Ruminating on and in Australia

It has been a highly frustrating festive period.  Once Julian had completed his Perth duties (except for a wonderful dinner with alumni John Watts, Roger and Gay Dean and John's delightful missus), he relegated me to the hotel room for most of the next two weeks.  If you've ever suffered 40 degrees Celsius in a plastic Aber carrier bag, you will appreciate the suffering I have gone through.

Nevertheless, with a mixture of the occasional outing and long discussions with Julian, watching Aussie television and having to hear the nattering of the chambermaids, I do feel able to make a few sage observations on life Down Under.

To begin with, there is the fauna.  I know that I have more cousins here than everybody in Wales has had hot dinners, but they are imports.  I'm talking here about the indigenous fauna.  To start with, there are the birds.  Outwardly, a lot of them bear similarities to those we see in Wales.  They all appear rather more streamlined, however, with rakish lines and longer bodies.  It's a bit like comparing a Ford Popular with a 1963 Chevvy.  They have crows, ravens, magpies and seagulls - but all with T-bird Fins.  Then there are the ones one won't see in Aber - the parakeets, parrots and, God forgive us, Kookaburras.  To misquote Ogden Nash, they "sound like ... a hepcat on a harmonica."  Another simile might be to relate them to hooting monkeys in an African jungle.  Certainly, Julian reckons they followed him around the golf course, awaiting every bad shot before launching into another hysterical cackle and hoot.

Then there are kangaroos.  If you are misguided enough to believe that sheep are stupid, you have to come to Oz and see the Roos.  Most Australians, certainly in anything remotely resembling the Outback, have great big "bullbars" on the front of their cars because no Roo has the sense to get out of the way of an oncoming vehicle.  Indeed, they have an unnerving habit of jumping out in front of cars in the dusk and becoming spectacular roadkill.  They infested the first golf course Julian played on (see below) and had to be herded away from the balls using a golf buggy.

The image of a little Joey enjoying a ride around in its mother's pouch is also codswallop.  They are too stupid to enjoy the ride and dive in head first so that the only thing you see sticking out are the back legs.

The most dangerous animal in Western Australia, however, is undoubtedly the humble cricket.  Unlike the chirp-chirp sound of the more well-known of this genera, WA crickets sounds rather like two ball-bearings being clacked together.  This is unfortunate, since this is also the sound made by the pelican crossings to aid blind people.  They clack slowly when the signal is on red, and then speed up when the green man appears, thus informing the visually-challenged that it is safe to cross.    Tragically, the crickets also have variable-timing.

The other big difference, apart from the Roos, when playing golf in Australia is that the usual coarse golfer in the UK spends a good part of their day rooting around in the undergrowth searching for a wayward tee shot.  Not so in Oz.  The first time Julian wandered into the bush he was immediately dragged back by a white-faced friend with the hissed warning of "Snakes!!".  It's not that one can see them, you understand, it's just that they have a nasty habit of snoozing under bushes and have been known to take a nice venomous bite out of any tasty ankle which disturbs them passing by.  It is therefore little short of miraculous that Julian, having bought a dozen balls for his first game, played four times in all and has returned with nine of them.  You'll be pleased to know that, like the Ashes, we triumphed.

Perth is regarded by all that live there as little short of Paradise on Earth.  They have a point.  The weather is simply awesome, they have mostly all made a lot of money from the explosion (if that's not too unfortunate a reference) of mining, oil and gas, and they live in homes that would make the average Roman senator envious.  Property prices have skyrocketed, share-dealing in penny mining stocks that can blossom overnight is almost universal, and the quality of life is something quite extraordinary.  Playing bridge with 31 others in someone's garden on New Year's Eve was quite surreal, as was visiting the Pinnacles (a sort of natural Stonehenge in the desert) and the magnificent beaches.

So, with the Aussies still crying into their ice-cold lagers over the triumph of the Barmy Army, we go back to work and travel to Singapore, where the temperature will be close to 10C lower but the humidity will make it feel vastly more uncomfortable.  Tune in again for news of the world's most international city.