Here and there – South Africa and Northern Australia
Reviewing topics in these ‘here and there’ blogs, they share one obvious similarity. While they describe adventures and recall fun, (as well as minor disasters!), the commentary seldom acknowledges what you might have wanted to see but missed the chance. If you plan to travel to another country as a tourist, you will have almost certainly thought about the places you would like to visit. However, even though your itinerary might include several famous sights, almost always your choices will turn out to be dictated – and limited – by the time available. It’s even worse if you are away for work, of course, as you’re doomed to see very little: most of the time is likely to be in meetings, and the only opportunity to observe the place is travelling in a taxi from your hotel base to work and back! Either way, schedules ensure there’s little time for an opportunity to step outside the limited set of pre-determined tourist spots or business venues. As a result, you will have seen very little of a country.
It’s not just that. Even back home you also see only a small part of the country where you live. You might go on some trips but, just as with travelling overseas, time is limited. By and large you settle into a life in ‘your world’ which may have very little to do with the rest of what sits around you. It is like wearing an invisibility cloak, just as Harry Potter did, except this one is inside out, and stops you from seeing beyond your immediate surroundings. I know the obvious retort: “you can’t see everything”. Sure, but what you do see shapes what you think about. All this was brought home to me by my one visit to South Africa.
I didn’t go to South Africa as a tourist, nor was I there for work. This was because my son was getting married, and I was going to meet the bride’s parents. If my visit was with ‘eyes wide open’, what that meant was that I wasn’t looking with any specific interests in mind. I knew of the existence of Table Mountain, and that was about it! Perhaps it was for that reason it turned out to be a memorable trip, captured in two experiences: first, arriving and going to bride’s mother’s home, and later going to her father’s place.
I arrived in Cape Town after a brief stopover in Harare, a required stopover at the time. As I recall you were not allowed to fly directly from Australia to South Africa, and so from Perth I had to go there via Zimbabwe. By the time I arrived at Cape Town International Airport, I was glad air travel was over. Incidentally, I’ve discovered there was a proposal to rename Cape Town’s airport as Nelson Mandela Airport, and later a second proposal to call it Winnie Mandikizela-Mandela Airport, but a name change hasn’t taken place, and still isn’t planned to be implemented. Anyway, let’s get back to my visit! I’m certain you’re familiar with the experience of looking out of a taxi window as you go from the airport to your eventual destination on arriving in a new country. You’re alert, taking everything in, sometimes asking questions, but often just silent, a witness to a new world. So it was on that occasion, and the drive to the bride’s mother’s home was certainly unforgettable.
As I remember it, the journey took place in stages. First, after leaving the airport complex, we drove through a world of sparse vegetation, and little else. I couldn’t help but think about the long section of road between Adelaide and Melbourne, the Mallee (the Murray Mallee in South Australia and the Loddon Mallee in Victoria). This, too, was empty, dry, a desert to all intents and purposes. Then, suddenly, the road took us through a huge shanty town, rickety houses and shacks all jammed together. Instead of engaging my good liberal values and feeling angry or outraged, my response was simple: I was totally engrossed in just looking.
Equally suddenly that high density poor world ended and we were in a more familiar suburban residential area. It took a moment for me to notice, but then I saw each house was protected by a high chain-link fence and equally high gates. People were living fenced in. An extraordinary transition from the bush to the slums and then the white suburbs. As far as I can see it hasn’t changed much since then, except the slums have expanded to reach the airport, as many more indigenous South Africans have moved closer to the city.
That was the first of my memorable experiences. I was visiting my son’s prospective in-laws. That shielded suburban house was where his partner’s mother lived. After some time there, it was time to move again. The next stage in my visit was to meet his partner’s father, who lived in a lovely property south of the city. Now we were in an area of rolling hills, wide open green spaces, and beautiful houses. I didn’t notice any protection around this man’s house: perhaps there was, but it was discreet. It seems all I missed in this journey of contrasts was an invitation to a chief’s house in one of the Zulu or Xhosa areas!
Leaving on one side family issues and complications, what did I learn from this visit to South Africa? It took place around the same time as I spent some time in northern Australia. Here were two places very different from where I was living, and anywhere I had lived in the past for that matter. Years later, I am reminded of Theodore Zeldin’s Intimate History of Humanity, where he suggests that when we look at others, we see ourselves more clearly. Perhaps because I wasn’t a tourist or about to undertake some business, I saw both Darwin and Cape Town as a curious outsider. I was very conscious I was white and privileged.
At first glance, Australia and South Africa share a colonial past, but in other respects they are very different. Australia is the planet’s sixth largest country after Russia, Canada, China, the USA, and Brazil. With an area of 7.8m km2, it accounts for close to five percent of the world’s land area (a total of around 150m km2,) and although it is the smallest continental land mass, it is the world’s largest island. In contrast, South Africa is a little less than 16% of the size of Australia. It isn’t tiny: South Africa is twice the size of France and five times as big as the UK. With an area of 1.2-million square kilometres it dwarfs the nations of Europe, except Russia, but its size doesn’t compare to the giants of Asia and the Americas.
However, given my comparison was with the northern part of Australia, when we turn to the Northern Territory the comparison is rather different. The NT covers 1.34 square kilometres. In fact it’s the third-largest Australian federal division, and, remarkably, the 11th largest country division in the world. It covers area only slightly larger than South Africa. It is sparsely populated, with a population of close to 0.25m, compared to just a little over 60m in South Africa. Comparing the major cities, Cape Town has just over 4.7 m inhabitants, (Johannesburg has 8 m), while Darwin has a mere 140,000. What a pipsqueak!
Despite the enormous difference in population, travelling in the Northern Territory has some similarities with South Africa. A few kilometres before you read the centre of Darwin you see areas of homes set in large tracts of land, in Howard’s Springs, Virginia and Girraween. Go further in on the Stuart Highway, and now you are in high density housing, including some areas where Indigenous Australians predominate. The Stuart Highway acts like a divider, similar to what I saw in Cape Town, the middle class and affluent close by but clearly divided from the working class and poor on the ‘other side.’
The population mix is very different, of course. Around a third of the residents of Darwin self-identify as Australian, a similar, slightly smaller percentage as English, those of Irish or Scottish background total about 20%, and around 9% Indigenous. Nearly 40% were born overseas. In Cape Town, 42.6% identified as Black African, 39.9% identified as Coloured, 16.5% identified as White. To my surprise, I learnt less than 10% were born overseas.
When it comes to dwellings, in Cape Town just over three-quarters of the households, (78.4%) are established structures (houses or flats), while 20.5% are in shacks, although it was the shacks I noticed. Almost everyone in Darwin lives in a solid dwelling. If you want to see the homes of the traditional Indigenous people, you have to travel away from the city, and there you can find many insubstantial shacks. It is possible to live in Darwin and have little contact with the indigenous population; it is impossible to do so in Cape Town.
Population figures ignore language differences. South Africa has 11 official languages: these are Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, English, Pedi (from Northern Sotho), Tswana (from Botswana), Southern Sotho, Bantu (largely from Zimbabwe), Swazi, Venda (a major language in Zimbabwe), and Ndebele! Of these, the three most spoken first languages are Zulu (22.7%), Xhosa (16.0%), and Afrikaans (13.5%). English is recognised as the language of commerce and science, but it is only the fourth most common home language, for around 10% of the population. However, it is the recognised as the daily language for many in South Africa, and it is the second most commonly spoken household language used outside of the home, (Zulu is the first). In Darwin, English is the only official language. There, the great majority of the population speak English or an indigenous language, but in this multicultural city nearly 4% speak Tagalog, 3.5% Greek, and 2% Mandarin. Diversity is evident.
Bearing in mind I am writing about visits more than 30 years ago, my comparisons are probably badly out of date. However, if I look at what I learnt, I suspect some of the same lessons can still be drawn today. Visiting Cape Town was an experience that made me confront being in a minority. I mixed with Caucasians almost the whole time, but I did so with a clear sense that I was engaging with a familiar but marginal group. You didn’t need to have read much history to be aware that people like me, especially the British, were there on sufferance. You had a curious sense the overall atmosphere was ‘British go home’. This was despite the fact that physical appearances weren’t all that different from Australia – eucalypts, colourful birds and flowers, desert vistas and heat. A beautiful place where I was conscious both I and the families I visited didn’t belong. I didn’t see Cape Town as the majority of locals saw it.
Catching up with a cousin, I also felt an outsider in Darwin. It is part of Australia, but, unlike the big population centres in the south and southeast, it’s tropical city. There’s a wet season and a dry season (the dry season seemed rather humid to me!). Many of the plants, trees and wildlife are exotic, including some creatures you see in frightening adventures in the cinema. It was another place where I felt I was in the minority, even though, at least in some senses, I was not. Most of the people I met were Caucasians, although I did spend some time visiting indigenous groups on a work visit. These Caucasians weren’t like me, however: they were outdoor people, tanned, active, and even had a distinct and very different accent. Paul Hogan gave a good impression of them in Crocodile Dundee. I felt a foreigner in my own land.
When we travel as tourists, we expect to be outsiders. We are visiting another place, and seeing it safely through a pane of glass, sometime literally through train carriage or car window, sometimes through an invisible barrier comprising unfamiliar language, customs and appearances. When we travel, we often behave like philatelists, collecting countries, ready to put the next collection of photographs into an album. If we have been conducting our visits diligently, we will have a record in images and mementos of all the ‘important things’ we saw and did. If a friend asks about visiting ‘X’ and we didn’t, failure is averted by saying, ‘No, but guess what, we were able to go into ‘Y.’
Observing, spotting, collecting, experiencing at a distance. We can be adventurous. “Let’s try that little café we saw close to the cathedral”. We can be a little bit daring. “I wonder what this lane leads to?”. Book into a tour, go to a concert, have a picnic with local bread, cheese and wine in a park, or wander through a shopping centre or group of small outlets along a subway exit, just looking. We can be flustered, even worried, when approached by a stranger, unsure of the local ethics: what did it say in the guidebook? Tourist time is time out, away from work obligations, washing clothes, cooking and cleaning. Tourist time is time out from being our humdrum everyday selves. For many years, I would attempt to see most of the key places the tourist agencies and travel books recommended when I was overseas.
A few years ago I decided to make some changes in leisure travel overseas. My new plan was that I would spend less time going from one place to another to ‘see the sights’, but rather stay in on place for a week or more, relaxing, seeing a little of the life of the place where I was based, rather than rushing from one spot to another. To quote again from Theodore Zeldin, he subtitled the beginning of Chapter 17 with the remark that “travellers are becoming the largest nation in the world, and how they have learned not to see only what they are looking for”. For two weeks staying in a converted farmhouse in Sirod, in Eastern France, I began to start thinking about where I was going, as I watched and paid attention to the steady lifestyle of the farming community. It led me to start writing How Should I Live? The book was nothing special, but the standing back was invaluable.
Compared to many countries I have visited, those trips to South Africa and Australia’s ‘top end’ were distinctive. In part it was because I arrived in both places without a work agenda and without a tourist guide. Did that make me more alert to what I saw? Perhaps I would have had similar reactions to other countries if I had arrived without a planned itinerary.
Being in Cape Town and Darwin were different in another way. On those two occasions, the reason for being there was family. Not close family, but still wanting to contact people who were part of my broader family network. I was keen to meet the people and would have been just as interested if those visits had taken place in Melbourne or Canberra.
Meeting unfamiliar relatives has one other consequence, which is that if you are going to their place, they are likely to take you around. How do they make that choice? In those two visits, they didn’t know me well. They might have chosen well known tourist sights, in the belief that was the right thing to do. They might have taken me to places they thought were interesting, in the belief they would interest me too. As it happens, neither was the case. We met, and sat, and talked and talked: we did very little sight-seeing. The offer was there, but conversation was far more of an attraction than seeing a (flat topped) mountain or a (large) crocodile. Of course, back in Melbourne I was asked what I had seen: the answer was about the people, and as far as enquirers were concerned, I was disappointingly vague about any of the famous tourist spots.
If a distant relative is coming to see me today, should I draw up an itinerary of things to do and places to visit? I can tell you, I wouldn’t. I will wait to see if they nominate something they’d like to do, aided by some gentle prodding and a few examples. Then I can make some suggestions. However, we’ll probably just sit and gossip!
