A wilful, lavish land

We had a wonderful weekend. We went to brunch with some of Kim and Llewellyn's friends here, a mix of American expatriots and Aussies, where Jake discovered George, an Australian 7-year-old who can match him in eating, talking and elaborate, imaginative warfare. Jake was smitten. We went to the farmer's market at the neo-hippy, eco-park Ceres, which we love so much. There Jake and Lucy got to feed the chucks while I sipped a dandelion latte and Matt bought freshly-laid eggs.

And best of all, we went to the zoo, and saw our first living marsupials, monotremes and various other extravagant wildlife. The photos above are all from our zoo outing. The mini penguins are local to Victoria and about as cute as it gets. The Emu shares with the Kangaroo the distinction of being 1) bizarre and 2) the national symbol of Australia; both are on the country's seal. I couldn't get pictures of either the wombat or the platypus, because they are both creatures that crave the dark, and flash photography disturbs them, but you can walk into underground caves and see the playpus swimming around or the wombat lying around. I loved the wombat, a little boxy bear of a creature that looks at you expressionlessly for a moment and then wanders off to curl up again. I love the sense of perpetual sleepiness they convey even when they are active. Matt's favorite part was not the platypus, but the sign for the Sidney Myer Platypusary (which you can see behind Jake & Lucy). We all loved the kangaroos, which are wild, but not caged. They wander around a very large section of the zoo which you enter through double gates, but within that area there are no significant fences. The only thing that keeps them away from visitors is their own distrust. But you are close enough to really see them move, and even when you know how kanagroos are supposed to move and you've heard what they can do with their tails, to see them do it is spectacular. It is ergonomically miraculous. They basically have 5 limbs. And the birds were beautiful: barking owls, diamond doves, the colorful budgerigar, all sorts of kites, finches, honeyeaters, robins, kingfishers, and woodswallows.

One of the kitschier aspects of the Melbourne Zoo is that in the Australian animal section they have little snippets of Australia's unofficial national poem printed on posts here and there. The poem is called My Country, by Dorothea Mackellar, and it is one of the most wonderfully excessive pieces of verse I have ever read. It has jeweled seas, sweeping plains, sapphire-misted mountains, droughts and flooding rains. The last stanza begins:

An opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land--
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand--

And yet for all the unintended humor of the poem, it makes sense to have its lines scattered through the zoo because there is something about the place and its egg-laying mammals, its trees that know to save water in their trunks, its extravagance of poisonous animals, and its scrappy, ferocious oddities that exceed the orderliness, the taming cages and fit-for-family entertainment of a zoo. Being at a zoo here, you realize that what is most interesting about Australia is too lavish for a zoo.

Homeville

Matt couldn't abide the bourgeois banality of our previous blog title (web address is still the same until our technological skill catches up with our social critique), so we are changing it to Homeville. Inspired by one of the cottages on our block, the name is appropriate in so many ways. The idea of home has been a preoccupation of mine since I was a nomadic child. My mother always said, where ever you are is home. I wanted to believe her and I have been trying ever since to make the zen-like philosophy of the snail my own, but with minimal success. I now tell Jake a variation on that same theme whenever he feels homesick: where ever we are together is our home.

When Matt and I were married Jeremy spoke elequently about the idea of "home," of how place and love and ritual and community are all home builders. Matt and I ended our vows to each other with the phrase: "You are home." And we continue to aspire to making part of the work of our partnership building the concentric circles of home, bringing into the sphere of comfort and familiarity more people and places and ideas. Homeville represents for us the challenge of moving beyond our ordinary view of home, beyond the well-worn shelter that holds our treasures, beyond the town we know, past ancenstral places. It is the challenge of maintaining a core of intimacy and also being a global citizen with a sense of compassion for and commitment to people we haven't met and can't understand. Like my mother's wisdom, its an aspiration more than a reality, but its a worthy aspiration; and it's one that helps us find peace and pleasure on this faraway little corner of earth that reminds us so much of home.

If you are reading this, if you have this address, you are already part of our home. And for all our cosmopolitan strivings, we still miss "home," and would love to hear from you. This homepage is not on a cul-de-sac; we chose this location for the two-way traffic. So leave us a comment. It doesn't need to be crafted or clever. Tell us what you had for dinner or what you are reading or what makes you different from other mammals.

Behinds and Blue Whales

We got a taste of local culture on Saturday--we went to a footy game. The Australian Football League (AFL) is made up of teams organized by neighborhood, so we went to see our own Carlton team play Essondon in what is dubbed the wooden spoon contest, the battle not to be the last place team in the league. We went with Jake's best friend from school, Tyler, and his parents, Jenni and Brett (see above photo). They are really sweet people and were great guides for what is a nearly-incomprehensible sport. It was a beautiful day, cool and sunny, and the game was at the Melbourne Cricket Grounds. The MCG is a famous stadium here, built for the 1956 Olympics and recently spruced up for the Commonwealth Games. It is grand (it holds about 90,000) and clean, but not especially charming. They play footy on a giant oval, like cricket, which looks very elegant after all the retangles and diamonds of American sports. Footy seems to have very few actual rules and even fewer fouls. It's total mayhem and it's pretty exciting. The players kick the ball, pass the ball (they can't throw it, but they punch it like a volleyball serve), run with the ball and tackle each other with abandon. There are 4 goal posts which make one central goal and two side goals. Kicking the ball through the central goal gets a team 6 points. The side goals are called "behinds" and kicking a behind (no joking) earns a team 1 point. The fans are loud, the players are volitile, and the whole thing is fast-paced and high-scoring. The final score was a tie: 105-105. I'm not sure what that means for the wooden spoon. Matt's comment on the whole thing was classic Matt (if you know about his obsession with sports uniforms): "We may not be good at world sports, but America leads the world in uniform design."

Yesterday we took Jake and Lucy to the Melbourne Museum, which is new, beautiful and very kid-friendly. The top two pictures are from that outing. Jake is standing in front of the skeleton of a Pygmie Blue Whale which washed up on shore here a few years back. I don't have the stomach Jake has for the natural sciences. The accompanying video of the whale's autopsy, which Jake found riveting, I found disgusting: it shows two men in rubber boots wading through mountains of decaying whale blubber. Lucy is riding an unidentified species of giant turtle. We also had a chance to see the taxidermied versions of all the native animals: kangaroos, wallabies, koalas, emus, wombats, tasmanian devils, dingos and many more. One detail I picked up which might interest Jeremy: monotremes, such as the platypus, are distinguished from other mammals not simply by laying eggs, but by laying soft-shelled ones. But this is probably pretty elementry stuff for a monotreme enthusiast.

North Carlton

Above are some pictures of our neighborhood, North Carlton, which we love. It is a neighborhood of wide streets and Victorian cottages (the first and last pictures are typical), many of them with their names carved into the ornate plaster work that trims the roof. Some are tiny old workers cottages, and others are quite grand. There are cafes, newspaper shops and milk bars (small convenience stores) everywhere. The strip of shops above is right around the corner from our house. There are even two 24-hour, drive-thru florists in our neighborhood. If you can tell a society's priorities by what they make available 24-hours a day and by drive-thru, then Melbournians prefer begonias to burgers.

The third picture is inside Jake's school, which looks like it was built in the 1930s or 40s. It is beautifully designed. The big central hall has high windows with stained glass trim that flood the building with light. The classrooms border the central hall; Jake's classroom is at the far end on the left. What you don't see in this picture is the loom that is currently set up and staffed by parents so that kids can try their hand at weaving, or the little garden right outside. I noticed that the water fountain had a sign in kid scrawl pasted above it which read: "No way sting worta." Nothing like phonetic spelling to illuminate the intricacies of the accent. Its funny what Australians do with Rs: they add and substract them liberally. So there is an R in the middle of "water" but not at the end. There is a kid at Jake's school named Conner Miller, which they pronounce Conna Milla (make the vowels sharper and it could almost be Bostonian). And the fascination with accents works both ways of course. We heard that Jake's classmates are all trying to imitate his American accent, and another parent told us that her son said that Jake's accent sounded "very clean."

Australia, like the U.S., is an old colonial outpost, and therefore, also like the U.S., it tends to lack the grandeur and old-world charm of Europe. But more and more we are seeing and appreciating the charms that are distinctly Australian. The people are open and warm and kids are welcome everywhere. The city is dotted with majestic Eucalyptus and Gum trees. Its seems like people are always stopping for coffee or a cup of tea. We are relaxing into life in Melbourne and starting to really love it.

Baby Steps Visuals

Baby Steps

Literal baby steps: Lucy took a couple steps today without holding on to our hands. It was so great to see her amazement, or maybe it was our own amazement reflected back at us. And something about the arrangement--us on the floor ready to catch her and her toddling between us--made me think those first steps are all of parenting in a microcosm. The bittersweet thrill of letting go and seeing your child negotiate the world on their own in ever new ways.

Metaphorical baby steps: we are slowingly settling in. We moved into our house on Saturday (as requested by Ed, visuals will be posted) which turns out to be a ski chalet. We live in a neighborhood of incredibly quaint Victorian cottages (I'll post pictures of the neighborhood soon), but we live in a 1970s Tahoe-style ski chalet. When I went to see the place last week I was heartened to find a beautiful and abundant lemon tree in the back patio, but when we showed up Satrurday morning, the landlord mentioned that the gardener had been around "to tidy up a bit," and all that was left of the lemon tree was a hacked-up skeletal trunk. No leaves and no lemons and barely any branches to speak of. I took it kind of hard and spent a chunck of Saturday feeling really bad for myself that I lived a gazillion miles from home in a ski chalet with no lemon tree in the back patio. All those empty white walls and the grey wet sky outside made me feel very homesick. But things have improved considerably. I bought flowers and found a framed Matisse print at the thift store. And we got out of the house. Sunday was cool but dry and we went to a local ecological park called Ceres. It's a lovely place stocked with Aussie neo-hippies, compost toilets, solar power, a nursery of indigenous plants, a cafe serving surprisingly tasty organic food, much of it grown in the communal garden, expansive play areas, a mock Indonesian village and tons of chickens (except they are usually called "chucks" here). And lots of signage explaining how to live a more ecologically senstive life. It was great. It felt like we were in Santa Cruz. And we have also begun meeting a few people, which helps. Our landlords are a couple who live across the street, and they are both really lovely. They have a couple of chucks and some bunnies in the back yard, and inside four boys between the ages of 7 and 14. Jake went over and found boy heaven: multi-artillery warfare, legos, snacks, and piles of Tin Tin books. The best thing about losing the house we'd originally planned on renting is that the people who live there are also great and have been incredibly welcoming (that and the fact that the ski chalet is two and half blocks from Jake's school). Louise invited me to go out with her "Mums Group" last night, which is 5 or 6 women whose kids go to Princes Hill Primary and who go out drinking on Sunday nights after the kids go to bed. It was great fun being out with them yucking it up in a pub. But nothing has softened our landing here more than having our friend Kim (from Wesleyan) living here with her husband Llewellyn and their son Jarrah. Their presence and abiding friendship has warmed the winter and made the ski chalet feel like home.

Food & Drink

So Jake has discovered fish and chips and thinks he has found culinary perfection. I heard him telling his friend Sarah on the phone yesterday, "It's like an ENORMOUS fish stick and it comes with fries, which they call chips. Fish and chips come from England. English people brought them when they tried to discover Australia." (I like the "tried").

Lucy we think was separated at birth from her real Australian family. She eats like an Aussie. She loves their traditional meat pies (which are truly foul) and guzzles the beer, or would if we didn't keep reclaiming the bottle.

Matt has also focused his epicurean research on beer and has found joy in Victoria Bitter on draught. It is creamy and delicious.

Night before last I had a "Roo Salad." I was momentarily shocked that they ate such adorable creatures until I reminded myself that we (the carnivorous we) devour lambs and bunnies by the thousands. Kangaroo meat is lean, full of iron, and quite flavorful, without being gamey. And it goes nicely with roasted beets and goat cheese.

I've also noticed two little linguistic variations in food products with big psychological consequences. Skim milk is called "skinny milk" and cookies are "biscuits." Both lead to increased consumption, something you'd think U.S. marketing companies would have picked up on by now.

Everything Old in New Again

We've been in Melbourne for five days and already so much has happened. The most important being that Jake turned 7 on July 10th. He also started school that day. Matt spent the early morning prowling Rathdowne Street, which is full of bakeries and cafes, buying up all the cupcakes he could find so that Jake could celebrate his birthday with his new classmates. I put the boxes of treats in a duffle bag and Jake and I rode the tram to school. He was so nervous about starting a new school, in a new country, in a new hemisphere, but he was also very brave. The school looks great; it is relaxed and informal and the kids seem creative and eccentric in that sweet, unselfconscious way kids can be. On the first day Jake helped put on a play about spies (I think Jake had a lot of input on the production's theme). The students call the teachers by their first names. It reminds me a lot of my grade school in Claremont, Sycamore, which its graduates still credit with nuturing the best parts of themselves. When I picked Jake up from school and his teacher told him how glad she was that he was in the class, he told her that he had loved it. But the bravery that the day required (coupled with jet lag) took its toll, and in the middle of his birthday party at home that evening, Jake curled up on the couch and went to sleep.

My small act of bravery was driving our car. Matt and I kept begging each other to pick up the car because neither of us dared drive on the left. I lost that battle. And to my surprise I discovered that we'd bought a manual transmission car, so I also had to drive with the stick shift on my left, which turned out to be much harder than driving in the left lane. I made it home without running anyone over or driving headfirst into another car, but it must have looked like a classic comedy scene to the other drivers on the road. Every time I went to signal, I turned the windshield wipers on and I was concentrating so hard on driving that it took some effort to turn them off again.

Its funny being in a place that is so familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. It makes the most ordinary acts, like going to school or driving a car or grocery shopping, novel and interesting. It is one of the gifts of being here that we are given the opportunity to reflect on so many little things that we have long since taken for granted.