Adventures in wonderland (Part 1)

I think it was the third night in Australia - hereinafter known as "Oz" - that I woke and suspected I'd acclimatised. Oz is magical. I'd dreamt that I had invented an essential missing element for the Oz lifestyle - Breakfast Beer. I could make my fortune tapping in to this hitherto untapped market. I had them over a barrel. It was obvious. Breakfast seemed the only time of the day beer didn't seem readily available. A low-alcohol, bright and cheery start to the day. I'd just pop round and talk to Tooheys, who seemed to be the big cheeses ale-wise in Oz, and let them in on my big idea. It's a stereotype, I was told. Australians are now falling down the beer consumption league table of the world . . . way behind the Czechs, the Slovaks, the Latvians. How would you like it, they said, if Aussies went round saying all the Irish were drunken brawlers? "That's interesting," I said, "we sit in the pub all day long arguing over the unfairness of that stereotype."

But Colm's friend Phil, who was shepherding us around Oz, gave the game away. There used to be an immensely popular band in Sydney (who were crap, musically speaking, he added) called Free Beer. They played badly to huge audiences for years under signs reading Free Beer Here Tonight (it was probably Tonite, if I know my showbiz). Well there you are. And with that we went down the Bottler, and bought another slab (that's 24 little bottles of beer wrapped in their own cardboard and cellophane).

When Captain Cook came upon Australia in 1770 the native population, numbering up to a million souls, with hundreds of languages, organised in 500 groups, hadn't got round to inventing alcohol. In the previous 50,000 years they had invented almost everything else necessary for a well ordered functioning society; art, law, social order and boomerangs (which are used to get birds up in the air so that they can be caught for food). The introduction of alcohol has been a bit of a bummer for the aborigines and a tiny minority of them have become some of the most inventively abusive drunks I have ever heard about.

A few days into the trip we left the group we were travelling with and went off to do cartoony things. While I was in a resort hotel, an hour-and-a-half by plane north of Sydney, giving away a prize at the Australian cartoonists' Oscars and showing slides (101 Wacky Cartoons About Terrorism - An Introduction to Northern Ireland) they were going round schools and doing seminars and stuff. "They" were, in the main, a mixed bunch of yoofs and their handlers from the Republic, Northern Ireland and Britain. One of the things they did was called "Politics in The Pub", where they spoke about The Peace Process. The local Sydney cheer-leaders for our former terrorists of the Republican persuasion were there, too, and proceeded to tell the throng about the horrors of being a Catholic Nationalist in Northern Ireland. The gentleman in question, it turned out, had never been to Northern Ireland. He came from Manhattan, bless him. One of our yoofs got up and pointed out that she was a Catholic, by tribe if not persuasion, from Ballymena and had never felt she was a second-class citizen. Another said, in responding to Mr Manhattan's view that maybe the war wasn't over yet and, if it was all the same to Mr Manhattan, he would rather not shed his own blood in the interests of Mr Manhattan's politics. If Mr Manhattan wants a spiffing example of oppression a little closer at hand he might take a quick glance at the history of the aborigines, the native Australians.

The policies, guns, diseases and laws of the British and European settlers reduced their population from up to an estimated million in 1770 down to around 200,000 in 1986. Since the native population wasn't included in the census in Australia until after 1967 (before that, I guess, they were part of the flora and fauna) it is hard to know exactly when and how this decline happened. The first aborigines to be given voting rights were returned servicemen in 1949, this was extended in 1962 and then in dribs and drabs until they achieved full equal voting rights in 1987 - that's, er, just 12 years ago.

While returned aboriginal servicemen, in this land that reveres the war dead above and beyond anything you would see even in Britain, were given the vote they weren't allowed into returned servicemen's clubs . . . the social centres of Australia, for quite some time after the war.

While the yoofs were in Sydney fighting for truth, justice and a bit of common sense, we were observing the Floridisation of Australia. This has nothing to do with putting chemicals in the water supply to allegedly keep your teeth strong and healthy. It has to do with inappropriate building practices. Oz is a magical place; it is as beautiful, majestic, comfortable and attractive as any place me and Herself have ever been. It has, sort of, indigenous building styles. They may involve tin roofs but they are local tin roofs. What we saw in northern, coastal New South Wales was American and not so chic, consisting of just-built resort hotels (we stayed in one; it was nice but it wasn't Australia) and, worst of all, behind the lovely little town of Yamba, a development where they dig out channels so every slightly-different-but-really-all-the-same-bungalow has its own piece of water to park the boat on. In other words, Florida. We didn't see many aborigines in these places. Actually I don't think we saw any indigenous Aussies here at all.

The pattern of population redistribution has left the aborigines across the mountains, away from the coast, in the interior, and in the north. Those left in the cities tend to be ghettoised in places like Redfern in Sydney where they can avail of all the opportunities social and racial discrimination have to offer. See inner city areas in America, Britain, Ireland, for similar examples.

Maps are available showing that every square inch of Australia was inhabited by one group or another before 1770. So wherever you are in Oz you are standing on some- one's native homeland. Sadly, in many parts of the east coast there are no longer any natives left to support a home. Captain Cook declared Oz to be a "Terra Nullius" which meant, for those conversing in Latin, that the land was empty and belonged to no one. Captain Cook must have been optically challenged.

In the 1950s Britain detonated three atomic bombs in this supposedly empty place, at empty places such as Emu and Maralinga, South Australia. Aborigines inhabiting these empty places got radiation sickness.

In recent years court cases have slowly and painstakingly established the rights of the Aborigines to their own land. This is known as "native title" and is constantly under judicial and governmental review.