Lessons for the Asian neophyte

There are probably four things any virgin visitor to Asia in general – and China in particular – ought to know.

The first concerns food. Abandon happy and homespun preconceptions of steamed vegetables, stir fry, slivers of filleted garlic beef sizzling on a hot plate or sweet and sour-flavoured animal which once grazed on a farm. The reality is instead an array of domesticated pets, vermin, noodle soup with the viscosity of kerosene and a multitude of other unidentifiables served on the gunk-encrusted hotplates by the side of the road. Accompany this guidance with the critical footnote that parts of the animal with which a Western vet wouldn’t even be familiar are served with genuine pride. In addition to ear, brain, penis and cartilage, you find vague and worrying references to muscle, wall, contents, joint or tendon.

This is a lesson also learnt in India. Vindaloo, Korma and the brightly coloured and textured sauces you find when out for a curry back in the West don’t exist in India. Substitute, among other things, tiny fish sufficiently salty to make your body hair fall out and peculiar egg-shaped and hollow crunchy vessels filled with a hot, watery fluid which smells suspiciously like blood and tastes like chalk. Or vice versa, depending on the time of day. Regardless, the lesson is not to avoid sampling all this food. Eating weird shit is integral to the experience and means you will regurgitate not merely the food – a given – but fantastic tales of the Orient upon your emaciated return. The lesson is to be prepared. And find someone who knows how to translate, “Look, I’m not saying I wont eat it. But I want to know what you mean by ‘glands’”. This is more important than “Which way to the train station?” or “Why are there tweezers next to the chopsticks?”

Second, habits. You’re supposed to refrain from adverse judgment when travelling to new and exotic places and to accept that different peoples find different practices acceptable. Just as we would expect conservative Muslim visitors to the West to hold back from soapboxing about women’s attire or anyone’s consumption of alcohol (not that they do), similarly the visitor to China should keep his mouth shut when confronted with some of the less ingratiating local habits.

But as far as I’m concerned, that prohibition extends only as far as not directly accosting strangers in the street. Bitching to people back home is fine. Table manners are the first thing. The constant open-mouthed mastication I can live with. Ditto the nosepicking and regular dinner-table hand down the pants. It’s the spitting of pieces of unwanted gristle – which constitutes pretty much the entirety of a cheap Chinese meal – in a perfect parabola within inches of the visitor’s face that really gets my blood up. But the spitting during meals is nothing – nothing – compared to the veritable celebration of expectoration that goes on absolutely everywhere else. The Chinese spit in the street. They spit in a car. They spit on the floor of a bus or in a hotel foyer. They spit on the wall of the train station. And worst of all, they’ll spit on the wall of your sleeping compartment on the train. (This, by the way, is even done by the sartorial elite in soft sleeper class, heading from one city to another for a business trip. The mind boggles at what it must be like further back in the train. Like standing in a saliva rainstorm without an umbrella I suppose).

The spitting itself isn’t even the worst part. It’s the preliminary cacophonic wind-up. Whereas the Indians (world-class spitters, themselves, it must be credited) measure social status using a complicated and ancient caste system based on ethnicity, profession and skin colour, the Chinese – to their own credit – have simplified the system wholesale. Social status in the Middle Kingdom is directly proportionate to the volume, duration and raspiness of the phlem-finding process. It begins in the lungs, whereupon the truly aristocratic spitter can, in an impressive display of only four or five hacks, raise five ounces of honeyish snot to his larynx, hold it there, while using his tongue and teeth to produce a lump of blackish fluid the size of a tennis ball before hurling it through a curled tongue at the nearest wall, piece of furniture or mortified backpacker. From there, he will watch it glissade languidly down the wall (or furniture or mortified backpacker) admiring its leisurely track downward (the highest socio-economic stratum can manufacture such viscosity that it’ll descend so slowly as to be undetectable in movement – like a medieval pane of glass which is thicker at the bottom than the top). The peasant spitter is profoundly incapable of such virtuosity – no doubt why he remains a peasant. He probably had a job interview in the 1980s, enthusiastically spat in the face of the interviewer but it splashed down onto the prospective employer’s coat instead of clinging impressively to his nose. What a loser.

Third, toilets. Americans, in their inimitable way, sneer at European toilets just as they laugh at our dental work (see below). I don’t think it’s even about hygiene, they’re just confused by a water closet incapable of handling a fecal deposit weighing five or six kilograms. If their consternation is in fact about hygiene, they should drag their planet-sized posteriors to Asia. Hell may very well be Baghdad after a bombing or being stuck in an elevator with Italians. But more likely, it’s having to use a Chinese public latrine.

I’ll spare you specifics. You can probably imagine what I’m talking about – qualitatively, if not quantitatively. Let me just say: Never again will I wrinkle my nose at the facilities at a football match in Britain or a beach toilet in Australia. Never, ever, again.

Fourth and finally, dentistry – or rather, its conspicuous absence. For all you muppets like me who’ve had thousands of pounds spent on orthdontics, periodontics or just plain dental hygiene over the years, it transpires you can manage perfectly well with one sole tooth at the front, and gums everywhere else. Not only is flossing a boondoggle cash-cow conjured up by a cynical tooth lobby, but brushing your teeth is too. Just let them fall out, and wander around frightening tourists with a monodent grin. They’ll want to take your picture and offer you money for the privilege. But stick to soft food.

So, four little things of which to be forewarned next time you venture beyond the Costa Brava or Cape Cod. One thing I’ve noticed, though, is that the west coast of the United States tends to do pretty well on all these things. Good food, clean toilets, selfconsciously free of bad public habits, and superlative teeth. As you cross timezones eastwards in the northern hemisphere, you’ll find that all these things steadily deteriorate. The US eastern seabord, then Britain, continental Europe, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, India, and finally China, which is a country of pet-eating, loogy-lunging, single-toothed floor-crappers.


I’m just saying. Forewarned is forearmed.

A whiter shade of grey

Stepping out of the customs hall in Shenzhen, having navigated the antiseptic metro system of magnificent Hong Kong and the nonsensical signs at the border (“China non-visitors this way”; “Foreign non-tourists take second queue”) you’re greeted by an urban vista which would make you vomit, but for the fact your first breath of the thick, fetid air got there first. The city is grey – but then, so are many around the world, and you can’t expect the self-indulgent prettiness of Florence or the colonial elegance of Phnom Penh everywhere you go. And calling Shenzhen polluted does an injustice to the word. Breathing is like fellating an SUV exhaust pipe while the driver hits the gas. But again: Athens is polluted, so are LA, Bangkok and Mumbai. Shenzhen is different, though. It’s worse. It may be the most miserable place I’ve ever visited outside of Utah. Or Agra.

Shenzhen today exists within the Shenzhen Economic Zone (SEZ), created in the 1980s to be a sort of Hong Kong within the People’s Republic of China. At the time, the city was little more than a collection of fishing villages with a combined population of about thirty thousand. It now has 8 million inhabitants. It has increased 300-fold in my lifetime. I’d be beyond surprised if in the history of humanity, any part of the planet has industrialised at that pace before.

China, as nobody with a newspaper needs telling, is for better or worse going to be the dominant global player of the coming century. Choose any measure you like of growth, of change, of the accumulation of wealth, and you’ll find this enormous country of over 1.3 billion people breaking astonishing ground. Perhaps with the exception of Shanghai, nowhere exemplifies Chinese growth better than Shenzhen. It calls itself “China’s richest city”. I don’t know how they come about that claim – productivity, perhaps; maybe GDP – but it’s a stomach-sinkingly awful place. Look beyond the pus-yellow smog that you feel clamming onto your skin, and the horrific stench (not the rotting refuse and bundled humanity smell of India, but the putrid reek of coal and exhaust and concrete dust and metallurgy), and you see what Dickens and Engels must’ve come across in Victorian London and Manchester. Factories as far as the eye can see (further, actually, considering you can barely squint beyond your outstretched arm), belching coal smoke into a dank sky which would make anyone who’s every been fortunate enough to leave the city open their wrists upon their return.

But of course, the millions of workers who slave away in this, the richest city of what will one day be the richest country, never get to leave, except for a few days every year when they return to their home villages for Chinese New Year, and hand over their meagre earnings to a family which can barely afford enough rice to eat. Just a couple of weeks ago, China’s worst weather in five decades brought the south-east of the country to a standstill over the new year holiday. 800,000 people were stranded for days in nearby Guangzhou train station itself, patiently waiting to take their annual few days’ respite from the inhumane backache of factory existence. In only the most recent of God’s nasty little jokes, many were prevented from seeing their families (their children included) for yet another year. It’s so obvious it goes without saying, but it puts one’s own pathetic little disappointments in perspective.

This area (Shenzhen, Guangzhou and their environs) is the part of China that produces much of the crap we buy on a daily basis. As a little experiment, I’ve just emptied my daypack which is sitting next to me in a smoky café in Yangshuo, and examined both its contents and done an inventory of what I’m wearing. Aside from my laptop, PDA, mobile and camera (all of which naturally are made in China), so too are about four fifths of all the other useless shit I have with me. If time and inclination moves you so, do the same. China is dressing you from shoe to brassiere to sunglasses and more. Statistics aside, these guys are producing everything.

And other than when Nike or the Gap gets caught in a PR glare by some do-gooding NGO and is then forced to renounce its use of sweatshops in south-east Asia, and the media momentarily trains its lens on such practices before the audience’s attention reverts to Wife Swap 3, it’s too easy to forget the real face of industrialisation. It’s not just ‘globalisation’, either – that’s an oversimplified cop-out by those whose main concern is losing jobs in their own manufacturing bases. It’s industry per se: the production of stuff in order for its consumption in order for growth in order for its further production. I’m by no means an agrarian utopianist; I’m very proud of and inspired by much that man has achieved. And exponential population increase naturally requires production to keep people alive. It’s just that stepping into the murk of ashen-faced Shenzhen and into a consumptive, Bladerunnerish gloaming, you can’t help but wonder what report card some of our ancestors might give us were they to see all this. Sometimes, it’s just not clear if we’re progressing at all.

I met one of Shenzhen’s anonymous millions on the sleeper train to Guilin. The sleeper train to get out of Shenzhen comes pretty close to redeeming the city itself. I adore trains – I’ve written ad nauseum on the subject before. I’m not what the English call an anorak – I don’t know one end of a train from the other – I just love the clickety-clack rhythm, I love the conductor taking your ticket and showing you the way to your compartment. I love the sliding doors and the bedside lamps (I’m talking here about real trains with little cabins and hot towels and fold-down beds, not the utilitarian cattle vessels where you sit aeroplane-style in rows and have to ask the corpulent bottom-feeder next to you whose stomach is hanging over onto yours if he’d move so you can get to the toilet. That isn’t really train travel. Unless the scenery is spectacular. And leaving Shenzhen, it surely ain’t).

So assuming you’re willing and able to spend what amounts to a month’s salary for a Chinese factory worker on a soft sleeper ticket, you get a journey of refinement and elegance which the TGV in France can never provide. It’s someone’s job to plump the pillows; another’s to vacuum the carpets on the corridor. It’s one guy’s job to patrol the train telling everyone to keep their valuables safe. As I was sharing my delightful little compartment with two girls who remarkably enough spoke less English than I do Mandarin, this cheery-faced and smartly-attired fellow came to give me his little rehearsed warning. I gave him a look of studied blankness before we both resorted to gestures, with my gestures signifying only that I didn’t understand his. Twenty minutes of this, and he was convinced I was not merely stupid but deaf too, so thankfully he moved on to give his performance to the lot next door.

But after tiring of nervous and uncomprehending smiles from my Chinese bunkmates, I ambled down to hard chair class and found the charming young woman who had helped me nagivate the otherwise unnavigable train station. A nurse in one of Shenzhen’s godawfully grey factories, she was heading home, as she does every weekend, to Guilin. Her name is Helen (her “English” name – her Chinese name sounded like the aluminium death-rattle of a TB patient) and she has an eight year-old daughter who lives in Guilin with her (Helen’s) mother. Helen’s husband left them some years back. I thought it impolite to ask the circumstances, but her sad eyes suggested another the existence of another woman. So the daughter lives with the grandmother, and Helen sees her for one day a week, once you take away the fourteen hour commute each way. The daughter is a gifted violinist, or so she said proudly, whipping out a well-thumbed and tattered album of pictures. Thrusting it into my hands and looking up into my eyes for a glimmer of warmth, I smiled as broadly as I could and said how beautiful her daughter was. She beamed back, exposing dental work that would make a blind man grimace, and invited me to come and meet the daughter and stay with them when we arrived in Guilin.

My heart ached with the recognition of one of those rare moments which are profoundly, palpably real. Here was a woman (she was 28, only a year older than me, but looked middle aged already) whose existence could at very best be called dire. What kind of life is this? Sixty hours a week in a Hadean beehive masquerading as a factory, a shared hovel in a city which Lucifer coughed up, separated from her daughter. A 28-hour return commute on a wooden-slat train bench every week to spend a sole day with her child, and having met a young traveller who was wealthy enough to afford a soft sleeper ticket, she invites him home with the presumable hope he would fall for the daughter and stay. I really can’t say for sure that she was hoping for marriage and a way out of this miserable life. She may just have been so proud of her musical daughter that she wanted to show her off. But although desperation in someone’s otherwise dead eyes is hard to describe, I know it when I see it. I’ve seen it a lot on this voyage. The tuk-tuk driver in Varanasi, the vegetable trader in Siem Reap, the rag-seller in Belgrade, the gypsy mother in Budapest, the beggar in Ho Chi Minh. It’s far too easy to mistake need for want; helplessness for calculation; desperation for envy. Desperation in such places comes in various guises and facing it with sympathy is the only real (however inadequate) susbstitute for empathy. Her desperation was different from theirs, but I saw it in her eyes. A barely educated and prematurely middle-aged single mother, in a country which values only men, with no money, no prospects and no real life worth the word. It was truly sad.

I apologised, explaining that my itinerary forced me to head straight to Yangshuo, and wished her all my heartfelt best. Sitting in the restaurant car a little later (my favourite place on a night train), drinking myself silly on undrinkable Chinese lager, I tried to regain my usual giddy enthusiasm for sleeper travel and for long, nocturnal journeys in particular. Peering out of the window, trying to grasp a glimpse of southern China by night and its tapestry of blackened factories chugging by, all I could see because of the bright lights above me was my own reflection in the glass.

A postscript to the bit about Australia

The "Pacific Solution" was the policy begun by John Howard in 2001 for dealing with the seemingly endless stream of asylum-seekers heading to Australia by sea from various Asian and Middle Eastern countries. The policy - instead of letting the boat people into Australia and examining their asylum claims - involved the Australian government paying the governments of Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea to house them in detention centres. Australia is state party to the Refugee Convention and the UNHCR. This policy (which also overlapped with the deporable "Tampa" situation which Howard used to win the 2001 election), was roundly criticised around the world and besmirched Australia's good standing as a global citizen.

I mention this now, because as of today, the last asylum-seekers have left Nauru, bringing an end - as promised in the election campaign by Kevin Rudd - to a racist and mean-spirited chapter in Australia's recent history. People who endeavour to come here on unseaworthy boats having used up their life savings to do so are either genuine refugees or they're not. Transporting them to deserted detention centres to keep the issue off the front pages and lying to the Australian public about the circumstances behind their arrival is one of the many reasons the country is better off for seeing the end of the little dessicated coconut and his ferretty little face.

A note

There is some problem on this page with text getting corrupted. I don't know why. To solve it, just click on the heading of the blog entry and it will bring the entry up in an uncorrupted, separate page. Thanks.

Back home in A Sunburnt Country

Perth, the town where i grew up, is unique. All places are – and a pedant will argue uniqueness is a binary state, something either is unique or it isn’t – but Perth is especially so. And the word continues to spread. The number of British people emigrating to Australia has already increased from 8,749 in 2001-2 to 23,290 in 2005-6 – and wandering through the major cities of Australia, you’d conclude the lion’s share have come to settle – as my parents, my brother and I did twenty-two years ago – on the sun-drenched and sleepy banks of the Swan River.

So why is Perth ‘especially’ unique?

A few facts to begin: Ben Elton once wrote that Perth has more dollar-millionaires per capita than any other city on earth. This would appear a tall claim to anyone who’s visited Hong Kong, Monte Carlo, southern California or Dubai. He wrote that in the 1980s so even if it were true then, it may not be now. Nevertheless, what is clear is that Perth is confidently affluent in a way that is dumbfounding, breathtaking to the hundreds of thousand of visitors it receives every year. If the weather, the green spaces, the crime rate, the provision of public services, the cleanliness of the air and the average standard of housing are what constitute ‘standard of living, it’s probably unrivalled by any world city. It’s also the most isolated city in the world. Adelaide is the closest neighbour (about 3000km away), Melbourne and Sydney are about half as far again, Singapore and Jakarta are about the same distance. Western Australia – of which Perth is the capital – has a population of just over a couple million, for an area the size of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Greece combined. It is 2.7m km2 of uninhabited and largely uninhabitable wilderness. So take my word, when you’re in Perth, you really feel a long way from everywhere.

Perth’s an ‘American’ city, built for the car and an exemplar of how urban sprawl can go unchecked when circumstances permit and geography mandates. Part of the reason is the history. The city was founded in 1829 on the banks of the Swan, but the early settlers were disappointed by the soil’s – that’s an Australian euphemism for gigahectares of sand – poor agricultural prospects. The more fertile areas were upstream and so small settlements such as Guilford were built. Although a ‘free’ settlement – unlike the settlements those built with convict labour on the east coast – many convicts arrived in the west and tourists can see their sartorially improved descendants to this day, stealing cars, plotting vegetable heists and sniffing glue over a tall macchiato on one of the cappuccino strip’s quaint cafes. Do wave and take pictures, I implore you. They love it.

Perth was generously designated a ‘city’ by Queen Victoria in 1856 – but a city which doesn’t have a second university shouldn't really be called a city at all. And that second university happened in 1975 – the same year that Australia had its major constitutional crisis (when the Queen through the Governor-General sacked the Prime Minister and dissolved parliament) and Australians vowed never again to tolerate a foreign Head of State*. The second university was called Murdoch Uni – rather appropriate since Rupert is Australia’s most influential person and he himself would be pleased to find that tens of thousands of mealy-mouthed undergraduates drop his name every day. A momentary digression on the subject of Mr Murdoch: Australia has the highest concentration of media ownership in the industrialised world. In the last major review (done in 1999), of the twelve capital city and daily papers, seven were owned by Murdoch and three by Fairfax. Few people complain, though, because the Australian media is so execrable there’s no guarantee letting anyone else in to produce more of it would have any beneficial effect whatsoever.

*They broke their necks getting around to a speedy referendum on the Republic issue only 24 years later, and the electorate – with the sort of well thought-out reason you expect from Australians en masse – decided that they quite liked the Queen after all, so voted no. Another referendum is expected some time in the 25th Century.


So although Perth was a city since back in 1856 (two years before the first independent school was founded – of which I am a proud alumnus, go you Haleians), it took until the 1950s to begin any meaningful expansion. Wave after wave of British immigrants came over on £10 tickets – the ‘£10 poms’ as they are affectionately known – and found themselves on a coastal settlement bound to the east by a mountain range (hills, really, but an obstacle nonetheless) and the endless Indian Ocean to the west. With barely thirty or so kilometres separating these two longitudinal barriers, expansion north and south was inevitable. And expand the intrepid settlers did. To call Perth enormous does an injustice to enormity. I’ve been to LA, I’ve been to Mumbai and I live in London. Trust me, for what it is, Perth is enormous.

The 1950s was the decade when the car became an affordable, mass-produced commodity. So a city like Melbourne on the other side of the country – which began its real growth decades earlier than Perth, setting up three universities** has a European-style system of trams and a public transport system broadly adequate for its people. Perth on the other hand has about the worst public transport of any place outside of Somalia, Mozambique and the United States. In that sense, Melbourne is to San Francisco or New York as Perth is to LA or Phoenix or Vegas. When space is aplenty and the car is affordable, governments built roads. And Perth is a road city like you’ve never seen.

**Murdoch Tech, Murdoch U and The Centre for the Study of Murdoch have done quite well, but the Murdoch Institute for Largescale Finance suffered due to its unfortunate acronym. No, I’m joking, but on that subject, Perth’s third university is the Curtin University of Technology. It was originally and ill-advisedly called the Curtin University of New Technology. But not for long.

Perth has more cars per capita than any other city in the world (roughly 750 per 1000 population, which translates to one per person when you exclude the elderly, children and those too incapable to pass their test. Thankfully, I suppose, it also has more car park spaces per capita than any other city in the world. Nobody seems to know how many that fleshes out to. Suffice to say at certain times of day you behold endless expanses of empty grey tarmac shimmering under the summer sun. At other times, you’ll get dizzy from driving around and around the block, cursing your road-fellows for their parking incompetence. “If that guy had parked ten centimetres further back, and the guy in front had done the same, and the guy in front and the guy in front and the guy in front of him had done the same too – I could’ve squeezed in there. Bastards.” This is a popular complaint. Circling the block in the city centre at night is like playing pass the parcel with Hyundais. It sucks.

In most other places, if you don’t have a car, or choose to leave it at home, you have – in addition to buses, trains and perhaps trams too – a variety of taxis buzzing around, which at least affords the option of beating the sweaty crush and not having to stand around with everyone else. For the sociopathically enclined, this has an irresistible appeal.

Perth has a population of just over two million people. Greater London has a population of nine or ten million. London has 30,000 official black cabs, and thousands of private hire mini-cabs too – which get you there just as fast, can be ordered at any time, and are a fair bit cheaper. Often the driver smells like a Parisian, but it’s a small price to pay for not actually having to be in Paris.

Perth, by contrast, has six hundred taxi licences. That’s right, six hundred, for a city the size of Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester combined. Because everybody drives, nobody takes taxis during the day. So you seldom see them, and when you do they’re parked on taxiranks with bored drivers. But that’s fine, because as I said, nobody has any need for them. The six hundred drivers have a pretty rotten life with nothing to do. Which explains the government’s refusal to issue any more licences.

The evening is a very, very different matter. On weekend nights in particular, the whole city wants to go out on the town to drink until they fall over. This is Australia, after all, a country whose people coined the expression “technicolour yawn” and who largely herald from working-class England. And the English are famous for binge drinking in the way the French are known for sitting around and spouting pseudo-intellectual tripe; it’s not so much an engrained habit as the scaffolding which keeps society in one piece.

A local here will tell you the average time nowadays to get a taxi after midnight on the weekend is somewhere around two hours. My brother once waited for three hours before giving up and walking home, which took three more hours. When half a million people go out eating, drinking and dancing, and then all want to go home at roughly the same time, six hundred cars is a trifle inadequate. This was a problem when I lived here. It’s become even worse in the years since.

But watching the Aussies trying to get home from the nightclub district is revealing in itself. I saw a queue at the taxirank one hundred long. They all waited patiently in the way only Anglo-Saxons can. I took the girl I was with (a very attractive young blonde), walked fifty yards up the road before the rank, and sent her into the oncoming traffic. We had a cab within ten seconds. Nobody else thought of this. Which just goes to show that you can take the Aussies out of England, but you can't take being English out of the Aussies.

That night I'd been out with a bunch of friends. We went first to a Caribbean bar at 9pm. The queue outside was fifty feet long. I pushed to the front and schmalzed the bouncer, which had about as much success as it would anywhere else in the world. The men at the front of the queue sported the self-conscious metrosexuality all Australia men have nowadays, including designer stubble. One of them said he’d been queuing so long he was clean shaven when he got in line. Actually, he didn’t say that – he was a moron – but that was a gist. The queue was static.

So we walked to another bar. Which was closed. On a Saturday night. We passed half a dozen clubs – all of which had queues more than a hundred people long – and found one which was moving at passable speed.

Twenty minutes later, my friends and I reached the entrance. A wet-faced eleven-year old girl with acne scarring that suggested she’d been hunting with Dick Cheney was clutching a clipboard with an expression of nauseating self-importance. She looked down at my shoes (perfectly clean and neat navy suede sneakers), shook her head gravely and announced – with the nails-down-the-blackboard excrutiatingness of the ocker Australian lilt: “Yoi carnt come in hiere wurring thoise, mite!”

I argued, I reasoned. I even tried flirting. I pointed out that the guy in front was let into the club wearing a singlet which left tufts of black hair hanging from his armpits like a couple of squished bushrats. I explained that the group of gentlemen in front were likely too mentally challenged to be able to exit the building in case of fire, whereas I am an expert at trying to leave places, having grown up right here in Perth. And finally, I touched her shoulder, smiled and gave her a look of saccharine droopiness that made my friends want to vomit. She looked hesitantly around for a bouncer. I left.

But a place is nothing without its people and, unlike the various other cities, towns and villages I’ve been lucky enough to visit on this trip so far, I can speak of Perth as a local. I spent sixteen years of my life here. And although many of my attitudes to this remarkable corner of the world would be wholly unrepresentative of the thoughts of others, it’s nevertheless a place I know well and one which has indelibly marked my sense of self. One’s self is but a function of the people and places which have passed through it.

Paradise – by many people’s understanding of the term – Perth really is. Describe to an Indian or a Bulgarian or a Cambodian or a Serb a place of such bountiful wealth and opportunity, of such safety and sunshine, of such abundant space and flora, and they will think you waxing panglossian about a hereafter. When you tell them it’s the place where you first played cricket in the street, drank your first beer, had your first kiss, learned to swim and drive and write in rhyme, they regard you with an otherworldly fascination. Even Americans – brought up as they so often are to believe in the unarguable exceptionalism of their own culture – see in Perth in particular and Australia as a whole – that which America wishes it were.

If you tell the Indian or the Serb, however, that – despite being grateful for what this pristine utopia afforded you – you couldn’t wait to leave, he or she regards you not with fascination or even bemusement, but a real incredulity. Either your description of the place has been woefully misleading, or you are indefensibly ungrateful for what you’ve been given. After having experienced this incredulity many times, I cannot help but conclude that the truth must in fact be both. I have both failed to depict fully Perth’s shortcomings and I have never fully appreciated its virtues and its people.

But who are the people? Who are the inhabitants of this most isolated of metropolises? Despite Perth’s (and Australia’s) chest-puffing claims to multiculturalism, it’s actually anything but. Scandinavia it is not, but – don’t be fooled – if you come here expecting a polyglot melting-pot of white, black, brown and yellow faces, you’ll be disappointed. To this day it’s an overwhelmingly white country – and a great majority of these white inhabitants are protestant Anglo-Saxons too. Melbourne and Sydney have small but significant Mediterranean minorities (predominantly Greek, Macedonian, Croatian and Italian), and Sydney has a growing Lebanese community – many of whom came over in 1980s during the civil war.

White as it is, though, Australia is a country which is changing, and it’s a really interesting time to be back. After 11 years of a right-wing coalition federal government the November elections brought about a landslide victory for the centre-left Australian Labor Party. In truth the ALP is neither a “Labor” party (Australians don’t shed many tears for the unions) nor centre-left (the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, calls himself a fiscal conservative) but it holds a commanding majority in Canberra, as well as every single one of the State and Territory governments. The vanquished Liberal party of John Howard is now so weakened that its highest-ranking public servant in the entire country is the mayor of Brisbane. And next week, as the US did for slavery and its treatment of native Americans, and the British for Ireland, Australia atones for its own original sin. The federal government, meeting one of its campaign promises, will apologise to the Aborigines for the Stolen Generation, which is supposed to put to bed the sorriest chapter in Australia’s young history.

Australia’s relationship with its original inhabitants is a tortured tale of disrespect, neglect, blame, racism, middle-class guilt and politically-correct relativism. To visit this self-described ‘lucky country’ and lay eyes on its original inhabitants has broken the hearts of thousands with a social conscience who’ve come to these shores. Surely, what’s left of the Aborigines is the most wretched social group of any developed country in the world. Prevailing wisdom across the political spectrum is gloomy beyond belief. Virtually everyone thinks the Aborigines will be effectively extinct within two generations. And to make matters worse, virtually everyone thinks the problem is intractable.

Aborigines have 26 times the dementia of Australians as a whole. They have 3 or 4 times the rate of respiratory disease and diabetes. They have a full 70-fold the rate of communicable diseases, two to three times the infant mortality and five times the drug-induced mental-disorders. Life expectancy is 59.6 years compared to 72.9 for Native Canadians, 72.1 for Maoris and 70.6 for Native Americans. According to a 2004 Canadian study of 100 countries, Australia’s Aborigines have the second worst standard of life of any group on earth (after some Chinese indigenous communities). Despite this, Australia ranks fourth globally on the study’s human development index. The UNDP’s 2007/8 Development Index (the best recognised of its type) puts Australia third, after Iceland and Norway.

None of these statistics can ever reveal the full picture, though. For that, you have to sit in the centre of any of Australia’s cities for a couple of hours, and watch the world go by. The Aborigines lurk in the shadows like H.G Wells’ Moorlocks. When you see them, they’re dressed like vagrants, limping, invariably carrying a bottle in a paper bag. These are the more active ones. Take a stroll to a nearby park, and you’ll likely see a group of Aborigines, of both sexes and all ages, passed out on the grass. But even this doesn’t tell the full story.

The full horror lies outside the cities. Although a small minority of Aborigines do live in urban areas (with almost universal unemployment and welfare dependance), a large percentage live on what may charitably be called ‘reservations’ in the Australian outback. They live neither the traditional nomadic lifestyle they once had, nor do they integrate into modern Australia in any way. Ask any knowledgeable Aussie and he or she will tell you that I’m not overblowing my point: Aborigines live a life where they just wait to die. These outback communities have no employment save the one man who sells alcohol. The children regularly die of diseases which have been eradicated in all but sub-Saharan Africa. I met a lecturer in the History department at the University of Western Australia. He made an interesting point:

“This is a soft left department at a soft left university. But whenever there’s some sort of governmental intervention into these settlements, those academics who’ve never visited one predictably decry the policy’s paternalism and illiberalism. And those who have been out there, complain that it doesn’t go far enough. These Aboriginal communities are places of indescribable degeneracy. And nobody knows what more can be done”.

A comprehensive examination of the history and causes of Aborigines’ wretchedness is beyond the scope of this piece here. But it’s worth telling an undisputable truth. Alcohol and pornography have decimated black Australia. In the middle of last year, the Howard government – in response to a long-awaited report which detailed horrific levels of child sex abuse in these communities – banned alcohol and pornography to certain areas of the Northern Territory, which amounted to a ban for Aborigines alone. The only real outcry from the Australian Left was not to the policy per se, but to the cynical, populist reactionism of the government in so drastically implementing it. In short, practically nobody who lives here, irrespective of their political leanings, is unaware of the appalling, unspeakable sex abuse which is widespread in Aboriginal culture. In my two decades here, barely a week would pass without yet another story of the gang-rape of children. Only two months ago, nine men who pleaded guilty to gang-raping a 10-year-old girl at the Aurukun Aboriginal community on Cape York escaped a prison term, with the sentencing judge inexplicably saying the child victim "probably agreed" to have sex with them.

The argument that alcohol and pornography are to blame is one which tends to stun and bemuse neophytes. After all, both are freely available in society at large, and child rape – while it does exist – is not endemic. But whether you loathe Aboriginal men for their evil, or make the case that the taboo on child sex is as culturally specific as the prohibition on corporal punishment, the fact is a significant majority of children as young as two or three are systematically and continually raped in these communities and 2007 in Australia was the year the civil libertarians ran out of objections. The complaint that imposing our standards on these communities is paternalistic and is the root cause of Aboriginal wretchedness carries no more steam. Just this week, Robert Bropho, a prominent Perth Aboriginal leader of the Swan River Nyungah community, is on trial for child sex charges. He is – and I don’t say this lightly – completely representative of Aboriginal leadership in Australia. In twenty years, I can’t count the number of Aboriginal “leaders” who’ve been found to be – at best – corrupt, and – at worse – child rapists.

In my final year of law school here in Perth, I took Advanced Criminology. The majority of this very small class conducted investigations and wrote theses into Aboriginal rates of juvenile incarceration, or deaths in custody, arguing vociferously that White Australia is to blame, that Aborigines are unfairly targeted, that the media manipulates the electorate into believing Aborigines are more predisposed to crime than everyone else. As a proud social liberal, I was stunned and a little guilty to find myself shouting these people down, class after class. Despite the good-intentioned but morally deficient policy of taking Aboriginal children from their homes in the 1950s, despite the fact that this was their country long before it was ours, and despite early Aborigines being massacred by the British, the relativistic nonsense my classmates were spewing made me bilious with opprobrium. As they spent a semester researching and making excuses, always separating the disease from the symptoms, I wrote my thesis on virtual child pornography and argued its continued legality. It made me a hate figure, but I think their hatred of me served to confuse their own defense of contemporary Aboriginal culture. This was in 2003. Maybe they’ve come round to mainstream opinion since. Not for nothing, I topped the class. In response they voted me most likely to be a serial killer. I hated them all.

So next week there’ll be a milestone in modern Australia. Although a handful of progressive premiers and senators apologised to the Aborigines a decade ago, the Howard government – despite public support – steadfastly refused to do so. The explanation was that an apology implies culpability and a flood of litigation would drown the judiciary and bankrupt the country.

This was farcical and mean-spirited. But the time has come, and the new PM is giving both a written and verbal apology for the suffering caused. It probably won’t make much practical difference to the dire conditions in which Aborigines live. An apology won’t get them off welfare dependence any more than it'll convince Aboriginal men that child sex is evil. But if there's any disease which underpins the wretchedness of Aborigines, the disease with contributes to the other diseases I’ve already mentioned, it’s a disease of the soul. A culture with no remaining self-respect cannot summon the strength to save itself. The dearth of dignity which leads Aborigines to spend their days stumbling through city centres, eye-bleedingly drunk and cursing drivel at an imaginary foe, must surely stem from knowing that the white man never thought much of them in the first place. So if a genuine, heartfelt apology, based not on direct guilt but on compassion and sincerity, helps just a few Aboriginal men to stand up tall and announce, “I am a proud man and I will be a leader of my people before it’s too late!” then perhaps everything is not as dire as I've made out.

Time will tell of course, but on this historic week, I can't overstate how sad the Aboriginal problem is. Australia is a country with so much to be proud of. With a tiny population, it has a booming and resilient economy, sends fine actors, writers and musicians everywhere around the world, conducts some of the world’s pre-eminent science, has produced thinkers as diverse as Germaine Greer, Peter Singer, Edna Everage and my own greatest hero, Clive James. It’s the country of Don Bradman and Banjo Patterson and Joan Sutherland and Rod Laver, and the tenets which underpin Australian culture are as admirable as any in the world. Although visitors and expats may laugh at the notion of “fair dinkum”, it’s a laudable belief and should be on the flag. Admittedly difficult to define, it broadly refers to a spirit of fair play and hard work. It means respect for integrity and candour. And it’s the reason Australians smile and call total strangers “mate” – and really mean it when they do. It’s a marvellous country with a marvellous people. Which makes it all the more sad that the open wound of Aboriginal reconciliation continues to fester on an otherwise tough and tanned skin.

Each time I come back to Australia, I find it less and less like home, but with more and more to admire. And being here in Perth, in this most isolated metropolis of all, on a land which – as the anthem goes – abounds with nature’s gifts, with beauty rich and rare, I am moved to raise a cold beer to the Great Southern Land, which is going through a rite of passage, consigning to the past its adolescent sins, and beginning an exciting and unwritten chapter in its history.