"The Australian Emptiness, The Australian Ugliness, The Lucky Country, The Land of the Long Weekend, The Great Australian Stupour, The End of Dreamtime"
The first laughing kookaburra, spotted on a golf course gum tree perch
Two solitary jokers with single irons were following their balls around in the evening
This on a stroll across the peninsula to Bondi Beach through the ragged public course behind Rose Bay, improbably called the Royal Sydney
As it were, no, as it is, Republic v. Queenie issues underlie a good many Australian realities
A fresh, invigorating thing about Australia is that it is so un-English
Nobody says "as it were"
The seminal Australian divide all over again: the prisoner vs. the guard, the bolters and bushrangers vs. the onrushing suburbanite
"More of Australia's history took place outside the law than within it, and more attempt was made to hide than record it"
And that first kookaburra on the golf course gum had a slightly crossed bill
Laughing kookaburras are big omnivore kingfishers
Also called, alarm bird, breakfast bird, bushman's clock, settler's clock, shepherd's clock, brown, great brown, giant kingfisher, laughing kingfisher
And Jack, Jackass, Jacko, Jacky, John, Johnnie, Kooka, Laughing Jack, laughing John, laughing Johnass, laughing Johnny, ha ha, and woop woop pigeon
No fish at all, their main diet is snakes
They take them by the head, fly to great heights and drop them for the kill
Leaving the Rose Bay Ferry, two pelicans were preening on the piles
Claret clear
Behind the ferry landing a private girls' school field hockey practice was finishing up
Most looked as though they could have run out South Head without breaking a sweat
In deep dusk make it into Bondi over the top and down Beach Road to Campbell Parade
And to the wide sand in front that's everything it's supposed to be
The whole South Pacific, from the zenith to your toes, up against you there
With that deep, all-powerful loom that the Oceanside has when night falls
In failing coastal light there still are two realms
But in the darkness, only the ocean, the land world left false until the dawn light
Bondi is like Santa Monica before Santa Monica went chic and high-rise
Like Manly on Sydney's North Harbour as you walk out Manly's Corso to the beach and Cabbage Tree Bay
Before Manly went Key West
Agape at the massive swells coming off winds built up between New South Wales and the coast of Chile
Punta Toro just south of Valparaiso is exactly at Bondi's latitude
10,412 kilometres of open ocean away
Nothing in between
No land, no reefs, no rocks
The Fatal Shore
Australia as terra nullius
Once there, you're there
"...its historical immensity of blue heat, bush, sandstone and the measured booming of glassy Pacific rollers"
Ocean, ocean, ocean
Stooping to Sydney on the flight in from Fiji
The Qantas 747 banked across Botany Bay and off the right wing in the turning parallaxes of brilliant glare was a flock of silver gulls
The first birds seen in a new place are an emphatic ratchet click-up of understanding, the first of clearly something else
The silver gull is Australia's universal gull
Also turns up in New Caledonia, New Zealand and some of the sub-Antarctic islands, southern Africa, and around Norfolk Island
Norfolk Island was Cook's second Australian landfall
Leaving, Lord Howe Island was the final vision from that sublime trip
The last Australian territory
It looked like a steep, brown, cloud-brushed imaginary kingdom
Glimpsed through the clouds
Like a mountain crest at ocean level ten kilometres below
Which of course it is
Imprinted and registered like every remarkable incident, every emphatic awareness in the realm of new things, new places, new time, new light
Travel nearly as free and wide as any standard issue just like an Aussie does it
In kip claret Redbacks
Up the old steps from Opera Quays to the Royal Botanic Garden and Government House
In the great urban park of Sydney's lofty, open grandeur
Big skies spread around water
A city of extraordinarily direct people
Travelers themselves, living in part by airport and airline codes
Like EWR to LAX to NAN to SVU to VBV back to NAN to SYD to LAX
The argot of worldly initiates who by whatever ruse or strategy manage promiscuous travel
And who respect it and understand immediately those who feel the same
Tolerance and openness are givens in an island continent with enough room for anything that comes to it over the curve of earth
Time to venture only a couple of degrees of latitude, a trifling distance from Sydney to Canberra on the Melbourne road, but once off the freeway immediately on the land within rural New South Wales
Merino country
"Hopping kangaroos moved in scattered company, not in damaging single file like sheep and cattle... No other land has been treated so gently"
Spotted quail-thrush, wonga pigeon, banded rail, grey goshawk
Yellowish claret, originally the color of Arbois
Now the familiar reddish violet
A night on Goulburn's long Auburn Street off the Hume Highway
Masked plover, pied currawong, black swan
Goulburn's three-story blown-concrete Big Merino ram, eyes glowing red at night
Australian emphatics and exaggerations
Often see Australians with the countenances and body language of John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage people
White Ibis,Sacred Ibis, dusky moorhen, Australian wood duck, magpie lark, noisy miner, black-faced cuckoo-shrike
Temporary Member Pass 433434 to the Goulburn Workers Club
Bistro meals, drinking, gambling and talk
Southern giant petrel, pied stilt, black cormorant, whiskered tern, chestnut teal, chestnut-breasted shelduck
West out of Goulburn in the dawn, ready, with the time, to cross the continent to Dampier and the Gorgon gas fields off Barrow Island southwest of Eighty Mile Beach and the Great Sandy
Ready to drive to the Indian Ocean western limit, across it all
Over the Dividing Range, across all New South Wales to Broken Hill, to the Flinders Ranges at the top of Spencer Gulf due north of Adelaide
Ready to skirt Lake Eyre on past the Musgave Ranges, cross the Gibson Desert, then down the Valley of the Fortescue between the Hamersley and Chichester Mountains
Into all of Western Australia, an infinity of coastline, roads, dry mountains
And then comprehensively return another way, back to Sydney via all the rest
South Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland, and then Tasmania
The whole vital rest of it
"The Aborigines' tracks laid the basis of the road networks, their campsites became homesteads and towns, their yam grounds became arable fields, and all their hunting grounds, so carefully tended by fire, became ideal pastures for sheep"
Welcome swallow, common skylark, Australian raven, crested pigeon, masked lapwing, spotted turtle-dove, scaly-breasted lorikeet, Willie wagtail
Coots floating on the Wollondilly River below a one-lane plank bridge
A pair of galahs sitting obdurately and magnificently on the narrow range road from Goulburn to Grabben Gullen in the dawn
Big crimson Rosellas brilliant beyond reasonable Northern Hemisphere imagination among the roadside gums, parrots at their most extreme
Crimson rosellas are the substantiation of psittacine presence and grandeur
"Flight fast and swooping, often with deep exaggerated wing beats, brassy cries"
Crimson bodies, crimson rumps, flashing their two-toned blue wings and bluish-white margined tails
Even bigger sulphur-crested cockatoos feeding on sheep paddock slopes
Their sulphur crests nodding
Imagine Australian roads with months to spend, imagine
Outside Canberra walking slowly from a blacktop road toward kangaroos to stand among them in the wild
Grazing on the fresh spring green of last January's burn
From the immense bush fires around Sydney and Canberra early in 2003
Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra burned out, its equipment and telescopes, even some of its records and data, lost
Whole communities of houses ravaged
Right there months on placidly watching a mob of big greys virtually within the city limits of Canberra in the evening and then again in the dawn
Winter fuzz still on their muzzles and their ears
Against the low sun behind
Greys about the color of white-tail deer that have lost their winter coats
Kangaroos in NSW something like deer in Northeastern America
Each member of every mob alert
The males watch most carefully while the females go about their graze
Their huge sharkskin tails, their front legs held praying mantis high
With their rear legs they can disembowel a dog
Now and then an amazingly large Joey leaves the grass to climb back into its mother's pouch
Joeys can graze from the pouch beneath the chests of their grazing mothers
"A female red kangaroo can produce one young approximately every 240 days as long as favorable conditions hold. Under such conditions most adult females examined in the field are found to have one quiescent embryo, one pouch young, and one accompanying young outside of the pouch"
An ontogeny with reflective implications for the ethics of abortion
As recently as the early 1990s there were probably more large kangaroos and wallaroos on the Australian continent than people
The ratio may be reversed ten years on because of the current long-term drought
Flush and drain, wax and wane, drought and rain
Out in what was the backend of the British Empire
"...having been shipped out of Britain as criminals, we were shipped back as cannon fodder; so that when peace came, the survivors could return to their real mission as Australians growing cheap wool and wheat for England"
Shipped back to Sydney Cove, everything comes back to Sydney Cove
The Rocks, George Street, Kings Cross, Darlinghurst, Paddington
And Darling Harbor
Parramatta's alluvial, on the river at the backend of Sydney Cove, the site of Australia's first successful farming
The complexity of Aboriginal societies ignored and pushed aside
The original Australians hung out to dry
Redfern, virtually adjoining Sydney University, out Regent Street from Sydney's center and Circular Quay, the locale of Aboriginal public housing, has riots, has anger, has the Aboriginal future in its past
Black America is a paradigm of social progress in comparison
In Sydney, the Taronga Ferry and up the hill into the Taronga Zoo for all the Australian exotics, Tasmanian devils, wombats and all the birds
Splendid wrens, Malurus splendens, inside their netted habitat move and feed like chickadees
The laser turquoise blue of the males against the blue sky and fluffy spring cumulus over Sydney Cove is impossibly vivid
Wrens, tiny wrens, may be the finest Australian sights of all
From Taronga the flaring skyline of the city, capital of the South Pacific, inevasibly there
Crisp and sure
A world city barely two hundred years old
Sydney even more visually exciting than San Francisco
"A strange house, the Establishment: everyone enters it facing backwards"
Strine
"The much decried apathy of Australians is often a misnomer for sensible imperturbability"
Broad and Flash
"The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever"
******************************************
My thanks to Nifty [a Premier of NSW was known by this nickname] for e-mailing me this; I take no credit for it at all; I thought it so true to life in Australia so I thought I would share it with the world
Map courtesy of Google Images.
6.6.06
The lucky country
"The Australian Emptiness, The Australian Ugliness, The Lucky Country, The Land of the Long Weekend, The Great Australian Stupour, The End of Dreamtime"
The first laughing kookaburra, spotted on a golf course gum tree perch
Two solitary jokers with single irons were following their balls around in the evening
This on a stroll across the peninsula to Bondi Beach through the ragged public course behind Rose Bay, improbably called the Royal Sydney
As it were, no, as it is, Republic v. Queenie issues underlie a good many Australian realities
A fresh, invigorating thing about Australia is that it is so un-English
Nobody says "as it were"
The seminal Australian divide all over again: the prisoner vs. the guard, the bolters and bushrangers vs. the onrushing suburbanite
"More of Australia's history took place outside the law than within it, and more attempt was made to hide than record it"
And that first kookaburra on the golf course gum had a slightly crossed bill
Laughing kookaburras are big omnivore kingfishers
Also called, alarm bird, breakfast bird, bushman's clock, settler's clock, shepherd's clock, brown, great brown, giant kingfisher, laughing kingfisher
And Jack, Jackass, Jacko, Jacky, John, Johnnie, Kooka, Laughing Jack, laughing John, laughing Johnass, laughing Johnny, ha ha, and woop woop pigeon
No fish at all, their main diet is snakes
They take them by the head, fly to great heights and drop them for the kill
Leaving the Rose Bay Ferry, two pelicans were preening on the piles
Claret clear
Behind the ferry landing a private girls' school field hockey practice was finishing up
Most looked as though they could have run out South Head without breaking a sweat
In deep dusk make it into Bondi over the top and down Beach Road to Campbell Parade
And to the wide sand in front that's everything it's supposed to be
The whole South Pacific, from the zenith to your toes, up against you there
With that deep, all-powerful loom that the Oceanside has when night falls
In failing coastal light there still are two realms
But in the darkness, only the ocean, the land world left false until the dawn light
Bondi is like Santa Monica before Santa Monica went chic and high-rise
Like Manly on Sydney's North Harbour as you walk out Manly's Corso to the beach and Cabbage Tree Bay
Before Manly went Key West
Agape at the massive swells coming off winds built up between New South Wales and the coast of Chile
Punta Toro just south of Valparaiso is exactly at Bondi's latitude
10,412 kilometres of open ocean away
Nothing in between
No land, no reefs, no rocks
The Fatal Shore
Australia as terra nullius
Once there, you're there
"...its historical immensity of blue heat, bush, sandstone and the measured booming of glassy Pacific rollers"
Ocean, ocean, ocean
Stooping to Sydney on the flight in from Fiji
The Qantas 747 banked across Botany Bay and off the right wing in the turning parallaxes of brilliant glare was a flock of silver gulls
The first birds seen in a new place are an emphatic ratchet click-up of understanding, the first of clearly something else
The silver gull is Australia's universal gull
Also turns up in New Caledonia, New Zealand and some of the sub-Antarctic islands, southern Africa, and around Norfolk Island
Norfolk Island was Cook's second Australian landfall
Leaving, Lord Howe Island was the final vision from that sublime trip
The last Australian territory
It looked like a steep, brown, cloud-brushed imaginary kingdom
Glimpsed through the clouds
Like a mountain crest at ocean level ten kilometres below
Which of course it is
Imprinted and registered like every remarkable incident, every emphatic awareness in the realm of new things, new places, new time, new light
Travel nearly as free and wide as any standard issue just like an Aussie does it
In kip claret Redbacks
Up the old steps from Opera Quays to the Royal Botanic Garden and Government House
In the great urban park of Sydney's lofty, open grandeur
Big skies spread around water
A city of extraordinarily direct people
Travelers themselves, living in part by airport and airline codes
Like EWR to LAX to NAN to SVU to VBV back to NAN to SYD to LAX
The argot of worldly initiates who by whatever ruse or strategy manage promiscuous travel
And who respect it and understand immediately those who feel the same
Tolerance and openness are givens in an island continent with enough room for anything that comes to it over the curve of earth
Time to venture only a couple of degrees of latitude, a trifling distance from Sydney to Canberra on the Melbourne road, but once off the freeway immediately on the land within rural New South Wales
Merino country
"Hopping kangaroos moved in scattered company, not in damaging single file like sheep and cattle... No other land has been treated so gently"
Spotted quail-thrush, wonga pigeon, banded rail, grey goshawk
Yellowish claret, originally the color of Arbois
Now the familiar reddish violet
A night on Goulburn's long Auburn Street off the Hume Highway
Masked plover, pied currawong, black swan
Goulburn's three-story blown-concrete Big Merino ram, eyes glowing red at night
Australian emphatics and exaggerations
Often see Australians with the countenances and body language of John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage people
White Ibis,Sacred Ibis, dusky moorhen, Australian wood duck, magpie lark, noisy miner, black-faced cuckoo-shrike
Temporary Member Pass 433434 to the Goulburn Workers Club
Bistro meals, drinking, gambling and talk
Southern giant petrel, pied stilt, black cormorant, whiskered tern, chestnut teal, chestnut-breasted shelduck
West out of Goulburn in the dawn, ready, with the time, to cross the continent to Dampier and the Gorgon gas fields off Barrow Island southwest of Eighty Mile Beach and the Great Sandy
Ready to drive to the Indian Ocean western limit, across it all
Over the Dividing Range, across all New South Wales to Broken Hill, to the Flinders Ranges at the top of Spencer Gulf due north of Adelaide
Ready to skirt Lake Eyre on past the Musgave Ranges, cross the Gibson Desert, then down the Valley of the Fortescue between the Hamersley and Chichester Mountains
Into all of Western Australia, an infinity of coastline, roads, dry mountains
And then comprehensively return another way, back to Sydney via all the rest
South Australia, the Northern Territory, Queensland, and then Tasmania
The whole vital rest of it
"The Aborigines' tracks laid the basis of the road networks, their campsites became homesteads and towns, their yam grounds became arable fields, and all their hunting grounds, so carefully tended by fire, became ideal pastures for sheep"
Welcome swallow, common skylark, Australian raven, crested pigeon, masked lapwing, spotted turtle-dove, scaly-breasted lorikeet, Willie wagtail
Coots floating on the Wollondilly River below a one-lane plank bridge
A pair of galahs sitting obdurately and magnificently on the narrow range road from Goulburn to Grabben Gullen in the dawn
Big crimson Rosellas brilliant beyond reasonable Northern Hemisphere imagination among the roadside gums, parrots at their most extreme
Crimson rosellas are the substantiation of psittacine presence and grandeur
"Flight fast and swooping, often with deep exaggerated wing beats, brassy cries"
Crimson bodies, crimson rumps, flashing their two-toned blue wings and bluish-white margined tails
Even bigger sulphur-crested cockatoos feeding on sheep paddock slopes
Their sulphur crests nodding
Imagine Australian roads with months to spend, imagine
Outside Canberra walking slowly from a blacktop road toward kangaroos to stand among them in the wild
Grazing on the fresh spring green of last January's burn
From the immense bush fires around Sydney and Canberra early in 2003
Mount Stromlo Observatory near Canberra burned out, its equipment and telescopes, even some of its records and data, lost
Whole communities of houses ravaged
Right there months on placidly watching a mob of big greys virtually within the city limits of Canberra in the evening and then again in the dawn
Winter fuzz still on their muzzles and their ears
Against the low sun behind
Greys about the color of white-tail deer that have lost their winter coats
Kangaroos in NSW something like deer in Northeastern America
Each member of every mob alert
The males watch most carefully while the females go about their graze
Their huge sharkskin tails, their front legs held praying mantis high
With their rear legs they can disembowel a dog
Now and then an amazingly large Joey leaves the grass to climb back into its mother's pouch
Joeys can graze from the pouch beneath the chests of their grazing mothers
"A female red kangaroo can produce one young approximately every 240 days as long as favorable conditions hold. Under such conditions most adult females examined in the field are found to have one quiescent embryo, one pouch young, and one accompanying young outside of the pouch"
An ontogeny with reflective implications for the ethics of abortion
As recently as the early 1990s there were probably more large kangaroos and wallaroos on the Australian continent than people
The ratio may be reversed ten years on because of the current long-term drought
Flush and drain, wax and wane, drought and rain
Out in what was the backend of the British Empire
"...having been shipped out of Britain as criminals, we were shipped back as cannon fodder; so that when peace came, the survivors could return to their real mission as Australians growing cheap wool and wheat for England"
Shipped back to Sydney Cove, everything comes back to Sydney Cove
The Rocks, George Street, Kings Cross, Darlinghurst, Paddington
And Darling Harbor
Parramatta's alluvial, on the river at the backend of Sydney Cove, the site of Australia's first successful farming
The complexity of Aboriginal societies ignored and pushed aside
The original Australians hung out to dry
Redfern, virtually adjoining Sydney University, out Regent Street from Sydney's center and Circular Quay, the locale of Aboriginal public housing, has riots, has anger, has the Aboriginal future in its past
Black America is a paradigm of social progress in comparison
In Sydney, the Taronga Ferry and up the hill into the Taronga Zoo for all the Australian exotics, Tasmanian devils, wombats and all the birds
Splendid wrens, Malurus splendens, inside their netted habitat move and feed like chickadees
The laser turquoise blue of the males against the blue sky and fluffy spring cumulus over Sydney Cove is impossibly vivid
Wrens, tiny wrens, may be the finest Australian sights of all
From Taronga the flaring skyline of the city, capital of the South Pacific, inevasibly there
Crisp and sure
A world city barely two hundred years old
Sydney even more visually exciting than San Francisco
"A strange house, the Establishment: everyone enters it facing backwards"
Strine
"The much decried apathy of Australians is often a misnomer for sensible imperturbability"
Broad and Flash
"The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever"
******************************************
My thanks to Nifty [a Premier of NSW was known by this nickname] for e-mailing me this; I take no credit for it at all; I thought it so true to life in Australia so I thought I would share it with the world
Map courtesy of Google Images.
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