The Beach

A little under the weather this morning, owing to unwooded chardonnay. Would wooded have been better? Who knows? Anyway, after taking Sara to work (she was, as usual, completely unaffected), I realised that all the tasks I’d planned for the day could be easily postponed until I was feeling better and, remembering all those mornings when I was feeling rough and dragged myself into the newsroom for a mammoth shift, I went for a walk on Diggers Beach, at the end of our road.

It’s never crowded, but, as this is Australia, there’s always someone exercising and at 8.45am I joined two runners, two walkers, looking determined but relaxed, and three surfers, bobbing gently up and down on a practically flat sea. I don’t think they had an hope of catching a wave; they were just glad to be there. Even though this is winter, the sun was blazing, the temperature was just topping twenty degrees, with a fresh breeze to remind me that the seasons change here as well.

In fact, the nearest the beach ever comes to being crowded is early on summer mornings, and I mean early, before six o’clock, when people like to get their exercise in before the heat of the day and, if they’re sharp, can also fit in a well-earned café breakfast before work. In fact, if you’re running, you can get quite out of breath exchanging greetings both with people you know and people you don’t. I’ve come to the conclusion that we’re not just saying “hi”. We’re actually saying: “Hello. Isn’t this wonderful? I feel so lucky to be here under this blue sky, my bare feet in the sand, and the warm sun just loitering above the horizon. I’m so glad to be here and I can see you are too. There‘s no place I‘d rather be, not even in bed.”

So there’s a cast of regulars, though not all appear first thing in the morning. Sara’s brother-in-law, Colin, strides along the beach and over the headland before and after work most days, recently listening to his French lessons on his MP3 player in preparation for the family holiday. As I discovered, he can’t always hear you and he concentrates very hard, so greetings are sometimes apparently met with muttered phrases in French. Lucky I know him. Fisherman trawl the water’s edge with bits of fish on a string trying to tempt worms to the surface for bait. The mysterious Asian woman wanders back and fore, so shrouded against the sun by her huge hat and scarf that I have only had a glimpse of her face. Brazen men stride toward the rocks that lead to Little Diggers, which has become something of a nudist beach, even at 6am as I discovered on one of my first early-morning runs.

The surfers are always there, even if only standing on the boardwalk that leads from the car park, contemplating whether it’s worth getting wet and usually deciding it is, however calm the sea, if only for the pleasure of chatting with the others while waiting, optimistically, for a wave. Some days, though, they get very good surf. And there’s the East Coast Surf School which holds daily lessons, sometimes for entire classes of school children, marking out its classroom on the sand with a couple of flags. I suspect surfing is on the curriculum.

Sara has a colleague, Sally, who periodically throws open the doors of their office and tells the world outside: “We live in paradise,” thus disturbing the travelling gentlemen trying to sleep amid the parrot droppings in the park outside. And it was on one of those sunny, big-surf days during the school holidays when the sea, the sand, the bush and the sky were all sparkling, that I fully realised she was right. There were more people than usual on the beach, the numbers swelled by seasonal visitors to the local resort. I was making my way out through the surf when a very large, blue, slowly-curving wave rushed up. I was at the bottom and, many, many feet above me, was another swimmer. I dived, he plummeted and we met somewhere in the middle, both at the mercy of the wave. We emerged spitting water and smiling and ascertained we were both unhurt. Then he flung his arms wide, as if he were going to embrace me. I thought this was bit too friendly, even for Diggers, but what he wanted to do was to embrace the entire scene. Still breathless from our dunking by the wave, he stood there in the water and shouted: “This is just so good, so good.” He was on holiday, it turned out, and having the time of his life. And reminding me that I shouldn’t take it for granted.

Whales and wallabies

Call me slow or naïve, but I was surprised to find that the adverts at the top of this page seem to be tracking what I write. Otherwise why else would they be plugging various forms of cockroach extinction and an insight into the disgusting secrets of roach life. (OK, so they've changed now and they're offering hotel deals here in Coffs). And can there really be someone offering roaches for sale on eBay? Live? Or stuffed? And for what? I found a couple of dead ones the other morning so if anyone wants to make me an offer..

We'll see what they make of this posting, which is also wildlife based. Llyw and I went out whale-watching and had a very successful trip. First we cruised down the coast with fine views of the Great Dividing Range just behind Coffs and it brought home just how narrow the coastal strip is here. It's rather sobering to think that the first settlers can have had no idea what was on the other side of that range, or if they'd ever find a way through it. The crew were scouring the sea with binoculars and, after an hour, announced that they'd sighted a humpback whale and we headed away from the coast.

It was a real spectacle when we reached the first pod, starting very quietly and building to a crescendo. First all we saw was the familiar water spouts but I'd never heard the enormous sighs that the whales make as they exhale and I wasn't prepared for the length of their backs as they curve through the water. After several deep breaths, the fluked tail makes an appearance as they dive and the whole affair seemed calmly impressive as they dived and reappeared several times.

Then the captain announced that his sonar had picked up two under the boat and they surfaced close to us, so close you could almost make out the texture of their barnacled backs. This was a real delight but then two adolescents (according to the captain) appeared on the other side of the boat and started beating their tails on the water, sending up showers of spray, and apparently trying to tell us to keep our distance. As the whales were somewhat bigger than the boat, that's pretty much what the captain did. It was a fine display.


Humpback whale saying "go away" to a small boat

Meanwhile, back at Diggers Beach, we had a visit from the Wallabies (rugby team). They have a training camp just up the road and came down for some surfing. Apart from the team jerseys, they were instantly recognisable by their size and the amount of surgical strapping apparently needed to keep their limbs together.

Right, let's see if anyone's offering whales or wallabies for sale on eBay...

Big Lights, Small Bells

Just back from a trip to Sydney to show Llywelyn the city and, after more than four months in little old Coffs Harbour, it was something of an eye-opener. There were crowds of people everywhere, none of whom Sara and I recognised, and some of them were wearing suits. Imagine! And at night there were many lights in the sky which apparently came from something called office blocks, which is where people in suits go to work, I’m told. Anyway, what with all that, and the shocking price of a short black (espresso to you), we were quite worn out and some of us woke rather later than others this morning.

I was breakfasting alone, after a run on the beach, surveying the banksias and the locust-ravaged yuccas in our terraced garden, when I heard the tinkling of a small bell. We’ve heard this before, on warm summer nights when we’ve been sitting on the patio, but never managed to discover what the bell was attached to. This morning revealed the owner to be a grey and black striped cat, looking extremely grumpy, possibly about being attached to the bell.

He may also have been grumpy about being a member of a persecuted species. Australia has its fair proportion of cat lovers but it also has a refreshingly large number of people who think, as one phone-in caller had it, that the only good cat is a dead cat. This is not because of the way cats torment vegetable gardens, which has always been my objection to the little sods, but because cats have brought Australia’s indigenous wildlife, particularly birds, to the point of extinction.

Now this may come as surprise to anyone woken here by the dawn chorus, which is deafening and varied, and less of a chorus and more of a heavy metal gig, but these people believe that every cat comes home in the morning covered in blood, fur and feathers after a night of slaughter. Point out that, birds aside, this fair isle has some of the most vicious and deadly indigenous wildlife in the world, and you’ll be told that cats are very clever.

Just how clever? Well, according to a leaflet published to encourage people to be “responsible” cat owners (there‘s a whole debate there, I know, but we‘ll leave it for the moment), every cat should have a collar with three bells on it. Baffled, I read on to learn that some cats were capable of muffling two bells, yes, two, with a paw, so having three ensured that the cat could move nowhere without alerting its prey.

Even I feel this may be going a bit far but I do look forward to my first sighting of a hunting cat, stumbling round the garden, desperately trying to cover its bells with a paw, and snorting soil out of its nostrils after yet another lurch into the ground as efforts to be a lean and hungry killing machine on three legs come to naught. And, after all the crapping in my vegetable gardens over the years, I’ll sit back in my patio chair, open another stubby, and have a good laugh.

The smell of Mortein in the morning....

We’ve been lucky with the wildlife outdoors so far - there’s plenty of weird and wonderful stuff in the garden (see below) but we’ve not come across anything deadly. This is something of a relief because if you listen to some people every bush is laden with creatures dripping venom. However, some of the indigenous species are apparently only happy when they’re sharing your house.

Llywelyn arrived from the UK a couple of days ago to find me traumatised after an incident in the utility room. I had donned a pair of rubber gloves to wash some cycling kit (the water is very hot; it’s not that the kit was particularly unpleasant) and, after a while, felt something moving against my forefinger. I thought I’d touched a zip or something so carried on but then felt it again. I pulled off the glove to find a brown, barbed leg stuck to my finger, together with some brown scales. Turning the glove inside out revealed a mangled, rather soggy, cockroach, minus one leg. I’d obviously given it a good poke because it was, thankfully, dead.

They’re pretty common here and Sara has long adopted a regime of unwavering vigilance and powerful chemicals. I used to find a rolled-up newspaper took care of most things back home, especially the Daily Mail, because the sheer weight of prejudice contained within squashed most things flat. But I arrived here to find that Sara had become a great fan of Mortein, which seems to be a descendant of Agent Orange and DDT.


Death in a can

It works like this. You find a cockroach and you spray it with Mortein. The roach then flies straight at you and hangs on. If Sara’s wielding the can, she then sprays both you and the roach and tells you to stop complaining. The roach falls to the floor and lies on its back (I know how they feel) but it’s just teasing you. Try to sweep it into the dust pan and it’ll flip over and scurry off. Sara applies more chemicals at this stage; I tend to hit it with the can. If you can lop something off, it helps. They take a long time to die and the garden ants eat them alive, once immobilized. And they call this the lucky country.

We’ve also had Huntsman spiders in the lounge. They’re three to four inches across, hairy and muscular, and they can, and do, bite but they’re not poisonous. You wouldn’t want to squash them as the mess on your furnishings would be dreadful. Curiously, they react to Mortein (any port in a storm) in much the same way initially, as they leap off the wall towards you looking irritated. Further applications cause then to rear up on the hind legs and wave the front ones aggressively but they do slow down a bit. This is your chance to drop a glass over them and slide some paper underneath, giving you an opportunity to study your prey, if you wish. Deposit them in the garden and they stagger off into the undergrowth, spitting Mortein, and presumably working out how they can get back into the house.

Much as I abhor the use of powerful chemicals, I do find it satisfying to open the garage to find three or four recumbent roaches, victims of the surface spray version of Sara’s insecticide of choice. And I do love the smell of Mortein in the morning.

Am I abroad?

Much as I dislike quoting Bill Bryson, he had a point about Australia and it was something like this: if you arrived from another English-speaking country, it didn’t feel as though you were in a foreign country. The language was the same, give or take the odd bit of jakka and spruiking, the buildings were much the same and so was the culture. He seems to have missed the crystal-clear blue sky and the sun beating down on his head but then he probably didn’t come here from the depths of a Welsh winter like I did. Even so, I knew what he was getting at. All that way, and yet it seems, well, familiar, the risk of sun-stroke aside.

You could almost feel disappointed, depending on why you came here. But you only need to go as far as your garden and things become very foreign indeed. We rent a house here in Coffs Harbour and the garden has been left in our care, including the fine stand of palm trees at the front, which keep off the worst of the sun (see, I’m talking like a foreigner already - the worst of the sun). But we get a sea breeze at night and the palm leaves brush against the outside wall of our bedroom, making a noise like a witch scratching to get in, or so my partner, Sara, tells me. She is, after all, still troubled by the dwarf in Bonanza (younger readers can go to http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Bonanza) So a particularly vicious saw was purchased, the offending branch lassoed and pruned. It was not what I was used to as a gardener. That aside, the palms don’t need much care, apart from picking up the fronds and stems when they die and fall off and then trying to get six foot of intractable plant into the special wheelie bin for garden waste. Best not to be standing underneath the frond when it falls. I never had that problem on my allotment in Cardiff.

Out the back, where we have a patio and a steep terrace with banksias and other, as yet unidentified shrubs, it gets more foreign. Sitting, or rather sweating, out the heat wave that arrived shortly after I did, I watched pairs of rainbow lorikeets cavorting, usually upside down, as the banksia branches bend under their weight as they waddle to the ends to nibble the flowers. Occasionally, black cockatoos flew over head and I looked up one day to see two herons on the roof of the house behind. Black and white butterflies fluttered by on with wings like soup-plates.

At ground level, I found what appeared to be the only four-legged spider in the world. This I discovered was the St Andrew’s Cross spider (what it’s cross about, I don’t know) which appears to have four legs because it keeps its back legs firmly together, if you see what I mean. Again, I don’t know why but one could speculate. Penny lizards which, as their name suggests, are very small, scurry round in sunny bits and I’ve seen a proper, three-foot lizard sunning himself on the top of the wall, just at head height. You need to be prepared for something like that and I wasn’t. Rather more appealing is the blue-tongued skink (yes, it does have a blue tongue) that periodically scuttles round the patio. But I’m a bit worried about him as I haven’t seen him for weeks. He would have been useful when the locusts arrived and started eating their way through the landlord’s yuccas. You can hear them munching on the leaves, they leave huge droppings and they’re very hard to squash - the locusts that is.

The previous tenants left the back garden in a mess of weeds so a gardener was summoned by the letting agents to put it to rights. I mentioned that might plant some tomatoes. “I laugh at people who grow tomatoes“ was the forthright response. Prone to diseases, apparently, and they cost only $1 a kilo in season. Which is all true but doesn’t take into account the need to make a patch of foreign soil one’s own, to make it less foreign. So I have three herb plants, all flourishing, and mounted a piece of metal-work by a friend from Wales on an old tree stump. It makes wonderful razor-sharp shadows on the garden wall as the Australian sun wheels across the sky. It looks like it's found its place.


Richard Sewell's metalwork in the garden. For more of his life and work, see http://www.jarkman.co.uk