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.