I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago and although I couldn't recall what I'd been dreaming about, the scent of Adelaide lingered in the air; a strange sweetness a little like jasmine, warm and with a tang of the sea.
I've been back in Norwich for over a month and have been meaning to write a blog about Australia ever since my return, but work has been busy and I was actually stunned by how bad the jet lag was. For the first week back I literally could not keep my eyes open beyond 8pm every evening. Okay, so I can hear you wondering what kept me from writing the second week? Well, life... The gentle slap in the face of reality when you realise that the holiday is over and normality has been resumed. And the more time that passes, the more Australia feels like a dream...
A very fun, very technicolor adventure of a dream...
It has a lot to do with our perception of Australia as a hot barren place of orange earth and constant sunshine... We arrived in Adelaide at the tail end of spring and spent Australia’s spring equinox driving around the Adelaide Hills, visiting a German founded township called Handorff and the highest point, Mount Lofty. So I had two Spring Equinoxes this year which is a shame as I love the Autumn Equinox! But anyway, being spring everything was green. Much of the country around the cities and towns looked like the epitome of Tolkein's idea of Middle Earth, perfect rolling hills and pastures of middle England. The vines in the many vineyards were just starting to leaf, the grass was a vivid bright green beneath a sky that seemed a deeper and more perfect blue than I'd ever seen in England. Surely this wasn't Australia?
And it wasn't just the climate and landscape, central Adelaide seemed very much like any other city in many ways other than the fact that I recognised none of the chains other than Borders (sadly closed) and MacDonalds. There were no Costas or Starbucks... It just felt like a dream construct, like my subconscious making everything seem familiar and keeping the details vague...
Adelaide seemed to be a strange gangly offspring of England and America, with all the spring green of England and the wide roads and building design of America... And I suppose it kinda is in many ways. Both Australia and America are younger settlements than Europe, both have the luxury of an almost unusable amount of space and both are packed with the descendants of Europe and England. In both locations many people have recreated the parts of European life and design that they liked...
You know how in some dreams you recreate a location that's close to something in reality but not quite the same and you can never quite put your finger on what's different? Welcome to Adelaide...
But my most enduring memories of Australia are of the significant differences; as I mentioned before, the very air of Adelaide smelt different, sweeter and lighter. The wildlife is incredible and although, thankfully, I didn’t experience any of the Huntsman spiders and it was the wrong season for the Redback spider, there were kangaroos to be hand fed, koalas to be stroked and pythons to be worn nervously around the neck like big cool muscular scarves. The sound of exotic bird song could be heard coming from every tree and there was something utterly enchanting about hearing parrots in the trees whilst waiting at the bus stops in central Adelaide!
Kangaroo Island was a phenomenal day trip and although being a tourist gives you a warped perspective of places, I could totally see myself living on KI. But to fit in and be a useful member of the community, I’d better brush up on farming, eucalyptus oil production or wildlife conservation. Only 155km long and underpopulated, it had the feel of rural Britain, but between the cultivated fields of glowing yellow rape seed and farmed eucalyptus trees, a third of the island is natural bushland with gum trees filling the horizons, orange dirt roads threading off into the distance, seal and sealion colonies dotted around the coast, wild koalas and kangaroos to be spotted and wallabies dozing in the sun by the side of the road. The Remarkable Rocks, eerie and alien, are naturally formed from the same geological roots as Ayers Rock/Uluru and Admiral Arch displays the power of the eternal sea, eating it’s way through rock and creating a sun filled frame for the clear green sea. With the variety of landscape and wildlife, KI began to feel like a compact sample of natural Australia and it’s stunningly beautiful.
It could be said that our trip was too short to really see much of Australia and that by visiting outside the summer season we weren’t seeing the place at it’s best. But that begs the question, if Australia is beautiful in the spring, how stunning is it during the summer? To get a true gauge of a place, to get a true experience of the landscapes and life, surely you need to experience it through all seasons? To take the great summers with the wet winters, the green spring with the golden light of autumn...
It is a place too immense to digest in one trip or one season and you leave in the knowledge that you’ll need to return, if only to get another breath of the sweet scented air that lingers in your dreams.
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My trip would never have happened or been as wonderful without my mum’s generosity, my family’s gentle sense of adventure and the hospitality of my amazing Australia relatives, Mike, Jenny and Steven and their friend Trevor. Malaysian Airlines were generous and caring. And barring the bus drivers, everyone we spoke to in Adelaide was warm, welcoming and engaging. I guess that means bus drivers potentially could be the same worldwide...
You might have noticed a lack of mention of the indigenous population and to give the Aborigines their dues would need to be a whole other blog post and I’d need to do a lot more research before I wrote it, especially as Adelaide cannot be considered a true representation of the whole of Australia. The Aborigines we spoke with were warm and happy to talk, but those we saw around Adelaide looked downtrodden and ignored. The wing of the South Australia Museum devoted to Aborigine history and culture was stunning but sadly empty of visitors and engenders the same mild sense of guilt at cultural thievery as the British Museum in London... And the Art Gallery of South Australia’s collection of Aborigine art was pitiful. I sense that the native people’s oppression and integration into the modern Australian society that the western world has created is fraught with politics, history, anger, guilt and shame... I think I’ll never know enough about it to really adequately comment. My dimes worth? Sometimes humans suck and we do the wrong things to each other. Kinda sums a lot up... I guess we’re still learning.
