Australia, Wrapped, For Now

Life has been so thrown into the air the last few months, it’s been hard to give priority to the blog backlog. But Australia still looms as a possible future, among others, and a few things are worth capturing:

Australia is not just familiar, it’s almost routine. I don’t know that I’m traveling. Now and then, something odd comes up – sunglasses aren’t sold where they’re sold in America– and I suddenly recall that I’m in another country. But so many of its ways seem known to me. The news is old news, in old, comforting voices. The cities invite and repel me in their distinctively Australian ways, inciting stresses and relaxations that are all old hat.

How to make it alien again?

•  The soil. Scrape a patch of the greenest grass, and it's there, coppery red. Bare, old, forked, ruined soil. Even on a cold wet day, it looks hot, parched. The earth’s oldest, driest and least fertile continent, upon which all life rests as lightly, like a sheen of lichen on an enormous rock.
  
  
• The birds. The soundscape is one feature of this country that gives the shock of arrival, every moment. I am no more likely to get used to the intricate metallic warble of an Aussie magpie, or the lacerating screech of the sulfur-crested cockatoo, or the quotidian flashiness of a rosella or lorikeet, than I am to get used to the Golden Gate Bridge rising above the fog, its tautness seeming to hold in place the city on the far end.



• The reptiles and spiders, while we're at it .. I've been lucky in this regard, this trip, but they will always shock, sometimes unpleasantly. Aussies are used to things crawling around in their houses. And of course, the biggest and most fearsome-looking are the harmless ones.  I'm sure I will again sleep in a room with a four-inch hairy huntsman spider loitering in an upper corner. Perhaps it will even wander out onto the ceiling over my bed. I’ll take deep breaths, praise its harmless exoskeletal soul, and fall asleep. I will, really. But when I see a snake that looks like a tree root, I’ll freeze. That’s how used to it I am.
  
  
•  The biting sun, a function of this latitude around the Southern Hemisphere. As a cloud clears, and before I can notice a shadow, I feel the sharp poke of the sun on my skin. Sunscreens reduce the harm, but not the liquid pressure of the brutal light.

Comments

[Miss Bliss]

Good to hear from you again. I will be emailing you in mere moments to discuss seeing you in July.

[D. Travers Scott]

Those crazy, screaming cockatoos amazed me! One of the bits of Ozzie oddness no one prepared me for.

That and the bats in the park in Sydney...

[Brian Miller]

Throw in the koala bears living in what looks to be a standard California suburb (in Brisbane area)

[dale]

I loved this description of alien Australia! Very vivid.

[Donovan Phillips]

Very nice blog!