Sorry for the Group Email

Since arriving in Sydney, we’ve done many things. We’ve got a bank account (albeit one with not much cash in it), mobile phones, and a place to live. We’ve even got jobs.

Even better, though, we’ve joined a library.

Currently I’m reading Great Mistakes of Australian History, edited by Martin Crotty and David Andrew Roberts. Not because I wish to denigrate Australians, who are a charming bunch, but because Australia’s history is particularly varied, comprised of almost even amounts luck, tragedy and a kind of epically bad judgement that makes my 1999 decision to break into my own house, resulting in two twisted ankles, shin lacerations and a slit wrist look like a kind of shrewdly calculated plot.

I’m only in the first chapter, but – and I hate to break this to any old-style British colonialists – the English hardly covered themselves in glory when scoping out Australia.

The biggest problem was a forceful tendency to assert that Australia was not only green and pleasant, but almost totally deserted. Sir Joseph Banks, one of Australia’s first visitors, informed a Committee on Transportation that there were “very few inhabitants” Down Under. In any case, the natives were so hopelessly backward that the chances of them disturbing an attempt at colonisation were preposterously slim. “I am inclined to believe,” he is reported to have said, “they would speedily abandon the Country to the New Comers.”

Upon arriving in Australia, Arthur Phillip, the first governor of the new province, with the tone of a man who has been betrayed by a particularly unkind superior,  noted sadly that “the natives are far more numerous than they were supposed to be.” By that time, of course, it was far too late, and the British would spend the next century attempting to make homes in a country which not only refused to support their attempts at farming and subsistence, but provided them with a hostile native population that went out of its way to harm them. Not only did the Aborigines have a surprisingly strong grasp of the concept of land ownership, but the notion that they would shrink quietly into the background while the British built a civilisation was painfully disproven when Phillip, of the aghast note to Parliament, was stabbed through the shoulder by an Aboriginal spear.

Incidentally, when the English first landed, they noted that the Aborigines would cry “Warra warra”, which they took, showing a rare and hitherto unsuspected streak of intuition, to mean “get out”. Had the Aborigines noticed the English, they might have observed that the interlopers said, “I say, Jones, just what the hell is that?”, quite a bit. Australia, you see, is home to a bewildering assortment of mammals that make elephants and zebras look like close, and frankly rather dull, relatives of the kinds of mammals you might find in Somerset.

Kangaroo. 85mm, 1/50th, f/5.6, ISO 100

To see for ourselves we visited Featherdale wildlife park. Featherdale lies to the west of Sydney proper, and we spent an hour gazing out of the window as our first glimpse of Australia’s suburbs slid past the window. The thousand-metre walk from the station to the park itself took in a neighbourhood of wooden-sided houses with a quite astonishing amount of furniture in their front gardens. We counted sofas, discarded, rain-damaged TV sets and 70s exercise equipment before we happened upon Featherdale.

We were at the park for four hours, slack-jawed and stunned into silence at the wilful variety of life Australia has to offer. If day-to-day Sydney seems like a more handsome, clean, and cheerful version of San Francisco or London, then its native wildlife serves as a jolting reminder that we are very, very far from home.

The humble and ubiquitous kangaroo is a case-in-point. The face of a donkey, the upper body of a tiny, furry tyrannosaurus rex, and a pair of spring-loaded legs so powerful that an adult can propel itself at nearly 50km/h. Or the echidna, a small, long-nosed animal that superficially resembles a hedgehog, but that nevertheless waddles engagingly about the place in an inquisitively spiky manner.

Australia's version of the hedgehog. 149mm, 1/250th, f/4.5, ISO 1600

The list continues: wombats resemble nothing so much as fat, luxuriously furry pigs. Or the cassowary, a flightless bird that survives on fruit and small reptiles, but nonetheless possesses a five-inch long claw capable of eviscerating a man before he can finish asking Jones exactly what kind of bird that was, exactly.

Wombats. Sorry, what? 149mm, 1/640th, f/5, ISO 800

It was captivating stuff. Featherdale park lets its animals wonder around freely, so wallabies lay around tripping up unsuspecting Americans, and I’m delighted to report that their fur is one of the softest things I’ve ever been in contact with. Should you ever stumble across one, scratch it in between the ears.

We also met a baby Wallaroo, a hybrid kangaroo-wallaby affair. It was adorable and, we were informed by a man wearing Paul Hogan’s outfit from Crocodile Dundee, hyperactive.

“Yeah, it might look cute,” he sniffed, “but this has the destructive energy of 35 three-year-old children. You wouldn’t want it in your house. And just wait for it to mark its territory.”

Wallaby. 300mm, 1/250th, f/11, ISO 1600

“Yeah,” I thought, “But it’s cuter, though.”

I’m thinking of selling all our glasses and getting one.

Dave was sold on the prospect of a Wallaroo, until he met a red panda, and now he wants one of them. I’m also painfully aware the formatting on this page isn’t what it might be. I’ve upgraded Wordpress and I’m having teething trouble, ok?

More of Featherdale in the Flickr set.