Leon Marvell is the head of the film program at a public college here, he’s on the Burwood campus of Deakin University. He was able to get me grant money for the trip here, both to give a talk at a conference on media art, and to be a “Thinker in Residence” at Deakin for a week.

Here’s Leon with a wild parrot. Leon and his partner Yolande live in an area that’s slightly like the Santa Cruz mountains—there’s lots of eucalyptus trees, and tropical birds. They drive on the left side of the road. The accent can be hard to understand.

We stayed at their house for a couple of days. One day it rained all morning and we played Scrabble in Leon’s house. Leon and Yolande refrained from using unfamiliar Australian words on the board, but they did teach us a few.

For instance a “pie floater” is a meat pie set into a bowl of green pea soup, with some bright red tomato sauce on top of the pie. When Leon was a boy in Adelaide, his grandfather would take him to town and the big treat would be a pie floater. Some people jokingly refer to the town as Addlebrain.

Saturday evening, Leon cooked us some kangaroo, which wasn’t bad, more or less like venison. I felt slightly guilty.

On Sunday, Leon and Yolande drove us deeper into the mountains into a rain forest, where we saw a really big kookaburra bird, the size of a chicken, in a tree. Sylvia saw a lyre bird with extravagant tail. We walked among tree ferns and saw the enormous “mountain ash” the size of a redwood. It’s actually a type of eucalyptus (they have about sixty different kinds of eucalypts here) with peeling bark and pocked with clumps of moss.

On Monday, they took us to a kind of zoo near their house, and we saw all the canonical Australian animals: kangaroo, lyre bird, koala, echidna, and the platypus.

The koalas don’t actually look like bears at all. In fact they look more like Mao Tse Tung.

We had lunch in the cafe there, and the ibis birds were all over the table. I’d always thought ibises were Egyptian, but they’re all over Australia, getting down and competing with the pigeons, even though they’re supposed to be sacred birds (cf. Thoth, the divine scribe, with the ibis head).

We saw some echidnas, who are hedgehog like monotreme mammal critters who, like the platypus, lay eggs and nurse their pups.

The platypuses were great, a male and a female, in separate tanks, very large tanks, dimly lit to simulate night, with leafy branches and rocks and worms and fresh-water shrimp that the Ozzies call “yabbbies.” The furry little platypuses swam around a lot. They close their eyes, nostrils and ear-holes under water, and find their way by using their soft, electrosensitive bills. Truly a sixth sense. The bills pick up the oscillating electrical fields of living objects in particular, although I suppose there might be some fields coming off inanimate objects as well. What a great way to perceive the world.

It was too dark in the zoo to get a picture of the platypuses, but Leon kindly gave me a stuffed one to treasure. Leon claims a baby platypus is called a “puggle.”

Yolande’s mother and brother are taking part in a platypus-counting program in Adelaide—each person goes out at night and tries to spot one in a certain area. As things stand, platypuses are so retiring that nobody knows how many of them there are.

I’m imagining an SF story where someone gets a platypus bill implant—and how they then see the world. They can sense sexual partners, or a wad of money, or drugs.

On a drive near Warburton, Leon showed us the rambling self-built house of “Boinga Bob,” which the owner terms a center of Boingaology.

Right on, Leon, and thanks for everything!

I’m just back from a nearly month-long trip to Australia with Sylvia. It was, in part, an academic speaking gig. We were in Melbourne, Sydney, Cairns, and the Great Barrier Reef. I’ll blog some of my travel notes and trip photos over the coming days.

[Carved “fairy tree” in Fitzroy Park in Melbourne.]

Flying into LA at night on the trip down was impressive. It’s an image I’ve seen in films, the great grid of lights— but to be there in person felt…epic. In a plane you can also look straight down and sense your height—it’s not just a panoramic view. You’re embedded and, to some extent, at risk. I was thinking of all the things people were doing down there at that very moment—eating, watching TV, fucking, getting high, arguing, with one or two even in the process of dying or being born.

[In the Victoria Market buildings in downtown Melbourne.]

We left on Tuesday and arrived early on Thursday morning, thanks to the International Date Line. We’ve been busy Turing ants the last two days, leaving trails hither and yon, scavenging scraps of food, culture, shopping. In some ways it’s like the U.S., in that it’s a young country, but there is a European feel as well. In the downtown part of Melbourne, there’s quite a few impressive old stone buildings, and an old shopping arcade with a tiled floor and a fancy ceiling. Indeed, many of the blocks have interesting little alleys or “laneways” cutting them in half, often with cafes on the laneways.

[“Luna Park” amusement park entrance in St. Kilda district of Melbourne.]

The city of Melbourne is pretty big, 3 million, and there’s many faces to see. Many fair British types, but lots of Chinese and Vietnamese, and some Indians and Indonesians as well. Some of the Brits are pasty and lumpy, but many are handsome or beautiful. From 1901 to 1973, the country had a “White Australia” policy of excluding non-white immigrants—ironic, of course, in the face of the fact that the Aboriginal natives are dark-skinned. You hardly see any Aboriginals in the cities of Melbourne and Sidney by the way—they seem to live up north or in the central and western deserts.

We rode a streetcar to a funky beach suburb, like Santa Cruz but grottier and bigger. St. Kilda. At the beach it was 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the bay water was listless and utterly flat, with dead blue jellyfish on the shore. We had a nice lunch in a beachfront place, glad to be in some air conditioning, I had a Pacific fish called trevalley, it was good. After lunch we went wading and suddenly a squall was whipping up waves and blasting us with blowing gritty sand. The wind was maybe 70 mph, with some rain in it, and we all hid inside. And then the squall was over and in that half hour, the temperature had dropped to about 75. The Australians didn’t seem surprised.

It’s interesting to keep on exploring the city. Cities are like fractals, or like Nature herself—as you delve deeper, you keep on finding new details. We were in Melbourne so long—eleven nights—that it started to feel like when I spent a semester in Brussels a few years ago. It moves beyond sight-seeing and becomes a matter of living in a new place.

[Kangaroos lie on their backs and scratch like dogs.]

Being on vacation, at first I didn’t feel too much like writing, which means that I felt a little blank. Writing wakes me up, centers me. But not feeling compelled to write is kind of relaxing. Like I’ve retired from life.

[Federation Square is cool.]

We’re sight-seeing, doing things like having a chai latte tea at the Riverland pub terrace between the Yarra River and Federation Square. The teapot is full of pods and seeds and leaves floating in steamed milk. I have a special sieve for straining this invigorating ichor into my cup.

[A Shrine of Remembrance for the war dead in Melbourne.]

All in all, this is one of those trips when I don’t really know what I’m doing or why I’m here. It’s all kind of pointless and random, like, why am I giving these talks, and why Melbourne? Well, because they paid me to come. It’s nice to be out of my normal life, with a new city and so many unusual people to see.

[Street scene in Melbourne.]

Everyone has been very friendly in Australia, I feel it’s a similar to Canada in the sense that it’s an English-speaking country that isn’t so conflicted and torn by internal contradictions as is the U.S.

I’m going to take a break from blogging for a few weeks. Heading down the foggy road.

I sent in version three of my autobiography to my publishers, and I’ve written a new outline for my novel, Jim and the Flims.

And now I’m ready for a break from the computer.

By the way, I took today’s pictures near the Skyline trail above Los Gatos and Saratoga. It’s good to get out into the woods and away from the keyboards.