Oz-yssey, Part I 

 And, as always, I begin at the beginning. I was once taught the advantage of “in media res” in structuring an introductory paragraph but I’ve never been quite comfortable with it, despite the ability to beguile you, Constant Reader with the possibility that the crocodile took my leg or the koala savaged the prize eucalypt. It makes me feel ever so seedy.  

 And what a fine country this is. Did you know that into the 18th century, this country’s principal export was the sea slug? Marvellous. Fine English gentlemen wore slug top hats (“slugs” in the vernacular). Slug traders bartered with the natives, exchanging convicts for the finest slugs and jars of Vegemite for the more common sea slugs. On such things was a nation founded.  

But I did suggest that I would begin at the beginning, and the beginning was YVR, Air Canada, a Boeing 767-300, sticky fabric seats, cheap overhead movies with the colour so off-centre that I might well have been watching a 3D movie, cake that tastes like the seat cushions must, and a flight attendant named Karen with a face so severely pulled back by a salt-and-pepper bun that her wisdom teeth glared at us when she purported to smile. Oh, the joys of international air travel! Squalling squacking babies and the cushion-muffled flatulence of 200-some-odd holiday makers.  

Honolulu at midnight coats your tongue with the taste of your armpit after six hours squeezed into economy class seats: moist, fuzzy, and sweetly redolent of a burro’s nether eruptions. Note: if you detect a “wind” theme at this point, it is because I am transfixed with horror at the idea of breathing others’ eructations and emanations for 16 hours.  

The rest of the flight dissolves in my memory with demented sleep disruption. My notes from the period are confused: neck aches – eyes unglue to see flickering toothy American sitcoms parade across the screen – the great sacrilege of airline food as a child: dessert served WITH the main course; this forbidden childhood pleasure rendered into 30-something misery as it materializes as a jam smear across a ginger kitchen sponge – child squacks and arthritic women banging against my knees as I loll across the aisle – Christ Jesu let me find so me sleep! – crossing equator at some point here. All fluids in my body swirling the other way – cld sea tradition of Badger Bag (check name?) coming aboad sea vessels to wet and shave first-timers; do airplanes have overhead sprinklers? – sliding back and forth through time must have some effect on the mind.   

Meanderings aside, I was wide awake as we crossed the International Date Line – a momentous event and one that is little touched upon by modern science: that infinitesimally short moment when our bodies slide from yesterday into tomorrow with only a gap where today should be. I used to stare at the International Date Line as a child. I’d spin the globe and try to figure our what it meant to cross this line that couldn’t even pass a policeman’s breathalyser test: it meanders left, then back, then right, then back to itself.   

 Even time gets no respect from cartographers.   

Oz-yssey, Part II 

 Coming into Australia on the airplane was an experience. We landed at Sydney, taxied to the gate, and then stopped. Stopped dead. The airplane crew came around with spraycans of DDT and started hosing us down in our seats. They opened the luggage compartments overhead and sprayed them too.  

 Pest control.  

 I suppose it is only right and proper. After all, once a country has let in enough beer-swilling rugby-playing dickheads, the authorities will want to ensure that no more make an appearance. Hence the quarantine.   

 I should have been aware of the necessity; after all, there was a recent film about the situation - a poor benighted bogan trying to find his way back to Brizzy or Cairns and a decent can of Foster's by following the Ocker-proof fence the evil authorities in Canberra set up.   

 Ah, the joys of 32-hour travel. Queue up, pass go, then run to queue up again. Plane to Brisbane (Brizzy, the pilot called it), plane to Gladstone, and then a helicopter (a "Squirrel") across to Heron Island!   

 I have pictures and they show the splendours of the island. Empty white sand beaches, seashells littering the shore, stingrays patrolling the surf, sharks and coral keeping the ocean at bay. I shall share. What the pictures don't show are the torrential tropical monsoon that swept the island, but why tell you about that?  

 Heron Island: no TV or telephones in the rooms, limited access to the real world. Two staff members to every guest - but, being Australia where tipping is not part of the culture, the staff would take your order then piss off to smoke a honking great joint before returning to ask you what you ordered again (a minor quibble, due more to the monopolistic nature of the resort and the fact that the average staff member appeared to be 13).  

 Oh, the birds! City folk talk about the silence and stillness of nature, and in the Okanagan you might believe that because pesticides probably knocked off the great flocks of birds years ago, but they know nothing. Try sleeping on a coral cay! Mutton birds, boobies, egrets, eagles, noddies, terns, and gulls. Honks, peeps, moans, shrills, trills, caws, di-di-di-duhs, whippo-whippos, and all together in a cacophonous 6th-grade orchestral arrangement.   

 Empty beaches, shells, dried jellies, coral along the strand. Things that would be snapped up along a conventional beach. Looking out at the still green water, the black patches of coral, moving shapes dark under the water: sharks and sting rays skulking along the shore, and on the horizon, a fringe of dark blue crashing onto the monumental miles of coral.   

 A red-eyed gull sat on my table and glared at me as I took these notes.   

 "The air is getting heavier as I write. Clouds are bringing in squalls that lash the reef. The air is heavy with moisture and the thick ammoniac smell of guano.   

 The interesting thing about a coral cay in the rain is that not one square millimetre of the place stays dry. The trees are designed to ensure that every drop funnels down the back of my shirt."   

 The sun comes and goes. We snorkel with the rays, we take a boat to the edge of the reef and swim in great clouds of small fish, schools of barracuda, and watch reef shark slink into the deep. Manta rays come to see what we are doing and I see a bird sizzle through the water to take a fish.   

 Rain and rays. Coral thirty feet thick and stretching out for acres and acres - swim on top in three metres of water, or along the edge in 30. Turtles lazily wending their way among the rocks . and the colours! Reds and blues and greens and iridescent technicolour acid-fleck opium dreams of colour!  

 Then back along an empty beach, back along a forest track flush with birds, back to the helicopter, back along the reef and to the shore, and back to Brizzy to catch a plane to Canberra.   

 Delayed. Of course. But that's all right because I got to swim with a manta ray.  

Oz-yssey, part III

 This morning (or, more truthfully, yesterday morning which is this morning for most of you given the difficulties with the international date line) I went for a jog up Mt. Taylor behind the Forbe's house. A beautiful clear sky with the sun rising behind the mountain, a nip in the air, and very smooooooth air. Lovely morning. Unfortunately, I didn't have a good grounding in antipodean geography: there is a trick to going up a mountain - you go downhill. This isn't a joke. Every time I took a turn to go up the mountain I ended up at the base. I only managed to make my way up by taking every path that led downhill.   

 Well, not quite every path. I did get frustrated and started making my way across country on a rabbit trail that seemed to lead me in vaguely the right direction. Lovely eucalyptus trees, wattle shrubs, grassy tufts, and all that jazz; however, about half way along I realized that I had chose to go bushwhacking in a country that harbours most of the world's most deadly creatures: spiders, even caterpillar can inject you with enough venom to leave you trembling and screaming for six hours before your die.   

 Freaked out by this thought, I pushed my way through the branches of two eucalyptus trees and burst through into the sunlight and almost bounced off a kangaroo! Luckily she didn't have time to lace on her boxing gloves and she was off with her joey. She was only a foot or two away from me and I could feel the ground move as she thumped against it with each jump.   

 Kangaroos! I went jogging with kangaroos! I startled another one this morning (tomorrow morning for most of you) and it started running parallel to me along the side of the road. Sure, she and her joey beat me, but for about twenty seconds I was running in partnership with a kangaroo!   

 God, I love this country.   

The Forbes feed the birds. Ordinarily, in the northern hemisphere that wouldn't mean much of anything, but here that means that every day at 7am, 4pm, and 5pm, a flock of forty-some-odd yellow-crested cockatoos, thirty magpies, two magpie larks, three galahs, and the occasional multi-coloured thing-a-ma-bobber which for convenience I will call a chuzzwumbler, descend upon the backyard. I could even hear the cacophony on the top of the mountain (probably the size of Mt. Doug for anyone who knows Victoria).   

Right now they are shrieking and warbling and cooing outside the window.   

Marvellous. Kangaroos, and today I saw wallabies and a koala. I saw the arse end of a wombat (which may be its best end) this afternoon.   

Canberra is rightly pooh-poohed as a boring city; however, its location is superb. I am enchanted by its rolling landscape and its urban planning (no building up hillsides, most houses are bungalows or two stories). It drives a bit like Winnipeg, but Winnipeg doesn't have parrots nibbling grass on the side of the roads, kangaroos springing up hillsides, and the red earth of an antique continent.   

Canberra does have, however, the most awful museum in Christendom. The National Museum of Australia is a post-modern nightmare beginning with its architecture and ending with its gift shop. Call me a snob, but I've always liked old-fashioned museums that no one ever goes into. Dusty cases filled with shrunked heads, pinned butterflies, some old codger's scab collection make me deliriously happy.   

 Unfortunately, the modern museum has no artefacts: it has video screens that tell you about all the things you used to look at. The building has no right angles and is constructed to break up crowds by sending them everywhere but in a coherent order. I was especially inflamed by the Aboriginal exhibits that HAD some artefacts: stones, bowls, and wooden fish traps . I was less enthused to see that every artefact had been manufactured since 1983.   

 There was even a section on "feelings" in which we were regaled with tales of Australians feeling joyful, mysterious, sad, enthused, and happy.  Richard was happy to point out that a prominent feature of the museum involved some old schizophenic's thirty years of writing "Eternity" around the streets of Sydney. When he was a child everyone laughed at this poor mental case and scrubbed off the graffiti. Now the "two remaining examples of his oeuvre" are on display and the gift shop sells posters with Eternity written in his pre-lithium copperplate.  

 Best of all was seeing a typical Aussie: a fat, elderly gentleman wearing Crocs, a t-shirt, and sweatpants held up by suspenders. This is truly the land of chuzzwumblers. 

Oz-yssey, part IV

 Australia is an odd country. I'm not certain that it can last. It is just a feeling I have but in the same way that Captain Cook happened to see it during the wrong season during the one good year in a seven-year cycle and thus created the myth that it was a verdant land suitable for convicts and colonists, perhaps this recent blip of settlement is taking place during the one good millennium out of seven. Droughts and locusts are coming and pretty soon the entire modern history of Australia will slip into the Dreamtime. Or, more likely, the entire continent will end up as an enormous pit mine supplying China's resource needs.   

 Even if something so catastrophic doesn't happen, the people might themselves slip into the Dreaming and abandon the world to its own fate. There is a look to a long-term Aussie's eyes that suggests a certain metaphysical remoteness (not a vacuity, but a dreamy lassitude).   

 Cook reported that the native people he met completely ignored him, his strange tall ships and the crew. The Europeans didn't exist for the aboriginal peoples. I suppose that in a land populated by ghosts and dreams it makes sense to just ignore anyone stranger who comes your way.   

 Heck, it might make sense to do that even in Canada which is remarkably ghost free. Too new, I suppose.   

 Let's face it, Australia is impossibly old and impossibly remote. Can it really exist? Isn't it really half-way to fantasy? I've walked among flocks of enormous flightless birds that look like nothing so much as South Sea island huts with necks and beaks. That just can't happen. The platypus aside, this country hops, crawls, and slithers around you with enough poison to drop you before you can think. It is a scorchingly hot nightmarish place, skirted even by the clouds.   

 Well, we are affected by our environment, so I think Australians are likely to slip into that similar remoteness. The Kiwis across the water have a similar "problem" - they are inclined to think that the rest of the world can go hang, New Zealand will be all right. Australia could succumb to that same thinking.  

But probably not. It doesn't really lack vitality. A trip to the Parliament shows that. The House of Representatives (the Commons, or whatever you want to call it) is a square with high sides and tier upon tier of spectator seats all around. It looks like an enormous cock-fighting ring. Or perhaps a dog-fighting ring. John Howard is the chief pitbull who gives the opposition the finger under the pretext of adjusting his glasses.  

 Imagine a legislature populated by John Crosbie's bastard offspring. Great fun. When asked why Australia wasn't reducing its Iraq forces proportionally to the Americans, Howard basically said that you need a critical mass of forces and if they were to reduce the forces they'd have to get rid of the bartenders and then the troops would refuse to fight. Then someone called the government a bunch of overblown ratbags.   

 So, there is a pugnaciousness to the people that I quite like. When a bartender tried to serve me and I mentioned (a little too quickly and curtly) that I was already being served, he cheerfully said "well, I suppose I'd better fuck right off then."  

 No, I suppose this country isn't disappearing anytime soon. They'll squeeze the water out of the rocks if they have to. They'll desalinate their own spit. They might even water their lawns with beer, god forbid.   

 In the meantime, they will continue to make souvenir coin purses from kangaroo scrotums, spit on the tedium of the northern hemisphere, play sports that no one else can or wants to play, and watch terrific sunsets marred only by the swooping of great flocks of parrots.   

 Well, time is precious, so I suppose I'd better fuck right off then. 

Oz-yssey. Part the Fifth

 And then the trip began to wind down.   

 Amazing how quickly a month can go by. The early days on Heron Island seem a year away. So much gets packed into a tour that it becomes impossible to sort it all out. 1500 pictures and a few hurriedly scribbled notes are all that remain for me to pull my memories together.   

 Travel so far has been by airplanes of various size, helicopter, boat, car, bus, tram, hot air balloon!!, and, this coming Friday, train. That's a lot of transportation, a lot of carbon emissions.   

 Even the hot air balloon involved carbon emissions, given that the fan that inflated the balloon and the gas jets involved in getting it afloat(?) burned some dinosaurs.   

 Ever been in a balloon? Amazingly fun, but also a bit disconcerting. You hop into the basket and then before you know it you are rising above the cow paddock and into the early morning sun.   

 I suffered a brief moment of panic when I realized that the only thing preventing me from scattering bits of myself over a wide radius was a wicker basket. But it didn't tip. It didn't even shake. It just wafted along with the breeze.   

 It is warmer in the air than on the ground - there is no sensation of wind as you are being carried along with the breeze. And, of course, the gas jets given off a bit of heat, especially when you are six foot and a bit in height and your hair is right beside the flame.   

 Amazing to think that a bit of hot air keeps you up there. Well, not a bit: 12 tonnes of hot air keep you up and the air at the top of the balloon is 100 degrees centigrade.   

 We took off from the side of the highway and drifted across Canberra, looking down on people illegally watering their lawn, men legally watering their lawn organically (stage 3 water restrictions require men to urinate on their gardens when possible), poor schmucks driving to work, kangaroos hopping around mountains, what I have decided in my wisdom to be a large wombat taking shelter under shrubs, and a lone woman on top of Red Hill waving to us.   

 Most fascinating to a nerd like me was the time when we DID feel a breeze: we were just at the point where the ground level air stream meets the mid-air air stream and they flow in different directions. I had no idea they were so well defined. The balloon was in the upper air stream and being pushed east while the basket was in the lower stream and getting a breeze going west.   

 The Australian Capital Territory spread out below us and New South Wales glowered angrily at the home of its federal government from the edges.   

 Canberra sprawls and the only place I can liken it to is Winnipeg where you have to drive for hours to get anywhere. Planned in the 1920s/30s and run for decades by bureaucrats (that reminds me that I saw a street sign near Melbourne for "Federal Street. No Through Road"), all the hilltops are parks and houses cluster in the lowlands. All roads are six-lane highways with greenery on the sides. So you can pretty much drive through Canberra and not even know you just went through a city.   

 Australians love to hate Canberra, but I think it would be quite a good place to live if you like the outdoors. Easy access to hills, hiking, even skiing. The coast is only 1.5 hours away. Sydney is 3 hours distant.   

 We went camping on the coast this last weekend and I even braved the cooler water, not realizing that the waters were chock-a-block with blue bottle jellyfish (Portuguese Man-o-Wars). Luckily I was not brave enough to spend more than two minutes in the water so I wasn't stung. And only the wallabies on the beach saw me flounder up the surf in indignation and shivering humiliation.   

 I managed to see a few goannas (monitors) about eight feet long. Lovely reptiles. Oh, and I insist that I saw the infamous and deadly funnel-web spider (responsible for the most delicious spoonerism on the Australian news when the newsreader mistakenly reported that a woman had been "bitten on the funnel by a finger-web spider").    

 So, as a base to spend a month, Canberra is quite a good place, despite having the worst museum in either hemisphere. And despite having a few too many Britticisms. 

 In English Canada, we like to think that our British antecedents have gone some way to making us distinct from our southern cousins. Uh-uhn. Nope. Just come down under to see what that would look like. Down here you see the result of a colony being closely linked to mother England: where there was money, it is grand (Melbourne has glorious colonial architecture), where there wasn't, everything looks as small and shabby as a council estate in Liverpool. Housing plots were usually small because workers didn't "deserve" large plots (they might feed themselves!) despite the fact that land was plentiful. I remember that my house in Wellington was a 100-year-old workers' cottage and it was narrow and cramped. Same thinking. And not just the houses. The rows of "shops" you find in each suburb have that half-assed construction we've come to expect from Britain: post-war shabbiness.  

 This is not to criticize Australia - they generally don't need to insulate their houses because it isn't too cold; gaps between wall and ceiling help with air circulation; midget shopping centres were fine for a small population; no one had the money for grand construction in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.  I'm just saying that it suffers the legacy of having too long drawn inspiration from the Brits. In Canada we are almost identical to our American cousins (though much poorer and smaller), and are generally better off for it. Heresy, I know, and we do have our faults, but at least we practice modern dentistry.   

 This evening I went out with the camera to commune with the kangaroos on Mt. Taylor. The sun set and the moon rose and a little joey practiced his boxing. I wandered back through the eucalyptus, the wottles, and the gum trees, kicking up a fine orange cloud of dust as I went. I came back to the house, made a cup of tea, nibbled the opposite corners of a Tim-Tam biscuit and sucked the hot tea through the chocolate wafers and cream just to the point where the tea hit my tongue. I then popped the whole gooey mass of biscuit (only held together by its outer layer of chocolate) into my mouth and let it dissolve slowly.   

 That's Australia. And the world is better off for it. 

Oz-yssey, the Epilogue

In the fine tradition of bureaucrats and analysts everywhere, I thought I might indulge in "lessons learned." My first lesson (Lesson 0.5) is to not anticipate home internet working after a month away (which is why this missive is somewhat delayed). 

From my notebook:

"Once more, I am on an airplane, winging its way into the future. The pinhead in front of my has reclined into my knees, I can't buy duty free because I will have to clear customs in Hawaii and the guardians of the West will confiscate my desired bottle of Elegancia, and in-flight entertainment (excepting the mile high club) is a contradiction in terms. 

"Lesson 1: Don't fly economy class to Australia if you can possibly avoid it. 

"Lesson 2: if you must travel economy, board at the last possible moment and work up a few phlegmy coughs to expel as you venture through the business class section. 

"Lesson 3: If forced to micturate in an Australian backyard, don't, don't, don't first make a habit of handfeeding magpies bits of sausage. 

"Lesson 4: Sydney is a beautiful city, but don't move there. You will only be able to afford to live in the Australian equivalent of Scarborough and you will never see the beach or the countryside. You will be forever condemned to wander the suburban strip malls. 

"Lesson 5: Australian trains are like Canadian Greyhound buses: full of the human oddities of nature.

 "Lesson 6: Don't expect Air Canada to provide a decent cup of tea. Those $#%^* bean counters in head office have obviously decided that making teabags from old sweatsocks filled with Sudbury dirt is cheaper. 

"Lesson 7: When in the Old Melbourne Gaol, where numerous convicts, including Ned Kelly did "the long drop" (i.e. they were hanged by the neck until dead), do not expect women to think it funny when you emerge gleefully from the 3rd floor toilets and announce that you too did the long drop in Old Melbourne Gaol. They will not think it is funny. Men, on the other hand, will find it worthy of much laughter and revisit the joke numerous times over the next hour. Women will not find that funny either."

Those are the lessons I wrote down on the airplane. I have a couple more: 

Lesson 8: Nobody needs to take 156 pictures of kangaroos. Not even in the digital age.

Lesson 9: Having left at 10am on Sunday and arrivied at 9:58am Sunday, I have learned that time travel ain't worth it. To waste 17 hours of my life to travel back 2 minutes is ludicrous. 

My final lesson is a wholly original lesson and well worth paying attention to. It is this: Australia is a quantum country. It only exists so long as it is observed from the outside. If the rest of the world isn't looking at it, it occupies a universe of infinite probability; the moment it is observed, the probabilities collapse and we are left with whatever craziness happens to emerge. 

This would explain why Captain Cook saw a fabulous harbour in Botany Bay and fertile lands and why, when the settlers arrived, hooked on this promise, they found Botany Bay a shallow, sandbar-ridden midden and the country arid and horribly inhospitable. With kangaroos and digeridoos. Had they arrived a year, or even a second later it might have been a markedly different country with tremendous mountains, eight-legged oxen, and a population of Barry Manilow clones. 

However, the settlers stayed and became one with the country and Australia is as it is. If the rest of the world learns to ignore Australia, it will once more venture into the realms of fantastic probability but that's a big if. As I have discovered, Australia is easy to like, possible to mock, and potentially detestable, but it is very much impossible to ignore. 

Australia and Vancouver, 2007