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