The minute the plane touched down in Brisbane I knelt
down and planted my sweaty palms on the steaming hot
asphalt.
Finally, after what seemed as forever, I had arrived.
Having spent time in Spain, Italy and other hot countries,
I thought that I knew how to deal with heat.
I was wrong.
Welcoming me to Australia as I walked to the terminal
was the Australian summer and that, dear reader,
means a humid kind of heat that would probably have
most of us begging for mercy.
As soon as I arrived at my folk's place on Tamborine Mountain
I was told to never to leave my shoes outside, to
always check for ticks(horrible little bloodsucking critters),
watch out for redbacks and funnel web spiders as they
are deadly, and kill all ants but especially the red and green
ones.
What!?!!??
Oh, and also, if you go for a walk in the rainforest,
wear gumboots so the leeches(black horrible things
that start out small but they suck your blood until
they are three times! in size) wont get you.
Not only could heat squeeze the life out of you,
apparently the country was also riddled with insects, snakes,
and other critters all hell bent on doing the same.
On hearing all this,
I was seriously considering to never venture outdoors
while I was in Australia.
Alas, heat is a serious antagonist and after sweating
gallons and enduring many, many sleepless nights...
I decided to find a breezy spot somewhere safe.
Ha! Amateur!
Returning from a walk in the rainforest(I had been
told that it was always much cooler there.)
I put away the umbrella(just in case ticks or other biting
or stinging insects pounced on me) and then sat down
to pull off my gum boots.
Looking at my feet after I having pulled off my boots,
I noticed that they were covered in blood and a
bunch of leeches.
Remembering someone telling me to put salt
on leeches to make them let go, I somehow made my
way to the kitchen, grabbed a saltshaker and started
pour salt on the bloodsuckers.
One by one they fell off and bravely I scooped
them up and flushed them down the toilet.
(From then on I always carried a saltshaker with me
when I went for a walk in the rainforest.)
As time passed and I learned to adapt to the many
''dangers'' that was part of living in Australia, I grew
to love it.
I applied for and was given a permanent visa,
I worked in my folk's restaurant, learned how to drive,
bought a car and started to drive off the mountain and
down to the beach as often as I could.
I made some friends and moved in to a share-house
with a young couple
who lived in a house barely 100 meters from the beach.
Nick surfed and made surfboards and Rita made clothes.
Every morning they would head down to the ocean for
a surf and I would come along for a swim.
For me, the Pacific Ocean was beautiful, inviting and
''safe'' in difference to ''land'', which seemed just riddled
with an endless offering of stinging, biting and potentially
deadly ''critters''.
Safe? Did I say the ocean was safe?
Wrong.
None of my surfing friends seemed bothered about
sharks, stone fishes, jellyfishes or stingrays, so I assumed that
I was quite safe body surfing the white-wash.
Wrong again.
One morning, happily surfing the white-wash
I suddenly noticed a bunch of my friends standing on the
beach waving, shouting and flailing their arms about.
I thought they were just fooling around until I clearly
heard the words: GET OUT!!!!!!!!!
Having just swum out past the break I stopped swimming,
started to tread water and had a look around me.
I was totally surrounded by Compass jellyfish.
(Very nasty, potentially dangerous.)
Somehow, I managed to get out of the water
without being stung. (Don't know how, it's still a
mystery.)
I have since been stung many times by another nasty
jellyfish called ''Blue bottle'', but here's the thing;
I still love Australia and call it ''home''.
Australia, some reckon, is a ''deadly'' country
not made for the faint hearted.
Whether on land, in the water, or in the air....
it seems danger awaits us.
Here's the thing though, it is also a country
with golden sands, crystal blue waters, open
spaces, night skies sparkling with millions of stars,
and a nature inhabited by flora and fauna found
nowhere else.
Australia also has
a living culture created by a people who have nurtured
and looked after country for thousands of years
and for whom the term ''deadly'' means excellent.
Putting some rubbish in my rubbish bin one
morning I suddenly came face to face with
this spider.
And yes, this is the real size.
And no, they can bite but seldom do so.
It did however give me a bit of a fright when
it was two centimeters away from my eyeball!
About the images: top: water colour on paper
''Lovecraft's Jellyfish''
above: water colour on paper
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