It's hard to look at your country through the eyes of a stranger, but that's what I'm trying to do. Australia is a country of such contradictions - stunningly beautiful, but also ugly and deadly.
Take cockatoos, for example. They're beautiful. Just beautiful. Snow-white feathers, beady black eyes and an amazing crest of yellow-gold. Gorgeous.
Until it opens its beak, and out comes What, I hear you asking, is the most horrifying noise ever heard? Any Aussies reading this should easily be able to answer that. I'll give you a clue. It's cute as a card full of buttons. It's furry. It has big, vulnerable eyes. It has sex in your roof.
Awww. Isn't he cute? Until he starts getting his rocks off with his lady friend about two feet from your trying-to-sleep head. Little fucker.But apart from the animals, what else is there? What else makes Australia Australia?
-bugs (we got lots of bugs)
-sun (getting sunburnt)
-the smell of eucalyptus
-browny-grey-green
What else?
(and no, things like Ken Done tea-towels and Vegemite don't count. We're talking early-nineteenth-century, baby colony type stuff. they didn't even have Strine yet)
6 comments:
Bone dry gum leaves crunching underfoot.
Magpies warbling, possibly the most beautiful sound in the world. Makes me feel homesick when I'm already home.
navigating ant hills to collect pretty, shiny bits of quartz.
dry northerly wind.
I love this country!
canoe: i have put in the magpie. excellent idea, and a kind of backwards example of what i was talking about before. cockatoos look fair and sound foul. magpies look foul and sound fair.
or was that magpies look fowl... sorry.
justine: i have already put in a bushfire thanks to a suggestion from you and scott. But leeches... hmmm...
I'm sure I'll wake up tonight thinking of ideas, but for now:
Slow flat rivers that sometimes are empty of water.
Bigger and bluer sky than UK/Europe
Plants flowering all the time not just Spring (eg wattle out now in winter)
In northern parts, the sound of torrential summer rain on a corrugated tin roof
Just to respond to other comments:
Men of war? Are they bluebottles?
And I think magppies look AND sound beautiful!
After I woke up from my statistics stupor yesterday I realised I could have just looked Portuguese men of war up and they are bluebottles - I've never heard them called that in Australia, though! Is it a Southerner thing?
i always called 'em stingers.
The still and quiet of the forest at noon. Plus, the cool of the early morning sunrise over the desert,
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