just broken over us and the rain was so heavy that it was advisable to stop the car. We were able to do so by the river and we had a view of a limestone village high on the other bank, made all the lovelier by the intermittent curtains of rain.
But, returning to Australia, the river that I most wanted to see was the enigmatic and, perhaps, romantic Darling, the river whose history was so adequately portrayed by the Australian writer C. W. Bean in 1911. I bought his book The Dreadnought of the Darling in the 1960s and read it, and re-read it, but it took me until the twenty-first century before I actually got to the Darling. And what did I see? Well, sometimes it is the journey that matters.
CHAPTER TWO
The Dordogne river rises near the centre of France and flows in a general south-westerly direction to join the Garonne some distance to the north of Bordeaux. It is 472 kilometres in length and the streams that mark its origin are the Dore and the Dognon. The Darling rises near Killarney in southern Queensland, Australia and is known there as the Condamine. Several small streams such as the Dumaresque, the Macintyre and the Barwon flow in a general south and south-westerly direction until at the confluence of the Barwon and the Culgoa Rivers that new river becomes the Darling. This river, the Darling then joins the Murray River at Wentworth. The experts tell us that the Darling has a total length of 1867 kilometres — four times as long as the Dordogne.
The Darling, as distinct from some of its tributaries, flows through a relatively arid part of Australia; in fact you could almost claim that today it marks the most westerly part of New South Wales that should reasonably be farmed and grazed. The Dordogne, on the other hand, flows through one of the richest and most varied parts of France: vines, fruit trees, walnuts, poultry (especially geese and ducks), cattle, sheep and goats (and therefore butter and cheese). The Darling and east of the Darling is somewhat sparsely populated but the Dordogne is a valley of villages, towns, farms, woods, native vegetation. In a word, varied.
Such different rivers, such different people! And the thing that intrigues me at the outset is the question: what is it that makes the inhabitants of one country so different to those of another? Why are the French generally so different from the Australians generally? I know, we all know, that it is in part the language, the mixture of races, history, tradition, and so on, but I maintain that it is more than the sum of those relatively minor things. It is in my view the very country itself, its climate, its soil, its sky its indefinable atmosphere. It is everything about the country; its streams, its oceans and beaches, its terroir, to use a French winemaking expression, that produces a population that has characteristics different to and distinct from those, in the case of Australia, of its mother country or countries.
The French have developed the term terroir to a nice point, and it must be said that it has been a commercial success, open to criticism in this modern world though as being rather too unbending. Terroir encompasses more than just the climate and the soil in which the plant or tree grows, or the bird or animal is raised, it encompasses the topography, the geology, the sky, the atmosphere… anything at all which could possibly influence the product, something even in its past, its history, traditional ways and methods. France and Europe are bound closely by tradition and tradition is both good and bad. Australia, on the other hand, may be open to the criticism that we have scant respect for our traditions: we are too eager to be free of everything.
Soil and climate and plant varieties have always fascinated me. Some fifty-five years ago, we decided that we should not only drink wine but that we should grow the grapes and make the wine. I was in the law at the time, and for many reasons, but including the proximity of my practice, we eventually found a four-hectare site facing the Dandenongs in the outer suburbs of Melbourne. We are still there. Now on that small vineyard, we have, for example, three plots of Pinot (interspersed with other varieties) and they all produce differently, ripen at different times and have different characteristics. And yet they are all within two hundred metres of one another a demonstration of terroir in miniature.
Varietal characters are another thing that shouldn’t surprise me but they do: there you have one apple tree planted next to another — same soil, rain, wind and sun — yet one is distinctly different to the other.
People, plants, terroir: a fascinating field for thought and reflection. But perhaps the final word on people and their country comes from an indigenous Australian, Bob Randall, elder of the Yankunytjatjara, the traditional owners of the rock, Ayer’s Rock. These days that wonderful creation is more correctly and colourfully known as Uluru. A short while ago, Bob was doing a lengthy television interview, which was filmed with the rock in the background, and he had many sensible things to say. That rock! Honestly, I’m unashamedly in love with French Gothic cathedrals, and Uluru is the equal of any of them, and even… But to return to Bob Randall. He said this: “The people don’t own the land — the land owns the people.” You’d have to applaud such a summation as that.
CHAPTER THREE
The most convenient, and the most spectacular view of the birth of the Dordogne River is from your bedroom balcony looking to your left over toward the forbidding bulk of the Puy de Sancy. (Puy in Celtic is “volcano” or perhaps simply “peak” and Dore is “ water”).
A long plane trip, a short plane trip, a rental car, and suddenly there it was cascading from what appeared to be a wound in the side of the rocky mountain still partly snow covered at the end of May. You can approach Sancy from the other direction, no doubt, and if you did, equally without a doubt you would come upon small streams which gathered together either short of, or in a cleft in the mountain, but to see it from the Mount Dore side is wonderfully impressive and picturesque. If you walk out of your hotel and up towards the ski lift you will come upon a bridge and under it is the fat and fast stream that the waterfall has begot. This stream plunges straight down to the thriving spa and ski town of Mount Dore and the road runs beside it. On one side of the road are a series of ski lifts and ski nets above the road cutting, presumably to catch unwary skiers before they break their bones, and on the other is this sturdy brown stream and a succesion of chalets, hotels, and the like. You are in the region of the Auvergne but the department of Puy de Dôme; and you are also in the proximity of a young and racy river. Brimful of water and turbulence and excitement, it cannot wait to get there. And despite its impetuosity and its gauche immaturity you admire it and you are intrigued by it. You are beginning to fall under its spell.
The Auvergne is not as well known as places like Burgundy or Alsace or Provence, and it is very different, but so astonishingly beautiful. I must say that my previous impression had been that it was of a land of austerity and mystery. I wonder now how I got that impression. Many years ago we had stayed at what was then the rather passé spa town of Vichy and I had spent a few hours late one afternoon walking in the hills to the west of that town, but why did I have this notion that the Auvergne was remote and sombre? I determined to find out.
I went first to consult our ancient Fodor, an old light blue covered and rather tattered volume dated 1971, and I looked at the entry under a section entitled “The undiscovered provinces”. It was headed “Exploring Auvergne” and it plunged straight into its spa towns, its healing waters and its health resorts but then it did go on to describe its volcanic mountains, its snow fields and its lakes. It even mentioned the famous literary mother Madame de Sévigné (who apparently frequented Vichy in the seventeenth century) and it went on to extol the architecture of the “beautiful twelfth century church of St. Nectaire”. It wasn’t a lengthy entry on this wonderful region, but there was nothing derogatory in it.
The aging Encyclopaedia
