Discovering Down Under in 2019

Link to photo Album Here

We’ve been to many 2^nd and 3^rd world countries. We always struggle with understanding the history of how they ended so far behind the First World countries.

Australia is a completely different experience. Here we arrive at a previously isolated, former British penal colony, at the other end of the world, that has created a first world country and has maintained it for many years. “How did dey do dat?”

We always thought we’d get a chance to visit here one day, and indeed a good opportunity came along in the middle of our six month stay in South Africa. Here’s the 14 hr route the Qantas 747 took. I’m always interested in relative latitude when traveling and it was very interesting to me that Sydney, Atlanta, and Cape Town, at about 33 degrees, are all the same distance from the equator.

One of the immediate differences we notice on this trip, compared to our Egypt OAT trip is the amount of un-scheduled, free time that we have available to do our own thing, which we like a lot. Clearly that wasn’t something OAT, or even the Egyptian Tourism Dept, wanted us trying to do in Egypt. But in Australia, it is safe, easy, and fun to wander, which we do a lot. Intuitively, we knew Australia was a first world country, and a great friend of America, but we hadn’t thought about how that would translate to our trip experience.

If you are comfortable traveling in America, you will love this international trip, because, from a travel perspective, this place is just like home. Since we arrive a day before the others, we just grab an Uber from the airport to the hotel, as we would in the U.S. Next day we connect with Jane, our guide, and 11, mostly senior Americans traveling primarily from Colorado, and take off on a 14 day circuit of Eastern Australia. The overlay of USA map here gives some concept of the size of the country and where the main cities are. The white lines show our particular flights to the cities we used as bases for our travel. Yes, you will do a lot of flying after you get here, several 2-3 hr legs.

This is a BIG country/continent. Basically equal to the United States in area, and even roughly similar in shape, but with a population of only 25 million, about 8% of the U.S. However, when you look at how the population is dispersed, you realize the bulk of the people are in the Eastern and Southern coastal sections. And in fact, almost half the population is in Sydney and Melbourne, which is where we spent about half our time on this trip.

The Cities

Sydney is the oldest, and most beautiful and interesting of the two largest cities. Situated on the largest natural harbor in the world, with iconic structures like the Opera House and Harbour bridge it ranks among the top beautiful cities in the world. As in most cities, the waterfront property is in high demand and priced accordingly and a cruise of the harbor is a must when visiting there.

I do the Harbor Bridge Climb. It’s been operating for 20 years with thousands of people climbing into well designed suits and harnesses connected to a safety wire to make the climb safe for anyone from 8 to 80 or more. For my birthday present, Estelle gave me the dawn climb which starts in the dark, showing the lights of the city and harbour, and then as you approach the summit of the bridge arch, you watch the sun come up over the city.

We also take advantage of the amazing Opera House venues to see a local theatre premiere of Mosquitos, which Estelle finds to be world class drama, and to attend a symphony performance in conjunction with the showing of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Melbourne is a hip, modern, and very diverse city of 4.5 million very young people! Our impression is that it has a high % of young Asians living and working there. It is hopping all hours of the day and days of the week. The architecture reflects the vibe as well. Get my first taste of kangaroo here, very tender, like veal or tender venison.

There are some nice day trips outside of the city to the coast and wine country but if you’ve done wineries and coastlines elsewhere, you can probably miss this without significant loss. We do take this opportunity to do a wildlife sanctuary

where we get up close to the unique Australian wildlife. We also are able to get some time with a local Aboriginal guide who provided some insight into that culture. The consensus of our group was, take a day away from Melbourne and give it to Sydney.

However, you really don’t want to go to Australia for the cities, or even the people living in the cities. For the most part they are like all the other western cities you have visited. You want to go to Australia to understand how did this place come to be? How did this landscape, unique flora and fauna, people, and modern economy happen at this far end of the earth?

The Land, flora, and fauna

What makes this place special from everywhere else in the world is that it is the only country that is also a continent, and an an island. It was cut off from the rest of the land masses in the world when it split away from the supercontinent, Gondwanaland, and subsequently Antarctica, about 100 million years ago. So the only land animals and plants it had were the ones that came with it when it split away, including dinosaurs. After their extinction, along with 80% of the animals on earth about 60 million years ago, the remaining, obviously very hardy, animals evolved on their own, cut off from all other land mass. So, as a result, some 80% of the flora and fauna on Australia is found no where else on earth. Of course there are unique fun animals here, most notably the marsupials like the Kangaroo, Wallaby, and Koala Bear.  And, oh, by the way, there are also more animals that can kill you here than anywhere else. A few examples to whet your appetite:

  A box jellyfish sting can be unbelievably painful. The venom is designed to paralyse fish, so it immobilises your nerves and affects breathing and movement. A large dose can cause cardiac arrest and death within minutes.

 Living in northern Australia, saltwater crocodiles can be found in the ocean, but they are more likely to be in estuaries, and occasionally, freshwater. The saltwater crocodile is very good at ambushing prey.

There are about 140 species of snakes in Australia, and about 100 of them are venomous. The Inland Taipan is the most toxic and highly venomous land snake in the world. One bite contains enough venom to kill several humans. The potency of their venom allows the species to knock out prey quickly.

And a variety of interesting insects like:

The Sydney funnel-web (Atrax robustus) is one of the world’s most dangerous spiders. Its toxic venom evolved as a defensive tool against predators, rather than for attack. Unfortunately, humans are especially sensitive. However, there hasn’t been a death since the development of an anti-venom in 1981.

Australian earthworm; they grow up to 10 feet in length and have an equally intimidating circumference. They're not dangerous…other than making your heart stop upon seeing them.

From the fossil record, we learn Australia evolved a flora of drought-adapted forests and shrubs and a fauna of large land animals—including giant kangaroos and marsupial lions, as well as giant birds and reptiles. Unfortunately for the plants and animals of that era the future of Australia was about to be changed forever.

People arrive in Australia

Most scientists today think the ancestors of all of us living outside of Africa are descended from a relatively small group that left Africa about 60,000 years ago and populated the world with modern humans (anatomically like us), replacing, and mating with, other hominids, like Neanderthals, along the way.

What is amazing is that in very few years from that out-of-Africa migration of our ancestors, it appears that a small group actually made its way to Australia which at that time required crossing at least a hundred miles of ocean to get there—again, 60,000 years ago! How did dey do dat? Consensus is that this was basically a single, one-way, migration event so apparently, this group of humans were then isolated from the rest of the world, much like the land mass was, for the next 60,000 years.

Unfortunately for the then-existing, very large and unusual mammals and indigenous forest, these Homo Sapiens invaders began making changes.  Apparently they first burned the existing forests, and then hunted most of the large animals to extinction, fairly quickly. The idea of man changing ecosystems and environment goes back a long way. However, these hunter/gatherer people obviously figured out how to survive. 60,000 years later their descendants were still here when the first Europeans began to arrive.

Clearly in so many ways the indigenous people were successful in Australia. Without any outside influence they survived and grew to an estimate 1 million people by the 1700s. However, by the time Europeans arrived they were still stone-age, hunter-gatherers, with no metal technology, or agriculture. And, while speaking over 250 diferent languages and 800 dialects, they had never developed any written language. 

One conclusion I draw (with no academic knowledge) is that maybe we can take some comfort that homo sapiens is not an inherently hostile species since all these different language peoples managed to avoid invasion, capture, and assimilation by any warlike tribe for 60,000 yrs. The downside of that, isolated into individual tribes and languages, is they didn’t get to share much knowledge across tribes or generations so no advances in lifestyle or civilization ever occurred and they were literally small groups of sitting ducks when the English landed.

The Europeans arrive—guns, germs, and steel

Long after Columbus discovered that there was a big continent, America, between Europe and Asia, Europeans still didn’t know there was another continent to the far south. It was another hundred years before the Dutch found one piece of the coast of this massive country and another 160 yrs before James Cook navigated and mapped it, and claimed the east coast for England in 1770.

Then, after 1776, England was giving up on trying to rule those unruly colonies in North America, and they needed to look for another place to send their overflow convicts. So how about sending them to the other end of the world? In 1788 they settle a group of prisoners in what is now Sydney Harbor in the penal colony called Botany Bay. The clearing of land to make homes for the colonial settlers and convicts effectively eradicated traditional hunting grounds and camp sites forcing the indigenous people to go further inland. Colonial diseases such as smallpox proved to be deadly for the natives. Many natives were killed by the colonizers. Some were shot, others were poisoned.  The mid-19th century saw the almost total wipe-out of the Aborigines in Sydney. As with Americans and our indigenous people, Australians today are not proud of this chapter in their history, and they recognize that continuing discrimination towards Aboriginals is a reality of Australian society today.  

My time spent there, and reading about the history of the continent and it’s first people, and thinking about the other examples in Africa and America has me disconcerted. It’s pretty clear, based on no independent progress toward civilization, that if North America and Australia had remained isolated, they would still today be very lightly populated, stone age continents, unable to optimize the human and natural resources contained in them.  Given the many different tribes and languages, culture clash, and illiteracy of many of the European settlers themselves, how could there ever have been a smooth and humane transition for original people to Western Civilization? Definitely not a problem an engineer is trained to solve!

Mineral wealth of Australia brings Europeans and Asians.

There was slow growth from that founding colony until gold was discovered in 1851 and then other minerals bringing in migrants from all over the world, so that the population by 1901 was about 4 million when Australia established the federated commonwealth. One of the first steps the new Australian parliament did was establish the “White Australia” policy. The White Australia policy involved the exclusion of all non-European people from immigrating into Australia, and was the official policy of all governments of Australia until the 1950s when the population was about 8 million.

The Outback

It’s easy to find the outback in Australia, just move away from any coast and pretty quickly you are there. As you can see on the map here, its essentially the yellow space, and it represents about 80% of the land mass. The main economic activity in the outback is mining since it is extremely rich in iron, aluminium, manganese and uranium ores, and also contains major deposits of gold, nickel, copper, lead and zinc ores.

An enjoyable way to get a taste of the outback is to fly to Alice Springs and Uluru (Ayers Rock) where you can both get a sense of the environment there, as well as some history and natural wonders.

Alice Springs. The center of the country in more ways than one.

We do get a taste of the Outback, walking into the local mountains in the daytime, and at a local ranch one evening for a Barbie and some instruction in boomerang tossing. Estelle is better than me at that of course. We later also got some didgeridoo instruction, which also didn’t take for me.

But what really blows my mind is when I realize, right here, Alice Springs, in the center of the outback, at the other end of the world is where the British Empire finished connecting all it’s possessions with an undersea telegraph line in 1876.  The true forerunner to the Internet.

Just think, the first telegraph message was only sent by Samuel Morse in 1844, and the undersea telegraph line around the world, connecting the British Empire, was complete 22yrs later, “How did dey do dat?” In a hundred years Australia went from an unknown (to Europeans) continent at the bottom of the earth occupied by stone age people, to a first world technology connected place on earth.

Uluru (Ayers Rock)

As an old rock and mountain climber, I am fascinated by this big hunk of rock that pops up in the Australian Outback. As others have said, even after seeing pictures for years, you really aren’t prepared for the impact it has when you first see it. Few places in the world I’ve seen have had more spiritual impact on me than being near that mountain. You do need to allow some time there, and preferably do sunset and sunrise in sight of it to understand why the Aboriginal people consider it a sacred place.

A bonus is the Bruce Munro installation of the Field of Light Outdoor art exhibit. He did a smaller version of this at Cheekwood in Nashville. However, walking in the outback at night, among a field of 50,000 lights, changing colors in waves along the desert, as the Milky Way is covering the sky above, is a pretty tough experience to top.

The East Coast—now for something completely different

We fly from Uluru to Cairns, another three-hour flight, and stay on the beach. I have to say none of the beaches we saw in Australia compare with the beaches we know in South Africa. But we did have a couple of neat adventures while we were there. A special one for Estelle is a walk with an Aboriginal guide among the sounds and smells of the Daintree Rainforest, the oldest rainforest in the world. Once again we learn that many plants there can hurt you but over their 60,000 yrs the original people learned how to live pretty comfortably in tune with that space. Some similarity to our experience walking in the Amazon but the guide really was great here.

The Great Barrier Reef was something I had always thought would be the highlight of a trip to Australia. As an old scuba diver and occasional snorkeler I have enjoyed some beautiful reefs in other places and sort of assumed that this would be the top of them all. Well, in our case, not so much. We take a boat out about 90 min to the Reef and then move to three different spots. They were all pretty similar with average color and variety of coral, and medium density of colourful and unusual fish. I’m sure there are other places along that 1400 mile reef where there are special underwater sights, and perhaps you have to be there for more time to get to them, but I would say you can skip the one day Great Barrier Reef trip from Cairns.

The modern economy that is Australia today

Of everything that fascinates me about Australia, perhaps the most astonishing is its economy today. Here is a country, only independent for 120 yrs, at the other end of the globe from the primary economic powers in the world. And yet, if you use some stats to compare how they are doing, you find them pretty much on top. Here are some representative numbers I came up with.

So what made it work? How did they rise to the top of most countries in the world in standard of living? Certainly, their natural resources helped, but only 7% of their GDP comes from natural resources today. 

My personal conclusion is they built the country with a hardy group of immigrants, who embraced their English heritage and system of law and government, and were open to trading with the rest of the world.

Conclusion and suggestions

So, the whole experience here was very eye-opening and really a window into the history of the earth, homo sapiens, the British Empire, and an example of how a country can really work well. The time spent really allowed me to dig a bit deeper and understand how it came to be. Also, getting the extended time with a neat group of people like those on this OAT trip added a fun extra dimension to the trip.

Knowing what I know now, how would I suggest doing the trip? First do a lot of reading ahead of time. There is more to this trip than sightseeing. Then fly to Sydney, use that as a base for a 7-10 day trip on the mainland. Fly to Alice Springs, drive to Uluru to get a real sense of the Outback. Do an couple of nights in Tasmania. Then head to New Zealand—South Island for a few days. And home from there.

Some reading suggestions

In a Sunburned Country by Bill Bryson—do the audio version. He is just really entertaining and informative about the country and its history.

Talking to my Country by Stan Grant—A very powerful personal memoir by a talented international journalist of Aboriginal descent.

Guns Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond—Old now but a true classic if you are interested in why Europeans came to conquer the world in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.