Animal Encounters

Yesterday I had the pleasure of eating a tasty hamburger, and a serving of apple and black cherry pie with ice cream, with a blue tongued lizard chasing my food around the table as I ate. I can honestly say that it was a new experience for me. In England you might find yourself tormented by a fly or two while you eat, but never by colourful reptiles.

This was at a roadside café, which is owned by one of the Man’s former colleagues from when he used to work at the tax office. We were on a long Sunday drive down the coast and had forgotten to eat anything, which is why we stopped there. The Man pointed out the lizard to me as we walked in. It was sitting on a table between two children, who were waiting for their parents to order. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if it was even real. It looked a bit like this hideous plastic lizard my brothers and I had when we were growing up. But then, it blinked its beady eyes and started strolling across the table, to my slight amazement. (I say ‘slight’ because I’m getting used to these wildlife moments in Australia.) The children were certainly blasé about it!

When our food arrived, the lizard perked up, and wandered from the children’s table to ours, by way of the window sill. You could tell it really wanted a taste of the Man’s ice cream, and boy could it move. We kept grabbing at the tea tray so that it wouldn’t burn itself on the teapot.

There was another unexpected animal moment when we went round the back to the toilets and glimpsed a fully grown pig wandering about the owner’s backyard. Now, I don’t think I’m being controversial when I say that leaving the tax office was a good move for this man. Let’s just say he seemed fairly eccentric!

I really love these beastly encounters. I didn’t grow up around animals. We didn’t have any pets, though my grandma had an adopted, outdoors cat. There were no animals around in Saudi Arabia, at least not on the compound where we were, though there were crows, which would occasionally attack the smaller children. (And, memorably, one dive bombed me once while I was sitting outside sunbathing). In England, of course, we destroyed nearly all our wildlife years ago. There’s practically nothing left except for birds, which are very un-Australian in their drabness and timidity, and massive, MASSIVE house spiders, which I suppose could count as mammals at a stretch if you classified them based on size and furriness.

Growing up without animals, you don’t think of them except in the theoretical sense. I had lots of stuffed animals, but I didn’t have much of a conception that they were based on actual living creatures, if I ever thought about it all. Besides, my mother told me, “These are much nicer than the real things. Real animals are dirty and smelly.” I never thought to question this. It seemed to make sense. Pretty much everything in life was better in imagination and books than in reality, so why should animals be any different?

The first time I remember really noticing real animals was on my backpacking trip to Thailand when I was 24. I encountered a baby elephant on the streets of Bangkok (I was enchanted, but now I wish I’d kneecapped its owners and set it free), and then in Chiang Mai I went to the zoo. A few months later I moved to Australia to be with the Man, and had my first encounters with kangaroos, koalas and other native animals, and the impossibly big and colourful birds that landed in our backyard to look at us, quizzically, and graciously accept titbits of food (and crap on the laundry). I was amazed to discover that animals are often far cuter in real life than their toy equivalents, with soft, clean fur, and not very smelly at all (obviously I’m excepting koalas).

Ever since I’ve had a kangaroo place its paw on my arm and look up at me with its chocolatey brown eyes, I’ve felt the weight of the responsibility that we humans have towards the environment and animals. I don’t know how anyone can personally experience animals and not care. I don’t know how people can happily destroy what remains of nature and replace it with shopping centres and ugly housing. Animals have such innocence compared with our abominable greed – how can people not feel guilty about what we are doing to them? If we want to have wild animals in our world, we have to protect them all of the time. They won’t just pop into and out of existence as we please.

Thus began the environmentally-aware phase of my life.

But back to the café. The Man told me that this was a piece of the old Australia. I could certainly see that, with the slightly barmy owner, reptile slithering across the tables, friendly family working in the kitchen and the home-style food. But oddly, it also struck me that if you took away the view outside and the lizard, there really was something quintessentially English about the whole set up. I’ve noticed that a lot about Australia, once you get out of Sydney. It’s more English than England sometimes!