Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: Australian travel

  • bristanbul

    bristanbul

    Brisbane always was like this…. for me. Suburban and shrill in the day; shadowed and sultry by night.

     

  • the language barrio

    Berliner to Brisbaner, who has urged him to cross against the lights, at peak hour, right in the middle of the city: Ah no thanks. I don’t like jail walking. Not with so many police around.

    Brisbaner: (folds her face into his shirt feeling the weakness of language adoration take hold.)

     

  • daintily, handily

    daintily, handily

    All the noisiness of sun. To a German, the crashing in the bamboo at 3am sounds like a housebreaker festooned with plastic bags. How could a little possum make so much noise? Why must the birds all shriek? When you lift a painting off the wall, exposing a transparent lizard, who exposes his heart lungs and liver to the world but will dart away into hiding when his cover’s lifted, that’s a shock. A person with no fear of local pushers, addicts, drunken punk louts, untethered giant dogs and bad buskers can be remarkably unsettled by the rustling and crashing that midnight brings when it’s hot tagsüber. “During the day,” I say, “everyone’s sleeping. Then at night when it cools down, they all come out to live their lives.” Handily our small grey cat has arranged herself across his extended hand to illustrate this point. She yawns her pink yawn.

  • meatbags

    meatbags

    It’s Monday afternoon and we are eating meatbags for lunch. This is because we are in Brisbane and have a German visitor. This German visitor has only been in Australia once before, in Melbourne for two weeks last year, during which visit I made him eat a meat pie from the local 7-11. Bad move. He got their name mixed up and months later, when I was marveling at the disgustingness of a German breakfast staple known as ‘builders’ marmelade’ (raw mince and chopped onions eaten on a bread roll), he burst out, “But what about those disgusting Australian meatbags?” Today it was time to reconstitute our culinary reputation, much as oranges will be reconstituted to make what we call fresh orange juice. We went to the local bakery. Standing in front was a line of people who amply illustrated what a lifetime of bakery products will do to your body. They were all having long, yarning conversations with the girls behind the counter, it was evident they all queue there every week. We got our pies and sat down to eat them in the shady courtyard. Afterwards my German visitor said, I feel like drinking a cacao. I said, a chocolate milk? Excellent notion, it will degrease our gullets. We took our chocolate milks across the parking lot and started towards home. Then my mother and father turned up. They too had decided it was time for a meatbag lunch for everyone and in addition they were hunting down a copy of the Sydney Morning Herald so that their sensitive liberal visitors would not have to suffer through The Australian every morning. For some reason the German visitor could not be persuaded to eat a second meatbag. “Maybe he’s full,” said Mum.