29 June 2002

THE FRONT LINE - Just another bloody car crash, mate

The aftermath of an accident that nearly killed social historian Robert Hughes could be a metaphor for Australia and its myriad complexities, says Eric Ellis.

Next Thursday, in a courtroom in the Western Australian city of Perth, the cultural critic and social historian Robert Hughes is expected to answer charges of dangerous driving - an incident that led to a car crash that almost killed him three years ago.
If he makes the exhausting trip from New York to court, Australia will read it as a sign that Hughes remains enamoured of his birth country - a land to which, despite 30 years as an expatriate writer, presenter and intellectual, he's paid the compliment of never losing its accent.
But if he doesn't show, their divorce will be regarded as final. At 64, the still-crippled Hughes will be a fugitive who will be likely never again to see his birthplace. Ironically for a man who wrote Australia's definitive history in the acclaimed The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes could end up a convict.
How did it come to this? Ask the small-town silks pursuing him with uncommon vigour - two prosecutors are also suing him for defamation - and they'll say no-one is above the law and that in the twilight of May 28 1999, after a big day's fishing, Hughes was driving his hire car on the wrong side of a desert road that Lonely Planet describes as the most boring in the world.
Ask Hughes and he'll say it is the arch exemplar of Australian parochial, big-fish-small-pond officials determined to snare a big, rich name - petty men so intent on reminding him he was somehow less Australian they made the initial trial date July 4, Independence Day in his adopted America.
And ask some folk in the raffish outback town of Broome, and they will say the irrepressible Hughes is a "wanker" who can't keep his mouth shut. And that Hughes never thanked the local firebrigade volunteers for saving his life.
A year after Kevin Bullen prised Hughes free with the Broome Fire Brigade's "jaws of life", the town honoured the fire chief by making him Citizen of the Year and asking him to light the town's Olympic cauldron.
The events surrounding Hughes' collision with a car full of dope-smoking rednecks is the very stuff Hughes the anthropologist, the intellectual, the yarnspinner himself would find irresistible.
It happened in a place as remote as it gets, the isolated north-west of the Australian outback, with its hairy-chested history of whoring, pearling and racism. Hughes had spent the day at a deserted beach and, as fishermen do, he was boasting. With two salmon and a tuna in his bag, he told mates in Broome, 120km away, to "fire up the barbie"' because he was coming back with dinner, a meal he never made.
The accident has also been imbued with the mysticism of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, at a time when Australia is going through a painful reconciliation with its native history. The smash was first discovered out on the Great Northern Highway by a nomad called Charlie Fish Hook and his daughter, who claim to have heard the much-feared "featherfoot" - an Aboriginal grim reaper - wailing in the scrub as Hughes himself wailed, dying, in his mangled hire car.
It is not politically correct in "salt-and-pepper" Broome to dismiss the featherfoot as hocuspocus. The featherfoot is the untrackable spirit held responsible for Broome's many bad things; cyclones, car accidents, even wife-bashing. It is part of town lore, though local whites tend to put as much store in drinking and marijuana smoking that is three times the Australian average.
Fame is also a factor in the Hughes drama. Australians are generally wary of it, quick to employ their Tall Poppy Syndrome, a social-levelling device by which they maintain their myth of egalitarianism, even with their intellectuals. When it was explained to former drug dealer Colin Craig Bowe who he'd collided with, he approached Hughes' lawyers for Dollars A50,000 ( £19,300/ $28,700) in exchange for favourable evidence - an extortion attempt for which Bowe is now serving 18 months in prison.
And there's class divide in a country that likes to believe it is classless. To the boozy Broomeites who would rather a fight and the footy over a feed and Figaro, Hughes is a Sydney silvertail. His nephew, Malcolm Turnbull, is the prominent republican and former head of Goldman Sachs in Australia, a man who could easily be Australia's first president.
Wealth, power and ability makes Hughes suspicious to the drinkers of the Roebuck Bay Hotel, a bloodhouse better known as "The Roey". Its patrons look forward more to the pub's annual wet T-shirt competition than the erudite dinner parties where Hughes excels.
The night the FT arrived to stay at The Roey, our Alain Mikli spectacle frames so exercised one drinker, he lurched over to warn "don't look at me through those nerdy glasses". We quickly changed our eyewear to something less metropolitan.
And there are contradictions: Broome might have a mostly black street known as "The Bronx", and a downtown Aboriginal settlement that would embarrass Vorster, but the town is a racial kaleidoscope whose 10,000 Malays, Timorese, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, whites and blacks have interbred over generations to become one of Australia's most genuinely multi-cultural communities.
Eclectic Broome also throws up people such as Antoine Bloemen, the much-loved magistrate, who emigrated to Australia in the 1970s from the US, where he'd emigrated from his native Belgium in the 1960s. A one-time US Army paratrooper, Bloemen dispenses "whitefella" justice in the world's biggest jurisdiction, over a population less than Cirencester in an area half the size of western Europe. Bloemen threw out the Hughes charge when it came before his court.
The local newspapers quoted a triumphant Hughes calling Western Australia's Indian-descended senior crown prosecutor Lloyd Rayney a "curry-muncher". Hughes denies that, saying he made an admittedly off-colour joke that magistrate Bloemen had "given Rayney curry" in court - this from a man who wrote The Culture of Complaint, his acerbic 1993 tilt at the intellectual vacuity of political correctness. But Rayney, who lives in faraway Perth, appealed on a point of law, and won.
The day after the Hughes matter was heard in Broome, there was a near identical case in nearby Kununurra involving an aboriginal, that didn't exercise Rayney's office with anything near the vigour of the Hughes case. 
It is that sort of case; petty, colourful, fascinating, mostly for where it is set. Hughes' big Broome mate, pearl-trader Bill Reed, says: "If this happened anywhere else, no one would care." But, viewed through Hughes' eyes, a prism through which he conjures complex arguments supported by trenchant insights, it could be a metaphor for the myriad complexities of modern Australia.
But then again, as Hughes might see it, it may not be anything like that at all. A Hughes trademark is to sprinkle his heavily researched work with disarming postscripts that might as well read, "That's all very well, but it's really just nonsense anyway", reminding the reader that the writer, for all his global sophistication, remains very much an Australian who cuts through the crap.
And as Hughes will inevitably tell it in yet another book, after he has placed his Broometime experience in context, at the end of the day it's just a bloody car accident, mate.