SSJ - Day 2 PM

We arrived at Tasmania Zoo, and piled in at a jog to see the famous meerkats. They are right at the entrance, in fact their glass-fenced enclosure opens on to the zoo cafeteria. You can sit at a table, enjoy meerkat activity and have a Slushee or a fisherman's basket at the same time. The radio is also on, and while we were there the meerkats enjoyed some Midnight Oil, Counting Crows and Sammy Hagar-era Van Halen.

They are completely loveable. They are a bit smaller than I thought, but very active. They were nibbling on scattered bits of stuff when we arrived, so we thought the "feeding" would probably not be a big deal for them, but they jumped to attention when the keeper went in with a bucket of grubs. They did quite a lot of the sitting-up-on-hindquarters thing that we all know and love. One of them was up on a little central perch, keeping a perky weather eye on the primates, Tasmanian devils and the Tasmanian masked owl. As those guys are all also in cages and pens, I don't think he really had much to worry about.

The rest of the zoo was pretty good, although quite bird-heavy. And I don't think I am much of a bird person. The blue and gold macaw thought it was pretty funny to make an appalling beak-squeak on the metal struts of her enclosure. You could tell she thought it was funny as it was followed by a frightening "HA HA HA HA HA HA!" remniscent of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

The Tasmanian devils were in a good mood - well, mostly asleep, but I did get a photo of one looking quite friendly. I think she was just working out how much of my arm she would be able to take off if I just leaned a little closer.

The cage I really couldn't tear myself away from was full of these guys. 

This is a pic from the zoo's facebook page - all my photos were kind of blurry and cagey. They are some kind of ape - I never managed to find out what kind on the day, and looking at the zoo map now I still can't work it out. They are tail-less, so i don't think they could be macaques. Whatever they are, they were eyeballing us very closely, and the message I was getting from that look was "get us out of here and take us into town with you so we can go shopping". They were so human-y. They kept reaching through the wire for handfuls of particular rushy grasses, and failing to uproot them. Marcus would pull up a few and try to share them out equally, but one guy was getting them all. When Marcus held them back out of his reach, he gave him the full teeth-revealing hiss of anger. It was pretty confronting, speaking as a fellow ape.

The cotton-eared marmosets were very engaging - one of them spent a lot of time millimeters from me, hugging his side of the bars. I felt like he really, y'know, understood me? He looked deep into my eyes and also asked me non-verbally if we could get him out of there and perhaps get him a skateboard and some sugary snacks. (I feel like I have just foretold the kids movie blockbuster of the summer, Las Vegas Skatin' Cotton-Eared Marmoset).

The croc house was disappointing. Crocs might be quite happy to have a concrete basin of water and a stretch of fake grass each - they might love it. But I was expecting some mudflats, some vague stab at a natural-ish environment. Maybe this is temporary.

I am merciless with typos. Fatastic indeed - they are thinking of the wombats.

My big gripe applies equally to all zoos and wildlife parks - if an exhibit or cage or enclosure is out of action or empty - put a sign on it. No-one wants to be the kind of zoo visitor who impatiently blows past a whole bunch of enclosures because there doesn't seem to be much happening. But when you have limited time to get around a big zoo, its maddening to find you have been patiently waiting for ... nothing. The nocturnal house, as far as I could tell, had one occupied enclosure out of about 20. I am sure there were at least a few more furry friends in there, but the majority of those glass boxes could have had a standard card in the window that just said "Sorry, nothing to see here right now".

Yellow bucket = mandrill food. Metal bucket = something dead for the devils.

Having had our fill of fauna, we went back into town to suss out the caravan park. How bad would it be? The caravan smelled pretty stale but that didn't last long once we opened everything up. Marcus and I went off to get dinner. After sausages and salad we broke our "no-buddies" rule and went to visit Joe and Jill and William. As usual William, Marcus and Michael had anarchic fun with a lot of ear-splitting laughing from William - again, a bit The Shining-esque. After a few beers, some school talk and half an A-League game, we had to let William get to bed. We went back to face the music at Glen Dhu Treasure Island caravan park.

Glen Dhu is the part of Launceston where my Dad grew up. That was before the expressway cut it in two. Dad's old primary school is now hard by one side of the Southern Outlet, and his father Didds' old workplace Coats Patons woollen mill is hard by the other side. I had never had a close-up look at Coats Patons before - it is really very, very big.

As it happened we had a terrible night, and none of us really slept. We just drifted through the next day in a group mind-fug. The road was so noisy, and the kids in the next caravan had a drunken revel until 3 or 4. I tried to make myself sleep by going through the nations of Africa and putting them in alphabetical order, then singing every Billy Bragg song I could think of to myself. To no avail. 

Sigh. We live and learn. Cheap is not always everything.

In the Shade of the Giraffe

I think that's the title of a lost Wilbur Smith thriller. On Sunday we caught the train into Spencer Street Station [not called that anymore] stuffed stuff into a storage locker, and caught another train to the zoo. A woozy Collingwood supporter who hadn't been to bed yet wobbled on to our train, and addressed the carriage at large. "HOW ARE YERS?"

It was a stunner of a day, actually pretty hot, and we hadn't packed all that well for a day out in the open under such conditions. (As we flew over Tasmania on the way up, the western peaks were still blanketed with snow). We had hats for the boys but not us, no sunscreen, and long pants all round. The zoo was crowded due to the great weather and it being the last day of the local school holidays. We managed to get around all the must-sees, with many rest stops on the way. Any shaded seats or bits of lawn were solidly occupied, so we ate our lunch on a nice pile of bark.

We were lucky to be there only about two weeks after the latest baby elephant was delivered. Still un-named, he was drawing massive crowds, and probably doubled the zoo attendance off his own bat. We queued for about 25 minutes to get a look at him, but then we had a good 10 minutes up fairly close, watching him scamp about with his mum and auntie. Baby elephants look hairy.

Elsewhere, the giant tortoise was sitting with his face resting on the fence. Kids patted his shell and even his head. I thought he might have been midway through a slow motion escape attempt, commenced some time in the Menzies era. Apart from the butterflies who sometimes land on your shoulder, the tortoises are the only touchable zoologicals in the place.

We saw those zany flatmates, the zebras and giraffes. The Melbourne zebras are strangely brown- rather than black-and-white, as if they are photographs fading in the sun. I love the Hills Hoist-style winch for getting the basket of food up the pole to the right height for the giraffes. The lions looked very, very tired, as usual. I shared their sense of ennui - by the orangutans, Michael and I were both just sitting quietly while Elf and Marcus made the most of the critters on show. In fact I was getting a kick out of just watching the people. Tattoos were ubiquitous.

We left a little earlier than originally planned due to simple exhaustion. Climbed on a train back to the city, unstuffed stuff from locker, got to the airport with a few hours to kill, ate cardboardy airport food for dinner, then flew home. My last sight of Melbourne was another happy Collingwood fan, jogging down the concourse and bantering with a group of nuns.

Sniblets

Elf is reading the Diaries of Ethel Turner. She wrote kids' book called Seven Little Australians in about 1893. "24 June 1893. I fainted this morning for a bit of excitment but I didn't like it much."

Tonight on that reality TV show The Zoo (which is actually about several zoos and the animals therein) someone said "At 12 or 13 weeks of age Harry will go the crêche to learn to be a bat".

Melbourne: Sunday

On Sunday Marcus and I were both awake about 6.30am. I sent him out to the kitchen to do some drawing but there was no way I would get back to sleep. The previous night Alex and Suparna and I stayed up talking past midnight, which is pretty late for me these days.

While Suparna made us a deluxe cafe-style hot brekkie, Marcus was pinging around the house with excess energy, so he and Alex and I went to the park at the end of the street with a flat football. There we relived the heroics of the night before on the very dewy grass. There is a Seventh Day Adventist church beside the park which has been designed to look as though one corner is sinking into a swamp. I do not know what this symbolises.

Suparna called us in when our breakfast was ready. Their house is beautiful, a very calm and serene space. Alex has a wonderful collection of colourful tin robots. They are very keen to have kids, and judging by how they doted on Marcus, I think they would very happily swap their serenity for some noise, scuffed walls and the occasional broken robot. We really enjoyed their company.


They drove Marcus and I to the zoo via a neighbourhood cafe. Windsor is a little corner sandwiched between Prahran and St Kilda. It is notable for the Astor Theatre, a train station and a number of dodgy second-hand fridge retailers. Alex and I shared a flat two stops up the train line, sixteen years ago now. I remember buying a fridge and some Mexican tin folk-art ducks in Windsor. There was a tapas bar, which was a daringly new concept at the time.

After fond farewells to our hosts at the zoo gate, we went in, turned left and got amongst the simians. We paced ourselves fairly well, and although we only saw about two-thirds of the zoo, we saw all that we were capable of in one go, including all our favourites. Here is a rundown on highlights.

The gorilla lay very still, and seemed to have a hangover. His head was the size of a 44 gallon drum. The spider monkeys were a little subdued as well. The porcupine was in his box, but was very attractive nonetheless. The lions were a little bit skinny-arsed, like they were down on their luck. I really liked the fishing cats - I think the next new AFL team could be the Fishing Cats. They were pretty much like a domestic tabby sized up about 400%. There is a pic of Marcus below sitting back to back with a grizzly bear (with some thick perspex between them admittedly). Marcus enjoyed that. It looked a bit like he had dropped in to watch telly with the bears - and the other grizzly had gone off to get them all some snacks. The seals are the happiest animals in the zoo. They seem very pleased with their gig. All the big cats and many of the small cats radiate a sort of intense annoyance at being in a zoo in Melbourne. The elephant area now goes on and on - it was an "elephant village", but seems to now be a small elephant country. My favourites are the co-located zebras and giraffes. They don't have savannah or acacias, sadly, so they are very easy to spot. I'm all for animals having a good familiar habitat, but if I can't find them after five minutes looking I am likely to feel peeved. The zebs and giraffes are right there. Also I like the hills-hoist arrangement that they use to get the giraffes food up to the right height.





I teed up my old friend (and ardent friend of this blog), Michael to pick us up at 2.00pm. This he did with his beautiful kids Cooper and Mackenzie in tow, and we all went off to Barkley Square for late lunch. (No nightingales sang). Michael's just started his own business, and his office is located at the old Essendon Airport. This is handy, as he is a keen pilot, and uses a plane that lives on the apron there. He took us through the gate and out onto the tarmac where he opened up the plane for the kids to climb about inside. It's just occurred to me that I would have liked to do this as well, but I was too busy taking photos. We walked down a covered way, which I gradually realised was an old walkway for passengers coming and going from the aircraft. The signs for gates 10 and 11 were right there, mouldering away, complete with rotary handles to change the destination and flight number. I tweaked one around to advertise a Special to Flinders Island.


The kids got on very well, devising games, shouting and shoving quite happily. On the way out I saw a dog with one leg in a cast being walked, then another. Besides Michael's consulting firm, there are also a veterinarian, many other small offices of various kinds, the Armaguard headquarters, and soon a mega Coles supermarket. Perhaps the Essendon Football Club may need to change its nickname from The Bombers to the Hobbling Huskies.


After this Michael dropped us at the Real Airport, where we flew home uneventfully. Michael and Elf were delighted to see us, and we them. Marcus said a few times over the weekend that he was really having fun. He kept saying it right up to when he fell asleep in the car on the way home.