Good Weekend

May 28 1994

If, at my christening, some vengeful fairy godmother had ordained that, in youth’s full flush and with Hollywood stardom beckoning, I was to be dragged off to the other side of the world by a sharp tongued Aussie in hobnailed boots, not even my consolation gift of a year-round tan could have assuaged my parents’ distress. Frankly, when told of this destiny, I would have begged, “shoot me now.”

As it was Australia didn’t figure in my consciousness at all. In history classes it was dismissed as some faraway colony that did as we told it and, later, as a place where lily-livered English boys were exiled to make men of them – including my brother, who subsequently met and fell in love with an Aboriginal girl and returned home with talk of marriage. I remember adding vigorously to the chorus of “Don’t be ri-dic-u-lous”, until he relented.

Much later, a room-mate received a postcard of the Sydney Opera House and, still under the impression that it was a country of prehistoric hopping rats and cowboys who chewed sheep’s balls for breakfast, I remember being surprised that you’d have need of such a place.

Bryan Brown, practically the first Australian Male I’d ever seen, only consolidated this opinion. He was shearing a sheep at the time, smeared with its blood and sweating buckets under a Hollywood sun. His handshake suggested that he’d shortly be having moi for breakfast. As it turned out, he got me lunch and tea as well. Breaking the good news to my mother went down, as they say, like a load of vomit. “I had Rachel at 21,” Mother explained politely. “That’s funny,” said Bryan, “I had her at 35.”

Yes, like everyone else I had read The Thorn Birds. I even got to be Maggie Clary on TV, so I learnt that Australia was the place where love, death, droughts, plagues, fire and rain are experienced in biblical proportions, and we all know this is to be a lie. Hey, I knew a good yarn when I saw one. Olivia Newton-John was still smiling; Australia couldn’t be that bad.

I was further reassured when, at the end of my first Qantas flight to Melbourne, we were spritzed with an insecticidal spray, presumably to keep out the disease and pestilence of less savoury worlds. Nice try, Qantas. I was almost complacent as I sauntered past the duty free-bummed koalas with not an “Enter at your own risk” sign in sight. Quite shocking then to find myself, not a week later, fleeing Melbourne’s fatal Ash Wednesday bushfires.

Ten years later, with a dangerous or venomous creature lurking in every cranny of this land, sea or suburb, I’m still running for my life. Well, not quite, but with Christmas Day headlines such as “Son watches helplessly as father is dragged into river by maneating crocodile”, and “Toddler in critical but stable condition after bitten by funnel-web spider”, one can never exactly relax.

Meeting the funnel-web, only the world’s deadliest spider, is so common in my neck of the woods that when I gamely suggest that we pop the latest specimen in a jam jar for school, I am told “Bor-ring, Tommy Snookes brought one in yesterday.”

On the positive side, I have been forced to give up jogging. Running around the home paddocks, unless you’re wearing knee high gumboots, is just too hazardous. You might step on a red-bellied black snake, or even a death adder, just the world’s most venomous snake. Small mercy that the taipan, which not only has the longest fangs and the highest venom yield but also the worst temper, lives further north.

I recently heard that a Queenslander, minding his own business beside his cane field, was confronted by a rearing, two metre long taipan. Watched by his wife, he picked up his deckchair and fenced with the monster for half an hour before it slunk away. The bush radio reported that the man and his wife were hospitalised for shock. No kidding!

Of course, your beaches will spoil us for any other beach in the world: mile upon mile of fine white sand, etched with those unfurling ribbons of turquoise and white. Beloved by all who surf or swim in them – man, dolphin, shark, sea snake, the lethal sea wasp and blue-ringed octopus, the puffer fish, sea pike and bluebottle. But not me. I have a turquoise pool, shaded by a canopy of gently rustling papaya and banana leaves, and that’s where I’ll be staying, thank you very much.

Needless to say, I’ve left your most deadly and efficient predator until last. Powerfully built but benign in appearance, it commonly pounces without warning. Where most wild creatures have suffered the unforgiving effects of the urban sprawl, like the funnel-web it has flourished and can often be found around fridges or bars. It tells very silly jokes and prefers thongs. Need I say more?

This pounce tactic is extraordinarily effective: the victim is taken completely by surprise and acquiesces in stunned submission. When a girlfriend of mine came to stay from New York, having just seen Crocodile Dundee, she requested that she’d like to meet such an Aussie cowboy. I obliged by asking a neighbouring farmer to dinner. The meal passed without incident, but when I returned from stacking the dishwasher I found him tickling her tonsils with his tongue.

She moved in with him the next day and for the rest of her holiday our only communication was waving to each other across the stalls at the weekly cattle sales. As with most evolutionary quirks, the explanation, I believe, for the Aussie bloke’s approach is pure survival. Ironically, in a country where it is purported that “the men are men and the sheep are nervous”, I find that it is, in fact, a country where “the women are women and the men are nervous”.

Women here are a fierce breed – a disposition fostered, I suspect, through 200 years of hard living, where fools and flirts are not suffered gladly; where a bloke game enough to hazard a wink or mutter “Nice pair of ….eyes”, risks the humiliation of a retort such as “On ya bike”, or, as he were no better than a funnel web, “Rack off, hairy legs.”

Ultimately, survival of the species must have been dependent on the collective awareness that a bloke just has to go for it, mate!

Not even remotely a graduate of the hard knocks school, I miss a little light flirtation from time to time.

A small sacrifice, I suppose, for a life of fresh mangoes for breakfast, kangaroos in the garden and feral children underfoot, of husbands who carry surfboards instead of briefcases, barbeques, night scented jasmine and the cicada’s song.

I am often asked if I miss England and secretly dream of returning home.

“What,” I say, “to the pretty lanes and hedgerows, to the little green fields and quaint church steeples, where the wildest predator is the blackberry bush or the lily-livered English boy?”

“Don’t be ri-dic-u-lous.”