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There are a number of myths which appear to have captured the collective imagination here in Australia. The idea behind the slogan in the title is that all newcomers get an equal opportunity to make something of themselves in this, the “lucky” land. It is not dissimilar to the notion that drives the dreams of Americans. Mark Watson, a historian from this country who spent a long time in America, found it deeply embedded in the psyche of just about every individual he met there. It amazed him that someone living inside a box on Broadway could still believe in the American dream, and tout the glorious opportunities at hand in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
The mythology is a little more mundane here. Perhaps the lack of a Hollywood dream factory, Silicon Valley phenomenon, or “Horatio Alger” myth (Australian readers will have to look that up) dilutes the dream of the yellow brick road. But the idea of equal opportunity does have a certain amount of credibility in this country. A recent survey by the OECD gives Australia high marks for social mobility. Surprisingly, parents’ incomes and education had little bearing on the success of their children, and the gap is actually narrowing between rich and poor. That is not something Americans or Canadians can claim.
Australia funnels cash benefits for the disadvantaged to low income households better than any other country in the OECD. It is not a good place to get old, however. Half of Australia’s singles over the age of 65 are living in poverty. That may be why is almost impossible to immigrate here if you are over the age of 40. This is a land for the young and able.
Like many Australian television viewers, (albeit a distinct minority). I have been captivated by a new series on SBS called, simply, “First Australians.” I read that it was patterned after an American series documenting our natives. What astonished me was the surprise registered by reviewers of this fine series. No Australians appear to have learned any of this history in school.
It is almost as if a collective denial has taken place in the educational system, along the lines of Japan’s denial of the atrocities of World War II. It is understandable that descendants of the white settlers of Australia would want to absolve their ancestors of cruel, bloodthirsty behavior, but the atrocities did happen. What happened to the aboriginals of Tasmania was tantamount to genocide.
The treatment of natives in Victoria was no less cruel, simply more measured. The numbers tell the story. In a very short time, the aboriginal population of Victoria dropped from 60,000 to 2,000. The “Protection Board” had Orwellian implications. Its purpose seemed to be tormenting the handful of aboriginals who survived. You can download all the episodes of the series at: http://www.sbs.com.au/firstaustralians/
Some years ago, when we were living in New York, an odd series of circumstances took me on a journey to Newfoundland. I visited a band of Micmac Indians living a hardscrabble existence in the South of the island. Their people had come from Nova Scotia. The first people in Newfoundland were called Beothuk. It is believed their use of ochre to paint themselves is the reason we call native Americans “red” Indians.
They were hostile to the Europeans, and their encounters with fisherman from England, France, Spain and Portugal often led to bloodshed. By 1829, the Beothuk had been wiped out. I suspect that most people today would be as horrified as I to learn of the casual genocides that were conducted by our ancestors on the natives of these lands. So, perhaps we have made some progress. “History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives,” said Abba Eben. I’d like to think we have come to that point.
We need a future that is no longer claimed by the past. The natives of our planet need a fair go from all of us.
It is hard to reconcile the beautiful weather in Melbourne with the economic hurricane devastating the world economy. The skies here are pigeon-egg blue dotted with puffy, cotton ball clouds. The temperature is perfect. The flies and fires haven’t hit yet. If it were possible to ignore the media, (which seems to have more than its share of bad news at the moment), it would be an excellent time to be in absolute bliss.
I headed up into gold country a couple of weeks ago to help a cycling friend celebrate his 60th birthday. He lives on a farm in the country now and there were two lambs, just a few days old, gamboling in the paddock. The sun was out and it cast a spell of enchantment. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood.
The birds go berserk at this time of year. The squawkers get up at first light, but they also make sure you know when the sun is going down. Magpies dive-bomb cyclists under the mistaken impression that their nests are under attack. Lorikeets and parrots fly in colorful formations, but the bell birds are my favorites. Riding through trees full of bell birds is like being delivered into a temple in Bangkok. The tones are resonant and beautiful and stay with you long after the birds have gone.
The Arts Festival and the racing season have just started. I mentioned in a previous post that this city is simply inundated with events. I managed to catch two films in the Italian Film Festival but I missed at least two other festivals and the State Fair. I stumbled across the furniture exhibition of the city’s Fringe Festival (perhaps its least interesting feature), One look at the catalog of offerings put me into a catatonic state. I was simply overwhelmed.
We did make it out of the house to see some dance/theater last night and we have tickets for an evening with Philip Glass doing the poetry of Leonard Cohen. We have to give our favorite Montreal poet a hearing. It is a city that has given us many good memories and Cohen is its most unlikely songbird.
I just got a lovely email from a friend there who is soaking up some balmy fall weather, thanks to a warm surge from down south. He’s a Scot, a golfer naturally enough. Some foxes have been frequenting the golf course of late and a few have become quite tame. Not a good thing for the long-term health of the animals, but it allowed him to get a fine photograph.
by David Robertson
It is difficult to ignore the local news, though. It lands on the doorstep every morning and itches like a patch of poison ivy.
The bitter debate on Victoria’s controversial abortion bill continued this week. The tragic fate of a lovely, 21 year-old Australian girl who disappeared in Dubrovnik on September 18 was just revealed. Another Qantas flight turned into roller coaster ride when it plunged 1000 feet over Western Australia and had to make an emergency landing. A quarter of the planet’s mammals are under threat of extinction; Australian mammals are the most at risk in the developed world. The Australian dollar got hammered.
If you want to come see the wildlife or the race horses, now would be a good time. It’s Spring and the weather is perfect.
Wall street’s implosion has brought an economic thinker by the name of Nassim Nicholas Taleb back in the news. A little over a year ago, his book, “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” garnered a certain amount of attention in North America because of its startling implications on an American mental landscape dominated by ideology. Taleb’s thesis was that we humans are highly susceptible to getting caught out by random events because we have such a strong tendency to discount their existence.
If you have spent your entire life in the northern hemisphere, you will conclude that swans are white. And that will be true as long as you never go to Australia, where swans are black. The difficulty is that we seem to be psychologically programmed to confuse improbability with impossibility. Taleb suggests that this may be because evolution does not favor probabilistic thinking. Not every snake is deadly, but those who avoid snakes may have more offspring than those who don’t. Particularly in Australia.
Taleb is also highly suspicious of historians who analyze events (like the start of World War I or the Great Depression) in great detail and then reconstruct the dominoes leading up to the disaster. They assume that they are reconstructing the reasons for the event, when in fact, they are simply predicting in reverse. There were plenty of crises in the Balkans that did not lead to World War I.
Taleb suggests that the real world is much messier and less predictable than historians, economists, social scientists or politicians believe. Perhaps my exposure to other parts of the planet at an early age made me less resistant to the black swan, and more skeptical of collective wisdom. I am inclined to believe that most conventional wisdom is wrong, but willing to entertain the idea that it may, occasionally, be true.
There are black swans, kangaroos, cassowaries and (the most unlikely of all), platypuses. The animal with a bill like a duck, that lays eggs like a bird, but is a mammal and suckles its young. And just for good measure, is venomous. European naturalists who never visited Australia maintained the animal was a hoax, concocted out of the parts of other creatures.
What is less easily understood is how the wizards of Wall Street did not see this particular disaster coming. This was not a black swan. This was home economics. It must have been obvious to people on the ‘street’ that the financial meltdown was coming. There was the Savings and Loan Crisis, after all, the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. Did anyone really think that allowing the biggest brokerage firms in the world to take on extravagant debt in derivatives was a good idea? What about selling houses to people with no ability to repay mortgage loans?
I never saw an emu eye to eye until I arrived in Australia, but its African relative, the ostrich, must have been lurking all around me in North America, brilliantly hidden by human forms. Bipeds with their handsome heads in the sand, blinded by a belief in free markets and deregulation, cutting taxes for the rich, taking on the world’s bad guys with smart bombs and spy satellites, and going shopping to keep the economy strong.
I was born at the beginning of America’s powerful march toward world leadership and I never thought I would witness its finale. But this may be the end of the American age. The fate of empires can be sealed by greed, hubris and a blind march down the path of crippling debt and disastrous wars.
It is time for Americans to wake up and resume their vital roles as caretakers, creative thinkers, practical tinkerers; to re-engage with the world around them rather than trying to control it. We are all interconnected. There are black swans everywhere.
There is a nice, neat hole punched through my Florida driver’s license now. Bottom right hand corner. That license, like the proverbial parrot of Monty Python fame, is expired, defunct, no longer valid. The upside of this is that I was able to get a permit to drive in the state of Victoria without doing any tests whatsoever. I did not have to demonstrate my ability to navigate a vehicle on what I consider the “wrong” side of the road or explain the finer points of the infamous “hook” turn. The downside is that the picture makes me look older (for some reason) and goofy.
This is not the first time I have driven on the “wrong” side of the road. I went to film school in London some forty years ago where I became infatuated with an adorable little car called a Super Seven. It was manufactured by Lotus and built from a kit. This one had even been raced on occasion. For some reason the builder (an amateur mechanic and racer) had neglected to install the windshield wipers. That was not to blame for my mishap, however.
One night, after hoisting a few too many pints with some Irish friends, I took a suburban corner a little too fast and actually hopped the kerb. The couple out for a stroll must have been a little disturbed to see a yellow race car following them up the sidewalk, but they took it very well. They ran back and asked me if I was all right.
Despite the excellent public transportation system, we owned two cars during our stay in Hong Kong. The first had a leaky sun roof and ended up rotting from the inside out one summer when I was in Nova Scotia. It sat too long in the sun and sprouted strange life forms. The other was an ancient (by Hong Kong standards) Daihatsu with fuel injection. It was perfect because it was so small and nimble. I loved driving it but there was no where to go.
On one of my first forays out in the City, I turned into the right (wrong) side of the road. Fortunately, there was a bus stop 100 metres from our apartment complex. I can still see the horrified faces of the commuters. They raised their hands in unison and pointed left in exaggerated pantomime. I got the picture and switched lanes. Others were not so lucky. One night I woke to the sound of a crash. An inebriated gweilo (white foreign devil) was driving home on the wrong side of the road. Fortunately, both the drivers were in Mercedes and neither was injured.
Driving down under has presented certain problems. When I was out house hunting in a rented car, I turned the wrong way into a one-way street. I frequently encounter difficulties negotiating busy round abouts. Some of them have stop lights, dividing the circumference into thirds. I seem to lose my way with alarming regularity despite downloading maps to my destination. I have yet to do the infamous “hook” turn that involves going into the far left lane to make a right hand turn.
And the car itself seems to trip me up. The gear shift is on the “wrong” side. I automatically hit the wand for the windshield wipers instead of the turn signal. At least the pedals are in the right position on the floor. We have purchased a vehicle which can, in theory, be driven off road. That may be the safest place for me to be.
Despite the fact that our rented residence has a very minimal garden, it needs water (during the two hours of the two days we are allowed to water). My wife insisted that it also required mulch and the dispensation of hard-earned Australian dollars (see previous post) at the local nursery, which seems to do a fantastic business despite the drought, thank you very much. I was the designated pack animal for the big bags of mulch and nicely polished black and white rocks which are part of the garden decor. At the nursery, Poyntons of Essendon, I noticed a small sign: Fall is Here! My God, I thought, Easter is still a month away.
Being down under does a number on one’s notion of seasons. We arrived shortly after the New Year to a heat wave. It was their equivalent of high summer, after all. There were a few days during that first month when the afternoon sun was absolutely oppressive. On Junuary 16th it got up to 105 degees Fahrenheit, but it felt like 125. It did not take long to discover that summer is not necessarily synonymous with shorts and T shirts. The weather of one day could fly through all four seasons without stopping for lunch.
Today is Labour Day in Victoria. Easter is in the fall. Christmas is in summer. June and July will bring in the dark days of winter, which are affected by the low latitude. In the dead of winter, there are only nine hours of sunshine, thirteen to fourteen in summer.
The idea of antipodal points comes to us from the Greeks, apparently. Each place on the planet had a correspondent point on the opposite side of the Earth. You just needed a good drill and a gift for languages. The British liked to think that Australia and New Zealand were their antipodes, but Auckland, New Zealand actually corresponds to Gibralter, and most of the north island of New Zealand corresponds to Spain.
Since most of the land masses on the planet are in the Northern Hemisphere, their antipodes are in the oceans. If we were to float the continent around to the other side, it would end up smack in the middle of the Atlantic. There’s plenty of room and I’m sure we would get more rain. Christmas would be in winter, once again.
They have funny money here in Australia. The notes come in peculiar colors and they are very, very slippery. As if to make up for the apparent flimsiness of the the bills, the coins range from the insubstantial five and ten cent pieces to the heavyweight hitters of the coin world– the one and two dollar coins. The two dollar coin is like a small, brass-colored black hole in the monetary universe. It is useful for tram tickets and parking, built like a tank.
The reason for the slipperiness of the notes is the material they are made of– polymer. It is plastic money. Australia was the first country to switch over completely to the durable stuff. It lasts four times as long as paper money, is difficult to counterfeit, and it can be recycled. So far, it Australia has turned on sixteen countries to the advantages of plastic notes.
Australia changed over to decimal currency in 1963, and the “dollar” was chosen over 999 other submissions. Smart choice. A $100 note features the soprano, Damne Nellie Melba on the front and Sir John Monash, a soldier, engineer and administrator on the back. I am pleased to say that there is a poet on the front of the $10 bill. AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson is back to back with Dame Mary Gilmore, who was also a poet, among her many other accomplishments.
It is the fifties that concern us, however. They are the bills dispensed by the ATM machines, the ones that seem to disappear so quickly that it is difficult to believe they were ever in the wallet. The fifty is graced by David Unaipon (the first Aboriginal author to be published) and Edith Cowan (the first woman member of parliament.) David was an inventor of note (the Leonardo of Australia); Edith was a dedicated social worker and feminist. These were people who defined their lives by deeds, not status or public relations. Neither was slippery in the least.
Of the two heavyweight coins, the one dollar is larger in diameter, but less thick. There are five kangaroos on one side, the ubiquitous Queen on the other. The two dollar coin depicts an unnamed Aboriginal elder set against a background of the Southern Cross. These two coins are mostly copper, The lighter coins offer a window on the animal world.
The five cent coin depicts an echidna, a spiny ant-eater. The ten cent coin shows us a male lyrebird and the twenty cent coin offers up the platypus. The fifty cent coin shows us the Australian Coat of Arms, supported by a kangaroo and emu.
When you move to a new city in a new land, you don’t arrive with any prejudices about the myriad of communities which make up the place. Melbourne is very spread out. With its 8,800 square kilometres, it is twice the size of Sydney. Despite a tiny central district, greater Melbourne eats up more land than London. The burbs spread in every direction for kilometers and kilometers, serviced by an extensive train system. Most of the homes in the older suburbs are quite small, but everyone who settled here wanted to have his own roses, his own backyard and his own garage. For 3.2 million people, that takes a lot of land.
You can get a strange look when you say you are living in Essendon. Everyone seems to think it is far away, although it is only 9 kms north of the main station, a twenty minute train ride. From where we live, the tram is more convenient, but it takes twice as long and can be held up by heavy traffic. Two weeks ago, my daughter’s tram was hit by a car, which was being driven somewhat erratically, according to her firsthand report. Perhaps the driver was on drugs. Drugs might be another reason for the strange look when you admit you live in Essendon.
A lurid story was splashed across the newspaper the other day about an underworld drug dealer who had apparently ordered the deaths of at least ten rivals. He has been behind bars for the last two years, but he just pled guilty to three of the murders and been sentenced. He may get out of prison before he dies. His name is Carl Williams.
In 1999, an amphetamine dealer by the name of Jason Moran shot Carl in the stomach. They were rivals and there had been some disagreement about finances. Jason thought that the shooting would give Carl a message that the Moran gang was not to be trifled with.
Instead, the baby-faced Carl decided to wipe out Jason’s gang. When you read through the long, dismal background of the murders, investigation, etc., it slowly seeps in that much of this sordid story took place in our area. The children of both drug dealers were enrolled in the same private school in Essendon. In one desperate attempt to bring Jason out into the open, William’s wife picked a fight with her counterpart out in front of the school. It didn’t work. When Carl’s hired killers finally caught up with Jason, the murder occurred at a football practice field in Essendon North.
Our placid-looking suburb would appear to belong to the pages of Miami Vice. Mind you, the gangland slayings over the last eight years don’t put Melbourne on the world’s murder map. In 2003, there were 302 murders in all of Australia. 12,658 in the United States. This country does have a much smaller population, but you can do the math. In terms of personal safety, we’re in Disneyland here.
Essendon is also known for its airport, its football club and its big box stores. It was the launching point for the Victorian Exploring Expedition– the disastrous trek across the Australian outback now known by the names of its ill-fated leaders, Burke and Wills. More about that in the next post.
You are normally not confronted by the question of your pet’s value until it reaches an age it would probably never achieve if it didn’t have things pretty cushy. The prospect of a move to Australia forced us to consider some big questions: what stays and what goes? Appliances of 110 voltage didn’t make the cut. The television stayed. It simply wouldn’t function down under. Our pets, on the other hand….
There seem to be two issues that make bringing pets into Australia both difficult and expensive. One is the simple fact that this is an island. Its distance from other land masses has helped protect it over the years from nasty things like rabies. The other issue seems to be that despite this huge moat around the island, Australians have been known to make some rather large mistakes importing flora and fauna over the years. They make Floridians look like pikers.
Jared Diamond was unkind enough to point out in “Collapse” that rabbits were imported three times! The first two species, introduced from the home country for a “spot of hunting” were not adaptable enough to survive the harsh new continent. A breed of rabbit was finally discovered in South America that was highly adaptable and incredibly destructive. This led to things like the infamous rabbit-proof fence. Of course, foxes were necessary to chase the rabbits. Despite their adaptability, it took sixteen years to get them permanently established. Now, there are permanent programs aimed at their eradication. The list goes on and on. Cane toads are the most egregious example this pattern.
When the opportunity to move to Australia came along, we were blessed with a dog and cat. Neither was distinguished by pedigree. The dog, in fact, had been my daughter’s rescue project at the Humane Society. He was a brindle mix, and he had some very attractive features, but he was an energy intense creature. Fortunately, through the auspices of a good friend in our neighborhood, he was offered a good home as a companion to another dog who got lonely during the day. That left our cat, Tibbey.
Tibbey came from a litter born at the Wolfville Animal Hospital in Nova Scotia. She is a Maine Coon mix of some sort. We may have paid as much as $35 dollars for her neutered self, with shots. Now you can add a couple of zeros to that figure. The problem with Maine Coon cats is that they are notoriously difficult to give away. My wife had another one in her life and tried to find her a home (for very good reasons) several times. The cat refused to accept its change of ownership.
To bring a cat to Australia, you need to start at least six months in advance. There is a seventeen page document that has all the instructions. The initial cost of the permit is $250. Then the real costs begin to mount. The pet will need a rabies vaccination and a rabies neutralising antibody titre test certified by the Department of Agriculture, a subcutaneous microchip, other shots, exams etc. You will need the expert services of an animal forwarding company, who will make the arrangements necessary to get the cat from Florida to Melbourne, Australia ALIVE. That is trickier than you might think.
Tibbey flew from Jacksonville to Houston, stayed overnight there, then flew on to Seattle, where she was picked up and brought to Vancouver. She was then returned to Seattle for her final flight to Melbourne, where she was transported to quarantine for thirty days. Fortunately, we were able to see her shortly after we arrived. Needless to say, she was not happy. The holding facility in the outskirsts of Melbourne was huge. We called to determine the visiting hours, then took a tram and train to Spotswood. Then we walked about a third of a mile. We made our way through security, and were shown the temporary quarters of our cat. It was not spacious, but it was clean and there was access to the outside.
Tibbey gave us a baleful look. She had retreated into the igloo, ignoring the cats on either side of her as best she could. We were finally able to coax her out, but it was obvious she was not pleased. She had been in quarantine three weeks when we arrived for our visit. We could not bring her into our temporary accommodation at University College, so finding a new home became a very pressing matter. Moving her to another “cattery” was not a cheerful solution.
All’s well that ends well. Tibbey survived. She is only seven years old, although the trauma of this move may have cost her a life or two. Now she comes and goes as she pleases, walks all over me when I’m in bed, sneaks up on my pillow, curls into a ball and purrs. The purr is priceless.
What we have here is a water problem. It is one of the very first things we noticed on the drive in from the airport a little over a month ago. Our route took us past the entrance to the zoo, which resembled a savanna on the great plains of Africa. Parched.
At University College it was a common subject of conversation, triggered by news items such as the one about the residents of Toowoomba in Queensland, whose mayor attempted to persuade her constituents to drink up to 25% recycled water rather than watch their town’s reservoir go dry in a couple of years. The “yuck” factor triumphed, of course, and they voted for a dam instead. [It is nice to have informed readers. I stand corrected with regard to the citizens of Toowoomba; please see the comment below]
Australia is into its fifth year of a drought. Geography and meterology make this continent susceptible to long-term dry spells, but global warming is undoubtedly exacerbating the problem. The country hit a record high in November of last year, sending the yearly average 2.11 degrees Celsius above the norm. The result has been misery for many farmers, wildfires in the mountains, and serious discussion about water rights in the Murry-Darling river basin. Prime Minister Howard convened an emergency summit to discuss the problem, putting forth the proposition that the river was too important to be left to the States to control.
The same prime minister who, until relatively recently, stood shoulder to shoulder with Bush on global warming as well as Iraq. Australians are almost as profligate with energy as Americans, but they are beginning to be concerned about water. There are local celebrities who pride themselves on taking their showers straddling buckets, then using the water on the garden. Some rural golf courses are in desperate straits. Fortunately, there is a fund for disaster relief which includes gold courses.
For someone who considers himself a conservationist, this scarcity is troubling. It was a key consideration in my purchase of a washing machine, which can onlybe called an investment. The brand new, very expensive, front loading German machine uses only 63 litres of water for a full load. If the salesman is credible, I was using ten times that amount with our old Maytag.
We are well into a Stage 3 alert, possibly on our way to Stage 4. That means: no watering of lawns at any time. Gardens can only be watered by hand or a dripper system two days a week, two hours in the morning and two at night. Cars cannot be washed at home except to clean windows and remove corrosive substances. Commercial car washes are still allowed. No filling of new pools. Melbourne is contemplating a desalinization plant in the not too distant future.
Whoa, what’s that I hear– thunder?
Okay, I admit it– I am a homebody. Stretching out on the couch with a good book is bliss. When I was a lot younger, it could be anybody’s couch. Now, I feel that things are right when it is my couch in my personal space. I went back over to our new abode today and had a look around, trying to imagine actually living there. Many of you who have some sense of my personality may be astonished at my choice of living space for the next two years. This house is bizarre. The facade itself almost disappears among its neighbors. It may have had a number at one time, but it no longer chooses to reveal that information. You have to deduce it from the houses next door. Most of the space is taken up with a two-car garage and the front door, which has no knob, only a deadbolt. If you are very perceptive, you will have noticed by now that there are no windows facing the street. You may be thinking by now that this is the perfect home for introverts. No one to see in, no one to find you.
The house is located in a lovely little cul-de-sac that the British (and Australians) call a mews. There is a little play area and play-set for small children. Most of the other homes are fairly substantial, and quite traditional. Ours is not.
Come in, come in. You will notice, of course, that the entry is long and the ceiling is quite high. Black and white tiles cover the floor as far as your eyes can see. The house is fairly narrow, but quite long. To your left as you enter is a door to the most substantial space in the entire structure, a huge garage with a ceiling that is at least twenty feet. [Let's face it, the man exaggerates. The ceiling is actually fourteen feet] This would be comfortable accommodation for an entire village in the third world.
The night before our movers were to arrive with our shipment, we learned to our dismay that the electricity had not been turned on. I don’t know if it was a slip up on the agent’s part or simply a misunderstanding, but DirectConnect, the service that was supposed to get in touch with me about getting the utilities turned on, failed to do so. For some reason I assumed that it was being taken care of. It wasn’t. Fortunately, the removal of a cotter pin saved the day. I was able to bypass the electric operation of the door and lift it up by hand. Not having access to the garage would have made the movers job much more difficult.
Just beyond the door to garage is an unusual room that is perfectly square, a small room with no windows, only pocket doors off the hallway. It was used as a study by the previous tenant, and it will be my study as well. When I feel too claustrophobic, I’ll work on the laptop somewhere else. The house opens up a bit immediately after the study. There is a nice size dining area that is quite light, thanks to a large inner courtyard. Glass doors from the dining area, the kitchen and the master bedroom offer access to the courtyard. There are some lovely plants, a stone Japanese-looking lantern, bamboo poles, and an electrically operated bamboo water device that fills up a stone bowl. The switch is in the master bedroom.
The kid in me loves this. But I am getting ahead of you. I can hear you asking about the corridor off to the left before the dining area. That leads, dear friend, to two bathrooms and the master bedroom. I can’t really explain why the two of us require two bathrooms, but it can’t hurt. They are both done up entirely in black and white. The first is quite large, and has a lovely tub. The wash basin is frosted glass, the fixtures first rate. There is no cabinet for storing anything.
The second bath is just off the master bedroom. It has a shower only, but it is spacious enough for two. It is adjacent to the closet, which has a considerable number of wire racks going all the way to the ceiling. Remember, now. The ceiling is twenty feet. I spent a good hour today going up and down our step ladder in the closet. Next to that, over the bathroom, is a store room for suitcases, perhaps.
The end of the bedroom gives on to the courtyard, which can get quite hot in the late afternoon. Fortunately, there are louvered blinds as well as an ingenious Australian invention– a sliding plastic panel built into a glass window or door for fresh air .
The kitchen is fairly narrow, crowded by the courtyard. And it is the single most designed room in the house. It is a wall of white panels, only suggesting a kitchen because the oven and the dishwasher are visible. Everything else, from the fridge to the freezer to the sink to the gas cook top, is concealed behind closed doors. The only counter space is a long white island facing the courtyard. I have no idea how practical it will be. There is a built in lava light. What do you think?
Step up to the sea of green. I forgot to mention the green carpet in the bedroom. It is the same in the other two bedrooms and the living room (lounge room as it is called here). You may have noticed that the living room has no windows. It is fairly large, running the entire width of the house. There is one straight wall, facing the courtyard, and a slightly curved wall facing it. There are built-in Bose speakers and a free standing woofer. The room offers a vast expanse of white, reasonably well-lit when the overhead spots are on, but obviously meant for a huge television set at the far end.
Behind the curved wall you will find two small bedrooms with high, rectangular windows. Between them is the third black and white bath, shower only. Squeezed into the exterior door giving on the back “yard”, there is a fine laundry area with a cat door. Yard is something of a misnomer. This back area is entirely enclosed. It has a Mediterranean feel to it. There are some lovely plants and a laundry line. That, and the cat door, will be getting heavy use.
Why did I chose this house, out of all the ones we looked at over two weeks of house hunting? I couldn’t tell you. Our antiques don’t look too bizarre. I haven’t had the courage to unroll a Persian carpet. The paintings? Especially the oils, they will look spectacular!
Maybe I’m regressing. Once an introvert, always an introvert. That couch looks awfully inviting.
