Getting Away From It; or Encounters With Emus

Things I  Like About Syndey No. 27: Getting Away From It...

I have to start this blog with a serious warning. Please pay attention. Here it comes...

Don't let anyone ever, EVER, persuade you that it would be a good idea to drive from Sydney to Adelaide. However attractive they may be, however stylish their car, whatever beguiling arguments they may come up with ("It will be both cheaper and more leisurely than flying; we'll drive past some magnificent scenery") DO NOT agree to their suggestion. For no amount of enticements and inducements can ever outweigh the sheer hellish reality of being sat in a carseat for two long, long days, driving down a featureless highway at a steady 110 kilometres an hour, passing road sign after road sign after road sign after road sign that doesn't even mention your destination as being anywhere remotely close. The "Are we there yet?" joke soon wears thin. Complaining that "We could have flown to London and back by now", doesn't help. And what is more, once you have finally arrived, once you've finally settled in to a holiday groove, guess what? You realise you've got to do the journey in reverse all over again in order to get home. And if you're really lucky, on your return travels, just as the thought of dinner is concertinaing the kilometres slightly as night falls, a thick fog will suddenly descend turning the first day's journey into a tense, hungry, relationship-busting thirteen hour nightmare...

Oh me, oh my. We got there and back safely, that's the main thing I suppose, and little Sniff didn't have to suffer the indignity of being stuffed in a plastic carrying case in the hold of an aeroplane. And we weren't actually headed directly for Adelaide, but for the Coorong which is east a bit and essentially a National Park consisting of a long, narrow, hyper-saline lagoon which stretches from the mouth of the River Murray, south-eastward for nearly 150 kilometres. Daniel's family own a sprawling homestead on the edge of the lagoon, McGrath Flat, so-called after McGrath, a white traveller who was butchered by aborigines whilst camping on the spot back in 1842. Shortly after this inauspicious beginning, in 1858, McGrath Flat became an hotel (and was briefly re-named the Tom O'Shanter). This inn developed into an important stopping-point in this bleak and uninhabited area and soon housed both a post office and a telegraph office. By the 1900s however, as trade fell away from the area and gold prospectors no longer passed through, it became a farmstead. Today, the neighbouring farmers still graze their sheep in the overgrown fields, kangaroos make their home in the woods, and the shearer's quarters, shearing shed and shearer's cottage are all slowly falling to wrack and ruin. The main house is being bravely maintained by the heroic efforts of Daniel's mother...

This is the main building. Just across from it, over a curving stretch of road, lies the lagoon. You enter the house from the left hand side of the building through a courtyard (Sniff has his nose to the wall in the photo as if banished to the corner for bad behaviour...).

In the enormous pine tree next the house roosts a pair of Nankeen Kestrels who watched us daily with flashing beady eyes. A couple of herons crash-landed there as well on our first morning but we never caught sight of them again. Galahs, currawongs and crows circle the chimneys of the farm endlessly (sometimes falling down them) and Black-Shouldered Kites have noisy face-offs with the kestrels. Pelicans occasionally glide soundlessly across the sky. These are the winter birds of McGrath Flat and Daniel, Sniff and I would sit on the low wall in the courtyard and listen to their cacophony of calls.

But the strangest, the biggest, the scariest bird of McGrath Flat? When would it reveal itself? We'd heard the rumours circulating, the reported sightings...

We first stumbled across evidence of something rather larger than a pelican on our early morning walk down to the lagoon along a path directly opposite the house. Daniel and I have named this walk the Dead Seal Stroll, after we discovered the seal corpse there (subject of Blog No. 21: Corpses...). Last winter, any attempt at the Dead Seal Stroll meant battling with endless clouds of midges and mosquitoes, but this year the walk was pleasantly devoid of insect life (apart from big fat hairy caterpillars clinging to grass stems), and we all bounded down the path with palpable energy. Daniel then spotted this:

And then as we got nearer to the water I spotted these:

Obviously something large and upright with an enormous middle toe was in the neighbourhood... something whose prints could dwarf those of a sizeable gull. Suddenly, it seemed that the few olive trees and scraggly native bushes didn't offer much protection.

It wasn't until the next day, when I drew back the curtains of the living room in the morning, that the owners of these prints stepped out of the bushes and revealed themselves in all their bizarre glory.

As Emus.

Here are some facts I've learned about emus.
1. They have two sets of eyelids.
2. They can run at speeds of up to 50 kilometres an hour.
3. They are thought to date back 80 million years.
4. They lay emerald green eggs.
5. Sniff doesn't like them at all.

None of these facts did I glean from watching the emus grazing the olive trees opposite the house at McGrath Flat. From watching them I learnt that they graze in groups, they jump off the ground to reach fruit on higher branches, they scarper at the sound of a gate opening but not at the sound of a passing car, and they sit down quite a bit and look bored. Fact No. 5 I learnt on an early morning Dead Seal Stroll with Sniff when we turned a corner only to see six emus directly ahead of us on the path. Sniff's hair raised up in a crest along his spine from head to tail and he started growling in a way I'd never heard before. Not reckoning our chances against six six foot emus I decided that we should scarper, especially as big chief male emu began to advance towards us as opposed to running off flapping its six inch wings (Fact No. 6 : they do have 'em....)

Below is my favourite footprint photograph for you can see the very identations of the skin on the sole of the emu's foot...With this much detail, be thankful that I shall spare you my photographs of emu droppings...the birds apparently often re-visit their own droppings in order to pick out any undigested seeds and from what we saw, that's quite a meal...

To your average Australian these shaggy relics are old hat. Emus are fairly common in the wild and are also busy being farmed for their meat, their feathers, their eggs, their toenails...However, they don't exactly roam down the streets of Sydney of a morning and to me they represent a strange, antique land and gave me an unique opportunity to briefly co-star in my very own production of Jurassic Park...

Gold!

Things I like about Sydney No. 26: Gold!

When I lived in Australia many moons ago, my family and I frequently went on sight-seeing trips out of Melbourne to various 'places of interest': to Healesville Sanctuary to stroke the kangaroos, into the Dandenong Ranges for a trip on Puffing Billy ("Australia's favourite steam train"), over to Prince Philip Island to look at the Fairy Penguins and so on. But one of our trips from 1974 that has stuck in my mind the most was when we went to an old gold mining town to pan for gold...

I can't remember now whether it was Bendigo or Ballarat or somewhere else entirely. I dimly recall people dressed in period costume wandering around in character (or perhaps I've even made that up) and that it seemed I had been transported back to the nineteenth century. I can't remember finding any gold but nevertheless found it all very exciting. Imagine! Magnificent fortunes being made overnight! Imperilment from bushrangers wearing metal balaclavas! Old lags grubbing around with sieves and sifters greedily searching for glimmers of yellow, frequently toppled in their toil by sunstroke or the swift bite of a poisonous snake or spider! Gold and convicts! This was the real Australia!

Since Daniel and I arrived in Sydney in 2008 (how time flies) I've wanted to go back to those Victorian mining towns and was very excited when we stopped off in Bendigo on the way back from Adelaide last winter, arriving late at night ready for a day of exploring on the morrow. But all excitement was immediately squashed when we discovered that Sniff, the wretch, was not allowed to stay in ANY of the motels in town. Or, in the state. Or in the country. I'd presumed that 'animal-friendly' on the websites of motels meant dogs could stay in your room when in fact it meant that dogs could stay in the car-park.

Now Sniff is a high maintenance little beast and the fits and shivering begin at the mention of the word goodbye. He is not the sort of dog that would happily settle down in the car for the night. How we wish he were...After driving around for an hour begging with various desk-clerks to let us and the beast stay in their crummy establishment, repulsed at every turn, we drove back to the first motel we went to (in case they would remember me I sent Daniel in this time and hid in the car) and booked a room. Throwing a blanket over his travelling cage I smuggled Sniff inside and hurriedly locked and bolted the door....

All well and good. Daniel sneaked out for some take-away pizza and Sniff settled down at the end of the bed, well-fed, well-watered and well-behaved. Pizza and Daniel arrive, we eat, watch crap television (something we can only ever do in motels and hotels being television-free at home) and go to bed. Come midnight and a strange whining sound starts up, immediately outside our door. Daniel and I wake up instantly. It sounds like a dog is scratching away at our room; it's whimpering. Sniff wakes up. He hears it too. He wants to bark. He's about to bark. We're going to have to smother him with a pillow. The owners have a dog and it's trained to sniff out unwanted intruders. It's smelt Sniff. We're going to be thrown out. Oh God. Sniff's going to bark.

This farrago went on for about an hour or so before we realised that what we could hear was in fact another resident's dog who HAD sensibly and legally been left in the car-park. In the car. But right outside our door.

We didn't get much sleep that night except for Sniff, who after the inital excitement of the dog outside snored away blissfully unaware of our anxiety. At first light, Daniel and I smuggled Sniff back out and hightailed it for Sydney rather than enduring another six nights of worrisome adventure (our plan had been to leisurely meander through towns between Bendigo and Sydney panning for gold and raiding op shops for 30s tableware and secondhand books).

The moral of this story is NEVER GET A DOG!

Anyway, I digress. Back to Gold!

Thwarted in recreating my childhood in Bendigo, once back in Sydney I went on the search for gold and the greatest manifestation of all that crazy wealth that I could find here has to be Martin Place. Martin Place is a pedestrian mall in the central business district (so-called CBD) which has late-Victorian splendour at every turn - it could almost be London. It was opened as late as 1891 and a lot of the best buildings weren't completed until even later (the late 20s/early 30s). Many of the buildings were, and still are, banks - depositories for all those fabulously large nuggets, here in "the heart of corporate Australia".

No. 1 Martin Place was once the main offices of the Australian Post office. Its magnificent 100 metre facade has a central entrance topped by an enormous flouncy marble statue of Queen Victoria flanked by allegorical figures and guarded by the lion and the unicorn. Here it is:

The Australian equivalent of that very British lion and unicorn are also everywhere to be seen in Martin Place but I feel that their symmetry is a little less refined....

These old Post Office headquarters now, needless to say, house shops, a hotel, wine bars and restaurants although the Post Office does maintain a small part of the building as a shop.

Further down Martin Place, after some fairly spectacular deco buildings and more late-Victorian banks, is my favourite gold! part of Sydney: the State Savings Bank, now owned by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia where yours truly holds an account. This building was opened in 1928 but must have taken a fair few years to build. It is hugely imposing, designed to completely   intimidate and belittle its customers, the grand exterior made out of pink granite and terracotta.

And, as if this awe-inspiring and jaw-dropping exterior wasn't enough for the humble Sydneysider in the roaring twenties then there was always the inside to put fear in your heart and a tremble in your step...and this interior has to be the best I've ever seen in a goddamn bank. Pink and green marble  everywhere you look, gleaming from a very recent multi-million dollar make-over, in a central pillared banking chamber that was once one of the largest in the world. Tellers sit behind elaborate grilles of wrought iron with gleaming brass details beneath an intricate plaster and pressed metal ceiling. It is truly fab and fantastically preserved down to its last frill.

I got told off for taking photographs (this is after all a working bank and the poor security guards have to cope with all the gawking tourists who are sensible enough to drop in for a look) so for the first time on this blog I am resorting to using someone else's pictures. I found these on the web: how it was in 1928; how it is now.

One of the best features of the bank is discovered by going down some stairs (with painted frescoes on the ceiling no less) and passing into a much cooler atrium wherein sits the most enormous safe I've ever seen. Obviously, now that I've been doing some teaching at NIDA (National Institute of Dramatic Art) and AIM (Australian Institute of Music) I have to visit frequently to deposit huge bundles of cash. It's very James Bond.

No doubt, much of the gold that was discovered in Bendigo and Ballarat and similar places all those years ago has ended up in these walls and floors and pillars of marble. Sydney's gold stopped here.

I have another reason for thinking of gold! this week. It was my parents' Golden Wedding Anniversary yesterday. For that reason, and because I dragged them along to 48 Martin Place when they came to stay last Christmas and they dragged me to Australia all those years ago, I dedicate this blog to them! Happy Anniversary!

The sudden uprising at Glenview Street

Things I like about Sydney No. 25: The sudden uprising at Glenview Street

The other week I introduced two new friends of mine, Thang and Kev, a pair of rainbow lorikeets who were then newly resident here at Glenview Street (aka Glenview Zoo). A few weeks on and I'd like to think that I'm now a firm favourite friend of theirs, a choice destination, for their visits are increasing in number and their volubility is escalating daily. They tell me all sorts of gossip these days and aren't adverse to pecking me "right proper" if I'm either not listening carefully enough or distributing sunflower seeds with the rapidity required to satisfy their ravenous appetites (which I kindly put down to the inclement weather and the intensifying cold). Occasionally there are little arguments with some other friends of theirs who pop in for a quick visit, but we soon get rid of them with some excuse or other and settle down again to our cosy circle. And at night, when Kev and Thang are fast asleep in the branches of some distant eucalypt, heads tucked under bejewelled wing, Pam the rat appears on the verandah to nibble away at their leftovers. She's very good at tidying up.

So all has been calm and collected at Glenview Zoo. Until today, that is. When Sarah and Michael arrived....

As you can see, Sarah and Michael are considerably larger than Thang and Kev. Sarah and Michael, if they were human, would both be over six foot tall. They also take very large shoe sizes - you can't buy them in normal shops....Their sheer bulk, those vicious looking beaks, and those large black talons all bespoke ferocity. But in fact, Sarah and Michael were quite gentle with me, even a little wary. One sudden move and up came those bright yellow crests...

When I was about eleven years old I came to Australia with my family to live in Melbourne for some months whilst my father was on an exchange visit with a university there. We took a house in a suburb called Heidelberg, as unlike the German equivalent as it is possible to be, and in the garden, a quixotic addition, was a caged Sulphur-Crested Cockatoo, called, um, Cocky. At the time I was obsessed with birds but I strangely don't remember much about him. This morning, up close and personal with Sarah and Michael, I began to remember. These cockatoos are very solidly built. They strut and preen and look muscular - the Tysons of the bird world. They are obviously, like all large parrots and cockatoos, extremely bright.

I can hear Australians in their hundreds saying: "Oh, you shouldn't feed them. They become a nuisance. They ruin your woodwork. Blah, blah." But for me, their visit this morning was simply out of this world.

For Thang and Kev it was a bit of a disaster...as you can see below it's not an equal contest...I've assured them however that it won't be a regular occurrence. Those cockatoos are fairly nomadic. Always going off on skiing holidays or so I've been told...

The Second Deluge

Things I like about Sydney No. 24: The Second Deluge.


Last week it rained. And rained. And rained and rained and rained and rained. And then rained some more.

In all honesty, this shouldn't be a subject for this blog because I really, really didn't like it.

It meant, for instance, that Sniff refused to step outside the house and lay, bored stiff, in front of the gas fire looking at me dolefully as if it was my fault that it was raining. He had to be forcibly carried out to the back of the house (where by this point there was a tsunami raging down the path towards the creek) to ensure he didn't pee up the chaise longue (which he did anyway) or poo on the carpet (which he did later, but that's another story).

It meant that half of the driveway washed itself down towards our parked car, leaving great canyons and piles of bricks to navigate further up the drive and great puddles of sand and silt to walk through to get to the front door.

 It meant that our towels were constantly damp and that no washing would dry. It meant that I had to wear Daniel's unsightly wellington boots - in public. It meant that, even when the rain ceased for a moment, you couldn't go walking along the creek as normal because the path was flooded. (Here's where we have to cross the creek over what are normally dry boulders).

And worst of all, it meant that the leeches came back in force. One even suckered itself to the lintel of the door hoping to latch on to our ears or cunningly kamikaze drop down the back of our shirt collars. It was a particularly choice, fat and dapper specimen - stripes indeed! Is it trying to endear itself to us with this flamboyance?

However, I feel that I can, Noah-like, appreciate this deluge to some degree and it can therefore become the 24th subject for this blog of "Things I like about Sydney". After all, the rain here is so extraordinary. As unlike London rain as it is possible to get.  Its persistence and endurance give Paula Radcliffe more than a run for her money. It is so loud, the drops so large. Teeming. That's the word. It teemed. One day in particular was biblical. Friday, 4th June. One week ago now. The rain was constant for fourteen hours, a constant teeming. Just when you thought it could not get any heavier or any louder the tempo and the volume would crescendo, the sky get even darker, and the water fall in blinding, thicker sheets. Trees fell down across the creek. Waterspouts appeared in Sydney Harbour and, rather frighteningly, waterspouts become tornadoes when they hit land, which they did in the Eastern Suburbs  - Bronte and Marouba - causing some damage. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that on that day "in the eight hours to 5pm, Sydney recorded 63mm of rainfall, with heavier falls in the city's northwest" ie., for us.

The creek became a magnificent, raging, noisy torrent. We can normally hear it from the house, benignly tinkling away; now it roared rather frighteningly.

I cowered inside all day waiting for the tornado to hit Greenwich, periodically shaking out Daniel's wellington boots to ensure that there were no leeches inside, donning them, grabbing Sniff, and running out through the silt and the puddles to plonk him in the drive to pee.

I felt as if I lived in an ark but had failed miserably to gather together any beasts more savoury than leeches. Even Thang and Kev the lorikeets were nowhere to be seen and Sniff didn't count as a solitary canine.

Eventually it stopped raining. We didn't float away after all. The leeches have disappeared, the creek can once more be crossed and the tsunami at the back of the house has dried to a trickle. And I'm about to take Sniff out for a proper walk. Catch you later.

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...