Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

The ‘real’ Australia

G’Day….always good to start with a cliche I find! Anyway my brother, the most English person you will ever meet, has become a barbeque fiend since moving over to Australia. No more of this frozen beefburgers burnt to within an inch of ecoli poisoning for them, no, it’s a well oiled machine of surgical quality tongs, made to measure barbeque luggage, monsterous prawns, various exotic veges (no, the full word is not used under any circumstances here) all cooked up on these incredible, gas fired barbeque things that are sat around in the various national parks….oh yeah they are free too!

The parks are also pretty amazing, the vgetation always looks so ghostly as all the trees have a wizened, etherial quality and the paths wend their way through to, well, where ever really! In this case it was along old aboriginal tracks alongside a dried up creek, along a ridge watching the kangaroos watching us, then up a hill to an ancient, smoothed rock overlooking the sacred territory of the Australian Federal Airport Authourity (or Tullamarine Airport as it’s better known around here) to watch the ancient spirits of Virgin Blue and Jetstar rise up to the heavens…..

You do get a weird feeling from it though, Australia is about the last place on earth you will get yourself caught in an earthquake, it is about the oldest and most stable land on earth, it has literally been like this for eons. It’s near neighbour, New Zealand, is pretty much the opposite, with it’s volcanic activity throwing up new islands regularly and it’s Southern Alps all dramatic sharp edges and peaks. In contrast Australia is rounded and smoothed through millenia of weathering, the rocks have been carved into some weird an wonderful, organic shapes by the winds and rains. The animals, famously the most poisonous in the world, are that way as they have evolved in lockstep with their predators and prey so each has had to develop better poisons and resistances to survice….which I find quite an amazing thought, although not a thought I would like to actually meet face-to-face in the wild, I’m looking to get ancient and mystical too!