Last tango in paradise... for a wee while

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‘“The time has come,” the Walrus said’… though, in my case, it’s not to talk of the deliciously lyrical “shoes and ships and sealing wax”, but of the harder-to-scan and much more mundane “laws and contracts and procurement”. Next Tuesday will see me scrubbing up, dusting off the high heels and the business suits, looking for the ON switch in my legal brain, and returning to the world of nine-to-five.

At least for a little while.

My bank account is salivating at the prospect.

I’m not.

Nor am I relishing a return to a still-wintery London after a wonderful hot summer Down Under. But, after seven years, more on the road than not, I’m not asking for sympathy. And the last few months in Australia have been a fantastic culmination to my years away from the grindstone, encapsulating the 2013 vintage of yours truly. In the depths of office life in 2005, did I stop to watch a line of ants bustling across my path? Let alone have the chance to watch a goanna plough its noisy way through the undergrowth, or experience the fascination of helping to raise an orphan joey, or giggle at the antics of chattering apostlebirds as they jostled for position around my proffered handful of rice? (Come to that, how much giggling did I do back then? “You don’t smile much these days,” I remember an erstwhile colleague saying out-of-the-blue as we discussed the nuances of some pricing provision or other.)

After a somewhat difficult autumn dominated by my mother’s worsening health, and the hassle involved in sorting out further adaptations to her home and care arrangements, I flew out to Australia on Christmas Eve looking forward to doing all these things and more. The rest of the world could do without me for a while.

The first morning at my cousins’ place in the Southern Highlands, I was woken by a glissando of kookaburras. Sitting in the doorway of the conservatory a little later, I soaked up the sunshine like a lizard – though perhaps lizards don’t tend to have two small dogs to play with as they do so.

Back at Fowlers Gap in far western New South Wales a couple of days later, there was a kangaroo in the garden my first evening, and three more the next morning. No need for a lawnmower here! The next afternoon, I went to lie down for a siesta and drank in the sounds around me – the wind in the gum trees, the chatter of the galahs, the ravens’ mewling cries – and felt the stresses of the last months begin to ebb away.

When, in the rising temperatures of early January, garden sprinklers became a regular feature of the late afternoon, the local wildlife would almost line up to take their turn in the much-needed cool of the spray. Kangaroos don’t seem particularly keen on water, but with the mercury hitting the mid-40s, the young ones would stand at the edge of the sprinkler’s range, faces in the shower, looking goofy. Australian ringnecks would hop up from the ground into the spray, and then roll over on their backs in the grass, getting to their feet again with their feathers all askew, a major bad-feather day. Spiny-cheeked honeyeaters flocked around the sprinklers, playing “dare” as they flitted in and out of the spray. One of the two orphan joeys we were babysitting looked startled to find his usual route back from the garden’s outskirts to his nice cosy pouch suddenly full of this airborne wet stuff. He initially froze, and then hopped crazily back indoors as if zapped by an electric shock.

Staying with friends in Thirroul, just north of Wollongong, a week or two later, I sat out on their tree house-like balcony, shaded from the intensity of the late afternoon sun. Sulphur-crested cockatoos protested the end of the day in ugly croaks so incongruous from such an impressive, snow-white bird. A distant kookaburra laughed at the world, the joke only shared with his own species. The cockatoos continued to grumble, arguing about roosting sites for the night or some such, as I alternated diary-writing with indulging in yet another novel – I was galloping through a decadently large pile of books, mostly of a frivolous persuasion – and waited for our friends to return from their day jobs for another evening of wine and chatter and good food.

We ran ahead of the mercury on that week-long trip to the coast. As Fowler’s Gap hit the headlines of the Sydney Morning Herald as the country’s hottest place that weekend (47.6ºC), the farm manager’s kids getting their moment of fame, photographed playing in the garden sprinklers, we were at a wedding in Sutherlandshire melting in the humidity of (only) the mid-30s. We left Thirroul the day Woollongong was forecast to hit 43ºC, driving past fire risk signs for the Royal National Park set all the way over to the furthest right, the red section. The previous evening our mobiles had received the automated alert, “Catastrophic Fire Danger tomorrow for Illawarra, Shoalhaven and Southern Ranges. Not being in a bush fire prone area is the safest option,” (no, really?). Three days later, we left a Melbourne waiting to see if a similar temperature would materialise. Lacking functioning air conditioning in the car, we toyed with the idea of postponing our return west until the forecast cold front came in the following week (though we had no Plan B that didn’t involve a fire-risk area), but my cousins came to the rescue and lent us a car. A few hours south of Canberra, the mercury started dipping from its peak of 38ºC, and we continued the rest of the journey wondering on and off whether we should have taken the broken car after all. Only at Broken Hill the next afternoon, did the temperature start rising again. (The Great Law Of Sod, of course, would have ensured that the cold front stayed down over southern Victoria if we had; we were just lucky that it had come further north sooner than forecast.)

Interspersed with my dedication to effecting a full ostrich (or should that be emu?) impression, I squeezed in a little work on an ongoing, very part-time project for Lawyers On Demand, the locum-type agency affiliated to a major London law firm through which I have been earning the odd penny or two the last few years (and which is to blame – or to be credited for – my forthcoming return to the real world). Technology isn’t always kind to those working remotely, particularly not someone working 120 km north of Broken Hill, but I muddled through, stomping up the path on my 400 yard daily commute to a networked internet connection. It did become slightly surreal, though, working on a firm laptop that insisted on telling me the then-current temperature in London. Looking out onto almost mirage-like landscape of the Outback in the low 40s, sheep wilting in the paucity of shade, while being told that it was -2ºC and snowing in London, was more than a touch bizarre.

But technology did hold up for my telephone/Skype interview with the new LOD client, Direct Line Group, in south east London, in early March. The day before, I’d been briefed by the client relationship partner, my (very) ex-boss whom I credit with introducing me to his brand of pragmatic, business- and deal-oriented law (and, in the process, ensuring I cancelled my then intended emigration to Australia), though I think he was more than a little bemused to hear that I was in the middle of “toileting a joey”. He offered to ring back later, but, embarrassed by this offer from a very senior and time-pressed City lawyer, I assured him that I could multitask, settling down on the floor with the joey in my arms and the telephone beside me. (I didn’t tell him that it might have been a different matter if she’d still been a bit squitty, as she had the day before. Too Much Information, I felt.) Even so, Mark found out more about raising orphan or abandoned joeys than he might have anticipated when he picked up the ’phone, so I sent him a couple of photographs after the end of the call to continue his education. He wrote later that he’d circulated them around the rest of the firm’s Commercial Group, to ‘lots of “oohs” and “aahs”’.

That wasn’t to be the only moment of fame for the joeys’ we were looking after. I was entertained to find that LOD had incorporated a picture of ‘Rocky’ in a mini article on the firm’s intranet about their new client and my forthcoming role, culminating in the comment, “It makes for one of our most creative interviews yet as Elizabeth was sat amongst kangaroos in the Australian outback when she ‘met’ the client for the first time online; a very different setting to Bromley where she will be based for her assignment”. If slightly stretching the truth (I had actually been sitting inside at a computer, door closed on the inquisitive joeys), it still made for a refreshing change to the usual litany of deals and office news.

Occasionally I’d also do Something Useful for the research station, driving into Broken Hill every week or two for groceries or to collect researchers from the airport. Life doesn’t go very fast in Broken Hill. Arriving at what I was already calling “my” coffee shop for an uncharacteristic second time in five days early on in my trip, I was enchanted to be warmly greeted by the owner and told that my “usual” table was free. He even remembered my coffee order. The following week, he stopped me for a chat, well acquainted with Fowlers Gap through the number of researchers and students who clearly sought succour there on rare forays into “civilisation”. “See you in six months’!” he called cheerily as I left the last time. (I didn’t have the heart to correct him, and say that it might just be a little longer than that.)

With the start of March and the official arrival of the austral autumn, the Outback seemed to sigh with relief and temperatures began to drop. We’d failed to get any of the onding that had soaked the eastern half of the state from late January through much of February (only in Australia: fire alerts and warnings about heat exhaustion one week, floods the next), with barely 25 mm. Mind you, that was more than had fallen here in the preceding six months, so no-one was complaining, just continuing to wish for more as farmers usually do, but it was enough to restart the bugs. Battling a kitchen drain blocked by dead insects, I thought that there was maybe one thing about this part of the world that I wouldn’t miss when I headed back to Sydney at the end of the week.

Leaving Fowlers Gap is always hard, but I’d promised myself a slow and gentle reintroduction to civilisation, as well as a decent chance to catch up with my growing collection of Sydney-based friends. New on the list this time was a trio with whom Jo and I had travelled in South America last year. The ringleader of the trio had been a Serious Party Animal on the trip, and had rebuked me on more than one occasion for preferring my bed to seeing in the not-so-wee sma’ hours with her and the others. “You can get your own back when I get to Australia,” I promised her, hoping she would forget. No chance. “Remember you owe me a massive night out…,” she said somewhat ominously in an early email when we were making arrangements to meet up, so we had an (in)appropriately excessive night in The Rocks one warm Friday. However, even she couldn’t have organised for the New Zealand navy to be in town that evening too, hanging out at an Irish bar at the start of what was clearly going to be a St Paddy’s Day Long Weekend, so we found ourselves unexpectedly entertained by various mid-ranking sailors. The next day I was a touch fragile, but it had been worth it. Meeting people when we’re all on the road, I am never entirely sure whether the friendship will translate back into our own reality, but this one certainly had, and we all four resolved to make this a regular event – “regular” having the new definition of “whenever we’re all on the same continent”.

In 2008, I extended my trip to see The Gin Club, an Australian band, play at a bar in Hobart. This year, a huge incentive for my extending my trip (though who was I kidding when I booked to come out here for only two months but on a three-month visa?!), was a slightly bigger name in music. Bruce Springsteen was due to play the arena in Sydney’s Olympic Park, and an incredibly efficient friend had already procured ten tickets when he extending the invitation to me. I resisted the temptation to shriek with excitement (at least I think I did): I’d never seen The Boss in concert, though I was pretty much brought up with his music, and had always envied the brother who’d managed to see him at Wembley two nights in a row during the Born In The USA tour. (Inefficiently, I and each of my three siblings had bought the album, a feat only equalled by another iconic album the following year, “Brothers In Arms”.) But now I’d see him for myself, on what was rumoured to be the last major world tour by this self-styled “hardest working white man in entertainment”, and I wasn’t disappointed. Shunning a support act, Springsteen and The E Street Band began the concert shortly after the scheduled 7.30 pm start, and played, without break, until nearly 11 pm. We were hoarse and hand-sore by the end (“I want whatever he’s on!” I said as the indefatigable entertainer played a fifth or sixth song in the encore set), but glowing with the thrill of seeing The Boss in action, and still in fantastic voice.

The rest of my final week puttered by. For the first time in aeons, I even managed a little sightseeing in Sydney. I don’t have the longest attention span for museums, but vowed to return to the Australian Museum the next time I’m in town. In a couple of hours, I hadn’t even finished going round the natural history and dinosaurs exhibition, though picked up a delicious number of “useful facts” with which to entertain folks in the future. Did you know that the group of spikes on the tail of a stegosaurus now has an official scientific name, the thagomizer, a term chosen to honour Gary Larson and his many years of offbeat dinosaur humour? (He’d first used the term when describing the tail that caused the death of caveman Thag Simmons.) Or that a now-extinct giant bird has been nicknamed the “Demon Duck Of Doom” when it was discovered to be more closely related to modern waterfowl than the ostrich/emu/rhea family which it superficially resembles? And those are just to whet your appetite!

After a soggy February, Sydney was basking in a glorious warm autumn, and we spent a happy few hours wandering through the Botanic Gardens, marvelling at the number of weddings taking place there that Saturday afternoon – we must have passed more than a dozen, though getting hitched with Joe Public wandering past wouldn’t be my first choice – and listening to rehearsals for the forthcoming outdoor performance of “Carmen”, dramatically set on the water’s edge with a backdrop of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge. I took the ferry over to Cockatoo Island and, while convict and industrial history don’t grip me enormously, it was a beautiful day to be on the water and the views up- and down-river from this erstwhile Mecca of shipbuilding were fabulous. On the way back, the ferry stopped at Woolwich and Greenwich, neighbouring districts on the northern shore of the Parramatta River, and I grinned ruefully to myself. I don’t think their London counterparts will be enjoying quite the same weather when I get back there later this week. In The Rocks that Sunday afternoon, I meandered around the craft market, gnawed my way through a delicious butter-and-chilli coated corn-on-the-cob, and people-watched. Buskers were out in force. I sat on a pavement edge to listen to Mark Wilkinson, and enjoyed his simple acoustic guitar and vocals so much I bought his latest album. On the promenade just round from Circular Quay, I found the most incredible street entertainer of them all, Bendy Em. This lively English girl chatted cheerfully to the quickly-gathering crowd through her headset as she bent herself in the most improbable directions. At one point, she had her feet behind her head and her arms around her knees as she rested her lumbar spine on a swivelling plate, spinning herself around to stunned applause and whoops. With the help of two young men in the audience to hold the apparatus steady, she climbed into a plastic cube with 16 inch (43 cm) sides, and one of the men closed the door on her. If I felt at all stiff that weekend, I felt positively fossilised as I walked away.

Now, as I sit in Incheon Airport’s Starbucks, listening to the babble of cheerfully efficient nasal chatter around me and revived by my five star overnight stay in the Seoul Royal Hotel (small pain – reward, more like – for the layover necessitated by Asiana’s flight schedules), I feel quite literally in between lives. A little of me wouldn’t take much persuasion to hop on a return flight to Sydney. A lot of me would love to get back on the road to return to Serious Travelling, something I feel I haven’t really had a chance to do in a couple of years – joining an organised overland trip, even one as “experience-full” as four months with Dragoman in South America doesn’t match up to the thrill and edginess of solo travel. But my head knows it is time. Time to go back home, to check up on Mum, to see my long-suffering UK friends, and, most practically, to earn some money once again. The travel coffers would appreciate it.



In Namibia, I found purpose;

in Rwanda, I found pain.

In Antarctica, I found tranquillity in monochrome;

in India, chaos in colour.

I giggled in Etosha, and cried in Gisenyi.

I loved in Cambodia, and danced in Grenada.

Footsore in Bhutan.

Breathless in Peru.

Drenched in Kerala.

Contentment on the road.



I’ll be back.

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Photos

"Wot you lookin' at?"
apostlebirds with a bemused-looking kangaroo in the background

passers-by on my way to work
Not quite London Bridge in rush hour...

"Peek-a-boo!"
red kangaroo, Fowlers Gap

novel name for a property
en route between Hay and Balranald

it's all a bit flat out here
en route from Wentworth to Broken Hill

another hard day being a joey
Rocky the red kangaroo joey, Fowlers Gap

"the Boss!!!"
Bruce Springsteen, Allphones Arena, Olympic Park, Sydney

Comments

[Nikki]

on the road again
Thanks for taking us all along on your travels. Love the shot of the Joey sleeping!

[taracloud]

Big adventures and small pleasures....
It seems you learned to appreciate the subtle pleasures of life in the magical outback. May you continue to find the sounds and smells of the natural world even in the chaos of London. The word pictures and photos of your adventures have been gorgeous! Best wishes readjusting and finding some wild excursions in the soggy Isles. Also, I love the photos of little Rocky--what a sweetheart!