Page 5 – C.E. Collins

The Perks of the People

Is it just anthropologists that are interested in people? Can any coffee drinker with a keen ear, nosey disposition and romantic notions about ‘people watching’ that they picked up in some gormless guide book to Paris be interested in people? Are we all anthropologists? Or are all people just interested generally in all people?

People-interest oscillates between those noble, benign feelings towards humanity one has when you invariably don’t have to interact with them, like on a country walk in the early morning, or when you’re feeling very generous with just your friends down the pub; and then the deeply felt misanthropy that surfaces when other people’s children throw shit fits in supermarkets. I am guilty of all these oscillations and naïve good intentions. But so far, the Australian people interest me deeply. Having just finished writing a satire of D.H. Lawrence’s collected works, I hesitate to make sweeping generalisations on an entire population throughout thousands of miles with the sagacity of a fortnight’s experience. But the people I’ve spoken to are delightful.

First, the lexicon of the Australian people (people-of-Canberra-Barton-well,theonesItalkedto) is quirky and highly endearing. That’s patronizing. What I mean is, I can’t help just smiling whenever I hear an Australian talk. My first experiences were superficial interactions in shops and bars. But my GOD they’re polite. Having endured service by untrained muppet teenagers who have never seen a pumice stone and wouldn’t know a courgette if 10kilos killed their mother from a great height, or who are clearly too busy flirting with their colleague or whoever just walked in from school, I have to admit we’re not great at service in England. It’s very different here. The standard salutation in these circumstances is ‘Hi, how’re you?’ which is really, unnecessarily nice! One can’t help launching in to a familiar discussion of your day’s movements (since you asked me for a tale…). One woman in a jeans shop pulled this one on me; after I stammered my reply and reciprocation, she told me her name and instructed me to let her know if I needed anything. I nearly gave her my number and asked if she’d like to meet for coffee because I’m new here and don’t have any friends yet and… Confusing friendliness for an Englishwoman. And I must stress, this is not the hollow, robotic blandness I have seen in America with its infamous ‘have a nice day!’ (keep smiling or they’ll take you out back in a bag!), but genuine.

Consider the only time the English interact with strangers. The country walk – you pass another couple out at their leisure, they stop their conversation as you approach and each of you gears yourself up for the altercation. Then there is the awkward spasm where you only have to say ‘morning!’ but manage to confuse the starts of words and and for god’s sake, don’t look at them. Our standard greeting is ‘alright?’ which succeeds in uniting two syllables into one vowel-y grunt, and the super effortful reply of ‘yeahyou?’ also manages to be a several toned single syllable. Here, if I encounter someone in the street or on a walk, they look me square in the face and offer their communication so clearly, so comfortably, so genuinely that I have to stop myself from hopping off my bike, grasping them warmly by the hand like a Dickenzian Pickwickian and telling them what a lovely day I’m having.

There are two incidences I’ve noticed where friendly human exchange is not forthcoming here. One is during your morning walk or jog. I find in England there is such profound respect and admiration for anyone that can be determined enough get up at six and march their arse at pace round the field/lane/block through the frost in the damn dark that my panted ‘mornings’ (I can now pant two syllables while running) are always met with slightly pitying but very encouraging responses. And solidarity amongst other mad bastards doing the same. Like a little pact. I find this hugely gratifying. Here, everyone is healthy so just get on with it and don’t expect wild praise just because you got your heart rate above sedentary.

The other incidence of the absence of warmth is flat hunting. It’s a very surreal and highly competitive scenario. You have fifteen minutes to view a flat, at the leisure of the estate agent. You gather outside in your guerrilla groups; couples sizing each other up – who looks like the better earner? – students with their wealthy parents, pairs of friends. You start counting how many there are. They’re all your competition. You go inside and all thirty-six-odd of you rampage around the place, getting in each other’s way, opening doors into each other, having muted conversations about the things you like, as Yates phrased so beautifully when he described it. You say loudly something negative about a cupboard, then run home as fast as you can to put your online application in, always clocking those that left first, wondering ‘what the hell is their game?’ It’s pretty freakin’ brutal.

So after two bloody weeks of this, we finally have a place. It’s an apartment in the city centre, cute little split-level affair with the two bedrooms, main bathroom and en-suite down a short flight of stairs. Then one large room with a smart little open kitchen on the right with an island unit. It’s very professional middle class and I can’t wait to start pretentiously arranging ikea blankets and display fruit. Balcony’s a bit shabby but hopefully plants and umbrellas and stuff will soften the brickwork. We move in this week. I am surprisingly tired of meals out, although the prospect of cooking the eternally popular ‘snausage gnocchi’ in forty degree heat doesn’t thrill me.

Other charming phrases we’ve heard in the last week are the abbreviations. If you can take a longer word, chop it in half (or preferably just down to its first syllable) and stick an ‘o’ or a ‘y’ on the end, job’s a good’un. Now this is not wholly unfamiliar to boaters, after Cow Roast is ‘Berko,’ I like to walk round the ‘ressy,’ are you going to the festival in ‘Ricki?’ So I’ve slipped into this quite readily (my favourite is ‘eggs benny’ – I’ve always found the phrase ‘eggs benedict’ needlessly pretentious) and I enjoy the squirm of pleasure I furtively observe Australians doing when they feel they have assimilated another pom. I also love the phrase ‘heaps of,’ and ‘get-go.’ Also ‘ks’ instead of kilometres. But the favourite has got to be wheeler-dealer Dean’s judicious and heavily frequent use of ‘Look’ every third sentence when he was selling us a car. It’s an alright car – ford focus, automatic, bit squeaky (then turn the goddam radio up), white… but we have a car now, and a running joke, so we’ll take that.

It’s been a bit of a funny week, seeing as I have been alone applying for jobs and piffling away at my silly writing while Yates goes out and earns. Not sure how I as a feminist feel about that one. Ironically, unliberated. I have been acclimatising to the heat because after three days of barricading myself into the hotel room, I realised life can’t just stop because it’s hot, so get out there, get sweaty, stay in the shade, drink water and commit to your twice daily shower. It’s a shame not to look at this blue, green, white and gold world. I went to the art gallery. Educated myself on a bit of aboriginal art. So a lot of what you see is called dot painting, and apparently, it’s what the desert looks like from above. There’s method in there. There are symbols mixed into all those shapes, for rivers, campsites, kangaroo tracks. Not just random colours and triangles yo. Lots of the pictures had names involving dreaming: woman dreaming, fire dreaming, egret dreaming, naughty boy dreaming (perplexing). On investigating this, I was told dreamtime is sort of all history, as well as the mythical creation of the world. This is, I gather, because of the oral tradition of the aborigines, everything from before your grandparents (Chris interpretation – I suppose then, the last people that can tell you stuff about a certain time) is ‘dreaming.’ Sort of beautiful.

Then it was the weekend, and we could do more exploring! We had a lovely time at the botanic gardens. We saw lizards! And we found a tinder party on the eucalyptus lawn…. And kangaroo tea towels. Then on Sunday we went to Tidbinbilla!

This is one of those unfamiliar words carelessly pronounced at me in the first week. I had to get the chap to write it down to make sure he wasn’t joking. Apparently it was great for all your standard Aussy wildlife. We’d been up into Namadgi park (just approaching the Australian Alps) the week before and I caught myself thinking, well it’s bloody hot, and we already walked around in glorious eucalypt covered hills last week. Tidbinbilla is amazing though, and I am vetting and spotting most places for Teck appropriateness and where I will take my family.

Tidbinbilla is an enormous nature reserve that you drive round. But there are loads of places of interest, where you park up, get out, use the loo (there are lots, but check under the toilet seat!) and then go for a walk. You can do 11k walks around the place, and lots of little ones…which easily add up to that. So it’s the sort of place you wanna pack a picnic for, take a ball or frisbee, a book and spend all day. Do some walks, chill out, have some lunch, do another walk. It was beautiful. And as we strolled around this enormous open site with nine thousand metre, green cloaked mountain peaks all around us, and yellow ragwort-like flowers adorning the grass, it occurred to me at once that I could see no one. There is not a damn spot in the whole of the vastness of the Lake District where you can’t see the little bright red figure of the gortex-wearing hiker somewhere on a ridge or against a sodden hill, but here, no one. Just Yates and I, and thousands of these funny little cricket things that had beautiful patterned yellow wings that could properly fly with them. Thousands of them in the air, how I imagine our butterfly population used to be a hundred years ago.
We finally saw kangaroos too. Scratching kangaroos, lying down kangaroos, hopping kangaroos, baby kangaroos. It was awesome. And swamp wallabies. We hunted for platypus very patiently, but didn’t see any. We visited the koala enclosure and saw some sort of displayed, like in a zoo and they are bloody cute, and we spotted one up in a tree. We heard kookaburras. We saw turtles and swallows, cormorants and a musk duck. It wasn’t forty degrees, it was shady and breezy and it was incredibly beautiful. I can see why a culture of respecting the land has persisted here for millennia; why my ancestors who travelled to western Australia battled isolation and hardship to stay here.
And when we thought there could be nothing more lovely on earth, we went to Gibraltar falls, which is the most end of the world freaking beautiful place on the planet. It’s a waterfall with gentle little streams and rock pools weaving their way down to the larger drop, in the palm of the mountains that rise up above it on all sides. And despite all the tiny yellow signs saying ‘danger, drop,’ it’s a local goddamn swimming pool. Loads of people in swim stuff luxuriating in the cool streams and pools and always with the beautiful blue, green and white of the bush to look at. Heavenly. I thought a place like that only existed in films or on the internet. So grab a picnic, a couple of beers and a book, and stay there till it gets dark.

In other news, I gave a killer karaoke performance last weekend too. Pub quiz again tonight, and I’ve been swotting.

It may not have escaped the notice of some amid my loud laments and complaints that the end of December was a little stressful for me. Of course, the way I carried on; no one had ever been so stressed in the history of civilization, thus I was justified in reciting my to-do list to anyone foolish enough to stop and ask me ‘how are ya, Chris?’ Well… But between all the work and moaning I at least had Australia to look forward to; my very own hotter-than-the-surface-of-the-sun light at the end of the tunnel. And I’d ask people who’d visited Australia; Jennie in London, Sarah at school: what’s Australia like? ‘Oh lovely,’ they’d say, ‘really great.’ Yeah but why, I probe, what sort of thing. The black cloud of mock papers is mounting behind me, I need escape and fast – paint me a picture. The food’s really good, they’d say, and it’s really clean.

But I needed more. So having been in Canberra a week, I can now tell you exactly what ‘clean’ and ‘good food’ mean.

Let’s get it out the way, it’s bloody hot here. Mid 30s is your high point, they said, and it’s a dry heat. Whatever the hell that means. Well, it turns out it means that in the shade, it’s pretty comfortable. And the minute the eye of Sauron (sun) is covered by a life-giving little rain cloud with all the spiritual significance to me as the post diluvian olive branch, again it’s pretty nice. But this week the forecast is 40degrees, 41, 40, 41, 39. Shit. So look, that just means it’s hot whatever you do. Oddly though, in the sun, 27degrees and 35 seem pretty similar to me. No UV, so the sun just reminds you that you’ve got about 15 minutes before you vanish into nuclear shadow.

But onto clean. When you’re sat comfortably in the shade, preferably on the grass by the lake with a brisk breeze coming off it, all that searing sunlight makes the whole place fecking dazzling. The sky is so blue it makes your eyes hurt and the bright, fresh green of young leaves in voluptuous bloom that are almost a succulent yellow green in the sun positively makes your mouth water. There is no litter. Colours are bright and sharp, and pierce their way into your eyes and your heart and make ya wanna paint, or write poetry. The fine French lace shadow of these oaks skipping on the pavement is the sort of purple of the Impressionists. The green goes on and on, and deepens to emerald as it races up the hills beyond, and deepens again to turquoise blue on those distant mountains that are there to just grace the skyline for the aesthetic benefit of the place, and also pales to a yellowed peridot between rocks and the sparser trees. That yellow that tells the foreign imagination ‘Australia,’ where it mixes with red earth. The blinding bone-white brightness of tall, elegant Eucalyptus trees that crowd hillsides and pavements alike, metaphors for eternal youth as their rough dark bark strips off in long brown and red ribbons, scattering at the roots to reveal the smooth, perfect clean trunk underneath. The palette of this part of Australia is blue, green and white.

So continuing with clean, there is barely no road that is not lined with trees. Therefore now, that dusty dirt of summer we feel in August, seems absent in this strange Jan-uly. The city; well it certainly ain’t no Paris or Turin; architecture here isn’t on the baroque or medieval or Georgian European style. Think your local town centre of the late 80s. Like Grays. But overrun with trees instead of pigeons, with nice umbrellas and outdoor seating instead of white plastic chairs and the smell of chip fat. Roads are wide and quiet. The centre is pedestrianised, fountained, decorated with bright paintings and sculptures and untroubled by cars, and if you want to cross a four-lane road, you only need wait about 5 seconds before there is precisely naff all coming. Then there are the tall, swanky looking blocks, apartments and offices but these are roughly kept to a tight circle that is at most, 2 buildings deep, then open space again. In England, there are urban green spaces, but in your average town you’ve got about 1 and you either live on it or you don’t. Here, there is a park every 10 minutes, and even if not, the wide grassy verges and walkways between roads are so cluttered with eucalypts that from a 3^rd floor apartment, you appear to be living above a veritable forest. Weaving between larger roads and swanky hotels are wide suburban looking residential roads, with dear little bungalows nestled amid hydrangeas, roses, agapanthus and tall, shade giving bushes. Like Billericay, but nicer. Quieter and greener and wider. I have not smelled a whiff of diesel or felt the need to hold my breath when crossing roads. On that, no one seems to smoke either, so easy breathing all round.

Then there’s the wildlife. So it’s the obvious thing, the Kangaroos, wallabies, koala bears and all. Well everyone knows that already. It’s the birds here that are unexpected. Magpies look like members of Kiss with their black lipstick beaks and they make this otherworldly sound like a flute in an electronica band that is so heart breaking. Wander through a park at any time and you realise you’ve not seen a sparrow or crow or pigeon, but bright red rosellas, the glowing yellow of sulphur crested cockatoos, pink headed galahs. Even your standard little brown jobs that most birds fall into I stare at fascinated thinking ‘what ARE you?!’ as I have no frame of reference for this long tailed, yellow stomached, red cheeked wattle bird, or a blue chested but-otherwise-looks-like-a-moorhen swamp hen. And the bats here make some sort of evening progress about 20.45 and languidly flap their enormous wings the size of freakin’ red kites from across the lake and away under the moon. I could watch them for hours.

And so in my most sunny boating afternoons when I have dangled off a lock gate and nearly wept for the sweeping chilterns either side, the glimmering canal and its butterflies, swallows and herons and grand ash and oak dappling shade above me, I do not feel that the Molonglo river or the mountainous home of the Ngunnawal people is making me homesick with the loss of beauty. Ashridge can do one.

SO: food. Now the food is great and let me tell you why. There are always at least 3 fish options everywhere. There are always at least 3 salad options everywhere. And interesting ones, like cauliflower and chickpea quinoa with rocket and coriander. Fresh, lovely nutritious salads are an institution. Even in your equivalent of tesco express out here, there is a deli counter half taken up with no fewer than 9 fresh made tubs of salads you can just put in a pot and have for lunch. They’re everywhere. And considering I am a homeless unemployed immigrant, with no kitchen to make food in, this is a boon. Otherwise I’d be living off dry tesco sandwiches and getting scurvy. Then restaurants – not seen a chain so far. Which makes me reflect on how damn ubiquitous they are in England. Tell me, is there a single pub in England that doesn’t offer fecking ham, eggs and chips and hunter’s chicken? Narrowing down the stuff you want to eat to about 3 things. We’ve eaten Mexican tacos, incredible Chengdu beef soup, crispy coated flat head fish, poached eggs and avocado (so like this is the ham, egg and chips equivalent out here), aubergine curry, Asian noodle salads and a hell of a lot of fresh vegetable and fruit juice. Mmmm mmm mmmm.

So these are my impressions of this fine country. I am looking forward to reading books on Australian poetry, history, visiting the museum to explore aboriginal art, walking the miles of hillsides and forests and learning more about this beautiful place that describes its white, usurping population as ‘rootless.’ Well the great feeling about growing up in Thurrock is giving yourself a feeling of belonging anywhere you please. I am somewhat troubled by finding myself comparing things to England in my western centric perspective and have a horror of imposing this narrative in a D.H. Lawrence sort of way, but so long as I skip opinions on the Jewish, women’s orgasms and Australian men in shirt sleeves, I should be fine.

For those who are interested we have climbed Mount Ainslie to see the epic sunset and spotted a wallaby, climbed through Namadgi park to Booroomba rocks, cycled bikes 17 miles around the lake and through the wetlands (so basically it’s like cycling in the countryside with none of the inconvenience), been to the art gallery and two great breweries. Tonight is a pub quiz. Hurrumble.