Cue the houseboat-dwelling stranger – here, as I am, “on safari”. It’s all too easy in wide-eyed ignorance, to magnify effects, succumb to fancy, to sentimentalise the inevitable drowning of kangaroo, koala, echidna, or to poeticise the beauty and the stillness.
IT’S Friday night; time for the pub quiz. Question one – when is a city a national park? Confused? Let me ask it another way. Name just one city that fits the national park city bill – the hybrid exists.
THE year is 2000. I am alone, footloose in Melbourne, just off the plane, and half a world from the comforts of home. It’s then I spot him from the window of my digs. He’s staring straight at me from the park – looking familiar. I double-take.
While brewing a storm, the Atlantic Ocean becomes a force-field of malevolence. Yet, on kinder days it glitters, enticing small boats to slip their moorings, to sail away across the sparkle of diamond-crushed waves.
“ONE man’s gaol is another man’s heaven,” says Ron, a businessman from Perth, the second most sun-soaked city on earth, he tells me, “after Honolulu”.
MY BridgeClimb guide is squinting into the sunset staring at mountains. “Don’t they look beaut?” he says. We are standing on top of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Below us, the city begins to sparkle, the sails of the opera house have turned pink, but my eye keeps shifting to follow Doug’s gaze. “Some nights they just glow the colour of sunset,” he says. “I guess you must have been there.”
To steal from Van Morrison’s lyrics: "Mama told me there’d be days like this." Days of gold. I am in Belfast, on the bright side of the road. The sun is shining. The city’s ripple of rolling hills strings its emerald necklace around the V of Belfast Lough and I am stalking the shade of Van Morrison, sometime freeman of this city, recently dubbed a knight of the realm.
