From My Notebooks In 1976: Leaving Australia and the Passage to Singapore

Perth, Mid-April

Before leaving the country I wrote this rather harsh assessment:

Australian life does seem to have a dreamlike quality. Life seems to pass in a daze, as though one were just going through the motions. People do work, but never show the effect of it, and this underlying assumption of imperturbability seems to run through even their most drunken or excited moments. There is no real intensity and so boisterousness, un-warmed by real emotion, has a hard and cruel feeling. One must assume that Australians protect themselves from self-awareness, could not bear to know what they feel and so prefer to feel nothing. Better to amble slowly in the sun, in singlet and thongs, a stubby – in its cooler – in hand, drawn by the ever-present aroma of barbecued meat, like a Bisto kid grown up in paradise.

The Passage to Singapore

The Kota Bali was a fairly small vessel. In its upper decks it was a cruise ship. Down below, it was an animal transporter, taking live animals to the halal butchers in Malaysia. To my jaundiced eye it was difficult to distinguish between the people upstairs and the sheep below.

But what really occupied my mind and tore me apart was the thought of the pain I knew I would cause Carol, because it had become clear to me that if I were to write the book I’d had in mind for two and a half years, I must finish the journey alone. It was a terrible dilemma – Carol or the book. There was no question that we loved each other, completely. How could I expect her to understand? That I would let a book endanger our relationship? That having invited her to join me, I could now abandon her? So I wrote:

When there are two people, at least half of what happens concerns the other, or is modified by the other’s presence. Travelling in concert somehow blunts the sense of new, strange experience. If I were writing about two people travelling together that’s a challenge I can accept. But I cannot introduce a second character at this stage. There’s not enough weight or interest to absorb such a change of parameters. But even more than that I have to admit the intensity of the experience is much lower á deux. More comfort, more indulgence – a microcosm of marriage.

The passage to Singapore is fraught with the burden of responsibility for bringing down the towering expectations in which it seems to me Carol has chosen to house her love for me. Every day now it seems a new storey or wing is added to this unstable structure – in French lessons, references to details in the future of the journey and most of all in omissions of remarks, of which I am most conscious. The impending doom is so oppressive but still I can’t bring myself to make the first, simple remark which will bring it all crashing down. It must fall, it seems, of its own volition.

The atmosphere on the ship is crude and harsh. Australian couples who by their mere presence, let alone their references to “your wife” emphasise the wrongness of our situation. For two people to insist on their own forms of truth they must be entirely open to each other, or the uneasy wriggling under misguided interrogations deepens the dilemma.

“When did you start the journey?” they ask Carol. “What will you do afterwards? Are you going to live in France or in America?”

None of our answers mean anything to them. If they had the faintest concept of a life less surely conceived than their own they could not have the temerity to ask so abruptly. And certainly, the first vague, evasive reply would give some hint that perhaps a moment’s thought should be given before the next, inevitable line of the catechism. But no, inexorably they continue. “Are you going to have kids?”

The aroma of beer rolls down the decks every time the saloon doors are opened. The ladies, it’s said, change their frocks four times a day.

Charles and Arthur Booth, bull shippers, sheep shippers, drear and dreadful men.

We are both deeply depressed by the huge chunk of our resources we have had to break off for this miserable experience – to be exposed finally to a parody of everything that was worst about Australia – to be taken through a gale – to be denied the few visual pleasures of the Indonesian coast we might have enjoyed – by a maudlin and waspish Welsh captain whose first words to me were so ridiculous as to be beneath contempt. [Sadly, I didn’t write them down.]

Watching the horizon one day, at evening, so definite a line stretching round the ship below a wash of orange light, it struck me that it was quite obviously circular, and if the horizon is a circle then clearly the surface must drop away on all sides and at an equal decline. Given that the same picture presents itself at all times on the open sea when the horizons are clear, the inference must be that the earth is a globe. It is so much more understandable to me now how Columbus came to this conclusion – and that he cannot have been the only one, but perhaps the one who could least restrain the urge to demonstrate it, whatever the peril.

Passed Christmas Island on Easter Monday – a tree-covered rock rising sheer from the water, with waves breaking on it. A mine of phosphate rock for Western Australia, and little else it seems, but 4000 people.

Next morning we pass by Java Head, but light is poor and hazy and can only distinguish low lying masses on either side. Am sad at having to come this way. Would have been so much better and cheaper to have followed logical route of Darwin – Bali, etc. But there seemed no other way out. [Darwin had been destroyed by a hurricane.]

“We’re on the wrong trip,” I said to Carol. “We’d better get back on the right one soon.” It was as close as I’d dared come to saying it all. Already I was suffering from a sore throat, and my body was preparing to act out my emotional predicament. But Carol took it up and soon the whole edifice lay in ruins about us, with Carol wandering about the wreckage like an earthquake survivor, stunned, howling with rage and grief, cursing me, herself, fate, everything.

So they went on, the storms and lulls, through our last day on board, through the first day in Singapore of chasing papers, hotels, contacts, money. And the second day of more papers and unloading until I could at last go to bed and let the fever break over me. Eventually, as the fever went so did Carol’s blackness, and at last we seemed to be clean with each other again.

“Did you really have to take us through all that?” she asks, unsure of herself. I thought so, had been thinking so, never feeling it right to stop the grief halfway.

[We agreed finally to go our separate ways when we got to the Cameron Highlands, in Malaysia.]

Singapore, April 22nd

Arrived 8am. Took bus from Jurong into city. There, hassled with shipping clerk about import permits, then found hotel on Bencoolen. Back to ship in evening to get documents and few things, then to hotel, struggling on foot part of the way because of difficulties with buses and one-way systems.

A long-vanished sight. Sampans in Singapore

April 23rd

After a bad night, still feverish, to the AA for import permit, then to ship for bike, and at last to hotel with all gear, to bed, to sweat and eventually in night, to break the fever.

April 24th

The infamous lunch engagement with Mr. “Polly” whose sloppy conduct I can’t forgive. [I suspect he was a shipping agent.] Call Sunday Times at night.

April 25th

Walk around thieves’ market – nothing much there really except atmosphere – and ride round the island in the afternoon.

April 26th

Nobody at ST to talk to except Anglo-Asian editorial manager, Mr. Jackson, who is polite and suggests features for the Sundays.

Mr. “Polly” compounds his infamy. Shipping from Penang to Madras comes to too much. Peter Harland is suspected of having appendicitis. Indian High Commission makes ominous noises about visas, and I become profoundly depressed about money. Have only £100 left.

At last, cut the knot and call Tony Morgan for $1000. [Tony was a friend in England who had kept some money for me.] He promises to send it to NatCit, Penang. He sounds pretty demoralised. “You certainly left at the right time.” [Britain, under Harold Wilson, was going through a dark time, literally, with power cuts and strikes.]

Feel much better and cross the road to join Carol on an evening harbour cruise. Nothing to see, but it makes an hour away from the traffic. Singapore Tourist Board has erected a stone carving of a “Merlion” on a pier by the bridge and unashamedly announces that this is a foremost tourist attraction in Singapore.

After harbour we wait out a torrent of rain then go to Telek Ayer street restaurant across the river.