Down Under Read Free

with life in numbers uncounted. For insects alone, scientists haven’t the faintest idea whether the total number of species is 100,000 or more than twice that. As many as a third of those species remain entirely unknown to science. For spiders, the proportion rises to 80 per cent.
    I mention insects in particular because I have a story about a little bug called Nothomyrmecia macrops that I think illustrates perfectly, if a bit obliquely, what an exceptional country this is. It’s a slightly involved tale but a good one, so bear with me please.
    In 1931 on the Cape Arid peninsula in Western Australia, some amateur naturalists were poking about in the scrubby wastes when they found an insect none had seen before. It looked vaguely like an ant, but was an unusual pale yellow and had strange, staring, distinctly unsettling eyes. Some specimens were collected and thesefound their way to the desk of an expert at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, who identified the insect at once as Nothomyrmecia. The discovery caused great excitement because, as far as anyone knew, nothing like it had existed on earth for a hundred million years. Nothomyrmecia was a proto-ant, a living relic from a time when ants were evolving from wasps. In entomological terms, it was as extraordinary as if someone had found a herd of triceratops grazing on some distant grassy plain.
    An expedition was organized at once, but despite the most scrupulous searching no one could find the Cape Arid colony. Subsequent searches came up equally empty-handed. Almost half a century later, when word got out that a team of American scientists was planning to search for the ant, almost certainly with the kind of high-tech gadgetry that would make the Australians look amateurish and underorganized, government scientists in Canberra decided to make one final, pre-emptive effort to find the ants alive. So a party of them set off in convoy across the country.
    On the second day out, while driving across the South Australia desert, one of their vehicles began to smoke and sputter, and they were forced to make an unscheduled overnight stop at a lonely pause in the road called Poochera. During the evening one of the scientists, a man named Bob Taylor, stepped out for a breath of air and idly played his torch over the surrounding terrain. You may imagine his astonishment when he discovered, crawling over the trunk of a eucalyptus beside their campsite, a thriving colony of none other than Nothomyrmecia.
    Now consider the probabilities. Taylor and his colleagues were 800 miles from their intended search site. In the almost three million square miles of emptiness thatis Australia, one of the handful of people able to identify it had just found one of the rarest, most sought-after insects on earth – an insect seen alive just once, almost half a century earlier – and all because their van had broken down where it did. Nothomyrmecia , incidentally, has still never been found at its original site.
    You take my point again, I’m sure. This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found.
    Trust me, this is an interesting place.
II
    Each time you fly from North America to Australia, and without anyone asking how you feel about it, a day is taken away from you when you cross the international dateline. I left Los Angeles on 3 January and arrived in Sydney fourteen hours later on 5 January. For me there was no 4 January. None at all. Where it went exactly I couldn’t tell you. All I know is that for one twenty-four-hour period in the history of Earth, it appears I had no being.
    I find that a little uncanny, to say the least. I mean to say, if you were browsing through your ticket folder and you saw a notice that said: ‘Passengers are advised that on some crossings twenty-four-hour loss of existence may occur’ (which is of course how they would phrase it, as if