|
Australia
April 2007
By BOB MALONE
 hree days after we got back from Australia, I was off to yet another time zone. I had a two-show hit and run to do in Florida, another three time zones away. Not that it mattered at this point. Well beyond jet-lag, I was now living in a dimension beyond time. Karen picked me up at LAX three days later.
"I saw a Qantas flight come in while I was waiting for you." She said. "I cried. I want to go back."
I knew how she felt. In my travels as a musician I have been lucky enough to visit many amazing and far-flung places (Japan, Italy, Belgium…Nebraska) but no place has ever quite gotten to me like Australia. Usually, when I get home, I'm glad to be home. Not that I love L.A. all that much, but I do love to sleep in my own bed, with the cats and the wife and my stuff. Home. There's nothing like it. It wasn't like that this time. This once-foreign land inhabits a permanent part of my heart.
We landed in Sydney at 7:30 AM on a Saturday. It was a fourteen hour flight. But it was really even longer than that. Somewhere over the Pacific, we crossed the International Date Line, and a whole day just vanished. We left L.A. on Thursday, and arrived on…Saturday. Through the magic of Ambien, we were able to snooze away eight hours of the flight. So it wasn't too bad.
We were determined to get on top of the jet-lag, and that meant staying up all day. We did an early check-in at the Four Seasons, and went up to our room. The view out the window of our room was a postcard brought to life. Sydney Harbor, the Opera House, the bridge. We tossed the bags, and headed out.
The first thing we did was walk right into oncoming traffic. They drive on the left in OZ, a little leftover from their British-Colonial past. After pulling back just in time to not get flattened by a Fiat cargo van, we then noticed the handy "LOOK RIGHT" painted on the curb. Clearly we were not the first tourists to have a near-death experience upon arrival.
We headed down George Street towards the harbor, stopping for coffee at the G'Day Café on the way - they say this is the most visited eatery in the whole country, on account of its location in uber-touristy "Rocks" area of Sydney. I discovered I had to be more specific about my coffee order than at home. The Aussies take their java cues from Italy, and as in Italy, coffee as we know it is "American style" and, also as in Italy, they think it tastes like bilge-water. I was faced with alien choices…flat white, flat black, tall short black. And of course your basic cappuccino, espresso, latte, etc. This all sounded great, but I was not able to make such complicated coffee choices until I had my coffee. A terrible chicken/egg dilemma. I took my chance with the flat white. It was a fine choice - we perked up (so to speak) immediately.
Caffeine fix in hand, we commenced our tour of the waterfront area around Circular Quay (that's pronounced "key" by the way). As was pretty much mandatory, we stopped to gaze at the famous Sydney Opera House, where we were tourist couple number 13,000,000,003 to take pictures of each other with that iconic while building in the background. And also tourist couple number 13,000,000,003 to not see the inside of the place. Which is ok, if everything goes well, one of these days I'll see the inside of the joint from the stage. I can wait til then.
As we walked around the harbor area, I was taken aback by how much the architecture and weather and vibe on the street reminded me of, well…southern California. It was slightly different in a remote, otherworldly way, as if I were visiting Huntington Beach or Marina Del Rey as it might exist in an alternate universe. A universe where, mixed in among the usual park pigeons and seagulls, there were also strange hook-beaked ibis birds strutting about, and flocks of lorikeets chattering away in the trees. The people, however, were completely different. Open and friendly in a way you almost never see in US cities. I already knew it was going to be very hard to leave this place.
We ate lunch at the historic Sydney Oyster Cove Bar, where we had our first taste of the very delicious Sydney Rock Oyster, and a plate of King Island cheeses. We would soon come to find out that the cheese plate is a big thing in Australia, and all the good cheese comes from tiny King Island, just off Tasmania. Also on the menu were "bugs" which are the local version of crayfish. We weren't ready for that.
At the table next to us were a couple of ladies who were at least in their 70s having a grand old time eating prawns and drinking champagne. One of them had just flown home from Indonesia. They seemed so much more alive and happy than older folks I see at home. I would see more and more of this as our time here went on. Maybe senior citizens in Oz are more valued in society, or spend less time wasting away in front of the television, or aren't stuck into old-age homes to rot while their progeny work their own way into an early grave. Mostly they just don't seem as beaten down with age, it's there, but it is not, by krikey, going to get in the way!
After lunch we bought a ticket for the ferry that would take us over to Darling Harbor and the Sydney Aquarium, which is known to be one of the finest in the world. We had a wonderful ride across to the other side of the harbor, and commenced with the viewing of native ocean fauna. Lots of sharks and poisonous jellyfish, of course. In general, a matchless variety of creatures that want to kill you. There are more ways to die in Australia than in any other country I can think of.
It was late afternoon now, and we were flagging badly, and weary from the crowds. It was then that I spied the Chinese Garden of Friendship. My wife had not planned this place into our tight and ambitious schedule for the day, as it had nothing to do with seeing animals or eating. I however had researched it in our National Geographic guidebook and planned to spring it on her when the time was right. I knew if I had brought it up in the planning stages it would have been shot down, but now the moment was right and I made my move. We paid the admission, and were immediately enveloped in a tranquil environment of Zen calm. Streams and waterfalls and little bridges and lilypads and ducks and flowers and carved gazebos…all that kind of shit. Karen said: "You know, a lot of your ideas suck, but then you have ones like this that are so great it totally makes up for all the other ones!" She is not the first person that is close to me to have made that observation.
Feeling I was on a roll, good idea-wise, I boldly made plans for dinner - Phillip's Foote. I'd read about it somewhere and really wanted to go. This is a place where you barbecue your own meat Aussie style. Or, if you want to get right down to it, American suburban style. The Aussies love their backyard barbecues just like all of us here who grew up in the great American postwar suburban sprawl. Phillip's Foote brought the backyard barbecue to the city. Made me wish West Hollywood had a place like it. You go in through a cozy old-school bar to the back, which is an outdoor open-air area with barbecue pits and tables scattered around. All the way back is the counter where you pick out your meat. I got the rump - rump seems to be the favored cut of beef in Oz…it made me realize that I hadn't seen a cut of meat in America called "rump" since I was a kid - probably because we've all become too squeamish to want to be reminded of what we're actually eating. "Rump" is just a little too specific for us, isn't it? I'm sure we're still eating it, safely hidden behind a euphemism.
We ordered our steaks and I commenced to cooking them on the grill. I fell into conversations with some other guys barbecuing…always guys. Guys cook meat on grills. Some things should remain sacred. This is one of those things. We conversed about a great many things relating to the grilling of meat, and at no time did anyone say "barbie" or "shrimp on the Barbie." I'm pretty sure now that was made up by an American ad agency. There certainly were no blooming fucking onions in sight!
Karen and I enjoyed meat and salad at our table, directly under a heat-lamp. It had been chilly all day. If you need to know how tired and extra-crispy we were, all you need to hear is the following conversation had by us, at our table, under the heat-lamp:
Me: "Wow! It's really nice out tonight!"
Karen: "Yeah, it's really warmed up. It was cold all day!"
Me: "Yeah, I can't believe how warm it is!"
Karen: "I just can't believe how the weather has ch…uhh - we're under a heat-lamp."
Me: "Oh."
We closed out the night at the Four-Seasons hotel bar, which conveniently for me, was also a cigar-bar. I achieved stogie-nirvana with a wonderful Graycliff cigar mailed to me by a fan in Austin just before the trip. Karen drank a martini. It was 9:00…we had made it through the day!
On day two, we made a trip to the famous Taronga Zoo where we got to see all the creatures that made Australia famous. The very first thing we came to was an enclosure where you could walk along a path while wallabies (think of a small kangaroo) cavorted uncaged all around you. Immediately upon entering, one crossed right in front of us, and Karen nearly burst into tears of delight. I'm sure that to the locals, this was like seeing a few deer in your backyard, but to us, it was unbearably exotic. After a full tour of the native fauna, we got in line for the de-rigeur koala bear photo, which, I believe, is required by law for all tourists.
Later we visited Manly Beach, which was like taking a half-hour boat ride across Sydney Harbor and arriving in…California. The place really reminded us of Redondo Beach, in the Southernmost reaches of Los Angeles, where Karen and I both used to live. Right down to the surfers and the beach volleyball. But they had one thing I'm absolutely sure Redondo Beach will never have: Oceanworld. Home of deadly Australian creatures. We headed immediately for the circular building on the beach and paid our admission. While standing at the counter, we talked excitedly about how we hoped we'd get to see a blue-ringed octopus. We liked this creature especially because it has a bite with enough toxin in it to kill 20 adult humans, and it's really cute. Well, by God, there was one in a tank right on the counter in front of us. I hadn't even played the festival yet, and I could have gone home happy! The little guy seemed quite content, clinging to the side of the tank in an upper corner, dozing the day away. "He just sits there all day, he really likes the bubbles" said the girl at the counter. Didn't look a bit deadly to me.
The place was a little bit tacky, but they sure had some great deadly creatures. Sharks, crocs, snakes, funnel web spiders. Tarantulas. We had already felt we'd gotten our money's worth when we met the blue-ringed octopus, so the rest felt like a bonus.
Dinner that night was at a very swanky joint right on the harbor called Quay (pronounced "Key," as I think I pointed out before). I called down to the front desk to have them make the reservation and they were so happy I pronounced it right I thought she was going to pay for our dinner herself.
The food and view were exquisite; we could hardly believe our good fortune. And the trip had barely just begun.
That night, as I was dozing off, I heard a faint booming…not quite loud car stereo booming, more like fireworks. But how could that be? I got out of bed and looked out the window. A fireworks display was lighting the sky over Sydney harbor, flanked on either side by that unmistakable bridge and the opera house - as glorious a scene as you could possibly imagine. Why? I have no idea. It was just a plain old Sunday night, as far as I knew. I tried to wake Karen so she could see, but she was having none of it. So it became my secret moment. I looked on in wonder, and felt as if no one but me was seeing those lights in the sky.
On our third and final day in Sydney, we visited the amazing Royal Botanical Gardens, kind of the Central Park of Sydney. It was a magical place. We strolled the grounds for hours, had lunch under giant eucalyptus trees filled with flying foxes, visited a hothouse full of exotic Aussie tropical plants. At one point we found ourselves surrounded by a flock of sulfur-crested cockatoos. This is the big white parrot you see for sale in the pet store here in the States for two grand. In Australia it is just another wild bird. They call them "Cockies." Mostly people complain about them eating the wooden siding off of their houses. Karen was delighted and managed to get a handful of the corn kernels people were feeding the birds. A couple of them sat right on her arms while getting their treat. At one point, she nearly got her finger taken off…pet store birds, these were not.
Later on, we went over to the one historical site I had really wanted to see, the Hyde Park Barracks. Built in 1817 by the very convicts who would later be confined behind its walls, the barracks were now a museum dedicated to Australia's convict past. You hear so little about the history of this country beyond "yeah - they all used to be a bunch of criminals!" and I was very curious about how this beautiful, civilized country of tidy towns, leafy suburbs, and cosmopolitan cities could have arisen in such a relatively short time from its origins as a penal colony. All I can say is - the place sure has come a long way! If I had to use one word to describe Australia's colonial past, "squalid" would be that word. One of the most fascinating things I learned was that everybody who got sent here got one of three sentences: three years, seven years, or life. Most of it was for the crime of being poor. Here's twenty-two year old Ian Jones, sentenced to life for stealing a loaf of bread. That sort of thing. And get this - the only reason the British started sending people down here at all is because we won the revolutionary war, and they had to stop sending all their criminals to Georgia and the Carolinas.
We had been invited to dinner by Baiba James, who manages and books Aussie blues pianist Jan Preston - the "Queen of Boogie Woogie," who was also playing the festival. Baiba and her partner Geoff picked us up at the hotel and we met Jan at a funky hole-in-the-wall African food joint called Le Kilimanjaro. This was in the Newtown section of Sydney - hangout of hipsters and college students and musicians. A place we surely would not have seen if we had just been there as tourists. The owner of the restaurant was a good friend of Baiba and Jeff, so we got the special treatment. The food was unbelievable - and cheap too! The five of us fell easily into conversation. It was like we had all been friends for years…this sort of thing is the best part of being on the road. I've made wonderful friends all over the world. People who make me feel at home wherever I am. It is truly a gift.
After dinner we headed over to Jan's place to play some tunes on her Yamaha grand. We ended up playing for quite a long time - separately and together. It's so rare that piano players get to meet each other, let alone play together. Jan, in many ways, reminded me a lot of, well…me. All the same piano-player neuroses were on display. It's like we shared a secret language that all the others did not understand, and we immediately began to communicate while the others looked on, mystified and amused. There are a few other piano-pounders I have this kind of relationship with - Wade Preston. Arthur Migliazza. Ann Rabson…we are all members of the same tribe. Separate even from the other musicians we know.
•
Top
| Back
|
