TRAVEL Gearing Up For The Cup

Aloit beea? Bloody Hell! Bring m’mate a Cooper’s Old.” Bad news. I am well into my second hour in the Sail and Anchor, the best pub in Fremantle, Western Australia, a charming Victorian-era fishing village and site of the America’s Cup trials, and John, my new “mate,” insists on yet another beea. One of the many reasons I love this country is its love of beer. Me too. Born beer, gonna die beer. I could play the lead hound of Baskervilles if the spoor were malt and hops.

Australia ranks fourth in the world in beer drinking with its thirty-one gallons per person, behind the Czechs, West , Germans, and Belgians. However, the citizens of Darwin, in Northern Territory, are the world’s recordholders with a staggering annual consumption rate of over sixty gallons per swiller. Alcoholics Unanimous, the place is fondly called. Aussie pubs used to close at 6 p.m. (10 p.m. now) and Melbourn-ians still recall their “six o’clock swill” champion who could down six pints of beer while the post office clock was striking six.

John was built like a refrigerator and had a friendly, power-drill stare-countersunk black eyes like carpet tacks, the obligatory John Newcombe-John Ber-trand horseshoe-shaped mustache. Like his country, he looked healthy and fresh-scrubbed, a living eat-more-fruit advertisement. “Something similar,” he shouted. More bad news. That’s Aussie-speak for “another round.” a phrase I came to fear along with “I’ll shout you another.” meaning “my treat.”

Travel-tossed but wide awake and lively. 1 had just flown across the Pacific Ocean, then across Australia, from East Coast Sydney to the Western Australian capital of Perth and its port, Fremantle. Here, on the world’s driest continent, in the farthest capital on earth from Washington, D.C.. seventeen syndicates have brought thirty-one boats, the greatest collection ever of twelve-meter yachts, and will spend about $200 million to win the America’s Cup, a barely knee-high, ornately scrolled silver ewer that sits behind bulletproof glass in the Royal Perth Yacht Club. On January 31. after as many as 234 trial races that began last October 5, the top challenger and defender will face each other seven miles off Fremantle for the start of the best-of-seven series to win the Cup.

Some unofficial history: in 1970, the state of Victoria became the world’s first jurisdiction to make wearing a seat belt mandatory; radio station call letters start with a figure: 5AD is Adelaide; Aussie French dressing doesn’t resemble our blob of melted orange crayolas but is a vinegar and oil-based dressing; Canberra, the largest inland city and national capital, is the world’s only city with a tree index: look up a street and you’ll learn its trees. In this egalitarian country, it’s considered proper to ride in front with the cabbie; a “spider” is a drink consisting of lemonade poured over ice cream and stirred, while a “shandy” is beer mixed with lemonade. Sydney’s yellow pages aren’t: they’re pink and names are listed by initials only and surnames.

Western Australia is a microcosm of the country. It is bigger than India or the Mediterranean Sea and three times larger than Texas, with a population of only 1.3 million, a million of whom live in Perth-Fremantle on the southwest coast. Two-thirds of the million-square-mile state is desert and uninhabitable. Arid or semi-arid land makes up 69 percent of Australia, which helps explain the popularity of beer; another reason is the awful taste of Aussie soft drinks. Perth-Fremantle fulfills the two basic Aussie requirements of a city: it has a true Mediterranean climate with a year-round daily average of just under eight hours of sunshine, the continent’s sunniest capital; and it has a locally brewed beer, the very creditable Swan Lager. Swan is owned by Alan Bond, the city’s best-known entrepreneur and the man responsible for financing Australia’s last four America’s Cup challenges.

High up on the side of the old Southern Roller Flour Mills building, slightly north of Fremantle along Perth’s coastal highway, a menacing red dingo stares out to sea over the America’s Cup course. Alan Bond painted it there as a teenager a few years after arriving from England in 1950. Today it’s the logo for the mill, one of Bond’s many holdings. A huge blue sign atop one of Perth’s buildings looming over the Swan River shouts BOND, testimony to a man who has accumulated a $124 million fortune based on real estate, mining, broadcasting, newspapers, and beer. In 1983, Alan Bond finally won the Cup when skipper John Bertrand captained Australia II from a fifty-seven-second deficit to a twenty-one-second lead at the final mark of the fifth leg of the final race to defeat his old rival Dennis Conner and the New York Yacht Club’s Liberty. To retain possession of the “Auld Mug,” as it’s known, Bond has spent $15 million on his new yachts, Australia III and IV, in hopes of defeating thirteen foreign challengers and three Aussie boats.



Is there anywhere a man who will not punish us for our beauty?”

-Fremantle graffito

Founded in 1829, Fremantle is Australia’s best-preserved city, a mid-19th-century Williamsburg with Norfolk pines and early Victorian facades lining narrow streets made of flagstone that came over as chunks of ballast in the holds of early ships, as did the wrought iron used to construct the beautiful balconies seen in Sydney. For the America’s Cup competition, both Fremantle and Perth have undergone a frenzy of facelifts: 132 different tourist-related projects and 6,600 new hotel rooms (eighteen new hotels in Perth alone). In all. more than $A2.5 billion ($2 billion) has been spent during the past eighteen months.

“We expect about a million visitors during the five months of racing, and we can lake care of them all,” said Richard Duldig of the Western Australian Tourism Commission. Duldig quoted room rates ranging from $A130 a night at the five-star Merlin in Perth down to a bed-and-breakfast for $A20 a night at Fremantle’s Seaview. Also, 1,800 private homeowners have signed up to house visitors during the races at an average rate of SA40 per night.

Normally agreeable as good weather, Fremantle locals like m’mate John at the Sail and Anchor aren’t entirely happy about changes wrought by the Cup races. They complain about higher rents, the brash “tall poppies” (rich folk), and outside louts here to “rage” (party), but not so much about the deluge of new dollars flooding into this quiet fishing village and art colony at the mouth of the Swan River twelve miles from Perth. One welcome change according to John; a dispersal of the Rajneeshes, whose ashram in the old Trades Hall has been taken over and expensively remodeled by the Yacht Club Italiano and their entry, Italia II.

A nice irony here, for Fremantle seems as much Italian as Australian thanks to a half-century of immigration. Delis and small groceries carry eight different olive oils (only three barbecue sauces), and both sell Il Globo, Italy’s most popular newspaper. Most of the best restaurants-La Maschere, Tivoli, Alfonso’s-are Italian. Fremantle’s hottest restaurant, however, is right out of chic Los Angeles, the too-hip-to-grip Rumbles on High Street, serving California Nouveau No-Sweat cuisine like venison braised in claret. Well, not quite. The chef works in a cowboy hat, shorts, and boots and squeezes a rubber bat (Chiroptera, not Louisville Slugger) hanging from a string to summon waitpersons to deliver his “Rumbles Crumbles,” boysenberry and apple cobbler topped with fresh apple ice cream.

After reading this headline in the local paper-’Madam Denies Prostitute Influx’-I knew Perth was in for a Super Bowl-esque extravaganza. In the story, the city’s best known brothelier, Mrs. Dorríe Flatman, denied that 500 love peddlers from the Eastern states had arrived at her Fremantle and Perth pleasure palaces. “I only have five girls and they’re all locals,” grumbled the ! mama-san. Don’t worry, Mrs. Flatman, the ladies of the evening will arrive, as will gamblers, hustlers, and freelance oppor-tunists the world over, all attracted to a “rage” of the America’s Cup dimension. In-cidentally, in Aussie slang, those who achieve sexual intimacy with the sisters of joy “score between the posts,” reflecting the country’s craze for sport of any kind.

Perth is prepared: the $300 million Burs-wood Casino, third largest in the world, and its adjoining hotel are ready. The jogging paths, in the magnificent 988-acre King’s Park high up on Mount Eliza, have been , lengthened. All 100 smorgasbord dishes at Miss Maud’s Restaurant at Pier and Murray Streets await customers. For dancing, the band is poised at the Pagoda Danceland, the city’s only remaining ballroom.

If you want a break from Cup activity, I would eschew the three-hour Perth city bus tour (two hours too long; you know you’re in trouble when the driver points out new fire stations) and instead take a boat down the Swan River, then out to Rottnest Island, twelve miles off Fremantle in the Indian Ocean. Or you can take the thirteen-minute flight on Rottnest Airways. Rent one of the clunky bicycles and spend a paradisiacal afternoon peddling around the twenty-five miles of shoreline, past small lagoons, stands of pine, and mallee shrubs until you find an absolutely deserted strand of white-powder beach, protected at either end by rocky grottoes. Along the way, you will encounter the island’s namesake, cute little quokkas that resemble miniature kangaroos. Dutch explorers thought they were rats and named the island Rottnest, or rat’s nest. They won’t bite and particularly like a Violet Crumble, Australia’s finest chocolate candy bar. At Thomson Bay near the ferry dock, there are shops, two hotels, a museum, and, of course, a beer garden.

Back in Perth-January being Australia’s July-you should choose one of the nineteen beaches stretching from South Fremantle north to Mullaloo, a becalmed inlet and the safest of the lot, about nine miles from downtown. If you favor swimming without clothes, Swanbourne’s for you. Surfers favor Cottesloe, while the best fishing seems to be at City Beach. For a hydrophile, it is the promised land.

I did not eat in Perth, but my tour bus driver touted Minty’s for fancy French; Zita’s (“the best Portuguese restaurant in the Southern Hemisphere”); and the loin of Western Australian lamb at the Sheraton Perth’s River Room. (Caution: an Australian “entree” is a small serving of a main course, not the whole enchilada. Unless you’ve been fasting, you’ll be risking serious bloat to attempt an appetizer, entree, main course, and dessert.)



After two weeks of crisscrossing Australia, I can confirm that the country leads the world in per capita friendliness. Aussies are almost obsessively pleasant, and it seems to be part of their genetic makeup to offer a handshake and smile to a stranger. This, coupled with their dry intelligence, good sense, and good-humored resistance to pretension or self-importance, makes them like Americans used to be before money assumed an equal importance to breathing. On the other hand, this is not a place to discuss Hegel. To me, what seemed lacking among Australians was a real feel for the history of the human race, a sense of belonging to an intellectual community.

In this splendid country, I found only one thing to avoid at all costs, a national obsession called Vegemite that is the closest thing Down Unders have to a national dish-aside from Foster’s Lager or Cooper Sparkling Ale. Last year, Aussies consumed 4,500 metric tons of this malodorous black paste that is thinly spread over toast. It is yeast slurry, a brewery waste product that is swirled together with water, salt, and onion-celery flavoring, then vacuum-concentrated into a stiff, dark spread that resembles axle grease and smells like a week-old pickup-flattened skunk. Tasting it brought to mind the legendary bushmen’s credo from the outback: “Kindness in another’s trouble, courage in our own.”

Finally, if everything had gone sour on my trip, I would always love Australia because of Finnegan’s Irish Donkey Stud Farm near Geelong in the state of Victoria. To keep his expensive stock happy, Justine Finnegan installed a color television set and claims the asses favor programs in bright reds and yellows. At last! The perfect home has been found for this 20th-century scourge, this abomination of blather. A barrel of Vegemite for the Good Mr. Finnegan and shout it to me and m’mate, John.