Feeding Time at Glenview Zoo

Things I like about Sydney No. 23: Feeding Time at Glenview Zoo

It has slowly dawned one me that none of my friends from London are going to come and visit me here in Sydney. I used to think that they would make the superhuman effort to come on over but "It's too far", they whine; "The children make it too expensive", they moan; "I don't like Australia", they opine; "What about the insects?" they fret.

So I am having to make new friends and the quickest way to do this is to anthropomorphise all the creatures around our house, now know as Glenview Zoo.

I'd like to introduce you to Thang and Kev, our newest best friends. Thang and Kev are two rainbow lorikeets. They have taken to coming every day to our balcony to be fed sunflower seeds by hand.

 Kevin's in the foreground. He has a much redder breast than Thang but is a cautious bird and took some persuading to graduate from the balcony railing to my hand. Thang on the other hand leapt straight on to my palm and bit my thumb. Saucy minx.

It began only a few days ago. Thang and Kev first appeared (they always appear together) one morning whilst I was sat on the balcony in one of our new directors chairs reading a paper. They perched at a far distance and chirupped and bobbed their heads up and down, their beady red eyes searching for something tasty to eat. I rushed inside and got the wild bird seed box and laid some seeds out in a line along the railing. They slowly crept up to them and began pecking avidly away. After a while they agreed between themselves that pecking directly from my hand whilst it rested on the railing would be OK. Soon after that I tried holding my arm straight out in front of me with my palm full of seeds. Thang flew straight onto my outstretched hand and started cracking open the husks. Kevin kept making feints for my arm but fluttered off in confusion four or five times. Eventually he made a crash landing and they settled, side by side, on my hand. And now, three days later, I am having to shake Thang and Kev vigorously to get them to release their tenacious grip on me.

I soon learnt that only sunflower seeds would do for Thang and Kev. All the other seeds in my wild bird variety box were quickly discarded as beneath them and chucked nonchalantly into the bush (which means that I am going to have to crawl under the balcony and make sure things aren't sprouting which shouldn't be sprouting or else the Bush Regeneration people are going to get me). So it was off to Coles yesterday to buy a bumper packet of cut-price seeds.

Why, indeed, pay more for what is obviously now an everyday basic?

Thang and Kev aren't picky. Oh no. Anyone will do if they've got food in their hand.

Below you can just see that Thang has a yellower breast which for some reason makes me assume she is a she. They both have a rapacity which is quite frightening and sometimes, beneath their gaudy exterior, you can glimpse a rat-like quality which is rather alarming and makes me worry a little about getting psitticosis. Shall keep you posted.

 The problem with making new friends, however, is that friends beget friends. Kev and Thang have started to invite their own friends over...gatecrashers really...and this morning the balcony looked like this:

And then this:

I wonder if we've started something we shouldn't have? Breakfast is beginning to feel decidedly Hitchcockian. I may soon look out through the window of our living room only to discover Tippi Hedren on the balcony, twenty lorikeets clawing frantically at her headscarf...

The Sydney Opera House

Things I like about Sydney No. 22: The Sydney Opera House

So many people have written about the iconic Sydney Opera House ("to date one of the most famous and acclaimed music venues in the world") that until now I didn't feel I could add anything to the babble of voices. Or pictures. John Utzon's website (Utzon is the Opera House's architect) points out that many thousands of pictures are taken of the Opera House each year, probably each day. Whenever Daniel and I go along to Circular Quay there are teems of tourists posing with it as the backdrop. Somewhat like this:

Here I am, New Year's Eve 2008, still reeling from the fact that I have re-located half way across the world - it is merely a month since our arrival in Sydney. I have a plastic lei round my neck because we were lucky enough to get tickets to a VIP area for the fireworks and, obviously, that's what VIPs wear. The sky is pink because our camera was malfunctioning. I'm pink because I was a) sunburnt and b) a little drunk. My glassy-eyed expression was permanent at that time, drunk or not. (Utzon had died less than a month before this and the paper's were full of his demise and the fact that he had not been involved in the completion of the building because of various recriminations and ridiculously imposed budget cuts.)


Fast forward to May 2010, nearly a year and a half after our arrival here, and here I am again.

The thing that may strike you first is that I'm pink once more. But this time I am neither sunburnt nor drunk. Oh no! I'm bathed in the soothing glow of the Opera House's spotlights, performing on the studio's stage last Saturday with Natalie Gamsu in something called Late Night Lounge (a sort of cabaret compendium of, and I'm quoting here, top talent). "Your neo-classical, rock ‘n’ roll, variety, cabaret, chat show experience!"

It was a sell-out naturally. Mainly I'm sure because the audience were promised (and got) full-frontal nudity. It wasn't provided by either of us though. Here's Natalie to prove it at the moment in our performance when she's being beamed up into outer space on waves of audience adoration:

I would like to point out that, not only were we making our Opera House debut but we were also performing two of my songs, along with a marvellous cover of Britney Spears's Hit Me Baby One My Time with which we opened. The entire show. Which unfortunately meant that the first thing I did on the Opera House stage after playing just three chords on the piano was to slap my arse and scream into a microphone....My youthful dream of standing in front of a full orchestra ready to play the Nielsen Clarinet Concerto on the Sydney Opera House stage didn't quite work out as planned. But I am more than grateful it didn't, this was much more fun.

Daniel took these illicit shots with his iphone which is obligatory gig behaviour. I can't understand why the two people in the audience in the photo of me are looking at Natalie rather than over towards me. I had a new jacket on as well. Next time I'll wear lycra too, that should nail 'em.

The nudity was provided much later by Ursula Martinez doing her striptease magic act which I last saw about ten years ago with Daniel in the Vauxhall Tavern in London at a Duckie event...Which is very bizarre in itself....Backstage in the dressing room Ursula seemed rather keen to know how I managed to settle here as she now has an Australian girlfriend. I wonder if I can flog her my residence visa...

There was also a man (a rather well-known singer apparently) called Iota backstage, waiting to go on after us. Having no surname is obviously de rigeur these days, but having a first name like Iota? I obviously need to change Jonathan Cooper to Pixel or Jot or Spitlickle. Also on the bill was a drag artist called Trevor - Natalie and I have played for him at his weekly cabaret nights - whose personality is as overwhelming as his dresses.

I'm so sad, I stole my performer's day pass instead of returning it to the stage door. But it serves them right because my name wasn't at the door anyway. Natalie had to persuade them that I was indeed an artist as security were in a very feisty mood as both the Prime Minister and the State Premiere were knocking about the Opera House having welcomed round-the-world sailor Jessica Watson back to Sydney (a story which I don't think will have impinged on anyone's consciousness outside of Australia). How dare they?! Next time, they better KNOW who I am!

I'm Pixel.

Or is it Jot?

Or perhaps Spitlickle?

Corpses

Things I like about Sydney (and environs) No. 21: CORPSES.

(Warning: this blog entry is not recommended for those of a nervous disposition...)

Murder No.1

It all began last winter (which obviously translates as summer for most of you) when Daniel and I were staying at his mother's country retreat, McGrath Flat, in the Coorong, South Australia.

It was bitterly cold and the wind was howling around the chimney-tops and whistling down through the fireplace causing smoke to billow out into the living room. We were playing scrabble and had been most of the day. Wrapped in blankets, Sniff looked as if he was never going to rise again. It was time, surely not?, to venture out.

Bulked up in layers of jumpers, neither of us having brought a coat ("It's Australia", we thought, "it's always hot.") we ventured outside, over the road, and down towards the Coorong - a long, shallow lagoon more than one hundred kilometres long that is separated from the Southern Ocean by a narrow sand dune peninsula. The sun was beginning to go down, creating a beautiful but mysterious haze on the horizon. Our eyes were peeled for emus, which we'd watched loping past the windows that morning and which, despite their size, are very good at camouflaging themselves amongst the scrub and the olive trees. There was no-one around, no-one for miles it seemed, and as thousands of moths and midges rose up from the grass we trekked through, grass that reached over poor Sniff's head, there was an eerie stillness, filled only by the howling wind and the distant sound of waves.

The path became more and more overgrown, obviously untrod by man for months, and Sniff had to leap and bound his way with increasing energy through the thickets, raising up more clouds of fluttering, pale insects as he did so. We began to near the lagoon, our footprints beginning to imprint into sand. The grasses around us became thicker and hardier, the wind colder and colder, the silence more ominous.

Then, ahead, in the distance, we began to hear a faint buzzing sound, emanating from around the corner - the unmistakable sound of swarming flies. An entire army of flies. A faint smell accompanied the sound, wafted towards us on the breeze; something other than the tang of the salt-water and the tart sharpness of the vegetation. Something distinctly disturbing...


One more corner to turn and we would reach the edge of the water. One more corner to turn towards the crescendo of buzzing. One more corner to turn - TO THE FIRST CORPSE!!

It lay in shocking graphic detail, in a terrible rictus of death, festooned with flies, beribboned with maggots, large and terrifying, as big as a human - this corpse of a seal; teeth bared in an eternal grimace, like Cerberus at the gates of Hell, body flattened by deliquesence, eyes eaten by ravening seagulls, fins nibbled away by crabs.

It was such a sad and lonely end for such a magnificent creature, in such a sad and lonely spot. The sand, dotted with Sniff's paw-prints as he scuttled past oblivious, cradled the corpse and the angle of the sun blackened its eyes and playfully lit up the silver in its fur. Daniel and I looked down upon it mournfully in silence...and then we returned to the house and played Scrabble again.

The next morning there was the most magnificent rainbow over the site of the seal's demise, promising another bright and cold day, and I thought of all the seals gambolling in the waters, alive and thriving, feeding themselves and their young, with no thought to their probable, perhaps even inevitable, shockingly pointless mass demise....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/29/international-failure-biodiversity-decline

Murder No. 2

Back in Sydney, and the corpses begin to pile up. It seems as if there is a serial killer on the loose. And close to home at that.

In our very driveway, we found the corpse of the Golden-Crowned Snake which has already been the subject of a blog entry. He or she seemed much more peaceful in death than our seal - I expect its death was swift and surprising, caused by the silent but deadly swoop of a Powerful Owl.

Equally, swift and surprising was the LIVE Golden-Crowned Snake I saw the other night, again in our driveway...

The nights have drawn in, it gets dark suddenly at about 5.30 pm. and, although we have a light on the top of our gatepost about a hundred yards from the house, most of the driveway beyond remains in complete obscurity. The drive twists and turns, climbing steadily and very unevenly upwards and it requires keen night vision to negotiate - something the Golden-Crowned Snake and Sniff (to a lesser degree) have and I very clearly don't...

As Sniff and I neared the house last night, through the gloom, with me heading blindly towards the patch of light emanating from the gate-post, Sniff suddenly pulled at the lead and careened forwards, dragging me with him, urgently in pursuit of something. He stopped near the gate-post and when I caught up with him I crouched down to see what it was that had excited his curiosity so much. With a gleeful thrill I spotted, rapidly disappearing into the dark towards the verge, a rather large snake. I was so excited that I didn't stop to think that bending down to peer at a venomous snake in the dark is probably not a good idea. What did I care for danger? I was getting my first glimpse of a live Australian snake in all its wriggling glory.

Similar in size and colouring to the one pictured here, even though I didn't catch a glimpse of it's (venomous) head, I think it was undoubtedly a Golden-Crowned Snake. I told our neighbour of this rare snake sighting and apparently the news is so exciting it will be going into the local council's newsletter...Daniel and I, needless to say, now imagine that every night the driveway is writhing with invisible snakes, which does lend a certain extra frisson to coming home from work in the dark.



Murders No. 3 and 4

The other week I wrote about the chocolate Easter Bilby, the last remains of which have now well and truly been devoured. Which is more than you can say for the remains of the creature which I stumbled across on Berry Island last week: Corpse No. 3.

I have no idea what this is (answers below please). Is it a Bilby? Is it a baby possum? Or more prosaically a rat?

Whatever it is, corpse No. 3 looked so angelic lying on its byre of dead leaves and twigs, with its forepaws curled up to its chin, its lustrous fur asking to be stroked, its ears still perky. For a short while I hoped that it might in fact still be alive, to still be breathing, but the tell-tale streaks of bright crimson blood told the true story...It did feel as if the murderer had barely left the crime scene. I could almost sense a pair of homicidal eyes watching me intently from the undergrowth, sizing up the chances of a fresh kill.

Sniff however once more showed no interest whatsoever and dragged me off down the track. Honestly, I sometimes wonder whether he is actually a dog at all.


We descend from the island down towards the beach where I am to search for shells for the bathroom whilst Sniff does his un-dog-like things. There are lots of shards from rock oyster shells which have a opalescent sheen on their underside and which I collect, along with a few limpets and barnacles. And then I stumble across it. Corpse No. 4. Frankly, I should have been a detective.

Oh, that's just a fish, you say.

Perfectly normal.

Except this was a bloody large fish, just lying there ripe for the eating, freshly dead. The murderer, once more, had only just left the scene of the crime. If I hadn't already had the experience of reading every sign there is to read on Berry Island I would have brought it home and cooked it. As it is, there is a warning to fisherfolk spelled out on a rather obscure noticeboard that the fish caught in these particular waters off Berry Island have too high a chemical content for safe eating, at least, it adds inconclusively, "in large numbers". Which just makes you worry once more. What is a large number? A large number of small fish or large fish? But then I remember. There won't be a large number any way...http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/04/fishing-techniques-decline

Hercule Cooper Investigates

Obviously I am on the hunt for the serial killer. And when I find him or her I will march them straight down to the Police and Justice Museum near Circular Quay.

This beautiful old police station was built in 1885 out of both stone and wood, mixed together in a lovely and delicate fashion. Unfortunately it now houses a rather mediocre and dull museum which promises a gruesome journey into Sydney's criminal past but distinctly fails to deliver any such thing. The museum absolutely needs to up its corpse count and I think I might be the man to help with the four cases outlined above...The fantastic building contains a fully preserved nineteenth-century court room with an enormous splendid Victorian skylight where, once our serial killer is caught, he can be tried, cuffed with some rusty old handcuffs and dressed in one of those fetching outfits covered in arrows. And once convicted, there is a convenient cell or two to put him in, with a lovely stuffed police dog called Trixie to stand eternal guard...

So Hercule Cooper is off to investigate. But I am already wondering whether that dead fish might simply turn out to be a red herring...

Wollstonecraft Station

Things I like about Sydney No. 20: Wollstonecraft Station

We are going on a walk again, you, Sniff and I. This time it's only a short walk, across the creek to our local station, Wollstonecraft, from where we can be whizzed into town in less than fifteen minutes.

Perhaps we'll start by admiring the autumn flowers popping up in our driveway - some of them, like the red ones, there one day, gone the next; others resolutely flowering for weeks on end. We need to grab this opportunity however as they will all have disappeared by the weekend. Our neighbours (who I thought quite pleasant until now) have complained to our estate agents that we have not been keeping up our side of the drive. Harumph! Firstly, it would have been nice to have been told that it was our responsibility to do so and secondly, couldn't they simply have asked us to tidy it directly? In the spirit of neighbourliness I have swallowed my rage and engaged the services of the wonderfully named Con to come and hack away at the overgrowth on Saturday. Con is very Australian. I need a translator when he speaks. He gardens without socks with a kind of blithe machismo but then complains bitterly when he's bitten by red ants. He should beware the funnel-web spiders - I've spotted their lairs and enjoy gingerly placing leaves over their tunnel entrances, leaves which are silently and secretively moved, spider-fashion, by the next time I pass...

Once past the drive we soon get to a footbridge over the creek, Beencke's Bridge, so-named after a Herr Beencke from Hamburg, born in 1852, who built the first shop here in Greenwich and many of the early houses. In 1906 he built a wooden trestle bridge on this spot to enable us to cross Berry's Creek (which no doubt was much wider and more treacherous in those days) for the steep sounding sum of £50.

Unfortunately, this has now been replaced by an infinitely uglier bridge built in 1964, the year I was born. No doubt this cost a lot more money, involved a lot more people, and was imagined to be a thing of beauty...Sometimes, no mostly actually,  I wish I had been born in 1852....

From Beencke's Bridge you could stop and look down through some magnificent, enormous tree ferns to the creek below if it wasn't for the fact that Sniff always bounds across it like a hound possessed.

From here it is but a hop skip and a jump to the station past some towering conifers and their attendant jabbering kookaburras. There is a small grass sward with a bench in its centre and this part is called Smoothey Park. I haven't been able to find out why but Australians seem to be very, very keen on naming things: every second step you seem to find yourself in a newly-named area. The smallest patch of green is called So and So Reserve, the tiniest beachhead Such and Such Point. There's a new suburb every second. In fact, now we're no longer in Greenwich we're in Wollstonecraft. After all folks, we've crossed a bridge...

I particularly like Wollstonecraft station because it is stuck in a charming time-warp. It looks completely provincial despite being only fifteen minutes or less from Circular Quay and the Opera House. There are no MacDonalds and WH Smiths here. Oh no. Everything is run by local independent shopkeepers and the station is manned by friendly eccentrics. One of these, a tall man of over six feet who seems slightly simple-minded, invariably asks whether he can pat the dog and then seems surprised when his formidable physical presence looming over him causes Sniff to quickly scarper.

This is Max. Max runs one of the two shops at Wollstonecraft Station (his is the larger of the two). He's always smiling and cheerful and refuses to sell you packets of muffins if there's the smallest tear in the wrapping...

His rival, on the other side of the tracks, is a diminutive Chinese women who sits behind a miniscule counter in her tiny shop beaming daily. Despite her apparent cheerfulness, I was too scared to ask to take her photo and she didn't look like someone who would understand the word 'blog'. I'm not sure that I really understand the word 'blog'...

Next to Max's shop is a small cafe which I have yet to venture into (after all, I'm usually off into town) but which we will investigate one of these days...Sniff inevitably sniffs it.

And that's it. Wollstonecraft station in a nutshell. There are two platforms - one going south into town, one going north to...oh, hell, frankly who cares where! So all you have to do now is come and visit - you know you want to. We're on the North Shore Line, marked in YELLOW on your map. Get on at either Central, Town Hall, Wynyard...It couldn't be easier. Sniff and I are waiting for you on the platform now...

PS If anyone has seen Daniel can they please send him home, preferably loaded with presents.

The edible plants of the Gadyan Track

Things I like about Sydney No. 19: the edible plants of the Gadyan Track.

Daniel is marooned in Amsterdam thanks to the belchings of Eyjafjallajökull. He was previously stranded in Berlin but managed to hop on a train to the Netherlands (cue Kraftwerk's Trans Europe Express or even better go here and watch the grainy video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWlgbAc3bbM). I am irrationally jealous of that journey. It should have been me speeding across Europe by train, preferably wearing a fur-collared overcoat and a smart hat, smoking continuously whilst looking enigmatically out of the window thinking trans-European thoughts. I trust that's exactly how Daniel did it...

He's now stuck in Amsterdam for another ten days or so before being allowed to come home by the powers that know about ash - which delay got me thinking: what if the other volcano blows? What if this becomes a permanent situation? What if we all have to stay put where we are now for ever? What if this heralds the end of inter-continental communication?  What if Australia drifts off into perpetual isolation?

There will be no more Marmite!!!!!!!!!!!!

No more Rose's English Marmalade, or Hellmann's mayonnaise. No more Fortnum and Mason's Finest Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. No more New Zealand lamb or Italian prosciutto or Melton Mowbray pork pies. No more Indian lime pickles or Puccini chocolates or Stollen or Panettone. No Camembert, no Roquefort, no Jarlsberg...

No no no no no! No foreign muck any more. Nothing but authentic Australian tucker from now on. There'll be kangaroo steak nightly,  relieved only by the appearance of a bit of beer-battered barramundi on Fridays. I'll be having Vegemite on my damper for lunch with a can of VB as my amber fluid. I'll be having snags on endless barbies, yabbies, muddies and a couple of lobbies with some coldies, sammies to go with some billy tea in my can, lammingtons, tim tams, pavlovas and chokkies for afters. Oh, it'll be one long party! And you're not invited. Because you're over THERE, in Europe, for ever and ever, Amen.

Only today however I learned that there are many delicious things out there in the bush that we can begin to eat, if only we listen to the wisdom of our elders and betters, the Cammeraygal.

The Cammeraygal were the original indigenous keepers of Berry Island and their name for the path along which Sniff and I daily perambulate (now the foxes have all been killed we've been allowed back) is the Gadyan track. And upon the Gadyan track are the following three plants which we can eat along with that kangaroo steak...

Firstly, a geebung. Brilliant name. A geebung. This particular edible geebung is called Persoonia Levis.

The edible part is apparently its small green fruit but as a) there was no fruit and b) I wasn't entirely sure this was the right plant I haven't tried it yet. The description says it has broad bright green leaves (check) and black flaky bark (check) and that you can eat the fruit raw. So when I see it fruiting I shall give it a go...I'm thinking Geebung Marmalade or perhaps a Geebung paste to liven up the godawful cheese that passes as cheddar over here.

The next edible plant along the Gadyan track doesn't appear to be quite so appetising. It's a distinctly inedible looking grass or rush plant called Lomandra longifolia.

I don't really look at this and think, hmmm, must cook up a bit of that to go with my roo but I am willing to give it a go. You can eat the flowers (presumably before they dry up and dessicate like the ones above) as well as the 'succulent' leaf bases and you can also grind up the seeds to make damper - a traditional Australian soda bread prepared by swagmen and drovers when on their epic solitary journeys across the middle of this uncompromising continent.

Finally, the most appetising looking plant of the three is the Coast Banksia. The magnificent flowers of banksias can be sucked for nectar or soaked in water to make a sweet drink - I'm thinking of starting a range of Cooper's Cordials...

Once more I wasn't sure if this was exactly the right plant and, just in case it happened to be the one type of banksia that drops you dead with one sip of its juice, I passed it by without drinking from those jaunty yellow cups.

So there we have it. Authentic Australian tucker to go with our kangaroo steak. I can't help thinking however that if Sniff and I had been walking the Gadyan track back in Cammeraygal times there would have been a fair chance that we would have ended up as that evening's steak ourselves with these plants serving as a couple of side dishes or as a bit of fancy garnish...Needless to say the reality is that the poor Cammeraygal of the North Shore are no more, entirely scattered, wiped out, disappeared. As early as 1860 it was recorded they were already rare visitors to their original homeland, many massacred or killed by diseases introduced by us, the colonisers.

On that cheerful note we'll have a completely gratuitous picture of a gum tree (inedible as far as I know):

You may like to know that the Powerful Owl is out there hooting tonight accompanied by the clicking of a myriad of marsh frogs. I like to think that they are carefully watching over me until my banished boyfriend returns from distant climes.

The Easter Bilby

Things I like about Sydney No. 18: the Easter Bilby.

Despite the fact that Australia has an appalling record when it comes to preventing extinctions - more mammals have become extinct here than on any other continent in the world - things seem to be looking up for one endangered species, and it's entirely thanks to chocolate...

Back home in London we have the Easter Bunny, the Easter Chick, the Easter Egg but here in Sydney, come Easter Sunday, it's three cheers for the Easter Bilby. Yes, the bilby - an insignificant-looking rat-like marsupial which is nevertheless worming its way into the hearts of a nation (we're talking an increasingly plump nation mind you) by becoming a national symbol for Easter.

Here are some beribboned and boxed bilbies in shiny plastic (you can't save everything at once it seems):

We have here (apart from Daniel obviously) two different Easter Bilbies by two different chocolate companies: Haigh's (who claim to have been there first with the Bilby idea) and Darrell Lee. Not being Australian I don't have any feeling about either chocolate company but Daniel was very sniffy about his Darrell Lea Bilby so they are obviously the downmarket alternative (perhaps like Cadburys is to Thorntons). Ah well, chocolate snobbery, can't be doing with it, chocolate gives me migraines anyway.

Daniel is also holding a chocolate Murray Cod, which is another vulnerable species now enshrined in foil ("Part proceeds from the sale of this item help the work of Healthy Rivers Australia"). In so-called real life the Murray Cod is enormous, reaching up to 1.8 metres long and living for a hundred years. Which is more than you can say for the average Australian bingeing on Easter chocolate....

Our Bilbies began like this:

And now look like this:

which I think is a very apt metaphor for their current state in the wild.

The only other time I have heard about a Bilby is through Martin, Daniel's brother, who found a Bilby in his garden in Adelaide last year. But it was, unfortunately, already dead. He picked it up and put it in the rubbish bin along with all his other rubbish but then, on reflection, felt terrible that he'd put an endangered species in the trash and spent several sleepless nights wondering whether he should rather have scooped it up and taken it to the nearest natural history museum or at least to a vet or anywhere really rather than putting it in with the rubbish. Me, I would have nipped off with that Bilby to the nearest taxidermist to get me something special for Easter...something lasting and non-fattening at that.

The owl at night...the skull in the rock...

Things I like about Sydney No. 17: the owl at night and the skull in the rock.

I haven't been sleeping very well lately. Not only do I find it difficult to get to sleep upon retiring but I also wake early to the sounds of kookaburras cackling and magpies hooting. There might be little or no traffic noise audible here in our shack but that dawn chorus sure is loud.

The other night I read a biography of Rock Hudson figuring that it might help send me to sleep. Instead I stayed up until two in the morning finishing the bloody thing. Poor Rock. Having magnificently managed to manipulate the press for all of his illustrious career, persuading both them and the general public that he was in real life the 'full-blooded' heterosexual male he portrayed in countless movies, it all went tits up right at the end. With threats of blackmail and betrayal looming thicker and faster than ever before in his life he was forced to publicly announce that he was dying of AIDS whilst holed up in a hotel room in Paris. As the first celebrity to admit to the disease he was not lauded and praised. Oh no. He was vilified like no-one before him or since, his entire career forgotten on the spot. His very image, one that countless women and men had swooned over for decades, was wiped out and entirely replaced by one skeletal photo of him looking seriously ill. Newspapers printed any old vile story, seriously claiming for instance that he deliberately tried to kill Linda Evans by kissing her in one of his final acting scenes for Dynasty...

Anyway, the biography, needless to say, all ends horribly with Rock being dragged through hideous court cases even AFTER his death, ex-lovers suing him for millions. I laid the book down, felt unutterably depressed remembering the people I knew in the mid-eighties who died of AIDS and tried to go to sleep. Next thing I knew I was screaming and watching an arm being thrust through the light fitting in the ceiling above our bed. Daniel leaps out of bed crying "What is it, what is it?" as I point dumbstruck at the ceiling. He rushes to turn the light on to reveal....the light fitting above our bed.

Poor Rock. Still giving people nightmares in 2010.

I lay back in bed trying to get to sleep again, rather disturbed by this very vivid hallucination, and that's when I heard it - this:

http://birdsinbackyards.net/images/audio/ninox-strenua.mp3

An owl! An owl! Somewhere out there in the darkness amidst the rustling trees and the outspread tree-ferns was an owl. Hooting, just like we expect owls to do.

I have done extensive audio research, cross-checked with lists of fauna and flora native to Lane Cove and its environs, and I can safely say that I was hearing the wonderfully named Powerful Owl, the largest of  Australian nocturnal birds. Unfortunately, I doubt very much that I will ever see the thing let alone manage to take a photograph of it so I have had to make do for this blog with a picture of an owl that resides round the corner from our shack (on the way to Wollstonecraft station), permanently, on someone's gate post.

The Powerful Owl mates for life (which can mean up to thirty years - not quite your Golden Wedding Anniversary) and pairs defend their all-purpose territory year-round. Now that I have heard the owl's nocturnal song I find I can pick it out most nights: a magical, haunting, melancholy, other-worldly sound, its mellifluousness belying the fact that this monster owl can eat a whole possum...Owls have so much resonance in folklore and legend it seems only right that I should lie awake of a night simply to catch its call and wonder.

But this is wreaking havoc upon my sleeping patterns as well as heightening my, apparently, already Gothic sensibilities. Today, I was meandering down a well-trodden route with Sniff, clambering down from Vista Street towards Berry Creek along a path whose entrance is hidden between the far right-hand bush and the squiggly ivy-clad branch on the photograph below.

As you can see, it was a beautiful day, with a brilliant azure sky and a sun not too penetratingly hot. I was silently lamenting the fact that the Council had been along and chopped down some undergrowth on each side of the path which had in the past provided perfect sanctuary to some tiny little grey birds - so swift and small that I have never been able to identify them - when my eye fell upon a rock close to the creek's edge...I stepped back in horror...

It may be Rock's doing; it might be the owl's. But what was previously a completely innocuous innocent piece of stone is now a SKULL-etched nightmare upon which the afternoon sun pounces to sketch in blood-dripped fangs. There this image will be, lying in wait for Sniff and I every time we wander past, just beyond the little grey birds' graveyard.........

Seriously, I really should get some more sleep. I haven't even started on the Easter chocolate yet....