Birds, Wilson's Prom...

Wilson's Promontory (aka the Prom, leading to jokes about "going to the Prom"...):

This place is bird city. As soon as we arrived we were greeted by a flock of brilliant red parrots - actually, crimson rosellas - who hop all around, squeaking and squawking, checking us out, finally hopping up on my hand to see what we've got. (Shona, you would love it here!) After a few hours, they start to seem like pigeons, more annoying than exotic. Just another freaking prismatic parrot, nothing to see here...

The kookaburra's call sounds like a monkey, a classic "jungle" sound - OOH OOH OOH OOH! AAH AAH AH AH! (Hear it at: http://www.anbg.gov.au/sounds/kookaburra.au .) You've heard it in countless cheesy TV shows and movies. At dusk the second day on the Prom we heard and then saw 2 of them duking it out, one yelling OOH OOH OOH! While the other yelled AAH AAH AH! And they meshed their claws together and fell from the trees while a couple of magpies circled around, playing bystander.

William Ricketts Sanctuary

I think that as we age our journeys mark us, and ultimately whittles us down, but if we live fully, with passion and with our own principles, what we lose is just the extraneous stuff, so what is left is just your essence, and that can be a beautiful thing. William Ricketts, even into his nineties, had the boldest, purest, most penetrating eyes, and though his voice was thin he still spoke strongly about the spirituality inherent in the natural world, about how the way we treat nature is also the way we treat ourselves. But he spoke most powerfully through his sculptures, loving ceramic renderings of people (mostly aborigines) and animals with lifelike, haunting expressions, set in his sanctuary among the lushness of a subtropical rainforest garden. Insects buzz by your head and mist drips from the ferns. The whole sanctuary is a work of art, a loving collaboration between nature and one sweet man. Not your usual white box gallery.

Melbourne & environs: funky city, lovely country...

Melbourne is far more eclectic than Sydney, mixing Romanesque and Victorian architecture with the most playful swooping steel and glass, goths and Japanese hipsters mixing with Australian rednecks ("bougans" in local parlance), yuppies, and rockers. Maria & Adrian's house is a sweet refuge. They are so generous as to lend us their truck, a massive Landcruiser with a chunky transmission and bellowing, shuddering motor; maneuvering this beast through the left-hand city traffic is quite entertaining on an action-comedy tip.

Riding Melb's excellent train and bus system - it seems like every other industrialized nation in the world has generally better public transport than the U.S., even ostensibly "liberal" San Francisco - a wide mix of Indian, Oceania (i.e. Samoans, etc.), Asians, africans, and various of the original penal colony descendant and ex-pat Brits and Irish, with scattered suburbs of small houses and colorfully painted businesses (running to yellow and other sunny shades), generously festooned with graffiti, all under the over-powering sun careening unfiltered through the ozone hole. All the older white folks have extraordinarily wrinkled skin courtesy of all the world's aerosol cans.

This brilliance, and the weathered faces of the rural folk, seem appropriate in the exotic wilds of the countryside, but set against scenes of Aussie urbanity, the hoodie-wearing, acne-befuddled teenagers spitting on the station floor, the dissonance seems strong, unmooring the subterranean at least in my mind, while the fundamental facts of the capitalist system that generate squalor as an inevitable byproduct churn forward inexorably, regardless of human or climactic context, what might have been cheerful brightness mercilessly exposing every flaw in crisp relief. Here we are in the twenty-first century, the density of contradiction growing like the components on cell phone silicon, unimpressed by mere sunshine.

Outside the city. Of all the places I've been - and I've been to a few - Australia is the most like the U.S., barring Canada. The main differences, other than generally predictable (and media-depicted) cultural wrinkles, are the population density and the flora and fauna. The size of the continental U.S., but with fifteen times fewer people, there's a lot of bush out there, space devoid of humans, to be explored and appreciated. Add in a plethora of unique critters and plants (considered to generally resemble the greenery of the primal Gondwanaland supercontinent), and a great park system, and you have a recipe for some incredible camping and hiking -- love!

Above, one of the beach altars Amanda made... A wombat, possibly the one that ripped a hole in our tent... Our wonderful Melbournian friends....

troublesome terrapins...

This one's for Truro:

At the Sydney Wildlife World, glassed-in rooms full of cold-blooded creatures. In one forested room I saw an eight-inch turtle hesitating at the lip of a little pond. That this was more than just stereotypical turtle-ness was revealed when a six-inch turtle already in the water, maneuvered purposely toward him; the first reptile slipped quickly past and so began the most ferocious turtle action I have ever seen, as the smaller creature zoomed and swerved, trying to nip the bigger terrapin's toes as he twisted away with flashing speed, finally leaving the battlefield to his more diminutive but aggressive terrarium-mate. The rest of the afternoon we amuse ourselves with cries of "turtle fight!"

Sydney, Australia: first step through the planet-glass.

On the ground in Sydney. Airport is sleek and airy, air temperate, an easy change. I ask A if she notices any difference in the light, and she says it is "crisper", more UV and blue, just like what I saw when I first arrived in NZ. It's the ozone hole.

Gas is cheaper. No, that's the price per liter. Gas is about$4/gal, almost $3 in SF. Typical Americans we are.

The tech sheets of steel and glass give way to brick and British style mixed with Moroccan strett fronts with intricate wrought iron. Brit block-style housing, all run together. Plants bristle in concrete everywhere. All block sizes seem smaller here, which seems nice, more human. Plenty of bicycles.

Turns out our hostel, which shows every sign of under-investment, from creaky stairs and dismal paint to a front desk person who barely speaks English (proximity to Asia), is technically in "Chinatown", though I doubt that such districts are well-defined in this century. In fact it sits on a busy street, its front stair drooping off onto a narrow sidewalk. As we stepped out, an enormous white cockatoo swooped through a parking lot between the blocks of flats, screeching imprecations. Soon we realize that these raucous, yellow-crested birds throng the city in organized, noisy flocks, keeping the few pigeons on notice.