The Salmon of Doubt

Interview conducted by Claire Smith Virgin.net, Limited, SEPTEMBER 22, 1999

Riding the Rays Every country is like a particular type of person. America is like a belligerent adolescent boy, Canada is like an intelligent thirty-five-year-old woman. Australia is like Jack Nicholson. It comes right up to you and laughs very hard in your face in a highly threatening and engaging manner. In fact it’s not so much a country as such, more a sort of thin crust of semi-demented civilisation caked around the edge of a vast, raw wilderness, full of heat and dust and hopping things.

Tell most Australians that you like their country and they will give a dry laugh and say, “Well, it’s the last place left now, isn’t it?” which is the sort of worrying thing that Australians say. You don’t quite know what they mean but it worries you in case they’re right.

Just knowing that the place is lurking there on the other side of the world where we can’t see it is oddly unsettling, and I’m always looking for excuses to go even if only to keep an eye on it. I also happen to love it. Most of it I haven’t even seen yet, but there’s one place that I’ve long wanted to revisit, because I had some frustratingly unfinished business there. And just a few weeks ago I suddenly found the excuse I’d been looking for. I was in England at the time. I could tell I was in England because I was sitting in the rain under a wet blanket in a muddy field listening to some fucking orchestra in a kind of red tent playing hits from American movie soundtracks. Is there anywhere else in the world where people would do such a thing? Anywhere? Would they do it in Italy? Would they do it in Tierra del Fuego? Would they do it on Baffin Island? No. Even in Japan, where national pastimes include ripping out your own intestines with a knife, I think they would draw the line.

In between the squalls of rain and trumpets I fell into conversation with an engaging fellow who turned out to be my sister’s next-door neighbour up there in Warwickshire, which was where the sodden field was. His name was Martin Pemberton, and he was an inventor and designer. Among the things he had invented or designed, he told me, were various crucial bits of tube trains, a wonderful new form of thinking toaster, and also a Sub Bug.

What, I asked politely, was a Sub Bug?

A Sub Bug, he explained, was a jet-propelled underwater buggy sort of thing. A bit like the front half of a dolphin. You hold on to the rear and it pulls you through the sea at depths of up to thirty feet.

Remember that bit in the movie of Thunderball? A bit like those things. Great for exploring coral reefs.

I’m not sure if that’s exactly what he said. He may have said “azure sea” or “limpid depths.” Probably not, but that was the picture in my brain as I sat in the blustery rain watching an escaped umbrella totter past the bandstand. I had to try one. I said so to Martin. I may even have wrestled him to the ground and knelt on his windpipe, everything was a bit of a blur to be honest, but anyway he said he would be delighted to let me try one. The question was where? I could try it anywhere, even just in the local swimming pool. No. The trick was to get to try it in Australia, on the Great Barrier Reef. I needed an angle, though, if I was going to get some hapless magazine to stump up a trip for me to try it which, believe me, is the only way to travel. Then I remembered my unfinished business in Australia. There’s an island I had visited briefly once ten years ago in the Whitsundays, at the southern end of the reef. It was a pretty dreadful place, called Hayman Island. The island itself was beautiful, but the resort that had been built on it was not, and I had ended up there by mistake, exhausted, at the end of an author tour. I hated it. The brochure was splattered with words like “international” and “superb” and “sophisticated,” and what this meant was that they had Muzak pumped out of the palm trees and themed fancy-dress parties every night. By day I would sit at a table by the pool getting slowly sozzled on Tequila Sunrises and listening to the conversations at nearby tables which seemed mostly to be about road accidents involving heavy-goods vehicles. In the evening I would retire woozily to my room in order to avoid the sight of maddened drunk Australians rampaging through the night in grass skirts or cowboy hats or whatever the theme of the evening was, while I watched Mad Max movies on the hotel video. These also featured a lot of road accidents, several of which involved heavy-goods vehicles. I couldn’t even find anything to read.

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I’d written both of them. On one occasion I talked to an Australian couple on the beach. I said, “Hello, my name is Douglas, don’t you hate the Muzak?” They said they didn’t, as a matter of fact. They thought it was very nice and international and sophisticated.