The Business Card That Evaded The Bin

One of my most vivid memories of playschool is standing in front of my peers and proudly unveiling my solution to breathing underwater: a surgical mask. Since then I have dabbled far enough into the sciences to realise that surgical masks do not carry oxygen, but I write this as proof that as a four-year-old I spoke in front of other human beings without a care in the world. Six years later, I considered any form of socialising to be a rather frightening concept which should be left to adults. At some point after leaving playschool, I had grown quiet and distant from the few friends I had. I decided that it was easier not to interact with them and instead spent my time wandering the wild fringes of the schoolyard tracking hedgehogs. 

I couldn’t cope with the awkward world my shy self lived in, full of school children I neither trusted nor knew what to say to, and used my imagination to escape. The out-of-bounds-tree at the edge of the schoolyard became an acacia on the African Savannah and each time I passed a eucalyptus tree on the walk to school I would scan for koalas and lorikeets. By the age of ten, in the last month of fourth class, I was finding myself refusing to go to the park with my family and sitting alone at lunchtime.

It was at this low point that two important decisions were made: my family had arranged to visit family in Australia over the summer and when we returned home I would move to a smaller school where it was hoped that I could cope better. 

Travelling halfway across the world is exciting for any ten year-old but Australia was particularly exciting for me. It had always been a place I was fascinated by and the rare occasion I came across an Australian book which had somehow washed up in Ireland, I would study it intensely. How exciting to think that if I dug down through 12,000 kilometres of earth, rock and magma I would reach a continent which seemingly hung upside down, a place where teddy bears dozed, birds cackled and wombats wombled. I studied pictures of pelicans and butcherbirds and squinted at the backgrounds of stock photos, trying to work out how different life must be on the other side of the world.

The result of this journey for me was astronomical: I was allowed to escape from my social environment, as I had dreamed of doing every night. It wasn’t easy. I struggled to cope with the flight and I burst into tears when my pen dropped to the floor. Then I realised I’d forgotten to buy sweets to chew for take-off, which surely meant that my ears were in imminent danger of falling off. But those fears and upsets were just part of the everyday to me, nothing unusual. What was unusual about the flight happened next. I took my seat on the second leg of my journey and smiled at the man seated next to me. We exchanged pleasantries and continued chatting for the rest of the flight.

My parents were gobsmacked. I was astonished. One week I was refusing to leave the house in case I met another human being and a week later I was chatting to a random businessman from New Zealand, receiving advice about the best places in Sydney to see blue tongued skinks while also marvelling at the height of the Himalayas we could see out the window. 

We flew into Sydney just as dawn broke. The lights of Sydney twinkled through the dark and the waters of Botany Bay reflected the red sky.  He gave my family his business card when he landed and to this day I have not binned it, still shocked that I managed to converse with this complete stranger. 

That flight woke me up. I knew the planet was big, but this big? I had seen the plains of Africa and the Outback of Australia on TV but flying in an aeroplane for miles across endless seas, mountains, and vast Never Never made me realise the scale of our planet was far greater than I could have imagined. 

Being taken out of my normal environment was like a breath of fresh air and slowly my confidence grew. I managed to force a steak down my wannabe-vegetarian throat so as not to offend a couple we were staying with. I plucked up the courage to ask the air hostess for a pen when I dropped mine on the plane home (and for yet another pen when the second pen fell). I battled the wonders of jet-lag. Step by step, I swallowed my fears of human beings and began chatting to them. 

As a child I saw Australia as a sort of last frontier. It seemed so distant and felt frustratingly underrepresented on television, a fact I shall prove using nature documentaries as a case study. There were so many documentaries on places as distant and remote as Antarctica that they seemed to leap out of the television. Meanwhile, Australia, a country that is actually inhabited, and home to a whopper 39 Starbucks outlets, was suspiciously absent from nature documentary programming, peaking its head through Home and Away, a single Scooby Doo episode, and ‘Yet-another-strapping-young-lad-becomes-a-lifesaver-in-Bondi’ instead. I felt I was being deprived of the sights and sounds of an entire continent. I was more likely to recognise the metallic wail of an emperor penguin than the call of a currawong and I had seen far more pictures of icebergs than of the peculiar domes of the Bungle Bungles of Northwest Australia. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed watching the occasional penguin regurgitate putrid, rotting fish soup straight into the gob of its chick as much as the next person, but I wanted an end to what I saw as outright continent discrimination. I longed to see nature documentaries full of numbats hunting for termites in the forests and sugar gliders soaring from tree to tree. Perhaps this desire was the inspiration behind my short-lived desire to become a wildlife filmmaker, though I suspect it also had something to do with escaping the jaws of the nine-to-five job.

I had so many questions about this country, which weren’t answered by the tourist brochures showing identical shots of Uluru. What does Australia actually look like? Does the outback smell? Does the water really go the wrong way down the plug hole? 

By the time I reached Australia, there were few scientific discoveries left. Kangaroos featured in every Irish school book and there were likely more koala teddies selling in Sydney curio shops than wild ones on the continent. But I didn’t need to make scientific discoveries, this continent had always seemed a distant, unreachable place and suddenly I was there, standing on Australian soil. Over those first few days, I recorded Australian Magpies, Kookaburras and caramel ice cream, creatures (and sugary items) which until then had to stay in two-dimensional books and TV screens. I found those blue tongued skinks. Then jet-lag caught up with me, I vomited in front of a kangaroo enclosure and the excitement was forgotten. 

Despite my dodgy stomach, I took time to record a splattering of my discoveries in a diary. It won’t win a literature prize. It is full of the most useless, irrelevant drivel I have ever come across. If I had to choose between reading my own diary and attending a talk on the front axle bracket of a 1950s heritage wheelbarrow I would choose the front axle bracket. I say all this not to convey a sense of humble vanity but to drive home my disappointment at the mundane content I somehow thought worth preserving. Here I was, an exciting new country at my finger tips, and yet I decided to fill a diary with blow by blow accounts of how we missed the bus and details of how my mum won an iron in a raffle. This diary was my chance to write and preserve memories which I could happily stumble across at the back of my wardrobe one day. So why, why, WHY did I decide that it was more important to record the time my sister got carsick than my visit to the Great Barrier Reef, a UNESCO world heritage site? Why did I describe at length a complex dream where I ate the harbour bridge and spilt my ice cream? Why did I think I would want to recall the difference in taste between Irish apple juice and the Australian variety? That said, I still maintain that there is a profound, tasty difference. Spelling mistakes are rife and the book is distastefully littered with lists of who went where (M,GD,G,I,B, went to buy food, while D,T,X,LMNOP checked the bus timetable etc). Most days I only bothered writing the date down and there are sections where my ever-faithful mother wrote while I dictated. 

The most intriguing entry reads:

I woke up at 6:01am, and wondered why the sun  wasn’t rising!!! I then fell asleep again… and then I remembered, the sun rose at 6:51am.

And those three exclamation marks, ladies and gentlemen, are the closest I got to humour in 2009.

Almost 10 years to the date of my first conversation with a stranger, I found myself seated in yet another aeroplane flying over miles and miles of black emptiness punctuated by the occasional light of rural Australia. I was busy completing an Australian immigration form and fretting over whether to declare the bar of chocolate in my hand luggage when I reached customs. 

Such questions were soon soon forgotten as the aeroplane began its descent and the dark night sky blurred with the dawn. Sydney twinkled its lights beneath us and suddenly a chocolate bar didn’t seem as important, even if it could lead to my incarceration for breaching Australia’s immigration laws (It turns out I shouldn’t have declared it and it led to an embarrassing conversation with a smirking customs official).

I had decided to come back and visit my cousins in Sydney, who ranged in age from 4 to 12 and were thankfully baptised as Youngest, Middle and Oldest at birth to avoid confusion. They have some unusual quirks: Youngest is an avid consumer of lamb chops and Turkish delight, Middle is indestructible and loves to fling himself off the odd trampoline or bunk-bed (with only one broken arm to show for it) and Oldest strangely doesn’t appreciate it when I pass on the kisses our grandmother sent over. 

As a ten year-old I fell in love with this country. I loved it so much that I could look past it’s obsession with uggs and the worrying abundance of SUVs single-handedly melting the ice caps. And I still like it, even more than I like changing to fifth gear while driving. The weather is nice, the people are easy going and schools give their pupils a fruit break every morning. It is the birth place of Merino Wool and the the Wiggles, things which the world could certainly do without but appreciates all the same. I even love its German tourists, who have such a passion for flinging themselves into crocodile-infested waters that the crocodile warning signs have ACHTUNG (WARNING) written in big letters. It is rugged, extraordinary and, with only two hundred years of European disturbance preceded by uncountable years of Aboriginal stewardship, it is arguably far more ecologically intact than the over-fertilised and exhausted fields of Europe. 

I soon realised that this is a country in ecological trouble, on the front line of climate change, exotic invasion (of plants and animals, not people), species extinction and what I’m sure are the worst records of gulls robbing chips on earth. But in the midst of harrowing bushfires and high extinction rates there are small pockets of hope for this land of bandicoots and fruit bats, hidden in age-old land practices of the past and radical conservation measures of the future. I am writing this blog series as a homage to a country in which I learned to be myself, to share stories of a city and country I have loved exploring and tales of a comedic trio of cousins united in their efforts to never wear shoes. 

I hope you enjoy it. 

Disclaimer: I have learnt to have more balance in my writing over the past ten years since I wrote my first account of Australia, so while I promise there will be no blow by blow accounts of missing the bus, there will sadly be no stories of me eating the harbour bridge. That is still a dream yet to be realised.