Captain Walrus And The Accident
A survivors guide to a day in Sydney with children.
One of the most exciting discoveries for the Sydney first-timer are the multiple information signs dotted around the metropolis telling you that the edifice you are looking at is the Southern Hemisphere’s Biggest ______. It sounds rather impressive but before we celebrate let me show you the maths. Only 11% of the world’s population lives below the equator. There is four times more ocean than land here, making this half of the globe home to mostly raging winds, stormy seas and the occasional large whale. Only Australia and South America are fully committed to this hemisphere with Africa is merely submerged to its waist. Asia dips a pathetic toenail of land below the tropics and Antarctica is melting thanks to our car exhausts (not that it holds much infrastructure anyway). Until the Pacific Garbage Patch develops a Central Business District the oceans will not be competing to build the largest anything for quite some time. So that leaves us with two and a half continents, hosting just one tenth of the world’s population.
With all this in mind, we should not be flabbergasted if New South Wales has the largest ocean bath, digital pipe organ or the fattest traffic cones in the Southern Hemisphere. Is it really that impressive to be told that you are sitting in the largest beer garden in the Southern Hemisphere? Or visiting the largest shopping centre? All this really means that you can search every sand dune of the Namib Desert and every cubic metre of the Amazon river but you will not find a beer garden larger than the one in which you are currently a patron. Likewise, you can search the streets of Sao Paulo and you can check behind every Albatross nest on St Helena but you will not find a larger shopping centre than the one in which you are at this very moment splashing your cash.
I was thinking about all this because I was lying on the floor bored, and I was bored because I was being held at gunpoint by Youngest and his fake pistol. Yes, that is correct, my first morning in Sydney was not spent exploring the streets or strolling the beaches with Herself but enmeshed in a hostage situation with a four year old. I don’t know whether it’s due to increased sugar levels or a consequence of 5G but childhood seems to have become a lot more polarized since my day. I remember spending my childhood moving a long line of my toy cars in eternal circuits of my sitting room in a calm, collected manner. Youngest, by comparison, spends his days alternating between calmly arranging his fridge magnets in styles inspired by numerous modern artists, shooting me and begging me to obliterate his cars beneath a choice selection of furniture.
Snapping out of my musings about where I might find the Southern Hemisphere's longest stretch of chicken wire, I discovered that my captor had moved on from “Murder-My-Incredibly-Tolerant-Cousin”” to “I’ll play and you watch.” This game really does what it says on the tin, with Youngest driving his cars around in bizarre excuses for circles (suggesting their drivers were heavily under the influence of alcohol) and scolding me upon each of my attempts to relieve my boredom and join in.
Occasionally, if he was feeling particularly forgiving, Youngest turned this game into a history lesson. He would take individual cars and recount stories about where each car was bought. Many stories were told with sadness, such as the long-winded tale of the battered door of a van he had flung across the room one day on a whim. This action was complemented by a temper tantrum when a responsible adult was unable to fix said broken door. Other tales consisted of moral dilemmas where he had to choose between buying a red and a blue car because he was only allocated funding for one car, the poor soul. If I was particularly well behaved I was allowed to hold these cars, weighing their deep, sorrowful history in my hands.
Alas, today was not a day for an interactive history lesson and after numerous yells it soon became clear that I should wise up and stop trying to join in with his game. It was clearly only a matter of time before he chose to whack my head with the barrel of the gun. I pointed out a cockatoo sitting outside the window and by the time he had had his fill of the large, squawking parrot he had mercifully forgotten about his impulse to shoot me and I was released into the kitchen to search for the rest of my family. I found Middle and Oldest sitting at the table, using their iPads to buy stocks on Wall Street. After much pleading they got dressed and we herded them onto a bus towards Manly wharf.
Australian school children see any form of transport (car, bus or moped) as a grand excuse to take off their shoes. It does not matter whether you are driving across the country for hours or popping out to the shops to buy veggie-mite, the shoes slide off instantly. For my cousins it is common practice to not only remove your footwear but also to somehow ensure that each shoe and sock is under a different seat on the other side of the vehicle. Middle is particularly adept at this and has managed to transport his socks from one end of an aeroplane to the other without leaving the comfort of his seat. Sure enough, when we went to leave we discovered that all three children were barefoot, with various items of footwear decorating the bus and giving it the feel and smell of a Gym on a Friday evening where someone had left the window open beside a field full of slurry.
We bundled the children across Manly Wharf in a dash to meet the ferry, blindfolding them briefly so that they wouldn’t be distracted by the ice cream for sale. Making the ferry with minutes to spare, we sat them outside, far from the enticing smell of the ferry’s food and drink stall. As we approached Sydney, Youngest was very excited to see the Sydney Tower, which looms over Sydney’s skyscrapers and which features several times on his fridge magnet display.
As I watched his face light up at what he has christened “the fancy towa”, it occurred to me that Youngest was a compelling case for how strange four year-olds can be. For starters, there are really only two food items he will stomach without complaint: lamb chops and Turkish delight (which must make him the first known human under the age of seventy who actually likes this sweet). He finds strange pleasure in holding his dear cousin at gunpoint and detests keeping his shoes on. Furthermore, he is the only member of his race who would be delighted to be told that lamb chops and Turkish delight were the only foods which had survived a nuclear fallout and that he must shelter in a metallic bunker decorated in Fancy Towa fridge magnets.
I decided to mentally store these observations on Youngest’s sanity for the moment and focus on the difficult task in hand: taking the same number of children off the ferry as we had taken on board. This proved impossible and we soon lost Middle and Youngest. After considerable panic, we located them beneath the feet of hundreds of tourists streaming towards the ticket barriers, engaged in barefoot combat on the floor. They surely posed the biggest health and safety nightmare in the Southern Hemisphere. In circumstances like these it is often best to pretend you don’t know the perpetrators so I feigned ignorance as we stepped over the WWE match blocking the ticket barrier. Oldest, who had nicked my camera, followed behind us and began his photography career by snapping everything from passing helicopters and office workers to lamp posts and my nose hair.
Conscious that this was likely to be the only peaceful moment of the day, we took in the active scene in front of us. Gulls crowded the green roofed wharves of Circular Quay, conspiring against the people who sat munching fish and chips on the quayside. Rainbow lorikeets were hooshed off restaurant tables and I eyed a pigeon I was sure I’d seen last week near the Ha’penny Bridge. Behind us, Sydney’s skyscrapers towered like cliffs while green and yellow ferries streamed in and out of the quay like ants in slow-motion, carrying passengers to different parts of the harbour. Yachts passed under the black expanse of the harbour bridge and tourists stood on the steps of the Opera House, admiring its white sails which glinted in the winter sunlight.
We took a train to Town Hall (trying in vain to ensure all shoes remained on feet) and emerged into the busy grid of Sydney’s core. Businessmen filed past signs for uggs (80% off) before scurrying down escalators into the deep abyss of the underground train station. Pedestrians stood calmly at traffic lights, headphoned and distant. Tram workers laid the foundations for Sydney’s recent conclusion that it was folly to get rid of its trams. A man strolled down the street barefoot and I was relieved to see that broken glass was a rare species here. This eased my anxiety that my dear little cousin’ s passion for barefooted rambling would damage their delicate soles. We headed downhill and allowed ourselves to be carried by various staircases over an expressway and into Darling Harbour, where some ibises, the local bin-chicken, were harassing tourists in an attempt to secure a free meal from Maccy D’s.
HMS Endeavor: The site of the the ill-fated Accident
A short while later we were to be found entering the National Maritime Museum, a splendidly white building with a replica of Captain Cook’s ship, HMS Endeavor. Middle and Oldest were quick to inform me that it was also the site of “The Accident”. Our stroll around the museum soon became a walking tour of this Accident and we were shown the anchor of Captain Cook’s Bounty upon which Youngest had previously decided to ram his head against like a stag in heat, acquiring a reasonable gash on his forehead. We were then shown where he and a responsible adult sat and waited for the ambulance; the parking space in which the ambulance parked; the spot where Middle and Oldest watched in horror; the list goes on. Youngest took advantage of my sympathy for this traumatic injury by demanding that I carry him while he daydreamed of lamb chops.
The recommendations of Sydney’s guide books are rich and varied: from visiting museums, aquariums and zoos to strolling around the Botanic Gardens. Not one guidebook, however, would support my family’s top Sydney recommendation: Paddy’s Market. At most a guide book might give it a footnote in the shopping section. I’m not trying to say that there’s anything wrong with Paddy’s market of course, just that most people who had travelled halfway across the world would probably spend their time doing other things like, I don’t know, walking the harbour bridge? Gawking at the Opera house? Joining Middle and Oldest’s tear jerking walking tour of The Accident?
Nestled on the edge of Chinatown, this market is full of stalls selling what I can only describe as the sort of tourist tat my family adores and they would emerge from the warehouse carrying boxing-kangaroo-teddies, camera cases with koala faces on them and those psueudo-Australian, leather hats. I certainly didn’t need any of this stuff, especially the hat, which screams “TOURIST” far louder than standing on the street, oversized suitcase in hand, wielding an A2 map of Australia and bellowing “WHERE EXACTLY ARE WE, VELMA?” All the same, I decided to visit for nostalgic purposes. And nostalgic it certainly was, like walking back into my childhood. Beneath the windowless factory roof were busy and crowded rows of stalls selling uggs, phone cases, uggs, fake pistols which gave you an electric shock, uggs, fake ponytails, uggs, uggs and more uggs.
I was glad that Paddy’s Market proved to be the Largest Ugg Merchant in the Southern Hemisphere as the Grand Matriarch had instructed me not to bother returning home without buying her a pair of uggs that were a few cents cheaper than the Irish variety. We wandered around until we found an ugg stall identical to every other ugg stall and purchased what I thought were her shoe size. It was not until later, when I proudly presented them to the Matriarch that I discovered they were too small, prompting my disinheritance and my seeking refuge from her anger in St Kevin’s Cell, Glendalough.
Blissfully unaware of the wrath my purchase would incur, we eventually came across an exit and dragged the cousins back through the darkening streets of buses and SUVs. The sun sank over the peninsulas of the harbour on our ferry journey home, blurring the lines between bush and suburbia.
After a dinner of lamb chops, surprise surprise, Oldest attempted to teach me how to play Fortnite, which was about as successful as teaching a snail to hang glide. After failing to achieve the the modest goal I had set of not dying for twenty seconds I admitted defeated and we put on a nature documentary. Middle and Oldest watched with interest but Youngest was not one to remain seated for an entire hour so he decided to play waiter with a box of chocolates. I had never seen such a talkative waiter and I had never before regretted just how quiet Mr Attenborough’s voice was.
“WHICH ONE WOULD YOU LIKE?”
“Are you sure you want that one? I don’t like that one.”
“Why not try this one?”
“NO YOU CAN’T HAVE THE TURKISH DELIGHT, THAT’S MY FAYVWIT”.
Chocolates exhausted, he briefly turned his attention to the television, where a group of walrus were unable to find enough icebergs to sit on and were crowding onto rocks instead.
“Which one is the Captain?” He asked, seriously. No one had any suitable answer to such an odd question but he clearly expected an explanation so he asked again and again, his voice rising in tone and urgency.
“Is he the captain? Where is he? Is that him? WHERE’S THE CAPTAIN?”,
It took us days to work out the origins of his strange questions. It all stemmed from an episode of his favourite TV programme about a scuba diving polar bear, penguin and kitten who spend their days roaming the seafloor. I have never been able to work out exactly why they take it upon themselves to do this, but perhaps that is just because I am old. In this particular episode the captain of this unlikely band of mammals (for a reason unknown to science or sense) decided that it was necessary to dress up as and impersonate a walrus to complete the day’s task. Upon watching this documentary, Youngest had evidently assumed that Mr Attenborough’s latest documentary was a sequel to The Walrus Impersonation and, logically, one of these walruses must not be a walrus at all but a polar bear dressed up as a walrus.
Listening to Youngest’s mind-boggling questions, it occurred to me that this was probably the most confusing, chaotic day I had experienced in my life. The strain of the day soon caught up with my jetlagged brain and I was slowly lulled to sleep by the vocalised ponderings of a four year old, trying to flush the identity of a walrus-skinned polar bear.
