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.