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.