Wobbegongs and Whipbirds

Over the years I have had to comprehend a number of mysteries about our planet (namely Calculus, how to attach a bike rack to your car and the purpose of solar-powered bins), but one thing I will never get my head around is Sydney’s love affair with four-wheel drives. For starters, the city is kitted out with tarmacked roads, there is not one dirt track in sight. And just like any city,  you can find whatever your heart desires in Sydney, be it Swedish DIY furniture, American burgers and, someday soon, cheap Danish tat named after an Indian big cat. If you really do need to travel to Brisbane because you must buy a toothbrush constructed from pomegranate hide and scented with elderflower you can do so on a nicely tarmacked motorway. The closest you will come to off road driving is a couple of small potholes navigable by a toddler on a tricycle.  

In short, no one in Sydney needs a 4WD, it’d be like riding camels around Westminster. These cars are designed for fording rivers and scaling sand dunes, not a visit to the chiropodist. But yet here they are, multiplying on the streets like hoarded toilet rolls in a pandemic.

I had a silent rant about all of this before dawn one morning as I tried in vain to walk off my jet lag. Under normal circumstances I would put this 4WD obsession down to some locals pretending to be Crocodile Dundee armed with Bluetooth capability instead of a knife and a croc-tooth necklace. But I was groggy, confused, under dystopian orange street lights and surrounded by enough 4WDs to protect an American president. And to say I overthought things a little would be an understatement. For example, what if these people were not flexing their wealth but knew something I didn’t? Perhaps access in Sydney was a finite resource? After all, you can’t get very far in a hatchback if, say, a plague of locusts with a sweet tooth for tarmacadam descended upon the city. In that scenario (and ONLY that scenario) it would make a lot more sense to own an off-road vehicle. 

My fears of disaster were not soothed by the cavernous storm drains along the roadside, large enough to swallow a monsoon like a swig of mouthwash. Rain must be pretty torrential to need such massive drains. I walked on, past rain sodden newspapers from yesterday’s five-minute shower, when I heard the sound of crunching leaves. They crunched at the pace of a tortoise but with the intensity of a passionate dancer. The only activity I could assign to the sound was raking leaves with an air of malice. Now that was the final straw for me.  It was only 6am and I had already unearthed preparations for an impending natural disaster that no one had bothered to tell me about. And now there seemed to be some dressing-gowned creep slowly raking leaves in his garden before dawn. I was so on edge that I was convinced this eager gardener wanted to do me harm. He was waiting for me, passing the time by sweeping his yard, ready to attack me using his customised rake handle with a serrated edge. I came to Australia expecting to find the vibrant, busy, lets-all-photograph-the-opera-house Sydney of my childhood, not the opening scene of a horror film. 

I decided there and then that I was going no further. If this stranger was enough of a crackpot to rake the lawn at such an early hour, they were not someone I was willing to pass by without a police escort. I had resolved to leg it back to the safety of my bed when I saw movement under the next street light. I breathed a sigh of relief. The creepy leaf crunching was not a malicious yard sweeper but a brush turkey, gathering leaves for his nesting mound. This compost heap is used to incubate his eggs. It is essential that the nest stays 34 degrees celcius: Any lower and he will have more females and any higher will trigger the opposite effect. Little wonder he was up so early. The only danger this bird posed was to the proud gardener who was about to choke on his morning brew when he found the Aussie equivalent of a beavers dam on his well-manicured lawn. 

The darkness began to lift as I reached one of the many coves of Sydney’s extensive harbour. I heard the first aeroplane begin its descent into Botany Bay and listened to the currawong fill the morning air with its sorrowful call. Dawn broke, kookaburras exploded with laughter and a lone pelican alighted on the surface of the water, ready to begin a day's fishing amongst the yachts. Despite the morning’s terrors, perhaps Sydney mightn’t be as dangerous as I had concluded. After all, I was only 13km from a city centre, and here I was watching a pelican.

Growing up in Ireland, the closest I got to city wildlife was some scrawny foxes and a couple of sickly squirrels who lived inside a dog poo bin. Sydney has a far more exotic selection of animals living alongside humankind. In the forests, water dragons sun themselves along hiking trails and white sea eagles nest high in the apple gums. The rare green and golden bell frog clings on at the Olympic Park while bush rats and pygmy possums grow in number in the wild refuge of North Head. In the suburban parks, Cockatoos squawk and vandalise the smaller branches of Eucalyptus trees, flinging them generously onto the heads of camera-wielding tourists like bridesmaids with confetti. Australian Magpies declare harbour grudges against cyclists and reenact the Battle of Britain every morning to dissuade the lycra-clad-hooligans even thinking of approaching their nests. Their attacks cause so many injuries that there is even a website, Magpie Alerts, which has recorded more than 1400 victims across Australia between July and September this year this year alone.

At night, brush tail possums venture out to feed beneath the lights of suburbia while the city’s few bandicoots use the darkness to forage and flee the local cat.  Penguins sleep the winter underneath jetties of businessmen waiting for the ferry and weedy seadragons feed in the shallow waters of touristy beaches.

Beneath the waves, octopuses and lobsters are hunted by the wonderfully named wobbegong, a carpet shark which hugs the shallow sea floor of the harbour. It’s name, which supposedly translates as “shaggy beard in one of the local indigenous languages”, refers to the flaky tassels of skin surrounding the sharks head. Along the harbour, groggy rich-folk sit in their waterside mansions, nursing headaches caused by the nightly chattering of the local flying foxes.

So there you have it, Sydney has an impressive list of wild animals which call it home, but you needn’t assume its easy to see them. Lorikeets burst out of trees like eggs in a microwave so they’re hard to miss but the penguins were halfway through their 6 month doze and the bandicoots are to busy steering clear of Felix the house cat for you to have any hope of seeing them. That’s not to say that all you’ll see is a fleet of 4WDs of course, because there is another vehicle overpopulating Sydney: The yacht.

They are by far the most common creature of Sydney’s harbour. Just like Wales with its vast numbers of sheep, it sometimes feels like Sydney has more yachts than people. It is impossible to find a view of Sydney harbour without yet another marina full of yet another gaggle of yachts. This dense population has to feed on something of course and current evidence suggests it might be the economy. Regardless of what it is, it has certainly helped yachts to reproduce in abundance. 

I soon discovered just how revered yachts are in Sydney when I found I had wandered on to the Spit to Manly Walk, which follows the northern edge of the harbour from the Spit Bridge. This bridge is one of only two bridges that cross Middle Harbour and carries the main road towards the Northern Beaches, a heavily populated suburb. Every hour, this road is closed for fifteen minutes and the Spit Bridge is opened to allow yachts to pass into Middle Harbour. Yes, that’s correct, for 15 minutes road traffic is subservient to yachts of leisure. Motorists sit biting their nails as they prepare apologies for their bosses, their dentists and their coffee partners, while a rich man in a striped shirt breaks open a beer in front of them as his yacht cruises under the bridge and out into the vast pool of Sydney Harbour. 

It was 10am and fast approaching the 10:15 bridge opening as I crossed the Spit. I could almost sense the urgency with which the cars zoomed over the bridge, doubtless fearing the boredom of a 15 minute wait. The roar of the traffic was deafening and after several minutes walking beside this bedlam I decided to dive off the bridge, thankfully landing on my feet in the middle of the Spit to Manly walkway. The loud roar of traffic was replaced by the breeze passing gently through the cabbage tree palms and the waters of Middle Harbour lapping against the shore of the harbour. Yachts queued in single file, waiting to sail through the Spit’s gaping mouth. I left them to it and wandered off into the bush.

I rounded Fisher Bay along bush tracks, skirting little coves and beaches and taking in harbour vistas. Amongst the birdsong, the shrill whistle of the eastern whipbird poured out from the bushes beside us. The whipbird has to be the most migraine-inducing bird on the planet (You can listen to it here). It emits a quiet, one-note whistle that crescendos until it travels right up the ear canal and whips the auditory nerve. I had the misfortune of walking past the whipbird just as it reached its climax and jumped five feet in the air in alarm. I stumbled into the undergrowth and felt the soft silk of a spider’s web brush against my face. 

Death by creepy-crawlies is surely one of the most discussed Australian topics among non-Australians. This isn’t too surprising as the majority of Australia’s population share the East Coast of Australia with two lethally poisonous spiders, the funnel web spider and the redback, and nine species of snake, six of which are deadly. My fears were somewhat soothed when I remembered that no one has actually died in the fangs of an Australian Spider since 1979 and, thanks to the creation of antivenom, should I be bitten I would merely have to contend with skin necrosis and nausea. 

I had been walking for a mere ten minutes and had already been brain-whipped by a bird and brushed with the silky face of death-by-spider, which just goes to show how dangerous this country can be. And I was only on the shore of an entire unforgiving continent with a nasty habit of barbecuing travellers in its sweltering interior. On average, 21 people die in Australia each year from rip currents and undertows (which, you will notice, is 21 more people than are annually killed by spiders). These currents have a stubborn streak.  When the Baragoola steam ferry hit and killed a whale in the 1930s, it took five separate ocean-bound towings before the currents stopped returning the carcass to the Sydney coast.

And so, with a new appreciation for just how dangerous it was to do anything in Australia, I bravely pressed on into the bush, bound for Manly. 

Manly is a suburb of sun, surf and pedestrian crossings wide enough to accommodate 600 socially distanced elephants. It was designed by Henry Gilbert Smith, a man who with a keen desire for his architectural haven to be the largest Brighton in the Southern Hemisphere. 

The manly testosterone was palpable as we ventured back out onto the street lined with Manly Sushi, the Manly pharmacy, Manly Ocean Foods and Manly Frozen Yoghurt. I wasn’t convinced that a pharmacy could really be described as having a manly bearing, but I would certainly consider the green and yellow Manly ferry to be a strapping young lad. In fact, it was so prepared for Manly’s swells that I would consider sailing it through the surging waves of the Roaring Forties. 

It was while strolling down the pedestrianised main street (The Corso) that the rain started and suddenly the massive storm drains which lined the streets made complete sense. Raindrops the size of marbles lashed down and within seconds the street looked like it had been powerhosed. Apparently in Australia even the rain can kill you. 

I sheltered under a shop canopy, but the shower was over in minutes, and I was soon back searching for edible testosterone: Manly fish and chips. It was only then that we became aware of the dark side of this serene seaside resort: a peculiar affliction which tourists succumb to. I have come to identify it as “gull pity”. Mobs of gulls hang around on  the street looking like teenage yobs. A member of this mob will choose a victim and stroll purposefully towards them, maintaining eye contact. I personally find that action creepy but at least 25% of victims are convinced that this is a “poor seagull who doesn’t have a wallet and therefore can’t afford to buy his own chips”. 

Overcome by compassion these victims decide that their role in Manly is not to enjoy their takeaway but to feed some birds a beer-battered and greasy version of what they are meant to be fishing for themselves out to sea. In an act of misguided philanthropy, chips and onion rings are generously tossed towards an army of gulls who have rushed to the aid of their comrade. Within minutes, the pavement is a scene of carnage as a raucous mat of birds squabble over the complimentary lemon. These “philanthropists” are the bane of the other 75% of Manly chip shop patrons who dance around, chips in one hand, stick brandished in the other, fighting for the right to eat their own food. 

The plague has spread from Manly and legions of gulls now march around the Sydney tourist hotspots, snatching sushi from school children and looting tourists of their quarterpounders. There is nowhere to run and nowhere to hide. I discovered that the only way to enjoy relative peace was to lunge towards the gulls screaming at the top of my lungs. This repelled the bird’s enough to buy 60 seconds of eating time before the siege resumed. 

The battle drew to a close once the last chip was consumed. Worn out and still rather hungry, I fled to a bench along the harbour and collapsed. After several minutes of panting and reaching for an inhaler (before remembering that I wasn’t asthmatic), I started to take in my surroundings. The sun was slowly drooping towards the horizon, saturating the yachts of the harbour in yellows and golds. Dogwalkers strolled along the footpaths and kids played in an ocean pool. The air was filled with the sound of lorikeets heading to their roosts in the Norfolk Pines and the Manly Ferry chugged sleepily towards Sydney. I happily concluded that all the negatives of Sydney weren’t so bad after all. 

Alright, it’s not a safe place to cycle and you certainly wouldn’t dream of eating takeaway on the beach here without full body armour and a sword. It’s essential to bring Panadol on every bushwalk in case some puny little bird endows you with a migraine of epic proportions. But, all things considered, who cares if you have to leave 15 minutes earlier to make your dentist appointment when you can take in the view over the harbour? Who cares if locusts eat all the tarmac* when you can take the ferry to work?

The point is, despite all of its potential dangers, Sydney seems an awfully nice place to spend your time. The birds are colourful and the rain is as sporadic as my Grandad’s ancient broadband connection. And, of course, it is the one place on earth where you can shout to your child “watch out for wobbegongs as you paddle darling!” If you are free between the 55th and 56th lockdown of Covid 19, I highly recommend a visit. 

*Perhaps I should emphasise that this is poetic license and that locusts do not eat to tarmac. If you take this to be true you are spreading fake news, and goodness knows we have enough of that already. *