Off the Edge of the Map: Notes from Australia

At first, it’s just a rustle in the trees—a squirrel or bird, nothing unusual. Until Keith’s eyes widen. My husband is as prone to wonder as I am, and yet, I’ve never seen this particular look of astonishment. He silently points, into the trees. My gaze follows his finger…past what look like loose boxwoods, miniature palms, and trees that look like they’re made of ferns. 

I see it.

Black eyes, staring. An ear, twitching. And all of a sudden, the creature, the size of a smallish dog, is bouncing away.

Bouncing.

Bounding.

A kangaroo? In the trees?

I remember the signs at the rainforest canopy walk yesterday. I know what this is. A forest kangaroo called a pademelon. 

My eyes scan the rainforest floor and I spot two more pademelons. A creature I hadn’t know existed is now watching me with a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. 

When I sent these video to my children, my son said, “Kangaroos come in varieties?”

Yet another thing I learned in this place so far away it might as well be the moon. 

After all, on that same walk through the rainforest, we passed a waterfall with a lake where a platypus lives (bummer we didn’t see it, but I now count my fortune in pademelons, so I am rich) along with glow worms. High in the canopy, bats hung and writhed, stretching out a wing here and there.

Bats.

At least three hundred of them.

Which explained the husks of fruit I’d stepped over time and again on the path.

A half hour later, over phenomenal beer at a brewery that also served up quite incredible pizza and boasted a cheese counter to rival ones in France (do I need to remind you that we’re in a rainforest?), Keith and I decided that Australia is not just like the moon because of it’s distance, it’s like the moon because it just makes no sense. 

In Australia, up is down and “How’re you doing” becomes “How’re you going?”.

Kangaroos come in varieties, some you can feed at a koala rescue in Brisbane and some reclusive ones you can spot just a ten minute walk from your car parked on a residential street that abuts a nature preserve. Your Airbnb host might be a koala rescue worker and there are so many bananas in the little produce market, you have to fight to remember the kind, the only kind, you get at home. Cavendish. So boring after little tangy red bananas. 

By the time of that walk in the rainforest, we’d been in Australia for a week. You’d think by then I’d have gotten used to the strangeness and fantasy of it all. After all, my first thought when I exited the airport was that the air smelled like one of those exotic biodomes, where the flowers are planted for your amusement.

Even in a city like Brisbane, the tech hub of Australia, a walk to dinner is akin to walking through the remnants of a Playmobil zoo turned upside down. I literally gasped at my first sighting of a lace monitor, a lizard as long as my arm with a ferocious looking crest and gnarly toes that flap when it runs.

When I posted photos of my strangest Brisbane bird sighting, Australian readers weighed in: brush turkeys—what my son said looked like three birds stapled together. I’m told they’re a nuisance and often called rats with wings. Much like the white ibis (despite it’s name, it’s legs and long, curved beak are strikingly ebony toned, along with many of the feathers), which strolled by me in a restaurant as I sipped my sangria flight. Apparently they are known as bin chickens. 

Bin chickens.

If you saw one on your local street, you’d wonder if you were hallucinating—or had stumbled onto the Jurassic Park soundstage. 

Except on a soundstage, you don’t get the kind of fantastic coffee you can get in Brisbane, nor can you walk to a world-class performance of Wicked (this is not hyperbole, I’ve seen the show twice on Broadway and this Brisbane performance was my favorite, perhaps because of the love in the performer’s voices when they say “Oz.”). 

With Keith at a conference each day, I had hours to stare at statues of heroes I’d never heard of and sketch flowers from plants like ginger that I didn’t even know flowered. Let along flowered into these waxy, lipstick pink, cone-shaped blooms. 

Feeling agog became my default state. 

And then, while I devoured probably the best bao of my life, I heard a song that made me blink and hold up a finger to still Keith from saying anything. I realized, it was a Christmas song. 

Which isn’t all that unusual in November, perhaps, except November is summer in Australia, and in my summer dress sitting on that sunny terrace sipping a lychee martini, I’d completely forgotten the season. 

Keith paused and listened. Sun, beach, and cold drinks. 

For Christmas?

eating and drinking in brisbane

I chuckled. 

Keith told me about the people he met at the conference. The conference happens in a few places around the world annually, but obviously, this one pull the greatest number of Australians. I’d met a few as a tagger-along, but he told me of others, their openness, their cheer.

Just then the waiter came by and asked where we were visiting from and how we liked it and where we were going next. He listened with great intensity before telling us he has a cousin in the States and wishing us a wonderful vacation.

It suddenly hit me, what made Australia feel like the moon. It wasn’t the the flora, the fauna, or the upside-down seasons, or even that I had about an hour a day where my waking hours crossed with my friends and family. 

What made Australia feel so completely other-worldly is that Australians live every moment of every day knowing that they are not the axis around which the earth spins. Think about it—if you live in Australia, you have to get comfortable with the images being shown in movies of college summer vacations, filled with bikinis and sunscreen. Meanwhile, summer vacation in Australia falls in their winter. Hit TV shows never include a pesky bush turkey. The frame of reference for the rest of the world, from seasons to what constitutes a normal city animal, are completely different. Add to that, the rest of the world rarely even acknowledges the presence of Australia. We hear about strikes in France or a change of government in the UK, but Australia is often overlooked. 

Honestly, my sense is that the are a-okay with that. No worries. 

gin tasting on tambourine mountain

I hate to generalize about so many people all at once, but after we spent a couple of hours talking to the guy pouring rainforest gin who literally offered us a place to stay if we didn’t want to go back to the States, I began to suspect that Australians, because they know the rest of the world doesn’t view them as the center of the universe, have learned not to need to be the center of the universe. There’s a grace in Australia, an ease, a spontaneity that comes from not white-knuckling entitlement. 

Pretty cool.

eating and drinking in noosa

From Brisbane, we drove to the Noosa coast. The beach town had a lived in beach-town grace with excellent food, but the real stunner was the hike along the coastline. People have spotted koalas in the trees, which we sadly didn’t catch sight of, though were treated to a posse of dolphins just offshore, cavorting around a kayaker, and a sea turtle swimming in the shallows. 

The hike hit fewer flora and fauna notes perhaps (though we stood in one place for minutes at a time listening to the strangest cacophony of birdsongs), but hit dizzying heights of landscape drama. Australia taught me that I can pretty much hike forever when I have a startlingly clear blue sea as my guardrail. At one point the path crossed a soft, sandy beach and we decided to stop for a swim. In our clothes, but who cared? Nobody around to notice and how could it be that we had this entire beach to ourselves? The water surged and gurgled over tide pools and I stood in the middle of it, turning in circles, hardly daring to believe any of this was real.

As we sipped cocktails under a red-blossomed flame tree that night, the sea rustling in the distance, we catalogued the ways Australia surprised us. The list was long, and that was before we arrived to our Airbnb on Tambourine Mountain.

Blanketed in fog, the mountain landscape blurred and shifted, twisting into half-seen shapes. When a kookaburra appeared, I blinked, certain I was imagining it. Before I could question myself, a scarlet parrot emerged from the mist and settled on a fence post—a parrot. In the fog. Ghostly strands of lichen swayed from the trees, drawing my gaze upward just in time to catch two emerald-and-violet birds darting in and out of a hollow. Lorikeets, I later learned.

I thought I’d been to a rainforest before, but turns out, I was thinking of a jungle. A rainforest is altogether different. The canopy walk helped articulate what makes a rainforest special, by pointing out spectacular features like strangler figs, which grow from the top of the tree down.

The seeds, you see, are dropped high in the canopy by birds or bats, where they germinate on an existing tree. From there, roots grow downward to the ground while branches spread upward, eventually enveloping the host tree in a lattice of woody stems. Over time, the fig can completely surround and sometimes outlive its host, leaving behind a dramatic, hollow column of twisting roots and trunks.

It’s the first tree I’ve ever seen that requires a video to do it justice, as you need a camera to pan from the muscular roots, up the corded trunk, into the canopy. The hush of it, a towering cathedral of a tree.

Pademelons lived in these woods, though we didn’t know it yet. 

As we sampled wine at one of many Tambourine Mountain vineyards, watching ruby red parrots and one lone frilly white parrot swoop across the winery lawn, we had no idea of the pademelons that awaited us the next day, in another patch of rainforest. 

But that’s Australia for you. A place where beyond every tree there could be a pademelon, beyond every turn in the path their may be a wash of quiet beach, in any restaurant could strut an  ibis.

Fallen jacaranda blossoms from the purple tree in above photo

If you need one last reason to believe Australia is worth the hours in a hurtling tin can (see my post on surviving the flight), let it be this: You know that old saw about toilets flushing the ‘wrong’ way? I came to Australia fully intending to check. But with every ordinary moment turned extraordinary, I never once thought to look.

Australia may not be the world’s point of reference. But way off in the corner of the globe, it can guard its secrets. And those of us who travel to her shores are rewarded with feeling, for perhaps the first time in our lives, like astronauts—disoriented and humbled, perpetually amazed.

Have you been to Australia? Does this match your experience? Australian readers, I’d love your feedback! And if you want more posts like this delivered to your email once a month, sign up for the Grapevine, my newsletter with travel inspiration, wanderlust stories, and destination tips. As a welcome to the Grapevine, I’ll send you a free e-copy of Santa Lucia, my bestselling book set in Italy. Just think! In just a few moments, you could be whisked away to the beauty and mystery of Italy.

how tambourine mountain says goodbye, and come again soon