In Hyde Park, Sydney, the beseeching arms of monstera plants (free-roaming siblings of that limp cheese plant in an undersized pot in your living room) creep along the ground between Moreton Bay Fig Trees so sprawling that they look like something Edgar Allan Poe thought up to impress you.
The Ibis – a large, unsettling-looking white bird with thick, dark dinosaur legs and a long, hooked beak, marches jurassically about looking for scraps of people’s lunches the way seagulls do at home. It’s easy enough to see why Australians generally respect the natural world in the way they do. There is no conquering, mastering or subduing it.
It can only be managed, placated and worked around.
In Canberra, where I live, a hundred plump white cockatoos will suddenly descend into a public park, shrieking. The collective noun is a “crackle”. They can live 40-60 years in the wild and, consequently, there are a lot of them. People go about their business as though a hundred pompous little avian popes aren’t waddling about in their gleaming splendour, screaming blessings at one another and digging their dexterous little feet into the grass in search of edible treasures.
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Canberrans walk and run on country trails, mincing to the left or right with limber confidence as though the sudden appearance of an eastern brown snake – one of the mostly potently venomous in Australia – isn’t good enough reason put off a nice walk of a Saturday morning.
Nature in Australia demands more respect than the softer, mistier and damper presence it represents at home. In Australia, nature simply feels more serious. More intimidating and awe-inspiring. Less of a benign presence. When Irish emigrants move here, the verdant, melancholy romance of our native landscape is swapped for vistas extending beyond visual comprehension. The sun is about three miles overhead (that’s a vague estimate but you get my point) and SPF becomes an imminent medical necessity.
Nature has a prehistoric, dramatic, capricious inclination, as though it’s extending you strained tolerance on a provisional basis. It’s more likely to sting you, bite you, render you speechless, blow your hat off, burn your ears into sundried tomatoes or leave you to starve in the wilderness if you wander off briefly in the wrong direction. It’s much more likely to swoop down and peck you in the back of your head on the way home from basketball practice.
I have plenty of environmentally conscious, nature-loving friends at home, but when it comes down to it, many will maximise convenience over their principles. Forged in this isolated land mass that features everything from rainforest to desert, Australians have the courage of their environmental convictions. While we secretly wonder if we can be bothered to wash out our yoghurt carton and recycle it if no one is looking, they are changing their route to work to avoid being assaulted by magpies because, and I quote a guy who lives in my building: “Well, the magpies are only protecting their nests and, honestly, they’re just plucky.”
The Australian magpie is nothing like our own small, soft lads at home with their glossy feathers and the peridot oil-slick gleam along their deft black wings and long, trowel-shaped tails. Eurasian magpies may be puffed-up brawlers when they need to be, but they have little ballerina legs and a delicate elegance that makes you think they set the table for dinner. The Australian magpie, on the other hand, is the type of bird you might ask to help you move a heavy couch. They have a domed, russet-coloured eye and a prominent bill, and they look more like black-and-white ravens – despite being no relation – than their curvaceous European cousins.
It’s not the swooping birds that are particularly Australian (though they do represent the general “taking names and kicking arse” approach of nature in Australia), it’s how people respond to them
I awoke early on our first morning in the Australian capital, more than a year ago now, to a bizarre sound, unlike anything I’d ever heard before. In through the open window floated a collection of noises that my brain had no means of contextualising. Somewhere between a wind chime and a flute, the strange warbling sounded almost digitised, as though someone had taken familiar sounds and run them through a synthesiser. What the actual f**k is that, I thought. Is it a pterodactyl? A car alarm? The last sound you hear before you die?
It was a magpie – another local avian scoundrel greeting the morning by roaring melodically into it, interspersing its chiming song with a sound suspiciously close to that of a small dog barking. They can mimic sounds from other birds and their wider environment. I’ve grown accustomed to their uncanny intelligence and strange haunting music each morning, ultimately developing the combination of fond respect and mild fear for them that my Australian neighbours seem to have.
Every spring around this time, the magpies lay their eggs and guard their nests. The males go – and I mean this respectfully – berserk in this mission. The main threats to those eggs, as far as magpies are concerned, are people on bicycles, people on scooters, and people whose jib they don’t like the cut of. If you have the audacity to cycle vaguely near such a magpie’s tree, it will swoop from above with the speed and ferocity of an Allied B-17. It will always come at you from behind, swoop multiple times, and will often draw blood if you’ve been stupid enough to enter its territory without a helmet.
It’s not the swooping birds that are particularly Australian (though they do represent the general “taking names and kicking arse” approach of nature in Australia), it’s how people respond to them. When someone is swooped, Australians in the vicinity will beep their horns, laugh affably as though this is all in good fun really, and say deeply unhelpful things like “You should have worn a helmet” as your ear bleeds like you’ve just emerged shoeless from a Trump rally. Tourists, on the other hand, will run screaming as though being attacked by swooping birds is not in fact normal or funny.
It takes some getting used to but swooping season is just an Australian reality.
Work around the magpies and don’t forget your helmet.
It’ll be grand.
