arab dress. This was almost certainly a pornographic fantasy. Chatwin, equally fanciful, denied that his fatal disease was AIDS, contracted from one of his sexual partners, among them Rudolf Nureyev. Instead, he claimed to be suffering from an exotic fungal infection carried by spores in a Tibetan cave.
Chatwin and Lawrence wrote with a flourish of the world’s emptiest places, generally with an enthusiasm the locals didn’t always share. In Robert Bolt’s screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia , Feisal, king of the Arabs whose warring tribes Lawrence unites as an army, is bewildered by his motives. “I think you are another of these desert-loving English,” he says. “Doughty, Stanhope. Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert—and no man needs nothing .”
But Lawrence thrived on nothing. So did Chatwin. And if there was nothing in the nothing to write about, he made something up. In the case of Australia, it was a theory about walking. Aboriginals “going walkabout” didn’t, he claimed, do so randomly. Rather, they followed directions contained in songs learned from the tribal elders. These described a “labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines.’ ”
In the book, this is explained to Chatwin by a European emigrant he calls Arkady.
“Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song described the nature of the land over which the song
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, Hamlet
T he swaggie was an icon of my childhood, an archetype who represented an Australian trait: in his case the urge to wander. Close behind in the ranks of national types came the military veteran, the Digger, followed by the humorless moralist, or wowser, represented by those people who gelded the statues in Centennial Park.
To these, we added another, more disreputable figure: the ratbag.
A ratbag has been defined as “a troublemaker or someone causing havoc.” This misses the element of manic excess that makes him more treasured than deplored. For Australians, he’s proof that regulations made for the convenience of the many do not necessarily apply to the dissident few.
I owed my first trip away from Australia to a classic ratbag. A few Europeans “go native” when they encounter Australia’s limitless horizons, but I’d never seen the process up close until Ian, a young English academic friend, started acting oddly. With his wife, I watched in astonishment as he announced to startled colleagues that he was no longer a professor but instead the university’s resident wizard, a modern Lord of Misrule like those appointed at medieval festivals to make mischief and mock the sacred. At commencement, instead of joining the other academics solemnly precessing in academic robes, he turned up in a striped neck-to-knee Edwardian swimsuit and jumped into a vat of green Jell-O. After this and other excesses, his wife decided to return to Europe without him. I went with her.
I n 1987, British writer Bruce Chatwin published a book about walking in Australia. Called The Songlines , it was an instant critical and financial success.
Chatwin had that far-seeing thousand-yard stare I remembered from Ian, as well as the capacity to speak for hours, in flawlessly syntactical sentences, of matters about which he knew nothing at all. He had impeccable credentials as a pedestrian. He’d crossed Patagonia and written a book about it. Not a very accurate one, but an exhilarating read. He was also a tireless, mesmeric, and charming self-promoter who, socially, sexually, and intellectually, shared many characteristics with Lawrence of Arabia. Both were closet homosexuals with itchy feet and a casual way with the truth. For years, Lawrence maintained he’d been flogged and sodomized by a Turkish official during one of his clandestine expeditions in Arab dress. This was almost certainly a pornographic fantasy. Chatwin, equally fanciful, denied that his fatal disease was AIDS, contracted from one of his sexual partners, among them Rudolf Nureyev. Instead, he claimed to be suffering from an exotic fungal infection carried by spores in a Tibetan cave.
Chatwin and Lawrence wrote with a flourish of the world’s emptiest places, generally with an enthusiasm the locals didn’t always share. In Robert Bolt’s screenplay for Lawrence of Arabia , Feisal, king of the Arabs whose warring tribes Lawrence unites as an army, is bewildered by his motives. “I think you are another of these desert-loving English,” he says. “Doughty, Stanhope. Gordon of Khartoum. No Arab loves the desert. We love water and green trees. There is nothing in the desert—and no man needs nothing .”
But Lawrence thrived on nothing. So did Chatwin. And if there was nothing in the nothing to write about, he made something up. In the case of Australia, it was a theory about walking. Aboriginals “going walkabout” didn’t, he claimed, do so randomly. Rather, they followed directions contained in songs learned from the tribal elders. These described a “labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over Australia and are known to Europeans as ‘Dreaming-tracks’ or ‘Songlines.’ ”
In the book, this is explained to Chatwin by a European emigrant he calls Arkady.
“Regardless of the words, it seems the melodic contour of the song described the nature of the land over which the song
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