After a staggering twenty-four hours in British Airways and Qantas ‘planes and another five or six going beltless and shoeless through the various security controls in Geneva, London and Singapore, I finally landed in a warm, sunny Brisbane, Australia.
This, at last, was the other side of the world, where things really are very different. It’s where the water goes down the plug hole anti-clockwise, where beer flows in abundance from public fountains, where the national sport consists of throwing a ball at three sticks and some lunatic in a helmet tries to hit it, where each and every café and pub offers the world’s best meat pies and where the fauna and flora are vastly different from dear old Kingston-upon-Thames.
As soon as I arrived, I began my quest for my Aussie Holy Grail – a sighting of a koala bear. It took more than two weeks before I finally saw one (see the cuddly wee beastie in the photo), and the wait made it all the more worthwhile. Did you know that koalas sleep at least twenty hours a day, that they only eat eucalyptus and certain gum tree leaves and they don’t drink liquid of any sortı I didn’t either until a beer-swilling Australian animal keeper of very doubtful origins told me. He also explained that the reason they sleep so much is because there are no vitamins in the leaves they eat so they have just enough energy to fall asleep.
Besides my koala, I caught glimpses of wallabies, kangaroos, multi-coloured parrots, kookaburras and duck-billed platypuses (where do they think up these namesı) and a few other unsightly unmentionables. I also saw some awesomely beautiful birds (the sandy Australian beaches are abound with them). What surprised me most however, was that unlike you dear reader, the average Australian doesn’t seem to be preoccupied with time (with perhaps the one exception of “In’it time for a beer mateı” ) and yet there are some quite extraordinary antipodean buildings bedecked with attention-grabbing clocks.
The fact that people down under don’t look up at them could emanate from their indifference to the hour or even their innate fear of getting sun on their faces, but methinks that it is more to do with the fact that when we look up we have a tendency to open our mouths and in Australia that’s really asking for trouble.
You know those crazy hats with corks hanging from them that you’ve seen Aussies from the outback wearing, well it’s not to show how many bottles of the local grape juice they’ve drunk, it’s because there is an inordinate number of flies down under and the swinging corks theoretically keep some of them away. Australia is home to one of the world’s largest fly congregations and if you look up at a clock and open your mouth the chances are that before you can say ‘Geez, catch an eyeful of that’ you’ll have caught a mouthful of those disgustingly dirty dipterous insects. One final thought on the matter: the next time you see that British Airways poster that reads ‘Fly to Australia’, remember it’s not a consumer suggestion, it’s a decree to insects!
But back to the clocks. The illustrations here show some of the unusual buildings with clocks I saw in Australia - an oriental edifice that resembled a mosque but in fact was a cinema, the wonderful Art Deco railway station in Melbourne, the interior of a vast Victoria shopping complex in Sydney, and last, but not least, the unfinished ‘wall clock’ that is on the exterior of a house in Sydney that seems to substantiate my theory that Australians don’t care about time. The fact that the house belongs to Martin Foster, our Australian watch correspondent does worry me a little though.
So, ‘til BaselWorld then … or as they say down under, ‘No worries, see ye mate!’