Featherview: The Biggest Little Farm in Mullumbimby

Once again I’ve been struggling with how to write about this place. It’s not that it’s not wonderful; it is. And it’s not that nothing happens; it does. I’m going to blame it on not wearing a watch. Without a watch, one day just bleeds into the next, and combine that with all the incense and all the nature and all the vibes floating around up here, and I think I’m basically just stoned on scenery every day. This is a place that demands a different kind of artist than I am - it needs a painter, a photographer, hell, maybe even a musician would have better luck than a writer. As it is, all I want to write about is sunrises and raindrops on banana leaves, but then I get distracted by a bird and suddenly my whole day is gone, and anyway, there’s not much to say about a sunrise is there? Either you get to see it or you don’t, but any description just ends up sounding like the Nature Channel version of a steamy romance novel.

Today, however, something worth talking about happened. I took a bath. This in and of itself may not sound remarkable, but it’s all about location. I took a bath in a rain storm. I took a bath in a rain storm, while surrounded by rain forest. This bath-taking occurred outside. So I lounged in steaming hot water, encompassed by trees, in a beautiful mosaic tub, with a beach umbrella over my head, while it poured down rain around me, and the happiest frogs since Warner Brothers croaked enthusiastically in a nearby pond.  I also had a mug of homemade chai with me. I think this, inarguably, is probably just about the coolest thing ever. I feel like I won something, although I’m not exactly sure how, because I’m very suspicious about entering contests. The situation was made even more remarkable by the low-lying and very dastardly looking clouds that were sweeping up the valley, successfully cutting off our hilltop from the rest of the world. I felt like I was bathing in a rainforest in a cloud. This is my new happy place. Before, when I got too stressed and frazzled by my abusive relationship with New York City, I used to picture little puppies, and the floppy way they run because the adorable little bastards still don’t quite know how to use their paws; from here on out, I will picture my tub.

Who knew banana fruit grew so strangely?

Now, you may be wondering, “if you can see into the valley, doesn’t that mean this tub is sort of, I don’t know, out in the open? Exposed, as it were?” The answer is yes, and it is time for me to confess something about this farm that I’ve neglected to mention. It’s run by naturalists, aka nudists, aka the farmer and his wife and his 18 month-old son very often don’t have clothes on, which is fairly normal for an 18 month-old but perhaps slightly less normal for a farmer and his wife. I don’t know, I don’t know that many farmers. 

Other Kate and I both knew this before we got here, and I think it’s safe to say that neither of us quite knew how we felt about it. But after seeing how comfortable our hosts were (and after solving the initial problem of eye contact), Other Kate and I both decided that this seemed pretty cool. After a little further discussion, we decided to go for it. After a hell of a lot of giggling, we actually managed to remove a little clothing. After a few moments of feeling the breeze, we realized that the full monty was maybe a little more than either of us had bargained for, and we reached a happy medium. So I can now proudly say that I have mulched, and weeded, and picked tomatoes, all while letting the girls see a little sunshine, albeit through a thick paste of SPF 50. I have in fact thrown a variety of shit at plants all while half-monty’d (none of the shit was literal shit, this is a vegan farm and I think in some way that I don’t fully understand, animal shit is not vegan). I have thrown seeds and fertilizer and wood chips; I have sprinkled and tossed and scattered. And I did it all without a shirt. 

I don’t know that I’m going to run off and join a nudist colony anytime soon, but I will say that it has been an interesting, dare I say liberating, experience, and I’ve very much enjoyed the decrease in laundry that goes along with wearing less clothing. In any case, it facilitated that bath, and I would happily give the shirt off my back all over again for another one of those. 

Mullumbimby: The Biggest Little Town in Australia

I have tried to start this post about 5 different ways. I keep trying to be clever and funny, like “Today I learned that it’s really hard to get out of a hammock. I also learned that nobody wants to hear you complain about how hard it is to get out of a hammock.” Or I try to come up with some way to share how remarkable this place is, like “I saw a koala in the wild today. He was just chilling in a tree, eating some eucalyptus, and seemed really confused about why this pale monkey on the ground was jumping up and down and screeching excitedly.” But here’s the problem. Nothing does this place justice. I’m sorry, I’m probably going to get all high-flung and baroque and such, but I’m living in paradise, and it lends itself to high-flung and baroque and such. 

I’m at a banana plantation in the hills outside of Mullumbimby, which is a tiny little hippy town outside of Byron Bay, which, if you remember, is a tiny little hippy town too, but more touristy, and closer to the ocean. Another girl and I (another Kate in fact, from the US) are sharing a flat underneath the farmer’s house. I could try to describe the view, but why bother? It looks like this:

We get to live here, and eat all sorts of delicious farm-fresh food, in exchange for a shockingly minimal amount of work. Don’t get me wrong, I have become a lazy city girl, so the four hours of work I put in today mulching and weeding under the just-unnecessarily-hot Australian sun knocked me on my butt, but I can still objectively say that I know I am not working hard enough to deserve this. There is a gorgeous outdoor shower in the middle of natural rainforest; even better, the water pressure is fantastic. There are huge screen doors on two walls of the flat, so we sleep with only these closed and get to hear all the crickets and birds and happy-hippy nature sounds of the day and night. The lighthouse in Byron Bay is visible enough to be awesome, but not visible enough to be sleep-disrupting. We’re going to bed around 10 and waking up to see sunrise every day (usually from the hammock, with a cup of coffee), as it creeps up over the ocean and streaks the valley below us with color. Sometimes, there’s rolling fog. Sometimes, there are sun showers. You can hate me now, I don’t blame you.

To balance it out though, allow me to say that there are spiders. Big ones, that hide in the banana plants and jump out at you when you’re not looking. There are also jumping ants that have a bite like a bee sting. And apparently there may be snakes, although I’m praying I never run into one and have to see whether common sense, which tells me to channel my inner tree and stay very still, or adrenaline, which tells me to channel Forrest Gump and run for the hills, wins. On the plus side, there are daddy long legs throughout our flat, and for the first time in my life, I don’t mind at all, because at least they aren’t fat and hairy and ginormous. 

There are also magpies. I know I spend a perhaps inordinate amount of time talking about birds, but seriously, Australian birds are weird. These magpies look like crows that had a mishap with some white paint, and they sound a little bit like a scratched Devo record remixed by Skrillex. And they’re smart, you can see it in their beady little eyes. My first hour here, I was lying on the bed, reading, and the doors to the outside were open to let some air in, or something. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced up to see Mr Magpie walking through the bathroom like he owned the place, or at least like he was the estate agent thinking about putting it on the market. I think I said something super smart like, “Oh. Hi.” Mr Magpie turned, gave me a quick once over, shat on my floor, and hopped out the door. This pretty much sums up my continued interactions with these birds. Other Kate and I gave them little bits of our muesli on the first morning, and they now wait not-even-remotely-patiently outside the window for us at sunrise and hop up and down angrily on our patio table and chairs. One bit of oat, and they now think that we’re vending machines. 

This obsession with the magpies speaks to a broader trend I’ve been noticing in the few days I’ve been here. Deprived of many of the standard stimuli (we have a tv, but I’m not convinced it works, and I’m avoiding the evils of the internet), I’ve started avidly watching insects and animals like I’m living in a cross between a Discovery Channel documentary and Real Housespiders of Hippyville. Other Kate and I watched this big spider that hangs out on our porch (a golden orb? I have no idea really, she’s pretty fat and funny colors) for almost an hour the other day as a male spider tried to work up the courage to mate with her. She ate him. It was awesome, and we narrated the whole thing from the spider’s perspective. I felt like David Attenborough. But I did have to wonder for a moment if I’m just living in the moment and becoming one with nature, or going a little batty. We’ve been burning a ton of incense and drinking “goon”, Australian for “boxed wine”, which I think is the only way to make boxed wine sound even less classy, so I may be losing some brain cells while I’m here. 

Yet I’m ok sacrificing a few brain cells to know that a place like this still exists, where people just want to relax, and eat some good food, and take care of the earth and each other. I even went to a commune the other night. I truthfully had no idea such things were real. It was in the middle of the forest, and the people were friendly and kind and proud, and fed us homemade vegan pizzas while an uncountable amount of barefoot children cavorted around our ankles. Hippies are real; it isn’t just a fashion choice. So please bear with me if I become increasingly blissed out over the next week, I can only assume it will pass. 

But for real, I saw a koala in the wild. It glared at me from its tree. If it’s still there tomorrow, I’ll name it and give it a role in my next great Mullumbimby animal soap opera. 

A Beginner's Guide to Dreadlocks: Byron Bay

I have many things I want to say about Byron Bay (at least, I think I do, it’s awfully hard to tell until I actually start writing), but I would like to pause first and consider Australian coffee. Why is it so good? By all rights, these people should be tea drinkers, and don’t get me wrong, they do drink tea, and they make it well and serve it properly with milk, and sometimes sugar (but only if you’re a woman, and they might still look at you a little funny), but their heart, their passionate love, seems to lie with coffee. They have mastered it so thoroughly that America should be ashamed. I can’t believe they even allow Starbucks to exist in this country. As I’ve mentioned before, coffee here mainly means espresso, in a variety of puzzling forms that don’t appear to exist outside of Australia. Even the meanest, grungiest little diner here has a barista that would make the hippest mustachioed, tattooed, suspender-wearing coffee craftsman of NYC weep and beg for his mother. These people are serious about coffee. I walked into a hippy-tastic (expect to see more of that word in a minute) little cafe near my hostel on my first morning in Byron and this shoeless, dreadlocked man started asking me if I liked single origin coffees. He then proceeded to tell me all about the espresso they had, describe the degrees of taste like a sommelier presenting a fine wine, give me meal pairings and explain that, on pain of death, I couldn’t drink it with milk in it. After that presentation (and the eventual realization that he worked at the cafe), I had to order that espresso, and here’s the kicker, he was right. It was perfection in a tiny little cup. They even make something here called a ‘baby-cino’, which is not made with babies, thank god, but instead is a cappuccino with a very short pull of espresso, made especially for the kiddies. Get ‘em hooked young.

Coffee chat over, let’s talk about Byron Bay, which is just over the New South Wales border from Brisbane (and by just I mean about a 2 hour drive, which is pretty close in Australia). It’s a tiny little town with one main road and a couple cross streets, set right on a beautiful beach, which is it’s raison d’être. It is a surf town, a hippy mecca, a shoeless, shirtless, dreadlocked, sun-bleached, bongo-playing, sitar-wielding, patchouli-smelling (although I think all the patchouli is there to just mask the weed), sunbathed wonderland of chill. I don’t think anyone in this town has ever worried about anything in their life, unless of course the waves are bad that day. Normally, I could find this a little irritating, a little like posturing; however here, it just feels right, it is simply a natural off-shoot of the beach lifestyle. No one is trying to be a modern day hippy, it’s just sort of happened naturally. Frankly, I like most of it. I love not wearing shoes, I’m fine with attractive people walking around with very little clothing on, I love fresh, organic, farm-to-table food, I don’t even mind the smell of patchouli. I just wish they would come up with another hairstyle, because there are only so many dreadlocks a person can take and hope to retain their sanity. 

I didn’t do very much in Byron, because honestly, there isn’t much to do. I spent a lot of time sitting on beaches, playing a fun game of chicken with my skin to see if I could get it to tan without burning (conclusion: I can’t). I had some surprisingly respectable Mexican food. I watched some spectacular fire-spinning — just an ordinary hippy couple, performing at the beach, spinning swords and metal fans and hula hoops and all sorts of things all of which were on FIRE. I sat on the sidewalk and watched some incredible street musicians, and some awful street musicians, and a lot in-between. I saw the most spectacular moon-rise, this massive orange disk appearing from behind a mountain, disappearing behind a cloud but back-lighting it with flames, and then bursting through the top; sometimes it feels like the sky is much closer here.

Also, I took a surfing lesson. I swore I would never do this, because it still doesn’t make any damn sense to me how a person can stand on water. That said, Byron Bay rubbed off on me and I had to try it, and it was awesome. These people are so used to dealing with moronic tourists that they make it idiot proof, giving you this big soft flotation device disguised as a surfboard that even an elephant could stand up on. The owner of the school was brilliant, gruff and rude and crude, but always with a smile, with skin like leather and long sun-blonde hair. His assistant, I kid you not, was Thor. Ok, obviously not actually Thor, but a dead-ringer for Chris Hemsworth. I have no photos to back this up, so you will just have to take my word for it. Perhaps it was because of my desire to not embarrass myself in front of Thor, but I did manage to stand up, and in general stay up, even making it all the way to shore a few times. I felt a bit like a drowned rat, but a drowned rat that was standing on a surfboard, so at least I had that going for me. If I’m not careful, I’ll soon have dreadlocks, and take to wearing those pants that look like flowy skirts and a crochet crop-top to match. Maybe I’ll change my name to Rain.  

Fraser Island

Selfie! I'm embarrassed.

A brief record of my first minutes in my tent at Fraser Island, with some amendments, exaggerations, and other inaccuracies. But really, my train of thought was something like this.

Bed time! I’m exhausted. This tent has been sitting out here for a while. I’ll just do a quick spider check. Nothing in the corners, good. AH! What’s that on the ceiling? Oh, that’s a just a little dangling dongle. Who the hell would put that on the ceiling of a tent? Oh damn, I don’t know how long this blanket has been in here. I better shake it out. That means I have to touch it. I am a big strong woman, I am not afraid of a spider. This is ridiculous, just touch the blanket. But if there is a spider, I better shake it outside. Shit, what if there’s a snake outside? Better check outside first. No snakes, ok, grab the blanket and shake it like you’re trying to kill it. Nothing. Cool. Maybe I better smack the tent to make sure nothing is hiding between the sides and the over flap. Ok, I’m safe. God, I hope no one saw all that. Lay down, go to sleep. That is not a spider you feel on your foot. Not a spider. Oh my god what’s outside the tent?! It looks like a homicidal midget with an ax! Or maybe it’s just a post. Oh yeah, it’s just a post. No spiders, no spiders. Is that a mosquito? Shit.

Given the rocky start, I actually slept pretty well. I was a little confused at first as to why I could hear the soothing steady sound of highway traffic outside of my tent, given that I was on a sand island in the middle of the ocean, until I realized that it was the sound of the ocean. I was a little disappointed that the ocean sounded exactly like a highway. I can’t tell if this is the ocean’s fault, or mine. 

Fraser Island, just to give you a quick run down, is the world’s largest sand island, and a UNESCO World Heritage site. It’s about 130 kilometers long and about 15 wide at it’s biggest point (I’ll let you figure that out in miles, I’ve given up). It’s the product of sand being blown and pulled off of the mainland over thousands of years and slowly accumulating against a few volcanic outcroppings in the ocean; over time, enough sand accumulated that an island was formed. But what makes Fraser so truly incredible is that there is fresh water, which has given rise to a rain forest. That’s right, this is a sand island, in the middle of the ocean, with a rainforest at it’s center. I’m still not totally clear on the mechanics that bring fresh water out there, but it’s something about a water table, and it soaking in on the mainland, traveling under the ocean, and then being forced back to the surface by the weight of the island. Or something like that. Regardless, the island is spectacular, a combination of big sweeping sand dunes that look like something out of Lawrence of Arabia, lots of desert scrub and eucalyptus, huge beautiful fresh water lakes, and then a giant bloody rainforest complete with towering Karri pines and prehistoric ferns and palm trees and a little creek with water so astonishingly clear that you can’t even tell it’s there.

The only way around the island is in 4wd vehicles, so I was with a little tour group of 7 people plus the guide in a Land Rover that made me feel like I was in some hybrid of Indiana Jones and Jurassic Park. Cruising down the beach, just above the surf line, at 80 kilometers an hour, is an experience that words cannot describe; similarly, words cannot describe the feeling of jostling down a sand track in the middle of a forest for an hour and half debating whether your head is going to go through the ceiling or your bum is going to break the seat first. It was like a naturally occurring roller coaster.

In spite of my fears, I did not see any giant spiders, although I did spend about 5 minutes in the shower examining the terrified little spider near the taps trying to determine whether it was a Redback or not (conclusion: it wasn’t). Nor did I see any snakes. I just saw a lot of lizards (called skinks, which I sadly find funny every time I say it), one giant cane toad (a pest that was introduced to the island, which gave the boys on the trip an excuse to try to hunt it down and kill it), a baby turtle, and some dingos. We were given extensive warnings about the dingos before going out, because they can be dangerous if they think you have food on you. Apparently tourists were frequently feeding them, which led them to associate humans with food, and then if and when food was not forthcoming, they could become aggressive. After seeing them, I understood the desire to feed them, although obviously I didn’t — they look just like small undernourished dogs. They also are solitary animals, which makes it even easier to feel sorry for them. Other than not trusting one with a baby, I think dingos have had a bad rap.

I could rhapsodize for pages about the beauty of Fraser Island, about the joy of coming over a huge sand blow and finding a lake, lined by eucalyptus forest, or about wandering out of the rain forest and finding the most impossibly blue lake lined with the most incredibly white sand. But I’ll just let a few amateur photos do the talking for me.

See that line of darker blue about 10 feet off shore? That is an underwater trough, and it's about 60 feet deep and filled with fish. Because of the fish, there are sharks and dolphins and other such giant sea creatures, just a few feet from shore. You definitely can't swim, but you can see shark fins and dolphins from shore. This is a long caption.

Maheno shipwreck

Eli Creek, the largest freshwater 'creek' on the island. It runs right into the ocean.

The sand blow by Lake Wabby. As a plus, there's me being artistic.

Lake Wabby

Towering Karri Pines at the edge of the rainforest.

See that little shimmer over the top of that sand? That is the purest water in the world.

Lake Mackenzie

Another bonus! Me and a terrified turtle (no turtles were harmed in the taking of this photo).

Brisbane: The Whole Story

The edge of the world

Poor Brisbane. Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Actually, that’s not even accurate. Brisbane is more like that awkward old maid near the back who is desperately hoping that someone will notice her. People really don’t talk about Brisbane, even in Australia. Before I got here, I asked a couple people about Brisbane, and the response was a near universal “Meh, it’s a city.” 

I initially decided that I liked Brisbane very much, but this was solely because of the breathtaking flight in. You come in along the Gold Coast, and you can actually see the little stretch of beach beneath you, glowing white against all the blue. But it is this blue that is so extraordinary. The sea is so impossibly blue, and dotted with little white clouds that float peacefully between you and the earth, that it's impossible to tell where the ocean ends and the sky begins. You feel like you're flying along the edge of the world.

The city itself and I, however, did not start out on a very good note, due to the inconvenient hill that hangs out right in the middle of town. For some reason that I doubt I will ever fathom, they have decided to put all of the hostels on this hill. In case you can’t see why that’s a problem, imagine slogging up a not-insignificant hill in 90 degree weather with the sun beating down on your head and a 40 lbs pack on your back. By the time I got to the top, I wanted to be cursing Brisbane, the entire Youth Hostel Association of Australia, my pack, the sun, my flip-flops, more or less anything and everything, but I was too busy sweating out most of the liquid in my body and panting like a sad old dog. The lovely people at the hostel gave me a popsicle. Clearly they got the memo on how to win me over. 

I wandered a bit around Brisbane that afternoon and decided that the descriptor “a city” fits it perfectly. It was a city, not particularly pretty or ugly or big or small or memorable in any way. Luckily, I met up with some lovely friends of a friend that evening who took me to the south bank (because, like all good Australian cities, Brisbane is built on a river) and I was reassured that Brisbane had slightly more soul than advertised. The south bank is quite pretty, with a beautiful winding tunnel of bougainvillea that runs parallel to the river and is flanked on the other side with trendy restaurants and bars. A little further in is an area called the West End, which is full of hippies and hipsters and other cool kids, and because of this, lots of cute little boutiques and painfully cool bars with lots and lots of live music. There’s a free ferry that runs down the river and gives you a flattering view of the city. All said and done, it is a city with promise; that’s about as much as I can say after only 2-ish days here. My only regret is that I couldn’t find the Aboriginal man that the dread-locked gent at the hostel told me about. Dread-Locks told me this man holds court in front of a particular bar in the West End, and will talk to anyone and everyone about his culture, his adventures, and lost secrets of the bush. It sounded like a great night to me, but sadly, his court was empty when I walked by. Instead, I went into a bar and listened to what I can only try to describe as reggae-thrash metal fusion, which may have also been a lost secret of the bush, for all I could tell. 

Melbourne: The End

I walked 18 miles yesterday. 18. That’s like, a gajillion kilometers. In my exuberance and enthusiasm, which flagged but never entirely waned, mostly because by that point I didn’t really have a choice if I ever wanted to make it back to my hostel, I didn’t think about the repercussions this would have for my legs. I didn’t think about it at all, in fact, until I tried to get out of my bunk bed this morning only to discover that my legs no longer functioned like normal. I stumbled, spun, and sort of flopped over backwards onto the tiny, unforgiving plywood table in the center of the room. That acrobatic maneuver took about all the energy I had. So needless to say, today has been a quiet day, a day for contemplation about this city we call Melbourne, a day for mincing about with tiny steps and cringing every time stairs enter my field of vision, a day for rubbing aloe vera on my first authentic Australian sunburn, while locals look at me and grin and say, “Looks like we got you mate.” Smug bastards. 

In keeping with this sense of contemplation, here is a list of things that delight me about Melbourne (and possibly about the rest of Australia, but I discovered them here, so I’ll count them to Melbourne’s credit).

1.               The art is plentiful and accessible. I know I’ve mentioned the street art a little bit, but it truly is remarkable, so much so that looking back through my photos of Melbourne, all I really have is photos of skanky (fun tidbit, my computer and I just had a fight about that word, it really wanted to turn it into ‘swanky’. I’m afraid if I look away, it might still win) alleys filled with beautiful graffiti. I also have an occasional building (mostly theatres), an occasional statue (mostly funny), and an occasional outdoor lighting installation (mostly trees). It is a city that breathes art, and really wants to ensure that it is everywhere, for anyone. I went to the National Gallery of Victoria today, which is split into two separate buildings on opposite sides of the river. Both were free, and had a fantastic exhibit spanning them of new work by Australian artists, in particular, artists based in Melbourne. It was well-curated, well-designed, and did I mention, free? There are free outdoor concerts, free outdoor movies, free museums; even cooler, the gallery today was filled with mostly students and 20-somethings, so obviously Melbourne is doing something right.

2.              The buskers are of an unusually high quality. One main drag, Bourke Street, which is sort of a shopping mecca, actually makes their buskers audition in front of a panel of judges, sort of like American Idol except, you know, without the fame and tv and irritating celebrities. This means that in general, you’re hearing really quite good music as you wander down the street. Similarly, the artists along the river seem to be in a constant competition, so they’ve all learned to put on a pretty good show. My favorite was a Mexican artist who used spray paint and dabbed and dribbled and splotched and scraped it all over canvases to create these alien landscapes. I saw him at 10 in the morning, and I saw him at 10 at night, just spraying away. This was a full time job for this man, although perhaps he was just enjoying the fumes too much.

3.             The newspapers are enormous. I picked one up this morning, the thing was at least a foot and a half wide, I think more like 2 feet. I couldn’t hold it. I couldn’t eat while reading it. I couldn’t do much of anything except wrestle with it while the wind tried to turn it into a paper equivalent of Mary Poppin’s umbrella. 

4.             At one of the busiest touring houses in Melbourne, a seat in the third row is always kept empty for the ghost of Fred Baker, who died on stage while being lowered through a trap door in the late 1800s. 

5.             At the old Melbourne jail (sadly now closed), the youngest person ever jailed, on charges of being idle and disorderly, was 3. He was kept in jail for 6 months. He must have been one hell of a little bastard.

6.             The main public transit is a series of trams that runs through the central business district. San Diego, please take note, look to Melbourne if you want to see how a trolley system should actually operate. These trams run down the center of the main roads downtown. Because of this, something has developed in Melbourne that strikes fear into the hearts of drivers throughout Australia, the infamous Melbourne right turn. Because they drive on the wrong side of the street in this country, right turns require you to cross traffic, like left turns in the states. Simple enough. But because the trams run down the middle of the road, you can’t wait in the middle of the street for your chance to cross, because you would be blocking the trams. Solution? The right hand turn lane is actually on the far left side of the street, where you have to wait, as far from your destination as possible, till traffic has stopped coming at you, and then you can swerve across the road and pray that the traffic you are merging into doesn’t hit you. Confused? Good, because so am I, and I’ve seen it in action. 

7.             Speaking of trams, I saw one yesterday with a restaurant on it. Just one tiny little tram car, with candelabras and beautiful linens and fancy place settings.I could see a bartender shaking a cocktail and attempting to keep his balance as the tram bumped over a bridge and down the street. I feel like this has the potential for great comedy.

8.              The theatre is fantastic. I can’t speak to all of it, but I saw one fabulous production that spoke to the ballsiness of big theatre in Melbourne. They had originally planned to start their season with ‘The Philadelphia Story’ but the rights fell through just as they were going into rehearsal. So instead, the director and actors created a farce loosely based on Gogol’s ‘The Government Inspector’ that was self-referential, massively meta-theatrical, and generally a send-up of the situation that they were in. And this theatre produced it, this brand-new, thrown-together, mash-up, basically improv’d piece. That takes some serious cajones, and if the crowd last night was anything to judge by, it is paying off brilliantly. 

9.              The live music scene is flourishing. So much so that the bands I saw perform on Tuesday, who were all truly exceptional and original, had a scant 30 people watching them perform. I think this speaks to the number of options in Melbourne on any given night.

10.            They are not afraid to light things on fire. There are these sort of ugly concrete and glass chimneys (big pillars, two stories tall, look like supports for a bridge that somebody forgot to build) that run all along the south bank of the river. They are so unremarkable that you can completely forget they are there. And then, starting at 8:00, and continuing every hour on the hour til God knows when, they start belching giant mushroom clouds of fire. It’s quite startling if you’re not expecting it, one minute you’re just walking along, maybe eating an ice cream, and the next minute there’s this tremendous WHOOSH and a lot of heat and a giant cloud of fire goes bursting into the air behind you and in front of you and then your ice cream lands with a sad plop on your toes. Did I mention, these pillars are surrounded by trees? Ballsy people these Melbournians. Ballsy, artsy, strange people. 

View from the rooftop

PS, written some hours later, and after an intoxicating night of movies and pear cider and free gelato (nothing intoxicates me like free gelato) - I went to a rooftop cinema tonight with a German friend, and it was everything a roof top cinema should be. The view was exemplary, the lawn chairs were comfy, the movie was great, they charged us for blankets (because who knew that it could feel that cold in Melbourne?) but gave us free gelato, perhaps to help with the blanket sales. But what actually stuck with me was the building. A very helpful bartender told me that it used to be the Communist Party headquarters in Melbourne, but then the party was banned, the building was raided, and it sat empty from the 60s til the 90s. It finally got redeveloped around 2000, and now it is 7 amazing floors that hold, among other things, a restaurant, a night club, a live music venue, a bookshop, and a kung fu school. There’s an elevator, but it doesn’t seem to work, so you have to climb up a tiny little staircase lined with stickers and graffiti to reach your floor. I think, when I look back on Melbourne, this building is how I will choose to remember it. 

Melbourne: The Beginning

I am a nerd. The most thrilling thing that I have found in Melbourne so far is the state library. But seriously, it’s beautiful. I’m currently in this huge grand reading room, lined with old wooden nooks and tables, that soars up to a sky-lit dome. It reminds me of Yale, except that the walls are all white and the dome lets in gorgeously filtered natural light, so I don’t feel like I’m burrowed into a book-lined hole. Parts of the library are art galleries, so you can take a stroll around for free and see such delightful objects as the homemade armor of Ned Kelly, Australia’s most famous bushranger (aka outlaw) which includes a bucket with a slit cut in it that he used as a helmet. Allegedly it was pretty effective. 

I’m having a bit of a love-hate relationship with Melbourne. When I first arrived, I was disappointed to realize that it looks exactly like San Diego. Don’t get me wrong, San Diego is a beautiful city, but I didn’t travel around the world to feel like I’m back in my hometown. Other than the fact that we were driving on the wrong side of the street, I felt like I could be in the Gaslamp in about 5 minutes. After getting rid of the bane of my existence, I mean, my backpack, I took off for a bit of a wander. There was a big festival in Melbourne this weekend, Moomba, which involved lots of street performers, fried food, and rides, sort of like a county fair in the states, but set up all along the Yarra River, which runs through the center of town. No one appears to know what this festival is celebrating - Google tells me it started when Queen Elizabeth II visited Melbourne in 1954, my tour guide tells me it’s to celebrate the 8 hour day and the labor movement, the drunk people in the street tell me it’s a celebration of getting schnockered during the day, so who knows? In general, this should be something I would enjoy, except that I couldn’t shake the feeling of being in bizarro San Diego, where everything was close enough to be somewhat familiar, but different enough to make me feel off-balance. This was compounded by the fact that it was about 100 degrees and blazingly sunny, and as I rapidly fried like a fresh turkey, I decided I hated Melbourne. 

I eventually stumbled into a little bar/restaurant down on the wharf, which offered a degree of shade from some strategic palm trees, and had bean bag chairs (!) strewn about on the artificial grass. I ordered a beer and some dinner, and then the sun began to set over the water, and a jazz trio started performing beautifully, and I decided that maybe this place wasn’t so bad. The couple at the next table over started chatting with me, which rapidly evolved into them inviting me to join them for a concert that was part of Moomba, followed by fireworks. Live music always fills me with a general love for all of mankind, so even though I have no idea who the performers were (apparently it was quite a big deal, 4 giants of Australian rock/pop from the 70s and 80s all playing together for the first time, I can only assume it would be like Bruce Springsteen, Bon Jovi, Billy Joel, and the BeeGees all decided to give a concert), I decided part way through the evening that I loved this city, a feeling compounded by the fireworks, because it’s impossible not to like fireworks. So Judy and Grant, I must thank you for rescuing my opinion of this city.

A walking tour I took yesterday also assisted in heightening my regard for Melbourne. It really is the most fantastically artsy city, with little statues everywhere, bookstores scattered liberally around, a thriving theatre neighborhood, live music almost every night and street art around every corner. Between the main thoroughfares are laneways, which seem to be split about evenly between being monuments to stunning street art and being filled with tiny little cafes and boutiques. I was somewhat skeptical of these laneways at first, because in New York, we would call them alleys, and it’s where you would go if you wanted to get a first-hand taste of being mugged. My tour guide assured me, however, that in Melbourne they are entirely safe. I am too much of a New Yorker to not remain skeptical. 

Sydney: All the Rest

I am a lazy blogger. This should come as a surprise to exactly no one. So in order to make the best use of our collective time, here is more or less everything that I learned about Sydney in my last 4 days there, organized as much as possible by general theme.

Lesson 1: Australia wants me dead

Well, not me personally, and maybe not dead exactly, but it certainly has come up with a myriad of fun and exciting ways to do you grievous bodily harm. All the hype is true, or at least, roughly based on the truth. For instance, and this isn’t one that they tell you about back in ‘Merica, you are taking a serious risk by walking under trees in Sydney. And no, it’s not because there’s some strange flesh-eating animal living in the trees (come to think of it, there might be, but no one told me about it and therefore I refuse to think about it) — it’s because of my old friends, the birds. They poop with the precision of an Air Force bomber, and the frequency of a rabbit with a broken sphincter. They shit everywhere. Walking under the trees is like a football drill, you dodge, you weave, you hop sideways like a manic kangaroo, and you generally feel like you’re under fire in the trenches of World War 1. I considered getting a helmet. All you hear as you walk along is the plop and splatter of steaming streams of bird dung hitting the ground. Needless to say, I quickly learned it’s better to not walk under the trees.

Then, there’s the ocean. Stunning, and deadly. One of my first days in Sydney, my friend asked me if I was one of those people who were afraid of going in the water because I might get eaten by a shark. I replied with a stout, “No,” assuring her that I knew that statistics, and it was absurd to be afraid of sharks. However, apparently my brain did not get this memo, because the first time I tried to swim out just a little ways into the incredibly calm, clear, and beautiful waters of a tiny little cove at Manly Beach, all I could hear was the “DA DUM DA DUM”  of the Jaws music playing in a loop in my head. It doesn’t help that there’s an unfortunate amount of seaweed in the water — unfortunate in that there isn’t very much, so you don’t just get used to it, but just enough that every few minutes something slimy brushes against your leg, or worse, tangles around your foot, and you leap out of the water like a seal (which is of course the worst thing you can do around an imaginary shark). Once you realize you are not, in fact, in any actual danger, you have to try to play your leaps and shouts off like you’re practicing for some new water sport, and hope none of the Australians look at you too funny. Needless to say, a 10 minute swim completely drained me, and I dragged myself back to shore like I had just finished an Iron Man. 

That night, back at the hostel, I was chatting with a new arrival in my room, an Australian woman from the middle of nowhere (at least, that’s how I understood it) , when I noticed that my feet had little red dots all over them, and were itching like crazy. I wondered aloud what it could be, and she helpfully pipe up “Sea lice.” What? Apparently, there are lice that live in the ocean, and like to take up residence in the exposed limbs of swimmers. She assured me that they couldn’t actually hurt me, but that they caused sort of an ugly rash and itched like crazy for a few days, before they died. Delightful. The next day, once the itching had subsided, I realized that it was actually just an awkward sunburn around the grains of sand that had clung to my feet. But still, I had something new to worry about, something I hadn’t even HEARD of before I came here.

The view from Taronga Zoo

That day, I went to Taronga Zoo, one of the more famous zoos around, and for good reason. It’s absolutely gorgeous, built on this steep hill across from central Sydney. It requires a peaceful and pretty ferry ride, and then legs like a mountain goat and the stamina of a Navy Seal to negotiate the hills. Taronga Zoo has taken great care to try to create natural habitats for almost all of its animals, so there are huge sweeping enclosures where if you are lucky and patient, you might see an animal. The whole thing feels rather like a safari. What I didn’t realize, however, was that in some of these enclosures, there is literally nothing between you and the animals. This seems to me somewhat overly trusting of both the animals, and the humans. I was delighted when, in the Australian Walk About section, a couple of wallabies bounced across my path. I was less delighted when I unknowingly entered an aviary and was dive bombed by some angry cockatoos. It felt like Hitchcock, and I am only slightly embarrassed to admit that I jogged hastily to the nearest exit. 

Lesson 2: Australia is weird

This can be broken down fairly easily into things I learned between the zoo, a walking tour of the city, and the Museum of Australia. 

- Platypuses (platypi?) are quite tiny, whereas wombats are enormous (and a group of them is called a wisdom, although they sort of look like hairy blocks with heads to me)

- Tasmanian devils are disappointingly small and sort of shamble around like drunken hobos

- There are didgeridoo performers all over the place, which is fantastic, don’t get me wrong, because it’s a bizarre but haunting instrument. But for some reason, they all feel the need to back their playing with these awful pre-recorded techno beats. Frequently, you’ll have two or three competing didgeridoo-ists playing in the same vicinity, which means that walking through these areas feels like walking around a very specific and confused club. 

- ‘Hotel’ in Australia can mean a hotel, as in a place where people sleep, or it can mean a bar, with absolutely no lodging other than an occasional bar stool, or, if you’re not too picky and not too sober, the floor. I feel this may be a little unnecessarily confusing.

The Demon Duck of Doom!

- Millions of years ago, after the dinosaurs but before humans, there was a 7 foot tall carnivorous bird walking around Australia, that used its sharp and lethal beak for tearing apart its prey. What did the Australians who discovered this fossil decide to name it? The Demon Duck of Doom. Absolutely brilliant.

- The first currency in the land was rum. I think this explains a lot.

- Fairly recently, some gents vandalized the Opera House with massive red graffiti protesting the war in Iraq. They were forced to pay for the cleanup, and then sentenced to some amount of prison time, but they only had to go on the weekend. They were sentenced to weekend jail. Bless you Australia.

- It is still legal to transfer livestock, on foot, over the Harbour Bridge between midnight and 5 am. No one has done it in 50 years, which makes me feel like I need some cattle and a couple volunteers to test it out. 

- There is a giant clock hanging from the ceiling of one of the busiest shopping centers/markets in downtown Sydney that every hour has a little animatronic puppet show take place inside of it, which you can see through glass windows. It’s like an attempt at recreating early-Disneyland. This animatronic show portrays scenes from British history, and culminates with a beheading, complete with bouncing puppet head and spurting animatronic blood. No one in Sydney seems to pay attention to this, or find it remarkable in any way. 

Lesson 3 - Australia is beautiful

There is just something about that harbor. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the ocean, but there’s this almost palpable magic about Sydney when you get close to the water. Myriad boats - ferries, yachts, sailboats, kayaks, ocean liners - move back and forth, the sun sparkles off the surface of the water, the hills rise green and lush above rocks and sandy beaches, the sky opens up above and it just feels like there couldn’t be a more beautiful place in the world. A few German girls and I were on the beach one day when a storm front started moving in. It was just this wall of roiling, bloated purple clouds that moved in over the hills and descended over the water. Across the bay, we could see other parts of Sydney dancing with sunlight. We hid inside a restaurant and watched as this clearly delineated mass of cloud swooped over our beach and rumbled toward the rest of the city, leaving sunshine and calm in its wake. It lasted all of 15 minutes and then the sun streamed back in, bringing back the technicolor world that seems to exist here, all the colors so impossibly bright that you feel like you’re living in a photograph.

Sydney, Day 3

I would like to take a moment to talk about birds. Now, I am by no means an ornithology expert, an avainophile if you will (I’m just making up words here), but I am truly impressed by the sheer range of birds that I’ve seen in Sydney, all of them fairly remarkable. Not that we don’t have some bizarre and beautiful birds in the US, but after 6 some years in New York, I just assume all birds are filthy sky-rats, aka pigeons, until proven otherwise. But not so here. My first day in Sydney, I saw a flock of cockatoos alight on a telephone wire. Cockatoos, just flapping around like pigeons, shitting on passing cars with their exotic cockatoo poop. My Aussie friends found this totally unremarkable. Just your average bird, hopping down the street, will be covered in massive black and white spots like some small feathery cow, or splashed with a myriad of colors like it’s wearing a technicolor dream coat, or like it was in the wrong place at the wrong time during a paintball fight. 

Yesterday, my bird-watching in Sydney rose to extreme levels when I wandered into the Royal Botanical Gardens. They are close to the magnificent new hostel I’m staying in (there’s a bathroom in the room, not in the hall! Amazing how quickly that has become a luxury to me), and I spent most of yesterday just wandering around the area that I’m staying in, The Rocks, and the nearby Gardens. These are beautiful gardens, full of helpful plaques explaining what the different trees and bushes are (Sydney seems to be enamored with informative plaques, slapping them on anything and everything that doesn’t have the presence of mind to run away). There are plenty of distinctly Australian trees everywhere, which more or less means 500 different types of eucalyptus, and then a smattering of trees that aren’t native to the continent, like swamp cyprus and bamboo. It’s right by the harbor, so it’s quite a pleasant walk all around. And it has the most magnificent birds, just wandering everywhere. I have no idea what the creature is, but I was stalking them everywhere trying to get a good photo. It probably doesn’t help that I’ve been reading Jurassic Park, so I was spending half my time in the park pretending that I was hunting down baby dinosaurs. 

In the course of tracking these brilliant little dirt-diggers around the park, I stumbled into the Asian Garden area, at the center of which was an overgrown lily pond, with an assortment of plants growing out of the muck to about 4 feet. It seemed impenetrable, and I didn’t pay it any more attention. I was distracted by a spider a little ways off the path in the bushes - my first Australian spider! Trying to prove to myself how brave I was, I kept sneaking closer and closer trying to get a photo of it. I was within perhaps 3 feet of it, had in fact just stepped off of the path into the untamed wilderness, when something behind me went ‘Aaah.’ There is no way to type that to do it justice. It sounded like a cross between someone being goosed and a bad singer attempting a vocal warm-up. It was completely human, and succeeded in startling the hell out of me. I jumped about 2 feet straight into the air and I think said something really intelligent like “Bloody hell, calm down!” although whether that was to myself or to the bird is anybody’s guess. Because that’s what had made that sound. A bird. A little black bird with a bright red patch above his bill that was staring at me defiantly from the lily pond. He yelped at me a couple more times and then paddled off, clearly content that he’d done his best sonic ninja attack. 

After the gardens I wandered into a wonderful (free!) museum, The Discovery Rocks Museum. The Rocks is one of the oldest parts of Sydney, right by the harbor, so it’s been a center of shipping for most of its history, and thus a gateway to the outside world. Like all harbor areas, where those dirty sailors congregate, it has long been considered a source of disease, depravity, drunkenness, and everything else that just sounds like an average Friday night in a college town. There were plans in the 1970s to tear the whole thing down and start again, and a valiant protest movement succeeded in halting the demolition and getting much of the area declared a historic trust. Now, it feels more like Williamsburg than Red Hook, and is in fact so expensive that I may starve to death in the next few days. 

The museum is wonderfully laid out, with lots of interactive screens that allow you to read more about the points that interest you. It covers the entire history of the area, from before recorded history up until the present. There were brilliant little historical gems scattered around, like the story of Cribb and his 3 wives. Cribb was a convict butcher that came over at the beginning of the 1800’s, and managed to create a thriving little empire for himself in Sydney. He’s important to the historical record because of a multitude of artifacts found in his well, which he apparently just used as a garbage shoot. He’s important to MY historical record, however, because of his wives. He left one behind in England when he was sentenced, but that didn’t stop him from marrying another woman after he’d been in Australia for a year. Then, uh-oh, his first wife decided to join him in Australia, so he paid off the second wife over 300 pounds, just an absurd amount of money at that time, to get the hell out of Dodge. She went back to England and lived happily ever after, while the first wife died within a year of being in Australia. Cribb married again shortly after that, which ended in his wife suing him, taking all his money, his business, and his home, and he disappears from history. Stories like that are why I go to museums.

Cribb aside, the most incredible part of this museum was the ground floor, which dealt entirely with the native peoples of Sydney, the Cadigal. The museum is Aboriginal owned, and one of the managers was giving very informative talks in this section about Cadigal tools and rituals. I am not a historian, so I will refrain from saying too much about Cadigal society, in fears of getting it horribly wrong, or being staggeringly culturally insensitive, but to be very serious for a moment, what the British landing here did was horrifying. They declared this land ‘terra nullius’, land belonging to no one, and then proceeded to completely destroy a society that had been thriving here for thousands of years. A year after the First Fleet landed with its cargo of convicts, 3 Cadigal people were still alive. 3. Everyone else had been wiped out, mostly by smallpox. It’s an intensely sad statistic. It does seem that Australia is now attempting to make some kind of amends, but it begs the question, how do you make up for destroying an entire culture?

Sculpture in the Royal Botanical Gardens created with the permission of the Cadigal Elders. 

Not to get too serious, I’ll end on a happy note. The sign below was by a lake in the botanical gardens, and I found it delightful, although it did make me very careful about where I put my feet, and I decided that going within 5 feet of the edge of the pool was just asking to be eaten by a giant slimy freshwater eel.