The lizard froze for a second, then skittered off under a bookcase, moving faster than something that size has any right to.
I blinked for a few seconds, and thought maybe I’d been hallucinating. But I decided to mention it to Roo, because sometimes people like to know if the cast of Jurassic Park takes up residence in their guest bedroom.
I broached the topic over breakfast, as we stood in the kitchen drinking tea and eating toast.
I couldn’t really think of a polite way to bring it up, so I just waited for a natural break in the conversation and blurted, “Is there a giant lizard living in your games room?”
“I dunno,” Roo replied. “Maybe.”
“Oh, alright then. Because I thought my mind was playing tricks on me.”
Apparently the weirdness of my mind was no match for the weirdness of reality in Australia.
Roo was quite nonchalant on the matter. “I was wondering about him. I think I’ve spotted him a couple of times, but he’s too quick to get a good look at.”
“Well I saw him pretty good. He’s about this big,” I held up my hands, shoulder-width apart, “and he’s black all over. Looks kind of evil, actually.”
“Ah! It might be a blue-tongued skink.”
“A what? Blue-tongued? That doesn’t sound real!”
“It’s real.”
“So, is that him making all those noises on the roof then?”
“No, that’ll be the possum.”
“Possums, eh? Those little hopping guys from the garden?”
“No, those are bandicoots.”
“Okay, you are SO making this up now.”
“No! Not at all. If I was making it up, I’d tell you about the drop bears.”
“What bears?”
“Drop bears. It’s a story we invented to tell foreigners who are freaking out about the wildlife here. Basically, drop bears are like the evil, carnivorous twin of koalas – they hang around in trees looking innocent, but when a person walks underneath they drop down onto them and bite their faces off!”
“Woah. But you do have koala bears…”
“Koalas,” she said flatly. “They are not bears.”
“Riiight. But drop bears are…?”
“Fictional.”
“Okay. I think I’ve got it. Possums and skinks and bandicoots. Man, the animals in this country are bizarre! But you have kangaroos, at least?”
“Not personally! But yes, we have kangaroos.”
“And you have all the world’s deadliest spiders here, don’t you?”
“Oh yes, spiders! That reminds me… hang on.” Roo led me back into the games room, which was a little disconcerting.
She took me over to the farthest corner and pointed into it. “There! See that one?”
“OH FUCK ME!” The spider was as big as the palm of my hand. I could see every hair on its long, spindly legs. “This is just inside?”
“Yeah, this one’s fine. These aren’t dangerous. This is a huntsman. It’s harmless.”
“What, so it doesn’t bite?”
“Of course it bites, but it doesn’t hurt. Not much. It’s not poisonous. And it eats all the mosquitoes and flies.”
“But, it bites?”
“Yes, but you don’t need to worry about it. That one, down there – that’s the one you have to be careful of.”
“What? Where… Oh.”
Tucked further back into the same corner was a tiny little cobweb, with a tiny little black spider clinging to it.
“See the red stripe on its back?”
I shoved my head in for a closer look. “Yup, I think so.”
“That means it’s a ‘red-back’. They’re pretty bad.”
“Like, poisonous?”
“Like, deadly. But no-one really dies from them these days, because there’s anti-venom in all the hospitals.”
“Well, that is comforting. I feel much better about having one in my bedroom now.”
“Don’t worry, I’m going to kill that one. They shouldn’t be inside, really, but when you live out here…” she trailed off with the kind of shrug that says ‘what can you do, really?’ Which was considerably less comforting.
“How do you kill them?”
“Oh, I’ll just squish it. With my thong.”
This seemed like an embarrassingly intimate revelation, so I decided to be all manly and offer my services instead. “No need to stain your knickers! I’ll do it with this shoe.”
She looked slightly puzzled*, but was happy enough to relinquish spider-bashing duties to me.
“Don’t get too close though!” she warned.
I froze. “Why? They don’t spit at you, do they?”
“No, but you’re getting close to the huntsman. And they jump.”
“Oh Jesus! So, jumping, biting spiders the size of my hand?”
“Yup! Welcome to Australia! Bet you’re glad you’ve got a lizard in your bedroom now, eh?”
*Roo was destined to remain confused on this occasion, because there is no good way to apologise for telling a girl not to stain her panties. It’s notoriously difficult to pass that shit off as a cultural misunderstanding.
The Curve
All right you lot, it’s time to admit it: ninety-five percent of everything you know about Australia comes from watching old episodes of Neighbours.
No?
Really?
Okay, then. Home and Away.
Don’t worry – same here! Only it was more embarrassing for me, because I was actually in Australia.
So on my first morning in the country, I was forced to re-evaluate my knowledge.
For example, as far as I knew, it was always summer in Australia. I knew that all the blokes loved beer, and all the women were called Sheila. And I knew that Bondi Beach was the spiritual home of the nation, and that as a direct result of this, the whole population spend their entire lives in swimwear.
Right?
Wrong.
I’d arrived in mid-winter. In the hills around Perth it was freezing; shivering, ball-achingly cold, particularly at night and in the mornings. Wearing a bikini outdoors was inviting death by hypothermia – as well as earning me quite a few strange looks.
It didn’t matter how good the beer was, as I couldn’t afford to drink it – alcohol turns out to be eye-wateringly expensive in Australia.
I was 2,498 miles from Bondi Beach.
And if you call enough women ‘Sheila’, sooner or later one of them will punch you in the face.
I was now living with six women of different age groups, and not a single one of them was called Sheila. I didn’t have a clue what they were called – something I only realised when the phone rang halfway through that first morning. I picked it up without thinking.
“Hello!” I said, “This is… the house of… some Australians?”
One distinct downside of open-plan living is that when you make a gaffe like this, everyone can hear it, no matter where they are in the house. All of them shrieked with laughter, and by the time I’d handed the phone off to one of the girls, the caller must have thought they’d dialled an insane asylum by mistake.
I later learned that Roo’s family name was Reynen – adapted by her parents from the Dutch ‘Reijnen’.
That day involved a fairly steep learning curve. I imagine that most tourists visiting Australia come and go without ever having to learn certain things, but living where Roo did, on the edge of the Western Australian outback, survival lessons were disturbingly important. I think they get taught at pre-school.
First up, I learnt that a ‘thong’ is not actually a skimpy piece of underwear. It is in fact a multi-purpose item of footwear, which most sane individuals would refer to as a flip-flop. I say multi-purpose, because the primary use of a pair of thongs, in Roo’s house at least, was to kill things. They can also be used to fix certain parts of a car’s engine, are often thrown at people to get their attention, form a miniature floating table for something light, like a bag of crisps, i
n the swimming pool, and – in an emergency – can even be used to paddle a canoe (though I only found this out much later). Because all Australians wear them all the time (unless they’re working in heavy construction – and sometimes even then) – I was offered the use of a spare pair of thongs. They were to be worn generally outside, but I had to “be careful wearing them in the back yard, because of snakes.”
I had to love this aspect of Australian culture. Rather than chaining the back door shut, and nailing thick wooden planks across it topped off with a sign saying, “KEEP OUT, THERE’S FUCKING SNAKES IN THE GARDEN!”, instead they say things like “if you do go out there barefoot, try to be a bit careful.”
But at least the snakes weren’t on the inside. Often.
“So I don’t use a thong to try and kill snakes, then?” I joked.
“No,” said Roo, looking vaguely disgusted, “why would you want to kill snakes?”
Which was a fair point.
I just had to hope the feeling was mutual.
Because I’d arrived in the coldest part of the year, with no money and almost no clothing, I had to borrow a fleece from one of Roo’s slender sisters.
It had ‘Bush Ranger’ emblazoned across the front.
I was the only one who seemed to find this funny. It was hard to tell whether this was a language-barrier thing, or whether it was because my sense of humour stopped developing at age twelve.
Regardless, now that I was suitably equipped to handle the cold, I had a busy day ahead of me. The girls had planned an epic road trip around the whole of Western Australia, and had been waiting for me to arrive so that I could accompany them.
But not only had I arrived three months late, I’d also arrived penniless.
It’s okay though – we’re blaming Thailand, remember?
So before we could set out on our grand Australian adventure, there were a few little details I had to take care of.
Like earning enough money to pay for it.
Luckily, both the girls had been in this situation before…
About three months ago, as it happened.
They fired up Rusty and drove me to the nearest bank, where I braced myself for an orgy of form-filling, coupled with the high probability of being laughed out of the place.
I always feel self-conscious in banks, as though the staff can see right through me and know instantly that I’m a man of very dubious financial security.
The fact that I was wearing ripped, stained jeans and a girl’s jumper was also fairly poor indicator. I half expected alarms to blare, and a giant illuminated arrow to swing down from the roof with a warning sign on it blinking ‘CREDIT RISK! CREDIT RISK!’
But I was pleasantly surprised to find that most of the bank’s customers were covered in concrete.
“Rich tradies,” Roo pointed out. “That’s who owns all those mansions! Builders and plumbers, and especially the miners. The guys on the big money.”
That was unexpected. Plumbers are expensive at home, but I didn’t know many miners that had earned their fortune. I distinctly remember being threatened with mining as a job, if I didn’t work hard at school and pass my exams. The cartoons were right, I thought, everything is upside-down here.
A very efficient lady typed in the details off my passport, and accepted Roo’s family address as mine.
“What funds would you like to open the account with?” she asked me.
“Funds?”
“Yes, you need to deposit some money into the account to open it.”
“Ah. How much do I need to put in?”
“Anything you like! A dollar will do.”
“Um… guys? Anyone have a dollar they can lend me?”
Roo dug into the pocket of her jeans. “Here – have two.”
She handed me a small gold coin. Travellers are often confused by this (as are the natives) – but for some reason, their two-dollar coin is half the size of their one-dollar coin.
And just like that, I had a bank account.
Next, the girls took me to an employment agency called ‘Select’. They’d both got temp jobs through this agency, and they reckoned there was plenty of work going.
Now this did involve a lot of paperwork; I spent about two hours filling it all out, taking maths tests and English tests, and then I sat through the inevitable video about Health and Safety in the Workplace. It was delightfully lurid, with graphic re-enactments of accidents so improbable I had to applaud the scriptwriter. I mean, what are the odds of being decapitated by a step ladder? I was tempted to try it just to find out.
Finally, the lady marking my answer sheet came over to me.
“Okay, so, we have some labouring work for you. I’m afraid it’s minimum wage stuff though.”
“Ah well, that’s okay! What is the minimum wage by the way?”
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Okay, so it’s eighteen dollars thirty cents an hour.”
I had to sit and think about this for a few seconds. It was tough to calculate, because I don’t have eighteen fingers, and the exchange rate was a little better than one-and-a-half dollars to the pound, and I don’t have one-and-a-half of anything on my body (unless you count my nose). And when I’d done the sums, I still thought I’d made a mistake.
“Is that… it can’t be? Eighteen dollars is more than ten English pounds an hour? That’s double the minimum wage in the UK! That’s more than what my Mum earns, as a qualified nurse!”
“I know,” she said, “it’s not great, but we do get better stuff in. Only, you wanted to start straight away.”
“Hell, I’ll start right now! Where’s the job?”
She looked impressed by my enthusiasm. Probably because she hadn’t seen my bank account.
“You can start tomorrow, if you’d like.”
Tomorrow would be my second full day in the country.
To celebrate the breath-taking swiftness of my transition from unemployed bum to valued employee, we first headed to Woolies (supermarket) to buy a chook (chicken) and some snags (sausages) for the barbie (iconic doll from the 1970s).
I also grabbed some bread to make a sanga (sandwich), and nearly bought a kanga-banga (kangaroo sausage).
It was a like free lesson in Aussie slang.
Next we went to buy some goon.
“It’s wine in a box,” Roo explained, “or wine in a bag inside a box. It’s what all the kids drink, because it’s the cheapest thing they can get.”
But we couldn’t buy it there, because the supermarkets aren’t allowed to sell booze. For that we had to go to a separate liquor store, which Aussies, with their typical subtlety, call a ‘bottle shop’.
Three things about the bottle shop blew me away.
First up, it was massive; not far off the size of the supermarket we’d just come out of.
Secondly, it was unfeasibly expensive. The cheapest bottle of vodka on offer was $45 – that’s £30! Now I knew why the minimum wage was so high.
Oh, and the third thing that blew me away?
It was a drive-thru bottle shop!
Seriously!
I couldn’t help but think this sounded like a really, really bad idea. Almost like an accident waiting to happen. I mean, isn’t there some sort of thing about drinking and driving not going terribly well together? I was kind of surprised there wasn’t a police station next-door.
I’d love to have been at the meeting where they came up with the idea.
“How bad is it, having to park up and get out of the car every single time you need to buy a beer?”
“It’s a bloody disaster! If only there was something we could do about it…”
Talk about first-world problems.
Anyway, fully half of the cavernous building was devoted to wine. They had Dry, Medium, and… Lexia. It sounded more like a car than a beverage, but absolutely nothing in the whole shop was labelled ‘sweet’. After reading the labels on half an aisle’s worth of wine bottles, we
discovered that Fruity Lexia is what everyone else in the world would call a sweet, white wine. Clearly some kind of award was in order for the most confusing labelling system in the world. But we couldn’t complain too much – once we’d identified Fruity Lexia as our poison of choice, we discovered why kids loved the stuff so much; a four-litre cardboard cask of it was only ten dollars.
We were the only people in the queue not buying at least two giant crates of beer. Supermarket trolleys were provided, presumably for those industrial-size purchases that wouldn’t fit through a car window. Alcohol buying in this country was obviously taken very seriously.
I felt rather inadequate, with my little box of goon, walking out of the bottle shop.
And the next morning, I started work – unloading container trucks of bog roll!
Alright, you can laugh now.
But it could have been worse.
Roo was working in a textile factory, categorizing towels.
And Gill was cleaning public toilets.
Oh, yes – we were living the Australian Dream all right…
Ready For The Off
And so, for the next two weeks, that was our life.
We got up early (painfully early in Gill’s case), we worked hard, and we enjoyed several delicious barbecues, cooked and eaten out on the Reynen family veranda.
We even went to the park for one – because there were free gas barbecues in the park! And not just a couple, but loads of them, dotted around a stretch of riverbank, complete with large, shaded picnic tables.
In England, they’d have been covered in graffiti and vandalised beyond recognition within half an hour of being put there. But here, only minutes from the city centre, overlooking a wide curve of the Swan river and the million-dollar residences on the far side of it, the great steel hotplates were spotless.
“I can’t believe it, they’re so clean,” I said to Gill.
“I know,” she replied. “I cleaned them. It’s not just toilets we do, y’know.”
“So that’s where my tax-dollars are going! Paying you to keep the barbies clean.”
“Nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Nope. I think it’s the best system in the world.”
It might not be a tourist’s idea of the Australian Dream, but it’s far closer to the average Australian’s version of it; hard yakka (work), honestly done, a good laugh, and a cold beer at the end of the day.
Kamikaze Kangaroos! Page 2
