Fog bound and warm

20 September 2011

I'd send you a photo of the 2m saltie I saw 150m off East Point but couldn't get close enough to get a good one! It was cruising high in the water parallel to the beach, watching me watching it, and heading towards the city. I reported it to the rangers, who like to know where the crocs are; more can be expected as the water warms up and the wet approaches.

Otherwise we're all good. We've found a map showing that our house is just outside the cyclone surge zone, but not by much, and the neighbour tells me they've had pythons in their pool, probably from the nearby coastal reserve (reserved for the surge) hunting the green tree frogs (Litoria caerulea) which are often found in the water during the wet season. On Friday a large tree frog was flushed out of the pool backwash system when it was used for the first time since we moved in, apparently not too bothered to be evicted so unceremoniously. Crawled straight back into the pipe out of the hot sun and away from the view of the many raptors, mostly Black Kites (Milvus migrans) and the magnificent Brahiminy Kites (Haliastur indus with their snowy breast and head and chestnut body), which always seem to be cruising overhead looking for easy prey. The frogs emerge at night and are hunted by ibis which patrol the streets and lawns of the suburb; one species, as yet unidentified, emits a call which is tragic enough to send you searching for an injured child. When approached they walk behind a palm trunk or post and stand perfectly still, hoping you'll forget they're there.

House is chaos, with unopened or part opened boxes everywhere, but the tv works, the internet is connected, the kitchen operational, and the pool clean, so we can't complain. Had a meeting this morning with an academic librarian about me working in the 'Vault', an apparently unexplored archive of the NT, including a suggestion there may be unaccessioned hand drawn maps from the exploration period in the 19thC and early 20thC -- hard to believe but can't wait to delve in. Otherwise, I'm discovering that doing anything other than sitting down writing after about 10am causes me to break into a dripping sweat with the heat, so writing is what I will do during the middle part of each day. It will give me time to brace myself to run alongside Ellie as she learns to ride her bike, a parental task which risks leaving me prone with heatstroke waiting for the arrival an ambulance!  

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as the French have it, though usually in not quite so positive a sense.

But enough reflection; now for reportage. To put it simply, and at the rist of seeming a bit over-enthusiastic, our new life is pretty damn good. Though as the summer increases in intensity I for one have found myself lying awake in the early dawn, sweating quitely in the humidity, listening to the unfamilar bird-calls, wondering what we've done and longing for a walk along the river on frosty Waikato morning. But then something amazing happens, a crocodile surfaces off the beach to watch me walking along the shoreline, a Brahmany kite, snowy white breast and head supported effortlessly on chocolate wings, eyes me with it's raptor's intellingence as it cruises overhead, or a snake suddenly emerges from the forest floor clutter to swim away across an almost dry creek, leaving me frozen for a moment, suddenly aware (once again) that I'm the intruder in the middle of an ecosystem at once strange and wonderful and (potentially) very dangerous. (Along that particular creek, a early evening cane toad hunt last weekend - I wish I'd been there! - scared up 7 or 8 snakes, various marsupials and native frogs, and a two metre esturine crocodile which persistently stalked the volunteers until the rangers brought the evening to a premature end.)

30 August 2011

Well, remarkable as it might seem, this morning as I drove home from Casuarina to the city I found myself enveloped in warm fog smelling of ozone and sea water and with a background hint of Darwin's particular odour, not exactly of sewage but faintly of drains. The same smell is associated with the tepid water that comes for the tap marked cold, and that permeates the occasional cup of tea. I turned off the car’s air-con and opened the window expecting to find a sudden coolness in the air, as I did once while driving in Sydney one summer afternoon long ago when a dense sea fog rolled in across the eastern suburbs, thick with the smell of the ocean.  No such coolness here, and the Darwin fog evaporated quickly as the temperature continued to rise steadily towards its expected maximum in the low thirties. By the time I’d risen up in the lift to our 4^th floor apartment it was all but gone. Still, it was an odd phenomenon, proof that the dew point at which water condenses out of air is relative, and does not need to be associated with the sorts of temperatures usually found on autumn nights in the Waikato.  

The other odour that fills the air here is that of smoke from bush fires burning around the city. A series of fires to the east around the airport and beyond flared up during last week. When we arrived at the Essington School Fair last weekend a fire was in full tilt to the south-east, smoke billowing into the sky and the air full of the smell of wood smoke, reminiscent of a winter’s evening in Hamilton. And whereas in Hamilton the larger limbs of street tree prunings would be reserved for firewood, here they are chipped along with the smaller branches for mulch.

The Essington Fair, which occurred at the end of the children’s first short week at the school, proved to be a wonderful introduction to the school community. Waiting among the parents (mainly mothers) outside Ellie’s class at 2:30 on her second day, I was able to volunteer for a session helping on the class’s sweet stall, and made a batch of chocolate coconut macaroons as my contribution. The parents and teachers are all very friendly and helpful, including a New Zealand family who arrived a couple of months ago from Christchurch, the husband having been offered a job at CDU the day before their house was ‘munted’ by the February earthquake.

As for school, the children appear to have found their feet after only a week or two (10 school days to date, to be precise). Will says, ‘I’m being stretched, but I’m not finding it hard’, whereas Ellie’s greatest challenge has been the swimming lessons (the water was too cold and too deep), but this morning she seemed keen to get there, much to our relief. We’re all feeling twinges of homesickness, but these soon dissipate in the face of the busyness of life here.

And as time passes, more and more things are falling into place. We picked up the first of our two cars yesterday, with all of 14km on the clock, a full tank of gas and more buttons and dials than I can figure out what to do with. This is to be my car, for transporting kids and groceries, while Giselle is driving a loan car while she waits for delivery of her new five-door.  Tomorrow, Wednesday, we sign the lease on our house in Brinkin, about 1200 metres from Giselle’s office and 3km from the school. The house is a block back from the Coastal Reserve at Dripstone Cliffs, with its beaches and walks and cycle-ways and wildlife. We’re told dolphins are sometimes sighted off shore, more frequently we hope than estuarine crocodiles. We’ll refrain from swimming in the ocean, despite one person’s assurance that it’s safe in winter, and rely on the pool at the house to cool down.

Finally, we’ve just had confirmation that our container has arrived in Adelaide, but no word yet on when we can expect it in Darwin. We will be camping in the house from 8 September, and hope to borrow airbeds and camp tables and chairs until such time as we can unpack.

Another day or two in paradise

Friday 26 August 2011 CDU Library.

Another perfect day in paradise, warm and dry under a cloudless blue sky. Kids at school and G at work. We seem to have found a house about 900 metres from G’s office, 3 bed, 2 bath, 2 living, with deep verandas all around and in a quite street of family homes, somewhere we’d be happy to buy into one day. Rent is$200 or so less than the previous house we applied for, so that’s a real bonus. If we take possession early September, we’ll have to move in when our time in Argus ends on the 8^th and make do with camping equipment and an eski. Better to spend a bit of money on new stuff (at Aussie prices using Aussie dollars) than to pay $200 plus a night for furnished accommodation.

We have also finally had our finance approved for the cars, and hope to pick up the CX7 soon. The other car, a Mazda 3 hatchback, is due in 2 or 3 weeks but we have asked for a loan car until it arrives. This will allow us to return the hire car, and to allow G to drive to work independently, saving me and the children the need to drive out at 5 or 5:30 to collect her from work, with all the stress that entails for tired children during the arsenic hour.

Life will get much better once we’re out of the apartment, which is getting increasingly unpleasant as the weeks pass. The toilet in the ensuite is being replaced today in an effort to fix the sewage smell which has persisted since last Monday. Keeping the place clean is a real challenge without proper equipment, while relying on a weekly full service from the Argus staff and irregular light services between times. What I have realised is that tiles are damn hard to keep clean and that those tv ads for steamer mops are aimed at people who live in the tropics. I’m definitely going to get one and use it daily in the kitchen. The question is, if the ceramic tiles show this much mess, what would a close examination of the cork tiles in the kitchen of 46 reveal?Ah, the travails of the domesticated male.

When not fretting about such trivia, I’m still delighting in the local environment, especially the bird life which is prolific and hugely varied, especially compared to New Zealand. Yesterday, while parked in central Darwin, a large eagle or hawk with a beautiful white breast and brown wings cruised over. Wedge tailed eagles are commonplace, and smaller birds, often hard to see, are noisy and busy. Walking on the Nightcliff foreshore yesterday I came across a small bird with a long curved beak feeding on the date like fruit of a palm with large fan-like fronds. The ground under the palm was covered in the dates and large bunches hung from the base of the fronds. I’ve checked a few reference books but am overwhelmed by the number of bird species and the difficulty of identification in the field.

21 August

Two weeks since our arrival and while the effects of the two and a half hour time difference have dissipated (even 2.5 hours leads to hunger at odd times and being awake too early, especially for the children), there is much more that has to be resolved before we can declare ourselves sorted, let alone acclimatised. Our offer to lease the Brinkin house for 12 months for a slightly discounted rent was refused and the owner’s counter-offer of 6 months at the advertised rent seemed to speak of a greedy landlord intending to put the rent up as soon as she could. (Having said that, I was shocked to learn today that rent hikes are normal here, with one landlord increasing it every 3 months, which is the minimum time required for notification before any rise.) However, each day brings new housing prospects as we scour the market and consider our options regarding location and type of house. A new inner city apartment seems more attractive now that we’ve seen some very unpleasant houses, dark, rundown places surrounded by wild jungle-like gardens (one with a fallen tree leaning against the rear wall which the agent was surprised to have pointed out), broken air conditioners of uncertain vintage and ceiling fans that wobble drunkenly and seem certain to fall with catastrophic effects on any tenant sleeping restlessly on the bed below.   

Meanwhile, and more significantly, G has completed her first week at work and in the process run the full gamut from elation and optimism to confusion and despair, though with a final and enduring sense that the move here was the right thing to do, and the job while not without its challenges, will be professionally rewarding. From my perspective, G’s most telling comment is her surprise at the lack of email traffic on the weekends, which, when combined with an office that closes at 4:30pm seems to indicate a job that is confined to the normal working week without spilling over into family and personal time. I am hoping that the series of evening engagements during her first week are to do with the time of year (more visitors, the Darwin Festival), and her taking up offers to meet new colleagues.

The most difficult aspect of the week has been trying to commute from the city to the northern suburbs in one car. The children started school on Wednesday and seemed to survive the experience well, but having to get them there by 8:15 and G to the office makes mornings stressful, and having to do the school run at 2:30 and then return to CDU to collect Giselle at 4 or 5 makes for an arduous afternoon which adds more stress to tired children. The best part for me has been the realisation that we can say goodbye to G at the school, allowing her drive straight to CDU and me to walk down to the coast and hence to CDU by way of Rapid Creek and the Casuarina Coastal Reserve. In the 15-20 minute walk I’ve observed wedge-tailed eagles, various parrots and parakeets and other smaller birds, and my first cane toad, dead on the side of the road like every good cane toad should be.

On the subject of cane toads, they have had a major impact on the local wildlife since arriving in Darwin from the east a couple of years ago. Whereas previously there were lots of lizards and other wildlife to be seen within the city, now they are rarely seen, killed by contact with the venomous toad. Tim Flannery describes the effect of the toad’s arrival in a new region in his 2010 book Here on Earth in the following terms:

In northern Australia it’s easy to know when you’re ahead of the toads. You see crocodiles, goannas, frilled-necked lizards, birds of prey and countless other native Australian creatures every day, all around you. But if you visit the region behind the moving frontier (which in 2010 lay near the West Australian border), all is silence and devastation. Unless you were there when the first toads arrived, it’s hard to fathom what happened. A friend of mine was camping on a river in western Queensland when the toads went through. He went out one evening to fish, and was distracted by a nauseating smell. Following it upstream he discovered a logjam of dead crocodiles, their bodies lying so thickly they clogged the stream. The toads had arrived, and so sensitive were the crocs to the toad’s poison that a single toad was enough to kill even the largest of them. (p. 76)

The local Darwin authorities maintain a toad deposit for the humane disposal of the toads comprising a small enclosure surrounded by a low fence into which the toads can be placed. Water is provided so the toads don’t suffer in the heat until they are collected and euthanized by being placed into a chest freezer. The toads cannot jump so are easily excluded from gardens with a fence to the ground, though they metamorphose from the tadpole stage at about the size of a fingernail, making them fatally attractive to smaller predators.  Their inability to jump was the fatal flaw in their introduction as a biological control for the cane beetle: the toads walked about at the base of the sugar cane stalks while the cane beetle continued to thrive above them and out of reach. As Flannery points out, with toads unknown in Australia prior to their introduction in 1935, native predators had no defence from the poison glands on the backs of the toad’s necks. There are rumours that some wildlife, especially birds of prey have learned to flip the toads on their backs before eating them, so avoiding the poison glands. Some snakes are thought to be becoming immune to the poison, though this has yet to be confirmed.

For their part, humans have found at least one use for the toads, though not one any sensible person would pursue. Licking the poison glands apparently induces a hallucinatory experience similar to that provided by magic mushrooms and just as dangerous. This may be one other reason for the large numbers of barefoot and dreadlocked hippies to be seen wandering the streets of Darwin , attracted by the dry season climate and the top end’s proximity to Indonesia, SE Asia and the Indian subcontinent.

School has been, to say the least, a big success. Both W & E’s class teachers are great, and the school community has given us a warm welcome. Will has been looked after very well by his assigned buddy and came home Friday very excited to have learned that his class will be issued iPads to use in class, the first class in his year to be given the privilege. He also took pleasure in telling me about the 3 or 4 wedge tailed eagles that he’s observed cruising above the school oval. When I arrived at 2:30 on Thursday, I counted 11 black and white ibis patrolling the grass for grubs and insects, and a solitary currawong, the large black native crow watching disdainfully from a distance. Ellie’s own animal encounter (her current heroine seems to be Bindi Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter’s daughter) was with a couple of frilled necked lizards, her school house mascot. She was told to stop when she attempted  to climb a tree in which one of the ‘frillies’ was sleeping; not sure what she would have done if she’d reached it, though after her baby croc experience she may have intended adoption.

Symptomatic of our welcome into the school has been my immediate involvement in the annual School Fete, wherein I was assigned an hour’s duty on the lolly stall and contributed a batch of chocolate coconut macaroons to the burgeoning tables of sweets prepared by the parents. It proved to be a great way to meet people, including one mother who, it turned out, has escorted us on a tour of CDU on our first visit to the campus in March. All were very encouraging in our struggle to find a suitable house to rent, and my efforts to negotiate the intricacies of the NT and Commonwealth government bureaucracies.

Although I am pleased to report that I’ve had some successes there, too. I’ve managed to obtain Medicare cards for the four of us, something I regard as a major achievement. We have working (if intermittently so) debit cards, complete with money in the account. Unfortunately, after using mine successively and successfully, it unexpectedly and repeatedly refused to accept the pin so is now locked until I can get to the bank tomorrow. The same thing happened with my NZ Visa card so that now I have to sign for everything, which is fine as we’re trying not to use NZ dollars now that G’s income has started to appear in the ANZ accounts.

We’ve also made progress with the cars, having had the finance accepted, though not before having to explain that as NZers we do not have residency visas. The 4WD should be available by the end of the week, providing G can find the time to apply for an NT driver’s licence, something I managed to do on Friday. The other car will be some three or four weeks away, so we’ll have to continue commuting from the city at least three times a day. At least we’ll be able to return the Holden Barina hire car which I’m starting to get quite fond of, despite it being so small and underpowered. I’m sure we’re going to be squashed flat as the proverbial shoe lace by one of the many huge 4WD we share the road with. The $3500 excess is supposed to be covered by the Visa card we used to hire the Barina, but that’s not going to be much use to us when we’re smeared across the Stuart Highway like so much vegemite (or should that be marmite, one’s Aussie and the other’s not).

The car leases include all insurances, tyres, servicing, petrol, etc. and up to 15,000kms travel per year, so if we live in the city apartment we’ll be doing about 7000km/year commuting, with plenty left over for weekend excursions.   

Shortly after waking up this morning I heard the sound of firecrackers coming from the small temple in the grounds of the Chinese Club across the road from the apartment. When I looked out the window, a young Asian woman and a man dressed in a traditional Chinese smock were standing on the porch looking towards the lawn from which a plume of gunpowder smoke was still rising. She was holding a cluster of smouldering incense sticks and bowed from the waist three times before turning and walking back into the temple accompanied by the man, presumably a priest or temple functionary. Perhaps she was acknowledging the spirit of a dead parent or relative, the crackers intended to awaken the deceased, the prayer to comfort both them and the living. People visit the temple throughout the day and can often be seen performing small, private rituals on the porch, bowing to one or other of the deities represented there. A tall statue of Lao Tzu or Confucius stands in the garden. On Saturday afternoon a Chinese man paid his own tribute to the immortal by mowing the lawn slowly and methodically.

15 August 2011

We’re slowly realising that the NT works in ways which are often circuitous, not to say interminable. In arranging leasing finance for our new cars we’ve been told we need NT driver licences, though only after being asked for and providing photocopies of our New Zealand ones. We’d earlier been assured that transferring to NT licenses was straightforward, a matter of paying a fee and having an id photo taken. On enquiry however, we find we need proof of residency, such as a lease or power bill, which of course we can’t supply as we’re living in a serviced apartment until 8 September. Likewise with the city library, proof of residency is required, in addition to photo id for the adults and Medicare cards for the children to prove, presumably, that they belong to us). Fortunately, Medicare seems to be a little more flexible, and will accept any two documents proving our shift to Darwin, including the transit documents for our household goods and evidence of G’s employment by CDU (hopefully a letter will suffice, as no payslips have been generated yet.

This all means that we have to continue to rent a car until such time as we can prove we are living here, so that we can get a Territory licence and thus complete the car lease application.

We had a similar problem with ANZ Visa, who refused to process our application for a new Australian credit card without two payslips to prove G’s level of income, despite having supplied them with a copy of her contract on the bank’s advice that this would suffice.

Otherwise, we’re trying to acclimatise as well as we can, which at this time of year is not hard. G had her first day at work today, so must be relieved that that at least is underway. The children are starting to get a bit bored with each other’s company, exacerbated today by G’s need to use the hire car which restricts what we can do here in the city. Not that a morning at the wave pool and lunch at MacDonald’s can be said to be boring. Presently (3pm Monday 15 August 2011) we three are sitting on the balcony in the shade (E’s drawing from her book of Aussie wildlife and Will is on his Nintendo), while a small army of cleaners gives the apartment a ‘full-service’ on the 7th day since our arrival. They come in each day except Sunday to change towels and do the rubbish, but today was the day for fresh sheets and clean bathrooms. Tomorrow we plan to take G to work so we can have the car, so we can drop in to the school and make arrangements for W & E to start, buy uniforms and stationary, and arrange for fees to be paid. We might go for a drive out of the city, though aimless touring along dusty roads in tinny Holden Barina is hardly going to be a winner with the kids.

One positive thing: we may have found our house, the closest we’ve seen to Chesterman Rd but with a large swimming pool. We’re waiting to hear back after submitting an application through the rental agent. The house has been vacant for a month or so, and a previous applicant was declined, but if we’re accepted we hope to not have to take up the lease until our stay here in the apartment ends on 8 September. Even at that late date it’s unlikely our container will have arrived in Darwin, so we’ll probably have to move to intermediate accommodation, by which I mean waiting a week or two somewhere much cheaper that the Argus but hopefully not too small or unpleasant. The prospect of camping in the house, while appealing, presupposes we buy or rent beds, linen, chairs of some sort, and a fridge to make the house habitable. Camp beds and a beer fridge might be of long-term use, and we would have access to the pool and the aircon to make life bearable, so it’s not a bad option.