Issue 25 Preview: The Australian Job, by Steve Himmer
Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash
Note: This essay is from our latest print issue, number 25, which you can and should order right here.
My career as an international bank robber was brief and unprofitable but at least I never got caught. After three decades I’ve stopped watching for INTERPOL over my shoulder.
I was on a gap year, my second, and only a “gap” in hindsight. There was no destination planned on the far side. After backpacking in Ireland and the UK, I’d shown myself less than adept at rock climbing in Colorado and wooden boat building in Maine, with a restaurant stint in between to save money. I’d intended to go on building dubious watercraft in St Petersburg but some disagreement between the nonprofit involved and the Russian government made that unwise. There was an invitation to teach English to a village of rug weavers in Pakistan, in the mountains a few hours’ drive from Lahore, but that, too, became politically complicated then impossible before I set out. Likewise the boarding school on the Bosporus which sounded like an exciting adventure right up until the school was shut down and the director arrested.
I nearly blew what remained of my small erstwhile college fund on a twenty-six foot mahogany sloop from the classified ads of Wooden Boat magazine. It needed only a skilled pair of hands and a sucker to make it seaworthy so I was half-suited, but in a rare moment of sense let that albatross pass. Instead I went to Australia for a few months, emboldened by all the travel writing in the nearly full set of Granta back issues shelved in the house “we” boatbuilders shared, to volunteer with a conservation group before setting out on my own. It’s striking how simple that sounds, how many assumptions and how much privilege are packed into the phrase, “Instead I went to Australia for a few months.” Not to mention the preceding list of false starts and absurd intentions. But at the time it was simple: I had no obligations and no direction and no student loan debt. I had parents whose ability to remain at least outwardly calm and to watch me screw up becomes a greater marvel the older my own daughter gets, and they pushed me to save from my restaurant jobs and spared what they could on my behalf.
The question of funding rarely arose when backpacking, unless the temporary off-the-books job you’d been doing in a fruit field or a hostel made a good story. Strangers compared how much this place cost versus that one, how cheaply we’d managed to eat, which broken payphone on which block of which city didn’t charge the full overseas rate, and how little we could live on for how long as an inverted matter of pride in a decade when being a sellout was the very worst thing. In the hallway of a hostel in Melbourne
I overheard another American volunteer from the conservation corps, the kind of guy who comes from such obvious wealth you feel guilty for making assumptions until they all turn out to be true, whining on a call to his father about how expensive everything was and that he needed more money. I was mortified on his behalf to be accidentally eavesdropping but he didn’t seem to mind.
Weekdays I slept in a tent on job sites around Victoria and Tasmania, working alongside a shifting combination of fellow conservation volunteers from Germany and Japan and Canada and the Netherlands and the UK. We dug trenches for drainage at a colonial-era mill in the first stages of restoration. We planted trees and uprooted others that weren’t native species, and we got blistered and sunburnt and filthy. Then we got drunk and rambunctious around the fire at night, playing cards and guitars.
One weekend between assignments I was out in Melbourne with some English volunteers I’d worked with for a couple of weeks, a woman named Claire and two Ruperts; Claire called them Big Roo and Little Roo but I just called each of them Rupert. We’d been to the beach at St Kilda then had a cheap lunch and a pint. We’d been joking and laughing and, in that late teenage state of full-grown bodies wrapped around half-grown brains, blocking sidewalks and disrupting the routines of Melbournians going about their innocent Saturday business.
We stopped in a camera store to replenish our film rolls then a camping store to replace things we’d broken. I bought a green self-inflating ground pad that’s still in my basement though by now the valve hardly seals.
Then we hit the bank before closing.
I needed to cash a few traveler’s checks from the thick stack I’d signed weeks earlier in the US, one after another until my wrist hurt and my signature deteriorated into an illegible scribble from which it has never recovered. I had a credit card, too, and could use it in a cash machine if necessary, but the 18% interest on that cash advance would start accruing from the instant the card touched the slot so traveler’s checks, their days numbered, still made the most sense.
We laughed in line beneath surveillance cameras, beside a big sign demanding motorcyclists remove their helmets. The Ruperts and I jostled and joshed while Claire egged us on, her big, braying laugh a reward the three of us competed for whether we realized or not. Old women waiting for a teller gave us withering eyes and old men beside them made a show of not noticing us in their midst. The red-faced security guard, as old as those customers and packed into his brown uniform like a man who knows he’s too close to retirement to waste money on the next size up, followed us from behind thick, wide glasses.
I stepped to the counter when my turn came and handed over my passport and checks.
And little Roo at my shoulder yelled, “Look out, he’s got a gun!” Later he insisted he hadn’t yelled.
It was a whisper, he swore, perhaps a too vigorous one, but the room had gone quiet in that second so what was meant for our eight stupid ears boomed across the whole bank.
It boomed, then froze, then erupted.
Old women wobbled and grabbed whichever shoulder or railing was nearest. Old men clutched their chests and I know how cartoonish and cliché that sounds but they did.
The guard pulled his gun and ran toward me. The Ruperts and Claire ran in the other direction, out to the street. The teller, who still had my passport on the far side of the counter, turned bone-white and stiffened, our eyes glued for a second before she burst into sobs and sank from her chair. Another teller lifted her and led her away while giving me the most violent stare of my life.
The bank manager charged from behind the counter. He held me by one arm while the guard held the other, each of them shouting and scolding.
“Do you think this is funny?” the manager demanded over and over.
The guard returned his gun to its holster but the hand that had held it still twitched for something to throttle or strike.
I don’t know what I said. Whatever it was didn’t matter. I stood helpless between those two raging men where, seconds earlier, I’d stood witless between the two Ruperts. In an instant I’d been reduced from an adult independently exploring the world to a child caught red-handed and stuck. If I could have melted, I would have, and my burning face made its best attempt.
I’d been invisible for so long. Not to the people around me but to the world. Without cell phones or GPS or email, I let family and friends know where I was with occasional, expensive calls and slow moving postcards or airmailers of the type that no longer exist: single page pre-lined letters that folded into their own envelopes. All at once I was real. I was seen. Without my passport I couldn’t go anywhere and where would I have gone if I could? The bank knew who I was. My face was on camera. That weeping, traumatized teller might still pick me out of a lineup today but I hope not; I’d hate to think the moment stayed with her or that I left a scar on her life.
Assuming the surveillance footage was erased at some point, perhaps overwritten when that cassette was recycled to record another day in the bank, no trace of the moment exists. No phones were whipped out to record it; no posts to Facebook or Twitter and no viral infamy or memetic half-life occurred. There was only the moment, as excruciating and bottomless and miserable as it was. Then it was gone apart from whatever mental snapshots each witness took. Gone, apart from the scars.
How would that moment go now? What would it look like preserved?
It was a mistake, an idiotic impulse from a teenager. The spillover of thoughtless energy ramped up by banter into ill-chosen words blurted more loudly than intended in the worst possible place.
If it had been recorded. If it had been tweeted and some lazy news outfit after free content had asked the recorder if they could use it. A misstep like that could grip me as tightly as the guard gripped my arm long after the man himself must be dead — I hope through natural causes, not hastened by the stress of our meeting. I could be trailed by the Google result “Idiot tourist tries robbing bank and you won’t believe what happens next!” In the summer of 2019 an English family touring New Zealand generated dozens of headlines and videos and mocking memes because of the chaos and destruction and cruelty to locals they spread before getting deported — fights picked at beaches and picnic areas, shoplifting, drugs. Those stories followed them home and the press waited for their flight to land. Would a backpacking bank robber fare any better, especially one so inept?
If the guard had been jumpier. If I’d jerked my empty hands the wrong way after Rupert’s outburst. If I’d been someone other than a dumb white boy with his dumb white friends. Or if terrorism and mass shootings had become part of Australian culture already, because I robbed that bank — not of money but I stole something from every other person who was in that room — a year before a gunman in Port Arthur, Tasmania killed 35 people and wounded 23 others. At the time of my heist the rumors and gossip around the hostel circuit were about a man facing trial for killing backpackers hitchhiking in New South Wales but not about guns. This was before school shootings and church shootings were so common in the US that they hardly rise above the newspaper fold, when the big threat in the news was tourists getting carjacked because their rental vehicles bore prominent logos. Terrifying at the time, it’s a fear as quaint now as classified ads in a magazine or payphones in hostels or cashing traveler’s checks.
In August 2019 I watched from a distance as first in El Paso then hours later in Dayton crowds of innocent people came under the gun. From the Netherlands, where I was leading a study abroad group, the news wasn’t surprising though the proximity was, one national failure coming so soon on the heels of another. The only shock that remains is how fully we’ve gone from a nation of temporarily embarrassed millionaires to a nation of temporarily alive murder victims, each of us knowing we will, given time, be caught in a shooting. It’s the law of averages, at this point, with more shootings than days in the year, putting us all in the sights of some stranger angry the world turns without him. I’ve read of soldiers deciding they’re already dead as a way of coping with war and suspect the US is a nation of zombies walking upright only until it’s our turn to fall down.
I got off lightly with scolding and shame. Someone else wouldn’t have.
Many someone elses have not.
Rupert got off with a punch on the arm and the inarticulate, adrenaline- and fear-addled chewing out I delivered on the sidewalk when at last I’d been given my money and passport in a transaction completed by the manager himself, glaring at me the whole time. The guard dragged me out by the elbow and told me not to come back, as if he needed to. I swear every customer and staff member and even the masked face behind the motorcycle helmet on the poster hissed like the eastern brown snakes I’d been warned about while at work in the bush but had never met.
Later, I think Rupert bought me a beer. We put it behind us and it stayed there for a long time. Until those shootings I watched from a distance in 2019.
How much could have hinged on that moment or other mistakes? My own and those made around me, like the drunk midnight hunter in South Australia who, mistaking some sleeping friends and myself for possums a month or so after the heist, fired a shot into the soil beside us. The world has become less forgiving and I’m not sure I’d make it this far with today’s stakes for stupidity. Despite having so much in my favor, unearned.
The students I travel with now are the age I was then. I’m sure on our excursions to Amsterdam and the Dolomites and Venice and elsewhere they do things as dumb as I did, some of which I hear about and others I happily don’t. I hope so; I want for them the chance to screw up. I want that for my own daughter, too. But I wonder if constant awareness of not only cameras but bombs and guns makes people timid, or if we’re inured to both risk and surveillance as we got used to other things once. The way we accepted the disappearance of classified ads and traveler’s checks and airmailers and all the daydreams they delivered.
I suggested to one of my classes that during our time in the mountains, having read about isolation and distance and loneliness in the accounts of past travelers, we might try putting our phones away for a couple of days. Turn them off.
“We’d love to,” they said, “but our parents would panic.”
So much can go so wrong so quickly that it’s hard to disagree with their parents, especially as one myself. A few years ago on a tour bus in the Netherlands I watched a colleague receive news of the bomb attacks at Brussels’ airport and central train station. Within minutes, through coordinated phone calls with the study abroad staff she supervises, every one of ninety students was accounted for whether on campus or spread across Europe. The invisibility of pre-cellphone, pre-Twitter, pre-terror travel wouldn’t have allowed that to happen, any more than it preserved my failed heist on YouTube.
In their book The Watchman In Pieces: Surveillance, Literature, and Liberal Personhood, David Rosen and Aaron Santesso highlight an eeriness of the ubiquitous surveillance videos we all find ourselves in — or most often don’t, because we don’t look; we never see the screen hours each of us produces. Considering security footage of the 9/11 bombers passing through Portland, Maine’s airport en route to attack, Rosen and Santesso point out that such images only mean something after the fact. If nothing had happened, if there was no event, no one would have watched that surveillance. It would have existed until the hard drive was wiped but not a single human eye would have known. Only after the unexpected occurs can pieces be assembled into cause and effect. Until there’s an outcome, the breadcrumbs we leave in both public and phones-in-hand private moments lead nowhere.
The question I ask all these years later, without the forensic advantage of evidence, is how close did I come to not walking out of that bank? Was it closer than the billabong campsite where I was fired upon by a hunter? Or the sidewalk, years later, where a crane fell from the top of a building under construction just after I’d passed? The friend’s 1973 Volkswagen Beetle in which the center console broke and got stuck on the accelerator as we sped toward a gas station’s brick wall? Police raiding my house at 4:30am, expecting to find the previous tenant with suspected ties to Whitey Bulger, or when I interrupted a drug bust with suspects handcuffed on a parking lot’s asphalt at gunpoint, trying to return a lost wallet?
Was it closer than each time I go to the mall or to work, or walk my daughter to school or ride the subway or go where other people will be? How many close calls are hiding in how many pockets and in awkward duffel bags slung over shoulders and under unseasonal coats? I assigned my travel writing students a story to read in which the author falls into conversation with a woman sitting beside him while they wait in an airport for a long delayed flight. This, I said, talking to strangers, is what travel is all about. They all agreed that if a stranger approached them like that they would flee. At the time I wondered if and how a generation could be so afraid of other people as to close itself off. But roughly 3000 mass shootings later than those in the summer of 2019, no doubt many more by the time this gets read, avoiding strangers may be good sense in our zombie nation. You never know whose too loud whisper or too fragile ego is about to erupt, no matter how many active shooter drills you practiced in school.
How close a call was it, my heist? Without any record I’ve no way of knowing. There’s only my word to tell you it happened. Two Ruperts at once, who’d believe it? What odds? You’re more likely to be shot in a mall or go viral than to meet two Ruperts at once. Whatever traces the moment created are gone. I couldn’t track down the Ruperts or Claire if I tried and it’s only the novelty of both a Big and a Little Roo in the same story that lets me remember their names. Claire may in fact have been Lucy, as easily as I could have disappeared in that bank in a different sense than I did. I’ve gotten away with something by being alive, by getting caught in that moment’s stupidity and walking away. By indulging the privilege of stupidity unavailable to so many others: my students, my daughter, people who aren’t dumb white boys gliding through the world on a cushioning cloud. And the luxury of having that moment define me only to the extent I chose for it to do so, by writing about it, not by becoming news fodder pieced together one security camera clip at a time in the aftermath of something awful.
Steve Himmer is the author of three novels, and stories and essays in a number of journals and anthologies. He edits Necessary Fiction and teaches at Emerson College.