Seas of green

One of the things that rarely ceases to amaze me about this country is the sheer richness and abundance of astonishing, untouched natural landscapes.

The cottage where we stayed in Berry was perched on the hump of a hillside dipping down to a rolling brook shaded among the trees. From every window on one side of the house, all you could see was the forest tumbling down the steep slope opposite; step outside and you'd glimpse the craggy escarpment of the Great Dividing Range looming above. The lawn and trees flickered with rosella and galah parrots, a wombat lumbered around as our friends arrived on Friday night, and, early on a crisp Sunday morning, an invasive fox stalked past through the high grass.

I used to look on the 28 hectares of Highgate Woods--a small forest in North London which was never built on or extensively logged--as a sort of miracle. And there is something remarkable about its ability to persist almost untouched while the industrial revolution rolled around it and one of the world's great cities grew to swallow it up.

But the almost profligate profusion of near-untouched landscapes in Australia makes such scraps of nature seem few and mean. A typical farmer may have a Highgate Woods'-worth of forest sitting on their land and regard it as little more than an irritant.

I suppose this is what Europe was like in the days when the great boreal forests stretched from the Urals to the Atlantic. Whereas nowadays even stretches of "wilderness" like the Scottish Highlands are the result of intensive sheep-farming, logging and hunting. The same is true of Australia in a way--Aboriginal people had a huge role in shaping the environment through fire agriculture, for instance--but the absence of pastoral and arable farming means the human impact is almost invisible to my eyes. The landscape seems pristine.

So despite myself, I can't help a certain incredulity sometimes when I hear of threats to Australia's woodlands. I agree with those who want to preserve this unique environment from development and degradation, but what I find most amazing about this country is not the scarcity of the natural environment but its vast, untouched abundance. All the more reason to preserve it, of course; but we should stop for a moment to wonder and be thankful for the scale of what we have.

Do your own Attenborough voiceover

I think I once wanted to be a nature filmmaker. Can't remember what happened to that, but on my 34th birthday, I finally shot some footage of a cool animal.

This is a Victoria's Riflebird and it came onto our verandah every morning where we were staying in Lake Eacham, north Queensland. It was trying to impress the ladies of course, but they were more interested in our breakfast scraps. Love can be hard.

Farewell to Bondi

We've been living in our new gaff for a couple of weeks now and we're loving it. Best of all is having our own back garden and no psychotic and aggressive neighbours. In fact the neighbours in Petersham are great - it's one of the first streets I've lived on in a while where I genuinely felt part of a community, rather than a mass of transients.

But I'll certainly miss plenty about living near the beach - first of all, the name of this blog doesn't sound quite so appropriate any more. There is definitely a totally different quality about life on the edge of a continent - with the smell of the sea on the air when the wind is in the right direction - to life in one of Sydney's endless suburbs. When we first moved to Oz, my friend Paul got me to do a quick segment on BBC radio about the attractions of living in Sydney, and one of the main points that came to mind was the humbling, taking-you-outside-yourself quality of living so close to something so elemental and so powerful.

I felt a little bit of that when I first started working next to the Thames in London: watching the river's moods, the contained but brutal force of its currents swirling round the piers of its bridges. Stop for a moment to think about it, and there is something frankly terrifying about the way the strip of mud on which beachcombers sway their metal detectors in the morning has disappeared below 20ft of swirling khaki water by sunset.

But if the Thames gives you a sense of nature's awesome power, it's nothing next to the sea (and not just any sea: a sea you can run down to and swim in, dive into, or even surf on). The first time I swam there after arriving here, with Kate, Dorani, Dorani's friend Diamando and her daughter, we all went body-surfing on a sunny afternoon in early summer. It wasn't awesome body-surfing, but it was enough that if you caught a wave just right it would take you all the 20 metres in to the shore. And with your legs hanging buoyant in the water, you could pick up the force of the sea swirling around you, as if you were a human seismograph. Somewhere further out there, or on the same beach on a rougher day, that same sea could be moving with enough strength to kill someone.

Anyway, I think that's what I will miss most and most want to return to, if we can ever afford it. Kate much prefers the people around here - fewer trustafarians with Tango Tans, a less self-centred culture generally, less chance of ending your life stuck in the grille of a Toyota Landcruiser - and I'd agree with all that. But there is something quite unique about living near the sea, and I'd love to do it again. When a big storm comes in, you can watch it darken the surface of the water as it rushes towards you; in autumn, whales often play close enough to shore that you feel you could almost touch them.

A trip to Flat Rock

Well this blog is named after the feeling you get after a swim in the sea, and late in the afternoon yesterday the overcast weather that has hung around Sydney since Christmas finally started to clear up and the temperature rose. So I threw a snorkel and mask and a towel into a backpack and headed down to the beach with Kate and Althea.

I've always been more of a snorkelling than stroke-swimming or body-surfing fan. Snorkelling is like a miniature, up-close underwater safari. There's something too about floating weightless, diving down and feeling the pressure on your lungs and sinuses, feeling yourself jogged by the ebb and flow of the current and watching it sway the seafloor around you.

The best place to go snorkelling in Sydney is Clovelly, a sort of giant rockpool formed when a fall of cliff rubble all but blocked off the entrance to an inlet about the size of two Olympic-sized swimming pools. But Flat Rock, the spot where the cliffs of the South Head peninsula crumble down to the sand of Bondi Beach, runs it a pretty close second.

[caption id="attachment_114" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="You can't get much closer to the beach than this"][/caption]

Even getting in is a ride. The tide swells here over a platform covered in weedy green and red algae, and aficionadoes can time their entries and exits perfectly so that the gentle waves carry them into and out of the deep water. When the water is too rough it's less fun - one friend once got dragged over the rocks and got cuts all over his feet which stopped him walking for a couple of days. Yesterday, though, was beautifully calm.

Once you drop off the edge of the rocks you find yourself hovering over a garden of waving, crinkly seaweed, in which more acute eyes than mine would be able to find leafy sea dragons. This falls away into a landscape of sand, punctuated by the odd rock, overgrown with weed and orbited by small fish. In the blue middle distance a school of silver trevally, each as long as my forearm, nosed their way out of the shallows off to the deeper water. Garfish twinkled past, jerking their needle-snouts from side to side. Closer to the waves, some of the boulders are coated with algae as pink as Miami stucco, and down between them you find the real action - crimson-banded wrasse popping in and out of shelter, dun herring cale inspecting their hunting grounds, and fortescue and rock cale squatting grumpily on the bottom.

I couldn't get pictures of any of this because my camera ain't waterproof, so here's some shots of the waves breaking at the base of the cliffs north of Flat Rock:

[caption id="attachment_111" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="A bit rough for swimming, this"][/caption]

Smells

With the exception of Smell-O-Vision (OK, not excepting Smell-O-Vision), modern communications have never been very good at conveying odours. So writing about the smells of Sydney in a blog seems futile, but it is the most evocative sense and I'm trying to capture a feel of what it's like living here, so here goes.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Sydney would smell so much more intense if I had one of these"][/caption]

Smells were, oddly enough, one of the things that Kate missed most about Australia. Londoners will no doubt complain that their city smells of old fried chicken boxes and exhaust fumes, but for the most part it is a strikingly inodorous city - I can't remember many occasions when I was forcefully struck with a strong smell, least of all a strong pleasant smell. The scent of barbecuing meat will always remind me of summer afternoons and a few times in summer you'll walk past some flowers smelling potent in bloom, but for the most part the city smells of paper and metal, ie nothing.

I think it must be something about the cleansing effect of the sea air and the ranker quality of vegetation in a warmer climate, but Sydney seems full of smells to me - Brisbane, closer to the tropics, even more so. Walking back from Bondi Beach last night the salty, seaweedy smell of the ocean swept over us in slow waves, and in between there were fragments of other, unconnected odours: the sweet smokiness of fish grilling in someone's garden, an astringent dose of eucalyptus sap, a tang of basil in a school vegetable patch, the rich dressing-table scent of frangipani blossoms. At night, you first sense the presence of the ubiquitous American cockroach (who seem to be the main element of pavement-traffic after humans once the sun goes down) through their not unpleasant pheromonal smell; jasmines glow a dull white in the warm summer dark, surrounded by heavy clouds of perfume.

Glorious

There was a slightly annoying column in the paper the other day going on about how everything in Sydney is crap but we do have amazing weather. Well I don't agree with the first part, but I do agree with the second. Or more specifically, we have the most amazing light: it makes colours more intense, beautifies otherwise ugly buildings and streets, and seems to inject a little germ of optimism into everyone's lives. The downside of this, I suppose, is the caricature of people not really caring about important stuff as long as the beer is cold and the barbecue is hot. But there's a reason they call it a sunny disposition.

I went out this evening to pick up a pizza. This is what was blazing at me all the way back home:

It's a little bit country...

My Christmas present this year from my lovely sis-in-law was a little pocket guide to "Sydney's hidden and intriguing places". That sort of thing is right up my street - just the thought of being able to brag: "I know the perfect place and it's just round the corner and you've never heard of it" makes me purr with smug self-satisfaction. Especially if I'm in a city where I've not lived for five years.

Anyway, such thoughts were going through my head as I got to the end of Adelaide Street the other day and dropped down into Cooper Park.



Ask most Sydneysiders about it and they'll tell you they've never heard of this 38 acres of never-developed bushland strung between the ponce of Double Bay and the bustle of North Bondi. Which to me is absolutely extraordinary.

In London, a treasure like this would be on the cover of every travel guide and filled with dogs, strollers and kids on bikes every weekend of the year. Think of it as Hampstead Heath with Jurassic tree palms, massive stringybarks corkscrewing their way into the ground, ghost gums surrounded by litters of peeled bark, and native birds sounding and whooping all around.

Because it's a steep stream gully, you can rarely even see the tops of the terraces and apartment blocks on the surrounding streets. Looking up through the treetops, you could imagine yourself in the Blue Mountains, or further afield still. Barring a bit of management and some work on the paths, this little scratch of land has not changed much since the days when the local Darug had never seen a European face.



For anyone who lives within 30 minutes' walk of Bondi Junction, the main transport interchange for Sydney's eastern suburbs, a walk through Cooper Park would seem an obvious way to work out the stresses of the day on the way home from work. But the strange thing is, the place was pretty much deserted on the three occasions I've been there so far.

Perhaps Australians are so used to being surrounded with genuine native wilderness that they become blasé to it when it's on their doorstep. But I can't escape the suspicion that the Double Bay types are too busy carving people up in their 4WDs, while the Bondi types aren't interested in any green space you can't jog through. There's a few tennis courts at one end of it, but I guarantee that visitor numbers would go through the roof if they knocked down an acre or so of forest and laid out a bland grass footie oval.

Anyway, I'm happy for it to stay that way. The second time I visited it was the week before Christmas, and I was on my way back from shopping for essentials at the massive Westfield centre in Bondi Junction. My backpack was full of drink and cat food and similar nonsense and it had been drizzling all day, but the weight seemed to disappear as I climbed down the mossy staircase into the gully. The spray fell in veils through the fern fronds and beaded on the leaves of the forest floor shrubs. A native magpie bristled on a trunk a few metres away, then unfurled its wings and dropped deeper into the valley. I felt nowhere near the city.