A Cool Change

There is a fairly common meteorological phenomenon in Melbourne called "a cool change." Sometimes it is very dramatic, as it was last Sunday when it went from 102 degrees to 70 degrees in about an hour. Yesterday's cool change was less radical although still abrupt; the temperature dropped by 15 degrees in about 40 minutes.

As I spend my last hour in the quiet office here at Melbourne Uni that has served me so well, I am thinking a lot about the cool change that awaits us in a few days. The change from summer to winter, the change in companions, tempo, and the feel of our lives. Our flight across equator and date-line will drop us back into our prior life almost as abrubtly as the Melbourne winds change the weather here. I fear and crave change in almost equal measure, but there is something about this one that feels less exhilarating, like change without change--a reversion, a move into the past rather than into the future. But I know I am wrong about that and that we will reinhabit our lives in D.C. in a slightly new way for having been here. And even if we don't, the magic of the future is such that it arrives and changes us without our noticing, whether we go anywhere or not.

I close this chapter by hurrying off to Melbourne's most famous bakery to pick up a Croc 'n Bush, a tower of profiteroles drizzled with chocolate sauce to take to Jake's class and his good-bye party. There is no reason change can't be both cool and sweet.

'Tis Which Season?

I have made a couple attempts at a new post recently without success. I am struggling to find the voice with which to say goodbye to this magical stay in Oz. I looked at the calendar last night and I could feel my throat tighten. We leave in two weeks. We are selling the car and the bikes, my gym membership expired, Lucy's music class is coming to an end and Jake's teachers want to know when his last day will be so they can send him off properly. We are readying ourselves to leave but we are emotionally unready. A couple months into our stay here Matt and I were happy but unhooked. Somewhere along the line we got hooked. So all I can offer at this point is a breathless, superficial recital of the last two hectic weeks as I continue to muster the courage for the next two.

After a very sweet springtime Thanksgiving with Kim, Llewellyn and Jarrah (we had fresh asparagus because you can't eat root vegetables in this weather), we went off for four days in Sydney. It is a beautiful city which sits spectacularly on its bay in much the way San Francisco does. We ate and drank at innumerable outdoor cafes. We listened to street musicians. We soaked up the water, light and warmth. Jake and I took a speedboat cruise around Sydney Harbor. We took a train ride through the botanical gardens and chased Lucy through the aquarium. We spent a great day at the beach with Kim Rubenstein (my Australian patroness and friend) and her family, who were also in town for the weekend. I got to see some barristers leaving court in their hilarious horsehair wigs. We said goodbye to Josh, who went back to the States. We wandered around the Circular Quay and Darling Harbor; we admired the Christmas decorations. The first night there we were having dinner outside when the wreaths on the lampposts lit up and Jake exclaimed: "Oh look, Christmas lights. It must be Hanukkah!" Along with the locals we used ferries as public transportation and watched a lot of cricket. The first of a series of test matches between Australia and England (this longstanding and famous rivalry is called the Ashes Series) began while we were there and all of Sydney was watching television. Because cricket is so important and the weather so exquisite in these days of early summer, there were a number of parks full of people sitting on the grass watching cricket on giant screens. This startling innovation of outdoor public television makes slightly more sense when you appreciate both the passion for and duration of the game. Each one of these serious cricket matches are played 8-10 hours a day for 5 days. There are, of course, tea breaks, when play stops abruptly for refreshments. Matt and I love watching it because it looks sort of familiar but we have no idea what is going on. The plain white uniforms and the bright green grass also make it beautiful to watch. Once we stopped trying to understand it through the lens of baseball and consulted any number of helpful websites, it became slightly less mystifying, but only slightly.

We celebrated Matt's birthday in Melbourne by all of us taking the day off and going to our favorite places. We woke up and biked to the Tin Pot Cafe for breakfast. Jenni took Tyler & Jake to the beach, I took Lucy and Matt went on a bike ride and had a massage. Then we all met up at Melbourne's famous Italian bakery Brunetti's to have a coffee and pick out an enormous birthday cake for Matt. We had cake with the kids and then Matt & I went out to dinner at our favorite restaurant. It was a beautiful, balmy evening and we ate outside and walked home in a happy, tipsy, sleepy stupor. Matt was practically giddy about getting to celebrate his birthday in the summer.

This last weekend we spent at a cottage on a raspberry farm a few miles from the beach. An hour outside Melbourne, down the Mornington Penninsula, are farms, vineyards and long stretches of beach. It is beautiful countryside, the weather was mostly warm and the berries were ripe. We must have eaten 5 pounds of raspberries this weekend, as well as big heaps of cherries from the local Red Hill outdoor market. Our friends Peter and Alison, and their daughter Sophie, joined us on Saturday and we had a lovely, leisurely day with them. They tormented us by showing us the house they have just purchased in Red Hill. Jake is crazy about mazes these days, so we went to the hedge maze in the area and got lost in the shrubbery. It felt a bit like a scene out of Jane Austen. We did some wine tasting and food eating at a local winery, Tuck Ridge, which is a parental paradise. It has a Napa-style view, a sandbox you can see from the tables on the patio, and good wine. We saw our first koala roadsigns, and we had mild, cloudless nights which allowed us a great view of the stars and unfamiliar constellations of the Southern Hemisphere.

As a Californian, warm Decembers don't seem odd, but it throws me off to see the rituals of summer and the rituals of Christmas rub up against each other. After gorging ourselves on berries and running around on the beach, we headed back to Melbourne for a Christmas party. That's just weird.

Settling In and Getting Around

We have just over a month left here in Australia and I can't begin to express how unready we are to leave. We have settled in, ventured out, made friends, and have found an easy rhythm that will be hard to replicate when we return home. All four of us have flourished here, the kids especially. Here Jake learned to ride a bike, his reading took off, and he has slipped into a new level of maturity that is heartbreakingly sweet. Here Lucy learned to walk and talk (her favorite words are "more" and "mine" and she has even picked up "ta" which is an Aussie colloquialism for "thanks," used most often with kids or when someone holds the door for you or pays you a casual compliment). Above all it has been wonderful to see Jake and Lucy's relationship blossom. Jake is amazingly patient, caretaking and genuinely entertained by Lucy (who can be genuinely entertaining). They share a room and Jake has taken to pulling her out of her crib when she wakes up in the morning and bringing her to his bed to play; instead of waking up to the sound of Lucy screaming to be freed, more and more Matt and I wake up to the sound of them laughing. Nothing brings me more joy. My gratitude for their flourishing and for small sibling pleasures is heightened by the fact that Lucy just turned 18 months old, the age at which Julien was diagnosed, and that part of my grief after he died was grief for the kind of companianship Jake had lost. Julien has been on my mind a lot recently and I am feeling both his absence and his presence very acutely.

Just a few days ago we returned from a week in Tasmania, a small Australian island just across the Bass Strait from the mainland. Tasmania feels remote, untrammelled and easy-going for Australians in much the way that mainland Australia feels for Americans. To us it felt almost other-worldly even though it takes less than an hour to fly from Melbourne to Hobart (above is Hobart's harbor). Once a penal colony for the worst of the convicts sent to Australia, it is now a kind of eco-paradise of the variety that California must have been 50-75 years ago. There are gorgeous harbors, bays, coastlines, beaches, pastures, vineyards, orchards, mountains, lakes and small lively cities. With the cleanest air and water in the world, Tasmania grows meat, seafood, cheese, fruit and honey that is sumptuous. We were traveling with my cousin Josh and my friend Steve Metcalf, who was there to do a story on Tasmanian food and wine for Travel and Leisure Magazine, so we ate like pigs on an expense account. In addition to some memorable feasts, including one of the best meals I've had at the Stillwater Cafe in Launceston, I also tried some of the best oysters, octopus, cheese, yogurt, honey and wine I've ever tasted. The gourmet Leatherwood honey, for example, is made only in Tasmania, where the bees are released into the small western rainforest to gather the spicy, pungent nectar of the flowering Leatherwood tree.

There is also a profusion of wildlife in Tasmania, and as a sad corollary, a lot of road kill. We saw many many echidna and wallabies, and one young wallaby in particular came up to us as we headed in from the beach, followed us to our car and even let us pet him. When we stayed in a wilderness camp on our last night, there were kookabura flying around hunting lizzards and a wombat waddled around our cabin. Needless to say, seeing a wombat in the wild was thrilling for me. I think he heard my squealing on the other side of the kitchen window though, because he bolted. We drove around most of Tassie, through endless pastures of grazing sheep, through Frechinet National Park, were we hiked up to the lookover from which you can see the famous Wineglass Bay (below), a pristine beach that is only reachable by hiking for two hours.

We toured a deep and shimmering cave heavy with stalagtites and stalagmites. We took a morning boat ride across Lake St. Clair at the southern end of the Cradle Mountains. We were stopped on a lonely rural road for 10 minutes while a loud heard of cattle were escorted haphazzardly across the road by two dogs and a rancher on horseback. We played on cool, beautiful beaches, where the sand was so fine it squeaked and as soft as velvet. We saw so many cows and sheep that Lucy learned how to say "moo" and "baa". We ate ourselves silly.

We have now seen more of this country than most Aussies have. It is vast, varied, spectacular, humane and we have completely fallen for it. We have fallen for the daily delights of Melbourne maybe even more than for the dazzling landscapes--for the smells of lavender and lemon and jasmine, which grow everywhere, for warm people, wonderful coffee, outdoor cafes, markets filled with local produce, and an abundance of parks. It will be very hard to leave.

The Beauty of Loneliness

Last week I went to Canberra for a day and a half. I was there for two reasons. I went to interview the Bosnian Ambassador to Australia for my translation project. An amazing woman, Ambassador Kapetanovic was the official translator for the Bosnian contingent at the Dayton Peace Talks and translated the new constitution for Bosnia Herzegovina from English into Bosnian. I also went to visit Kim Rubenstein and her family. Kim is the person who first invited me to Australia, who facilitated my visit at Melbourne Law School, and who, sadly for us, then moved to Canberra.

Because of the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne, Canberra was created to be Australia's capital. Much like Washington, D.C., Canberra is a highly-designed city placed in the middle of inauspicious physical surroundings. D.C. was built on a swamp and Canberra in the bush. Unlike D.C., however, the architecture of power here doesn't manage to dominate and displace the nature landscape. For all its sweeping vistas and high-modern government buildings, one has the distinct sense in Canberra of being in the country, of being witness to either the disinclination or the inability of urban planners to fully make over the environment. There is something about the clean modernist grandeur of Parliment House (see above) and the High Court coupled with the scarcity of people that makes this quiet, lovely, parched city feel the tiniest bit lonely.

It was odd that while I was in Canberra, staying with Kim and her exceptionally warm and convivial family, I was most struck by two small monuments to loneliness that I came across. One was a monument to the loneliness of loss, and the other an ode to the loneliness of landscape. The first was a monument to the Stolen Generation, which is the term used to describe the Australian government's policy during much of the 20th century of removing aboriginal children from their homes and placing them in state orphanages or with white foster families. It is estimated that between 1910 and 1970 the government took well over 100,000 aboriginal children away from their parents. Between one tenth and one third of all aboriginal children living during that period were forcibly removed without warning and without a legal proceeding of any kind. Most of the children taken were mixed race because the rationale of the policy was to ensure that aboriginal children would assimilate into white society and that the black population would eventually die out. While some of the children ended up among loving caregivers, many of them were subjected to neglect and abuse, and all of them were stripped of their families, their culture and their identity. The grief of the children and especially of their parents is well-documented in Bringing Them Home, the report from the government inquiry begun in 1995. The monument in Canberra is a simple and powerful stone slab from which water falls like tears, where music plays and on which are etched many quotes taken from the inquiry, quotes which capture the heartbreak of the policy and the unutterable loneliness of loss.

The other monument that caught my attention is not really a monument at all, but a small framed quote, tucked into the corner of the foyer of Parliment House, that comes from the preface to a 19th century book of poems by Adam Lindsay Gordon entitled Sea Spray and Drift Smoke. The preface, written by fellow Australian poet Marcus Clarke, captures something of the wilderness which Canberra has only partially transformed. It reads: "In Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charms of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness. Whispered to by the myriad tongues of the wilderness, he learns the language of the barren and the uncouth, and can read the heiroglyphs of the haggard gum-trees, blown into odd shapes, distorted with fierce hot winds, or cramped with cold nights, when the Southern Cross freezes in a cloudless sky of icy blue. The phantasmagoria of that wild dreamland termed the Bush interprets itself, and the Poet of our desolation begins to comprehend why free Esau loved his heritage of desert sand better than the bountiful richness of Egypt."

The Red Center

The enormous central Australian desert is aptly named, being as it is in the center of the country and very red. And something about the name also captures the quality of the color--a searing orange-red that can be arresting in its intensity. It is a landscape as demanding as it is beautiful. It is hot, cold, dry, and full of strange, scrubby bushes and little, skinny, wispy trees that look as if they have been hastily drawn by children. This unforgiving scenery is almost unpopulated by humans but is home to 25 species of mammals, 74 species of reptiles, 178 species of birds and 4 species of frogs. There are also vast populations of bugs, ants, enormous grasshoppers, venemous insects, and this time of year, flies. These flies look exactly like the common house fly but there are about a billion more of them and they are assertive. There are 20 or 30 of them on your clothes at any given moment and they don't hesitate to land on your face. Archeologists think that the humans who do live here have been in the area for at least 10,000 years. It takes that kind of tenacity to make it in the outback.

And arising out of the Simpson Desert is this magnificent, startling rock that changes color with the light, but which is mostly the same orange-red as the soil. At sunrise and sunset it glows, and anytime of day it has an uncanny presence to it. White settlers named it Ayers Rock, but it is now mainly called by its older Aboriginal name, Uluru. Forged by geological forces of arkose sandstone and exposed by erosion, it is maybe a quarter of mile high, and is thought to extend underground for 3-4 miles. Uluru is also a sacred site of the Yankunytjatjara and Pitjantjatjara peoples, local Aboriginal groups who call themelves Anangu. Uluru is central to Anangu law and legend (Tjukurpa). The Anangu believe that at the beginning of time the world was flat and formless, but very powerful ancestral beings (tjukuritja) travelled across the land and their movement and activity formed the landscape. Among the most important ancestral beings were the woman python (Kuniya), the poisonous snake (Liru), and the rufous-hare wallaby (Mala), all of whom came to Uluru, their rites and battles shaping the rock. Most of Uluru's countless crevices, caves, and undulations have an aboriginal backstory. For example, on one section of the rock there is a dark vertical line and a squiggly horizontal line that mark the site of a great battle between Kuniya the python and Liru the snake (see photo, and along the path is my dad shrouded in fly netting). Kuniya had travelled a great distance to Uluru carrying her eggs around her neck like a necklace. Setting her eggs at the base of Uluru (still visible as a mound of boulders), she set off in search of Liru, to avenge the death of her nephew who'd been killed by Liru. She found Liru by the water hole (still known as Kuniya) and did a powerful and magical dance. She spat poison at him, so that all the plants that grow there became poisonous. She threw her spears so forcefully that they created two large cracks on the other side of the rock. And Kuniya and Liru's forms were seared into the face of the rock. An ancient oral tradition is written into the landscape at Uluru and even if you don't know the stories, which mostly we don't, the place feels sacred, scarred and magical.

We also drove three hours north to Kings Canyon, a beautiful canyon formed 400 million years ago from compressed sand dunes. We did the Kings Canyon climb, hiking up to the rim and all the way around it. The 6-kilometer, 4-hour hike on rough terrain in 95-degree heat with a 1 year old, a 7 year old and a 71 year old was, in retrospect, foolhardy. Actually we realized it was foolhardy about halfway through when Matt left us for an hour to help the rangers carry an injured tourist back to where the helicopter could land. But miraculously Lucy mostly stayed in the backpack, my dad stayed upright, Jake proved to be an excellent hiker and we all made it down unharmed. We drove on to a camel ranch for gas, camel burgers and a fortuitous dingo sighting.

The funny thing about the intense climate and physical grandeur of the outback is that those weren't the things that most impressed Jake. When we asked him what he liked best about the red center, he said it was the mirages. He'd never seen a mirage before, and there in the heat, the road always appeared to be covered in water up ahead. For all the magic in the culture and landscape around us, he loved best the magical effects of light and heat on an ordinary asphalt road.

The Tallest Trees in the British Empire

Not long after we arrived in Melbourne, Matt and I saw a vintage travel poster for Australia that boasted the "The Tallest Trees in the British Empire" in a little town not far from here. Matt has wanted to see them since then, and this weekend, after my dad arrived for a visit, we all went out to the Yarra Valley. About an hour outside Melbourne is a beautiful valley of farms and vineyards that grows some of the best wine grapes in Australia, and just beyond the valley is a small range of mountains where you can still find miles of Mountain Ash trees. They are incredibly tall and straight, and while they were mostly chopped down to build ships and towns, some stands still remain and they are magnificent. My photo does not do them justice. There are enormous ferns growing around the base of the trees and it makes the landscape look prehistoric. Jake kept exclaiming that this is what it looked like in the time of the dinosaurs.

It was a lovely weekend. We stayed in the quaint town of Healesville, not far from the spectacular Healesville Animal Sanctuary, in a little cottage on the edge of cow pasture that had a trampoline in the back yard. Jake and Lucy were thrilled by the trampoline and had to be pried off of it so that we could go do all the fun things we had planned. They would have been just as happy to spend the weekend on the trampoline.

Jake and I took a hike across the cow pasture (being careful to avoid the cow patties) and up a hill that overlooked valley, vineyards, cows and sheep. We took pictures of each other, of cows, and a couple of us together. I had such a good time walking and talking with him. He really thrives out in nature.

We also went back to the animal santuary, where I first fell in love with the wombat. It was a warm day and my wombat was sleeping in his burrow.

But out in the open was another wombat named Maggie, who did us the favor of sleeping in such a way that we could get a good look at her. There are heaps of wombats roaming the countryside, what Australians call the bush; so many that there were a number of road signs alerting drivers to their presence.

On Sunday it was chillier and every half hour it would rain for 5 minutes, so we got soaked a few times, but we managed a couple wine tastings and a disorienting walk through a giant hedge maze that Jake loved. My poor jet-lagged dad hung in there and Lucy was a champ. As long as she is with Jake and doing the exact same thing as Jake, she is generally happy. We are thinking of enrolling her in second grade with him when we get home. We think she'll do just fine.

Simplicity

Our most recent discovery has been the Collingwood Children's Farm. In the heart of the city and yet utterly bucolic on the banks of the Yarra River, it is a working farm and community garden. It reminds us a lot of Shelburne Farms, which is an eco-yuppie kid paradise in Vermont that we have visited the last few summers, except without the grand robber barron architecture and expanses of estate-style pasture. Collingwood is distinctly simpler and deeply appealing in its simplicity, although there is something elegant about the peacocks perched in the rafters of the barn. There is a small blackboard at the entrance that keeps a talley of the spring births, and chicks, piglets, kids, lambs, calves and foals arrive daily now. Jake milked and brushed Bella the cow and spent a great deal of time feeding the goats. Lucy chased all the chickens and ducks under the picnic tables and than got up close and personal with a lamb, until it very gently head-butted her and she burst into tears. More than just a petting zoo, the kids watch and participate in some of the farm chores, like collecting eggs, making goat cheese and shearing sheep. The place was made to appeal to the pastoral nostalgia of urban-dwelling parents, and Matt & I are total suckers for it. And the kids happily indulged us.

The imagined simplicity of the farm made me think about how simple our life seems here, shorn as it is of many of the obligations of regular life, like house and car maintenance, juggling two jobs, coaching soccer, helping out at Jake's school and the endless odd tasks. Many of our obligations at home are joyful, such as walking Roxie, teaching, seeing friends and family. But with enough of them missing there is a strange and wonderful quiet to our lives here. As if we were camping, we go to bed earlier than usual because it is dark and the wine is drunk and the dishes are clean. Even when you add in an episode of some HBO show and the occasional night out, we still get more sleep than we do at home. Also like a camping trip, we look at the unfamiliar constellations and landscape and always see how lucky we are to be in such a beautiful place together having so much fun.

But simplicity is double-edged. Life is simpler here because we do less, we know fewer people and we have not put down roots. We are less attached to and entangled in a community of people, which in some ways is liberating. But it also sometimes makes us feel like what we are--long-term sightseers. And every once in a while, when I near the edge of the existential abyss that I try to avoid at all costs, I suspect that what we really are is superfluous. Then I wonder if we avoid the sinister possibilities of too simple a life by ornamenting and buttressing it with acquaintances, adventures, collections, commitments and convictions that our lives are more than that. Even the idyllically simple Collingwood Children's Farm keeps a few exotic breeds--like the magnificent Black Leghorn and Chinese Silky chickens--to decorate and anchor the farm yard.

Moral of the story: life would be simpler for everyone if self-indulgent psuedo-philosophers were not allowed to trot out their cosmic angst on blogs!

Translating English into English II

The Everyday
I have to confess that I've been a little disappointed by how few people actually say G'day mate. It must be too cliche for cosmopolitan Melbourne (pronounced Melbun). Most people say "how you going?" which sounds a little off to us because its so close to both "how's it going" and "how you doing" but clearly isn't either. Similarly, "good for you" is "good on ya!" here and always said with apparent enthusiasm. Another everyday expression is "no worries," used by almost everybody in place of "no problem" or "you're welcome." I occasionally hear "no dramas" as another substitute, which I quite enjoy, although it leaves me with a vague and erroneous sense that I'm being admonished.

The Edible
I hear some of my favorite Australian English in pubs, where we seem to spend a good deal of time since Lucy likes beer, Jake likes pool and everyone there likes having kids around. The standard 10-oz glass of beer is a "pot" (as opposed to a pint), and when your glass is empty, "the tides gone out." Standard pub food is chips (fries), calamari and "bangers and mash" (sausages and mashed potatoes). Most salads are made of "rocket" which is arugula. A more general term for food is "tucker" and it took us a while to figure out that an "entree" is a starter and not a main course.

The Quaint
A swimsuit is a "bathing costume" which is adorable in its quaintness. People are "keen" to do things they enjoy. And "cute" and "lovely" have suffered from inflation here, and are "gorgeous" and "beautiful." Children especially babies, are gorgeous and food tastes beautiful. I think Lucy is going to suffer a blow to her ego when we return to the U.S. and she is demoted to cute again.

The Pop
I also made an important discovery about the lyrics to Men at Work's "Land Down Under." This is probably obvious to anyone who watches pop-up videos, but I always thought the lyrics were: "We come from a land down under. Where women glow and men plunder." We went to a really great dinner party a couple nights ago with a couple of families from Jake's school and ended the evening watching music videos fom the 80s (my idea of a perfect evening). Anglo-American cultural heremony means Australians in the 80s also made out to Roxie Music, danced to Madonna, partied to Talking Heads, played Kate Bush on road trips, and still know all the lyrics to Graceland. So "Land Down Under" came on, and my kind hosts enlightened me to the fact that men in Oz don't plunder so much as "chunder" (throw up). It makes so much more sense now that I've been here. I haven't checked the lyrics on-line; they may actually do both.

The Code
There is also some residual rhyming slang here in Australia, related to Cockney rhyming slang and brought over by working class Brits. An American friend of ours here, Kevin, also a recent arrival, has a really good website on which he explains rhyming slang. A common phrase (sometimes itself slang) is rhymed with the word you want to communicate, such as "bread and honey" with "money," and then the rhyming word is usually dropped, so that bread itself becomes slang for money. Or "billy lids" (a billy is a metal pot used for boiling water) is rhymed with "kids" and billy becomes slang for kid.

The following comes from Kevin's website:

I sorted this out as I finally figured out why people sometimes referred to me as a septic":

Septic = Americans, who are "yanks" = "septic tank"... or just "septic" in rhyming slang.

Just a few more examples:

Loaf = head, as in "loaf of bread" - so, "look at the loaf on that guy Gary!"

Al Capone = phone - so, "hand me the Al Capone"

Olivers = drunk, as in "pissed" like "Oliver Twist" - so, "last night I was Olivers"

Captains = look, as in Captain Cook, with "ava" a shot version of "have a" - so, "Ava captains at that girl!

So ava captains at these pictures of my outing with Jake and his friend Tyler to Luna park a few days ago. There the normally cautious Jake embraced the rollercoaster with gusto and the three of us had all kinds of stomach-churning fun.

Idling

What are we doing here? A number of people have asked us that. Its a good question, and one we should all ask ourselves from time to time. I suppose Matt is working at being idle, if that isn't a contradiction, and I am idly working. Jerome K. Jerome http://www.jeromekjerome.com/man.htm apparently once said that "It is imposible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do." Our six months here are set against a life back home in which we both have plenty of work to do, so my sabbatical is meant to be an interlude of idling for all of us.

Sabbaticals, as far as I can tell, are meant for working and rejuvenation. I am trying to do both. So on most days, after dropping Jake at school, I bike to work (I am a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne law school with absolutely no academic responsibilities), have a coffee, check my email and look at the New York Times on line, do some work, go to yoga or pilates, have a quick lunch, do a little more work, and if by this point I have made it until late afternoon when the sun streams through my office window, then I am compelled by the need to articulate one idea before leaving for the day and by my sleepy, sun-induced delusions of originality to extrude a few more sentences of scholarly drivel. Then I bike home. As you might gather from this account, I work short, semi-productive days. My aim is idle work, to get just enough done to avoid self-recrimination and have plenty of time left over to be with my family. So far so good.

The content of my work is, in one piece, the way cultural evolution and fusion make certain cultural property claims problematic in that they implicitly invoke notions of cultural purity. I am looking particularly at the dispute over the use Native American mascots in college sports and have been intrigued by the way the politically correct and the culturally correct cut against each other in this context. The other paper I am working on is about law, film and translation theory and coniders the way that film visually translates legal ideas into the domain of culture.

Matt is on a leave of absence from his job and is not working. He is our domestic goddess. He hangs out with Lucy, does the shopping, the cooking and the laundry. Homemaking here in Melbourne has a vaguely romantic and European feel to it, especially if it's temporary. Laundry gets hung out on the line to dry. Shopping involves not only the grocery store, but the butcher, fishmonger, deli and bakery as well. Matt went to the fishmonger yesterday in fact, and brought home a local fish called John Dory http://www.theworldwidegourmet.com/fish/divers/johndory.htm. He then spent much of dinner saying, "John Dory, this is good fish!" Matt and Lucy have joined a playgroup of tots and mums, and Matt put a kid seat on his bike, so he and Lucy cycle around the city. I stay home with Lucy one morning a week, and we now have a babysitter named Fee who comes two afternoons during the week so Matt can take some longer bike rides. He hasn't ridden to Sydney yet. Fee (short for Fiona) is a former child care worker who has gone back to college, she lives next door to us, drives a red motorcycle, and is incredibly sweet.

The evenings are getting longer and warmer and allow us even more time for idling, eating out and walking up the street to get gelato at the Gelo Bar. After the kids go to bed, Matt and I have been obsessively working our way through a few HBO series on DVD. We are currently halfway through Deadwood, which, among its many virtues, elevates swearing to an art form. The weekends are dedicated to slightly more energetic and adventursome forms of idling, about which you will unboubtedly hear more.

Rainforest and Reef

Coconut Beach, at Cape Tribulation, is where two world heritage sites--the Daintree Rainforest and the Great Barrier Reef--meet in one dazzling landscape. It's three hours by plane to Cairns and then another three hours by car from the airport, including a ferry ride over a croc-infested river and a winding one-and-a-half lane road through rainforest and along palm-lined beaches. It is literally where the pavement ends. Past Cape Tribulation you need a 4WD to make it over the rutted gravel roads. When we walked out onto an empty Coconut Beach last Thursday my first thought was that paradise was closer than I'd imagined. I'd thought you would have had to travel to the ends of the earth to see it. My second thought was that I had, in some sense, travelled to the ends of the earth. It was here, in 1770, that Captain Cook, the first European to find Australia, had run his ship into the reef. He wrote in his journal that "here began all our trials and tribulations," and henceforth this beautiful spot was called Cape Tribulation.

Just a few yards in from the beach is the "longhouse" of the Coconut Beach Resort, a place which has perfected high-end eco-tourism. The rooms are all individual cabins hidden in the rainforest, from which you see nothing but green and hear nothing but breeze, rain and an abundance of birds. We saw a lot of the orange-footed scrub fowl and the bush turkey, and heard a lot of the butcherbird, but we didn't catch sight of the elusive and endangered cassowary.

In the tropical climate, the weather isn't warm or cold, but wet or dry. One of the pleasures of the constant warmth is that all restaurants and many stores and homes have pleanty of roof but fewer walls than you'd expect, so that the distinction between indoors and outdoors sort of melts away. Our cabin had no windows, just screens and shutters. It was an opulent camping experience--falling asleep and waking up to the sounds of rustling leaves, a cacophany of bird calls and an occasional pounding rain.

The palm canopy inside the rainforest. The Daintree has no large predators, except for the wild pigs that were brought over from Asia a few hundred years ago and have been mercilessly rooting up the rainforest ever since. There are however plenty of colorful birds, lizards, frogs and snakes and many strange and marvelous botanical sights: trees whose trunks flower; strangler figs that germinate in the canopy, send roots down to the forest floor and take over a hundred years to kill the host tree; undulating vines; the purple cassowary plum; native varieties of nutmeg, walnut and mahogany; buttressed tree roots; and the oldest known flowering plant, the ribbonwood, which has been growing in the area for the past 120 million years and which the aborigines called idiot fruit because it is posonous to all animals. Lucy really rolled with the punches during this trip and missed a lot of naps, but it was in the peaceful green world of the forest that she lost it, had a good 15-minute meltdown, frightened away all the wildlife and finally fell asleep in my arms.

On the boat, coming back from our first day of snorkeling. Jake is already asleep. Everyone snorkelled except Lucy. I can't begin to convey what the reef looks like close up. The coral alone was Seussian in its fantastical array of colors, shapes, textures, and sizes. There were orange dinnner plates big enough to serve up an adult, purple antlers, green heads of lettuce, pink boulders, shimmering yellow tentacles, and blue spikes, all made of coral. And the parrot fish, angel fish, clown fish, giant clams, blue sea stars and giant turles weren't shabby either.

After three days at Cape Tribulation, we headed down Captain Cook Highway to Port Douglas, a sweet beach town a couple hours south of Cape Trib, where we spent a few more days after Matt's parents left us. The place has a peaceful easy feeling, long beaches of soft sand and warm water and a lot of good restaurants. A block from our hotel was the Beach Shack, which had only outdoor tables, a sand floor, hanging lanterns, great food and Van Morrison on the stereo. We ate there two nights in a row. We also found a terrific breakfast place--Soul 'n Pepper--right on the warf, which is now Jake's favorite restaurant of all time because his scrambled eggs and toast came with a mountain of eggs. They must have used 5 or 6 eggs. Being as eggs are Jake's favorite food, he announced that his own personal heaven would have a Soul 'n Pepper on every corner.

I love this picture of Jake, taken after his third snorkeling trip. He and I had a great time floating in the water, holding hands and silently pointing out the magical sights to each other. He spotted a giant turtle and we followed it for awhile. We watched the clams with their thick green and purple lips close up when they felt the current change. An enormous angel fish came up to us sideways to check us out with one eye.

We knew Jake would love the rainforest, and he did, but we weren't sure how well he'd take to snorkeling. It can cause a little vertigo at first, breathing underwater and inhabiting a world so unlike our own, and it took him awhile to get a feel for it, but once he did he was addicted and wanted to go out as many times as possible. He and Matt were out snorkeling in a coral cove just off Port Douglas the same day Steve Irwin died at a reef not far from there.

Our last afternoon in Port Douglas, after one of the best weeks of our lives.

Penguin Parade

Not too far from Melbourne is a beach that belongs to the penguins and where all year round, every evening just as it gets dark, they come ashore, waddle across the beach and into the grassy dunes to find their burrows. It is the pristine Summerland Beach, on the tip of Phillip Island, in the Bass Straight, in the Southern Ocean. You drive out of town in the afternoon, past the suburbs and small towns and by the time you get out into countryside, the dark green pastures of sheep and cattle are striped in rich late-afternoon light and elongated shadows. It looks a little like Ireland with the expanse of rolling green fields and water all around. At Summerland Beach, the national park has tried to accommodate hundreds of thousands of tourists annually while still protecting the penguins. Development is minimal, although there is small pavillion that provides snacks, educational material and a gift shop filled with all sizes of stuffed penguins. Once outside, no cameras or cell phones are allowed (the image above comes from the internet). Long wooden paths take you over the dunes to a low set of cement bleachers built right into the sand. We had a picnic and looked though binoculars at a kangaroo on the hillside while we waited for it to get dark. When dusk finally settled into dark and the pengins could be reasonably sure that the birds of prey were in their nests, they started emerging out of the surf up and down the beach, usually in groups of 6 or 8. They splashed around a bit, made sure the coast was clear, and then waddled across the sand toward the dunes, often joining other groups that were making their way across the beach. This nightly ritual is called the Penguin Parade, which makes you think they might hop out of the ocean with top hats and canes, but the event is magical in its simplicity. The park turns on high, soft lights so you can see, everyone is quiet, and the penguins do their thing. When penguins are out at sea fishing, they are very solitary, but once ashore, they become gregarious, social and loud. As we headed back along the walkways, we could see them continuing their journey over the dunes. Here they meet up with their mates, hang out, play, preen, breed in the spring and sleep. We saw a couple huddled in their burrow, a whole group making their way deeper into the dunes, and penguins courting, chasing and looking for each other. More than anything, we heard them. The dunes were raucous with a dazzling variety of sounds, all of them belonging to the penguins: caws, hee-haws, screeches, rattling song, whistles and lilting calls.

The Australian Little Penguin is the smallest penguin you can find. They are about 16 inches high and weigh 2 to 3 pounds. They are native to Southern and Western Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand and they come ashore mainly on islands to avoid predatory animals, such as foxes and dogs. Phillip Island is the largest colony of Little Penguins, with about 20,000 birds. They form long-term monogomous pairs, with most penguins having one mate for life, although one of the rangers told us they have an 18-30% "divorce rate" which tends to result from either death of the partner or infidelity. They breed between August and October, with each pair producing two eggs. Although both eggs usually hatch, generally only one of the chicks lives to maturity as the parents cannot provide enough food for both. They feed the larger, stronger chick until it is satisfied and give the food that is left to the smaller chick. The parents share equally in incubating and raising the chicks, trading off daily between foraging for food and protecting the nest. When the chicks are 3 weeks old they are mature enough to stay alone, and both parents will go out to forage during the day. The chicks wait at the edge of the burrow at dusk squawking for their meal of regurgitated food. Once the young are independent, they do not stay with their parents but go off to join other colonies.

As we walked back to the car, Jake reflected on how much our family resembles penguins. He noticed that Matt & I take turns watching our young, like penguin parents, and that Lucy waddles like the penguins when she walks. Jake didn't mention this, but we also have had the pleasure of a visit from Matt's parents this last week, which allows us feel some of the safety and fun of a colony. I kept wondering how they find their mates and their burrows, although I suposse they do it the same way we do. Indeed, from a penguin's point of view, we must seem indistinguishable as well, and our burrow complexes bewilderingly vast.

Tomorrow we all head up to Queensland in northeast Australia to explore the rainforst and the Great Barrier Reef. I doubt we'll have internet access, so we'll be incommunicado until late next week.

St. Kilda

St. Kilda is a beautiful and bohemian neighborhood south of downtown that sits on the bay. It was where the great Melbourne entrepreneurs built mansions at the end of the 19th century, and by the turn of the century new tram lines brought middle class sea bathers, dance halls, theaters, an amusement park and revelling pleasure seekers. The Depression and World War II brought hard times to the neighborhood, the pleasure turned illicit and the area was quite seedy until its regentrification began about 25 years ago. It is the story of many neighborhoods.

It was gorgeous last Sunday, so we drove down there and walked along the esplanade where there is a craft market on Sundays. We mostly played on the beach. Jake and Lucy are crazy for the beach. Jake found two boys from New York, and they built an elaborate Romanesque fortress that channelled the surf

until Lucy came along like godzilla, sat on their architectural triumph in her enormous soggy diaper and flung handfuls of wet sandy ruins into the air.

It is the story of many civilizations, played out in about an hour.

The seaside amusement park in St. Kilda is very reminiscent of Coney Island, and for good reason. Twenty of the men who helped design Coney Island were imported to help build Luna Park (named for one of Coney Island's main venues). Like its inspiration and namesake, Luna Park was a turn-of-the-century marvel, its rides and side shows evoked exotic lands across the sea, famous discoveries and disasters, such as the San Francisco earthquake, and human curiosities. It was a place of illusion and spectacle and like the original Luna Park, it glittered with the novelty of thousands of electric lights. Its wooden rollercoaster, the Scenic Railway, which began operating when the park opened in 1912, is the only rollercoaster from that period which has been in continuous operation. The postcard below was printed by the Rose Stereograph Company.

On the drive home Matt wondered who St. Kilda was. Jake suggested she might be the saint who watches over drunkards. We thought that was an odd response, until Jake told us that Tin Tin had thought such a saint was the only explanation for Captain Haddock's continued well-being. On further inquiry Matt discovered there was no St. Kilda. The neighborhood was named for a yacht named the Lady of St. Kilda that had been moored for some time in the harbor. The ship's name came from a group of Scottish islands, which in turn got their name from an old norse word for shield: skilda. From a misread map notation Saint Kilda was born. Incidently, in a cruel historical twist, just as Melbourne's St. Kilda was enjoying its heyday, Scottish St. Kilda was experiencing a tragic decline. Inhabited since prehistoric times, at the end of the 19th century 80% of the islands' children began dying in infancy from tetnus, which they got from poor midwifery practices. By 1930 there were only 36 inhabitants of St. Kilda left and they were voluntarily evacuated to the Scottish mainland. The islands have had no permanent population since.

International Parasites

Australia is isolated enough to allow for the development for all manner of strange creatures unknown elsewhere in the world, but the immensity of ocean surrounding it hasn't been an obstacle to many forms of global pestilence. We've encountered three varieties in the last week alone: ants, lice and multinational corporations.

Ants don't digust me, even in their long, relentless columns that lead them to the tiniest scap of food flung by Lucy to the far reaches of the kitchen. If anything they inspire awe at their sheer numbers, and they make me think how all the ingenuity and technology of advanced civilization can't keep them out when they want in, how they live among us at all times, by the billions, in shadow cities in the soil and crevices of our own metropolises. They make me aware of all the cracks and fissures in the edifaces we create to make ourselves believe we have tamed nature, and that I find a little disquieting.

Head lice, on the other hand, are truly disgusting, foul and loathsome vermin. They don't just break in for a late-night nibble, they feast on our bodies. There was an outbreak of lice in Jake's class, and though he remained louse-free for quite awhile, he finally fell victim, and then I did too. They look like elongated ticks; they are vile, repugnant bloodsuckers with lots of little legs. And they are hard to kill, although I think we have succeeded in massacring them with odiferous, potent eucalyptus oil. There is one, and only one, thing I like about lice--that in the singular one is a louse (which according to the OED is where we get the word lousy, used in its generically derogatory form as early as the 14th centure by Chaucer). It made me feel a little better about our insect invasion when I called a friend in DC a few days ago and discovered they were also battling ants and lice.

And finally, my brand new digital camera broke. It just sputtered and gasped out an error code and then stopped. After a few days worth of correspondence with the cyborgs that work in Canon's customer service department as well as several calls to repair shops here, it appears that it will cost me a few hundred dollars to fix it and the warranties don't apply abroad. It turns out I can forgive ants and lice because they are creatures of necessity, but I can't find it in my heart to forgive Canon Corporation for designing disposable, pre-obsolete products, for providing worthless warranties, and for exploiting both workers and consumers in order to increase their profits. Needless to say they, far more than the other global parasites, have motivated this rant.

My camera debacle has me walking around muttering obscenities, which have become increasingly comic. Thanks to Paul & Ed, Jake is obsessed with Tin Tin books, so we've had to beg, borrow and buy a bunch of them here. These days I feel like I have big white dialogue balloons above my head full of the incensed expletives of Captain Haddock: troglodytes!... ectoplasm!... bashi-bazouks!... technocrats!... filibuster!!... gyroscope!!... politicians!!... diploducus!!...dipsomaniacs!!!

The absence of image today is brought to you by Canon Corp.

The Wombat

So I love wombats. Ever since we read the wonderful kids book, Diary of a Wombat, to Jake and Julien I have liked the idea of wombats. Now that I have made the acquaintance of one, I feel more strongly about them. This weekend has been really beautiful in Melbourne, and yesterday we drove out to Healesville Animal Sanctuary with Tyler, Jenni and Brett. Healesville is about an hour out of the city, right in the middle of the Yarra Valley, which is wine country. It looks like Napa Valley, but with a lot of grazing sheep where there aren't vineyards. The Animal Sanctuary is full of native animals. The Pink cockatoos were sitting in the trees. The Kangaroos were lying around. The Ibis trolled the picnic tables looking for scraps of food. One tried to take Lucy's cheese out of her hand. The koala bear slept wedged between branches, but for a moment stretched and we saw that it was curled around its baby. We saw a birds of prey show and an Aborigine man demonstrate boomerangs. Jenni and Brett brought a delicious picnic and good wine and Jake and Tyler bought hand-made boomerangs. But the wombat really did it for me. This guy was not in his burrow, but waddling around his enclosure and then he came right up to us, looked us over, and leaned against the fence, as if he were having a visit.

Wombats, as it turns out, have very little fear of humans. They are strange, enigmatic creatures. Once thought to be simple-minded, it turns out they have the most developed brain of any marsupial. They are intelligent but very obstinate. Shy but inquisitive. Playful but solitary. One website mentioned that when running, a wombat "may indulge in shoulder rolls and somersaults." One doesn't think of a wombat running at all, but although they are generally slow-movers, when they need to they can cover 100 meters as quickly as an Olympic sprinter. Though small, they can summon immense reserves of strength. Wombats are dense and powerful, and this, combined with their stubbornness, make them prone to plowing through obstacles rather than going around them. Their primary defense is an exceedingly tough rear. When in danger, a wombat jumps into its burrow and uses its bum to plug up the hole. With almost no tail and a very solid rump, there is nothing for the predator to get hold of. Brett told us that if you run into the back side of a wombat, it can total your car. In fact, on the drive up to Healesville we passed a wombat highway sign. Collisions can be bad for everyone involved.

Not surprisingly, I suppose, wombat poop is as weird as wombats. Their droppings are cube-shaped and called "scats." Each wombat's scats have a unique smell. With terrible eye-sight and an excellent sense of smell, wombats use their scats like bread crumbs in a forest. They leave scats outide their burrow so they can find it again and also so they can tell if the burrow belongs to someone else. Wombats give birth to underdeveloped young that stay in the pouch to nurse for two years. The pouches are backward-facing so that they don't fill up with dirt when the wombat digs and burrows. And my favorite wombat fact: they sometimes sleep on their backs with their legs up in the air, and they snore. What's not to love?

Photo credits: my camera died before we met the wombat, so this photo is from the internet.

Translating English into English

These Australians seem to have a different word for everything. They call gelato gelo. They call Jello jelly. And they call jelly jam. The differences are endless and yet the fundamental structure and vocabulary range so much the same that translation is effortless and fun. Jake has begun keeping an Australian dictionary; a lexicon of second-grade. Here are a few of his entries:

tag = tiggy
dodge ball = poison
ketchup = tomato sauce
lots = heaps
candy = lollies

My favorite recent moment of cognitive dissonance was when Jake came home and told us that his class' reading teacher was named Reader. I burst out laughing and told him that he had probably misheard. He insisted that he hadn't. And he was right. The reading teacher is Rita, and indeed, as improbable as it is given her job, it is pronounced Reader. It still cracks me up.

This past Saturday we drove out of the city, halfway around the long arching bay and down the Mornington Penninsula. We stopped at a little tiny cove from where you could look out across the bay and see the Melbourne skyline in the far distance. The water was so still and the late-afternoon sun hit the red cliffs and made everything glow. Most of the time we were the only ones there. Jake, who is not a natural athlete, nonetheless has his dad's gift for frisbee, and so Jake and Matt and I played frisbee while Lucy sat happily nearby eating huge handfuls of sand. Jake has very recently reached the stage of physical coordination that we can play frisbee and catch with him and he is just good enought that it is actually fun. I'm so excited to have arrived at this moment of parenting. Jake is blooming in a lot of ways, and seems suddenly more thoughtful and mature. Although he is still a major space cadet. Lucy is becoming ever more like herself. She is affectionate, funny, quick to laugh, quick to scream, knows exactly what she wants and is basically the boss of all of us. As Jake said recently, "When you're with Lucy its impossible not to have a laugh." She walks around the house unaided, but likes to hold onto a finger when we are outside. She doesn't much like help eating anymore and shovels food into her mouth and onto the floor at an equal rate. Her favorite activities are tackling Jake, looking for Jake under blankets and riding on Jake. Jake adores her.

Lucy herself occasions plenty of translation as well. Her new word is bruh-ber, which means, of course, brother. When Jake says to her, "say bruh-ber," she shakes her head no and laughs like crazy.


By the way, our high-tech DC number is finally up and running. You can call us at (202) 536-4132 and it will reach us here. Try it--its wild.